if your rigour does not forbid me...

I've been listening to some talks on the Exeter Conspiracy and Cromwell it sounds like was heavily involved with the process. He investigated and imprisoned the Pole family. Considering he helped kill Henry Pole Baron Montague and frame Margaret Pole why on Earth would Mary still have liked him by the end? Curious what you make of their relationship?

Are you hinting at their relationship as portrayed in Wolf Hall/TMATL? Imo, the likelihood of his role in the Exeter Conspiracy deteriorating the trust she had had in Cromwell was rather underwritten in that series, but the trust as it was, does seem to have existed previously (superficially, at the very least, and perhaps even authentically, for a time).

This, from Cromwell's biographer, Diarmaid MacCulloch:

On Chapuys's testimony, Mary herself felt real gratitude to Cromwell for his goodwill towards her, and she expressed it extravagantly: 'how much I am bound unto you, which hath...travailed, when I was almost drowned in folly, to recover me before I sunk and was utterly past recovery.' Cromwell himself told the ambassador he was convinced that his own imprisonment loomed [...] [T]he King had arrested Cromwell's friends and probable fellow-conspirators against Anne [Boleyn], Sir Anthony Browne and Sir William Fitzwilliam, who in turn yielded up the name of a definite fellow-conspirator, Sir Nicholas Carew. Add to that the arrest of Anne Hussey, wife of Mary's long-standing Chamberlain, and things looked desperate indeed.

I cannot imagine Mary holding much in the way of warmth and fondness for somebody that equally used and deceived her own supporters/friends in his own power grab, and then later used them as cannon fodder once their usefulness to him ran out, to maintain the same elevation. Regardless of the warmth/pleasant rhetoric of her letters afterwards (it's like people forget that self-fashioning/self-preservation is a thing, because they are so wedded to the Mary, the One Honest, Good & Pure Tudor, incapable of lies/dissimulation, narrative...)...but, maybe that's just me...

At least one historian, Hazel Pierce, was very upset with this portrayal in TMATL. Fwiw, I don't really agree with her reasoning, but it's relevant to your question, so might be worth a read.

and, a few things … more political than personal, 1), and 2) the ‘crossed out’ part is underrated.

3) well. i think from the assertion chapuys was mary’s most vehement defender, his opinion of cromwell matters. i would actually argue that he would be a far better judge of cromwell than AB, as someone that actually shared meals with him and hosted him etc.

and this is where i tend to get frustrated— anything negative said about cromwell from this source, about this dynamic, tends to be dismissed.

such as: