Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”

Last fall, while on vacation in London, we tried and failed to get tickets to the London theater production of “Wolf Hall,” starring Nathaniel Parker as Henry VIII and Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell. The play moved on to Broadway in New York with the same cast, and was staged in two parts. And then the BBC mini-series, starring Damien Lewis and Mark Rylance, aired on PBS (the trailer is below).

It was a wonderful production. I was inspired enough to read Tudors by Peter Ackroyd, the second volume in his History of England.

The plays and television program are based on the novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the well-known U.K. novelist. It is the first book of a trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to power in Tudor England, to become second only to Henry VIII himself. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2010. The second book in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies, won the prize in 2012. The third has not yet been published.

Thomas Cromwell was, at first glance, an unlikely candidate for career promotion. In Mantel’s story, he flees England at little more than 12 to escape a drunken brute of a father. He serves in the French army, eventually finds himself in Italy and connecting to the banking families. He finds his way to Antwerp, where he becomes a merchant. And then he returns to England, becoming part of that rising merchant class and London business class that was helping England break out of its medieval history into more modern times. He becomes a trusted advisor to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor in Henry VIII’s England. That is the backdrop to Wolf Hall.

Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger (1536)    

That is the backdrop, yes, but not the story. The story is the intertwining of two stories powerful enough to stand alone but together the kind of event that changes nations – the royal succession, or Henry VIII’s obsession to produce a male heir to the throne, and the Protestant Reformation. As Cardinal Wolsey eventually fails to convince Pope Clement to annul Henry’s marriage to Katharine of Spain, he finds himself losing his offices, forced to leave London, and living in internal exile. Eventually he is facing arrest and execution – the powerful dukes and the Boleyn family want his head (not to mention his wealth).

The only Wolsey man to stand true to the cardinal in his troubles is Thomas Cromwell – and that is what ultimately commends itself to Henry VIII. Cromwell begins to work for the king, and his successes for Henry begin to propel him upward. He becomes the stage manager to allow Henry to put aside Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn – and it is a production involving church, foreign kings, Parliament, nobles, merchants and businessmen.

Hilary Mantel

Mantel paints each scene with rich, historic detail. The world of the Tudors comes alive. The people who populated that world – from Henry VIII to servants and priests – become three-dimensional people. Cromwell is relentless for the king, but he also has a heart, and tries to find ways to help people escape some of the worst consequences they face. People like Thomas More, Henry’s chancellor after Wolsey whom Mantel paints in a very different way than the saintly Thomas More of the 1966 Oscar-winning movie A Man for All Seasons.

Wolf Hall is a marvelous novel, so good that one soon forgets he’s reading fiction because this must be exactly the way all that Tudor history happened, right?

The writing, the story, the characterization, the plot -- they're all that good. This is historical fiction at its well-researched best.

Painting (top): Thomas Cromwell, oil and tempera on oak panel by Hans Holbein (1532-1534). National Portrait Gallery, London.

Judging by the values of another century

I was reading Peter Ackroyd’s Tudors, which by necessity has a heavy emphasis upon the religious turmoil in 16^th century England. I say “by necessity” because the reign of the Tudors coincided – was directly connected to – the English Reformation. Henry needed a male heir, and so he eventually forced the matter (he did wait quite a few years, however, before he married Anne Boleyn, hoping the Pope would grant a dissolution of his first marriage).

Religious affairs in England – influenced by Luther’s Reformation in Germany – inevitably became entangled with dynastic concerns and political affairs. And a lot of deaths. Ackroyd notes that 308 people were executed during Henry’s reign for violation of the Treason Act of 1534; 300 Protestant martyrs were killed during Mary’s much briefer reign; and 200 Catholics (including 123 priests) died during Elizabeth’s reign.

And then Ackroyd says this: “The historian here often pauses to deliver a lament on human bigotry, but the temptation should be resisted. It is not possible to judge the behavior of one century by the values of another” (emphasis added).

What a quaint idea, I thought. What a refreshingly quaint idea. In that one short statement, Ackroyd lays waste to one of the dominant themes afflicting universities in particular and society in general in the 21^st century.

He’s not saying that something like the Holocaust shouldn’t be judged by today’s values; it was judged by the values of the 1940s and every decade afterward, and rightfully so. But he is saying that we in our 21^st century smugness think we are so much more knowledgeable, so much more tolerant, and so much more intelligent that those who lived in centuries past.

My response to that sentiment is this: Consider the leading candidates in this year’s election for President of the United States, in both major parties, and then tell me how much more knowledgeable, tolerant and intelligent we are. Or better still, follow a disagreement on Twitter – any disagreement.

No, Ackroyd is right. We may have more information at our fingertips, but access to information does not equate to knowledge, and it certainly doesn’t equate to wisdom.

We should read read history with a good measure of humility. The human condition has not changed much over the centuries, if it has changed at all.

Illustration: The depiction of the burning of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the stake in Oxford, England in 1556, during the reign of Queen Mary; from the Book of Martyrs by John Foxe (1563).

Related: My review of Tudors.

Peter Ackroyd’s “Tudors”

They ruled England for less than a century. But their influence and impact was enormous, and reaches to our contemporary times.

They were the Tudors – Henry VIII (reigned 1509-1547), Edward VI (1547-1553), Mary (1553-1558), and Elizabeth I (1558-1603). They ruled England from 1509 to 1603, and their reigns included the English Reformation, the first English explorations of the New World, the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada, and the cultural explosion that was Elizabethan England.

Their reigns also experienced plots, attempted overthrows, and more burnings at the stake than any other period in English history (usually for heresy, of both the Protestant and Catholic varieties). And who better to tell the story of this powerful family and the period they shaped and lived through than Peter Ackroyd?

Tudors is the second volume in Ackroyd’s History of England, the first being Foundation, which covered the beginnings to the reign of Henry VII.

Edward VI

And what a great story Ackroyd tells. The story of 16^th century England is the story of religion. No other issue had as much impact on governments, power alignments, politics and the royal court than did religion. While the impetus for the English Reformation was Henry VIII’s desire to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, because of no male heir, the Reformation was actually multi-faceted, with ebbs and flows by the Reformers; Henry himself continuing as a practicing Catholic with the exception of acknowledging the Pope’s sovereignty; the dissolution of the great monasteries, abbeys, convents and friaries; and constant changes in diplomacy and continental power politics.

Mary

Ackroyd tells the story chronologically and tells the story factually. The worst religious excesses (not counting Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries) occurred in the two shortest reigns – the boy king Edward VI and his immediate successor and half-sister Mary. The first was more to the Reformer extreme; the latter to the Catholic reactionary stream (including the burning of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, at the stake on Oxford). Elizabeth would steer the nation’s religious life back to the middle, and it was in her reign that the final shape of the Anglican church known today came to be.

Elizabeth I

Because this is history focused on the country’s rulers, it’s also a history of the powerful courtiers, religious leaders, and aristocrats who surrounded them and often opposed them. Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, numerous dukes, Mary Queen of Scots, Lady Jane Grey (queen for nine days), the Seymours, the Duke of Essex, William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, among many others, are treated fully. Treason was not taken lightly; many aristocrats and would-be royals lost their heads or were hung, drawn and quartered.

Tudors is the story of sixteenth-century England and the Tudor family that dominated it, in all its color, pageantry, glory and gore. It is also the story of the development of religion in England, and how Anglicanism fianlly took hold (with portents of the Puritans to come).

Related:

My review of Peter Ackroyd’s Foundation.

Reading Peter Ackroyd.

A Revolt over a Prayer Book.

Top illustration: Henry the VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1537.