Review: Wolf Hall

This piece was originally written last year for a journal whose editors accepted it and then, having paid for it, decided not to print it. Mantel’s book is now hardly new any longer; nor is it a classic, not yet at any rate. But I think it is still topical, because the idea of the State as God appears to be growing more popular every year.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a fictionalized account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, one of the architects of Henry VIII’s reformation of the English Church. It was published in April 2009 and has won the Man Booker prize and more recently, the National Book Critics’ Circle award. It has attracted unreserved praise from a great number of reviewers in the most prestigious papers. The novel’s overwhelming success is surprising for a very long work about what is, after all, the best-known period of English history. The fact that it is highly readable is certainly one reason for this success, but there may be another. Most works of history or historical fiction (excluding bodice-rippers) that reach a broad audience do so because they address current fears or longings, and this is very true of Mantel’s novel. It is about Cromwell, yes, but it is also about religious fanaticism, social dislocation, and how best to govern an unruly people, all matters of pressing concern to contemporary Britons. For Wolf Hall is a Whig history: it offers us a Cromwell much like ourselves as our eye into the past, while we are the novel’s heroes.

Mantel’s account of Cromwell’s life begins with a scene in which his violent father has knocked the youth to the ground. Skimming lightly over his youthful adventures on the Continent, it goes on to recount the story of his friendship with his patron, Cardinal Wolsey, the genial papal legate, who tries and fails to secure a divorce for Henry VIII. Cromwell recovers from Wolsey’s downfall and commits himself to the service of the king, where he goes from one success to the next. His intelligence, his gift for languages, his understanding of money and trade, his administrative ability, and his political shrewdness all contribute to making him a very useful man, and ultimately a very powerful one.  It is not until the second half of the novel that Cromwell gradually becomes embroiled in the affair that made his career, the Boleyn family’s attempt to negotiate a marriage between Anne and the lovesick Henry. Although instrumental in arranging her marriage, Cromwell betrays Anne in the end: he is a new kind of servant who places loyalty to the state above personal ties.

Once this intrigue is concluded, Mantel gives short shrift to some of the other important events in Cromwell’s life: his involvement in the dissolution of the monasteries, for example, (although she seldom fails to point out how their inhabitants were parasites); or his persecution of heretics, redefined as enemies of the state after Henry’s break with Rome. The novel ends with the separation of Sir Thomas More’s head from his body, and Cromwell (or the narrator, it’s not quite clear) telling himself, “Today, More was escorted to the scaffold by Humphrey Monmouth . . .  Monmouth is too good a man to rejoice in the reversal of fortune. But perhaps we can rejoice for him?”

Mantel’s use of Cromwell as the only set of eyes through whom we view the action of the novel, her sympathetic portrayal of scenes from Cromwell’s childhood and domestic life, some of which are certainly her own invention, and her skilful elisions of most of the minister’s less appealing or justifiable actions, allows her to turn Cromwell into a new man for all seasons, a rebuke to the figure of Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play by that name. In fact, Mantel’s Cromwell is something of a “Mary Sue,” a wish-fulfilment figure, and one who is rather too good to be true. His actions as depicted by Mantel are always justifiable; he never fails in any enterprise except through the failures of others; he is seldom shown to be wrong about anything; and he appears to be gifted with nearly superhuman foresight, although of course all this must falter in the second book Mantel is to write, as Cromwell in turn becomes the victim of his sovereign’s paranoia.

Mantel’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, who might be said to be the villain of the novel, is too wicked to be convincing, even for those disinclined to hagiography. Mantel sets up More as a foil to Cromwell. While More is a sadistic masochist who teases his wife ferociously, wears hair-shirts, and tortures heretics, Cromwell, who was historically responsible for torturing rather more people than More, is shown to be kind to wives, servants, children, and dogs. While  More is a slippery, self-aggrandizing courtier with a penchant for dramatic gestures, Cromwell is a plain-spoken, pragmatic administrator often insulted for his low birth. Above all, while More is a fanatical Christian (though of course also a man on the make), Cromwell is a rational man for whom the pursuit of God is not the first goal of human life.

There is no doubt that Mantel’s Cromwell is more appealing than Mantel’s More. The question is, does she create an accurate portrait of either man? It is difficult for one who is not a specialist in Tudor history to answer that question. Other questions present themselves to the detached reader. Was Cromwell really so good a father? Was More really so terrible a husband? The contemporary records are mixed, and Mantel does not indicate her sources. Those reviewers who proclaim her book to be astonishingly well-researched are surely saying more than they can know from what Mantel has provided for us in her work. Verisimilitude and plausibility are admirable qualities in an historical novel, but they are not the same as historical accuracy. Finally, while Cromwell may have been, as many English historians have concluded, the architect of the modern English state, that does not mean that the real Cromwell would have appealed to modern tastes any better than More, either as a personality or a political actor. Neither man recognised the individual conscience as the supreme authority in determining matters of right and wrong. Neither man hesitated to execute those people who rebelled against established authority. They were not like us, and for Ms Mantel to make Cromwell more like us to make his policies more sympathetic is a kind of cheating.

Mantel’s book supports neither the Protestants nor the Catholics in the English Reformation. For example, she writes admiringly of the obviously Romish Cardinal Wolsey, a man who stood for everything that Protestant reformers hated about Catholic priests and the papacy. She is critical of the Reformer William Tyndale, whose zeal and adherence to principle she finds distasteful. She turns her sights neither on Catholicism nor the Reformation, but on religious fanaticism, or, as we say today, “fundamentalism.” She paints More in an unflattering light because the deaths for which he was responsible were carried out in the service of religion. Worse, More, like Tyndale, was willing to die for a point of principle. Yet she accepts or excuses the executions for which Cromwell was responsible because they were carried out in service of the state.

Leaving aside the question of whether Mantel’s portraits of Cromwell or More are historically accurate, readers ought to ask themselves whether the fanaticism she deplores was really as pernicious as she thinks, or whether it might even have been a necessary ingredient in bringing about the kind of polity that good liberals admire. Without the fanatic Luther to declare, “here I stand; I can do no other,” would the nations of Europe really have been able to throw off the yoke of Rome, as Mantel would no doubt describe it? Without the fanatics who translated the Bible into modern tongues would literacy have spread the way it did in Protestant nations, and then, as the Catholic Church fought back, in Catholic nations as well? Could we have achieved our present liberty of conscience, fragile as it may be, without the fanatics who were willing to die (and sometimes kill) not for the claims of the subjective conscience, but for that which they thought was indisputably right? It is courage and not political expediency that sets an example to be remembered down the ages and leads people to question received truths.

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