Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Still trying to use the spare time during my sabbatical to catch up on long-neglected reading, this Easter weekend – helped by the rainy weather – I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the first of her novels that I’ve read. This “historical novel” won the Booker Prize in 2009 and I understand was made into a play and a TV series, neither of which I have seen.
The novel is set in Tudor England in the reign of Henry VIII and revolves around Thomas Cromwell, who rose from lowly beginnings in Putney to be one of the powerful men in the country. Cromwell gets a surprisingly sympathetic treatment, at odds with most of the historical record which treats him largely as a cruel and unscrupulous character, undoubtedly clever but given to threats and torture if appeals to reason failed. From a 21st century perspective, it’s hard to find redeeming features in Cromwell. Or anyone else in this story, to be honest.
The historical events of the period covered by the book are dominated by Henry’s attempts to have his marriage of 24 years to Catherine of Aragon annulled so he could marry Anne Boleyn, along the way having himself declared the Supreme Governor of the Church in England, causing a split with Rome. Henry does marry Anne, and she bears him a daughter, destined to become Elizabeth I, though her second pregnancy ends in a miscarriage. The book ends in 1535 just after the execution of Thomas More, beheaded for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy.
(More was portrayed sympathetically in the play and film A Man For All Seasons though he was much disposed to persecution of alleged heretics, many of whom he caused to be burned at the stake for such terrible crimes as distributing copies of the Bible printed in English. Significant chunks of the penultimate chapter are lifted from the script of A Man For All Seasons but given a very different spin.)
Henry VIII is also portrayed in a somewhat flattering light; Anne Boleyn rather less so. Mary Tudor, Henry’s eldest daughter by Catherine of Aragon, cuts an unsurprisingly forlorn and intransigent. There are also significant appearances from other figures familiar from schoolboy history: Hugh Latimer, Cardinal Wolsey, and Thomas Cranmer; as well as those whose story is not often told, such as Mary Boleyn (Anne’s older sister). I have a feeling that Hilary Mantel was being deliberately courting controversy with her heterodox approach to characterization. She probably succeeded, as many professional historians are on record as hating Wolf Hall as much of it is of questionable accuracy and some is outright fiction.
Incidentally, one of the most negative reactions to this book that I’ve seen is from Eamon Duffy who is on record as detesting the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell and was “mystified by his makeover in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall from a thuggish ruthless commoner to a thoughtful sensitive figure”. I mention this particularly because Eamon Duffy, an ecclesiastical historian, was my tutor when I was an undergraduate at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
On the other hand, Wolf Hall not meant to be a work of scholarly history: it is a novel and I think you have to judge it by the standards of whether it succeeds as a work of fiction. I would say that it does. Although rather long-winded in places – it’s about 640 pages long – it is vividly written and does bring this period to life with colour and energy, and a great deal of humour, while not shying away from the brutality of the time; the execution scenes are unflinchingly gruesome. The book may not be accurate in terms of actual history, but it certainly creates a credible alternative vision of the time.
It’s interesting that the title of this book is Wolf Hall when that particular place – the seat of the Seymour family – hardly figures in the book. However, one character does make a few appearances, Jane Seymour, who just a year after the ending of this book would become the third wife of Henry VIII. It also happened that Thomas Cromwell’s son, Gregory, married Jane’s sister, Elizabeth. I suppose I will have to read the next book in the trilogy, Bring Up The Bodies, to hear Mantel’s version of those events…
In the Dark 
March 31, 2024 at 8:38 pm
I’m intrigued a student studying science would have an historian as a tutor. Anyway, I would agree strongly with Eamon Duffy in his assessment of Thomas Cromwell, although I would extend that assessment to the whole of the Tudor regime.
March 31, 2024 at 8:46 pm
The system at Cambridge when I was there was that students were assigned a tutor who was not in the same discipline. The role of the tutor was strictly pastoral. Academic supervision was undertaken by your Director of Studies, a different person.
Unless something very bad happened you would meet your tutor only once each term for a friendly chap. I always liked chatting to Eamon Duffy, who was very friendly, although he always referred to me as “Coles from Newcastle”, each time as if I’d never heard it before.
March 31, 2024 at 9:05 pm
It’s interesting that the roles of academic tutor and personal tutor were separated. That might work well, in that it could broaden the support available to students, particularly when problems arose. Other universities could adopt such a practice to the benefit of their students.
“Coles from Newcastle” is witty but a bit obvious.
March 31, 2024 at 9:09 pm
The separation of these roles has much to recommend it but outside Oxbridge, I don’t think universities have enough staff for it to be feasible.
March 31, 2024 at 10:43 pm
There probably are few staffing implications from separating the roles. Academic tutoring is time consuming, particularly when weekly tutorials are involved, of course. Personal tutoring usually requires little more than a short chat every several weeks, unless significant problems arise.
March 31, 2024 at 8:54 pm
I agree with your last comment. The Tudor period – like earlier periods of English history – is populated by monstrous individuals with very few redeeming features to be found among them.
March 31, 2024 at 9:06 pm
Yes. Most of the establishment figures from that period were grotesques.
March 31, 2024 at 10:17 pm
History is weird: the characters are unconvincing and the plots implausible. Novels are much more comprehensible.
April 1, 2024 at 12:36 am
I’ve seen the play of the sequel, <i>Bring Up the Bodies.</i> It was nothing special. I disliked the film of <i>Man for all Seasons</i> from the moment I saw it as an uncomprehending 10-year-old. When I watched it again recently I had my opinion confirmed; scene after scene is merely big men shouting at each other to show how strongly they feel. I guessed that it had originally been a play, and googling confirmed this. The play would work a lot better.
You’ve not mentioned the subtext which unquestionably caused Eamon Duffy to dislike it: the English Reformation. Thomas Cromwell was proto-protestant, Thomas More Catholic, and Duffy wrote the leading apologia for English Catholicism of his generation, <i>The Stripping of the Altars.</i> Duffy undoubtedly showed that 16th century English folk, contrary to the claims of generations of Anglican historians, were quite happy with Catholicism and were bewildered or unhappy about the ecclesiastical changes that took place in their lifetimes. What he was silent about was the fact that the Catholic church did its utmost to keep the Bible out of the hands of the common people, without any doubt because (although this is never conceded) they would then see for themselves the chasm between late-mediaeval Catholicism and New Testament gospel Christianity. Duffy also attempted, unsuccessfully in my view, to defuse the criticism levelled at his book that it neglected the Lollards, effectively an underground protestant movement before the Reformation in England. Across Europe there were many such groups, all persecuted (and movingly depicted in Leonard Verduin’s book <i>Reformers and their Stepchildren</i>), of which the Lollards were probably the largest. Duffy attempted to draw this criticism in his Preface to the second edition of <i>Stripping of the Altars.</i> I much prefer his next book, <i>The Voices of Morebath,</i> in which he sensitively chronicles the ecclesiastical changes experienced in a rural parish from Henry VIII to Edward VI to Queen Mary to Elizabeth I, using the preserved diaries of a Devon vicar. Of such changes was the satirical song <i>The Vicar of Bray</i> made.
Henry VIII was Catholic in his theology and he merely wished to replace the Pope by himself in England. To the end of his life he had Lollards burnt for heresy. But he could not appoint Catholic theologians to educate his son because of his repudiation of the papacy, and young Edward and his council were actively protestant. The effect of Luther’s doctrines was crossing the sea from the Continent at this time. In Germany the Reformation began as a spiritual movement and then went political as well. In English it began as a political movement and then went spiritual as well. (Gospel Christianity is not political.)
April 1, 2024 at 11:21 am
The Dissolution of the Monasteries (a process that Thomas Cromwell oversaw) did not begin until 1536, which is after the events in this book (but no doubt in the next one). This was done not so much for ideological reasons but because Henry wanted to get his hands on the Church’s immense wealth. In England at any rate the Reformation was largely used as cover for purely secular motivations.
April 1, 2024 at 11:28 am
I’d say rather that the English Reformation *started* as cover for secular motivations. I regard the Dissolution of the Monasteries as the right action for the wrong reason.
April 1, 2024 at 9:33 am
As to Cromwell’s awfulness or otherwise, I don’t have a dog in the fight, but I think Duffy is missing the point. All three books in the trilogy are pretty much Cromwell’s interior monologue: if Cromwell emerges as a sane, rational, kind man, well, that’s what most people think about themselves. This is particularly so in Bring up the Bodies, where (spoiler alert!) Cromwell’s behaviour becomes even more questionable, but his motivations (which to him are very reasonable) are pretty plain. Of course, that raises the question whether it makes any sense to do a version for the screen, where no attempt is made to indicate what C is thinking and all the focus is on what he does. Similar problem to doing a film version of Dune – if the original book is based on one character’s inner thoughts, turning it into a movie turns it into something else entirely.