Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel

WOLF HALL
Hilary Mantel
A critical paper by
Leigh Fabens

In Wolf Hall the reader encounters the intellectual challenge of under-standing history presented as fiction. You are hyper-conscious of authorial construction: there is dialogue between characters who had real-life counterparts, and you may know something about their actions, and the consequences of their real-life behavior. As you read an historical novel – or watch a play, a miniseries, a movie – you remind yourself that the author wants you to believe in the authenticity of her representation. You know it’s impossible – we don’t know what Henry said to Katherine or his courtiers, and in Wolf Hall the dialogue is modern, not 16th century. Thank goodness. Wolf Hall is an ambitious novel – there’s a lot to discuss. In this paper I will concentrate on Hilary Mantel’s construction of character.

Both history and fiction are narratives, and sophisticated readers know the power of an author’s choices: how is the story framed? What facts or subplots get a full exposition, and which ones are left out? Except for the futuristic – think of Margaret Atwood – all fiction is historical in the sense that the world of the novel is a world of the past, long past or immediate. How to describe that world? If the novelist takes too many liberties with well-known and well-established records, she dooms her work. Few will treat it as a serious novel, even if it is identified as fiction, not biography. Hilary Mantel could be confident that her readers would be familiar with the history of the period, but the better informed are likely to have better-formed opinions. Tudor England is risky subject matter for a novelist. Christopher Tayler, in his favorable review for The Guardian, asks “how do you write about Henry VIII without being camp or breathless or making him do something clunkily non-stereotypical?” (She manages very well, he concludes.) How do you build dramatic tension when every literate person knows what will happen?

King Henry VIII’s devices and desires drive the action of this novel, and we all know where they lead: he splits with Rome, dumps Katherine,  and marries Anne Boleyn, who has only a female child. Anne is beheaded, although not in this volume. Thomas More is beheaded. Many people we didn’t know about are beheaded or burned at the stake. The irony of Elizabeth I’s glorious reign is unknown to all the characters who work so hard to ensure that a legitimate male heir will be born. From our perch we want to shout back “don’t worry about it, Henry!” Mantel shows us why his worries were justified.

Thomas Cromwell, the focal character of the novel, was an ideal choice. Sufficiently famous to merit an unfavorable reputation and more than a bit part in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” Cromwell was nevertheless relatively obscure. The lives of Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey are better known, more thoroughly chronicled. The same is true for many of the major figures in the Tudor court. Cromwell’s “low birth” is frequently mentioned - in derogation, puzzlement, or pride. The acidic, gossipy Lady Rochford, Anne’s sister-in-law, offers Cromwell her view of Mark Smeaton, a young musician at the court: “he sticks like a burr to his betters. He does not know his place. He is a jumped-up nobody, taking his chance because the times are disordered.” Cromwell replies: “I suppose you could say the same of me, Lady Rochford. And I am sure you do.”

Born low and brought up in a poor household with an abusive, drunken father, Cromwell breaks away and heads to the Continent, where he educates himself in the ways of the emerging Renaissance world, learning multiple languages, serving in the Italian army, working as a trader, and as an accountant in a Florentine bank. If he does not match our idealized notions of a “Renaissance Man,” he is master of many trades and professions. His lack of pedigree doesn’t bother him because he is convinced that a man’s money and credit are worth more than a title. From our perspective we know he was right – ahead of his time, perhaps, but on the right track. Money is thematic in this novel. Thomas Cromwell is born poor, rises by the use of his own wits, gets very rich in the process, and at the height of his powers is resented for it. “You do everything, Cromwell,” says Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and Henry’s brother-in-law. “You are everything now. We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves.”

When Cromwell is sent to “fix” Harry Percy, to beat the notion of marrying Anne out of him, he reminds him of his debts, his empty coffers, his need to provision his armies on the northern borders. He wonders, to himself, how to explain the contemporary world to Percy. Mantel uses Cromwell’s interior monologue to describe political realities: “The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall…Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by….the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and the shot.” His spoken words, as the author imagines them, are by turns cajoling and ferociously threatening; his thoughts are pure realpolitick. The scene, with petulant, privileged Harry overmatched by a hard-nosed fixer, dramatizes the weakness of the old order. In the novel, as in history, Harry Percy is the loser.

His materialism goes hand in hand with the skepticism that characterizes Cromwell’s attitude toward the Roman church and the entire ecclesiastical order. Mantel brings it up in the first pages of the book, when she has the fourteen-year-old Thomas drop a holy medal, a gift from his sister,  into the channel after touching it to his lips “for luck.”  Not faith – luck. The reader is reminded of this gesture when Cromwell, years later, accompanies his mentor Cardinal Wolsey out of London after he has been thrown out of his palace. Wolsey, anxious and pathetically grateful to Henry Norris for bringing a message of tepid good will from the king, takes a chain from his own neck and hangs it on Norris. George Cavendish is shocked: Wolsey has parted with his reliquary, a piece of the true Cross!  Cromwell reassures him: “We’ll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get a certificate with St. Peter’s thumbprint, to say they’re genuine.”

Mantel shows her skill in these early scenes with Wolsey. Instead of simply describing the sumptuous palace the Cardinal inhabits as Archbishop of York, the author gives us a dramatic account of the kings’ men stripping the place of books, tapestries, gold plate, bolts of fabric worth their weight in gold.  Her considerable research underpins the narrative without announcing itself. The issues of the day are embodied in principal characters. Cardinal Wolsey was Archbishop of York and also Lord Chancellor; he exercised both ecclesiastical and secular power, a privilege that ultimately brought him down when he could not find a way to end Henry’s marriage to Katherine. Readers familiar with the establishment clause of the United States Constitution are reminded that church and state were not separate in Tudor England; Henry had a real problem.

Cromwell served Wolsey and then Henry, after Wolsey’s downfall. Servant, courtier, observer, actor - he is a well-placed lens through which to study the period, and the narrative is so tightly focused in Cromwell’s point of view that the novel is, essentially, his story.  Mantel imagines his character, and while she improves on his reputation as Henry’s “fighting dog,” she allows other perspectives, through dialogue rather than description. She lets him show his awareness of his reputation in the exchange with Lady Rochford. Later, Cromwell confronts Patch, the fool he parted from Wolsey, as the fellow removes his Cardinal’s costume after playing the part of Wolsey in a brutal parody of the Cardinal’s descent into Hell. Cromwell retains his loyalty and respect for Wolsey and finds the entertainment abhorrent. How can Patch act that part? Patch sneers: “I act what part I’m paid to act. And you?...No wonder your humor’s so bitter these days. Nobody’s paying you, eh? Monsieur Cremuel, the retired mercenary.” They exchange threats, Cromwell asserting his power and the fool taunting him.

Mantel uses this scene for multiple purposes: to show how the once-powerful Wolsey is ridiculed; to give us a picture of what passed for entertainment at Hampton Court – a palace built by Wolsey; to show Cromwell’s toughness and the opinions of his enemies. But in the middle of the confrontation with Patch, which takes place behind the scenes, she adds a bit of interior monologue to give us a sense of Cromwell’s humanity. He hears a child sobbing, somewhere out of sight, perhaps the small boy who was hit in the eye by one of the actors, perhaps slapped again for dropping a bowl. “Childhood was like that; you are punished, then punished again for protesting. So, one learns not to complain; it is a hard lesson, but one never lost.” Cromwell appears to be an empathetic person, even as he reveals his toughness.

Much of Wolf Hall is about relationships – domestic, political, commercial. They are dramatized, as opposed to being described. Cromwell loses his wife and two young daughters to what appears to be a type of plague. He keeps his emotions under control, plays the hard-bitten servant of the king, but privately grieves. His household is expansive. At Austin Friars he accommodates not only his wife’s sister and her family, but various others who work for him and at the same time stand almost as family members. There is Rafe, handed over like an apprentice and taken from his family on a miserably cold, rainy night, Rafe who becomes his right-hand man. Abandoned by her husband, Helen Barre is taken in with her two very young children. She tells Cromwell that the nuns in the convent where she works will take her in, but they won’t take the children. “Another instance of the church’s charity,” Cromwell thinks, and he asks her to come into his household. Later, Helen and Rafe will marry. Christophe, a stray cat of a boy, joins the household.

At the very end of the novel Dick Purser appears in Cromwell’s study to ask a favor.  Now keeper of Cromwell’s guard dogs, he once served Thomas More in Chelsea and was whipped by More in front of More’s wife and daughters. Purser asks permission to accompany Cromwell to More’s trial; his humiliation still stings, the memory of the beating and the more painful memory of the ladies of the household laughing at the spectacle. As Mantel imagines it, Purser is not vengeful so much as he is needy – he needs to see his tormentor in the dock to believe it. Cromwell receives him graciously, and offers him a glass of wine; the scene again shows the “fighting dog” as one whose humanitarian impulses are intact. He is kind, sympathetic, mindful of his own harsh treatment at the hands of his father.  At an earlier point Cromwell kisses his own infant son’s fluffy head and says “I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?”

Here is an example of the challenge I referred to. We know that we cannot possibly know what Thomas Cromwell said or felt. Surely there were many of his contemporaries who hated him, and for different reasons. The titled nobility hated him for his power and influence. Anyone he threatened in the course of his service to the king must have hated him. Mantel doesn’t leave out the bad stuff: the threats, the bribes, the personal enrichment. But she must not have believed he was all bad, and the character she constructs is a man of his time: materialistic, skeptical, but also deeply humanist. He cared more about improving life on earth than about preparing for an afterlife in the next world.

Cromwell and Wolsey discuss the matter of the king’s progeny. There is at least one illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, and one daughter who survives – the Princess Mary, Katherine’s child.  Other children died in infancy, at birth, or were miscarried. Why such misfortune? Wolsey voices the orthodox attribution to divine favor or divine wrath, but is puzzled by examples that do not fit that explanation. Cromwell thinks “It’s not the hand of God kills our children. It’s disease and hunger and war, rat bites and bad air and the miasma from plague pits; it’s bad harvests like the harvest this year and last year; it’s careless nurses.” A very modern line of thought.

In his confrontation with More – it was part of his job – Cromwell is exasperated, not simply angry or vengeful. He cannot understand the total absence of pragmatism in More: why won’t he agree to a cleverly worded confession that would save his life while satisfying the king? He cannot understand how the man could care so little about the effect his martyrdom would have on his family. But Mantel has already given us a picture of More that shows how little he cared for his wives, daughters, and servants. Throughout the novel there are references to More’s pursuit of heretics and heresies, from the inconsequential – Dick Purser’s sin was saying the host was a piece of bread – to the very serious matter of translating the Bible into English. Cromwell secretly owned a copy of William Tyndale’s translation, and he intervened unsuccessfully on the scholar’s behalf when Tyndale was captured in Antwerp, tried and condemned to death. Tyndale was doomed: he publicly opposed Henry’s divorce on scriptural grounds and managed to incur the wrath of both Wolsey and More. Robert Bolt left out the parts about the heretics; while glorifying his man for all seasons, he vilified Cromwell, who was very much a man of his time.

Wolf Hall is a big book, and I have had to skip many interesting lines of discussion, but before I conclude I would like to call attention to the author’s use of visual descriptions. Cromwell has his portrait painted by Holbein, whose portrait of Henry VIII is probably the one in everybody’s mind’s eye. To have one’s portrait painted in the first place was a sign of wealth and power, never mind that the artist was a court painter. Mantel devotes a short chapter to the unveiling, when Cromwell’s family and the Emperor’s Ambassador register their opinions. “You look rather stout, uncle”; “that is not the expression on your face”; “your Protestant painter has missed the mark…one never thinks of you alone…but in company, studying the faces of other people.”

He is seated at a desk. There is a fine, gilt-edged book bound in leather – not a Bible but a book on how to keep your books – account books, presumably, since Cromwell was credited with moving England from the inefficient Feudal tax system to a proto-modern fiscal bureaucracy. The iconography of his lawmaking profession is pictured: a quill, paper, his seal in a bag. Wolsey’s turquoise ring is on his hand, but he holds a folded paper in a gesture that looks “as sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife.” Cromwell remarks that perhaps Mark Smeaton was right when he overheard him say that he looked like a murderer. His son’s reply comes as an abrupt end to a passage that was about celebrating success: “Did you not know?”

Cromwell has seen himself as others, or at least one other, saw him. The image seems to be the only one we have of Cromwell; in any case he probably was not painted multiple times, and we can’t make comparisons. Holbein, like Hilary Mantel, chose how to frame the portrait, what to show, what to leave out. Because the portrait doesn’t glorify good looks we assume it must be a good likeness. We can only speculate about he gesture, the folded paper in his hand – “is this a dagger that I see before me?” The painting, like the man’s life story, is open to interpretation.

People in 16th century England were not accustomed to seeing reflections of themselves, in paintings or in mirrors. Mantel takes care to include a passage that takes place in Cromwell’s house when he has already accumulated some wealth and has begun to use it to purchase fine clothes for the women of the household. He has also bought mirrors. His sister-in-law remarks that they never had mirrors – she never saw herself reflected, never knew how she looked to other people. It’s one of the author’s fine details, descriptive of domestic life in Tudor England and at the same time a reminder that before the age of cameras and ubiquitous mirrors the meaning of “self image” was much more obscure.

The novel ends with a nod to what will be a sequel. Anne Boleyn is slipping out of favor. She has become a liability rather than an asset, and Thomas Cromwell is turning his councillor’s attention to the Seymour family of Wolf Hall. There have been so few mentions of Wolf Hall in the novel that it almost comes as an “aha! moment.” We know what will happen: Anne will be executed, Henry will marry Jane Seymour, who will not live long after giving birth to Prince Edward, who also will not live long enough, and Cromwell himself will fall victim to the Tudor politics in which he was so deeply involved. We know what will happen, but we want to know how Hilary Mantel will put it together.