Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (2009)

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (2009). Winner of the Man Booker Prize; 1st of a trilogy which continues with Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light, and the basis for a 2015 PBS miniseries. #3 on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century So Far.

There are two basic things historical novelists do when they dramatize and personalize the past. One is to underscore the deep and strange otherness of the past, the degree to which “the past is a foreign country” - and thus to underscore the transience of our own present, and the degree to which all the ways of living, thinking, feeling, interacting, and being human that we take as normal and solid in our own time are in fact shifting sands, constantly in flux. This approach in the hands of a talented writer, deeply immersed in the historical era of their choice, can truly open our eyes to the difference of the past in an imaginative way that nonfiction historical scholarship never could.

The other approach is what I think of as “the Flintstones approach” - to treat the past as if it resembles the present, as if nothing really changes that much. Just as in The Flintstones, although it was set in Stone Age times, everyone understood that it was really 1960s suburban middle class America, and that was the joke. And I don’t mean to belittle this approach by calling it the Flintstones approach, either - actually The Flintstones rested on a clever satirical premise that enabled a nuanced and humorous take on its own present. Of course it seems natural (and perhaps a little too easy) to assume that, no matter what place and time you choose to travel back to, people behaved and thought more or less the same as we do now. Call it the “presentizing” of the past - and the thing is, you can learn from this exercise. But you’re not learning about the past. You’re learning about the present; you’re creatively manipulating the raw material of the past to gain insight and perspective about the present.

I don’t mean to imply that a writer of historical novels must choose one or the other. It’s more that they blend both approaches. Of course we all appreciate that the past was different - it’s just that some treatments minimize the differences down to surface details, like different clothing and lack of electric lights. And of course all stories for a present-day audience must relate in some way to the present - or why write it? And how could you write them? You might say that if a brilliant historical novelist were truly to somehow capture the past in all its strangeness and foreignness, it might have as little relatability to present readers as if it were written in an incomprehensible and obsolete language.

Hilary Mantel certainly blends both these approaches in Wolf Hall, the first of her three-volume trilogy covering one of the true set-pieces of English history: Henry VIII, his six marriages, and his related struggle with the Catholic Church. I thought a lot about the two approaches, past-centric and presentist, as I read this book throughout most of December (while also doing holiday shopping, feeding and entertaining my wife’s family, and finishing the eleventh God Street Wine album). Relating to my last point above, one major concession that Mantel makes to the present - as pretty much any writer covering this material would really have to do - is having the characters speak more or less comprehensible modern English, rather than the pre-Elizabethan Early Modern English they actually used in the 1530s. Language aside, I wondered a lot whether Mantel’s characters, at the center of political power in Tudor England, weren’t being subtly modernized, in their thoughts and sentiments and habits, and in a more political sense, in their relationships to the evolving nature of power and the state.

I also thought a lot about another question: why is this story so darn fascinating to people? After all, Henry VIII and his women have been the stars of so many books, movies, and TV dramas: off the top of my head there’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Other Boleyn Girl, A Man for All Seasons, the Tudors TV show, the musical Six, and so many more books, shows, and documentaries of varying lengths and qualities - the whole thing has been just done to death, I kept thinking. Obviously you can get why it’s interesting on the most basic level - king marries many times, likes to have his used wives executed, and so on. To give Mantel credit, she goes far beyond the most prurient type of blood-and-sex treatment of the story to explore questions about monarchy, power, religion, and the making of the modern state, and creates nuanced and three-dimensional versions of the central characters like Henry, Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, etc.

The main thing that makes Wolf Hall unique is that Mantel centers the story around the figure of Thomas Cromwell - a lawyer, banker and fixer for Henry VIII, who has generally been considered a colorless and ruthless apparatchik of the Tudor monarchy, but who Mantel portrays as a sympathetic figure, an ordinary man of humble circumstances who manages to keep his perspective even when reaching the heights of power and influence. Cromwell is an interesting figure to center the story around, far more so than the actual monarch; Mantel seems to admire him, or at least the version of him that she’s created, a figure of many admirable qualities, with an empathy, an even-temperedness, and a variety of experience that stem from his humble origins, self-made aspect, and position outside the blinkered bubble of the English aristocracy.

But looking at Hans Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell - the painting of which figures in the novel - I can’t help feeling that I am looking at a much colder and harder man than the one depicted in Mantel’s novel. And the word apparatchik, which I used rather offhandedly, really seems quite apropos when you consider that the brutal monarchist regime, which Mantel depicts in fascinating detail, was in fact nearly as awful as the Bolshevik state in the Stalin years. It wasn’t just Henry’s wives; they executed people, hung and disemboweled and beheaded them, for treason or for heresy or faint allegations of those things, and locked them in the Tower of London on the slimmest of pretexts. Beyond the worst violence and the utter lack of rights, the state’s completely arbitrary and unaccountable nature, the lack of any social mobility and the cruel vehemence of aristocratic snobbery, seem to have made Tudor England a rather awful place to have existed. Monarchy, to put it plain, fucking sucked. If it wasn’t actually quite as bad as Stalin’s USSR or Hitler’s Germany, that was mainly because it was still the 1530s, England wasn’t even Britain yet, and modern technologies of violence and mass persuasion were still centuries away. But it still wasn’t a nice place, the real Cromwell was probably not what we could call a nice person, and - speaking of the past being a foreign country - a denizen of those times would in all likelihood have found our 21st century interest in niceness to be peculiar and probably insane.

Now, a lot of the story - beyond the sex and murder - revolves around Henry’s gradual break from the Vatican, eventual rejection of Catholic authority, creation of a modern and Protestant England, and, in a larger sense, the transition to early modernity and formation of a recognizably modern secular state. This is the stuff that, at least to historians, is a lot more compelling than the personal aspects of Henry’s sex life. And in one way of framing the story, at least, it’s a story of progress: Cromwell, empowered by Henry, fights back against the medieval power of Rome, and against the corruption of England’s churches and monasteries. You can see the Enlightenment in the distance, and the Renaissance closer up, when Cromwell and the King persuade each other that in breaking from Rome they may even be clearing the mists of Dark Ages ignorance and superstition:

Where does the prince get his power, and his power to enforce the law? He gets it through a legislative body, which acts on behalf of the citizens. It is from the will of the people … that a king derives his kingship. … he, Henry, is not a despot; he is a monarch who rules within the law … (494)

However, as we moderns know all too well, it’s not as simple as that. Never mind that Locke is still 150 years away and the idea of the consensual state with legitimate and lawful rulers was not really on the table in Tudor times. The fact is that, even when it did finally come along, the modern state would prove, in many cases, just as adept an oppressor (or invader) as premodern ones. Merely legitimating a state through the underlying consent of the governed may be more abstractly just, but is no guarantee that a state will be good (in fact, you could say that we’re still working on that problem).

In any case, Wolf Hall rarely delves into political/historical issues so explicitly. Most of it is intensely personal, relationship and personality based, which tends to conceal rather than highlight the historical issues. As I said, the characters are deftly drawn; but the fact remains that they are indeed “drawn”, not based in any objective historical reality. Beyond Cromwell and the King, and Queen Katherine and Anne Boleyn, Thomas More is one of the book’s central and most interesting figures. The intellectual and deeply devout Catholic and author of Utopia, eventually sainted by Rome for his resistance to the Reformation and fidelity to the Vatican over Henry (for which he paid with his life), More has often been portrayed positively, for example in 1966’s A Man for All Seasons. Mantel takes a decidedly darker view of More as a cold and rather fanatical anti-Reformation intellectual, who is happy to torture those he regards as heretics and burn them at the stake if they fail to repent. The novel ends (Spoiler Alert) with More’s execution for treason despite Cromwell’s attempts to secure mercy for him.

Beyond Cromwell, More, the King, and his wives, Wolf Hall juggles a cast of many, many side figures and supporting players - to the point where it is truly difficult, to someone not an expert in the Tudor era, to keep track of who is who. (A five-page “Cast of Characters” at the front of the book is helpful; I counted 99 characters listed there, and there are certainly others who appear in the text but are not listed in the “Cast”. I found myself often venturing to Wikipedia to figure out who some obscure court nobleman was, or to dig deeper on some of the main characters and events.) There’s something both impressive and intimidating about Mantel’s command of such a vast assembly of characters, all based (as far as I can tell, anyway) on quality current scholarship. It’s undeniably immersive; but it can also be exhausting for the reader.

After finishing Wolf Hall, I went on to watch the 6-episode PBS miniseries with my visiting in-laws; it’s truly well made, with great performances by Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Anton Lesser as More, Damian Lewis as Henry, and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn. It serves one very legitimate purpose for historical drama - as pure entertainment. Having now read the book and binged the series, I’ve had a cozy, Decembery sojourn into the world of Henry VIII, as reconceived by the very talented Hilary Mantel - and I feel I can, finally, navigate the vast world, many personages, and broader historical currents of Henry’s England with some small degree of confidence.

But I can’t help thinking of something I wrote earlier, about Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing and the TV series based on it: how I noticed that when it was transformed into a drama, so much of what Keefe had written was downplayed or missing. Because in a way, every drama is the same. Every drama functions in a dramatic way according to dramatic rules. There’s good guys an villains, perpetrators and victims, comedy and tragedy. And watching a drama pulls you into focusing on the interrelationships between the characters at the expense of the broader context of which they are all a part. Maybe I’m just a hopeless history nerd. Or maybe I should just accept the entertainment, albeit highbrow, for what it is. But for me, sometimes the history, the true mystery of the past and its people, is what I’m really fascinated by, and the drama, while fun, ultimately just kind of gets in the way.

(Read December 2024)