Taming the wolves in Wolf Hall. Historical fiction that bites.
Heads Up! Spoilers! Read the damn book first.
The fact that Anne Boleyn died by Henry VIII’s command because she cannot bear a male heir is what everybody knows. Idem the death of Thomas More as a heretic, committing treason against the king instead of God. We know about old mate Henry VIII himself: we know what the guy looks like with a plumed cap, fluffed up royal shirt and a bit of a potbelly that you might mistake him for the dude who backflipped on a skatepark and told everybody that you might not like it, but this is the peak male physical performance.
But we don’t hear much about Thomas Cromwell. I’ve heard his name being thrown around, he’s right in there in the mud and shit (and stirring the shit himself) but he’s not a saint, like Thomas More, he wasn’t fucking Henry, like Anne Boleyn, nor was he as well-liked as the bulwark immovable Katherine of Aragon, who was loved by everybody during her lifetime and after. Unless you watched the Tudors back when, like my grandma did, I suspect you only have a passing understanding of what happened in this intricate period of English history which arguably determined European history for the following generations. Fuck, I think my grandma knows English history better than I do.
But to say that Wolf Hall is simply a historical drama is a disservice to the book — The bloody thing won the Booker Prize. Mantel’s style can be jarring. The usage of the present tense third person of ‘he’ for most of Thomas Cromwell’s dialogues polarise the readers into two camps. The main events in the background just ‘happens’ before you know it, which leaves you to question what the fuck just happened? Sometimes a dialogue is not just a mere dialogue, but can determine events and relationships later on. Blink and you’d miss it.
Despite all this, Wolf Hall is a master work in character study. It is also an intriguing exploration between the body politic and personal relationships. Certainly there have been books that have explored such themes, but I can’t think of any at the moment of any work that has done it more elegantly. Do I think Mantel’s Booker Prize is well deserved? I don’t fucking know, I just read whatever’s in those useless book lists. Did I enjoy it? Yes, I damn well did.
The Perilous Whims of Henry and the meteoric rise of Tommy Cromwell
We meet Cromwell at his lowest: within an inch of death after having beat up by his old man by a nice little king hit when he was a lad of fourteen or fifteen. He doesn’t even know how old he was himself. This prompted him to gtfo his hometown and make his luck somewhere else. This was apparently a wise move, because within a few pages we meet him again, now a lawyer in his forties with a direct access to the Cardinal every night. Real recognises real. The Cardinal is within an earshot of the king, but the king is whimsical and the Cardinal’s privilege didn’t last long.
The next time we see Wolsey, he’s getting kicked out with all his possessions squeezed in to a cart, much of them stolen and vandalised. The fallout between Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey was not explored deeply in the novel, but Wolsey wasn’t able to secure an annulment of Henry’s marriage with his first wife, Katherine. Plus, we can see that the Cardinal was getting fat with his lavish lifestyle and coffers overflowing. The Cardinal from here on out will live under the earthly limbo of the king’s axe or the king’s grace, with his head off or his reputation restored. Yet throughout this time, Cromwell remained loyal to the Cardinal.
Why did Henry want to annul his marriage? Simple, because he wants to smash his new mistress Anne Boleyn, even though he’s actually already shagged her older sister Mary some time before, giving birth to a bastard. Seems like this one is real though, because as far as “history” knows, she kept her V-plates on until she was consummated with Henry. Whether this elopement was legit or not is still a contentious issue to this day.
But this was Cromwell’s end goal, even though he doesn’t feel too crash hot about the cunning but vain Anne Boleyn, or her promiscuous sister Mary. Plus, the king’s Secretary Stephen Gardner really, really doesn’t like Cromwell and Thomas More would put him into his torture chambers if he could. All these juggling act has implications to the people under which England is ruled. Religion in England is changing to allow for the marriage between Henry and Anne to take place.
Plus, Thomas Cromwell has to manage his household, which at times seem to be as challenging as managing the king himself. But Thomas Cromwell is an expert of running his household as well as a proxy for the king in managing the country. When it all comes down to it, Thomas Cromwell is one ruthless bureaucrat, and this is the reason of his success.
Thomas Cromwell Redux
Sometimes you shouldn’t really read the blurb lest it gives you false expectations. In the back of the book, the blurb states Cromwell as a “bully” which I couldn’t see for the first half of the book. But as the events in the story unfolds, Cromwell becomes increasingly more notorious and at the end of Wolf Hall, he was an absolute fucking beast.
But we don’t see him as this monster who wiped his enemies’ blood from his fanged teeth. We see him firstly as a merchant, a loving husband, a man with intellectual and physical prowess — those immovable mountains of principles. We see him losing his wife who was fine in the morning but died at night, and we see him losing his daughters during the plague within days of each other. Yet we also see him raising the children that he adopted, like Rafe Saddler who was practically abandoned by his parents. We’re going to be in Thomas Cromwell’s side pretty early on in the book.
At the death of Cardinal Wosley, Cromwell squeezed his way into the king’s court and quickly became his main advisor, beating the likes of Stephen Gardner and Thomas More, who themselves are polarising characters in history. Stephen’s rise in power not only comes from social manoeuvring, but also the ownership of the knowledge of the king’s accounts. When given the accounts of all the abbeys and monasteries, Cromwell used this to his advantage to say, to wipe the dirt.
But it was his plan to separate away from the Church of England which plays the most significant role in his success. Separating the church of England away from the papacy gives Henry a financial advantage of not having to lose his coffers to Rome. It also makes him the indisputable power next to God, as the Pope really has no more jurisdiction in the affairs of England. It puts the entire population under his role under a precarious situation: to oppose or to follow, much like political leaders use in their propaganda nowadays. The English at this time, was really in a tight spot.
Still, we see Cromwell not as a villain but as an astute man who can run the kingdom and his ever abundant household. It is this relationship with those under his keep that makes us root for Cromwell: his ability to butcher as capable as his cook Thurston, which creates a close bond between them, his banter with the French boy Christophe, who would supply him with the most valuable information, his relation with Rafe and the pugnacious resolve to see Rafe succeed. Cromwell is one complicated dude.
History, but not as you know it
History is written by the winners, or they are written by authors in historical fiction. No, it’s not a genre that I am familiar with, even though we can argue that some of the classics that we know are also historical fiction. Look at the presence of Napoleon in War and Peace. We can argue that Haley’s Roots was also a historical account as Haley’s own ancestors. Mantel worked closely with historians in order to reconstruct the events that occurred in the book.
But the events are secondary to the ambition of the book. Wolf Hall is an exploration of history itself. Though Mantel wants us to be there, hunting with King Henry, butchering pigs in Cromwell’s kitchen or in the darkness of the prisons where Thomas More was kept, it is a reimagining of well-documented events. Mantel meticulously ensured the timelines in history matched the timelines in the novel, but we don’t see that.
We are in essence, inductively reasoning as Mantel is doing, picking up the fabric of history to weave the tapestry again to its original grandeur, as Mantel wrote about the fallen Cardinal’s fabric herself:
“The cardinal’s clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man’s inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore’s petticoat.”
It is apt that we see these events of history, now reconstructed in TV shows, in kitschy memes, without fully understanding that the fabric had once served a cardinal. But it is the attempt to reconstruct objectively that gives history its meaning, lest that it instructs.
The fate of the Tudors were too closely attached to the fate of England. Henry’s fanatical determination to find a male heir to the throne only brings more anguish to those around him. Henry, in Wolf Hall, is a fumbling king who let others take the blame, follows his whims based on his most trusted advisor at the time, be it Cromwell, More or Wosley, and a man with dubious sexual tenacity.
So are there any instructions here? Perhaps, there needs to be a separation between the personal and the state, a message so obvious, but often unfollowed to dire consequences, a question asked by the emperor’s ambassador, Chapuys to the king:
“There is a distinction to be drawn between the welfare of the country and the welfare of the Tudor line. Or do you not think so?”
A warning ignored.
In the end, our fascination of history is to fill the gaps within our lives as well, whether it be the pursuit of instructions, entertainment or intellectual fulfillment; or for more nefarious reasons. We need the past more than the past needs us. It is in fact, the living who pursue the dead instead of the other way around:
“It’s the living that chase the dead.”
Days after finishing Wolf Hall, I’m going to flip the pages of its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.
