Towards the end of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell recalls how as a child of six he made
coffin nails as his blacksmith father’s apprentice. He wondered then why we
nail down the dead and answered the question: “It’s so the horrible old buggers
don’t spring out and chase us.”
Many years and many deaths later, Cromwell has another
answer.
“He knows different now. It’s the living that turn and chase
the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds and words
like stone thrust into their rattling mouth; we rewrite their lives.”
It is an apt way of looking at what is happening in the
book’s moment, but it also reflects on what Mantel has done to Cromwell’s life,
to what all writers of historical fiction do.
And by this book’s end we might feel as if we are the very privileged reader ghosts, shadowing a vibrant, alive Cromwell, so palpable is Mantel’s unshrouding. She achieves this small miracle through vivid descriptions, a layered peopled world and an interesting narrative construction.
And by this book’s end we might feel as if we are the very privileged reader ghosts, shadowing a vibrant, alive Cromwell, so palpable is Mantel’s unshrouding. She achieves this small miracle through vivid descriptions, a layered peopled world and an interesting narrative construction.
We suspend our lives and immerse into Cromwell’s world. He becomes
our focus. As the narrative unfolds in third person present, we chase him, following
his moves, his sentiments, sometimes his thoughts. As Mantel uses the pronoun, he almost becomes Cromwell’s name; even
as it reminds us of our literary and
historical distance; the pronoun makes him intensely present. This
could be, but is decidedly not, a first person present narrative. It is a life relived as it’s retold – and
read.
He starts sprawled
and bloodied on the cobblestones, being told to get up by the brawling brute of
a father who kicks him when he’s down.
A scrappy kid, he’s regularly beaten up by Walter, a man
everyone, including local magistrates, fears. Tom’s crime this time: ironically fighting, fighting he can only vaguely
remember. His solution: fighting.
Cromwell is less than 15 years old when he leaves his
father’s abuse, his hometown and homeland, looking for a war somewhere,
anywhere. His only regret – leaving his dog Bella behind, a sentiment that
reveals the tender side of Cromwell the reader will come to admire.
The narrative jumps ahead 27 years to a Cromwell who is now
a man of the world – one who has not only picked himself up but picked up
several languages and business and legal skills as well. Now conducting business in part as an
assistant to Cardinal Wolsey, who mentors him further, the two work to promote
the King’s interests whatever Henry VIII determines those interests to be.
Chief among them is begetting a male heir – to ensure a smooth succession and prevent
civil disruption.
Wolsey, as a cardinal, will encounter difficulty and pay
dearly for it. He, however, has faith in
his apprentice. Wolsey speculates:
I wonder,” Wolsey says, “would you have the patience with
our sovereign lord? … If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him
as he is, a pleasure –loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are,
which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow
about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful, charm, Tom.”
That combination of
fighting and charm allows Cromwell to ultimately take his place as the King’s
most loyal adviser, supervisor of his affairs. Mantel ably depicts a spectrum
of characters, many engorged with self-interest.
The coy seductress Anne Boleyn is among the most powerful of
these. She spends seven years tempting the king --- gradually allowing more and more access – at
one point he may undress her but not more.
While the king’s primary concerns are sating his appetite for
pleasure and producing a male heir, religious heretics and foreign thinkers are
undermining the England’s Catholic Church and Thomas More chases and persecutes
them.
Ultimately Cromwell engineers what Wolsey could not --
annulment of the king’s
marriage to Katherine of Aragon and the coronation of Anne Boleyn.
The king’s new marriage alone is not enough. He must get
others to recognize the marriage and its effect on the succession by taking
oaths of support. One who refuses: the now rejected More.
Thus the principled More emerges as practical Cromwell’s
chief antagonist. The contrast has been carefully and subtlely developed since
the book’s beginning.
While Cromwell has been humane and expedient, More has been ruthless and
rigid both with himself and others. One is a man of God’s world; the other of
this world. Early on:
“These are good days for him {Cromwell}: every day a fight
he can win. “Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,” remarks Sir Thomas More. “
I mean your idol Usury.” But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes
up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a
creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in
for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to
get the day’s exchange rate.”
While Cromwell’s political genius for doing what’s expedient
is most challenged by More in this book, the fuller human portrait of Cromwell
as a son, husband, father, apprentice and mentor anchors it. Henry VIII’s court
may be where his mind solves the business of the day, but home at Austin Friars
is where his heart is.
Austin Friars is where he picks up women’s gossip and
cherishes his daughters, encourages his gentle,
intellectually average son and mentors another, Rafe the young man who is most like a son to him. It is where he hears children
play, women laugh, where he loves. It is where a succession of dogs, all named
Bella, keep him company.
At one time “He thinks, I may not be rich, but I am
lucky.” He has a house full of relatives and wards, and visitors everyday and a
woman he loves. Later he delights in his wealth. He
revels in the things of this world – and also deeply feels his many losses.
Plaque infects his world.
He has long known how brutal the world is. He
has seen a woman burn to death when he
was a young child; he knows live evisceration is the penalty for traitors.
Repeatedly his response to such brutality is kindness and
mercy for those less fortunate or more stubborn than he -- those who hold that beliefs on both sides are
more valuable than life Itself. He asks for a merciful end for a protestant
heretic John Frith. He seeks similar mercy for the Catholic More.
Home and extended family are his refuge, what he holds most
dear. So it is fitting that when Cromwell tries to persuade More to embrace
freedom he appeals to him with what he Cromwell values most – the pleasures of
family and domestic life. That quality is what the reader admires him for – and
alternately questions the sense of More’s principled sainthood.
If the world of Cromwell seems brutal in Wolf Hall, the first
of a trilogy, the second book, Bring Up the Bodies, promises more of the same.
For Wolf Hall, is not
where the action takes place, but rather where it leads, the home of the Seymours – including Jane who we know from
history will be Henry VIII’s third wife.
Cromwell knows well the implications of a wolf. Towards book’s
end as he faces a longtime adversary: “The saying comes to him, homo homini
lupus, man is wolf to man.”
In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell, fighting dog that
he is, gets another chance to show his mettle. I hope to again shadow him as he does.
I've been thinking of tackling this one. I will certainly have to before the film comes out since I blog (mostly) about movies based on books! And Wolf Hall is being adapted by HBO and BBC as a television mini series. Peter Straughan is writing the script - he co-wrote the screenplay for Tinker Tailor and The Debt. What actor do you think would make a good Cromwell? How about Ms. Boleyn????
ReplyDeleteI'm really bad at imagining actors in roles. I think I just don't go to enough movies. I can't get the pictures of him out of my head. He was such a big chested man. Henry is also an interesting character. Who would you suggest?
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