Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is an account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, one of the architects of Henry VIII’s reformation of the English Church. It was published in 2009 and has won the Man Booker prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle award. It is a historical novel about one of the well-known periods of English history (1500’s). The novel is huge with more than 650 pages and has a vast cast, almost one hundred characters but it is still gripping and very readable.
Mantel’s account of Cromwell’s life begins with a scene in which his violent father has knocked the youth to the ground. Skimming lightly over his youthful adventures on the Continent, it goes on to recount the story of his friendship with his patron, Cardinal Wolsey. Wosley is the chief advisor to king Henry VIII. The king has no male heir and if he dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn but the pope and most of Europe oppose him. Wosley is charged by king with securing the divorce for him, a task which he fails to secure.
Cromwell recovers from Wolsey’s downfall and commits himself to the service of the king, where he goes from one success to the next. His intelligence, his gift for languages, his understanding of money and trade, his administrative ability, and his political shrewdness all contribute to making him a very useful man, and ultimately a very powerful one. It is not until the second half of the novel that Cromwell gradually becomes embroiled in the affair that made his career, the Boleyn family’s attempt to negotiate a marriage between Anne and the Henry. Although instrumental in arranging her marriage, Cromwell betrays Anne in the end.
Once this intrigue is concluded, Mantel gives short shrift to some of the other important events in Cromwell’s life like his involvement in the dissolution of the monasteries or his persecution of heretics, redefined as enemies of the state after Henry’s break with Rome. The novel ends with the separation of Sir Thomas More’s head from his body, and Cromwell (or the narrator, it’s not quite clear) telling himself, “Today, More was escorted to the scaffold by Humphrey Monmouth . . . Monmouth is too good a man to rejoice in the reversal of fortune. But perhaps we can rejoice for him?”
Mantel’s use of Cromwell as the only set of eyes through whom we view the action of the novel, her sympathetic portrayal of scenes from Cromwell’s childhood and domestic life, and her skilful elisions of most of the minister’s less appealing or justifiable actions, allows her to turn Cromwell into a wish-fulfilment figure, and one who is rather too good to be true. His actions as depicted by Mantel are always justifiable; he never fails in any enterprise except through the failures of others; he is seldom shown to be wrong about anything and he appears to be gifted with nearly superhuman foresight.
Similarly Mantel’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, who might be said to be the villain of the novel, is too wicked to be convincing. Mantel sets up More as a foil to Cromwell. While More is a sadistic masochist who teases his wife ferociously, wears hair-shirts, and tortures heretics, Cromwell, who was historically responsible for torturing rather more people than More, is shown to be kind to wives, servants, children, and dogs. While More is a slippery, self-aggrandizing courtier with a penchant for dramatic gestures, Cromwell is a plain-spoken, pragmatic administrator often insulted for his low birth. Above all, while More is a fanatical Christian, Cromwell is a rational man for whom the pursuit of God is not the first goal of human life.
Mantel’s book supports neither the Protestants nor the Catholics in the English Reformation. For example, she writes admiringly of the obviously Romish Cardinal Wolsey, a man who stood for everything that Protestant reformers hated about Catholic priests and the papacy. She is critical of the Reformer William Tyndale, whose zeal and adherence to principle she finds distasteful. She turns her sights neither on Catholicism nor the Reformation, but on religious fanaticism. She paints More in an unflattering light because the deaths for which he was responsible were carried out in the service of religion. Worse, More, like Tyndale, was willing to die for a point of principle. Yet she accepts or excuses the executions for which Cromwell was responsible because they were carried out in service of the state.
Thus in this portrayal of Cromwell we see him as a wholly original man a son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events, ruthless in pursuit of his own interests and ambitious. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. In the shark-tank that was Henry's court, Cromwell was as skilled and as deadly as any. But in Wolf Hall he is the one whose motives we come to understand. And since we know what makes him tick better than we do any of the other players in the drama, we come under his spell and begin to see events from his point of view. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, Wolf Hall peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage. The novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death. It is about Cromwell, yes, but it is also about religious fanaticism, social dislocation, and how best to govern an unruly people.

Tarundeep Singh
2008CS10195