Thoughts on Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

To say there are spoilers in this post seems faintly silly. We all know what happens at the end of Bring Up the Bodies. Anne Boleyn gets her head lopped off. It’s her primary claim to centuries-long fame. If we didn’t know it historically, there have been dozens of fictional re-tellings of the story of the machinations of Henry VIII’s court leading up to and throughout his second marriage. But I write this post assuming the reader has read one or both of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

The relationship between a fictional world and the actual is poorly understood psychological phenomenon. As readers, we seem to grant the author wide license to make up what happens at the fictional world. But not total freedom. We still import many beliefs about our world and apply them to the fictional world.

Historical fiction is uniquely situated in its relationship to the actual world. In practice, it’s usually a repository for either immature indulgences of desires or nostalgia porn. This is not to say I never read it – I do (Hi Philippa Gregory!). It’s a genre of which I am so fond I will read even a lot of the crap. It’s frustrating that there is so much crap, however. Historical fiction could be so much more. It has opportunities that other fictions don’t. It can be a study of what is preserved across two cultures (i.e., our own and the setting in the past). It can be a work of inductive psychology, taking the known actions of a person and shedding light into the motivations behind them. It can illuminate the aesthetic properties of real events. It can actually put forward its own historical argument. Historians, after all, judge what should be accepted as a fact, and often speculate about what is not known. So does a historical fiction author.

Historical fiction is almost never any of these. Yet Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are all of them. By restricting herself to the facts (more or less – of course what counts as fact is disputable), author Hilary Mantel is able to draw an aesthetically vivid likeness of Thomas Cromwell in detail. In the process, she makes a historical hypothesis: that Thomas Cromwell was not so bad as all that. In fact, he was kind of awesome. At least at first.

I have read multiple accounts of the Tudor period, most of which demonize Cromwell, and a few of which lionize him. I haven’t read the primary sources, so I can’t judge whether her argument is plausible qua historical argument. Regardless of whether she is right or wrong, simply by making an argument about the real world using fiction she is stretching the concept of what historical novel can do.

By using the novelist’s ability to inhabit a consciousness, she makes Cromwell breathe. By giving us what he knows, she also shows what he didn’t know: what other people were thinking and doing, what was going to happen in the future. We let go of our hindsight and his actions become more explicable.

She also uses the repeated motifs of a novelist. Her Cromwell and her Henry repeatedly mirror each other fictionally, which reveals part of the nature of their real life relationship.

These, Henry and Cromwell, are radically modern men. Henry repeatedly, insistently, against his own interests and contemporary customs, married for love (his grandfather, Edward IV, had done the same). Inhabiting Cromwell’s viewpoint, it is all the more clear how striking and self-destructive this must have seemed to Henry’s contemporaries. Henry, also against contemporary royal custom, promoted and trusted courtiers based at least partially on merit, not birth.

For his part, Cromwell envisions a role for government that few at the time could also see, i.e., as a potential tool for promoting the well-being of the poor. He understands that aristocrats don’t really run the world, that bankers and legislators do. So he teaches himself banking and law. Not only that, he never denies his origins as a blacksmith’s son, seeming to understand intuitively that, a la Abraham Lincoln three hundred years later, playing up your humble past can actually work to your advantage. He never lacks confidence that, despite the sneers of the aristocracy, he really should be running the country.

In Wolf Hall, Henry accuses first wife Katherine of Aragon of incest because she was originally married to Henry’s brother Arthur, who left her a widow months later. Henry charges she must have slept with Arthur during their brief marriage; she denies it. He does this so he can marry a woman with whom he is sexually obsessed, Anne Boleyn, with whose sister he has slept. That’s a lot of brothers and sisters and sex and marriage. To drive home the mirroring point, Mantel has Cromwell sleep with his wife’s sister after the death of his wife and daughters. I assume this is an invention, and that it is not known that Cromwell slept with his sister-in-law. Also in the novel, Thomas More is accused by his wife of sleeping with his daughter. All the courtiers are related to one another and sleep with one another. And, of course, when Anne Boleyn is finally tried, one of her crimes will be incest with her brother. Everyone sleeps where they eat, so to speak, but only women’s interests are harmed by it. Kings get dispensation, queens get dethroned and/or beheaded.

Henry and Cromwell also both have beloved but not-quite-suitable eldest sons. Henry’s eldest son is a bastard and can’t inherit. Cromwell’s son Gregory is gentle, protected, and not all that bright. Henry and Cromwell also each have two absent daughters. Henry essentially disowns his, and Cromwell’s die. Both men collect substitutes for those who should inhabit a station by virtue of birth but are unfit. Cromwell has Rafe Sadler and his nephew Richard Cromwell play the roles assisting in his work that his son can’t. Henry has Cromwell and Cranmer who take roles that should be played by aristocrats.

In Wolf Hall, Cromwell’s mastery of everything is itself a pleasure to read. This is reminiscent of Westerns and spy movies, where we savor watching the extra talented hero deploy his skills (say, he’s crazy quick on the draw) to the detriment of the unsuspecting antagonist. Cromwell is an administrative, legal, and linguistic genius. A tender father and devoted husband. Confident, calm, collected, and funny. “He is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” We like watching him work his abilities and succeed.

If anything, in Wolf Hall Cromwell is a little too perfect. Implausibly perfect. In Bring Up the Bodies, he starts to slip. He bangs tables and threatens torture while interviewing witnesses. He prosecutes five men for treasonous sex with Anne Boleyn. Yet he believes them only to be really guilty of insulting his beloved former boss, Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell justifies his rigging the case against Anne and her five supposed lovers to himself. He finds for Henry (who wants to be rid of Anne so he can marry Jane Seymour) men who were guilty of something – just not what they were accused of. And Anne, of course, arranged for Wolsey’s downfall, and soon would arrange Cromwell’s, so he feels he is justified in prosecuting her on no evidence. Later on, Cromwell has fallen so far as to substitute legal concepts of guilt or innocence for moral ones. Guilt is only what can be proven, not what really is the case. Given the man in Wolf Hall, this slippage doesn’t feel quite right. Loyalty to the Cardinal doesn’t do the work it should in explaining Cromwell’s fall.

Although their fall from a talented peak is another way that Henry and Cromwell mirror each other. Henry starts out full of talent and hope and strength and good looks and ends up an embittered, oozing tyrant. Cromwell starts out as the restorer of England’s financial and judicial future, but will end (as we know) thanklessly enacting Henry’s tyranny.

Bring Up the Bodies begins and ends with Cromwell’s feathered daughters. As the novel opens, Cromwell is flying falcons, smeared with gore, who are named after his dead daughters. Which signifies, I suppose, their comedown in Cromwell’s mind. His beloved daughters have gone from people to animals, sweet girls to violent birds living only for prey. At the end of the novel, he holds the feathered wings he had made for a costume his youngest daughter, Grace. In Wolf Hall, we see Grace love the wings, and later it is affecting when Cromwell mourns her deeply while holding them. At the end of Bring Up the Bodies, the wings have become smeared with the blood of Cromwell’s prey, Mark Smeaton, one of the accused lovers of Anne. Henry winds up turning away again and forgetting his second wife as he did his first. He considers that his youngest daughter Elizabeth, the one he had by by Anne Boleyn, must be another man’s, despite everyone’s opinion of Elizabeth’s marked resemblance to Henry. Again mirroring, and falling, Cromwell is starting to believe that his youngest daughter Grace was not his child. He seems to be separating himself from the memory of his family and from his belief in the loyalty of his wife. As Henry has done. He convinces himself to throw away the wings.

The too-perfect Cromwell is a bit hard to believe in itself, and more so when paired with the falling Cromwell. Pretty small potatoes compared with what these books do. They are beautiful in themselves, and enlarge the possibilities of a moribund genre.