As an American, my knowledge about Henry VIII of England comes from Shakespeare, plus what little American schools teach in history classes. He wanted to divorce his wife, the Pope said no, so he split with Rome and created the Church of England with himself as its head. That marriage didn’t work out to his satisfaction either, and he divorced and/or executed her and several more wives. If we’ve heard of Thomas Cromwell, his name is usually preceded by “Henry VIII’s henchman.”
Wolf Hall is the story of this period of English history, told through the eyes of a reimagined Cromwell.
Not all that much is known about the historical Cromwell, a commoner of obscure origins who rose to the very apex of power and influence in Henry’s England. So Mantel has started with a fairly blank slate and given us a much more sympathetic Cromwell than the one who usually appears in the tales of the Tudor Dynasty.
When the book starts, young Tom is being horribly abused by his drunken blacksmith father. Beaten nearly senseless, he takes refuge in the home of his older sister and her husband, then decides his only hope is to become a soldier and get out of the country. Since the English have been mostly fighting each other for the past few decades, he determines to join the French, whom the English haven’t defeated on the battlefield in a good long while. It’s a foretaste of the pragmatism with which he will run his own life and eventually advise the King.
When next we see him, an adult Thomas Cromwell is a special assistant to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, one of the richest and most powerful men in England. We learn gradually that Thomas traveled widely after his stint as an infantryman, learning languages and many trades, including the textile trade and the law. In Italy he learned about money and finance, and everywhere he picked up a worldliness bordering on cynicism that is almost wholly lacking in his native land.
Wolsey is embarked on a mission of reforming the Catholic Church in England, especially some of the more grievous practices of the monastic system. With Cromwell as his, well, henchman, he is closing some of the worst monasteries, consolidating others, and confiscating much land, using it to found secular colleges. For this, for his extravagant lifestyle, his progressive beliefs and mostly for his failure to procure an annulment for the King from the Pope, Wolsey runs afoul of the Powers That Be and is removed from office.
Cromwell sticks by him as a friend, though, and Henry comes to admire him for his loyalty as well as his pragmatism and business sense. The rest of the book is the intriguing tale of how Cromwell step by step becomes an ever more important advisor to the King, and how he helps engineer the radical solution to Henry’s domestic and dynastic problems.
The historic backdrop to this novel is rich and complex. I encourage anyone not English who takes up Wolf Hall to bone up a little bit — even just read the Wikipedia entry — on the Tudor Dynasty. In a nutshell, England has recently gone through decades of civil wars over the succession of the crown. Henry isn’t just a randy royal, he needs a male heir to avoid the specter of further succession wars upon his own death, and Katharine isn’t providing him with one. Of course, we know that Anne Boleyn doesn’t either, but she does give birth to Elizabeth, who in due course becomes one of England’s most powerful and beloved monarchs, though the last of the Tudor line.
Also very much part of the backdrop is the Protestant Reformation, which has already swept much of Europe, igniting civil wars and threatening dynasties and setting the Germanic principalities against each other. While England remains Catholic, English translations of the New Testament by Tyndale and others have been circulating for some time, and many English people have read them and learned just how much of what the Catholic Church teaches and does is not anywhere in the Gospels. We see a scene or two (and hear of many others) in which “heretics” are horribly tortured to death in public for their beliefs, or merely for possessing a copy of Tyndale’s translation.
In Cromwell, Mantel has created one of my favorite literary characters in recent memory. He springs to life on the page with his deft intelligence, his quick wit and his compassionate pragmatism. Or is that pragmatic compassion? He grieves for a wife and children lost to “the sweats,” a nearly annual summer contagion that rivals the Plague in its lethality; he treats women and children with gentleness and respect, taking many into his household as servants, domestic help and apprentices. Though he carries out the King’s will in ways that lead to the imprisonment and death of many men and at least one woman, he always allows the victims to retain as much of their dignity as possible. But he is not above personal vengeance, either, and it is with a quiet relish that he sets about destroying a handful of nobles who were instrumental in the fall of Cardinal Wolsey or who in the past unnecessarily insulted Cromwell or his family because of his own humble origins.
Mantel is truly a master storyteller. She uses a wide range of novelistic techniques to enhance the story, including flashbacks and flashforwards, and she has obviously done prodigious research to capture the milieu of this chaotic and formative era. But most of all, in Cromwell she has created a fully dimensioned character, with all the tendencies toward good and evil of a real human being. He’s impossible not to like, and also not to fear a little for his singlemindedness and his cunning. And although we come to know him quite well, we never fully penetrate his motivations, any more than those around him ever do.
Wolf Hall is a hefty book with a complex cast of characters. It comes with a family tree of the Tudors and a list of most of the main characters by name and role, which comes in handy because many of the individuals are sometimes called by their name and sometimes their title. I found it to be a compelling page-turner. It is richly deserving of all the accolades it has received, including the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
(Henry Holt and Co., 2009)
