Invitation To a Beheading / The Thomas Cromwell novels of Hilary Mantel.

Invitation To a Beheading

The Thomas Cromwell novels of Hilary Mantel.

James Wood

12 April 2012

Anthony Powell, in wise-facetious mood, once quoted an English publisher on how to write “a good Jewish novel”: write a good novel, then change all the names to Jewish ones. The joke came to mind while I was reading Hilary Mantel’s “Bring Up the Bodies” (Holt). Both this new book and its predecessor, “Wolf Hall,” are mysteriously successful historical novels, a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness. One of the reasons for this literary success is that Mantel seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties.

Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case. In effect, she proceeds as if the past five hundred years were a relatively trivial interval in the annals of human motivation. Here, for instance, is Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist of both “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” reflecting on Gregory, his son. The date is September, 1535, and the location London:

Gregory is a good boy, though all the Latin he has learned, all the sonorous periods of the great authors, have rolled through his head and out again, like stones. Still, you think of Thomas More’s boy: offspring of a scholar all Europe admired, and poor young John can barely stumble through his Pater Noster. Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shining star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted. He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him. He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve his elders. He doesn’t slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them. If anyone sneezes, he says, “Christ help you!” The historical details in that passage—Thomas More, Pater Noster, the European diplomats, and so on—are not central to its liveliness. Instead, it is girded by a cunning universalism, whereby Thomas Cromwell becomes any parent competitively comparing his son with someone else’s; the list of a boy’s possible failings (staring around in church, interrupting old men, feeding spaniels at the table), while delightfully specific, seems similarly timeless. By the same token, when a historical fact is central to a novelistic detail, Mantel uses it in a way so novelistically intelligent that the historical fact seems to have been secretly transposed into a fictional one:

This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents for the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion. The bags are heart-shaped and so to him it always looks as if they are going wooing, but they swear they are not. Nephew Richard Cromwell sits down and gives the bags a sardonic glance.

Do you know if Mantel has manufactured or borrowed from the record this information about the fashionable Fugger bag? In some sense, it doesn’t matter, because the writer has made a third category of the reality, the plausibly hypothetical. It’s what Aristotle claimed was the difference between the historian and the poet: the former describes what happened, and the latter what might happen.

If you want to know what novelistic intelligence is, you might compare a page or two of Hilary Mantel’s work with worthy historical fiction by contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd or Susan Sontag. They are intelligent, but they are not novelistically intelligent. They copy the motions but rarely inhabit the movement of vitality. Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real. Her two most recent novels concern famous historical events—Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, her execution at the King’s orders, the English split from the Roman Church and the authority of the Pope—but they make the stories fragile again, with everything at suspenseful risk.

In short, this novelist has the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting. Quite a few readers would be prepared to yawn at a novelistic scene set in 1530, featuring Thomas Cromwell, then one of Henry VIII’s privy councillors, and Thomas Cranmer, the Anglican theologian who gained renown as the author of the Book of Common Prayer. Hasn’t this material been worked over—in descending order of quality—by Ford Madox Ford, by Robert Bolt, and by the TV series “The Tudors”? Yet such a scene in “Wolf Hall” exhibits Mantel’s stealthy dynamics. There is nothing dutifully “historical” about this encounter. Instead, all is alive, silvery, alert, rapid with insight. The two personages size each other up. Cranmer is a modest gentleman’s son, a careful and pious academic from the tiny village of Aslockton, near Nottingham. He is also a Cambridge man, a Fellow of Jesus College, and a little dry and prim. He is two years from being plucked by Henry as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cromwell is the robust, working-class son of a blacksmith, from Putney, on the Thames, now a member of Parliament—enormously astute, but not schooled like Cranmer, who would seem to have the social advantage here. Yet Cranmer appears a timid provincial alongside Cromwell, who spent years in France and Italy, and who often longs for a southern sun. Cromwell compares his childhood with the cloistered Cambridge academic’s, and his reflections open like an estuary:

 

He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terra-cotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people’s saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no farther.

There is hardly anything in that wonderful passage of prose to identify its content as time-sensitive; it could almost be thought today.

Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485-1540) is one of the most fascinating characters in contemporary fiction—brutal, worldly, reticent, practical, unsentimental but not without tenderness of a kind, Biblically literate but theologically uncommitted, freakishly self-confident but perilously low on friends. He is also the creature of two great sponsors: first, Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor, who fell from grace in 1529; and then Henry VIII, who made him his chief minister in 1534. The son of a violent bully (“Wolf Hall” opens with him being beaten by his father), he ran away from home as a young man, and wandered in Europe. He may have fought as a mercenary for the French Army; in Italy, he assisted the Frescobaldi banking family. He returned to England experienced and polyglot.

In Mantel’s narrative, Cromwell has been hardened and enlarged by the abuses and travels of his youth. Hugely competent and consumingly diligent, he looks with wariness or disdain upon most of the aristocratic courtiers with whom he must do business. They, in turn, enjoy reminding him of his lowly origins. But those origins have given him his tough, scarred hide. He can go anywhere and do anything he likes, an undaunted empire of one: “His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; 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. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed.”

Watch how efficiently, in the early pages of “Wolf Hall,” Mantel uses the present tense (which she employs throughout both novels) and free indirect style to establish Cromwell’s likable bluntness. Again, as in the passage from “Bring Up the Bodies,” Cromwell is thinking about his son, Gregory:

He smiles. What he says about Gregory is, at least he isn’t like I was, when I was his age; and when people say, what were you like? he says, oh, I used to stick knives in people. Gregory would never do that; so he doesn’t mind—or minds less than people think—if he doesn’t really get to grips with declensions and conjugations. When people tell him what Gregory has failed to do, he says, “He’s busy growing.” He understands his need to sleep; he never got much sleep himself, with Walter stamping around, and after he ran away he was always on the ship or on the road, and then he found himself in an army. The thing people don’t understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking.

Cromwell, unlike “il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today,” is extremely good at “the basic business of thinking.” Among the pleasures of being in his fictional company is witnessing his cool command of hundreds of details, from the small to the lofty. In one of many fine scenes in the new novel, Cromwell interrogates Anne Boleyn’s father: he instructs Thomas Boleyn to inform his daughter that the King has lost interest in her and wants to shuck her off. When Thomas Boleyn has gone, Cromwell shares a cup of Gascon wine with one of his officers. “I gave Francis Bryan an import license for this,” Cromwell dryly comments. “Would be three months back. No palate, has he? I didn’t know he’d be selling it back to the king’s buttery.”

Mantel stays close to Cromwell’s acute class-consciousness, to his sense of being different from most of those around him. “All these people,” Cromwell thinks at one moment, of the courtly set, “are related to each other. Luckily, the cardinal left him a chart, which he updates whenever there is a wedding.” One effect of this authorial proximity, and of Cromwell’s impressive self-motivation, is that he emerges from these novels if not quite a hero, then at least someone whose torments have been chosen for comprehension, like the sinful protagonist of a Graham Greene novel. This is brave of Mantel, even bravely peculiar, given the reputation of the actual Thomas Cromwell, who acted as a brutal fixer for both Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII. Stephen Greenblatt, reviewing “Wolf Hall” in The New York Review of Books, likened Cromwell to Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police, and marvelled that Mantel had taken him on. Under Wolsey, Cromwell plundered the English monasteries. He survived his master’s demise, in 1530, and as Henry VIII’s helper-in-chief managed the annulment of the King’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and his remarriage, in early 1533, to his mistress, Anne Boleyn. In 1535, Cromwell presided over Thomas More’s execution for treason. That is where “Wolf Hall” closes, with Cromwell’s savagely controlled assessment of the ascetic More, now imprisoned in the Tower. As far as Cromwell is concerned, More is the author of his own death: “Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don’t give a fourpenny fuck.” 

“Bring Up the Bodies” continues the tale, post-More. If anything, Mantel is even less sentimental in this novel than in the last in her appraisal of Henry and Cromwell. It is 1535-36; the King is weary of Anne Boleyn, and of her inability to provide him with a male heir. He is eying Jane Seymour, and Cromwell, now chief minister and principal secretary to the King, is used again to make the chief players offers they can’t refuse. There is a necessary comedy to Mantel’s new-old story, as Henry and his royal servants engage, for a second time in only three years, in servicing the King’s marital dissatisfactions. “What if . . . there is some flaw in my marriage to Anne, some impediment, something displeasing to Almighty God?” Henry wonders. Cromwell reflects that he has heard those words before, about a different woman. History repeats as farce, and the reader comes face to face with the Henry VIII of Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon’s funny poem, once quite familiar in British classrooms:

Bluff King Hal was full of beans;

He married half a dozen queens. . . .

The first he asked to share his reign

Was Kate of Aragon, straight from Spain—

But when his love for her was spent,

He got a divorce, and out she went.

Anne Boleyn was his second wife;

He swore to cherish her all his life—

But seeing a third he wished instead,

He chopped off poor Anne Boleyn’s head.

“Bring Up the Bodies” ends with Anne Boleyn’s execution—and the prospect of four more Mantel novels of this period, each a variation on the same tragicomic theme, each devoted to a royal wife. (Though what is more likely, to judge from an authorial note, is that Mantel will write a third and final volume, in which we follow Cromwell’s own fall from royal favor, and his execution, in 1540.)

Once Cromwell is sure of Henry’s marital intentions, he moves against a group of privileged courtiers and aristocrats. He sees an opportunity to avenge the shameful treatment of his beloved master, Cardinal Wolsey. Anne Boleyn has been noisily indiscreet; there are scores of stories about her lovers. If Cromwell can authenticate these tales, he can find Anne and her lovers treasonable. Four young aristocrats stir his most concentrated vengeance: Henry Norris, George Boleyn, William Brereton, and Francis Weston. These men took part in a play at Hampton Court, not long after the disgrace and death of Wolsey. The play, in Mantel’s telling, was a raucous allegory entitled “The Cardinal’s Descent Into Hell.” A man dressed in scarlet, representing the ousted Cardinal, was tossed and bounced by four devils, played by the four aristocrats, each of whom held a limb of the supposed Cardinal. It was their misfortune that Thomas Cromwell, grieving for Wolsey, was watching in the wings.

“Bring Up the Bodies” lolls a bit in its midsection (and perhaps suffers merely on account of coming after the extraordinary freshness of “Wolf Hall”), but becomes menacingly narrow in its last third, as Thomas Cromwell dresses his victims in careful accusation. The scenes of their interrogation are as frightening as anything in “Darkness at Noon” or “1984” (and better written). First comes Henry Norris, known as Gentle Norris: “Gentle Norris: chief bottom-wiper to the king, spinner of silk threads, spider of spiders, black centre of the vast dripping web of court patronage.” Full of bravado at first, Norris says that Cromwell will get no confession out of him: “You will not put gentlemen to the torture, the king would not permit it.” Cromwell rises and slams his hand on the table. “There don’t have to be formal arrangements. . . . I could put my thumbs in your eyes, and then you would sing ‘Green Grows the Holly’ if I asked you to.”

Even after this outburst, Norris remains confident, until Cromwell calmly asks his prisoner to recall a certain play, “in which the late cardinal was set upon by demons and carried down to Hell.” Four men, Cromwell thinks, “who for a joke turned the cardinal into a beast; who took away his wit, his kindness and his grace, and made him a howling animal, grovelling on the boards and scrabbling with his paws.” Norris’s indignation gives way to “blank terror,” as he comprehends the fragility of his fortune and the persistence of his prosecutor. Watching Norris’s fear, Cromwell thinks that at least “the fellow has the wit to see what this is about: not one year’s grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down.” He goes on:

Would Norris understand if he spelled it out? He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.

A silence falls. He sits, waits, his eyes on the dying man. He is already thinking what he will do with Norris’s offices, his Crown grants. He will try to oblige the humble applicants, like the man with fourteen children, who wants the keeping of a park at Windsor and a post in the administration of the castle.

This long, flawlessly dramatic scene ends with Cromwellian terseness, as the interrogator takes his leave of the unfortunate captive—“Henry Norris: left forepaw.”

And so it goes: the calmer Cromwell becomes, the more productively terrifying he is. When George Boleyn tremblingly asks, “Are you threatening me with the rack?,” Cromwell mildly answers, “Well, now, I didn’t rack Thomas More, did I? I sat in a room with him. A room here at the Tower, such as the one you occupy. I listened to the murmurs within his silence. Construction can be put on silence. It will be.” Indeed, the four men who once tossed around a dramatic likeness of the late Cardinal end their lives much as Thomas More did. “Bring Up the Bodies” fills its final pages with their trial and execution. After them comes Anne Boleyn, kneeling and blindfolded, as the executioner approaches from behind with his sword: “There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.”

Like its predecessor, “Bring Up the Bodies” has a distinctively Protestant, not to say secular, tone. Henry and Cromwell are monsters, but familiar ones, whereas in “Wolf Hall” Mantel seemed to find the saintly monster Thomas More alien and forbidding. In the new novel, Thomas Cranmer is tediously devout, a flinty bore. Mantel has the novelist’s dislike of asceticism. She is drawn to the worldly ego, with its irreligious experiences and unforgivable sins. There is something refreshing about this secularism, as if she were throwing the weight of the novel, that secular, tragicomic form, behind her historical protagonists, and against the hagiography that distorts the remembrance of this riven period. (This novelistic revisionism perhaps explains Mantel’s need to return to England’s early sixteenth century.) At least, she seems to think, Henry and Cromwell would have a good drink with you before squeezing you to death; More and Cranmer would probably drown you in Scripture. Cromwell is interestingly indifferent in matters of religion, and at times almost skeptical or near-atheist. He is not a religious officer but, supremely, a servant of what will become the modern state, for good and ill.

And although he is comprehended, sometimes tenderly, that ill, that terror, is squarely seen in this book. For what Cromwell becomes, in the last third of the novel, is the forerunner of O’Brien in “1984.” Henry Norris cries out to Cromwell that “you cannot make my thoughts a crime,” but that is precisely what Cromwell does. What is the evidence for Anne’s adultery? the poet Thomas Wyatt asks. The King, Cromwell replies, has always known of Anne’s crimes: “He knows if she was not false to him in body she was so in words, and if not in deeds then in dreams.” These may be the most frightening words in Hilary Mantel’s novel, words pregnant with all the future miscarriages of the totalitarian state. Cromwell’s mind may drift into reverie and fond anecdote, but he does not have loose or undisciplined thoughts. He is reticent, taut, controlled: a master of his silences, and prosecutor of other people’s. 

Published in the print edition of the May 7, 2012, issue

THE NEW YORKER