Anyone watching The Mirror and the Light – the BBC adaptation of the final part of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – can admire the performances of Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, and Mark Rylance as Mantel’s hero Thomas Cromwell. But no one should confuse them with real history. The late Dame Hilary was a classic case of an artist letting her personal background and education slant her presentation of the historical record. Mantel had an awfully strict Roman Catholic upbringing and allowed her suffering at the hands of school nuns to dictate the way she saw the English 16th-century Reformation. She came to believe that ‘no respectable person’ could be an observant Catholic.
Mantel should not be allowed to get away with her deification of Cromwell
As a result, she despised St Thomas More, the Catholic martyr executed by Henry for refusing to accept the breakaway Church of England, and she hero-worshipped Cromwell, the thug who destroyed More, dissolved the monasteries, and confiscated their wealth to enrich both Henry and himself. Therefore, both readers of Mantel’s novels and viewers of the TV version get a thoroughly distorted vision of our history, in which the Catholic players like More and Timothy Spall’s Duke of Norfolk are presented as cardboard cut-out baddies, and Cromwell is seen as an essentially upright figure bravely battling a corrupt and evil institution.
I am no Catholic apologist, and in most of the epic religious struggles of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find myself instinctively siding with the Protestants. They were, after all, the patriotic embodiment of an emerging England: a liberty-loving island of the blessed fighting against obscurantist Catholic continental oppression. Nevertheless, despite my Protestant sympathies, Mantel should not be allowed to get away with her deification of Cromwell, a career civil servant with no strong religious principles of his own, who rose from obscurity simply because he efficiently executed the king’s desire for a divorce and the pillaging of the religious houses.
The Wolf Hall trilogy is seen by some as a necessary corrective to Robert Bolt’s 1960s play and film A Man For All Seasons, starring Paul Scofield, which idolised More in a way diametrically different to Mantel’s rosy view of Cromwell. I am familiar with this drama as I once trod the boards at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre during my brief, inglorious career as a thespian, where I was cast as the villainous Richard Rich, Cromwell’s slimy sidekick. For Bolt, Cromwell is the beast who fatally entraps the saintly More, and he ignores the historical reality of St Thomas as a Catholic bigot who maintained a private torture chamber for Protestant heretics in his Chelsea house.
So Bolt, in his play, is as historically tendentious as Mantel. Like Mantel, Bolt was a youthful communist (at least until wealth came his way with his play and his successful film screenplays) and anachronistically identified his conscience-stricken Tudor hero with his own activism as a militant CND member.
Contrary to Bolt’s and Mantel’s po-faced views, the English Reformation took the course that it did because Henry wished to get his ulcerated leg over the comely body of the Protestant-minded Anne Boleyn, divorcing his Catholic first wife, Katherine of Aragon, in the process. Henry, who had been awarded the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ by the Pope for his fidelity to Catholicism, remained sincerely Catholic in his theological beliefs until his dying day in 1547. For him, the Reformation was simply a convenient means of getting his end away with Anne to secure a male heir, and his hands on the Church’s loot.
Mantel was a bog-standard middle-class leftie who had been a member of the Young Communists League and transposed her own banal beliefs into the very different world of 16th-century Tudor politics. In doing so, she gives us a misleading picture of the Tudor world, saturated with her own misbegotten opinions. But her idiotic ideology comes over most nakedly, not in her Tudor tales, but in her notably nasty story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
Published in 2014, a year after the former Prime Minister’s actual death, this spiteful little piece – which the Daily Mail described as a ‘warped fantasy’ – imagines an IRA sniper murdering the PM in 1983, with the aid of the story’s narrator, clearly a mouthpiece for the author herself. (Mantel confessed to her own ‘boiling detestation’ of Thatcher.) So vicious was Mantel’s view of her target that even her usual cheerleaders gave the story a cool reception, with the Guardian’s reviewer finding it a ‘disappointing’ rant. Mantel’s partisan politics and her almost demented hatred of Thatcher infect her fiction in too obvious ways that seriously detract from her novels’ other undoubted merits.
Thatcher was not the only prominent woman to incur the lash of Mantel’s spite: she compared Katherine Middleton, before her marriage to Prince William, to a ‘shop-floor mannequin’; a spurt of bitchiness that incurred even the disapproval of the then Labour leader Ed Miliband. We can find excuses for Mantel’s bitterness in her childhood. Nonetheless, she still allowed her personal political positions and prejudices to warp her art. So much the pity for both her readers and her legacy.
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