BONES BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE HILARY MANTEL’S RESURRECTION OF THOMAS CROMWELL IN WOLF HALL (2009) AND BRING UP THE BODIES (2012): A DEEP ANALYSIS OF THE HISTORICAL CHARACTER IN THE 21st CENTURY POSTMODERN HISTORICAL NOVEL
Word count: 27,026
Nick H. C. Braekevelt Student number: 01603487
Supervisor(s): Prof. Dr. Guido Latré
A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels
Academic year: 2018 – 2019
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to and appreciation of my supervisor, Professor
Guido Latré of Ghent University. The passion with which he lectured Renaissance literature inspired the topics of both my bachelor paper and my master thesis and it was his guidance and detailed, constructive feedback that made it possible for me to write them. His flexibility, openness and work ethic are a true inspiration for all young scholars. I am forever indebted to his support.
I would also like to thank my parents, Luc Braekevelt and Karine Verhoye, who have supported me in more ways than I can describe. Their everlasting support and boundless faith in me made it possible for me to focus on my studies full-time, for which I will always be grateful.
I also want to thank my dear friend, Ceri Savage, who has her way with words and is a great editor. Thank you for your efforts.
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Table of content
Acknowledgements ...... 1
Table of content ...... 2
Introduction ...... 4
Chapter 1: The Current State of the Historical Novel ...... 8
1.1. Popularity; between literature and history ...... 8
1.2. Genre or genres? ...... 9
1.3. Terminology ...... 13
1.4. The Importance of Well-Rounded Characters in Historical Fiction ...... 16
Chapter 2: Narrator and Plot ...... 20
2.1. The Plot ...... 20
2.2. The Narrative Situation ...... 24
2.3. The Narrator and the Plot ...... 25
Chapter 3: The Character: Emotions, Mind, Ethics and Senses ...... 26
3.1. Emotions ...... 26
3.2. Mind ...... 27
3.3. Ethics ...... 29
3.4. Senses ...... 32
Chapter 4: Laying the Scene: Creating an Authentic Historical Setting ...... 33
4.1. Portraits through Time: Approaching the Character through the Visual Arts ...... 33
4.1.1. Verbalising Fictional Art ...... 34
4.1.2. Verbalising Non-Fictional Art ...... 39 Braekevelt 3
4.2. Intertextuality ...... 46
4.2.1. Commemorating and Remembering through Text ...... 48
4.2.2. Experiencing Religion through Text ...... 51
4.2.3. Resisting Authority through Text ...... 53
4.2.4. Establishing Authority through Text ...... 57
4.2.5. Discussing the Character through Text ...... 60
4.2.6. Intratextuality ...... 69
4.2.7. Conclusion ...... 70
4.3. Self-reflexivity in the Cromwell novels ...... 71
4.4. Laying the Scene through Language ...... 75
4.4.1. Language and Realism through Dialogue ...... 75
4.4.2. Language in Relation to Telling the Truth ...... 79
Conclusion ...... 83
Works Cited ...... 97
Word count: 27,026 Braekevelt 4
Introduction
During the last few decades, the historical novel as a genre has won both popularity with the readers of English literature and recognition by the literary scholarly world. As Marion
Gymnich points out in her paper “Fictions of (Meta-) History: Revisioning and Rewriting
History in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012)”, the twentieth and twenty-first century historical novels have “been among the most prolific, versatile and innovative genres in Anglophone literature and has increasingly gained the attention of writers, readers and scholars” (Gymnich 71). This versatility proves to be a problem when trying to define what the genre of the historical novel is precisely, as scholars in the field will, without doubt, confirm.
The novels about which Gymnich talks in her paper; Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, are well-received novels by the author Hilary Mantel. Mantel is the only contemporary historical novelist who was rewarded with the Man Booker Prize for two consecutive novels.
The success of the novels was followed by a theatre adaptation by the Royal Shakespeare
Company, which worked closely with Mantel when writing the script, and a successful BBC
Two adaptation into a miniseries, also named Wolf Hall.
Although the Cromwell novels are her best-known works, Mantel does not limit herself solely to writing historical fiction. Her first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day, was published in 1985 and is a comedy. More recently, she sparked literary controversy with her short story
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014).
Throughout her life, Mantel has suffered from a gynaecologic disease called endometriosis which left her in bad health and chronic pain for most of her life. Despite its serious consequences, Mantel claims that “it influenced the course of my life because I probably wouldn’t have become a writer if it hadn’t been for this” (“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing”). She is currently writing the third, and last, Cromwell novel, The Mirror and the Light. Braekevelt 5
In my bachelor paper, I explored Hilary Mantel’s theory on the historical novel which she set out in her series of Reith Lectures, delivered in 2017. After a close reading of these lectures and the novel Wolf Hall, I explored how her theory was embedded within the novel and how her theory held up against other theories of contemporary literary scholars. During the research for my bachelor paper, I sensed that there was still more research to be done on these novels and therefore I have chosen to write my master’s thesis about the same subject. The title of this thesis is also an allusion to Mantel’s Reith Lecture “Can These Bones Live?”.
The historical novel holds a certain relationship with its audience which is not held by other contemporary genres. As has been proven by multiple scholars on the subject, the historical novel “played a significant role in the creation of both national identities and a pan-
European identity” (Hamnett 4). This effect on the creation of national identities is both a peculiar and interesting aspect for a genre of literature to have, certainly during the last decade in which the quest for national identity and the founding of identitarian groups have seen a resurgence. An example close to home is the ostentatious employment of the motto “schild en vriend” by the right-winged identitarian group Schild en Vrienden, a motto which was popularised by the publication of Hendrik Conscience’s De Leeuw Van Vlaanderen (1838).
Furthermore, the historical novel is not only a source for the quest of a national identity, it is also a result of that same inquiry. Renate Brosch, professor of English literature at the
University of Stuttgart, claims that “Every fictional history is predicated on an idea of its culture; thus it contains a reflection of cultural identity politics” (165). Because of this, and this is purely my opinion, the contemporary field of historical fiction ought to be widely researched and analysed. Therefore, I will analyse how the historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the
Bodies succeed in drawing in the contemporary audience so successfully.
What makes a close analysis of Mantel’s novels interesting is the revisionist aspect of the novel. If we consider the typology of the historical novel by Ansgar Nünning, professor of Braekevelt 6
English at Justus-Liebig-University in Germany, both Cromwell novels may be considered examples of a revisionist novel. One of the most important characteristics of this sub-genre, according to Nünning’s typology, is “its criticism of versions of the past that have been taken for granted within historiography, which often correlates with a tendency to highlight the opposition between past and present and to undermine the narrative illusions; revisionist historical fiction tells alternative histories, for instance by focussing on the perspectives of marginalised and silenced groups” (Gymnich 72). Nick Bentley, author of Contemporary
British Fiction (2008), claims that it is this idea that makes historical novels such as Mantel’s postmodern: “One of the key features of the condition of postmodernity is a suspicion towards grand narratives, and one of these is the idea of history as a single monolithic account of the past” (128). Mantel’s theory on the historical novel also resonates with these statements. She claims that “She [the historical novelist] offers a version of the past – there can be others, and there will be” (“The Iron Maiden”). By offering her account of Thomas Cromwell’s life, she is helping to break down the historical ‘monolith’. Even though Thomas Cromwell is a famous historical person, Mantel’s decision to take him as the protagonist for her novels is refreshing and new within the canon of historical novels about the Tudor court. Critics and scholars agree that it is an unexpected point of view for a historical period that has been revisited so many times. The narrative voice of most historical novels about the Tudors is generally given to either
Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn or another of Henry’s wives. One only has to take a look at Philippa
Gregory’s oeuvre to identify this trend.
Accordingly, Andrew James Johnston, professor of English at Freie Universität Berlin, noticed the revisionist aspect in, more specifically, the portrayal of both Thomas Cromwell and
Thomas More. He claims that “Just as Mantel presents us with the remarkable image of a likable
Cromwell, she casts More in the highly unusual role of an arch-villain who betrays not a hint of the kindly and proto-enlightened protagonist of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons Braekevelt 7
(1960)” (541). Even though I agree with James Johnston that Mantel offers a fictional Cromwell who deviates from the expectations of the reader, I disagree with his labelling of Thomas
More’s portrayal as an arch-villain. Accordingly, Cromwell is often reviewed as a “tolerant, omincompetent hero” (Purkiss, Diane. “Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel”).
Given the novels’ commercial success and literary praise, it struck me as odd that literary critics and scholars discuss Mantel’s characters in such polarising terms. It seems as if these critics expect that Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, as historical characters, will only either be a hero or a villain. I predict that my analysis of the novels will show that the characterization of these men is more nuanced and complex than that.
It is these critics’ perception of the historical character that prompted me into exploring how Mantel constructs her characters exactly and with which techniques she employs to do so.
First, I will situate these novels within the literary canon. Then I will analyse the novels in more detail, starting with their plot structure and narrative situation and then moving on to the linguistic and literary techniques Mantel used to create the historical characters.
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Chapter 1: The Current State of the Historical Novel
1.1. Popularity; between literature and history
Generally, it is accepted by the majority of scholars who specialise in the topic of the historical novel that with Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), the genre was born. Or rather, that the nineteenth century was the “the period of its maturation” (Hamnett 3). It must be noted that the popularity of the historical novel was not constant from the nineteenth century onwards, as it experienced downfalls and relapses of popularity. “The serious historical novel revived in
Western and Central Europe from c.1939 in the later stages of Modernism, and has flowered in developing and post-colonial societies, and their diaspora, from the 1970s” (Hamnett 11). It comes as no surprise, considering Brosch’s statement that the cultural environment greatly influences the popularity of the genre, that, during times in which identity (both national and individual) is shattered, the historical novel experiences a renaissance. This has happened during both turbulent decades of the early twentieth century and during the most recent decade of the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding the fluctuation of popularity, the genre started evolving and progressing into the genre(s) of historical fiction we know today.
Furthermore, during the nineteenth century and those that followed, in which the historical novel developed itself, history as a discipline became increasingly self-aware and self-critical. The struggle of history to set itself apart from other disciplines such as literature may be one of the reasons why it is so critical of the historical novel as a genre. The historical novel is a genre of texts stuck between two disciplines: history and literature. Although the general public may perceive them as two completely separate and independent disciplines, they do, in fact, share a long and intertwined past, almost like a set of twins who were joined together at birth then separated postnatally, and ended up resembling one another but not completely looking identical. Brian Hamnett, author of The Historical Novel: Nineteenth Century Europe
Representations of Reality in History & Fiction (2011), stresses the following aspect in regards Braekevelt 9 to this struggle: “They were linked by their common expression through the medium of narrative” (Hamnett 1). It is this shared medium which lays at the basis of the ongoing debate between history and historical fiction. Arguments can be made for both sides but the following argument goes straight to the heart of the problem:
There is a problem, which for centuries Western historians managed to ignore; namely,
that their contribution to human knowledge was itself language-dependent (not just
dependent on the adoption of particular narrative forms or rhetorical devices). […] The
limits of the historian’s language are the limits of the historian’s world. (Harris 13)
Thus, the novelist and historian both utilise the same tools and techniques and consequently are subject to the limits these bring with them. The historian Hayden White agrees with this statement and says that history is “obliged to deploy exactly the same devices as those available to any writer of fiction. This is why it is legitimate to regard the historian’s account as a literary artefact, subject to exactly the same analysis as any other” (Harris 27).
Nevertheless, this does not mean that the historian and the historical novelists do exactly the same work. In Mantel’s opinion, it is up to the historical novelists to bring the past back to life and to make the dead live again. The historian does not have to live up to these expectations.
1.2. Genre or genres?
Just as the historical novel has undergone severe changes throughout the last decennia, so has the attention of the literary academic world towards the genre. Until fairly recently, the leading scholars in this area were Georg Lukács and then later, with the coining of the term historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon. However, their monopoly on literary criticism regarding the historical novel seems to crumble, according to Andrew James Johnston, author of The Return of the Historical Novel? (2017). He argues that “things seem to be changing: the last decade or so has seen the advent of new ways of thinking about the historical novel” (James
Johnston 9). It seems as if both the genre itself as well as the academic research around it are Braekevelt 10 developing simultaneously. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of (deep) academic research on the topic, especially in regard of the contemporary postmodern historical novels such as
Mantel’s.
In short, the historical novel as a genre has shifted from myth to historical romance to social realism to then go on to Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction. One could end this research at Hutcheon’s description and take it as the definition of the contemporary historical novel, but according to Ansgard Nünning “a second survey of the historical novels that have been published in England since the Sixties shows that the broad spectrum of different kinds of
British postmodernist fiction is not limited to historiographic metafiction” (237). To speak of a kind of fragmentation of subgenres or ‘spectrum’, as Nünning approaches it in his typology, would be more correct. In his article “Crossing borders and blurring genres: Towards typology and poetics of postmodernist historical fiction in England since the 1960s”, Nünning elaborates on this spectrum and says that “The spectrum of British postmodernist historical fiction ranges from moderate types of revisionist historical novels over metahistorical novels that use and at the same time subvert some of the conventions of postmodernism to implicit and explicit forms of historiographic metafiction” (237). This disregard of Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction as the definition of the contemporary historical novel does not mean that I disregard her whole theory. On the contrary, some of the features of historiographic metafiction are also present in
Mantel’s novels, as will become clear when I discuss intertextuality later in this paper.
In further support of the fragmented state of the ‘genre’, I would like to refer to
Nünning’s typology. Marion Gymnich, in her paper “Fictions of (Meta-)History”, describes the typology as:
a graded scale […] [it] encompasses five different prototypical forms of historical
fiction: (1) the documentary historical novel, (2) the realist historical novel, (3) the Braekevelt 11
revisionist historical novel, (4) the meta-historical novel, and (5) historiographic
metafiction. (Gymnich 72)
‘The historical novel’ can thus no longer be defined as ‘a genre’ but rather as an overarching term for multiple subgenres, a ‘spectrum’. Scholarly research should accordingly be conducted on this basis. But the question here still remains: to what subgenre(s) do Wolf Hall and Bring
Up the Bodies belong? If we may believe the Historical Novel Society, both are biographical fiction, also often referred to as ‘biofiction’. Michael Lackey, in the introduction of his anthology Biographical Fiction: A Reader (2017), immediately sets biofiction as a genre apart from historical fiction and says, “This anthology symbolizes the official arrival of biofiction, which has finally emancipated itself from both historical fiction and life writing and has charted a narrative space uniquely its own” (Lackey 3). Lackey, unfortunately, fails to give a clear understanding of what that unique narrative space might be since an approximate definition of biofiction is missing. However, if we consider the American author Irving Stone’s essay ‘The
Biographical Novel’, which is included in the anthology, we get a more detailed description of the genre. Stone describes the biographical novel as “a true and documented story of one human being’s journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form” (Stone 166). He goes on to argue that “The biographical novel is based on the conviction that the best of all plots lie in human character; and that human character is endlessly colourful and revealing. It starts with the assumption that those stories which have actually happened can be at least as interesting and true as those which have been imagined” (Stone 166). In this light, we could consider both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies as biographical novels because of their focus on the life of Thomas Cromwell and because of their intense focus on the human character. Not only do they meet the requirements set out by Stone in this description, but Stone’s description also resonates with Hilary Mantel’s Braekevelt 12 style of writing. In her Cromwell novels, everything is perceived from the protagonist’s point of view: Cromwell.
Nevertheless, even though Nünning’s typology suggests clear distinctions between the different subtypes he describes, no historical novel will ever be purely one of these genres but rather a mixture of multiple subgenres, with one or two genres that step more to the front than others. Just like we can argue that the Cromwell novels are biographical novels, we can also argue that they are revisionist novels. Mantel, who was well aware that she was writing about one of the most fictionalised periods in English history, made an unexpected choice when she made Thomas Cromwell her protagonist. From this angle, it allowed her to revisit the story known to many and offer a new perspective. Renate Brosch states that “It is the privilege of the historical novel to revise traditional historiography, to question conventional assumptions governing a dominant view of the past, and to shift centre stage things and people hitherto neglected […] Wolf Hall’s revision of history as well as its engagement with present-day values hinges on its protagonist” (qtd. in James Johnston 166). Mantel depicts Thomas Cromwell and
Thomas More in a different way to the authors who preceded her and, as a result, sparked some controversy in the Catholic Church. For example, The Bishop of Shrewsbury (England), Mark
Davies, called Mantel’s rendition of More “perverse” and “anti-Catholic” (“Wolf Hall under fire from Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury”) and goes on to describe Mantel’s characters with the stereotypical terms “hero” and “villain,” which I discussed earlier. Of course, this use of language, which is also employed by literary critics and scholars, comes as no surprise in this case since the bishop is neither an unbiased critic nor a literary scholar at all.
Additionally, the genre of the historical novel is not only hard to define, it also has to defend itself against the prejudice of what the genre used to be (for a significant amount of time, the field of the historical novel was primarily dominated by historical romance, which was not considered ‘serious’ literature) and it also has to set itself apart from genres such as that of Braekevelt 13 alternative history. This genre is generally set in the past but portrays events which clearly go against the historical record. Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) is an example of this and set in 1980s London under Thatcher’s administration. However, the U.K. loses the Falklands
Wars and technology has reached a point at which it produce robots that are frighteningly human-like.
In conclusion, it is because of the lack of research on how the postmodern historical novel creates its characters and the effect that has on the way literary critics approach the genre that I chose to analyse Mantel’s novels, to try and discover how she creates and employs the fictional character of Thomas Cromwell in order to create a historical world which feels authentic and familiar, but at the same time also revises the way we think about the past.
Additionally, the debates on how the historical novel interplays with the past, history and fiction will not be the focus point of this paper, although I will refer to them because they play an important part in how Mantel constructed her characters. My main interest lies in what brings both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies into the revisionist novels, and how the characterization of Thomas Cromwell and the way the historical setting is created is used as a medium to this end.
1.3. Terminology
For the sake of clarity, the following terms, which I will use frequently, need precise definitions: the past, history, and cultural memory. I will also explain how they are related to the historical novel. “The past” and “history” are often used synonymously, but, in fact, they are two very distinct terms which should not be confused with one another. The past is simply everything which has been and which has happened until right before the present. It is complete, static, and unchangeable. History, on the other hand, is our interpretation of that past. As Mantel puts it,
“It’s the method we’ve evolved of organising our ignorance of the past, it’s the record of what’s Braekevelt 14 left on the record […] it’s no more than the best we can do and often it falls short of that” (“The
Day is for The Living”). Mantel essentially argues that history as we know it is a narrative constructed ‘post-mortem’, after the death of the present which immediately turns into the past.
The past is thus an objective reality, and one of the main problems for both the historian and the writer of historical fiction is that it is almost impossible to get a complete, impartial record of it. History is, even though many historians will claim the opposite, always partial. It is the result of many corruptive processes such as selection, interpretation, editing, and narration.
Grant Rodwell in Whose History? (2013) refers to Seixas, Fomowitz and Hill to explain the difference between memory, the past and history:
An easy dichotomy can he [sic] drawn: memory is the construction of the past, which is
immediately available, deeply held, profoundly meaningful and therefore impervious to
critique. History is the product of evidence-based investigation, rational dialogue and
dispassionate scholarship. Memory is the product of direct experience; history is the
product of a [a disciplined] questioning, inquiry and critique. (Qtd. in Rodwell 57)
In this paper I will refer to “memory” and “cultural memory” when I talk about how a certain event is remembered by the majority of the people. Although the contemporary audience has not been a witness to most of the historical events described in Mantel’s historical novels, and thus have had no direct experience, as this quote suggests, they have learned about them through the study of history. Diane Molloy, author of Cultural Memory and Literature (2016), describes it as such:
It is what survives when the eyewitnesses are dead and society must rely on stories and
other reminders to represent the past. Cultural memory consists of the shared memories
or remembrances of groups, ranging from small social groups through to nations, is
produced by public, mediated representations of the past, and is conserved in symbolic Braekevelt 15
forms such as monuments, museums, memorials, memorial rituals and celebrations,
historiography, art and literature. (Molloy VIII)
How a culture remembers events and historical characters, is not always in line with how they were taught, through the medium of history. Memory and cultural memory are therefore inherently subjective. The way Thomas More is remembered, for example, was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church who wanted to stress his status as a saint.
Furthermore, this relates to what we often call “the truth” and how it is intertwined with the terms previously discussed. Roy Harris, in his The Linguistics of History (2004), says that the question of truth in relation to history falls into four categories:
1) Establishing the truth is the historian’s aim. This, although often difficult, is in
principle possible and in some cases attainable.
2) All that historians can do is establish probabilities. The truth about what actually
happened can never be ‘proved’ conclusively.
3) There is no such thing as ‘the truth’, but there are multiple truths, depending on the
viewpoint adopted. These truths are not necessarily consistent with one another.
4) Truth is illusionary, a rhetorical construct or a strong conviction disguised as an
independent reality. (Harris 198)
Contemporary scholars, including Mantel, combine the second and third hypotheses, meaning that they do not view history as a lie, but rather as a probable truth. It could be one of the multiple truths, but that is not certain. The historical novel, to them, fits within this series of probable truths. These novels break the monopoly held by the historian by adding versions to this list. It could be that this shared position is a source of frustration to certain historians such as John Guy, who an article in The Guardian claimed that believing what is written in Wolf
Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is problematic and went on to say that “this blur between fact and fiction is troubling” (Brown, Mark. “Students take Hilary Mantel’s novels as fact, says Braekevelt 16 historian”). Ironically, by saying this, he is disregarding the literary, fictional aspects and the unreliability of his own profession. Of course it is troublesome to interpret everything in
Mantel’s novels as factional, but the same can be said for “history.”
Furthermore, to state that there is no truth at all to be found in these narratives would be equally wrong. At the same time it would be naïve to think that history as a craft is free of fiction since, as argued earlier in this paper, they use the same devices. Harris himself is also critical of the this-is-truth status some unnuanced historians apply to themselves, and says that historical statements are accepted as reliable rather than scientifically proven. The statements never reach “a point at which a statement is matched against an independently accessible state of affairs in order to determine whether the two correspond” (Harris 199). The same can be said for statements made in historical fiction, though we must note that literature in general has the advantage of having a sort of contract, often referred to as the “suspense of disbelief,” with the reader which results in literature not having to constantly defend itself whilst history does.
Additionally, for the sake of clarity, Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will be referred to as Mantel’s texts, Mantel’s narrative, or the Cromwell novels. Whenever I want to speak about one of the works in particular, I will explicitly mention the title. Also, in light of what I have related before, whenever I mention Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More or any other historical name in this paper, it should be interpreted that I am discussing the fictional characters made up by Mantel, and not the real, deceased ones.
1.4. The Importance of Well-Rounded Characters in Historical Fiction
Historical characters, that is characters who play any role in a historical novel and who are to represent people who existed in the reality of the past and who are known to us through the medium of history, ought not to be simplified into flat characters if the author aims to write a historical novel which is plausible and seeks to compete with other historical narratives written in the same historical setting (e.g. the Tudor court during the early years of Henry VIII’s reign). Braekevelt 17
Even though we realise that a carefully and well-constructed character such as Cromwell in
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies does not represent the precise reality of the past, it makes a great effort to be plausible and tries to offer an honest portrayal of the real person it mimics. A flat characterization of that same person, on the other hand, does the opposite. It turns away from reality and almost denies the existence of the real person with whom they share a name.
One could almost argue that this kind of characterization leans more towards the realms of satire. It is in this light, then, that I take problem with scholars who reduce the characters’ complexity, by claims such as “Just as Mantel presents us with the remarkably original image of a likable Cromwell, she casts More in the highly unusual role of an arch-villain” (James
Johnston 541) or “Thomas More she pushes in the other direction, from saint to inquisitor”
(MacFarquhar, “Bringing Wolf Hall to the stage”). More examples of this sort of language can be found in the attachment to this paper. It is certainly true that Mantel offers an alternative version of the two men than the one we are used to, but this sort of analysis is problematic because “when a historical figure is presented as an archetype for evil, all other characteristics and/or achievements seemingly become irrelevant” (Alghamdi 128). This also works the other way around, as in: a character presented as a saint, will only be judged for the good achievements he or she accomplishes. This means that the character, be it Cromwell or More, would again fall into a flat-charactered portrayal of themselves even if it is a substantially different one than the one we are used to. Charlotte Higgins, literary journalist for The
Guardian, also remarked on this phenomenon and claims that “[Mantel] has fuelled the debate about the literary claims of historical fiction by arguing that characterisation in historical novels,
‘even very good historical novels’, is ‘often two-dimensional’” (Higgins, Charlotte. “Hilary
Mantel discusses Thomas Cromwell’s Past, Present and Future”).
It is therefore of great importance for a historical novelist, if he or she wants to be taken seriously by both the reader and the literary field of the historical novel, to invest in a well- Braekevelt 18 rounded characterisation, even more so than the details of setting or the poetic fluency of the text. Mantel strives for accuracy in her novels and as a result of thorough research into the historical record, none of the characters in both Cromwell novels is made-up except for
Christophe, Cromwell’s French errand boy. But even though all of her characters are based on real people, the characterisation involves processes which are not applicable to the real historical person; inventing and creating:
Historical novelists also write about people who lived in the past, although there are two
fundamental distinctions between them and historians. The novelist who uses real
historical characters places them in a fictional setting, along with invented characters.
He or she may also alter the chronology and scale of actual events for dramatic purposes.
In other words, the novelist commits the crime impermissible to the historian: he or she
invents. A historical character, however, may embody the spirit of a particular historical
time or culture, even though he or she has been invented. (Hamnett 3)
As Hamnett here claims, the historical character must embody the mind-set of the age in which he or she lives, which often proves difficult. As David Buchanan says, “There are restrictions; for example, the author must introduce nothing inconsistent with the manners or the age”
(Buchanan 191). These restrictions are present both on the level of the psychological and ethical mind-set of the character, as well as on the level of the physical setting in which that character lives. Renate Brosch goes even deeper into that psychological mind-set and claims that “Wolf
Hall educates its readers that identity is unstable, a process rather than an entity, and – above all – that it depends on interpersonal construction” (Brosch 180). This unstableness of character which Brosch recognises in these novels already undermines the binary view which is held by its critics. How Mantel succeeds in producing such a character precisely will be discussed later in this paper. Braekevelt 19
Furthermore, apart from providing entertainment, historical fiction could also be employed for educational purposes, because “relating to historical figures on a multi-sensory and ‘personal’ level actually increases cognition and memory of historical ‘facts’” (Alghamdi
124). Some works of historical fiction already have proven their worth in this regard, such as
De Leeuw Van Vlaanderen, which I have mentioned before.
In conclusion, we can argue that the mental and psychological development of historical characters is one of the prerequisites for a historical novel to be taken seriously by both the reader and the literary field. It determines the way the genre in general is perceived by critics.
It also greatly impacts the way the novel influences the way historical events and characters are remembered in cultural memory. A deeper analysis of how this works exactly can therefore lead us into the direction of explaining Mantel’s popularity and success in the genre.
Braekevelt 20
Chapter 2: Narrator and Plot
2.1. The Plot
As an author of historical novels, Mantel has less freedom than other authors in terms of plot and narration. She cannot go against the historical record even if it would make writing easier for her, nor does she want to, as she claimed in her Reith Lecture “Can These Bones Live”: “I have one piece of advice: don’t lie. Don’t go against known facts […] Your characters are never how or where you’d like them to be”. This means that the way her character will be perceived by the reader is not completely in her hands: if a historical character is a murderer, she will make him murder and he will be perceived as a murderer. She is bound to a predetermined plotline, that of the past. Although this predetermined plotline imposes certain restrictions on the author’s freedom, it also brings along certain advantages. The main themes of the plotline are recognisable even for an audience that is so far removed from the original setting:
The problems of Tudor Britain – social mobility, religious freedom, the ongoing tussle
between individual, church and state – have not been resolved with the passing of the
years. Henry’s sexually motivated struggle to wrest his country away from the Catholic
church can be seen as the origin story of our own age, the moment that England broke
free from Rome and began to worship and think in its native tongue. (Laing, Olivia.
“The Tudor’s finest portraitist yet”)
It is a rag-to-riches narrative which supports ideals we highly cherish today: social upward mobility, the struggle for a strong national identity and the ideal of the self-made man. This notion of mobility, which in our society is fairly well known, was not as self-evident during the
Renaissance. In the Cromwell novels, this is pointed out by the noblemen of Henry’s court who refer to Cromwell’s low birth at almost every chance they get. Regardless of his poor lineage,
Cromwell finds himself at the centre of all these problems of the Tudor court, and he is the man who has to deal with all of them. Braekevelt 21
Additionally, looking at the history of the genre of the historical novel, we notice that its popularity is largely dependent on how a certain society reacts to changes in that society.
Hamnett claims that “The historical novel significantly contributed to the development of collective identities initially in Scotland, and more especially, going beyond England and
France, to the Italian and German territories, Spain, the Russian Empire, and also to Poland and
Hungary” (Hamnett 6). There is no denying that, for the last few years, there has been a certain wave of nationalism in Europe, which is in search of a clear national identity. The parallels between this aspect of the plot and these recent feelings could explain the contemporary reader’s interest in the Cromwell novels, which is only to Mantel’s advantage.
Nevertheless, we cannot deny that she is subject to restrictions, and the writing process gets even more complicated considering that she must not only tell the truth but also deliver a narrative that is compelling to read. The selection of scenes she chooses to write and the parts of Cromwell’s life she decides to highlight is where she can get creative with the story and how she can potentially deliver a well-rounded character. For Thomas Cromwell that means that she shows scenes from his political life, the aspect on which the historian mainly focuses, but balances these out by inviting the reader into his private life. To recreate a historical person’s private life is something which is often overlooked by historians but, for the historical novel, is of major importance in order to create a well-rounded, wholesome character.
Already from the first paragraph of Wolf Hall, Mantel’s choices in terms of the plot of her narrative deviates from the cultural memory surrounding his name. She introduces a young boy who is being beaten by his own father and who is on the verge of death: “One blow, properly placed, could kill him now” (Wolf Hall 3). Later in the chapter, he flees to his sister,
Kat, who, because of the absence of his own mother, acts as a motherly figure. Kat takes care of the abused Cromwell and he “would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat” (Wolf Hall 5). These first few scenes are filled with Braekevelt 22 extreme, opposing emotions: violence, abuse, neglect, empathy, love, pity … with Cromwell centred in the middle of it all. This sense of innocence and vulnerability contraposes the villainous connotation of the Cromwell name as it exists in cultural memory and plays into the empathy of the reader. Mantel lets the image of the young Cromwell return multiple times throughout both novels, reminding the readers that the adult statesman and the young boy are one and the same person. She could easily have chosen to start Wolf Hall off with the adult
Cromwell but then she would have missed out on the effect this time gap creates. We learn, later in the novel, that the years which are left out of the narrative were quite formative for
Cromwell’s character. The fact that they were not described in the narrative implies that the character lives beyond the text, and that they exist beyond their role in the scene.
Wolf Hall’s title also foreshadows where the narrative is moving towards. Wolf Hall was the Seymour family residence. At the end of the novel, Cromwell decides to take Henry to
Wolf Hall “[…] we shall visit the Seymours.’ He writes it down. Early September. Five days.
Wolf Hall” (650). In a way, the whole novel is trapped by Wolf Hall: between its title and its last words. It stresses the fact that at every point during Anne’s rise to power, the reader is aware that she will not survive her romance with Henry. The title, therefore, plays into the self- reflexive character of the genre of the historical novel.
Bring Up the Bodies starts with the odd sentence: “His children are falling from the sky”
(3). Later in the paragraph, it becomes clear that he named his falcons after his deceased children. It is a quick reminder, for those who have read Wolf Hall, of the emotional scenes of their deaths. Both novels, thus, start off with scenes that invoke empathy and/or pity and portray a softer image of Cromwell than one might expect. Throughout both novels, scenes like this are a break from the ‘seriousness’ of his professional life as an advisor at Henry’s court.
The balance between both of Cromwell’s lives – his private life and his professional life
– is kept up throughout both narratives and allows the reader to get a behind-the-scenes look at Braekevelt 23
Henry’s court, which is not, like most other fictional Tudor writing, a look into the bedchambers of Henry or Anne.
In terms of temporality, Wolf Hall spans thirty-five years (from 1500 until 1527) where
Bring Up the Bodies only spans a short year (from September 1535 until the summer of 1536).
That means that the plot for Bring Up the Bodies is more dense than that of Wolf Hall. Whereas
Wolf Hall sometimes employs time gaps, which again bring about the feeling that the plot develops beyond the written text, Bring Up the Bodies feels quicker because of its shorter time span and the lack of such gaps. This change in timespan could be explained when we consider the main storylines of both novels. In Wolf Hall, because it is the first novel of what will be a trilogy, Mantel needs to establish Cromwell and the other main persona as valid characters. In
Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel is able to rely on the reader’s familiarity with the characters and is thus able to drive up the speed of the plot. Wolf Hall covers Cromwell’s long road to power and the long timespan stresses the difficulties of climbing the social ladder. Bring Up the
Bodies, on the other hand, covers the downfall of Anne Boleyn and the trails and interrogations that process entails. The shorter timespan stresses the intensity of those proceedings.
In short, even though Mantel is bound to a fixed storyline, she found relative freedom in the temporal situation of both narratives. This freedom is quite dependent on the historical characters, especially Cromwell, and the reader’s familiarity with these characters. The selection of the scenes have a strong influence on the development of the character. In turn, that character has a great influence on the freedom the author has to play with the timespan of the novels. Braekevelt 24
2.2. The Narrative Situation
In both novels, Mantel employs a third-person pronoun to refer to her protagonist and mainly writes in the present tense. The use of the present tense invokes a sense of immediacy we would not expect from a narrative which is set in the sixteenth century. Even though the tense of the narrative draws the reader closer to the action, Mantel’s choice of the third person creates a certain distance from the protagonist, as Andrew James Johnston claims, “The narrative style closely resembles interior monologue, but the novels are, nevertheless, rendered in the third person not the first, which one would normally expect from an interior monologue” (James
Johnston 543). Nevertheless, the effect for the reader is as if the reader is a fly on the wall in
Mantel’s Renaissance world, watching everything unfold ‘live’ before their eyes and not able to intervene. Another effect of this third person narration, and especially of the almost continuous use of the pronoun “he” to refer to Cromwell, is a sense of confusion. This especially occurs when there are multiple male characters within one scene and “he” could refer to any of them. In Bring Up the Bodies, “he” makes place for a clearer “he, Cromwell,” which makes this sequel an easier read than Wolf Hall.
Furthermore, Lisa Fletcher, in her essay “Hilary Mantel: Raising The Dead,” notices that there are some instances in which Mantel deviates from this narrative point of view and uses a second-person or first-person narration. Fletcher claims that they are “designed to invite the reader closer still to Cromwell than the limited third-person perspective allows […] the effect of the second-person pronoun is to ask readers to imagine themselves being part of this sixteenth-century scene” (Fletcher 42). Brosch claims that it is this closeness to the character that has a major impact on how the reader receives the character: “Participating in the mental life of a character in this way can lead to identification, a mode of reading often encouraged by popular historical novels but disparaged in literary criticism” (Brosch 175).
Braekevelt 25
2.3. The Narrator and the Plot
These changes in the narrative situation, Fletcher argues, occur mostly when the scene is an emotional one: when Cromwell discusses the deaths of his wife and his daughters.
The plot, we can argue, has a direct effect on the narrative situation and this affects the way the character is perceived by the reader. Central here is that Cromwell himself is the narrator and thus holds a tight grip on both the plot and the narrative situation. It is important for the reader to keep in mind that even though the changes in the narrative situation (which cause different ‘distances’ between reader and character) and the versatile yet balanced plot is almost completely related through its protagonist narrator and thus inherently subjective.
Braekevelt 26
Chapter 3: The Character: Emotions, Mind, Ethics and Senses
Mantel’s narrative point of view, as if the reader is watching everything unfold from behind
Cromwell’s eyes, combined with the fact that Mantel portrays him in such a versatile way, makes the reader welcome Cromwell as warmly as they do. Brosch goes on to say that Mantel’s
Cromwell possesses “many attributes that we tend to admire today: intercultural competence
(he is fluent in many languages), financial and legal genius, psychological insight, physical courage, wit and last but not least a greater interest in others than in himself” (Brosch 179).
This versatility is mainly a result of the many methods Mantel employs to create the character’s traits. Here, I will discuss some of these ways, which are inherent to the character itself: emotions, mind, ethics and senses.
3.1. Emotions
The readers who focus on the politics and Cromwell’s professional life in the novels might perceive him as unempathetic, ruthless or as a ‘villain’. Indeed, there are scenes in which this aspect is highlighted, such as during the interrogations in Bring Up the Bodies. However, similar to the plot, Mantel alternates these scenes with some softer, more emotional scenes, such as the following:
He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his
sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You
think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling,
emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes
out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone. (Bring Up the Bodies 393)
Because of the narrative situation of both novels, talking about the protagonist’s internal emotions and the emotions of the other historical characters is complex. Braekevelt 27
First of all, this is because the narrator only scarcely implies any tender emotions. There are scenes in which Cromwell openly shows a more vulnerable side, but only a few. However, much of his vulnerability is implied rather than shown. As we look back at the first paragraph of Bring Up the Bodies and learn that he named his falcons after his deceased children, the readers picks up a sense of Cromwell’s vulnerability in regards to his losses, even though it is not explicitly mentioned.
Second of all, because the narrator and the protagonist are one and the same for most of both novels, we are not able to objectively interpret the emotions of any other character apart from Cromwell. The reader only has access to Cromwell’s emotions and this distorts the view the reader gets of the other characters, especially Thomas More in Wolf Hall. The emotions the protagonist projects onto the other characters give us a clearer view of Cromwell’s interpretation of the relationship between him and the other character, rather than telling us something objective about that character.
3.2. Mind
At the heart of every well-developed literary character lies his, hers or its mind. Since Mantel is constructing a character based on a real person, she has to be careful and make sure her representation of Cromwell’s mind and mental capacities is credible. There are two main channels through which she creates this image: externally and internally, from the viewpoint of the character.
The most obvious one is the external channel, which means that his mind or mental capacities are described by other characters or the narrator, but not by himself. For example:
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 Braekevelt 28
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. He makes money and he
spends it. He will take a bet on anything. (Wolf Hall 31)
These explicit, externally-channelled descriptions are strewn throughout both Wolf Hall and
Bring Up the Bodies. The reader links these traits with Cromwell regardless of whether or not
Mantel has proven them to be true in her novels. Mantel uses more “external techniques,” which will be discussed later in this thesis.
The less obvious manner in which Mantel creates Cromwell’s mind is internal. This manner is harder to point out because it is implicit. They are the instances in which Cromwell remembers small details, memorises numbers and dates or short recollections from his past in which he learned a certain skill (which often happens in both novels), which help the reader create an interpretation of his mental capacity. Even though this capacity is exploited subtly most of the time, there are references through both Cromwell novels to a memory system
Cromwell allegedly learned during his younger years in Europe which raises praise from the other characters: “Cavendish looks sly. ‘No one exceeds your own powers of memory,’ he says”
(Wolf Hall 78).
The combination of both ways leads to a portrait of a man of remarkable mental capacity and a man of all trades. James Johnston recognises the ideal Renaissance man in Cromwell’s portrayal: “In letting ourselves be seduced by Cromwell – the man who looks ‘like a murderer’
– we are seduced by our willingness to identify in his lineaments the apparently inexhaustible attraction of Renaissance Man. Cromwell’s depiction in the novels invites this kind of reading
– and makes us painfully aware of it” (James Johnston 551).
However, rather than portray a perfect Renaissance man, Mantel is aware that no human mind is perfect and subtly inserts small failures of his mind in order to make her character more Braekevelt 29 plausible: “He gives his little nieces the pearl and coral bracelets he bought them weeks ago, but forgot to give” (Wolf Hall 209).
The way Cromwell’s train of thought and character is developed by external circumstances will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapters. However, we can already notice that the character is irrevocably tied to his surroundings.
3.3. Ethics
One of the reasons why Mantel’s portrayal of Thomas More receives such critical feedback may be found in one of the principles Mantel sticks to when creating her characters, namely that the character must live and act in his or her own ethical setting. In her Reith Lecture “The
Iron Maiden,” she claims that “A good novelist will have her characters operate within the ethical framework of their day – even if it shocks her readers.” Where the emotional vulnerability of the character may lead to identification for the reader, this ethical setting can lead to defamiliarisation.
According to the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Mantel depicts More as “a cruel, cold and creepy misogynist” (“Wolf Hall under fire from Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury”). This assessment is probably based on the scenes in Wolf Hall in which Cromwell visits the More household and witnesses the way More publicly shames his wife, Alice:
‘Father,’ she says, ‘don’t forget to tell the story
of the woman who didn’t believe the world was round.’
‘No, that’s a good one,’ More says.
When he looks at Alice, staring at her husband with painful
concentration, he thinks, she still doesn’t believe it. (Wolf Hall 231) Braekevelt 30
Although it is true that these scenes show a more aggressive and rude side from someone who is officially a saint, there are two things one must keep in mind before jumping to conclusions and calling the fictional More a cold misogynist.
First of all, Mantel depicts both Cromwell and More as fathers who put more than moderate (for those times) effort into their daughters’ education. Cromwell observes More’s love for his daughter, Margaret, and the quality of her education: “He is keen to show off his darling. She takes the book, kissing it; over the interruptions of the fool, she reads in Greek”
(Wolf Hall 229). Thus, to label More as a misogynist would be a harsh assessment to make, based only on his relationship with his wife.
Second of all, it would be wrong to say that Cromwell is depicted as a person without any misogynistic traits. In Wolf Hall we learn that he once had a sexual relationship with a woman named Anselma and Cromwell himself admits that he did not treat her the way he should have done.
Furthermore, the reader must keep in mind that, during the Renaissance, women were not allowed to have as strong a voice as they do now. Even a queen-consort, the most prestigious and powerful rank in society for a woman to hold, was not entitled to her own opinion or treated respectfully. Mantel, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, says that:
You’ve got to be realistic about this, the women, they’re cannon fodder. They’re wombs
on legs as far as Henry’s concerned. They are strong women. Henry was involved in the
shape of his first wife and his second wife: two of the most intelligent women in Europe
and very strong minded but it was the men who were writing the rule book. And you
have to embrace that, you can’t make them into proto-feminists, you can’t make them
into something they’re not. And the harshness of the world for women and the
unfairness of it is somewhat the core of the story because Henry has brilliant men about Braekevelt 31
him but only a woman can give him the thing he really wants. (“Hilary Mantel on Wolf
Hall”, Broadway and PBS)
For critics then to judge More and/or Cromwell as misogynist would be un-nuanced. According to our contemporary ethics, they might be, but according to their own, not so much.
The unfamiliar ethics the reader has to get used to when reading Mantel’s novels not only apply to such sensitive topics such as sexism, feminism and misogyny, but also to other parts of society such as economy and politics. For example:
How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his
border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from
Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with
sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from
counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus (Wolf Hall
378).
Reading the Cromwell novels requires the reader to transport themselves to a world where capitalism does not yet exist in the terms as we know it now.
Apart from these secular aspects of society, the change in ethics and thinking in general also applies to more personal aspects of society which have an effect on daily life, such as religion. Boyd Tonkin remarks, “What we do find difficult now is how deeply they cared about theological ideas – at what a deep and primal level this battle between the Catholics and
Evangelicals was fought” (Tonkin, Boyd. “Hilary Mantel: the History Woman”).
It is clear that the Cromwell novels are not just an easy read. They are an exercise in mental transportation into a world that, at first glance, may look a bit like ours but is vastly different, unfamiliar, and maybe even ‘shocking’.
Braekevelt 32
3.4. Senses
Because of the narrative situation in the Cromwell novels, the fictional physical world in which
Mantel’s characters act is only accessible through the narrator. Mantel acknowledges that
“Landscapes, streetscapes, objects, are dead in themselves. They only come alive through the senses of your characters” (“Can These Bones Live?”). This, of course, is true for most novels, but in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies the focus on the physical world also plays a part in how the characters around Cromwell are portrayed: “[Thomas Cromwell] is not often preoccupied by material matters such as displays of wealth through clothing, unless observations thereof contribute somehow to his estimation of another character” (Moseley Qtd. in Alghamdi 473). In the following example, Cromwell is observing George Boleyn, Anne
Boleyn’s brother, who got on Cromwell’s bad side when he played a role in the play “The
Cardinal’s Descent into Hell”:
He [George Boleyn] is as witty a young man as any in England, polished and well read;
but today what fascinates him is the flame-coloured satin that is pulled through his
slashed velvet over-sleeve. He keeps coaxing little puffs of fabric with a fingertip,
pleating and nudging them and encouraging them to grow bigger, so that he looks like
one of those jugglers who runs balls down their arms. (Wolf Hall 338)
The observation of the satin is quickly followed by the image of a juggler, showing that
Cromwell does not hold Boleyn in very high regard. In Bring Up the Bodies, it will be Cromwell who causes George Boleyn’s trial and eventual death.
Apart from creating a fictional physical world, Mantel employs Cromwell’s senses to describe the relationship between him and the other characters.
Braekevelt 33
Chapter 4: Laying the Scene: Creating an Authentic Historical Setting
The ethical framework and, by extension, the mind-set of the historical character are influenced and formed by the external factor that is its intellectual surroundings.
Therefore, I will first of all take a deeper look into how Mantel creates a historical intellectual setting and how the historical character and this setting interact with one another. I will begin my discussion by analysing two main cultural fields which are highly influential on the way knowledge is retained and spread, namely: the literary field, and the field of the visual arts. Because both fields, in their entirety, would be too broad to discuss in this dissertation, I have chosen to focus on those instances in which these fields take centre stage in the Cromwell novels, that is, in intertextual and ekphrastic moments.
After my discussion of intertextuality and ekphrasis, I will move on to how the character himself helps to create the setting.
4.1. Portraits through Time: Approaching the Character through the Visual Arts
“Words and image seem to be in closer and more complex interrelations than the knots of
Laocoon’s serpents” (247), Liliane Louvel states in her paper “Types of Ekphrasis: An Attempt at Classification,” published in Poetics Today (June 2018), and this certainly seems to be true when trying to untangle the ekphrastic moments in Mantel’s Cromwell novels. Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies contain a significant amount of ekphrastic moments even though neither of these texts are solely centred around this literary phenomenon, as in the traditional ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrasis as a literary phenomenon, as described by Valentine Cunningham in her paper “Why Ekphrasis?” (2007), is:
that pausing, in some fashion, for thought before, and/or about, some nonverbal work
of art, or craft, a poiema without words, some more or less aestheticized made objects.
This might be done by the poet, whose name we might or might not know, giving a Braekevelt 34
whole poem over to such consideration, or stopping that action, the narrative flow of a
longer work, to direct his gaze, his character’s gaze, our gaze, for a while, at such a thing
or things. Or it might be a matter of the novel turning the narrative focus, a character’s
attention, the reader’s focus, for a time, on such things: a moment in which “The Story
Pauses a Little” […], for an episode of intertextual or intermedial, or even, as one might
say, synaesthetic miscegenating, overlapping, blurring - for some words about more or
less artistic works not at least this is the fictional claim of such moments - not made out
of words. (57)
Furthermore, Cunningham claims that these moments may be, other than the obvious ekphrastic moments which are based on real, actual works of art, “fictional, made up ones” (57). Both of these, the real and the fictional, are present in Mantel’s texts and therefore I will discuss the ekphrastic moments according to this division.
I have based my selection of the art pieces on the effect they cause on the character and/or the reader, and on how many times they are referred to in the novels.
4.1.1. Verbalising Fictional Art
These fictional works, though based on a realistic interpretation of the then common iconography, occur throughout both novels, and the most notable one is without any doubt the
Solomon tapestry. We first encounter this tapestry at the beginning of Wolf Hall: “Behind the cardinal is a tapestry, hanging the length of the wall. King Solomon, his hands stretched into darkness, is greeting the Queen of Sheba” (21).
It will return to Cromwell’s thoughts on several occasions throughout the texts, and most of those times it will relate to this first encounter as it brings back the memory of Cardinal
Wolsey and the years in which Cromwell served the cardinal. In other words, it brings about retrospective moments, tainted by introspection and meditation. The effect of this remembrance Braekevelt 35 is recognised by Cunningham, as she claims that “ekphrasis grants a demonstration of literature’s persistent resurrectionist desires - the craving to have the past return livingly, to live again, to speak again” (Cunningham 63). She goes even further in claiming that these moments are “commonly good for the fictional character” and are “morally heuristic” (Cunningham 65).
The art or act of resurrection is not unknown to Mantel, as she attests in her Reith Lecture “Can
These Bones Live?”: “The task of historical fiction is to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in a body.” Sue Lawley, the moderator of the lectures, claims that novels such as
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies “can give the dead fresh life.” It then only seems fitting that
Mantel would employ the resurrective character of ekphrasis to do so.
Accordingly, Liliane Louvel, professor of English at the University of Poitiers, says ekphrasis “may be strongly marked by the interplay between past, present, and future” (qtd. in
Poetics Today 252). The Solomon tapestry and its ekphrastic moments seem to prove this argument. Louvel elaborates on her claim and says that ekphrasis “often aims to help retrieve the past […] for it strives to erect a momentum to commemorate a person or an event” (252).
In these instances, that person is Cardinal Wolsey and, by extension, his times of glory and his downfall. That Cromwell seeks to commemorate Wolsey comes as no surprise since, in Bring
Up the Bodies, he puts a lot of effort into bringing down the men who shamed the late cardinal in their play “The Cardinal’s Descent into Hell.”
Louvel classifies this type of ekphrasis as elegiac ekphrasis, which she further defines as “akin to a momento mori” (253) and, in this instance, the ekphrastic moment stresses the parallels between Wolsey’s and Cromwell’s life narratives: both are men of low birth, both have worked their way up within English society, reaching the level of the upper class, both are extremely pragmatic, and the story foreshadows that, just like Wolsey, Cromwell might (and will) fall out of the grace of the king, which will lead to his death. Braekevelt 36
Furthermore, Cunningham also recognises this foreshadowing characteristic of ekphrasis when she discusses its prophetical implications: “[ekphrastic moments] characteristically announce future truths, speak truth into the future. […] And these prophetic noises are, as prophetic voices tend to be, at the very least morally serious” (Cunningham 65).
This may be a bit far-fetched, but the ekphrastic moments as a momento mori and as a prophetic noise might explain why the Solomon tapestry is also related to Anne Boleyn: “Sheba makes
Anne look bad” (Wolf Hall 199). This can be seen as a foreshadowing (an act Mantel does not shy away from) of Anne Boleyn’s downfall even before she has risen to the estate of queen.
The past, with the death of Wolsey, is combined with the future: the rise of Anne and eventually her death.
The ekphrastic moments in regard to the tapestry could also be classified under another category of Louvel’s typology: the affective ekphrasis, which “expresses the desire for erotic absorption and fusion with the world of the image or with the image itself” (Louvel 253) if we focus on Cromwell’s memories of Anselma, with whom he had a sexual relationship when he was staying in Antwerp: “[the tapestry] reminds him of the young widow he lodged with when he lived in Antwerp. Since they had shared a bed, should he have married her? In honour, yes”
(Wolf Hall 23). Again, the past image of Anselma, merged with the image of Sheba, brings about introspection and moral reflection.
The tale of King Solomon and Queen Sheba is one that has been revisited throughout the ages but has the Christian Bible as its most known source. In short, it relates that the Queen of Sheba came to Jerusalem bearing gifts for King Solomon, wanting to test his wisdom for which he was known. After having asked him some riddles, which he answered satisfactorily, they exchanged gifts and she returned to her country. During the Renaissance, this narrative gains popularity and both King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba are vested as historical figures within the then-contemporary popular culture. Braekevelt 37
This ekphrastic moment, thus, is not only one which is intermedial (the visual arts translated into literature) but also entails a certain degree of intertextuality, as the image of
Solomon and Sheba, without doubt, also brings about the tale of the two figures. Cunningham talks about an “intertextual, intermedial genre: loose; shifting over time; merging, of course, into the discourses of art history, and the textuality of anthropology and cultural studies”
(Cunningham 60).
The theme of the tale is fitting within the setting of the novels, as are both characters.
This instance of ekphrasis helps to create a setting which, to the contemporary audience, feels authentic. The intertextual aspect of this ekphrastic instance gives the reader the sense that the setting exists even beyond the text itself and gives a certain authority and authenticity to the scenes even though the narrator does not explicitly relate the tale to the reader. Louvel talks about this phenomenon as “expanding the effect of ekphrasis beyond its descriptive paragraphs”
(258). The feeling of connection and interplay between the visual and the narrative gives the readers the sense that there is a world, fully functional and authentic, beyond what is being presented in the texts. It creates the illusion that, even though a character steps out of the scene, they still exist, live, breathe, plot, gossip, and progress without any narrative aid.
Cunningham agrees with Louvel’s interpretation and claims that the ekphrastic encounter tries to:
resolve this ancient and continuing doubting by pointing at an allegedly touchable,
fingerable, thisness. It lays the claim that the absolute thereness of an aesthetic object,
the thereness writing is (rightly) so doubtful about, and seeks to corral that evident (or
claimed) empirical, real, truthfulness for itself and its own doings. It wants the real
presence of the made object to rub off, as it were, on its own proceedings. (Cunningham
61) Braekevelt 38
The encounter, therefore, demands to be taken seriously and it advocates for the probability of the historical narrative in which it appears: that the narrative is set in reality, though not the truth, nor a lie, but in a truthful account of what may have happened. Cunningham explains this as:
The painting or tapestry or whatever aesthetic object is gazed at, described, made
present in such texts, offers […] the effect of the real, […] the knowable, touchable real,
in a more certain style than writing by itself can ever do, and making the painting and
so forth a subject, or object, of the writing is, in effect, a way of laying claim, by proxy,
to the presence, reality, truth of the writing. (Cunningham 62)
Again, it stresses that, even though the narrative the reader is reading at the moment is the result of Mantel’s imagination, the setting and the backbone of it is realistic.
For the historical character, especially Cromwell, these kind of encounters prompt a moment of self-reflection which allows the reader a glimpse inside the character’s emotions, which the reader of the Cromwell novels does not often get. This effect is even more noticeable with Liz’s prayer book. Liz, Cromwell’s wife, got the book from her first husband and in that sense carries her past before Cromwell: “it was a wedding present, a book of hours, from her first husband, and he wrote her new married name in it, Elizabeth Williams” (Wolf Hall 39).
After her death, Cromwell holds on to the prayer book, now carrying multiple pasts as he experiences a deep moment of introspection: “Now he stands in a window embrasure, Liz’s prayer book in hand. His daughter Grace liked to look at it, and today he can feel the imprint of her small fingers under his own” (Wolf Hall 155). The physicality of the book prompts a deeply emotional moment for Cromwell: “But he is crying again. The ghosts are gathering, he feels cold, his position is irretrievable. In Italy he learned a memory system, so he can remember everything: every stage of how he got here” (Wolf Hall 156). Braekevelt 39
The ekphrastic encounters I just discussed are only two examples of ekphrasis based on a fictional art piece. Moments like these, even though they have a less intense effect on the reader, are strewn throughout both novels. According to James Johnston, “the novels betray a considerable interest in the material and, especially, the visual culture of the Renaissance and, consequently, also in the sources that aid modern readers in re-imagining the past” (James
Johnston 542). Apart from the functions I discussed before, they thus also employ an obvious aesthetic function: they create an aesthetic framework for the reader.
4.1.2. Verbalising Non-Fictional Art
Now let us turn to some ekphrastic encounters which are based on aesthetic objects which can still be viewed in the present: the Holbein oil paintings. Hans Holbein The Younger (not to be confused with Hans Holbein The Elder, his father) is perhaps one of the most recognised painters of the Northern Renaissance, alongside others such as the Van Eyck brothers and
Albrecht Dürer. Originally a German, Holbein travelled to England in search of work and ended up at Henry VIII’s court, where he created some of his best-known oil paintings, such as
Portrait of Sir Thomas More (1527), Portrait of The Merchant Georg Giese (1532), The
Ambassadors (1533) and Portrait of Henry VIII (c. 1536), just to name a few.
The first important oil painting we encounter in the texts is Sir Thomas More and his family (c. 1527), and even though the original version is no longer available for observation since it was destroyed during a fire, we can rely upon copies created around the same time as the original for the basis of our analysis. Liliane Louvel would categorise the following ekphrastic moment from Wolf Hall as hermeneutic ekphrasis:
Entering the house, you meet the family hanging up. You see them painted life-size
before you meet them in the flesh; and More, conscious of the double effect it makes,
pauses, to let you survey them, to take them in. The favourite, Meg, sits at her father’s Braekevelt 40
feet with a book on her knee. Gathered loosely about the Lord Chancellor are his son
John; his ward Anne Cresacre, who is
John’s wife; Margaret Giggs, who is also
his ward; his aged father, Sir John More;
his daughters Cicely and Elizabeth;
Pattinson, with goggle eyes; and his wife
Alice, with lowered head and wearing a Hans Holbein The Younger, Thomas More and his family (copy), c. 1527 cross, at the edge of the picture. Master
Holbein has grouped them under his gaze, and fixed them for ever: as long as no moth
consumes, no flame or mould or blight. (Wolf Hall 227)
Interesting here is that the narrator already thinks about the destruction of the painting even before it happens. He points out that this state of ‘for ever’ is one on conditions, just like More’s state at court. Again, the ‘prophetic noises’, as described by Cunningham, are present in this ekphrastic encounter. The moment goes on:
He prefers their host as Hans painted him; the Thomas More on the wall, you can see
that he’s thinking, but not what he’s thinking, and that’s the way it should be. The painter
has grouped them so skilfully that there’s no space between the figures for anyone new.
The outsider can only soak himself into the scene, as an unintended blot or stain […]
Just as in the painting, Alice has a little monkey on a gilt chain. In the painting it plays
about her skirts. In life, it sits in her lap and clings to her like a child. (Wolf Hall 230)
Louvel states that this type of ekphrastic moment “may also point to a possibly hidden story or mystery” (250), in this case the hidden story is the ‘true’ family connection between More and the rest of his household. As Cromwell relates more and more about the More family, we as readers notice that Cromwell’s reality does not agree with Holbein’s representation. Not only does this have a revisionist flair to it, but it also directly confronts us with the effect the visual Braekevelt 41 arts can have, especially considering the context in which the painting was made. Today the painting may serve a role in history as an object of commemoration, or even just as a decorative aesthetic object, but within the context of a royal court during the Renaissance it cannot be overlooked that one of the objectives of this painting was a propagandist one. As paintings, alongside tapestries and stained glass windows, were one of the only forms of visual media at hand during the Renaissance, a courtier such as the actual Thomas More would have made sure that the representation of himself not only pictured him as a person but also represented the office he held and the respectability that came with it. For the fictional Crowell, then, to point out that the More in the painting and the fictional More with whom he interacts are not the same person, and in fact differ immensely from one another, lays bare this deception. This fits perfectly into the overarching idea that Mantel not only revises Cromwell as a historical character but also Thomas More, showing us that there is more behind what meets the eye (or the cultural memory, in this case). But we must be very careful when interpreting the narrator’s opinion, since it is not unbiased. The More he describes ‘in life’ is also an abstraction and an interpretation by the fictional Cromwell. What this ekphrastic encounter actually does, rather than create an image of Thomas More, is illustrate the strained relationship between the two characters. It sets the tone for the way these two characters are going to communicate with one another for the rest of the texts.
The Portrait of Thomas Cromwell (c. 1532-34) is perhaps the most significant instance of ekphrasis in both Cromwell novels, not only because the subject of the piece is the protagonist of the texts but also because the oil painting still exists and thus can be inspected, be it via the Internet, by the reader. This ekphrastic moment has a long build-up. Cromwell meets Holbein several times throughout Wolf Hall and during these meetings they discuss the progress on the portrait: Hans Holbein says, “Thomas, I’ve got your hands done but I haven’t paid much attention to your face. I promise this autumn I’ll finish you off” (Wolf Hall 482) […] Braekevelt 42
‘When shall we see my master’s portrait? You have been at work on it a while, Hans, it is time it came home. We are keen to see what you have made of him’” (Wolf Hall 495). Mantel thus not only focuses on the end product but also on the process of how it came to be. Making the reader wait for the ekphrastic moment only makes its eventual effect more intense.
The following ekphrastic moment contains most of the characteristics as previously described by Louvel and Cunningham:
He looks at the picture’s lower edge, and allows his
gaze to creep upwards. A quill, scissors, papers, his
seal in a little bag, and a heavy volume, bound in
blackish green: the leather tooled in gold, the pages
gilt-edged. Hans had asked to see his Bible,
rejected it as too plain, too thumbed. He had
scoured the house and found the finest volume he
owned on the desk of Thomas Avery. It is the monk Hans Holbein The Younger, Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, c. 1532-34 Pacioli’s work, the book on how to keep your
books, sent to him by his kind friends in Venice. (Wolf Hall 525)
The intertextual and intermedial aspect of this ekphrastic moment is quite noteworthy because it takes a very literal form in this instance. Cromwell describes how he used a book on accounting as a replacement for the Bible. One text is divine and holy, the other is extremely secular. Even though the Renaissance is thought of as paving the way for later capitalism, in this passage, Mantel saw the opportunity to underline how her Cromwell is more drawn to personal economic prosperity than his faith. Even though he is a Christian man, it shows that, some of the time and perhaps most of the time, his personal interest takes a superior position over his religious conscience on his list of priorities. By employing ekphrasis in this way,
Mantel is able to give the reader more information about the inner workings of her character Braekevelt 43 without having to do so explicitly. It intertwines the character with its setting. The ekphrastic moment goes on:
He sees his painted hand, resting on the desk before him, holding a paper in a loose fist.
It is uncanny, as if he had been pulled apart, to look at himself in sections, digit by digit.
Hans has made his skin smooth as the skin of a courtesan, but the motion he has
captured, that folding of the fingers, is as sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks
up the killing knife. He is wearing the cardinal’s turquoise.
He had a turquoise ring of his own, one time, which Liz gave to him when Gregory was
born. It was a ring in the shape of a heart.
He raises his eyes, to his own face. It does not much improve on the Easter egg which
Jo painted. Hans had penned him in a little space, pushing a heavy table to fasten him
in. He had time to think, while Hans drew him, and his thoughts took him far off, to
another country. You cannot trace those thoughts behind his eyes.
He had asked to be painted in his garden. Hans said, the very notion makes me sweat.
Can we keep it simple, yes?
He wears his winter clothes. Inside them, he seems made of a more impermeable
substance than most men, more compacted. He could well be wearing armour. He
foresees the day when he might have to. (Wolf Hall 525)
It is clear that, just like the Solomon tapestry, this portrait also brings back a moment of introspection. The hands, especially, point out Cromwell’s unique position. They look like those of a nobleman, which refers to the high office he now holds within the court, but their movement brings forth the image of a slaughter man, which refers back to his younger years and his low birth.
Mantel describes how Cromwell continues to study his painting: Braekevelt 44
He smiles. There is no trace of a smile on the face of his painted self. ‘Right.’ He sweeps
into the next room. ‘You can come and see it.’ They crown in, jostling. There is a short,
appraising silence. It lengthens. Alice says, ‘He has made you look rather stout, Uncle.
More than he need.’
Richard says, ‘As Leonardo has demonstrated to us, a curved surface better deflects the
impact of cannon balls.’
‘I don’t think you look like that,’ Helen Barre says. ‘I see that your features are true
enough. But that is not the expression on your face.’
Rafe says, ‘No, Helen, he saves it for men.’
[…]
He says, ‘Your lady mother always said she didn’t pick me for my looks. I was surprised,
when the picture came, to find I was vain. I thought of myself as I was when I left Italy,
twenty years ago. Before you were born.’
[…]
He turns to the painting. ‘I fear Mark was right.’
‘Who is Mark?’
‘A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a
murderer.’
Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’ (Wolf Hall 525-27)
The Portrait of Thomas Cromwell also serves as a momento mori in this text as the protagonist is quite literally faced with the fact that he is aging and, as a result, is getting closer and closer to death. Cromwell admits this to his son, Gregory, as he is observing the painting. This taps into the introspective character of the ekphrastic moment as Cromwell starts to become more and more aware of his own less pleasant characteristics and finally acknowledges that he might look like a murderer. This testimony, even though prompted by the ekphrastic moment, had Braekevelt 45 been building up throughout the text as we followed Cromwell through his sometimes ruthless actions and tactics. Just like the portrait of Thomas More’s family, this ekphrastic moment lays bare the way the characters see one another. It is also not merely a piece meant for decoration but, in those times, also served a more diplomatic, propagandic purpose. This explains why
Cromwell is surprised when he notices that he might look like a murderer. He knows that this is how people see him and will see him, even after he has passed. In this way, this ekphrastic moment is self-reflective on how history and memory are influenced, or even misled, by the visual arts. James Johnston claims that “It is through their references to visual art that the novels come closest to employing the self-reflexive narrative strategies typical of historiographic metafiction” (James Johnston 542).
Not only the character and the setting are affected by these ekphrastic moments but also the reader. These instances are normally a moment of shared knowledge between the character and the reader; both are looking (one may say that the reader is ‘looking mentally’ rather than
‘physically’) at the same aesthetic object. Even though the mental setting of the reader and the fictional character are quite unlike one another and their interpretations of the work of art will surely not comply with one another, since both are surrounded by and were brought up in two very distinct iconographic cultures, when the character looks at Holbein’s Portrait of Thomas
Cromwell, so does the reader. This creates a more intimate bond between the character and the reader; the latter looking through the former’s eyes, a shared gaze.
In general, we can conclude that Mantel, in her overarching quest of resurrecting the dead, employs these ekphrastic encounters of both fictional and non-fictional art pieces for multiple purposes which influence character, the setting, and the reader. Through their retrospective and introspective effects, they cause the character to self-analyse and in that way give the reader more insight into the character. This also causes the character to meditate on the Braekevelt 46 workings of memory and history itself. This self-reflexive characteristic is common in the postmodern historical novel.
Furthermore, as the contemporary reader is most likely unfamiliar with the aesthetic framework of the Renaissance, these explicit ekphrastic moments are needed to introduce the reader to that framework. It shows the character as being part of that aesthetic framework, as observer and critic but also as the aesthetic subject itself.
4.2. Intertextuality
As I have mentioned before, Mantel employs some elements which are external to the character in order to create that character’s mind-set. In other words, she uses elements out of the environment the character lives in to create that character’s inner workings. Next to the visual arts, which I have just discussed, the literary field is employed in a similar manner.
As the printing press became a more and more widespread phenomenon throughout
Renaissance Europe, it became easier for people to spread information at a quicker pace. This technological revolution signalled the beginning of a process some would call the
‘democratising’ of literature. The fact that books could now be printed in larger quantities, which lowered their prices, was to the advantage of reformers who used the printing press to spread their ideologies and to reach an audience they otherwise would not have been able to reach. In the Cromwell novels, the character William Tyndale is the embodiment of this literary revolution as he continues to write and print his forbidden Bible translations.
Any person familiar with the basics of literary scholarship is familiar with the term
‘intertextuality’ and has probably also heard Kristeva’s famous quote: “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations” (66). The literary device “acknowledges that the individual author of a text is an assembler of remnants, constructing an order from assorted shards of the past” and that “Texts refer directly or indirectly to previous texts and depend on them for their Braekevelt 47 meaning” (Maclean et al. 1735). Or, as Umberto Eco claimed when writing about his The Name of the Rose (1980), “I discovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told” (20). This certainly is true for the stories about the Tudor court. Mantel’s text depends on other historical novels, and the historical record, to create its own meaning. It is partly because of that dependency, and the comparison that comes with it, that we are able to identify Mantel’s novels as revisionist. Linda Hutcheon also claims that literary works cannot stand fully on their own and that “it is only as part of prior discourses that any text derives meaning and significance” (6). In this light, we might consider Mantel’s novels as both intertextual works leaning on a large corpus of other Tudor writing and as additions to that same ‘canon’. This strikes the same chord as Mantel’s literary theory in which she sees her narrative as an alternative telling of history’s story.
For Hutcheon, intertextuality, in connection to her historiographic metafiction, puts more focus on the relationship between the reader and the text. Therefore, a close study of what stories in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies retell and how they interact with the historical characters and the reader cannot be overlooked at this point in this paper.
The fact that the story told by Mantel and also the stories told by the interwoven texts within the novels are set in the Renaissance can easily evolve into a great challenge. As De
Pourcq and De Strycker claim, “As the culture to which a text refers is removed further away, the effect on the reader can be that he or she feels the more excluded and misses the context which is needed to understand a text” (13, own translation)1.
For the sake of clarity, I will not go into great detail about the other texts which attempt to relate the story of Thomas Cromwell, since the collection of these texts does not consist
1 “Naarmate de cultuur waarnaar een tekst verwijs verder verwijderd is, kan het effect op de lezer des te meer zijn dat hij of zij er niet bij hoort en de context mist die nodig is om een tekst te begrijpen” (De Pourcq and De Strycker 13). Braekevelt 48 exclusively of historical novels and would require a close reading of a vast amount of historic writing. Instead, I will use Linda Hutcheon’s theory on intertextuality in connection to historiographic metafiction and apply it to a selection of explicit intertextual instances in Wolf
Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Nevertheless, I cannot ignore some texts, such as Roman-
Catholic biblical texts, Tyndale’s bible translations, and other religious and/or reformist writing which have a strong overarching influence on the narrative, the characters, and the setting of the text in general.
Marko Juvan, in his History and Poetics of Intertextuality (2008), claims that cases of intertextuality count on the public “not only to be able to recognize citational connections but to interpret them as an aesthetically and semantically relevant writing strategy” (146).
Because the Cromwell novels contain a vast amount of intertextual references, I thought it to be a good idea to make a selection based on the importance of the texts which are mentioned and categorise them according to the way they are employed in the novels.
4.2.1. Commemorating and Remembering through Text
Nowadays, music and literature are considered as two distinct art forms even though the former uses many of the same techniques and principles as the latter. For a long time, song writing in general was considered a lowbrow literary genre if a genre at all. This debate recently was brought back to life after Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, pointing out the parallels between music and ‘serious’ literature to the dismay of many literary scholars.
Whereas music now seems to fill the sole purpose of entertainment, during the Renaissance it filled multiple purposes.
The historical record shows us that Henry VIII was a great supporter and patron of the arts, and therefore it comes as no surprise that in Mantel’s novels music is included in an intertextual manner. Natasha Roule in her paper “Pastime With Good Company: Music in the Braekevelt 49
Making of Magnificence at the Court of Henry VIII, 1509 – 47” points out the versatile functions of lyrics at the Henrician court. She claims that music at court was not only entertainment but also a political tool: “By merging spectacle with diplomacy, Henry found a showy way to demonstrate his cultural grace and physical strength” and “music was not merely a spectacle, but an integral part of everyone’s life” (12).
The important role of music at court in Mantel’s novels is highlighted by the death of court musician Mark Smeaton, who was tried and executed because of an alleged affair with
Anne Boleyn. Whether or not the affair actually had taken place is neither explicitly confirmed nor denied in the novels, but it does stress the close relationship between the English nobility and the court musicians.
Regardless of how interesting the musical intertextual instances in Wolf Hall and Bring
Up the Bodies are, I will not analyse them extensively here. The most remarkable of these instances is “Scaramella va alla Guerra,” allegedly composed by Josquin Desprez, a composer and musician who was active in Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth century.
The song relates the story of a young soldier, Scaramella, who is on his way to war:
“Scaramella va alla guerra Colla lancia et la “Scaramella is going to war with lance and
rotella La zombero boro borombetta, La boro buckler, la zombero boro borombetta, la boro
borombo …” borombo”
(Wolf Hall 206) (“Texts and translations – Early Music now”)
Apart from what the title leads us to believe, “the emphasis is rather on the audience’s perception of the humor in the text and in its characterization of the bumbling lancer” (Dickey).
The young soldier, whilst on his way to war, sings about his expectations and “it is not always clear whether Scaramella the soldier is wielding a knight’s ‘lance’, or if his martial misadventures involve sexual peccadillos as well” (Dickey). It nevertheless, for the reader who Braekevelt 50 is not familiar with this intertext, evokes a feeling of dread of war which is fitting for the often tense surroundings in which Cromwell operates, even if these surroundings are not always to be taken very seriously. The song is first mentioned when Henry is still courting Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell is trying to look for a solution to Henry’s marital problem. Mantel employs the twisted image of a courageous soldier mixed with that of a sexually active ruffian to remind her readers of the Henry at this stage in the novels as well as Cromwell’s past on the
European continent. This mysterious ‘past’ is mentioned quite often and given as an explanation for Cromwell’s multilingualism and his great memory which he developed into a powerful tool in Italy. The commemorative character of this intertextual instance is similar to that of the ekphrastic moments.
Another song which is mentioned several times is “Pastime With Good Company,” which is thought to have been composed by Henry VIII himself, although there is no hard evidence for this claim. Nevertheless, the piece was popular during Henry’s reign (early sixteenth century copies of the scores are preserved in the British Library) and Mantel cleverly plays into the alleged authorship by letting Cromwell’s jester Anthony sing it whilst he is impersonating Henry VIII. In this way she neither denies nor confirms the original authorship.
According to Natasha Roule, “the practical study of music comprised a crucial element in the education and lifestyle of a prince” (Roule 6). Accordingly, the song brings back the image of a much younger Henry than the one we encounter in the Cromwell novels. The contrast between these two Henrys suggests a process of maturation between the two which feeds the impression, similar to that caused by actual temporal gaps in the novels, that the characters were/are alive beyond the boundaries of the text that is presented to the reader.
Apart from the effect lyrics have on the mental wholesomeness of the character,
Mantel’s use of lyrics also sparks a reconsideration of the genre for the reader. Additionally, it Braekevelt 51 shows that even Mantel’s use of ‘lowbrow’ genres bears significance and adds to the mental and intellectual wholesomeness of the character and the setting of the novels.
4.2.2. Experiencing Religion through Text
Almost all religious texts which are mentioned in the novels are part of the Christian biblical canon and most of them are part of the Bible, be it either the Old or the New Testament. These texts are worth discussing as overarching texts instead of analysing their specific mentions in the novels. It goes without saying that the Bible, being a point of contention within the English
Reformation, has a great influence on both the characters and the plot. In the novels, ownership of Tyndale’s Bible translations could get you locked up, as I will discuss later. Even though
Mantel’s English Renaissance world is slowly becoming more and more secular, and reformist ideology is working its way into the ruling classes, it still very much hinges on the Roman
Catholic tradition which dictates much of the daily life. In general, we could argue that the
Bible is used as a reminder of the fragile state of Catholicism in a country that is about to disassociate itself from the papacy and make its own monarch head of the Church. The power of the biblical texts over daily life is shown through the three different ways in which the texts
(the Bible) function in the novels.
First and foremost, it is used as a source for religious argumentation. The frustrations experienced by Cromwell and Henry originate from the fact that some of the Roman Catholic doctrine does not have an origin in the Bible: “Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’.
Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says ‘Pope’” (Wolf Hall 39). It is also a source of confusion for Henry in regard to his marriage to Catherine:
Useless to suggest that, if Deuteronomy orders you to marry your brother’s relict, and
Leviticus says don’t, or you will not breed, you should try to live with the contradiction,
and accept that the question of which takes priority was thrashed out in Rome, for a fat Braekevelt 52
fee, by leading prelates, twenty years ago when the dispensations were issued, and
delivered under papal seal. (Wolf Hall 24)
This contradiction brings Henry to the idea that his marriage with Catherine is void and thus should be annulled. This role is one which drives the plot of the narrative since these kind of frustrations add to the anti-Rome sentiments which will eventually lead to the schism of the
English Church.
Additionally, it also has a physical role as an instrument of law: “‘Now … will you put your hand on this Bible, and swear before me and in the presence of the king and his council that you are free from unlawful knowledge of Lady Anne, and free from any marriage contract with her?’” (Wolf Hall 381). This type of function, in which the Bible is used for legal reasons, which would normally be considered a matter of common law, underlines the importance of religion within the Renaissance society and stresses the fact that the legal-and-regal world is interwoven with the religious world.
Its role in education is equally important. It is mentioned several times throughout the novels that Henry VIII was meant to lead a religious life: “His [Arthur’s] younger brother Henry would likely be Archbishop of Canterbury” (Wolf Hall 66). It goes without saying that the Bible then would have served as a didactic tool. For Cromwell, the Bible is also used in this manner:
“‘Master Cromwell can recite the whole New Testament,’ Wyatt says helpfully” (Wolf Hall
410). In this way, it is used to highlight not only the mental capability of the character, but also what Cromwell expects to be his first and ultimate source of inspiration and consolation.
In conclusion, these religious texts influence an important part of the setting and the characters’ lives. By using them in the ways I described, Mantel reminds the reader that the setting of the novel is a foreign one, regardless of how familiar it feels to the contemporary reader. Braekevelt 53
The collection of these texts, not only the religious ones, are both what needs ordering in Cromwell’s mind and part of that ordering technique. A particular memory system is mentioned throughout both Cromwell novels:
In Italy he learned a memory system and furnished it with pictures. […] When you have
made the images, you place them about the world in locations you choose, each one
with its parcel of words, of figures, which they will yield you on demand. […] He keeps
them, in strict order, in the gallery of his mind’s eye. Perhaps it is because he is used to
making these images that his head is peopled with the cast of a thousand plays, ten
thousand interludes. (Wolf Hall 216)
This system allows him to retain much detailed information which then allows him to make informed moves and ask pungent questions to the right people. This remarkable mental feature is even more stressed when compared to how Gregory, Cromwell’s son, handles his education:
“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” (Bring Up the Bodies 27).
These texts are not only an addition to his stored knowledge, they are also a means to categorise and order the information. His brain is, quite literally, structured like a well-organised library:
“Fortunately, my brain is furnished with texts” (Wolf Hall 360). This stresses even more the importance for literary scholars discussing the historical character Thomas Cromwell to take into account these intertextual instances, since they are so inherently part of his character.
4.2.3. Resisting Authority through Text
The authority of the religious texts and the institutions which authored them, which I just discussed, underwent questioning by authors such as Tyndale and Luther and their writings.
Something which can be said of both Tyndale’s and Luther’s texts is that, more important than their actual, explicit mentions in Mantel’s novels is their influx of their reformist ideas into the Braekevelt 54 dialogues and minds of Mantel’s characters. Therefore, a closer analysis of their most influential works cannot be omitted.
William Tyndale, most famous for his translation of the New Testament into English, is mentioned several times in both novels (even though he is never actively brought onto the scene because of his exile) as the English authorities tried to keep an eye on him during the English
Reformation and the years leading up to it. In the novels, more important than the character of
Tyndale himself is his Bible translation and his The Obedience of a Christian Man.
The Obedience of a Christian Man (full title: The obedience of a Christen man and how
Christen rulers ought to governe / where in also (yf thou marke diligently) thou shalt fynde eyes to perceave the crafty conveyuance of all iugglers) was written by Tyndale in the year 1528 and probably printed in and distributed from Antwerp, from which it quickly found its way into the
English court. This was all done in secret as “ecclesiastical authorities in England were beginning to crack down on the circulation of reformist texts, published abroad” (Felch and
King’oo 88). The controversy of the texts is highlighted by the fact that “the work appears on several state-authorized lists of banned books dating from around 1530, at least one of which was drawn up by divines appointed to the task by Henry himself” (Felch and King’oo 90).
Other such prohibited texts which are mentioned in the Cromwell novels include
Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into the vernacular English and Luther’s Liberty of a Christian Man (1520). The ownership of the book could bring you into serious trouble with men like Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More, as Mantel shows in Wolf Hall:
A few days later, a former monk and a leather-seller are burned together. The monk had
run in consignments of books through the Norfolk ports and then, stupidly enough,
through St Katharine’s Dock, where the Lord Chancellor (Thomas More) was waiting
to seize them. The leather-seller had possession of Luther’s Liberty of a Christian Man,
the text copied out in his own hand. These are men he knows, the disgraced and broken Braekevelt 55
Bainham, the monk Bayfield, John Tewkesbury, who God knows was no doctor of
theology. That’s how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash hanging
over Smithfield. (Wolf Hall 335)
Luther’s text, in the eyes of the English authorities, undermines the authority of the Church and therefore ended up on the list of banned books. Luther, the avid German reformer, just like
Tyndale, is not actively involved in the Cromwell novels but is present through his writing and reformist thought.
But what is interesting here is Mantel’s choice of characters who fall victim to the authorities’ punishment: a former monk and a leather seller. It highlights the tension in which the English Reformation took place: the clergy slowly losing its grip on the monopoly of religion, which was slowly becoming more democratised because of its accessibility through such texts and vernacular translations. This access is made possible by the employment of a new sort of media at the time, the printing press, which made it easier for knowledge and thought to travel further and quicker.
The consequences of being involved with Tyndale’s texts, just like with Luther’s, bore great consequence, as Mantel points out: “No, don’t tell me [Cromwell]. If you [John Frith] were going about Tyndale’s work, I had better not know it. […] And he [Henry VIII] hates
Luther, and you have translated Luther into English” (Wolf Hall 434). In this dialogue with the character of John Frith, it is clear that Mantel has chosen for her Cromwell to be very aware of the dangers which accompany these texts but does not let these dangers dictate his dealing with these writings. Creating a Cromwell who completely avoided these texts would have made it more difficult for her to incorporate them since Cromwell is both the narrator and the protagonist, and only what Cromwell sees and thinks is what the reader gets to read.
Now that we know the consequences of possessing such a forbidden text, it may be interesting to see what arguments in these texts caused them to be banned. Tyndale, in his Braekevelt 56
Obedience, claimed that the Church should hold no authority over “divinely appointed (and anointed) kings” (93), which was an idea which would have served Henry in his quest for the annulment of his first marriage. However, Tyndale also strongly advocated for the right to translate the Bible into the vernacular English and strongly opposed the prosecution of those who owned such banned texts. These ideas seemed too extreme for a still very Catholic
England, and as Richard Rex, professor of Reformation history at Cambridge University, claims: “Prior to the break with Rome, his [Henry’s] religious beliefs and practices stood squarely within the parameters of ‘traditional religion’” (Rex 2).
The Obedience is also explicitly mentioned in Wolf Hall: “Master Tyndale says, “One king, one law, is God’s ordinance in every realm.” I have read his book, The Obedience of a
Christian Man. I myself have shown it to the king and marked the passages that touch on his authority. The subject must obey his king as he would his God; do I have the sense of it? The
Pope will learn his place’” (Wolf Hall 242). Even though, in this passage, Mantel conveys the
Protestant thought, she avoids putting the words in Henry’s mouth because that is a dangerous terrain to enter, as even historians fail to precisely pin down Henry’s religious beliefs in detail.
Rex even claims that “nothing would have been more surprising to him or his contemporaries than the suggestion of a fundamental and lifelong consistency in his religious views” (Rex 4).
Additionally, Susan M. Felch and Clare Costley King’oo, in their paper “Reading
Tyndale’s Obedience in Whole and in Part,” claim that “Historians have long asserted that, within a year of its publication abroad, a copy of William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a
Christen Man (1528) made its way to the English court, where it was owned by Anne Boleyn and read with great enthusiasm by King Henry VIII” (88). They go on to argue how this idea, taken up by history, is actually quite improbable. Mantel, by having Cromwell present the text to Henry instead of Anne Boleyn, gives us another version of the story than the one given by history. With Mantel’s version being more probable, Nünning, who I have mentioned before, Braekevelt 57 would see this as a sign of ‘revisionist’ writing. Even though the intertextual instances concerning Luther and Tyndale seem dangerous and tricky for Mantel to use, instead of ignoring and avoiding the texts, she successfully integrates them without assuming any character’s religious opinions. Furthermore, by using these texts, she also highlights the authors’ intentions to question the authority of religious institutions.
4.2.4. Establishing Authority through Text
Apart from religious authority, some texts in Mantel’s novels also aim to establish secular
(religion, of course, is always part of the discussion) authority, as we see in the writings of
Stephen Gardiner, Marsilius of Padua, and Henry VIII himself.
Gardiner, who is an important character in the novels, defends in his Of True Obedience the power of Henry VIII over that of the pope. “It shows why oaths to the papacy are of none effect [sic], yet our oath to the king, as head of the Church, is good. It emphasises most strongly that a king’s authority is divine, and descends to him directly from God” (Bring Up the Bodies
38). Apart from shining yet another light on the problem of the Reformation, it also reminds the reader of how intricately related the religious world and the secular world are in the
Cromwell novels.
Some of the secular texts are, similarly to the religious writings, used for their argumentative worth in the whole debate around the English Reformation. Defensor Pacis, in particular is used by Mantel to point out the parallels between its contents and the problems faced by Henry VIII and Cromwell.
Marsilius of Padua, an Italian philosopher and scholar who was active during the fourteenth century, finished his Defensor Pacis around the year 1324. In it “Marsilius argues for the secular community’s autonomy from papacy” (Koch 167). The work was probably prompted because of Pope John XXII’s refusal to acknowledge the Duke of Bavaria, Ludwig, as emperor. Marsilius argues that religious as well as secular temporal authority is directly given Braekevelt 58 by God and that, therefore, the one cannot be superior over the other. His main argument, clearly in favour of Ludwig, states that “unruly priests” (168) are a threat to society and that, therefore, the position of the Church’s authority should be reconsidered.
In Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel lets Stephen Gardiner (Bishop of Winchester) bring the text to Henry’s attention: “‘You brought the king a book to that effect, the book of Marsiglio of
Padua, his forty-two articles. The king says you belaboured him with them till his head ached.’
‘I should have made the matter shorter,’ he [Stephen Gardiner] says, smiling” (Bring Up the
Bodies 39).
Even from the short description of the text’s essence I have just given, it is already clear that there are significant parallels between the theme of Defensor Pacis and the English
Reformation: Henry VIII, just like emperor-elect Ludwig, is being obstructed by a pope to do what he thinks is his right as sovereign and is questioning whether or not it is correct for a pope to act as a king’s superior. Even though the Reformation is an important, driving theme of the plot in both Cromwell novels, it is not always the centre of attention because there are several distinct, though heavily interrelated, storylines which unfold at the same time, such as
Cromwell’s personal life as a father, husband, and mentor, Henry VIII’s struggle with his conscience and faith, and the political environment of the Tudor court.
As a result, in contrast to what one might expect from a historical novel set in this age, there are not many details about the technicalities that establishing the Church of England2 brought with it, except for the main ones the reader needs to understand its importance. By implementing Marsilius’ text and relying on the parallels between both narratives, Mantel returns the readers’ attention towards the overarching problem her Cromwell and Henry VIII
2 Of course, in the timespan of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies we cannot yet speak of a fully completed English Reformation but, even here, there are not many details on how it legally unfolds. Perhaps the third Cromwell novel will have this as a focal point but that is mere guesswork. Braekevelt 59 face and remind them of the core problem of the Reformation and their arguments for the reform.
Apart from relying on external arguments for the Reformation and the annulment of
Henry’s first divorce, the characters in the Cromwell novels also come up with their own arguments. The text A Glass of the Truth concerns arguments which question the legitimacy of
Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Even though the work was published anonymously, it was perceived that the text was written by Henry himself. Mantel also acknowledges this rumour in Bring Up the Bodies: “The king – it would be three or four years back and to justify his first divorce – put out a book called A Glass of the Truth. Parts of it, they say, he wrote himself” (342). Interesting here is how Mantel acknowledges the rumour without actually confirming or denying the truth of it by using the ‘they say’ clause. This is something which I will return to later in this paper. The focus here now is on why she mentioned the work.
James Christoper, in his doctoral thesis “Representing Henry VIII: Humanist discourse in the years of the Reformation Parliament,” explains how this work is also a propagandist text apart from being an explanatory one: “what there is in A Glass of the Truth for readers to
‘imprint’ in their hearts goes well beyond the evidence and arguments against the validity of
Henry’s marriage. Just as important is the image of the kind and the relationship between king and subjects that is here represented, in print” (63). By mentioning this particular work, Mantel helps to create an image of Henry VIII without explicitly describing him. In the show-don’t- tell tradition many creative writers vow to, Mantel relies on the implications of A Glass of the
Truth to attribute some characteristics to her Henry: that he was a king who was concerned about how he was viewed in public opinion and how he had a need for a clear conscience (hence the ridding himself of guilt through the reasoning in this text), but also that he valued the arts, such as literature, and that he knew how literature could be employed for propagandist purposes and how authority could be established through writing. Braekevelt 60
4.2.5. Discussing the Character through Text
Apart from giving arguments why the character is right or wrong within a religious or political debate, some of the intertextual instances also attribute some characteristics to the historical characters. One such text is Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend (c. 1260) which describes the lives of saints. Although the topic is religious, one could consider this text to be more myth, fable or legend than theological writing. Mantel uses this text, together with
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), to talk about Cromwell’s son, Gregory:
When the weather is too wet to hunt, Gregory sits poring over The Golden Legend; he
likes the lives of the saints. ‘Some of these things are true,’ he says, ‘some not.’ He
reads Le Morte d’Arthur, and because it is a new edition they crowd around him, looking
over his shoulder at the title page. ‘Here beginneth the first book of the most noble and
worthy prince King Arthur sometime King of Great Britain …’ (Wolf Hall 221)
The contents of these texts, which are based more on fantasy than on fact, add to the view
Cromwell has that his son was growing up to be a decent man but not a shrewd pragmatic politician like himself. Again, Mantel uses the topics of other texts to highlight certain characteristics of her historical characters.
Intertextuality in the Cromwell novels does not only apply to physical texts, but also to literary motifs which reoccur throughout the novels. One such motif is the Goddess Fortuna and her Wheel of Fortune. It is used by Cromwell when he is in a contemplative state of mind:
“He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune.
Decayed Magnificence sits in the centre” (Wolf Hall 55).
Even though for contemporary readers the personification of Fortune may be directly linked to the meaning of the word ‘fortunate’, which is not incorrect, the allegory of Fortune had a deeper meaning during the Renaissance than it does now. Jess Titterington, in her article
“The Wheel of Fortune,” claims that “For over two millennia, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Braekevelt 61 woman who spins it, has been a symbol for man’s unstable material fate in Western society. It can be traced to a popular pre-Christian Roman goddess, Fortuna. As goddess of luck and destiny, Fortuna both bestowed and snatched back her gifts on her whim and a spin of her wheel” (46-7). This mysterious and random goddess gained popularity during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as Titterington attests, “throughout the Middle Ages, Fortune was well known amongst both common people and nobility” (48). It found its way into many different genres of writing during these periods, as we find Fortune/a in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century, in his Monk’s Tale, for example), and in theatre in Shakespeare’s plays (in
Hamlet, Fortune plays an important role), just to name a few. Mantel uses this allegory when
Cromwell witnesses the beginning of the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, and by employing this personification of Fortuna, she highlights her characters’ dependency on their faith and their lack of knowledge of the future which, according to Mantel, is one of the pitfalls for historical novelists.
Another significant text to pass through Cromwell’s hands is Machiavelli’s Il Principe
(1513-15). Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (2018), records the text being given to Cromwell:
Henry Lord Morley, was Cromwell’s friend and shared his love of things Italian. It is
therefore significant that some time in the late 1530s Morley could assume that
Cromwell would be pleased by a gift of Niccolò Machiavelli’s best known works the
History of Florence and The Prince, in Italian editions, for recreational and instructive
reading. (28)
It is therefore fitting that Mantel makes her Cromwell own this text. Not only does it stress his multilingualism – “he had a gift for learning languages” (27) – but it also links our interpretation of his political thinking with the concept of Machiavellianism. Machiavelli, who in present cultural memory is best known for lending his name to “a particularly nasty form of politics in Braekevelt 62 which practitioners have no scruples about applying any means – force or fraud, murder or rapine - to achieve their own, usually selfish, ends” (Zuckert 85), wrote and published Il
Principe around the years 1513 to 1515, after which it quickly spread throughout Europe and became one of the most controversial pieces of political writing of the time.
However, how one is remembered in history is not always a just representation of the past, and in order to correctly analyse the role Machiavelli’s text plays in Mantel’s novels, we first ought to revisit his text and see what he actually wrote down. His “reputation as a teacher of tyrants” (86) is primarily supported by the modern day use and connotation of the word
‘Machiavellian’, which is often used as a synonym for ‘ruthless’. This interpretation is based on one of the most famous sentences from the texts in which Machiavelli is instructing princes on how to preserve a state: “to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it accordingly to necessity” (Zuckert 86). But as Catherine Zuckert points out in her paper “Machiavelli and the End of Nobility in Politics,” this statement is falsely interpreted because “teaching a prince how not to be good is not the same as teaching him to be bad” (86).
Furthermore, Zuckert states that “In The Prince Machiavelli confines himself to urging a political leader, whether he comes to power with the aid of the great [respectively the nobility] or of the people, once in power to seek the support of the people” (89). This core essence of Il
Principe is the most valuable to Mantel and her insertion of the text into her own narratives.
The first real encounter with the text happens early on in the first novel, when Cromwell spends time at home right after the death of his wife Liz:
He has got Niccolò Machiavelli’s book, Principalities, it is a Latin edition, shoddily
printed in Naples, which seems to have passed through many hands. […] Someone says
to him, what is in your little book? and he says, a few aphorisms, a few truisms, nothing
we didn’t know before. (Wolf Hall 105) Braekevelt 63
At this point in the novel, Cromwell has a clear idea of what is about to happen: that Queen
Catherine is going to be replaced by Anne Boleyn, but how exactly that is about to be achieved is not yet clear. Mantel, by informing the reader that Cromwell is well versed in Machiavelli’s teachings, leans on both interpretations of the text: both the contemporary and the original. As the reader reads the rest of the novel and its sequel, they might recognise Thomas Cromwell in the contemporary meaning of ‘Machiavellian’: a ruthless man who does what he needs to do, without any scruples, to obtain what he wants. This ‘characteristic’ may also be awarded to the character of Cardinal Wolsey and even Thomas More. However, this one-sided-interpretation is too narrow to fully encompass the way in which Cromwell’s character unfolds. Some of the things he does, according to the ethical mind-set of the contemporary reader, may seem ruthless and extreme but throughout both novels we learn that Mantel only lets her character act like this when there are no other options available. For example, when Cromwell is interrogating
Henry Norris on whether or not he participated in adulterous behaviour with Anne Boleyn, the interrogation heats up and he says, “I could put my thumbs in your eyes, and then you would sing “Green Grows the Holly” if I asked you to.’ He sits down, resumes his former easy tone.
‘Put yourself in my place. People will say I have tortured you anyway. They will say I have tortured Mark, they are already putting the word about” (Bring Up the Bodies 387). Even though he comes across as extremely aggressive, when you compare it to the way Cromwell interrogated Mark Smeaton a couple of scenes earlier, Norris is not faced with the same brutality. He could have chosen to also submit Norris to torture but he settled for threatening words and in that way chose a more ‘peaceful’ path. Cromwell’s Machiavellian behaviour may thus be interpreted as ‘not good’ out of necessity rather than intentionally bad, only inflicting real pain when absolutely necessary. This more nuanced interpretation accords with the original reading Zuckert suggests. Both readings of Machiavelli’s text transfer some of their connotations and ‘feelings’ to the characters with which they are related: Thomas Wolsey, Braekevelt 64
Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas More. But it is the reader, when he or she fails to recognise the correct understanding of Il Principe, who downgrades the connotation to merely ‘ruthless’. It comes as no surprise that in many reviews on Mantel’s novels, the word ‘ruthless’ is used to talk about Cromwell. The critic, in this case, tends to equate the whole historical character of
Cromwell with some of his actions which they interpret as evil for the sake of evil, and in this way ignore all of the other features of these well-rounded characters. By departing from a contemporary ethical mind-set and discussing the characters in this way, they also overlook the exact cultural and political ethics which are introduced by these political texts.
As I have said before, Mantel’s texts are considered to be revisionist historical novels and one of the characters which is uniquely affected by this is Thomas More. Andrew James
Johnston claims that “Just as Mantel presents us with the remarkably original image of a likeable Cromwell, she casts More in the highly unusual role of an arch-villain” (James
Johnston 541). I would personally not go as far as to say that More is an arch-villain in Mantel’s work because that would be a short-sighted interpretation of the complex character Mantel made him to be. It is not because Mantel pulled him out of his comfortable martyrdom that she casts him in the opposite direction of the spectrum. Accordingly, Cromwell is not uniquely
‘likeable’ as Johnston claims. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two characters is indeed very strained and we could state that both view one another as enemies to a certain degree. A closer look into how More’s works are being treated by Mantel’s Cromwell gives us a clearer view on the relationship she wanted them to have.
Thomas More’s life could be called turbulent, to say the least. As an Oxford-scholar- turned-lawyer, he first went into politics during the reign of Henry VII as a Member of
Parliament. After being forced to leave politics because he opposed Henry VII’s tax exactions, he “continued practicing law and writing humanist and theological texts, of which the most famous was Utopia” (Zuzamek 306). He went back into politics after Henry VIII’s ascension Braekevelt 65 to the throne and worked his way up to Henry’s councillor and eventually attained the office of
Lord Chancellor. However, because he refused to sign and swear to the Act of Supremacy, which would put the sovereign as head of the English Church and would mean a definitive break from the pope in Rome, More fell out of grace with the English court, which would eventually lead to his execution in 1535.
The time at which Utopia (1516) was written was marked by religious troubles and economic challenges for England, which prompted More to seriously consider the way these things were governed. However it must be pointed out that we cannot take Utopia and interpret it as More’s stance on these issues or as an instructive text on how to govern because “after being published, Utopia assumed its own life” (Zuzanek 1). Accordingly, as Sanford Kessler claims in his “Religious Freedom in Thomas More’s Utopia”:
Tentativeness is warranted here because the ‘sphinx-like’ fictional setting makes it
impossible to achieve certainty regarding More’s stance towards any feature in Utopian
life. In Utopia’s narrative, Hythlodaeus recounts Utopus’s arguments for religious
freedom to a fictional More character (…) who records them for the reader. These
arguments, seemingly three steps removed from the author’s own pen are also filtered
through […] Utopian history as well as through each character’s interpretive lens. (211-
2)
Throughout the Cromwell novels, it seems that Mantel took this critique into consideration since, even though Utopia is mentioned several times, Mantel’s More never comments on what he thinks about the text’s argument, nor do the other characters. For example: “This is how the book Utopia begins: friends, talking in a garden. On the paths below, Hugh Latimer and some of the king’s chaplains are play-fighting, pulling each other around like schoolboys” (Wolf Hall
562). Braekevelt 66
Accordingly, what many critics and scholars seem to overlook is that the same technique concerning the authorial voice which has been used in Utopia is being used by Mantel in her novels. Mantel did not portray More as a character with a narrative voice. The same awareness
Kessler called for should therefore be raised when reading Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies as well. The More we get to see in these narratives is projected through the “interpretive lens” of the fictional Cromwell and not an unbiased portrayal of the man. That More is not being presented as a saint, as the Bishop of Shrewsbury would have wanted, is in this regards no surprise. It is actually more probable that Cromwell viewed More in such light, rather than that
Cromwell held him in high regard. Mantel’s depiction of Thomas More is therefore not incorrect, since it is not actually a portrayal of Thomas More but rather a portrayal of how her
Cromwell perceives him.
Furthermore, the mentions of Utopia in the Cromwell novels actually add a certain sense of authority to More’s character as a serious political philosopher and statesman, which
Cromwell does not deny regardless of his liking of him. In the same manner, Mantel also inserts
More’s History of Kind Richard III (1512-1519), establishing him as a multilingual scholar:
After supper they talk about wicked King Richard. Many years ago Thomas More began
to write a book about him. He could not decide whether to compose in English or Latin,
so he has done both, though he has never finished it, or sent any part of it to the printer.
Richard was born to be evil, More says; it was written on him from his birth. He shakes
his head. ‘Deeds of blood. Kings’ games.’ (Wolf Hall 231)
Thus, in contrast to what the Bishop of Shrewsbury claims, Mantel does not portray More as “a scheming villain” (“Wolf Hall under fire from Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury”) since she does not shy away from showing More’s intellect and analytical mind-set. At the end of Wolf Hall,
Cromwell even applauds More for his resilience and calm demeanour.
Braekevelt 67
Not only do the intertextual instances question religious authority, secular authority and other text, they also question the Cromwell novels themselves as part of the genre of the historical novel.
Before the story about Cromwell starts, the beginning of Wolf Hall quotes two texts which, even though they differ from one another in age, both bring about a self-reflexive moment. The first texts is a paragraph from Vitruvius’ De Architectura (c. 27 BC):
There are three kinds of scenes, one called the tragic, second the comic, third the satiric.
Their decorations are different and unalike each other in scheme. Tragic scenes are
delineated with columns, pediments, statues and other objects suited to kings; comic
scenes exhibit private dwellings, with balconies and vies representing rows of windows,
after the manner of ordinary dwellings; satiric scenes are delineated in landscape style.
(Wolf Hall XXIII)
The second one is a list of characters from John Skelton’s Magnificence (c. 1520):
These can be the names of the players:
Felicity Cloaked Collusion
Liberty Courtly Abusion
Measure Folly
Magnificence Adversity
Fancy Poverty
Counterfeit Countenance Despair
Crafty Conveyance Mischief
Good Hope
Redress
Circumspection
Perseverance Braekevelt 68
(Wolf Hall XXIII)
Both texts talk about the creative process of making a theatrical piece; Vitruvius about the setting of the stage and Skelton about the characters who will participate. These intertextual instances stress the fact that the narrative which is about to follow is the result of a creative act, almost like a play. The comparison between Mantel’s Cromwell novels and a script for the theatre has been made before by Larissa Macfarquhar in her review of the Wolf Hall stage adaptation: “the dialogue in all Mantel’s novels is so vivid, and carries so much of the story, that her books, in places, read like dramas” (MacFarquhar, Larissa. “Bringing Wolf Hall to the stage”), and by Charlotte Higgins, who claimed that “there is a Shakespearean quality to
Mantel’s writing” (Higgins, Charlotte. “Hilary Mantel discusses Thomas Cromwell's past, presence and future”).
The Skelton text returns several times, in relation to Anne Boleyn, as it is said that Anne played the role of Perseverance during a performance during her early days at the English court.
This Perseverance can be read in several different ways: as a self-reflexive indicator of her person filling a role or part within a larger theatrical production, and the fact that multiple people can fulfil certain roles. In addition, it also contributes to the opinion the reader has of her as, quite literally, a woman who perseveres.
Furthermore, the text’s consciousness of its own artificiality will keep returning throughout the narratives as the fictional Cromwell often reflects on himself and feels as if in a play. Some of these moments of self-reflection are more implicit: “He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: ‘put on a mask, as it were.’ He applies that to each place, each castle or inn or nobleman’s seat, where he finds himself waking” (Wolf Hall 320). Others are more explicit: “It’s hard to escape the feeling that his is a play, and the cardinal is in it: the Cardinal and his Attendants.
And that it is a tragedy” (Wolf Hall 51). Braekevelt 69
In these instances, the idea of being in an artificial play is met with the image of Greek theatre masks. They do not only offer the character a moment of self-reflection but also remind the reader of what kind of text they are reading and how the genre constructs itself.
Furthermore, the themes of plays and theatre prove to be important in the plots of the
Cromwell novels. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell attends a performance which will have a significant influence on the later plot:
At Hampton Court in the great hall they perform an interlude; its name is ‘The
Cardinal’s Descent into Hell’ (…) The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine,
is dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils. There are four devils,
one for each limb of the dead man. The devils wear masks. They have tridents with
which they prick the cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. (Wolf Hall 266)
Later, in Bring Up the Bodies, the plot structure follows the four ‘devils’ and Cromwell’s vengeful interrogation of them, which will eventually lead to their deaths.
In conclusion, these secular texts do not only lay bare the artificiality of the performative act of being a courtier at the Henrician court, they also question the construction of the genre of the historical novel as a whole.
4.2.6. Intratextuality
Apart from referring and citing other texts, as discussed above, the novels also refer back to themselves, as is clear from the beginning of Bring Up the Bodies, which is prefaced by a quote from Wolf Hall: “‘Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?’, Henry VIII to Eustache
Chapuys, Imperial ambassador.” By prefacing her second novel with this quote, Mantel stresses the second novel’s state as a sequel and also refers back to one of the major themes of Wolf
Hall which will continue to be at the heart of Bring Up the Bodies: Henry’s inability to divorce and remarry as he chooses. Braekevelt 70
Mantel, by making the novels refer to themselves, stresses the post-modern self- reflexive character of the genre. This self-awareness is not only noticeable in the characters themselves, as I discussed before, but also in the way intertext is used, as I just discussed.
4.2.7. Conclusion
After this elaborate analysis of the selection of intertextual instances in Mantel’s narrative, we can conclude that Mantel employs intertextuality for several purposes.
For the character, intertextuality is employed to illustrate the protagonist’s reception of other characters and/or authors. It also gives the reader more insight into that character’s psychological development and level of literacy as well as their rhetoric. It underlines
Cromwell’s highly structured memory and analytical mind. Intertextuality is used as a tool for commemorating the dead and also bears a certain foreshadowing aspect as well. For the reader, the intertextual instances remind them of the overarching inter and intra-national political and diplomatic background of the novels’ setting. They also help create the setting and capture the ethical atmosphere of the times, which is foreign for the contemporary reader, in which the events take place. It highlights the religious debates and problems faced by Mantel’s characters whilst also giving the reader more insight into the arguments which fuelled these debates.
For the genre of the historical novel in general, intertextuality stresses the self-reflexive and self-aware aspect which is inherent for the postmodern historical novel. According to
Ansgard Nünning, this influences the way the past is reconstructed by this genre of writing:
“What emerges in such postmodernist historical fictions, then, is a pattern of retrospective projections. The novels […] suggest that there is not one truth about the past, only a series of versions which are dependent on and constructed by the observer rather than retrieved from the past” (A. Nünning 231). Braekevelt 71
Furthermore, this effect of intertextuality is what plays into one of the reasons why readers are drawn to the genre: “The persistent use of almost every conceivable mode of intertextuality keeps reminding the reader of how literature, works of art, and music have contributed in significant ways to defining an Englishman’s sense of his cultural nationality”
(A. Nünning 225). In that sense, some of the texts stress the English resistance of an overarching authority, with which the contemporary Britons may feel familiar. In Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies this is the papacy in Rome. If one would analyse Mantel’s novels through the New
Historicism approach, one could draw some parallels with the current Brexit situation in the
United Kingdom, stressing their resistance against an overarching authority such as the
European Union because of capitalist reasons instead of religious ones. Some of the arguments used in Wolf Hall (e.g.: “It will be the last money Your Majesty sends to Rome, if it rests with me” (429)), could have been used by the Brexiteers before the referendum if they would just have replaced ‘Your Majesty’ with ‘the UK’ and ‘Rome’ with ‘Brussels’.3
4.3. Self-reflexivity in the Cromwell novels
Even though self-reflexivity has been an inherent characteristic of the genre of historical fiction, it recently has been “elevated to an ineluctable characteristic of the historical novel” (James
Johnston 547).
Although the Cromwell novels also bear this self-aware and self-reflexive characteristic, it is not, as Mantel advocates, meant to try and give the genre more authority when it comes to talking about the past. She is critical of authors who “try to burnish their credentials by affixing a bibliography” and goes on to say that “You have the authority of the imagination, you have legitimacy. Take it. Do not spend your life in apologetic cringing because you think you are
3 The Brexiteers’ argument that 350 million pounds could be invested in the NHS from the money they would save by leaving the European Union was incorrect, as we know, but it was nevertheless used as an argument during their campaign leading up to the referendum in 2016. Braekevelt 72 some inferior form of historian. The trades are different but complimentary” (Armitstead,
Claire. “Is Hilary Mantel’s view of historical fiction out of date?”)
Renate Brosch also describes this phenomenon and claims that “supplying paratext […] to elucidate the way their fiction intersects with history” (163) is wrong. She further claims that these self-reflexive interruptions “demonstrate an awareness of the strangeness of writing historical fiction” (163). For Linda Hutcheon, the mode of self-awareness of the genre is at the heart of her historiographic metafiction as a postmodern genre of historical fiction. It seems that, for the author, the key to approach self-reflexivity in historical fiction lies in focussing on the workings of the genre and the “reflection upon the representational processes of ‘history’”
(Gymnich 71) without employing the characteristic to validate themselves as conveyers of the truth.
Because this aspect is so central to the genre of historical fiction, it is worth taking a look at how it plays out in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.
Both novels, before the story begins, start off with a ‘list of characters’ which the reader gets to know throughout the narratives. In Wolf Hall, the characters are geographically and chronologically categorised. The first name on every list per place starts off with the most prominent character in that place. The other characters, listed under that character, are then described in relation to that first character. In Bring Up the Bodies, however, the characters are categorised according to the household to which they belong, regardless of their family relationships. Even though the cast of characters in Bring Up the Bodies is much easier to comprehend for the reader, both casts have the same effect on the reader.
Just like the Vitruvius and Skelton quotations at the beginning of Wolf Hall and the Wolf
Hall reference at the beginning of Bring Up the Bodies, these lists accentuate the genre of text which is about to follow: historical fiction. They stress the point that, almost like a play, the narrative is the result of a creative act by Hilary Mantel. It lays bare how the novels are going Braekevelt 73 to represent the real, dead, historical persona. They are actors who play the roles of real people, who reconstruct a version of the past, and which are carefully selected, created, and cast by
Mantel.
What these lists also highlight is the patriarchal society in which the narratives are set.
In the Renaissance structure, especially amongst the nobility, almost every household was dependent on its ‘head’ for guidance and stability.
Cast of characters in Wolf Hall Cast of characters in Bring Up the Bodies
These lists are then followed by a pedigree of the most important families that play a role in the novels. For readers not familiar with the history of these families, these offer a clear overview The Tudor’s pedigree in Wolf Hall of how the characters are Braekevelt 74 related to one another. They also underline the phenomenon of intermarriage between important noble houses which nowadays, in Western Europe, is not as prevalent as it was during the
Renaissance when your family name could either make you or break you. Marriage then was much more of a diplomatic tool than an act of love. In the Cromwell novels, this is clear in the way that certain families scheme and plot to be able to deliver the ‘next queen’, as the Seymours do in Bring Up the Bodies.
These explicit instances of self-awareness and self-reflexivity thus do not only reflect on the workings of the genre which is trying to relate a possible history, but they also comment on the theatricality of the English royal court during Henry’s reign.
Ansgard Nünning claims that these kind of novels “do not portray the past as a self- contained and complete world, but as liable to the distortions that subjective reconstructions and recollections entail” (A. Nünning 224). Mantel is very aware of these distortions, as is clear from her comments on George Cavendish’s Thomas Wolsey, late Cardinal, his Life and Death.
She says, “It has been published in many editions […] It is not always accurate, but it is a very touching, immediate and readable account of Wolsey’s career and Thomas Cromwell’s part in it” (Wolf Hall 651). It is clear that she approaches these sorts of narratives with a certain awareness and caution but is able to find their worth and employ them for her own good.
She inserts this uncertainty and caution in the way her characters talk about the creation of (his)stories. Cromwell, for example, is aware of there being different versions of the truth:
“What happened next, he asked George, with Harry Percy and Anne Boleyn? He knew the story only in the cardinal’s chilly and dismissive rendition” (Wolf Hall 77).
Mantel’s Cromwell also comments on the way (collective) memory works and how it can distort our view on the past: “The attendants, the witnesses, are at least a generation older.
And so many years have gone by – twenty-eight, to be precise. How good can their memories Braekevelt 75 be?” (Wolf Hall 143). Apart from showing her stance on this topic explicitly, she also shows it through her characters.
Mantel goes even further and lets her Cromwell reflect upon the institutional creation of history and ‘the truth’: “They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt.
For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is favourable to Rome” (Wolf Hall 219).
In conclusion, both Mantel’s novels and her characters are aware of how storytelling and the recreation of the past unfolds itself. Both the author and the characters are aware of the pitfalls and hurdles that come along when trying to produce a version of the past. By doing this,
Mantel makes her readers aware that in no way she is telling the story of Thomas Cromwell but rather a possible version of it.
4.4. Laying the Scene through Language
4.4.1. Language and Realism through Dialogue
An important factor which gives us more insight in the psychological development of a character is the language which is used by that character. Not only the content of what is said, but also the register, the chosen syntax, and, more importantly, the vocabulary, give us an impression of how the consciousness of the character is played out.
For an author of a purely fictional novel, there are little to no boundaries in which they are required to work in terms of dialogue. This is not the case for the author of the historical novel. Conforming to the boundaries they experience in terms of plot, these novelists must try to achieve a certain realism which they want their work to possess. This plays out in terms of content; the characters cannot discuss things which are impossible for the temporal setting in which they are said. Mantel cannot let Henry VIII talk with certainty about the future reign of Braekevelt 76
Elizabeth I, for example, since the character does not possess any knowledge which transgresses the then ‘present’.
This also applies to the syntax and vocabulary which are employed by the characters. In order to be truly realistic, novels should be written in the language which was spoken within the novel’s timeframe. This is quite impossible, not only in terms of accuracy of the target language (it would be almost impossible to make up an entire novel in Old English without any grammatical or lexical mistake) but also in terms of accessibility towards the contemporary audience. People will not buy books they cannot understand, even if they are more ‘historically accurate’. Therefore, the author of these novels must use a language which is understood by its intended audience. In the case of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, this is Modern English.
Much of the setting of the scenes in both novels is interwoven into the dialogue of the characters. Mantel does not only rely on the narrator to lay the scene, as it were. Bryony D.
Stocker suggests, in his article “’Bygonese’ – Is This Really the Authentic Language of
Historical Fiction?”, that “Spelling, typesetting, phrasing and grammar are also modern, with none of the eccentricities and vagaries of the sixteenth century, in which this scene is set, whilst the sense or content of the dialogue is clearly historical” (Stocker 313). In this article, he also defines three linguistic techniques which are used by historical novelists to create the sense of realism the genre values greatly: immersion, hybridisation and reader guidance.
Immersion, according to Stocker, entails that “vocabulary, sentence structure and spelling are faithfully reproduced [in the authentic historical language], and the reader must adapt himself or herself to the language of another age” (Stocker 311). This expectation cannot be met by the twenty-first century audience for which Mantel’s novel were written, so it is impossible to expect her to write her texts in this manner. As Stocker admits, “Immersion requires a history it is at least in touch with: it may not be altogether familiar, but neither is it altogether strange” (Stocker 312). Even though this may be said of the readers of Wolf Hall and Braekevelt 77
Bring Up the Bodies, since most people, to a variable extent, have heard of the history of the
English Reformation, the life of Henry VIII, and/or Thomas Cromwell, we cannot expect the reader to adapt to a historical language.
Another technique, described by Stocker, is called hybridisation. Stocker refers to the author David Mitchell who coined the term ‘bygonese’ and describes it as following:
To a degree, the historical novelist must create a sort of dialect – I call it ‘Bygonese’ –
which is inaccurate but plausible. Like a coat of antique-effect varnish on a pine new
dresser, it is both synthetic and the least-worst solution. (qtd. in Stocker 313)
Stocker himself describes it as a technique which is “consciously inauthentic, focussing on effect rather than accuracy” (Stocker 313). This hybrid language is the one Mantel employed in both of her Cromwell novels, as shown in the following excerpts: “‘My dear Patch, I will write you a letter, a letter of your own. I shall write it tonight,’ he promises, ‘and put my big seal on it. The king will cherish you; he is the kindest soul in Christendom.’ Patch wails on a single thin note, like someone taken by the Turks and impaled” (Wolf Hall 61). Even more interesting than the references to the hierarchy of the sixteenth century society and the reference to the interwovenness of religion and politics in this excerpt, is the simile which is used by the character Thomas Wolsey. In order to understand this literary device, the reader requires a certain knowledge of the international political situation of the sixteenth century, more specifically that of the Ottoman Empire and its quest for expansion. Even though this simile is not used by the character to introduce this topic, its effect is that it gives the setting of the scene a more historical feeling. These kind of idiomatic expressions are sown throughout both novels, as in this instance in which Thomas Cromwell is contemplating his daughter’s future: “She’s not like a flower, a nightingale: she’s like … like a merchant adventurer, he thinks. A look in the eye to skewer your intentions, and a deal done with the slap of a palm” (Wolf Hall 128). Braekevelt 78
This simile, again, requires the reader to understand what a merchant adventurer is and what significance they had in the context of the sixteenth century English economy.
The instances of bygonese are not only performed by means of literary devices such as the previous examples, the text also contains some more subtle examples of bygonese. For example: “So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss, the text of their dealings, nor append a moral” (Wolf Hall 212). The practice of adding glosses to texts, which started during the middle ages, is here used as a verb even though it is not widely practised in the contemporary literary field. The use of this noun as a verb demands from the reader that they have a certain notion of the term in order to fully grasp what the author means with its use.
As mentioned before, these instances of hybrid language help to create a historical atmosphere in which the scenes take place. They assist to ‘lay the scene’ for the characters to play in without the need for a narrator to explicitly point out historical details or give extensive descriptions before the dialogue takes place.
The last device, which is described by Stocker, is that of reader guidance. As the term suggests, the reader is aided by the author when he uses vocabulary or references which are not expected to be directly understood by the reader. It could then be that the author decided to incorporate a summary of those terms and their explications into the novel. Other examples are maps, which precede the rest of the novel, an author’s note at the beginning, or at the end of the novel.
Mantel also employs this technique in her novels. We first encounter it at the beginning of Wolf Hall. The text of the novel is preceded by two different instances of the reader guidance technique. The casts of characters, which I discussed when talking about self-reflexivity, are examples of this. Stocker claims that his technique is usually employed in order to create a more authentic historical atmosphere, but in the case of Mantel’s novels, as I have argued before, Braekevelt 79 they are employed in order to stress the self-awareness and self-reflexivity of the genre.
Nevertheless, it cannot be argued that the reader is quite literally ‘guided’ by these lists and genealogies when reading the novels. Apart from these instances, there are little to none examples of reader guidance to be found in the Cromwell novels.
Mantel’s choice to use bygonese for her characters to speak establishes them even more in their historical setting. This mimetic language is one through which their world is reflected and which feels natural to the characters even if it does not always feel natural for the reader.
Without compromising comprehensibility, Mantel succeeds in creating a speech that feels authentic to its temporal setting even though it is not the exact language which was spoken at the time. In doing so, she invokes a certain sense of realism even if the reader is aware that it is not reality.
4.4.2. Language in Relation to Telling the Truth
As I related at the beginning of this paper, the relationship between history and the past is tense and difficult to dissect. It proves to be a problem for the historical author who needs insight into the past but needs to battle history in order to get there. As Mantel states, “[historical] evidence is always partial, facts are not truths though they are part of it and information is not knowledge and history is not the past” (“The Day is for the Living”). Taking into consideration the
“authentic fallacy”, as described by Jerome de Groot, which is “the concept that readers of historical novels want to believe that what they are reading is somehow real or authentic, provoked often by the realist or mimetic mode of writing” (de Groot 183), it is clear that authors such as Mantel should be very aware about the way they present certain propositions as fact within their fictional writing.
One of the aspects of the novels which has been overlooked by its critics is that, given the narrative situation of the novels I discussed earlier, all of the information which is given to Braekevelt 80 the reader is filtered through the protagonist, Cromwell. Furthermore, the manner in which
Cromwell retrieves information is also often unreliable. Mantel uses the technique of hedging to do so. Douglas E. Ott, in his article “Hedging, Weasel Words and Truthiness in Scientific
Writing,” explains that “the purpose of hedging is a linguistic means of indicating a lack of commitment to the truth of a preposition and as an opening for the writer to introduce alternative unproven claims to influence readers” (2). Its effect is that the assessment whether a certain idea is true or not is up to the reader, not the characters, which frees Mantel from the constraints of facts since she never presented the ideas as such. She aims for a “lack of commitment to the truth” (2) because that truth is irretrievable. For example, let us take a look at the following lines from Wolf Hall: “‘Thomas Cromwell?’ people say. ‘That is an ingenious man’ (91). Here, it is claimed that Cromwell is ingenious and the claim takes on the form of a fact through its use of the existential verb ‘to be’ and the use of the present tense. These are two linguistic features generally used to indicate factualness. The reader could easily take this claim as fact, if he or she forgets to take the alleged source of this claim into account. The phrase ‘people say’ clearly shows that there is no direct, verifiable source of this information; it is mere rumour.
Just like in the creation of cultural memory, what ‘the people’ think or claim may be what is remembered but it is not synonymous with the truth. In this manner, Mantel is able to insert much of the gossip of the time without passing a judgement on the truthfulness of it. This is interesting, especially because some of those claims are quite important for the plot of the novels, such as the claims made by Lady Rochford which, whilst unconfirmed, help Cromwell to send George Boleyn to the scaffold.
Taking into consideration the entirety of both Cromwell novels, I have distinguished four different categories of hedging, employed by Mantel:
• Category A: a statement that is presented as general knowledge of the times (e.g.: ‘it is
well known’) and/or it claimed by an unknown person or group of people with no way Braekevelt 81
of retracing how it came to the character in the scene (e.g.: “the gossip is”). Example:
‘Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself
with a small scourge, of the type used by some religious orders.’ (Wolf Hall 87)
• Category B: the main character in the scene, usually the protagonist, is confronted with
a secondary character who relates something out of own experience (an alleged event
or opinion). The information is thus once removed from the main character and thus
filtered through two characters before it reaches the reader. Example: ‘Spill her secrets.
All or only some. ‘Who heard this?’ She shakes her head. ‘Perhaps a dozen people. They
could not help but hear it.’ (Bring Up the Bodies’ 309-18). And: ‘It’s only what the
women are saying. The silk women. And the cloth merchants’ wives.’ He waits, smiling.
‘Which is of no interest to you, I’m sure.’ (Wolf Hall 71)
• Category C: The character who is talking questions his or her own reliability. Example:
‘It is all conjecture, perhaps I have spoken in haste, one cannot know that anything has
passed between them, I could not swear it.’ (Bring Up the Bodies 310)
An overview with more examples is attached to this paper (attachment 2).
The first category is the easiest for Mantel to employ since it does not involve any of her characters having to vouch for any of the statements and thus avoids altering the way the readers perceive those characters.
Furthermore, as a result of this technique, Mantel does not lie or be untruthful since the ideas she presents are not presented as facts or the truth. Mantel uses hedging to avoid a clash with history and, as a result, avoids the debates surrounding the genre of the historical novel and its relationship with history.
Category B is less frequently used because they affect the way we as readers view the involved characters. In both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell has conversations with Lady Rochford in which the latter tells the former about the adulterous behaviour of her Braekevelt 82 spouse. Whether these claims are true or not is of no importance here, but the fact that Mantel lets her Lady Rochford make such confessions strongly influences how the reader perceives her: a vengeful woman or a great tactician, a jealous woman or a great conspirator.
Additionally, category C has a smaller impact on how we view the involved character, but it does stress the self-reflexive aspect of the genre of the postmodern historical novel, as I discussed earlier in this paper.
We may conclude that Mantel uses these hedging techniques to introduce interesting claims whilst safeguarding herself from deceiving her readers. Her protective attitude over these ideas may be explained because of their importance in the plot of her narrative such as Lady
Rochford’s testimony for the trial of George Boleyn or the gossip concerning Anne Boleyn’s adultery for the unfolding of her trial. By not shying away from these parts of the historical record, which are hard to proove, Mantel shows her awareness of how they (can) shape history and her determination not let these rumours influence the integrity of her writing.
Braekevelt 83
Conclusion
In conclusion, given the rise in popularity and the higher regard for postmodern historical fiction as the result of severe changes in the genre, a lack of in-depth analysis of novels of this genre in literary academia still remains. This is evident in the way literary critics and scholars approach discussing the historical characters. Given this problem and the fact that the
‘seriousness’ of the genre, next to a credible plot line, depends mainly on the character, I therefore chose the historical character to be the focus point of this paper.
It is clear from the beginning of my research, when looking at the narrative situation and the plot line, that the character Cromwell is the main voice of both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the
Bodies. It is Cromwell through which all the scenes are filtered and it is him who selects the information that will reach the reader. This point of view is important to keep in mind because it not only influences the plotline but also affects the way the reader perceives the events. It is this lack of his own opinion which may cause the reader to misinterpret the characters in the novels. Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, claims that this resembles the lack of personal opinion of Cromwell’s in the real Cromwell’s archive of letters he studied for his Cromwell biography: “Hilary Mantel has sensitively captured this quality in Thomas Cromwell’s archive in her novels: her Cromwell is pre- eminently an observer, even of himself, not ‘I’ but ‘he’” (MacCulloch 3).
Even though Cromwell is the main focaliser, his emotions and more internal psychological workings are not always very accessible to the reader. The reader has to look for indications of them in other characters and the setting. What we do get a clear sense of, however, is the ethical mind-set in which the character operates. It is shown through his speech and his acts. Even though the contemporary reader might find some of his deeds shocking or surprising, they are clearly considered normal by Cromwell’s surroundings. Braekevelt 84
Additionally, notwithstanding that the character himself is not often openly self- reflective on his inner emotional situation, Mantel uses a few techniques to reveal to the reader some of this unshared mental terrain. Her use of ekphrastic moments (both fictional and real), for example, initiate in Cromwell moments of introspection and self-reflection. This can be done because of both the commemorative and foreshadowing character of ekphrasis in general.
Mantel also uses these ekphrastic moments to show the strained relationship between Thomas
Cromwell and Thomas More whilst highlighting the biased view the former creates of the latter.
Furthermore, the artificiality of the portraits tells us something more about how the visual arts were employed during the Renaissance and how the characters cared about their composition.
Similar to the ekphrastic moments, the intertextual instances give us a glimpse into what goes on in Cromwell’s mind. Cromwell, by making use of the memory system he learned in
Italy, gains a strong grasp on the information he receives throughout the years. This unique ability combined with his multilingualism prove invaluable qualities during his work for
Cardinal Wolsey and later during his royal service. These qualities are highlighted through the various and plenty intertextual instances, the most important ones of which I discussed.
Apart from describing the character, intertextuality in the Cromwell novels also reflects on how history and storytelling work, how religious and secular authority can be rebelled against or established through text, and how the genre of the postmodern historical novel is inherently self-reflexive and self-aware of its own workings.
The language used by Mantel’s characters even more intertwines them with their setting and her hedging allows her to use rumours of the time without having to corrupt the plot by confirming or denying them.
Overall, Mantel’s Cromwell is much more intricately constructed and much more complex than the critics’ and scholars’ language on him might suggest. Mantel clearly breaks away from the connotations surrounding the genre, which are a result of its own past. Unlike Braekevelt 85 other contemporary historical novelists and screenwriters, she does not oversexualise her women to boost her readership numbers, nor does she twist the historical record in order to fit her narrative. She created a living, breathing Cromwell: highly intelligent, shrewd, friendly, straightforward, patient, a father, a veteran, a husband, a royal servant, a schemer, a lover, a scholar, a friend, an enemy. In other words: a man who needs at least three novels to be resurrected.
Braekevelt 86
Attachment 1: Literary critics’ and scholars’ language concerning the characters Thomas
Cromwell and Thomas More
Source The New York Times Title of article/academic “Renaissance Men” paper Author Christopher Benfey
Publication date 29th October 2009 Statements concerning “Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel” (Benfey) Thomas Cromwell Statements concerning “In Wolf Hall it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who Thomas More is the ruthless tormenter of English protestants” (Benfey)
Source The Guardian “John Guy tells Hay festival that applicants cite author in Title of article/academic interviews and says blur between fact and fiction is paper troubling” Author Mark Brown
Publication date 31st May 2017 Statements concerning / Thomas Cromwell Statements concerning “the depiction of More as a misogynistic, torturing villain” Thomas More (Brown)
Source The Guardian Title of article/academic “The Tudors’ finest portraitist yet” paper Author Olivia Laing
Publication date 26th April 2009
“in many ways, Wolf Hall is a riposte to Robert Bolt’s acclaimed 1960s play A Man For All Seasons, which casts Statements concerning More as saint and Cromwell as sinner”, “By centring her Thomas Cromwell and narrative on the humane and free-thinking Thomas Thomas More Cromwell, who believes in kindness, tolerance and
education” (Laing)
Braekevelt 87
Source The Guardian Title of article/academic “Cromwell, the fixers’ fixer” paper Author Martin Kettle
Publication date 22nd January 2015 Statements concerning “[Cromwell] he is unsentimental, cold-blooded, secular, Thomas Cromwell and ruthless” (Kettle) “Thomas More remains the incarnation of individual Statements concerning conscience, of rising above the quotidian, and doing the Thomas More morally right thing in difficult and dangerous times” (Kettle)
Source The Guardian Title of article/academic “Wolf Hall is wrong: Thomas More was a funny, feminist paper Renaissance man” Author Jonathan Jones
Publication date 29th January 2015 Statements concerning / Thomas Cromwell “Why does Wolf Hall demonise one of the most brilliant and forward-looking of all Renaissance people? Its Statements concerning caricature of Thomas More as a charmless prig, a Thomas More humourless alienating nasty piece of work, is incredibly unfair”, “Wolf Hall’s extremely negative caricature of More” (Jones)
Braekevelt 88
Source The Guardian Title of article/academic “Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – review” paper Author Christopher Taylor
Publication date 2nd May 2009 “Thomas Cromwell […] makes a surprising fictional hero Statements concerning now”, “If not a man for all seasons, the book’s heroic Thomas Cromwell accountant is surely the man for his season” (Taylor) “He’s made repulsive even more by the self-adoring Statements concerning theatricality behind his modest exterior than by his interest Thomas More in torturing heretics and contemptuous treatment of his wife” (Taylor)
Source The Telegraph Title of article/academic “Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: book review” paper Author Claudia FitzHerbert
Publication date 22nd January 2015 “In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel rewrites the history of Statements concerning England from 1527 to 1535 with Thomas Cromwell as the Thomas Cromwell hero” (FitzHerbert) “Mantel’s More is physically grubby and mentally vain, Statements concerning gleefully seeking out, torturing and burning suspected Thomas More heretics, maudlin and self-regarding in his familial relations” (FitzHerbert)
Braekevelt 89
Source London Review of Books, Vol. 31, No. 8 Title of article/academic “How to Twist a Knife” paper Author Colin Burrow
Publication date 30th April 2009 “Mantel’s [Cromwell] is a sensitive paradox, younger and Statements concerning gentler than Ford’s hardened nasty, genuinely though Thomas Cromwell secretly evangelical, and able to use his charm to persuade people to do things they do not want to do.” (Burrow) “Thomas More is here a dogmatic persecutor of heretics (which he was), a man perhaps unhealthily obsessed by his daughter Meg (which he may have been), and someone Statements concerning who makes cruelly unfunny jokes about his second wife, Thomas More Dame Alice (which he did). He is not much else (although he was). Here Mantel’s revisionary eye seems cruel, or to have missed something […] Her More is a stubborn old Catholic sexist” (Burrow)
Source The Washington Post Title of article/academic “Wolf Hall review” paper Author Wendy Smith
Publication date 6th October 2009 Statements concerning “He [Cromwell] observes, evaluates and makes his moves, Thomas Cromwell but never shows his hand. He's a committed, albeit covert Protestant who runs uncharacteristic risks to protect the new movement's more militant adherents from the heretic- Statements concerning burning More (acidly depicted as a cruel, sanctimonious Thomas More egomaniac nothing like the saintly hero of ‘A Man for All Seasons’)” (Smith)
Braekevelt 90
Source The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 Title of article/academic “Hilary Mantel: Raising The Dead” paper Author Lisa Fletcher
Publication date 2017 “For numerous reviewers, the most ‘surprising’ thing about Statements concerning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is Mantel’s choice of Thomas Cromwell an ‘unlikely hero’, Thomas Cromwell” (Fletcher 41) Statements concerning / Thomas More
Source Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year Title of article/academic “Comments on Wolf Hall preceding the novel” paper Author /
Publication date 2009 “Magnificent. Turned Tudor history on its head by Statements concerning recasting Thomas Cromwell as the hero, and was every bit Thomas Cromwell as good as promised” (qtd. in Wolf Hall) Statements concerning / Thomas More
Source The Telegraph Title of article/academic “Hilary Mantel interview” paper Author Anna Murphy
Publication date 1st March 2010 “Some critics saying that Mantel has given one of the most notorious figures in British history – the man who Statements concerning engineered everything from the dissolution of the Thomas Cromwell monasteries to the execution of Anne Boleyn – too easy a ride” (Murphy) Statements concerning / Thomas More Braekevelt 91
Source The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century “Fictions of (Meta-) History: Revisioning and Rewriting Title of article/academic History in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up paper the Bodies” Author Marion Gymnich
Publication date 2018 Statements concerning / Thomas Cromwell “In contrast to Thomas More, Cromwell comes across as a Statements concerning thoroughly modern figure due to his attitudes, beliefs and Thomas More even his language” (Gymnich 76)
Braekevelt 92
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https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Benfey-t.html. Accessed March
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Brown, Mark. “Students take Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels as fact, says historian.” The
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hilary-mantels-tudor-novels-as-fact-hay-festival. Accessed March 2019.
Burrow, Colin. “How to Twist a Knife.” London Review of Books, 30 April 2009,
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FitzHerbert, Claudia. “Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: book review.” The Telegraph, 22 January
2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/wolf-hall-by-hilary-mantel-
book-review/. Accessed March 2019.
Fletcher, Lisa. “Hilary Mantel: Raising the Dead.” The Contemporary British Novel Since
2000, edited by James Acheson, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 37-
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Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012).” The British Novels in the
Twenty-First Century, edited by Vera Nünning, WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag
Trier, 2018, pp. 71-85.
Jones, Jonathan. “Wolf Hall is wrong: Thomas More was a funny, feminist Renaissance
man.” The Guardian, 29 January 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/jan/29/wolf-hall-
wrong-thomas-more-was-funny-feminist. Accessed March 2019. Braekevelt 93
Kettle, Martin. “Cromwell, the fixers’ fixer: a role model for our times.” The Guardian, 22
January 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/22/thomas-
cromwell-fixer-wolf-hall. Accessed March 2019.
Laing, Olivia. “The Tudor’s Finest Portraitist Yet.” The Guardian, 26 April 2009,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/26/hilary-mantel-wolf-hall. Accessed
March 2019.
Murphy, Anna. “Hilary Mantel Interview.” The Telegraph, 1 March 2010,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7345476/Hilary-Mantel-interview.html.
Accessed March 2019.
Smith, Wendy. “Book Review: Booker Prize-winner ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel.” The
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Attachment 2 Here is a selection of examples of how these categories play out in the Cromwell novels:
Category A Category B Category C
“We need not believe that. Not the trail of blood. They saw it in their minds “Just once, when he was “‘It’s only what the women perhaps. He will ask, what sober, Walter had said are saying. The silk “Six times (to the world’s time did the queen’s pains something that sounded women. And the cloth knowledge) Katherine and the begin? But no one seemed true, and was, by his lights, merchants’ wives.’ He king have lived in hope of an able to tell him, despite their eloquent: I suppose, he said, waits, smiling. ‘Which is heir.” (Wolf Hall 80) close knowledge of the I suppose we pissed it of no interest to you, I’m incident. They have away.” (Wolf Hall 111) sure.’” (Wolf Hall 71) concentrated on the blood trail and left out the facts.” (Bring Up the Bodies 215) “‘A brother cannot picture his sister in a man’s “Under his clothes, it is well embrace,’ Edward “It is all conjecture, perhaps known, More wears a jerkin Scene in which Lady Seymour says. ‘At least, no I have spoken in haste, one of horsehair. He beats himself Rochford talks about the brother who calls himself a cannot know that anything with a small scourge, of the behaviour of her husband Christian. Though they do has passed between them, I type used by some religious (Wolf Hall 506-7) say at court that George could not swear it.” (Bring orders.” (Wolf Hall 87) Boleyn –‘ He breaks off, Up the Bodies 310)
frowning.” (Bring Up the Bodies 52) “When he gets home his son comes out to greet him. ‘Have you heard what “‘Thomas Cromwell?’ people the queen is doing? She say. ‘That is an ingenious “Gregory frowns down on has risen from her childbed man. Do you know he has the her: ‘She could be and things incredible are “’It was a long talk, and – whole New Testament by anybody’s.’ Lady Shelton spoken of her. They say with respect to you, my lady heart? He is the very man if an raises a hand to hide her she as seen toasting – more full of hints than argument about God breaks smile. ‘You mean to say, cobnuts over the fire in her particulars.’” (Bring Up the out; he is the very man for Gregory, all babies look the chamber, tossing them Bodies 313) telling your tenants twelve same.” (Wolf Hall 552) about in a latten pan, ready good reasons why their rents to make poisoned are fair. […]”.(Wolf Hall 91) sweetmeats for the Lady Mary.’” (Bring Up the Bodies 228) “It is hard to associate his “The gossip is that she allows pleasant person with the “Spill her secrets. All or him to undress her. In the kind of bestial appetite of only some. ‘Who heard evenings, good wine keeps which his wife accuses him, this?’ She shakes her head. the chills out, and Anne, who and for a moment he looks at ‘Perhaps a dozen people. reads the Bible, points out George and wonders if he They could not help but hear strong scriptural can be guilty of any it.’” (Bring Up the Bodies’ commendations to him.” offences, except a certain 309-18). (Wolf Hall 119) pride and elation.” (Bring Up the Bodies 396) “The gossip is that people – people of influence – have complained to the king, and the king has complained to Wolsey, about the monastic houses he has closed down. They don’t think of the good use to which the cardinal has put the assets; they don’t think of his colleges, the scholars he maintains, the libraries he is founding. They’re only interested in Braekevelt 95
getting their own fingers in the spoils. And because they’re been cut out of the business, they pretend to believe the monks have been left naked and lamenting on the road. They haven’t.” (Wolf Hall 126)
“There are people in London who say that John Howard, grandfather of the Norfolk that is now, was more than a little concerned in the disappearance of the children who went into the Tower and never came out. The Londoners say – and he reckons the Londoners know – that it was on Howard’s watch that the princes were last seen” (Wolf Hall 232)
“There is a group from the House of Commons who dine with priests at the Queen’s Head tavern. The word comes from them, and spreads among the people of London, that anyone who supports the king’s divorce will be damned.” (Wolf Hall 361)
“They say that at any of his houses at close of day you can hear him slamming the shutters and shooting the bolts, in case the late Cardinal
Wolsey is blowing through a window or slithering up a stair.” (Bring Up the Bodies 224)
“They say she keeps poisoners in her house. You know what she did to old
Bishop Fisher.” (Bring Up the Bodies 227)
“Those gentlemen who are less in the queen’s favour are keen to talk to the newcomer and give him all the gossip.” (Bring Up the Bodies 263)
“The king – it would be three or four years back and to justify his first divorce – put out a book called A Glass of the Truth. Parts of it, they say, he wrote himself.” (Bring Up the Bodies 342)
“Bryan shrugs. ‘She was sent to France and they never knew each other till they were grown. I have known such Braekevelt 96
things happen, have not you?’” (Bring Up the Bodies 373)
Braekevelt 97
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