Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, chief advisor to the 16th century English king Henry VIII, is a rebuttal. Narrowly, it’s a rebuttal to A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s 1954 play (and later Academy Award-winning film) about Thomas More, Cromwell’s contemporary and greatest antagonist. In Bolt’s play, More is a paragon of honorable resistance against politicians—Cromwell and King Henry—who challenge the authority of God. In Mantel’s novel, Cromwell is the guardian of common sense and More the defender of an increasingly corrupt Catholic Church. But Mantel’s book is not a mere fictionalized revisionist history. She knows her readers are likely to be familiar with the mainstream reading of events. The book’s greater ambition is to challenge the inertia of historical narratives themselves, to ask what we really know about Cromwell and More, to push us to consider that stories gain fierce hold of the public imagination simply because they are, or were, useful to somebody powerful. Power is Mantel’s real subject. Is it possible to be a decent man in halls filled with wolves, or a principled reader of histories written by winners? And furthermore to be decent and principled not by turning away in disgust from the game, but by willing oneself to first see the rules clearly, then judge without egotism and with conviction—out loud or in the recesses of one’s heart—what is just and what is wicked about the game, and then finally traverse the narrow and treacherous lines of such a subjective justice? Law is brought into being by collective and repeated acts of imagination, but sometimes individuals must whisper courage into the ears of the people. The court intrigues of 16th century England are, in the scheme of things, a gossipy unimportance. The quest to define and exalt law over the will of both king and God is not. 9
Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. Fourth Estate (UK), 2009. Reviewed August 19, 2024.
