7 April 2015 A.D. WASHPO: How ‘Wolf Hall’ will entertain millions — and threaten to distort history in the process
7 April 2015 A.D. How ‘Wolf Hall’ will entertain
millions — and threaten to distort history in the process
Wolf, Gregory. “How ‘Wolf Hall’ will entertain millions — and threaten to distort history in the process.” Washington Post. 5 Apr 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/04/05/how-wolf-hall-will-entertain-millions-and-threaten-to-distort-history-in-the-process/?postshare=2771428331798168. Accessed 6 Apr 2015.
By Gregory Wolfe April 5 at 4:56 PM Shown
from left: Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII and Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell
in “Wolf Hall.” (Giles Keyte/Playground & Co. Pictures for Masterpiece/BBC)
When the BBC miniseries
“Wolf Hall” debuts on Masterpiece tonight, the American public will once again
be enthralled by a superb British costume drama. Think “Downton Abbey” and
“House of Cards” with a King Henry VIII twist.
Based on award-winning
novels by Hilary Mantel, the series chronicles the political and religious
intrigues surrounding King Henry VIII’s effort to divorce his first wife,
Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn.Claire
Foy as Anne Boleyn in “Wolf Hall.” (Giles Keyte/Playground & Co. Pictures
for Masterpiece/BBC)
This is well-worn, if
fertile, ground for historical drama. What makes “Wolf Hall” fresh and
distinctive, however, is its choice of protagonist —Thomas Cromwell, who rises
from humble origins to become Henry’s chief minister.
Before you watch the
show, you need to know about three historical figures hotly debated among
scholars, because all three were embroiled in one of the fiercest church/state
battles of all time: Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More and Cromwell.
The pope’s refusal to
grant Henry’s request for an annulment of his marriage puts him on a collision
course with Rome. More, lord chancellor to the king and a devout Catholic,
decides that he must resign when it becomes clear that Henry intends to pass a
bill naming him as supreme head of the church in England, breaking his
allegiance to the pope.
But because of More’s
reputation as a brilliant writer and legal scholar, Henry won’t allow him to
retire from the public stage; he insists that More sign a public oath stating
that he agrees to Henry’s divorce from Katherine and marriage to Anne Boleyn.
To force More to do this, he enlists the services of Cromwell.
Thomas
Cromwell vs. Sir Thomas More
In Mantel’s version of
the story, Cromwell — formerly thought of as a ruthless Machiavellian who would
stop at nothing to give Henry precisely what he wanted — has been transformed
into a hard-nosed but ultimately sensitive soul. Even while preoccupied with
royal matters, he works quietly but persistently on behalf of the burgeoning
Protestant Reformation.
Cromwell, the son of a
blacksmith, becomes in Mantel’s imagination a champion of the common man, a
pragmatic businessman who eschews religious fundamentalism and fear-mongering.
Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in “Wolf Hall.” (Courtesy of Ed
Miller/Playground & Company Pictures for Masterpiece/BBC)
But what makes for great
drama may not make for good history.
And, in fact, “Wolf Hall”
has stirred considerable controversy among historians and critics, many of whom
have wondered what responsibility novelists who write about the past have
toward history.
Mantel has made no secret
of her desire to overturn the traditional understanding of “the king’s great
matter.” One of her stated goals in writing “Wolf Hall” was to take on Robert
Bolt’s 1954 stage play, “A Man for All Seasons.”
The hero of Bolt’s play
is More, and it concludes with his execution for treason when he refused to
sign the oath Henry put before him.
Bolt’s More is a hero of
conscience — very like the martyr whom the Catholic Church eventually canonized
as a saint — a man who goes to the scaffold saying, in accordance with the
historical accounts, that “I die his Majesty’s good servant but God’s first.”
In Bolt’s play, the man who suborns perjury to obtain the verdict of treason
against More is Cromwell.
Critics have pointed out
that the author’s liberties with the historical record demonstrate a clear
ideological bias. Mantel was raised Catholic but is now a vocal critic of that
church, which she has said “is not an institution for respectable people.”
Historians
debate over ‘Wolf Hall’
Questions about “Wolf
Hall” have been raised not only by the Catholic faithful but also in the
academy. Professor David Starkey, a historian and president of Britain’s
National Secular Society, said there is “not a scrap of evidence” for the
narrative and describes the plot as “total fiction.”
Simon Schama, the
respected Jewish historian and veteran television presenter, writes in the Financial
Times that while he believes
that historical novelists should have some leeway for invention and
imagination, Mantel has gone too far.
“It grates a bit to
accept that millions now think of Thomas Cromwell as a much-maligned,
misunderstood pragmatist from the school of hard knocks who got precious little
thanks for doing Henry VIII’s dirty work,” Schama writes. “When I was doing research for ‘A History of
Britain,’ the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in
fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in
England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture.”
The question arises:
Outside of ivory tower debates, what do these warring versions of the story
mean to you and me?
Mantel’s version could
obscure important lessons from that dark period that have continuing relevance
for the present moment.
Where
the author goes wrong
Mantel demonizes More,
turning him into a pinched, pedantic prig, ready to torture heretics at the
drop of a hat. She seems to imply that he represents little more than religious
violence and fanaticism.
But the truth is that
More and his fellow Christian humanists such as Erasmus were not only harsh
critics of the Catholic Church but also ardent reformers. They were proponents
of an educational program that relied less on abstract theology and more on
great literature that renders the ambiguities and conflicts between competing
claims to truth in experiential terms. The humanists of that era, including
More, saw Europe succumbing to increasing polarization and “culture wars” and
held out a vision of dialogue and slow, steady change.
The Cromwell depicted in
“Wolf Hall” is also a man seeking to avoid conflict, but he goes about it in an
entirely different fashion. He supports the efforts of William Tyndale to
translate the Bible into English (something More also wanted) but becomes
frustrated when Tyndale, like More, opposes Henry’s divorce.
Mantel’s hero, in the
end, turns out to be less interested in reforming religion and more interested
in minimizing possible religious objections to personal self-interest.
Starkey criticizes Mantel for “compounding the erroneous approach of
seeing history in the light of subsequent events by her eagerness to set More
against her hero, Cromwell, to make the latter appear a ‘herald of the future.’
”
Where
Henry VIII fits into the story
Perhaps the real “herald
of the future” in this slice of history is Henry VIII himself, the figure who
tends to get lost in the More vs. Cromwell debate. Henry was the most truly
modern man in that era: someone who was willing to abandon the claims of
history and tradition in favor of immediate personal satisfaction.
Even in Mantel’s version,
Cromwell’s primary mission is to sweep aside anything that comes in the way of
Henry’s desires. It’s a doomed policy, as Cromwell’s own eventual execution
attests. But whereas More went to his death with dignity, Cromwell begged his
king for “mercy mercy mercy.”
In his piece on “Wolf
Hall,” the British historian Eamon Duffy compares More and Bible-translating
Tyndale, enemies of each other who were executed by Henry VIII.
“But both died as
witnesses that truth mattered, that in a truly human society both law and
liberty must be rooted in something deeper, more objective and more enduring
than personal preference, political expediency or naked power. Neither would
have looked to Cromwell for a soul-mate.”
Gregory Wolfe is the editor of Image, a journal of contemporary art and literature that engage with the
faith traditions of the West. He serves as writer in residence and director of
the low-residency MFA in creative writing program at Seattle Pacific
University. Wolfe is the author of several books, most recently “Beauty Will
Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age.”
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