Above all, Mantel works against preconceptions. Her Henry VIII is not a tyrannical monster and lecher, but a bemused man past his golden youth, full of guilt and desperate for a son. Anne Boleyn is no romantic victim in the making but a sly, cock-teasing girl determined to be Queen, ‘a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes’. Cromwell’s sympathies are with the bullied, obdurate Katharine and her humiliated daughter Mary, and also with Anne’s fair-haired sister, another Mary, whom Cromwell rather fancies for himself. Mantel evokes them all with a light, confident touch, anchoring them to reality with descriptions of their world as precise as stitches in a tapestry, of the light over the river, the texture of scarlet cloth, the song of a bird or the smell of crushed rosemary in a nosegay.
Her main achievement, though, is to rehabilitate Thomas Cromwell by making him human. Biographers, for the most part, rely on personal material, the more the better. A novelist like Mantel benefits greatly when such material is sparse. Historians have long recognised that while the official record of Cromwell’s later career is dense, his private life remains hidden. This absence allows Mantel’s informed imagination great freedom, and she makes the most of it. Her Cromwell is a man who adores his wife and daughters, weeps when the plague takes them from him, worries about his frivolous son, likes to chat to his cook, and has a series of dogs called Bella, named for the one happy memory from his loveless childhood. He is also a rational man who deplores religious fanaticism and the burning of heretics, unlike his contemporary and rival Thomas More, whom Mantel presents as a scruffy, self-deluded misogynist rather than a saintly man of conscience. Her picture of More is just as true to the record as the more flattering A Man for All Seasons version. Biographers, let alone playwrights, can be just as selective as novelists.
Mantel ends this book inconclusively, with More’s execution and Cromwell riding high. We all know, at least in outline, what happens next, and she has already given us glimpses of several of the characters she will be bringing out of the shadows in the sequel she is writing now, like Mark Smeaton, the musician who will be crucial to Anne Boleyn’s downfall, and quiet little Jane Seymour (who lives at Wolf Hall). Mantel makes us think again about what we assume we know: ‘Beneath every history, another history’, she says and this powerful, subtle book illuminates her point. There is historical truth, and there is imaginative truth. Hilary Mantel, who has never written better than in this book, respects both.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.