Wolf in sheep’s clothing

An award-winning novel is accused of getting Reformation England profoundly wrong, Greg Daly reports

Cambridge University’s Dr Richard Rex believes the award-winning bestseller Wolf Hall contains “some pretty major blunders” for “a work which aspires to a high level of historical accuracy”, but is quick to stress his awareness that historical fiction requires a certain amount of creative licence.

“Of course, I think everybody understands that,” says the university’s Reader in Reformation History, continuing, “It’s a rather cheap game to pick your way through a historical novel and say ‘ooh, that’s wrong’ and ‘she’d never have said that’ and things of that kind, but equally, the extent to which you might criticise a work of fiction on historical grounds varies very much with the kind of work of fiction it is, and indeed both the aspirations of the author and the reception accorded to it by its readers.”

Named after a Wiltshire family home, Wolf Hall is a fictionalised account of the nascent English Reformation, centring on the rise of Thomas Cromwell, a man of lowly birth who rose to become Henry VIII’s right-hand man, overseeing the imprisonment and executions of Ss John Fisher and Thomas More.

While historical fiction can be enjoyable and can inspire an interest in history which can be developed in other ways, he believes there’s a problem when historical fiction “consciously or unconsciously misrepresents and distorts the past”.

Narrative

Conceding that “any kind of narrative about the past obviously has some kind of fictive element to it”, Dr Rex recognises that “historians as much as novelists and others are telling stories”. The difference, he says, is that historians, if they’re doing their job, should be “genuinely and professionally trying to get as close as they can to what actually happened and why it actually happened”, whereas historical fiction tends to be written on a spectrum, at one end of which is pure story, the classic Walter Scott-style novel where fictitious characters and plots take place against a historical background.

“I think we can say without misrepresenting it that Wolf Hall takes us quite a few steps away from story and towards history, and that’s deliberate,” says Dr Rex, adding that Wolf Hall’s author Hilary Mantel “herself has said that she does not much care for that classic model of the fictitious story against a historical backdrop, so she’s doing something else”.

Explaining how the book attempts to put fictional flesh on the bare bones of the known historical narrative, Dr Rex says that while that’s “a perfectly legitimate aspiration”, it’s also one that’s bound to invite criticism and analysis from historians.

“From my perspective as a historian, once novelists start to make claims about historical accuracy, I feel I have a kind of historical licence to comment and if necessary to criticise,” he says.

Critical historical eyes can at times be a curse as much as a blessing, he suggests, saying that among historians there’s “a common professional reaction” against historical fiction set in their own periods. “You just know it too well and you get too irritated by things that strike you as wrong,” he says, relating how within the first three minutes of watching 1999’s Elizabeth he was “bouncing off the ceiling”.

“It was a travesty,” he says, “and to be fair to Wolf Hall it doesn’t do such grotesque things as alter people’s life spans.”

Asked whether historical novels perhaps tell us more about our times than about the times in which they’re set, he says “I think that’s always going to be the case, though there’s an extent to which that case can also be made about historical writing in general”.

“Most historical fiction has a greater or lesser admixture of fairly blatant anachronism because the characters tend to have to be made rather more amendable to modern tastes,” he continues, before taking the unfashionable view that the level of characterisation in Wolf Hall is rather low, even juvenile, with most characters other than the protagonist Thomas Cromwell being emblematic types.

“I struggle in reading Wolf Hall to find a single character who cannot be characterised as either a goodie or a baddy,” he says, pointing to “the supporting cast of nice wishy-washy Protestant clerics or mean and nasty Catholic clerics”. Conceding that one could argue that Cromwell is fairly well rendered, Dr Rex nonetheless feels his characterisation shows “a whole panoply of late 20th- and early 21st-Century social attitudes”, and maintains that St Thomas More is painted as “a double-dyed villain, irredeemable in every degree and every respect”.

St John Fisher isn’t invariably presented as a nasty Catholic, Dr Rex admits, saying, “Fisher pops in only here and there through the novel, and when it suits the novel’s purposes, he is presented indeed as a gullible old twit, but elsewhere he’s also presented as a standard Catholic bishop, which is to say a mean, heartless, cruel persecutor”.

Neither side of the fictional Fisher seems to tally with the historical champion of better-educated clergy and laity that was the subject of the first of Dr Rex’s many books, but this doesn’t surprise the historian.

“Let’s be frank about this,” he says, “Wolf Hall is not interested in presenting very much of the modern revisionist tendency in the history of the Reformation.”

Understanding

Said tendency may have taken its name from a 1987 essay collection entitled The English Reformation Revised, edited by Christopher Haigh, author of the subsequent English Reformations. A.G. Dickens, whose 1964 The English Reformation was for long the standard work on the period, had called for historians to examine more closely the texture of ordinary life during the Reformation, but was not prepared for the results.

“Our understanding of the history of religious change in this period has been transformed over the past generation, or perhaps we should say two generations now,” explains Dr Rex. “Rather ironically, Dickens’ call for a greater engagement with lower level records produced in the end interpretations very different from the ones he expected to find and the ones he thought he did find of a rapid popular uptake of the new ideas.”

*****

A succession of historians – Haigh, Dr Rex’s Cambridge colleague Louth-born Prof. Eamon Duffy, and Jack Scarisbrick being but the vanguard – have since shown that England’s late medieval Catholicism was far more vibrant than popular Protestant myth subsequently claimed and that the widespread uptake of Reformation ideas in 16th-Century England was very much slower, more reluctant, and more piecemeal than hitherto believed.

Faced with a sea change in how the English Reformation would have to be understood, Dickens assumed that Haigh must have been a Catholic, and on learning that he was not and never had been one, famously exclaimed in incredulity, “then why does he say such things?”

While Wolf Hall shows no awareness of developments in mainstream Reformation research, “it’s well enough informed on the revisionist scholarship of a slightly different kind on Thomas More, the hostile picture sketched out in the 70s and 80s by Geoffrey Elton and Richard Marius”, Dr Rex observes.

The popular image of St Thomas More is the iconic hero of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, unforgettably played on screen by Paul Scofield. Bolt’s More, a champion of truth and conscience who refuses the state’s demand that he deny what he believes to be true to prove his loyalty, had his roots in R.W. Chambers’ 1935 biography of the saint.

Geoffrey Elton, the great Cambridge historian of the Tudor era, in exalting Thomas Cromwell and attempting to exonerate him from the charge that he had perpetuated a reign of terror, utterly rejected Chambers and Bolt’s construction of More, and his rejection was built on by Richard Marius, whose 1984 biography of the saint portrays him as a ‘failed priest’ plagued by a repressed and somewhat perverse sexuality.

“Marius really starts from where Elton left off – he takes his departure from one or two articles that Elton wrote in the 70s,” explains Dr Rex, who says Wolf Hall draws on Marius, Elton, and “a few extra little bits as well that have been added on by rather inferior historians and biographers since”.

One of these bits, he says, was first advanced as a hypothesis in Brian Moynihan’s 2002 book If God Spare My Life: William Tyndale and Thomas More, A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal, which details, he says, “the utterly absurd story that Thomas More from the Tower of London in 1534-1535 was somehow masterminding the capture of William Tyndale in Antwerp through paid agents”.

While he said that “laughable hardly begins to describe it”, he’s clearly troubled by the notion that “people will read Wolf Hall and would come away with that idea”.

*****

More may have died a saint and martyr, but Dr Rex is under no illusions that he was without flaws. Ahead of his times in some ways, he was also very much a man of his time, and when Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor had been responsible for the execution of six Protestants.

“I don’t think there’s anybody out there, never mind any respectable historian, who denies that Thomas More played his part in the persecution of Protestants especially when he was Lord Chancellor,” Dr Rex says. “But the construction on the top of that of this mythography that Wolf Hall picks up of this slathering bloodthirsty torturer who took perverse pleasure in inflicting pain upon his victims – for this there is little, very little evidence. There are one or two things upon which you can base such a claim but the picture is obviously untrue and is largely embroidery and long-range psychoanalysis.”

The fact that there’s so little evidence for such a construction is striking, given how the 16th Century is a historical period for which a vast amount can be known, even about people of relatively humble backgrounds due to the tendency of people in the era to write wills.

“There are chronicles and other narratives, there are letters, particularly in the case of Thomas More who left a reasonably sized corpus of letters behind him, not obviously by any means as many as he wrote but because of his character and his state more of them survive than might otherwise have done, personal account books, a mass of administrative materials you can mine in various ways, some biographies, and lots of public writings,” the historian explains.

“And of course from the reign of Henry VIII on in Britain and most of Europe there are portraits and pictorial evidence,” he adds, “though one has to handle it with care as we tend to read more into portraits than to read out from them.”

In a 2010 interview, for instance, Wolf Hall’s author Hilary Mantel said that “Hans Holbein painted this incredibly dead picture of Cromwell, and since then it was almost as if everybody backed off,” continuing, “what I wanted to do was tell Cromwell’s story, because it had not been told, to clear out the junk and the prejudice and get a fresh start with the character.”

Rather than attempting to breathe life back into the picture, as Dr Rex infers Ms Mantel had been trying to do, he as a historian is instead drawn to ask “why does a painter as skilled and insightful as Holbein paint this incredibly dead picture of Cromwell?”

In contrast, he says, Holbein’s celebrated portrait of More is “full of life”, noting how in the BBC documentary Holbein: Eye of the Tudors art historian Waldemar Januszczak commented on the two Holbein paintings that face each other on either side of a great fireplace in New York’s Frick Collection and said that forced to choose between what he called a recent fictional portrayal and the 16th-Century portraitist, he knew whose vision he was inclined to believe.

Wolf Hall has since its 2009 publication received an even bigger audience through being adapted two years ago into a successful BBC series.

As far back as 1935, G.K. Chesterton was warning of “a real danger of historical falsehood being popularised through the film, because there is not the normal chance of one film being corrected by another film”, pointing out that “when a book appears displaying a doubtful portrait of Queen Elizabeth, it will generally be found that about six other historical students are moved to publish about six other versions of Queen Elizabeth at the same moment”, but that few people are in a position to fund, produce, and distribute films to counter dubious cinematic representations of historical events and characters.

For Dr Rex, the problem is worse. “Not quite so apparent to Chesterton in that pre-television age, we’re much more aware that the visual impresses itself on people so much more forcefully than the purely verbal,” he says, citing the old line that ‘seeing is believing’.

“If a false view of the past in its broad proportions is turned into film or television,” he continues, “then of course it reaches not only more people but it reaches them more impressively in the literal sense”.

The one saving grace of what Dr Rex dubs ‘Hollywood History’, is that “one can always hope that people won’t take it seriously as a guide to the past”, but while sophisticated viewers might be inclined to view historical dramas with a certain scepticism, that scepticism is often at odds with the assumption that the broad strokes of such dramas must be correct. “It’s no use having inbuilt scepticism if you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dr Rex says. “It doesn’t matter how sceptical you are – you can only judge things when you know. Knowledge is much more important than anything when dealing with the past.”

Ultimately, Dr Rex says, his main problem with Wolf Hall is that for all its accuracy in innumerable tiny details, its central engine – the relationship between St Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell – “is fundamentally out of proportion because both characters have been fundamentally misunderstood”.

While he accepts that there’s lots of very respectable research work in Wolf Hall, the historical record tells a very different story from the novel.

“Truth, as Hilaire Belloc used to say, resides in proportion, and this book just gets the 1530s out of proportion almost all the time,” he says, concluding, “Its myriad accuracies do not redeem that.”