Historical fiction |
Great Britain -- History -- Henry VIII, 1509-1547 -- Fiction |
Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex, 1485?-1540 -- Fiction. |
Essex, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of, 1485?-1540 |
Historical novels |
History -- Fiction |
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Summary
Summary
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Henry VIII's challenge to the church's power with his desire to divorce his queen and marry Anne Boleyn set off a tidal wave of religious, political and societal turmoil that reverberated throughout 16th-century Europe. Mantel boldly attempts to capture the sweeping internecine machinations of the times from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, the lowborn man who became one of Henry's closest advisers. Cromwell's actual beginnings are historically ambiguous, and Mantel admirably fills in the blanks, portraying Cromwell as an oft-beaten son who fled his father's home, fought for the French, studied law and was fluent in French, Latin and Italian. Mixing fiction with fact, Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times and brings to life the important players: Henry VIII; his wife, Katherine of Aragon; the bewitching Boleyn sisters; and the difficult Thomas More, who opposes the king. Unfortunately, Mantel also includes a distracting abundance of dizzying detail and Henry's all too voluminous political defeats and triumphs, which overshadows the more winning story of Cromwell and his influence on the events that led to the creation of the Church of England. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Mantel fictionalizes the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, crafty architect of Henry VIII's annulment from Catherine of Aragon, the execution of Sir Thomas Moore, Henry's schism with the Church of Rome, and the Reformation. Delving deeply into the psychology of the man behind the throne, she paints a portrait of a brilliant schemer, bullied by his brutish blacksmith father determined to rise above his circumstances by dint of his own wits and the strength of his own resolve. Competent, complex, and the consummate behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer, Mantel's Cromwell is not an unsympathetic character; in fact, readers will be surprised that he is presented in a far more favorable light than the sainted Thomas Moore. This wholly original and authentically detailed take on an often reviled real-life figure will appeal to fans of meaty historical dramas and fictional biographies.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"TRY always," says the worldly Cardinal Wolsey in "Wolf Hall," Hilary Mantel's fictional portrait of Henry VIII's turbulent court, "to find out what people wear under their clothes." Katherine of Aragon, the queen who can't produce an heir, wears a nun's habit. Anne Boleyn, the tease eager to supplant her, won't let the king know what she's wearing until their wedding night; she says "yes, yes, yes" to him, "then she says no." Thomas More, willing to go to any lengths to prevent the marriage, wears a shirt of bristling horsehair, which mortifies his flesh until the sores weep. As for Thomas Cromwell, the fixer who does the king's dirty work just as he once did the cardinal's, what is he hiding under his lawyer's sober winter robes? Something "impermeable," Hans Holbein suspects as he paints Cromwell's forbidding portrait. Armor, maybe, or stone. Go to the Frick Collection in New York and compare Holbein's great portraits of Cromwell and More. More has all the charm, with his sensitive hands and his "good eyes' stern, facetious twinkle," in Robert Lowell's description. By contrast, Cromwell, with his egg-shaped form hemmed in by a table and his shifty fish eyes turned warily to the side, looks official and merciless, his clenched fist, as Mantel writes, "sure as that of a slaughterman's when he picks up the killing knife." One of the many achievements of Mantel's dazzling novel, winner of this year's Man Booker Prize, is that she has reversed the appeal of these towering rivals of the Tudor period, that fecund breeding ground of British historical fiction as the American Civil War is of ours. Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel - tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane. We follow his winding quest in vivid present-tense flashbacks, drawn up from his own prodigious memory: how he left home before he was 15, escaping the boot of his abusive father, a brewer and blacksmith who beat him as if he were "a sheet of metal"; how he dreamed of becoming a soldier and went to France because "France is where they have wars." Cromwell learns banking in Florence, trading in Antwerp. He marries, has children and watches helplessly as the plague decimates his family. In short, Cromwell learns everything everywhere, at a time when European knowledge about heaven and earth, via Copernicus and Machiavelli, is exploding. At 40, he "can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." He knows the entire New Testament by heart, having mastered the Italian "art of memory" (part of the inner world of Renaissance magic that Mantel drew on in her comic novel "Fludd"), in. which long lines of speech are fixed in the mind with vivid images. Cromwell is also, as Mantel sees him, a closet Protestant, monitoring Luther's battles with Rome and exchanging secret letters with Tyndale, the English translator of the Bible, about the "brutal truth" of the Scriptures. "Why does the pope have to be in Rome?" Cromwell wonders. "Where is it written?" Historians have long suspected that Cromwell harbored Protestant sympathies, even before Anne Boleyn's "resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom" caught the king's eye. Mantel, with the novelist's license, draws the circle more tightly. As a child, Cromwell is present when an old woman is burned at the stake for heresy: "Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked." Years later, he watches in disgust as Thomas More rounds up more heretics to feed to the fire. For Mantel, who acknowledges her debt to revisionist scholars, Henry's divorce is the impetus for Cromwell's "Tudor Revolution," as the historian Geoffrey Elton called it, by which the British state won independence from foreign and ecclesiastic rule. In "Wolf Hall" it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who is the ruthless tormenter of English Protestants, using the rack and the ax to set the "quaking world" aright. "Utopia," Cromwell learns early on, "is not a place one can live." More's refusal to recognize Henry's marriage was the basis for his canonization in 1935, as well as his portrayal as a hero of conscience in Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons" and its 1966 screen version. To Mantel's Cromwell, More is in love with his own martyrdom, his own theatrical self-importance, while Cromwell, more in keeping with the spirit of Bolt's title, seeks a way out for his old rival. There's a tense moment when More, locked in the Tower of London awaiting trial for treason, claims to have harmed no one. Cromwell explodes. What about Bainham, a mild man whose only sin was that he was a Protestant? "You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley's cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again." Tortured, Bainham names names, who happen to be friends of Cromwell's. "That's how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash." IN her long novel of the French Revolution, "A Place of Greater Safety," Mantel also wrote about the damage done by utopian fixers. And surely the current uproar over state-sponsored torture had its effect on both the writing and the imagining of "Wolf Hall." Yet, although Mantel adopts none of the archaic fustian of so many historical novels - the capital letters, the antique turns of phrase - her book feels firmly fixed in the 16th century. Toward the end of the novel, Cromwell, long widowed and as usual overworked, "the man in charge of everything," falls in love with Jane Seymour, lady-in-waiting to Boleyn, and considers spending a few days at the gothic-sounding Seymour estate called Wolf Hall. What could go wrong with such an innocent plan? Perhaps in a sequel Mantel will tell us. Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. "Wolf Hall" has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Trained in the law, Mantel can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator's day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society - not of a medieval fief based on war and not, heaven help us, a utopia "When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power," Cromwell reflects. "Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them." Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" is both spellbinding and believable. Thomas Cromwell can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight and fix a jury. Christopher Benfey, Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of "Degas in New Orleans" and "A Summer of Hummingbirds."
Guardian Review
Oh, those Tudors! We can't get enough of them. Whole bookshelves have been filled with them, acres of film consecrated to their antics. How badly behaved they were. What Machiavellian plottings and betrayals. Will we never tire of the imprisonments, torturings, entrail-windings, and burnings at the stake? Philippa Gregory has very successfully tackled the Boleyn girls, Mary the Mistress and Anne the Aggravating. Then there's The Tudors, the TV series, in which church geopolitics are ably dealt with, though some of the underwear is anachronistic and Henry VIII is a dark, brooding romantic who never gets fat. This is stretching it, but makes for much better sex than if he were to wheeze and grunt and ooze from his decaying leg all over the bedsheets, as in real life. I have a weakness for the Tudors, so I inhaled Hilary Mantel's terrific Booker-winning Wolf Hall - the first in her series about Thomas Cromwell the Calculating and Ruthless - in almost one sitting. Now comes the aptly titled Bring Up the Bodies, which picks up the body parts where Wolf Hall left off. As the book opens, it's summer. Henry and his court are staying at Wolf Hall, home of the Seymours, where Henry has his piggy eye on stiff, prudish little Jane, destined to be his next queen. Thomas Cromwell is flying his hawks, named after his dead daughters. "His children are falling from the sky," Mantel begins. "He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze . . . All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment." And we're off, into the deep, dark, labyrinthine, but strangely objective mind of Thomas Cromwell. The historical Cromwell is an opaque figure, which is most likely why Mantel is interested in him: the less is truly known, the more room for a novelist. Cromwell rose from obscure and violent origins through a life abroad - sometime soldier, sometime merchant - to become England's top go-to man, the prime maker-and-breaker of fortunes and spines, secretly hated and despised, especially by aristocrats. He played Beria to Henry VIII's tyrannical Stalin: he did the dirty work and attended the beheadings, while Henry went hunting. Cromwell elevated reform-minded Anne Boleyn, and sided with her until she stupidly thought she could get rid of him. Then he joined with her enemies to overthrow her, which we see him doing with steely finesse in Bring Up the Bodies. He was very feared and very smart, with a capacious memory for facts and also for slights, none of which he left unavenged. While Cromwell has always had a bad press, Henry has generated mixed reviews. His early life was golden - Renaissance prince, sportsman, composer of poems, sprightly dancer, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and so on - but he became increasingly despotic, bloodthirsty, rapacious, and possibly crazy. Charles Dickens, in his quirky A Child's History of England, has no use for him, calling him "a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England". In his later years, says Dickens, Henry was "a swollen, hideous spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every sense that it was dreadful to approach him". It's a 21st-century sport for doctors to weigh in on what exactly was wrong with Henry: it used to be thought he had syphilis, but diabetes now appears to be winning out. That, and possibly a brain injury from his jousting accident - an accident that causes Cromwell to lose his cool, since if Henry dies without an heir there will be civil war. Whatever else the Tudors did, they brought peace to England, and peace is what Cromwell works for. That, for Mantel, is one of the more praiseworthy motives for all the bloodletting that Cromwell engineers. Peace rests on a stable king, and in that respect Cromwell has his work cut out. Already by the book's beginning Henry is beginning to fade, swell, and drool; his paranoia is growing, and the Plantagenets are plotting in the shrubbery. Cromwell sees this with precision and clarity, as he sees everything. He's a very self-aware narrator, and does not spare himself his own unwavering view, as when he appraises the portrait Hans Holbein has painted of him, "his dark purposes wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it". His own son tells him he looks like a murderer, and other portraitists achieve a similar effect: "Wherever they begin, the final impact is the same: if he had a grievance against you, you wouldn't like to meet him at the dark of the moon." But he also has corners of tenderness, and sees these in others: he's deep, not merely dark. And through him we experience the texture of how it feels to be sliding into a perilous dictatorship, where power is arbitrary, spies are everywhere, and one wrong word can mean your death. It's a reflection, perhaps, of our times, when democracies appear to be slipping back into the dungeon-filled shadowland of arbitrary power. Cromwell's main opponent, Anne Boleyn, is as wilful and flirtatious as she usually is in fiction, but by the time of her death she has shrivelled to "a tiny figure, a bundle of bones". Is she more to be pitied than blamed? Not by Cromwell: "She does not look like a powerful enemy of England, but looks can deceive . . . If her sway had continued, the child Mary might have stood here; and he himself . . . waiting for the coarse English axe." Anne knew the rules of the power game but she hasn't played well enough, and she has lost. And, for the time being, Cromwell has won. The ambiguous Cromwell is a character who fits Mantel's particular strengths. She's never gone for the sweet people, and is no stranger to dark purposes. Beginning with smaller canvases - novels set in present-day England - she moved to widescreen historical fiction with the masterful A Place of Greater Safety (1992), featuring the major actors of the French revolution as well as a large supporting cast and its twisted interactions. She relies on the same talent for intricacy in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. There are a lot of people lurking around in Henry's court, all of them on the make or trying to sidestep the axe, and helping the reader keep track of them is a special craft. Historical fiction has many pitfalls, multiple characters and plausible underwear being only two of them. How should people talk? Sixteenth-century diction would be intolerable, but so would modern slang; Mantel opts for standard English, with the occasional dirty joke, and for present-tense narration much of the time, which keeps us right there with Cromwell as his plots and Mantel's unfold. How much detail - clothes, furnishings, appliances - to supply without clogging up the page and slowing down the story? Enough to allow the reader to picture the scene, with lush fabrics and textures highlighted, as they were at the time. Mantel generally answers the same kinds of question that interest readers in court reports of murder trials or coverage of royal weddings. What was the dress like? How did she look? Who really went to bed with whom? Mantel sometimes overshares, but literary invention does not fail her: she's as deft and verbally adroit as ever. We read historical fiction for the same reason we keep watching Hamlet: it's not what, it's how. And although we know the plot, the characters themselves do not. Mantel leaves Cromwell at a moment that would appear secure: four of his ill-wishing enemies, in addition to Anne, have just been beheaded, and many more have been neutralised. England will have peace, though it's "the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home". But really Cromwell is balancing on a tightrope, with his enemies gathering and muttering offstage. The book ends as it begins, with an image of blood-soaked feathers. But its end is not an end. "There are no endings," says Mantel. "If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. This is one." Which will lead us to the final instalment, and to the next batch of Henry's wives and Cromwell's machinations. How much intricate spadework will it take to "dig out" Cromwell, that "sleek, plump, and densely inaccessible" enigma? Reader, wait and see. Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood is published by Bloomsbury. To order Bring Up the Bodies for pounds 12.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Margaret Atwood Caption: Captions: Anne Boleyn . . . late 16th-century copy of a lost original As the book opens, it's summer. [Henry VIII] and his court are staying at Wolf Hall, home of the Seymours, where Henry has his piggy eye on stiff, prudish little Jane, destined to be his next queen. [Thomas Cromwell] is flying his hawks, named after his dead daughters. "His children are falling from the sky," [Hilary Mantel] begins. "He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze . . . All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment." And we're off, into the deep, dark, labyrinthine, but strangely objective mind of Thomas Cromwell. While Cromwell has always had a bad press, Henry has generated mixed reviews. His early life was golden - Renaissance prince, sportsman, composer of poems, sprightly dancer, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and so on - but he became increasingly despotic, bloodthirsty, rapacious, and possibly crazy. Charles Dickens, in his quirky A Child's History of England, has no use for him, calling him "a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England". In his later years, says Dickens, Henry was "a swollen, hideous spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every sense that it was dreadful to approach him". It's a 21st-century sport for doctors to weigh in on what exactly was wrong with Henry: it used to be thought he had syphilis, but diabetes now appears to be winning out. That, and possibly a brain injury from his jousting accident - an accident that causes Cromwell to lose his cool, since if Henry dies without an heir there will be civil war. Whatever else the Tudors did, they brought peace to England, and peace is what Cromwell works for. That, for Mantel, is one of the more praiseworthy motives for all the bloodletting that Cromwell engineers. Its end is not an end. "There are no endings," says Mantel. "If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. This is one." Which will lead us to the final instalment, and to the next batch of Henry's wives and Cromwell's machinations. How much intricate spadework will it take to "dig out" Cromwell, that "sleek, plump, and densely inaccessible" enigma? Reader, wait and see. - Margaret Atwood.
Kirkus Review
Exhaustive examination of the circumstances surrounding Henry VIII's schism-inducing marriage to Anne Boleyn. Versatile British novelist Mantel (Giving Up the Ghost, 2006, etc.) forays into the saturated field of Tudor historicals to cover eight years (152735) of Henry's long, tumultuous reign. They're chronicled from the point of view of consummate courtier Thomas Cromwell, whose commentary on the doings of his irascible and inwardly tormented king is impressionistic, idiosyncratic and self-interested. The son of a cruel blacksmith, Cromwell fled his father's beatings to become a soldier of fortune in France and Italy, later a cloth trader and banker. He begins his political career as secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England. Having failed to secure the Pope's permission for Henry to divorce Queen Katherine, Wolsey falls out of favor with the monarch and is supplanted by Sir Thomas More, portrayed here as a domestic tyrant and enthusiastic torturer of Protestants. Unemployed, Cromwell is soon advising Henry himself and acting as confidante to Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, former mistress of both Henry and King Francis I of France. When plague takes his wife and children, Cromwell creates a new family by taking in his late siblings' children and mentoring impoverished young men who remind him of his low-born, youthful self. The religious issues of the day swirl around the events at court, including the rise of Luther and the burgeoning movement to translate the Bible into vernacular languages. Anne is cast in an unsympathetic light as a petulant, calculating temptress who withholds her favors until Henry is willing to make her queen. Although Mantel's language is original, evocative and at times wittily anachronistic, this minute exegesis of a relatively brief, albeit momentous, period in English history occasionally grows tedious. The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction. Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As Henry VIII's go-to man for his dirty work, Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540) isn't a likely candidate for a sympathetic portrait. He dirtied his hands too often. In the end, Henry dropped him just as he had Cromwell's mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, who counseled the king before him. But as Mantel (Beyond Black) reminds us, Cromwell was a man of many parts, admirable in many respects though disturbing in others. Above all, he got things done and was deeply loyal to his masters, first Wolsey and then the king. Nor was Henry always bloated and egomaniacal: well into his forties, when in good spirits, the king shone brighter than all those around him. Verdict Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama: Henry's abandonment of wife and church to marry Anne Boleyn. It should appeal to many readers, not just history buffs. And Mantel achieves this feat without violating the historical record! There will be few novels this year as good as this one. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09; history buffs may also enjoy reading Robert Hutchinson's biography, Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister, reviewed on p. 66.-Ed.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.