Men wielding power in hellish times
“Wolf Hall,” the Man Booker
Prize-winning historical novel about the court of Henry VIII — and most dramatically, the
conflict between Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More — is now a TV series (presented on PBS). It is maddeningly good.
Maddening because its history is
tendentiously distorted, yet the drama is so brilliantly conceived and executed
that you almost don’t care. Faced with an imaginative creation of such
brooding, gripping, mordant intensity, you find yourself ready to pay for it in
historical inaccuracy.
And “Wolf Hall’s” revisionism is
breathtaking. It inverts the conventional view of the saintly More being undone
by the corrupt, amoral, serpentine Cromwell, the king’s chief minister. This is
fiction as polemic. Author Hilary Mantel, an ex- and anti-Catholic (“the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable
people”), has set out to rehabilitate Cromwell and defenestrate More, most
especially the More of Robert Bolt’s beautiful and hagiographic “A Man for All Seasons.”
Who’s right? Neither fully, though
“Wolf Hall’s” depiction of More as little more than a cruel heretic-burning
hypocrite is particularly provocative, if not perverse. To be sure, More
worship is somewhat overdrawn, as even the late Cardinal Francis George
warned at a 2012 convocation of bishops. More had his flaws. He may have been a man for all seasons, but he was also a
man of his times. And in those times of merciless contention between Rome and
the Reformation, the pursuit and savage persecution of heresy were the norm.
Indeed, when Cromwell achieved
power, he persecuted Catholics with a zeal and thoroughness that surpassed even More’s
persecution of Protestants. “Wolf Hall’s” depiction of Cromwell as a man of
great sensitivity and deep feeling is, therefore, even harder to credit. He was
cruel and cunning, quite monstrous both in pursuit of personal power and
wealth, and in serving the whims and wishes of his royal master.
Nonetheless, Cromwell’s modern
reputation will be enhanced by Mark Rylance’s brilliant and sympathetic
cinematic portrayal, featuring a stillness and economy of expression that is at
once mesmerizing and humanizing. The nature of the modern audience helps too.
In this secular age beset by throat-slashing religious fanatics, we are far
more disposed to despise excessive piety and celebrate the pragmatic, if
ruthless, modernizer.
Which Cromwell was, as the chief
engineer of Henry’s Reformation. He crushed the Roman church, looted the
monasteries and nationalized faith by subordinating clergy to king. That may
flatter today’s reflexive anticlericalism. But we do well to remember that the
centralized state Cromwell helped midwife did prepare the ground, over the
coming centuries, for the rise of the rational, willful, thought-controlling,
indeed all-controlling, state.
It is perhaps unfair to call
Cromwell (and Henry) proto-totalitarian, as some critics have suggested,
essentially blaming them for what came after. But they did sow the seed. And
while suppressing one kind of intolerance, they did little more than redefine
heresy as an offense against the sovereignty not of God but of the state.
However, “Wolf Hall” poses questions
not just political but literary. When such a distortion of history produces
such a wonderfully successful piece of fiction, we are forced to ask: What
license are we to grant to the historical novel?
For all the learned answers, in
reality it comes down to temporal proximity. If the event is in the recent
past, you’d better be accurate. Oliver Stone’s paranoid
and libelous “JFK” will be harmless in 50 years, but
it will take that long for the stench to dissipate. On the other hand, does
anyone care that Shakespeare diverges from the record (such as it is) in his
Caesar or Macbeth or his Henrys?
Time turns them to legend. We don’t
feel it much matters anymore. There is the historical Caesar and there is
Shakespeare’s Caesar. They live side by side.
The film reviewer Stanley Kauffmann
said much the same about David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” vs. the real T.E.
Lawrence. They diverge. Accept them each on their own terms, as separate and
independent realities. (After all, Lawrence’s own account, “Seven Pillars of
Wisdom,” offers magnificent prose but quite unreliable history as well.)
So with the different versions of
More and Cromwell. Let them live side by side. “Wolf Hall” is utterly
compelling, but I nonetheless refuse to renounce “A Man For All Seasons.” I’ll
live with both Mores, both Cromwells. After all, for centuries we’ve accepted
that light is both wave and particle. If physics can live with maddening
truths, why can’t literature and history?
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