Wolf Hall

Finished, at last, with my slog through Tolkien, I turned immediately to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. It's been a bit of an adjustment, going from Tolkien (who, though a worthwhile read, has too many adverbs and all the humor of the Heimskringla) to Mantel, whose wit could be metaphorically compared to something that is very sharp.

The hero (or antihero, if you must) of the book is Thomas Cromwell (who was indeed related to Oliver, though we mustn't hold that against him). History, for the most part, has not been kind to Cromwell: the impression one often gets is that he was an amoral schemer, who, in the end, reaped the whirlwind after several years of attempting to manipulate the king's favor. If you've seen A Man for All Seasons you've probably got a much more charitable opinion of Cromwell's rival Thomas More, whom Roman Catholics now call a saint; he's held in high esteem at Notre Dame, certainly. But Mantel deconstructs this beatific image we have of More: as she sees it, he was little more than a religious zealot.

[Cromwell] never sees More — a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod — without wanting to ask him, what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before?

It's worth remembering that More was not some selfless defender of personal conscience to be compared to Cromwell's unprincipled henchman of royal prerogative. More merely preferred Papal tyranny to royal tyranny. The question, perhaps, is: which should one prefer in Henry VIII's England? Despite my fondness for Anglicanism, I still have this image of the king as this horrible sort of Bluebeard character, ruled by his appetites, quite probably more beast than man. I don't know if Mantel means to dispel this characterization further on in the book; after all, I've only read about a hundred of its six-hundred-odd pages. But I recommend it highly, so far.