What I'm Reading: Wolf Hall

I’m used to thinking of Thomas Cromwell as a villain.

Thomas Cromwell was a minister of Henry VIII’s—the one who engineered his infamous divorce with Catherine of Aragon. In that time, divorce was almost never done—and getting a divorce could get you excommunicated, putting your immortal soul in peril. Henry VIII did that and more to marry Anne Boleyn—wresting religious control away from the Pope and putting himself at the head of his own Church of England (today’s Anglican Church), all for love. Of course, we all know how that love story ends.

Anyway, what Henry did was revolutionary in the extreme for his time—a time when the threat of hellfire was very real to many people. And Cromwell was its architect—a secular advisor and lawyer who was, as Henry tells him at one point in this book, “cunning as a bag of vipers.” This is usually how Cromwell is portrayed in literature and art—as a ruthless man who didn’t care who he had to impoverish or see executed in his relentless pursuit of the King’s will. Mantel, however, sees him quite differently. And I love her for it.

Note: Spoilers be below.

Mantel’s Cromwell is a tough, ruthless man—but he is also deeply human. He tries to protect the people he loves. He works to persuade Thomas More—a prominent cardinal and important advisor of Henry’s who refused to go along with his divorce, in fear for his soul; for which he is ultimately executed—to come around to the King’s point of view in order to save his life. He has two daughters who die of the plague—a disease that in this world recurs with the regularity of Flu Season in ours—as well as a wife, whom he loves and mourns throughout the book. Even after the deaths of his daughters, his house is loud and merry with children—nieces, nephews, and people he takes in.

The language in the book is deeply poetic. Coming from the generation before Shakespeare’s time, it should be at least as dense as that—if we’re going for verisimilitude. Hilary Mantel’s solution is a seamless language that perfectly evokes the spirit of the time without being too dense or difficult to parse through—and the book is brilliant just for that.

But for me, the brilliance goes farther. I have deep respect for a writer who can look at a painting like the one in this post (come on! That guy is a villain! How can he not be a villain?)—and see someone underneath that readers deeply sympathize with, even at his most unsympathetic.

As for what I’m drinking here: brandy. It’s not easy to drink—at least not for me. But the warm, heady glow it gives is worth the burn on the way down.