I resisted reading the phenomenally successful Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel for as long as I could. Stuck for something to read while traveling, I picked up a battered copy. LIke everyone else, I found it a surprisingly compelling read. At the same time, I could not help but notice the revision of imperial politics at work.

If you’re the other person who didn’t read it yet–even the little bookstore in Port Douglas, Queensland had her new one in the window–the book tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII. More exactly, after a brief prelude it describes six years of Cromwell’s rise to power, along with that of Anne Boleyn.

This is the Tudor-Stuart story that many middle-class people get taught at school. especially in Britain and its former colonies. That this period is so central to the teaching curriculum is in considerable part the legacy of James Anthony Froude, heir and biographer of Thomas Carlyle. Froude transformed Cariyle’s mystical theories of the Hero into a straightforward narrative of British heroes from history.

In his monumental 12-volume History of England, Froude dealt only with the Tudor period. His thesis is nonetheless simply stated: the privateers like Francis Drake and other adventurers of the period set Britain on the road to imperial glory. Froude constantly advocated for the formation of a global Anglophone sea-power empire that he called Oceana. Arguably, American power in the 20th century from the Great White Fleet to Midway and the Cold War was exactly that.

Mantel takes this thesis, whether consciously or not, and applies it to Cromwell. Like Carlyle, she proclaims

It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries.
The voice is ambiguous throughout, so it could be said that this is Cromwell “speaking” but it is also the voice of the indirect narrator.

Cromwell is presented as a modern man, who learns multiple skills as a mercenary fighting in Italy for the French. In other words, he is depicted as exactly the kind of hero Froude had in mind, only updated for the era of financialization. Cromwell’s talents are presented as bureaucratic organizing, especially filing, and the ability to render accounts. He regulates the money supply, like any good neo-liberal should. Mantel modifies the blustering great man thesis accordingly. History is shaped rather by the detail and the person behind the scenes. Describing Cromwell cooking up a deal with an ambassador she writes:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals the processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes.
So whereas for Froude and Carlyle, the double of the Great Man was the historian, for Mantel it is of course the novelist. creating a reality effect by the convincing detail.

And everyone says how realistic it all seems and that’s true because Mantel has in effect written a screenplay. She has the conventional dramatic opening scene that forms the youthful character, in this case a brutal beating of Thomas by his blacksmith father. We then jump cut to 27 years later, when Cromwell is already a successful administrator to the then all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey. The book is carried forward by dialog, rendered almost entirely in modern style with the occasional “in no wise” to remind us that this is the sixteenth century.

Much of the assertion is frankly hard to credit. Would an early sixteenth century father have thought that he should treat his children kindly because his own parents were mean to him? Or has a classic baby boom self-justification not been projected back five hundred years? Would Cromwell and Henry VIII have worried so much about the opinion of women, much as we might think they should and might like to imagine them doing so?

There is a strong literary revisionism at work in the book. Thomas More is made to say “Words, words, just words” so often that even the slowest reader will be reminded of Shakespeare. Other lighter references to Eliot and Joyce can be found. But the heaviest conflict is, oddly, with Robert Bolt’s old play and film A Man For All Seasons. The Catholic More is presented by Bolt as a civil rights hero, defending freedom of conscience against a tyrannical government. Mantel depicts More as a brutal inquisitor, willing to torture and burn all heretics that come his way. The imperial state is the good guy in this movie.

To create her central conflict, Mantel writes Cromwell as a convinced Protestant reformer, perhaps the one principle he is not willing to bend. Again, she follows the line of Carlyle and Froude in insisting that English empire was properly Protestant from the first. She defends the literate virtues of this Protestantism against the vanities of Popery and the excessive radicalism of Anabaptism alike. Where modern radicals have seen the Anabaptists of Münster as a precedent, Mantel sees only foolishness and male sexual desire. Catholics are simply deluded in their attachment to transubstantiation, relics and icons. The execution of More is nonetheless the denouement, Cromwell’s necessary evil.

You can’t help but read Wolf Hall to the end once you’ve started–at least. if you come from the cultural background that it takes for granted. For all its capacity to tell a good tale, Mantel’s exaltation of the financial bureaucrat, the imperial servant and nationalism in general but Englishness in particular are all to be rejected. Don’t go and see the inevitable movie with Anne Hathaway as Anne Boleyn, Michael Gambon as Henry VIII etc and I already hate the fact that it will win 15 Oscars.