Hilary Mantel (1952-2022): Past Perfectionist

HILARY MANTEL’S SUDDEN death at the age of 70 came in the prime of her writerly life. To under­stand Mantel as a writer, we need to understand how she came to write the Thomas Cromwell trilogy — Wolf Hall (2009), Bring up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020)—which brought her many accolades, public adulation and two Booker prizes. Set in the time of the capricious King Henry VIII, the trilogy follows the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who climbed to the dizzying heights of chief minister to the king. Mantel skil­fully weaves Cromwell’s personal story with key moments in England’s history including the Reformation, the creation of the Church of England, and Tudor Poor Laws.

Mantel herself, one could say, experienced such a dizzying rise to become in the last decade or so the reigning queen of historical fiction. After a stint selling dresses in a department store in Manchester in 1975, and with little money to finish her legal training, and with little appetite for becoming a social worker, she began reading books (she’d bor­rowed from the library) about the French Revolution. In the 1970s, historical fiction meant historical romance. Though she hadn’t had academic training as a historian, she wanted to write about what happened, and when she couldn’t find a novel she liked about the French Revolu­tion, she began making one about the story of Robespi­erre, Danton and Desmoulins in A Place of Greater Safety (1992). But as she delved into the accounts, she realised that there were gaps and silences, and the project of filling these gaps made Mantel into a novelist.

“My concern as a writer is with memory: personal and collective, with the restless dead asserting their claims,” she said in an interview to the Guardian in 2017. Her own family history, though, was meagre; “a long line of nobodies,” she said.

We get a sense of her writerly journey in her author’s note to A Place of Greater Safety. She writes that she has used the evidence that exists and made educated guesses about the rest; that her account is not an impartial one: “I have tried to see the world as my people saw it, and they had their own preju­dices and opinions…I have been guided by a belief that what goes on to the record is often tried out earlier, off the record…The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.”

This was the interim position she occupied in her subsequent works including the Cromwell trilogy. “I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.” Her dictum—you become a novelist to tell the truth—she followed to the very end.

The 800-page novel on the French Revolution had no takers, not among the publishers or the agents she approached. Her fledgling marriage was failing and she was sick and in pain most of the time. So she decided to write a completely different novel, a modern one filled with awful characters living miserable lives, which became her 1985 debut, Every Day is Mother’s Day.

Ghosts and the dream worlds created the landscape of her early novels and also populated her final one, The Mirror and the Light. In her initial works, she wrote about “odd and marginal people” who were social workers (her 1985 debut), religious (Fludd, 1989), psychic (Beyond Black, 2005) or the French (A Place of Greater Safety).

Her fame as a historical novelist is tethered to the Cromwell trilogy. After experiencing a rebuff in her first foray into histori­cal fiction (the book on the French Revolution), it seems odd that Mantel decided to forge ahead with another one, this time focus­ing on Thomas Cromwell. Historical accounts branded him as a villain, a man who was responsible for plotting Thomas More’s execution and for engineering the split from the Pope and creating the Church of England with the King as its head (the English Reformation). Mantel, driven by a powerful curiosity wondered, if a villain, an interesting villain, yes? In her interpre­tation, Cromwell is an arch-plotter, smarter than Henry VIII but not meaner. As she delved into the historical records, her early prejudices about the man began to ebb. She spoke to her publisher in 2005 and suggested the idea of writing a book about Cromwell, one that had been lingering in her mind for 20 years. With 2009 being the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession, her publisher agreed.

Here is a glimpse into how Wolf Hall began for Mantel. “I could see it, rather than hear it: a slow swirling backdrop of jewelled black and gold, a dark glitter at the corner of my eye. I woke one morning with some words in my head: “So now get up.” It took a while to work out that this was not an order to get the day under way. It was the first sentence of my novel.” The person on the ground was Cromwell and the camera was behind his eyes as he watched his violent father kick him. The events were happening in present tense, and it didn’t make sense to call him Cromwell, she said, so Mantel called him “he”. Another unusual aspect of Wolf Hall was it duplicated not the historian’s chronology but the way memory worked: in leaps, loops and bounds. We see Crom­well’s character-shaping events in bits of flashback—as a soldier, a trader, an accountant— and move to his present as an emissary of Cardinal Wolsey’s project to liquidate some smaller monaster­ies and fund an Oxford college and a school. The first half of Wolf Hall is about Wolsey’s fall from grace and Cromwell’s domestic woes (his wife and daughters die in epidemics). The second half traces Cromwell’s rise in Henry’s court as he smooths the path for the King to marry Anne Boleyn. The book’s close third person present tense, modern diction, and sparkling dialogue carry the modern reader along at a spanking pace.

Mantel justified her use of the present tense saying that in contrast to a god-like knowingness of the past tense, the present tense seemed “natural for capturing the jitter and flux of events, the texture of them and their ungraspable speed.”

The Booker prize, the public’s greed for Tudor history, and most of all, the accessible prose and heated pace combined to make Wolf Hall a phenomenon. The Economist reported that in 2010, it had sold 2,15,000 hardback copies making it one of Brit­ain’s top-10 highest selling hardback novels of the decade. Wolf Hall, said one commentator, made historical fiction respectable.

Historical novelists, though, face questions about whether their work is legitimate, and whether their narrative is true. The trueness of the narrative for a reader is often found in the history books they grew up with, but as Mantel pointed out, a reader ought to be wise to the many kinds of evidence there are and how they can be used. “From history, I know what they [histori­cal characters like Cromwell or Danton] do, but I can’t with any certainty know what they think or feel.”

So how did Mantel, the novelist, approach history in a way that would be palatable to historians and other readers? “Evi­dence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it—information is not knowledge. And history is not the past—it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past,” she explained in an interview. However, readers still ceded historians moral authority and believed that they told the truth.

“What we have left of the past, when the centuries have run through it is simply a few scraps of writing, a few stones and scraps of cloth. It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance… It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them.”

In the Cromwell trilogy, she was fascinated by the undercurrents that run under political discourse and the elements that occurred at the symbolic level. Mantel’s concern was with the drama of the interior life of her characters, ie how Cromwell and the others thought (mostly) and felt (less so). And it was that point— where the enacted met the dreamed, where politics met psychology, where the private and the public met — Mantel tackled so brilliantly to reveal the drama fuelling the actions of those historical figures.

IN THE SECOND BOOK of the trilogy, Bring up the Bodies, we follow the fall of Anne Boleyn and the fickle Henry VIII’s desire to wed Jane Seymour. Cromwell, now the King’s Chief Minister, has to walk a dangerous path and find a solution that gets rid of the powerful Anne (whom he had championed in Wolf Hall) and smooth the path toward making Jane the queen. Through Crom­well’s gaze, Mantel shines a light on the machinations of Jane’s powerful relatives and Anne’s bold moves to hang on to power. The book ends in May 1536 with Anne Boleyn’s head struck off by a hired French executioner. Her crime: adultery.

The Mirror and the Light, the final and the most sublime part of her trilogy, spans the last four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life from the moment of Anne Boleyn’s execution to his own execu­tion in 1540. Cromwell, who was instrumental in concocting the false charges of adultery against Boleyn, breakfasts with the victors, but her death and the subsequent death of now-Queen Jane Seymour in childbirth puts his position on knife-edge. His powerful enemies gather and unite around the Duke of Norfolk, while waiting and egging the fickle king to lose faith in Crom­well. “Your whole life depends on the next beat of Henry’s heart, and your future on his smile or frown,” a gleeful imperial ambas­sador reminds Cromwell.

The Mirror and the Light brings us Cromwell’s interiority as he reflects on his past actions and tries to make sense of his own story—how a blacksmith’s son could become the second most powerful man in England. It is like he is observing himself as he reflects on his family, his dead children, and his betrayals and deeds done for his masters (Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII). As Cromwell nears his end, their ghosts crowd in, and he becomes more mysterious to himself. In the previous two books, his power depends on making himself indispensable to his masters, but not in this one. As an Earl, he enters the realm of dynastic politics and becomes personally powerful, but also more vulnerable.

His intelligence and ability to discern the true motives behind the courtierly masks, his strategy to keep the spies his enemies sent close because they might send a worse man, and his efforts to woo these spies into his camp by treating them well — all are brilliantly laid out in the trilogy. When those closest to him abandon him at the end, he is surprised because he had been a good master to them and had expected love and loyalty in return. Such naivety on his part surprises us, the readers. How can such a perceptive man have failed to perceive the true intentions of these spies turned friends turned enemies? But he provides us the answer in his musings on his early life as an apprentice to a Florentine banker. He tells us he still loves the Italian master who took him into his counting house, and that the relationship nurtured by a good master and those he governs is more precious than the love between father and son. His surprise then, comes from the hope he carries about human nature; that human nature will better itself if given the right conditions (as he had hoped for the poor of England with the Reforms). Through these subtle moves, Mantel humanises not just Cromwell but also history’s narration, one that combines the inner drama of the protagonists’ thoughts with their outer deeds. The Mirror and the Light is Hilary Mantel’s swan song and deserves the highest accolades for interweaving the symbolic and the dreamed in Cromwell’s inner life with the enacted and the perceived in his public life to create a rich historical tapestry, one that informs, illuminates and captivates the reader.

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