Bring Up The Bodies: there are no endings

In the period of enforced idleness brought about by a broken ankle, I’ve been reading Bring Up The Bodies, the second part of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy tracking the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s that began with Wolf Hall.

Short digression: This is the first book that I’ve read using Kindle on a tablet. 21st century though that may be, ‘tablet’ is a word that Cromwell would have recognised, for its function if not the technology.  The OED lists one definition of ‘tablet’ as ‘a small, smooth, inflexible sheet for writing upon’ and offers several examples of this usage from near to Cromwell’s time:

This tablet lay upon his breast, wherein, our pleasure, his full fortune doth confine. (Shakespeare – Cymbeline, 1681)

Had I not kept memorandums in my tablet, I could not possibly give any account of our proceedings. (Mme Darblay, Diary, 1780)

Anyway, back to Mantel.  Where she left us – at the end of Wolf Hall – Thomas Cromwell had freed Henry from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, engineered his union with Anne Boleyn by breaking from Rome, and had Thomas More executed. The book concludes in the late summer of 1535, with Cromwell, the king and his attendants stopping off at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, the seat of the family of Jane Seymour, ‘a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence, and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise’.

Jane Seymour as Queen, by Hans Holbein

And this is where the second book begins, with Cromwell flying his hawks, named after his dead daughters. ‘His children are falling from the sky’, are the opening words. ‘He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze … All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment’.

We are back where we were in Wolf Hall – inside the mind of Thomas Cromwell, this man who is firmly committed to forging a new England. Methodical, organised and capable, his past nevertheless seeps in when he’s least expecting it. There are moments when he’s beset by the ghosts of his own pain and loss, especially those of his wife, Liz, and daughters Anne and Grace, carried off in Wolf Hall by the sweating sickness, and by the death of his former employer, Cardinal Wolsey.

‘What I was trying to do,’ Mantel explained in an interview with the Telegraph, ‘is recreate the process by which memory does overtake us. In novels, people stop and ‘have a memory’ – but that’s not how it works in life. It’s some sensory trigger that sparks the memory off’. Where historical novels can often fall short, Mantel said, is in the creation of interiority.

Characterisation can often be complex but not deep, and I wanted to do something different in these books. I did want to get some sense of the narrative growing from the inside, and of us being behind Cromwell’s eyes – the idea of how a memory interpenetrates the events of today is really part of that.

We are inside the mind of this calculating man: seeing with Cromwell’s eyes, hearing with his ears, increasingly aware that, despite his manoeuvrings, he is advancing with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, moving forward into a future that is not predetermined,and where the risks are great.  I baulked at the technique Mantel adopts here, identifying Cromwell’s actions and speech in company with the words, ‘He, Cromwell’.  But, after a while it ceased to be an irritant.

Cromwell is surrounded by men of noble birth or Catholic leanings (often both) who, if they could, would destroy him:

Knowing this, he is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his indefatigable attention to England’s business. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood. At home in his city house at Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. When he saw the portrait finished he had said, ‘Christ, I look like a murderer.’

There are noblemen who despise his religion and suspect his works; most of all, though, they sneer at his origins:

How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. Some say he came up with the Boleyns, the queen’s family. Some say it was wholly through the late Cardinal Wolsey, his patron; Cromwell was in his confidence and made money for him and knew his secrets. Others say he haunts the company of sorcerers. He was out of the realm from boyhood, a hired soldier a wool trader a banker. No one knows where he has been and who he has met and he is in no hurry to tell them. He never spares himself in the king’s service, he knows his worth and merits and makes sure of his reward: offices, perquisites and title deeds, manor houses and farms. He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and he will introduce that same man to  aspects of himself he didn’t know existed.

Mantel’s style – which raises these books so far above most historical novels – creates the sensation of reading a dream.  Small moments are acutely observed, and vivid scene segue into one another, frequently shifting to a different location or a different set of characters with little explanation. It’s an austere technique, never filling out for the reader, as a lesser novelist might, what a room, a street or a building looks like, and only describing the clothes someone is wearing when it has some significance.

In a piece for The Guardian about her appearance at last year’s Edinburgh book festival, Hilary Mantel illustrated her technique by referring to a scene, early in Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell, from a window, watches Jane Seymour walking with Henry in the garden of Wolf Hall.

Cromwell does not realise it, but the king is falling in love. Cromwell regards them through ‘the wobble in the glass’ – the uneven Tudor glazing of the window. At times he cannot see precisely what is going on; nor can he hear them. This scene, said Mantel, is a hint about the nature of the book. ‘People are in your sightline one minute and then they bob out of it. And then there’s the wobble in the glass, and you have to change your position to try to follow them’.

It’s at Wolf Hall that Cromwell first recognises the king’s desire for Jane. He sees how rumours spread about Anne can be used, as he puts it, to ‘separate her from history’ and get rid of her. And he sees how he can use her fall to punish four men, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston and George Boleyn (Anne’s brother), who six years before performed in a masque at court in which they mocked the fall of Cromwell’s master, Cardinal Wolsey.  Interrogated later, Norris protests, ‘It was a play. It was an entertainment.’ In this world, though, there is no such thing.

So the ensuing story is one of Cromwellian revenge, secured by Cromwellian political adeptness.  As Cromwell maintains: ‘I am not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations’.  Other novelists might have made their focus the romantic element – the King, the Queen and the Lady – but Mantel unfolds the story through the eyes and thoughts of Cromwell alone.  This does raise the question as to whether her account of the man is a little to sympathetic.

I remember almost falling in love with the man when I studied the period for A-level History back in the early sixties when Geoffrey Elton’s England under the Tudors was the key text, having dramatically shaken up perspectives on 16th century English government.  Elton argued that Thomas Cromwell was the author of modern, law-based government which replaced medieval, household government.  By steering through the legislation that made lawful Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn lawful, the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, Elton argued that Cromwell laid the foundations of England’s future stability and adherence to constitutional government.

There are some striking passages in Bring Up The Bodies in which Mantel dramatises this view of Cromwell, giving rise to the thought that Mantel may be, ever so slyly, suggesting that the 21st century reader might look around themselves at their own society.  This is here account of Cromwell’s musings at what closing down the monasteries might yield:

England needs better roads, and bridges that don’t collapse. He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give employment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbours, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist. We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would all have the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat. What if their fathers before them were bawds, pickpockets or highway robbers? That signifies nothing. Look at him. Is he Walter Cromwell? In a generation everything can change.

As for the monks, he believes, like Martin Luther, that the monastic life is not necessary, not useful, not commanded of Christ, There’s nothing perishable about monasteries. They’re not part of God’s natural order. They rise and decay like any other institutions…

In another passage, Cromwell muses on how busy he has been, dealing with matters other than the problem of the royal succession:

In March, Parliament knocks back his new poor law. It was too much for the Commons to digest, that rich men might have some duty to the poor; that if you get fat, as gentlemen of England do, on the wool trade, you have some responsibility to the men turned off the land, the labourers without labour, the sowers without a field. England needs roads, forts, harbours, bridges. Men need work. It’s a shame to see them begging their bread when honest labour could keep the realm secure. Can we not put them together, the hands and the task?

But Parliament cannot see how it is the state’s job to create work. Are not these matters in God’s hands and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order? To everything there is a season: a time to starve and a time to thieve. If rain falls for six months solid and rots the grain in the fields, there must be providence in it; for God knows his trade. It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax, only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy. And if Secretary  Cromwell argues that famine provokes criminality: well, are there not hangmen enough?

Mantel is true to history here, in the sense that the historical records reveal the nature of the reforms which Cromwell was presenting to Parliament at this time.  But the question must remain: what kind of a man, really, was Thomas Cromwell? Reviewing Bring Up The Bodies for the London Review of Books, Colin Burrow wrote:

Cromwell is central to all this. When I reviewed Wolf Hall I said, roughly, that it represented this greatest of all the many great bastards in the 16th century as far too nice. Cromwell’s excess of sensitivity, indeed his Whiggish modernity of consciousness, is still there in Bring Up the Bodies, where he is, around the edges of all his plots, attempting to introduce income tax and a single system of law that might be fair for all, as well as working on a bill to protect orphans. He also repeatedly remembers his past experiences of the high points of Italian art. Cromwell was indeed a reformer, and did use his control over legal and parliamentary process to address larger problems in the commonwealth. But the crude question ‘Does this mean that he could have felt as much and as finely as he does in this book?’ still needs to be asked. The novel’s present-tense mode of narrative, focalised through a single principal character, has an intrinsic problem. It would be almost impossible to write this kind of fiction and make the central character a brute, since so much depends on what he or she notices and feels, on sensitivity.

Margaret Atwood reviewing the novel in The Guardian made an even more dramatic comparison:

Cromwell rose from obscure and violent origins through a life abroad – sometime soldier, sometime merchant – to become England’s top go-to man, the prime maker-and-breaker of fortunes and spines, secretly hated and despised, especially by aristocrats. He played Beria to Henry VIII’s tyrannical Stalin: he did the dirty work and attended the beheadings, while Henry went hunting.

Of course, Mantel is sophisticated enough as a novelist to avoid presenting a one-sided portrait of Cromwell.  There are hints throughout of his ruthlessness, and suggestions that, though his own hands may be clean, there are bloody deeds which he has had others carry out.  ‘If he had a grievance against you, you wouldn’t like to meet him at the dark of the moon’, someone says of him at one point; and, of the men that rumours say have been Anne Boleyn’s lovers, Cromwell thinks to himself, ‘I have probably gone as far as I can to accommodate them. Now, they must accommodate me or be removed’.

In the London Review of Books article, Colin Burrow suggested that Mantel’s hints and allusions ‘require you to see him as a kind of psychopath who has things done which he can’t bring himself to think about, who wants to keep his worst actions beyond the edges of his own consciousness while he tries to think of himself as the person who attempts to persuade the rich to take some legal responsibility for the poor, and who does a series of terrible things for the ultimate good of more than himself’.

Detail from a portrait of Anne Boleyn by Hans Holbein

At the start of Bring Up the Bodies ‘the falcon of Anne Boleyn is crudely painted up on hatchments’, replacing the pomegranates of Katherine of Aragon. At the end, Anne Boleyn’s fall is marked by similar, economical, symbols of the order changing: the heraldic lions of the dead Boleyn are replaced by the panthers of Jane Seymour – they only only need new heads and tails. Henry gives Jane Seymour a prayer book which had belonged first to Katherine of Aragon, and then to Anne Boleyn.

What this is all about, of course, is medieval politics of the most serious kind. For almost thirty years of his reign, Henry was consumed by his need for a male heir. Religious and political activity all drew inexorably to this issue. It was not until his third marriage that Henry had a son who lived. His daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, continued the Tudor line, despite Henry’s fear that his bloodline would end. But, Elizabeth never married, and she was indeed the last of the Tudors. The line did end: just a lot later than Henry had imagined.

In the meantime, Cromwell is charged with doing something about the problem.  Events move inexorably towards their conclusion, with Henry ordering an especially adept executioner from France to perform Anne’s execution quickly and efficiently. The narrative builds steadily towards the final scenes of trial and execution. The French executioner’s sword flashes and ‘the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.’

Cromwell is philosophical: ‘She does not look like a powerful enemy of England, but looks can deceive … If her sway had continued, the child Mary might have stood here; and he himself … waiting for the coarse English axe’. For the time being, Cromwell’s skilful moves mean that he has won. He has removed his former allies the Boleyns, and is left trying to make alliances with the unreliable Seymours. Meanwhile others threatens him from the wings. But Bring Up the Bodies is not just a revenge tragedy in which Cromwell manoeuvres to their death those who stand in the way of his master the King’s desires.  It also sets up the outlines of another tragedy, that of Cromwell himself:

During daylight hours he thinks only of the future, but sometimes late at night memory comes to nag him.  However.  His next task is somehow to reconcile the king and the Lady Mary, to save Henry from killing his own daughter; and before that, to stop Mary’s friends from killing him.  He has helped them to their new world, the world without Anne Boleyn, and now they will think they can do without Cromwell too.

The novel ends with the statement: ‘There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.’

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