Hilary Mantel – ‘Wolf Hall’ / Georges Simenon – ‘The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien’

At school, I took Early Modern History for A‑level, and did extraordinarily badly at it. My English teacher knew exactly why I could do his subject but not the other: History is hard work; you can’t skim along on intuition. Now, all I can remember is the date of the Battle of Bosworth (1485), and that some king or other (a Richard? an Edward?) died after gorging on apples. I don’t remember if we covered Henry VIII, but a vague recollection of the teacher talking about Cardinal Wolsey suggests so. I was as bored by the whole thing as Miss Brodie would have been, unless perhaps she had seen in Henry’s ruthlessness some of the good social sense she had divined in fascism. It’s not impossible: his reforms of the Church (piggybacking on Martin Luther’s) had the consequence that the Bible was printed, legally, in English, taking away much of the clergy’s power and mystery. It would have done nothing for the employment rate she was so fond of, though: the liberation was of the soul and the intellect, for those with the leisure to exercise them. And, of course, of the Church’s assets, into Henry’s hands, but I don’t expect there was much in the way of trickle-down wealth.

Mantel stares down my history-is-boring prejudice by placing an extremely prosaic character at the centre of her drama. Thomas Cromwell, aide first to Wolsey and later to Henry, is a practical man, whose reveries – though they may claim otherwise – are not the stuff of poetry:

The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It’s not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it’s there to open your heart to possibility. It’s like the scriptures: it’s there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spend of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year. (p. 365)

Almost every other character is more excitable than Cromwell, and this is what he relies upon. Connected to trade by birth and by the activities of his youth, when he ran away from his abusive blacksmith father to Europe, he understands what the dukes do not: that money is what matters, and that money comes from trade. He acts as a supremely efficient man of business, focusing always on the how over the why of what he sets in motion. He does have his own loyalties, but the early death of his wife and two daughters cuts him adrift personally, so that his career becomes all-important.

The problem, for me, was that I didn’t care enough about the bigger picture. Going back to the book for brief periods, the prose was never less than crisp and efficient, and it wasn’t dry in itself, but the apparatus it was trying to shift along was too cumbersome. Over longer stretches my attention wandered; I forgot who characters were, to which faction they belonged. I even read a Maigret novel as refreshment before the final push – which, to my consternation, didn’t even get us to Wolf Hall. Once, I opened the book at S.’s bookmark by mistake, and read this great passage, in which Cromwell demolishes Harry Percy, out of sequence:

How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sales of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. (p. 378)

The narrative concludes with the death of Thomas More, who is almost as dry as Cromwell, but just passionate enough in his dry religious beliefs for a trap to be set. Another point of comparison with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: sympathy is pushed in a direction it can’t follow, when so much regret is expressed (by the unsympathetic Duke of Norfolk, but also by Cromwell) at the necessity of executing More, essentially for his stubbornness in refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy. More’s torture and execution of Reformation sympathisers and campaigners means that few can have deserved execution more than he did. Cromwell’s position here is interesting, because he never forgets about More’s cruelty and sadism; rather, he realises that it would not be seemly for a man who was so recently Lord Chancellor to be hung, drawn and quartered, especially following the persecution of the previous Lord Chancellor, Wolsey (in the event, Henry is merciful and More is merely beheaded). He was the facilitator of most of the reforms which sprung from Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the consequent break with the Catholic church, but he wanted the effort to be invisible.

And Maigret? There are certain similarities between him and Cromwell:

Maigret was tall and wide, particularly broad-shouldered, solidly built, and his run-of-the-mill clothes emphasized his peasant stockiness. His features were coarse, and his eyes could seem as still and dull as a cow’s. In this he resembled certain figures out of children’s nightmares, those monstrously big blank-faced creatures that bear down upon sleepers as if to crush them. There was something implacable and inhuman about him that suggested a pachyderm plodding inexorably towards its goal.