David QuinnHistory can be shaped to reflect perspectives, writes David Quinn
Most readers of this newspaper will probably have seen the movie A Man for All Seasons at one point or another in their lives.
Released in 1966, it was based on the Robert Bolt play of the same name. Paul Schofield played Thomas More as a man of deep conviction and erudition, patient in the face of adversity, kind and attentive to his family, dutiful, and finally prepared to face death rather than betray his conscience.
Thomas Cromwell, on the other hand, who succeeded Thomas More as Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, is conniving, ruthlessly ambitious, and an ignoble character compared with the noble More.
Thomas More is, of course, a saint of the Church, and the patron saint of politicians into the bargain. Few politicians will even lose the party whip, let alone face death for what they believe, and while St Thomas More was not a politician as such, the role of Lord Chancellor was deeply political. When Henry told Thomas to sign the Oath of Supremacy and recognise Henry as head of the new Church of England, the easy thing to do would have been to sign it.
After all, almost every bishop in England had signed it and so had the nobility. Why was Thomas More being so stubborn? Why could he not be ‘reasonable’?
Fantasy
Even Alice, More’s wife, wrote in a letter to Henry that he was in the grip of ‘devilish fantasy’ and therefore not responsible for his actions. Henry would have none of it and Alice probably didn’t believe it either but was desperately trying to free her husband from the sentence of death.
It is worth bearing in mind that although Thomas More was beheaded in the end, for a long time he was in danger of being hanged, drawn and quartered, a truly hideous death.
Mainly as a result of A Man for All Seasons we tend to think well of Thomas More. But Hilary Mantel has other ideas. She clearly dislikes More’s exalted reputation and wants to tear it down.
Mantel is the author of two historical novels about More’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Both of these novels have been condensed into a new six part drama for the BBC called Wolf Hall. Part two was broadcast this week. It is being rightly-praised as a very fine piece of television.
In any event, what Mantel has done is to swap the personalities and characters of More and Cromwell as commonly depicted.
Cromwell becomes the man of noble character and More the conniver, a hypocrite and a religious fanatic who wore a hair shirt in order to ‘mortify the flesh’ and sent heretics to the stake.
Mantel is a convent educated girl who has since become a vociferous critic of the Catholic Church. Her attitude towards More fits in with this.
Is Mantel’s criticism of More correct? I’m not a historian, let alone an expert on the period in question. I will instead refer you to The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd, which is regarded as the best biography of More.
Ackroyd is not a religious believer and therefore has no partisan reason to extol the virtues of More. Nonetheless, the More which emerges from his book is not too far off the More found in A Man for All Seasons.
The More Ackroyd describes is deeply admirable, the most educated man in the land, a Christian humanist, pious in the manner of other pious late Medieval people, a family man who thought his daughter should be as educated as any man, and a devoted servant of God and King until he believed the King had set himself against God by splitting from the Pope and Rome.
Real lesson
But the real lesson of Mantel’s revisionist depiction of More and Cromwell is this: a historian and a novelist can use history much like putty. Think of a recent figure like Margaret Thatcher. She has fierce critics and devoted followers. A critic would turn a historical novel about her into an attack; an admirer would do the opposite.
The reader would think they were reading about two entirely different characters. Which one should they believe? They would probably opt for the one that best suits their prejudices.
If you can do this to a recent figure, who most of us remember vividly and independently of any novelist or historian, imagine how much easier it is to do it to a figure who is distant in time, who we know nothing about apart from what the novelist or historian chooses to tell us?
Then we are really taking them on trust. They may in fact be writing in all sincerity. But the point is that another writer could take the same set of basic data about the figure in question and interpret them very differently.
Things get even murkier when we try to guess the motives of someone for doing something. Was Thomas More dicing with death because he had a martyrdom complex or because he genuinely felt he could not sign the Oath of Supremacy? More himself questioned his own motives. We all question our own motives sometimes. Do we want something for selfish or unselfish reasons?
So when a writer tries to work out someone’s motives, a lot of the time they are only guessing.
I recommend you watch Wolf Hall, but watch it as drama based on historical events and not as a true and accurate account of all the characters found therein because such an account is, in fact, impossible to obtain.