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Wolf HallShelf life: Looking at secular booksWOLF HALL I guess we all know the story: Henry’s frustration and infatuation, the break with the Pope, Anne’s rise and fall. Wham, bam, England has turned Protestant in a rather inglorious way. Hilary Mantel has entered this tired territory and triumphed. Her 650-page novel relays the story from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, highlighting the detail of the period and offering a very sympathetic portrait of arguably the key figure in the break from Rome. The book starts with a beating: Cromwell’s at the hands of his drunken blacksmith father, and so we are introduced our subject and his times. From that moment of childhood we leap to Cromwell in Wolsey’s service, surviving Wolsey’s fall and rising to become Henry’s most trusted adviser. The book ends abruptly with Anne still Queen Consort, but Henry about to visit Wolf Hall where the dalliance with Jane Seymour will begin. Central to Cromwell’s aims are his religious affiliations. Only a couple of incidents from his childhood are narrated; and one is the burning of a Lollard, movingly and simply described. He is a Protestant, attending preaching meetings even while working for Wolsey. The other reformers are shown charitably as well: Latimer, Little Bilney, Cranmer (hurray) and others demonstrate gentleness and passion, the opposite of their nemesis Thomas More (boo, hiss). What stops this being an all rosy picture of Bible believers is the portrayal of the Boleyn family. Mantel shows Anne to be a controlling shrew, who is herself controlled by her avaricious and heartless father, their Protestantism used solely for personal gain. This seems to fly in the face of recent scholarly views, but, I guess, keeps Cromwell in the clear as it was he who (in part) engineered Anne’s downfall. For a more positive version of Anne’s life, do read Day One’s short biography, Anne Boleyn by Colin Hamer (£7.00). In short then, a great book; I was entertained, educated and thrilled. Thrilled because into the hands of the reading public has been put a book which portrays the Reformation, for all its politics, as an exciting and relevant period. I will lend this history to friends and I will talk with them about reformation today. As Cromwell observes in the book, ‘Only the gospel will guide and console you’. Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - January 2010 |