Flickr/lisby1Wolf Hall was meant to be a novel about Thomas Cromwell, but something went wrong. Wolf Hall itself, the country seat of Jane Seymour’s family, is only mentioned right at the end. Somewhere along the way the book was hijacked by its pantomime villain, Thomas More. Cast by the author in this unaccustomed role, he nevertheless manages to steal the show, as she ruefully admits through the voice of her hero, Thomas Cromwell (the traditional choice for villain in previous productions), who resentfully observes at one point that everyone seems to be acting out a play in which More ‘has written all the parts’. We should not be too surprised: as the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt noted, More was adept at on-stage improvisation. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall is defined in contrast to More, his common sense and decency set against a charge-sheet of fanaticism, superstition, cruelty, malice, and hate. The More of Wolf Hall is also defined in contrast to More, or at least to More as usually understood, for he is heavy-handedly stripped of all the sympathetic qualities credited to him by those who knew him and by the consensus of historians and biographers. Yet somehow, devoid of any redeeming features, he still overshadows the novel. It is his story that gives the drama whatever unity it has. His execution is its last act.
Things have changed. In his classic play A Man for All Seasons (1960), Robert Bolt gave us Thomas More as a liberal hero for the Cold War, a lone voice speaking the truth and standing up for the rights of the individual against the totalitarian demands of the State. Bolt’s play was a brilliant dramatisation of the liberal More painstakingly constructed by R. W. Chambers in his 1935 biography. It was not ‘the truth’ about More, but it was a persuasive transposition of the heroic Catholicism of the sixteenth century into the heroic liberalism of the twentieth. It told some of ‘the truth’ about More: he was in the end a hero, meeting death with fortitude and even a measure of humour. As he knelt down he stroked his long grey beard forward and laid it carefully over the block so as to avoid the blade, telling the executioner that he didn’t need it trimmed. Edward Hall, the chronicler of Henry VIII’s reign who put a po-faced paragraph into the mouth of Cromwell on the scaffold, was frankly baffled by the ironic cast of mind which enabled More to meet death with a wry smile.
The great Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton, determined as he was to exalt Cromwell as the defining genius of Henry VIII’s England, chose to make diminishing More an integral part of his enterprise, partly in reaction to Bolt’s iconic portrayal. Elton’s iconoclasm was taken further in the 1984 biography by Richard Marius, who advanced a sub-Freudian vision of More as a ‘failed priest’ haunted by a savagely repressed but slightly perverse sexuality. John Guy, who has written three of the most important books ever written on Thomas More, has comprehensively dismantled the Elton-Marius construct in his incomparable forensic work on the sources for More’s life. But it is the More of Elton and Marius who has become the villain of Wolf Hall, just as Bolt’s hero was drawn ultimately from the pages of Chambers.
