Defending St. Thomas More . . . A Critique Of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall In Its Screen Adaptation

By JAMES MONTI

Part 2

(Editor’s Note: James Monti, the author of this two-part series, wrote The King’s Good Servant but God’s First: The Life and Writings of Saint Thomas More [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997].)

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As for Thomas More’s involvement as a governmental official in the execution of heretics, historians have only been able to identify six cases in which he played a direct or indirect role during his tenure as lord chancellor, (1) certainly not a spectacular number when compared with other parts of Europe (2) or with the five-year reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558), during which 277 were put to death. (3) In early June of 1535, while More was languishing in prison, Henry VIII’s regime with Thomas Cromwell at the helm burned at the stake 14 heretics. (4)
But more significantly, it is absurd to single out More as a cruel man for having accepted the practice of capital punishment for heretics when in fact most of his contemporaries, including many early Protestants, believed in this concept, seeing it as enjoined by the Book of Deuteronomy (13:1-11). (5)
More and his contemporaries inhabited a world in which everyone’s salvation and passage to eternal bliss in Heaven was considered everyone’s business. Their perception of the supernatural and the eternal was so vivid that the death of one’s soul and the prospect of an eternity in Hell were understood not only by the individual but by the society as a whole as a fate worse than physical death.
Hence the heretic, a person perceived as deliberately turning people away from God and toward Hell through the repudiation of one or more basic tenets of the faith, was seen as a murderer of souls (St. Paul describes them as “fierce wolves” — Acts: 20:28). It is for this reason that for centuries the Christianized kingdoms of Europe considered heresy the moral equivalent of murder and therefore a capital offense (this was also a time when even lesser crimes such as theft and forfeiting were punishable by death). (6)
Thomas More foresaw the catastrophic fragmentation of Christendom that was coming and, out of love for the Church, tried to do all he could to prevent it according to the commonly accepted laws and practices of his age. Times have changed, and things are done far differently now. But unjustly condemning our forefathers in the faith will get us nowhere.
Yet all the efforts in Wolf Hall and elsewhere to paint More as a torturer and heretic-slayer are, I believe, merely a cover story for the real target of the saint’s critics: More’s passionate apologetic writings. Significantly Cromwell’s fictional anti-Catholic tirade from the book version of Wolf Hall that we quoted earlier begins by decrying a so-called thousand-year-old lie and More’s “undivided church.”
These are in fact references to two of More’s fundamental apologetic arguments, namely that history stood on the side of the Catholic Church, which had taught the same doctrines in England for a thousand years, and that Christ intended His Church to be one, one in what she believed and professed, which is why all the Church’s councils, her saints, and her doctors stood in opposition to the novelties of the heretics. (7)
It seems that Hilary Mantel and others cannot forgive More for being an ardent and reasoned adherent and literary defender of the Catholic faith; his attractive personality and urbane wit make him all the more dangerous from their perspective, because these winning qualities can and do lead people to perceive the Catholic religion as a creed that many reasonable, sensible men and women actually do profess. Hence arises the need to cast More as a fanatic.
The events leading up to More’s execution are likewise mutated, falsified, and glossed in Wolf Hall to deny More any sympathy whatsoever as he pays the ultimate price for his convictions. Thus as Cromwell and Anne Boleyn watch Thomas More offer to King Henry his resignation from the office of lord chancellor, Cromwell sarcastically observes, “His great protest. England is just a stage to him” (episode 3). (8)
The depiction of More’s interrogation on April 17, 1534, which leads directly to his imprisonment for refusing the Oath of Supremacy, concludes with a monologue by Mantel’s Cromwell which is calculated to persuade the viewer that More’s account of this event, recorded in a letter to his daughter, (9) is little more than a tale invented by More to make himself look like a hero and his opponents like villains:
“He’s writing an account of today for all of Europe to read, and in it, we’ll be the fools and oppressors and he’ll be the poor victim with the better turn of phrase. He wrote this play years ago, and he sniggers every time I trip over my lines” (episode 4).
Mantel apparently wants us to believe that More personally contrived and orchestrated the reputation he was to gain as a saint and martyr by making his writings the vehicle for a cynical manipulation of how he would be seen by future generations. Mantel needs to resort to this absurd theory to explain away why the man she has cast as such a grotesque fanatic became one of history’s most admired men.
The day that More’s books were removed from his cell to punish him for his continued refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy becomes another occasion for an agenda-driven rewrite of history in Wolf Hall. When in response to Cromwell’s complaint that he failed to understand the distinction between martyrdom and “self-slaughter,” More answers simply, “Christ drew it” (a rare instance of Mantel putting in More’s mouth a reply worthy of the real man), Cromwell fires back by asking caustically how More could have the audacity to compare himself with Christ.
Here More begins to speak one of his most famous comments from his prison interrogations, “I do nobody harm. . . .” To these admirable words Mantel invents a response from Cromwell that serves yet again to undermine the viewer’s sympathy for More:
“You do nobody harm? What about Bilney? What about Bainham? You remember James Bainham, who you had racked in your own home? Who you had beaten and abused? His body was so broken they had to carry him, carry him in the chair to Smithfield to be burned. And you say, Thomas More, you do no one harm? You just be grateful, sir, that we have spared you the methods you use on others” (episode 4).
Beyond the fact that there is no credible evidence that More ever tortured Bainham (as we have said already) or Bilney, there is no evidence whatsoever that Cromwell would have used such an argument against More, nor was he in any position to do so in view of his own history of iron-truncheon tactics. Likewise implicit in this scene of Cromwell throwing the matter of Bainham in More’s face is the premise that More in the end is getting what he deserves, that he had become the victim of his own cruelty.
This of course fits into the whole schema of Wolf Hall to present a role reversal between More and Cromwell. It was in reality Cromwell who ultimately died as a victim of the very ruthlessness that he himself had engendered with and for the king.
Wolf Hall’s degradation of More climaxes with Mantel’s rewriting of the saint’s trial in Westminster Hall. As More feebly struggles to climb some stairs to reach his place in the court, the surprised Duke of Norfolk exclaims to Cromwell, “[He] looks like we’ve had him whipped,” to which Cromwell sarcastically replies, “And he says I never miss a trick” (episode 4).
The implication is that More is feigning infirmity to garner sympathy for himself, to make himself look like an ill-used victim. This is nothing other than a low-minded slur. In reality, from shortly after the death of his father (1530) onward, More had been suffering from acute chest pains that his doctor considered dangerous, an ailment that More believed had arisen from the many hours he had spent stooped over his writing desk. He was also afflicted with leg cramps and kidney stones. As he confessed in a 1532 letter to his friend Erasmus, “For when my health is weak, I am so listless that I accomplish nothing at all.” (10)
In keeping with the underlying premise of Wolf Hall that More must from beginning to end be presented as a victimizer rather than a victim, Richard Rich, the witness at More’s trial who perjured himself to bring about the saint’s conviction, is here presented as a faithful public servant who gives credible testimony against More. More’s energetic and categorical refutation of Rich is replaced with a depiction of the martyr as a befuddled, senile defendant unable to recall for certain what he did or did not say to Rich. Similarly More’s impassioned and articulate profession of papal primacy is entirely omitted from his post-verdict speech.

A “Dangerous Man”

Thus by tampering with the historical record of More’s trial (particularly through the omission of key details supplied by More’s son-in-law William Roper) (11), Wolf Hall bars the viewer from seeing More as he truly was, a man who stands tall in the face of perjured testimony and dares to speak truth to power. The consensus among a panel of legal experts and historians who collaborated on the most comprehensive study of More’s trial ever published (2011) was that Richard Rich indeed committed perjury. (12)
Even in the depiction of More’s execution the martyr is ultimately denied any sympathy, for it is schizophrenically interspersed with flashbacks of Cromwell as a boy being coldly snubbed by the teenage Thomas More (a total fiction), first when Cromwell brings More bread and the latter looks up disdainfully from his prayers while kneeling before a statue, then when More is playing a recorder at the window, and Cromwell from below waves to him, to which More reacts by stopping his playing and closing the window. Not surprisingly, More’s memorable last words at his execution are omitted.
A character profile for Wolf Hall posted on the PBS website speaks of Cromwell resolving to fight Thomas More because he realizes he is “dangerous.” (13)
Yes indeed, Thomas More is a dangerous man. He is a danger to those who seek to expel God and His Church from the public square. He is a danger to those who want a convenient Christianity tailored to their personal whims and pleasures, rather than one that will challenge them to seek the things that are above and establish a kingdom of love here below. And he is a danger to those who prefer not to think that there are eternal truths worth living by and dying for.
Mrs. Mantel, if you are reading this, I know you won’t be pleased with a lot of what I’ve said. But if you’re willing to rethink what you’ve done, there’s a great man standing on Heaven’s blissful shore who is ready to become your friend, a man who will inspire you, and show you what it truly means to be a Christian, and even make you smile, if you’ll just let him. His name is Thomas More.

FOOTNOTES

1. Richard Rex, “Thomas More and the Heretics: Statesman or Fanatic?”, in George M. Logan, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 105.
2. Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 74-75, 80.
3. Fr. Herbert Thurston, SJ, “Mary Tudor,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1907 ed.), vol. 9, p. 767
4. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, ed. W.D. Hamilton (London: Camden Society, 1875), vol. 1, p. 28.
5. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, pp. 78, 82-83.
6. Ibid., pp. 77-78, 81-82.
7. James Monti, The King’s Good Servant but God’s First: The Life and Writings of Saint Thomas More (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), pp. 148-150, 158-160, 168-248.
8. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Wolf Hall are from the screen adaptation Wolf Hall (BBC/Masterpiece, Company Productions, 2015 — adapted by Peter Straughan from the novels of Hilary Mantel). In compliance with copyright law, all quotations are used for purposes of criticism only.
9. Letter of More to Margaret Roper, c. April 17, 1534, in Stephen Smith, ed., For All Seasons: Selected Letters of Thomas More (New York: Scepter, 2012), pp. 224-228
10. Letter of More to Erasmus, June 14, 1532, in Smith, For All Seasons, pp. 150-151; see also letter of Margaret Roper to Alice Alington, August 1534, in ibid., pp. 239-240; letter of More to Thomas Cromwell, March 1534, in ibid., pp. 205-206; epitaph of Thomas More (composed by More himself), in Agnes Stewart, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas More (London: Burns and Oates, 1876), p. 359.
11. William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knighte, ed. Elsie V. Hitchcock, EETS, o.s., no. 197 (London: Early English Text Society, 1935). pp. 84-97.
12. Henry Ansgar Kelly et al., Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 2011), passim.
13. “Sir Thomas More,” Character Hub, Wolf Hall, Series 1, Masterpiece, PBS, PBS.org.