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

By JAMES MONTI

Part 1

(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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In a May 2012 interview, Hilary Mantel, author of the Tudor novel Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, openly declared her view that “the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.” (1) That, I suppose, would exclude from the ranks of respectable society myself and most of the readers of this column. It would also exclude from respectability about a billion of the Earth’s current inhabitants.
If Mantel had said such a thing about almost any other religion, she would have been roundly denounced as a bigot. But we live in an age when anti-Catholicism has been raised to the level of a civic virtue. Mantel’s opinions go a long way toward explaining why in Wolf Hall St. Thomas More’s reputation for sanctity and integrity is reduced to rubble with iconoclastic fury. Wolf Hall likewise throws red meat to those seeking to pummel the Catholic Church into submission to contemporary culture.
A novel that won the acclaim of the atheist Christopher Hitchens, Wolf Hall depicts the Catholic Church as a purveyor of fanaticism and superstition and Thomas More as the moral equivalent of a war criminal. By contrast, Thomas Cromwell, the father of the modern police state and a prime engineer of Tudor terror, is in Wolf Hall morphed into a beneficent superhero and 16th-century human rights activist.
In the BBC/PBS screen adaptation of Mantel’s story, this utter inversion of reality is set amid an enticing backdrop of authentically rendered historical events that beguile the viewer into believing that Wolf Hall is more fact than fiction.
Throughout this television mini-series, Thomas Cromwell serves as an interlocutor for Mantel’s interpretation of the people and events that pass before our eyes. Thus we are told by Cromwell in a conversation with King Henry VIII not to trust what we think we know about pre-Reformation England: “For hundreds of years, the monks have written what we take to be our history. I think they’ve suppressed our true history, and written one which is favorable to Rome” (2) (episode 2).
He describes the monks as mostly corrupt, wasteful, and exploitive of the poor, adding that the pupils entrusted to them for schooling receive no education but instead are turned into mere servant-boys. In another scene, Cromwell urges his wife to read William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, telling her, “Read it and you’ll see how you’re misled. No mention of nuns, monks, relics. No mention of Popes” (episode 1).
These vindictive diatribes against the Church are relatively mild when compared to what Mantel in the original book version of Wolf Hall has Cromwell say to Thomas More when the latter is sent to the Tower of London, a hateful screed that the BBC producers had enough sense to omit from their screen adaptation of Mantel’s story:
“A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, I hold it up and it shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many. . . .” (3)
It is rather odd that Mantel should bring up the subject of slashing bellies open. It’s something the Reformation England of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, freed from the so-called shackles of papal Rome, became quite proficient in, slashing open the bellies of many a priest, monk, and layman who failed to conform to their particular litmus test of ecclesial identity. (4)
But before addressing Mantel’s perverse projection of More as a monster of mythological proportions, we need first to set the record straight as to who her hero Thomas Cromwell really was.
When in Wolf Hall Anne Boleyn proposes to Thomas Cromwell that he should torture Thomas More to make him break his silence on the Oath of Supremacy, Cromwell answers, “No, madam, we don’t do that” (episode 4).
So Cromwell would never do such a thing, Mrs. Mantel? Apparently the official state papers of King Henry’s reign seem to have escaped Mantel’s notice. Thomas Cromwell’s recourse to torture and worse to achieve his ends is well documented. In a letter dated September 7, 1536, Cromwell authorized the torture of Fr. James Pratt (“to pinch him with pains”) to “fish out” information from him; the “pinching with pain” was subsequently carried out. (5)
In June of 1537 Robert Dalyvell, a saddler, was repeatedly racked upon Cromwell’s orders after an initial interrogation of the man had not yielded enough information: “And according to your lordship’s commandment, the Thursday at afternoon I brought him to the rack and there strained him. . . . Yesternight I proved him at his first coming, and about eight of the clock again, and in the morning after again.” (6) During Cromwell’s tenure as master secretary, the psychological torture of being publicly displayed in a wooden headlock, the pillory, was regularly used, with the victim’s ears sometimes being nailed or cut off. (7)

A Campaign Of Terror

But far worse than these “garden variety” instances of conventional torture were the executions that Cromwell engineered in a campaign of terror by which the faith that Englishmen from peasants to royalty had professed for a thousand years was suddenly a crime punishable by a gruesome death of disembowelment and dismemberment.
The first four victims of Cromwell’s police state measures were the four monks Richard Reynolds, John Houghton, Robert Lawrence and Augustine Webster (+May 4, 1535). When the jury failed to reach the guilty verdict that the Henrician regime required, Cromwell “in a rage went unto the jury and threatened them.” As the jury does not seem to have shared Mrs. Mantel’s perception of Cromwell as a warm and fuzzy gentle soul who cuddled kittens, they took his words seriously and gave him the required guilty verdict. (8)
The man whom Mrs. Mantel would have us believe could not countenance the thought of torturing anyone had Reynolds and his three companions dragged on hurdles through the streets of London to Tyburn, where, “While they were still alive the hangman cut out their hearts and bowels,” after which “they were beheaded and quartered, and the parts placed in public places on long spears” as a reminder that remaining a faithful Catholic in England was no longer considered respectable. (9)
On June 19, 1535, three more monks were executed in the same manner after spending their time in prison “upright, chained from their necks to their arms, and their legs fettered with locks and chains for thirteen days.” (10) Over the years that followed, others were to be starved to death in prison “with stink and miserably smothered.” (11)
On May 22, 1538, Cromwell directed and choreographed another ghoulish spectacle of inhumanity, in which the Franciscan Friar Blessed John Forest, after being dragged through the streets and harangued for three hours by the radical preacher Hugh Latimer, was slowly burned to death for two hours over a fire fueled by a wooden statue of St. Derfel. Ordering the burning to begin, Cromwell said to the preacher, “My lord bishop, I think you strive in vain with this stubborn one. It would be better to burn him.” (12)
Six months later, Cromwell, the man supposedly appalled by the execution of heretics according to Mantel, oversaw the burning of the Protestant John Lambert. (13)

The Sack Of Rome

As for Thomas More, in the fictional universe of Wolf Hall he is cast as a cruel, arrogant, and sanctimonious religious fanatic with a sardonic grin indicative of the pleasure he takes in the misfortunes of his enemies. The demonization of More’s character is virtually unrelenting from when he first enters the story up to his execution.
Almost every time More appears or is mentioned, he is either portrayed as doing something sinister, or Cromwell tutors the viewer as to why this or that action of More should be considered cynical, vicious, or hypocritical. Thus upon learning that More has accepted from King Henry the high office of lord chancellor, Cromwell mocks the saint’s piety, accusing him of having hitherto only pretended to want a life of prayer, lowliness, and modest means.
Later, in a secret meeting with supporters of the heretic William Tyndale, Cromwell warns them, “More will burn men” (episode 1). When Cromwell is told about a report from More that Lutheran troops sacking Rome (May 6, 1527) had murdered babies, he dismisses the story, adding that the soldiers wouldn’t be looting if they had been better paid.
The sack of Rome was one of the worst war crimes of its time, with atrocities ranging from the violation of women to the drowning of hospital patients in the Tiber River. (14) It is unconscionable that it is treated so lightly in Wolf Hall, but of course in this story whatever More might say, think, do or believe is routinely treated with scorn.
Casting aside the abundant testimony of More’s contemporaries, Mantel depicts More’s family life as grim. At the dinner table, the saint is portrayed as devoting his conversation to little more than bestowing vulgar Latin epithets upon Martin Luther and expressing gleeful hopes for the arrest of William Tyndale, as More’s family sits stone-faced, embarrassed by everything he says.
The jester William Patterson whom More employed for the entertainment of his family is depicted here as a mentally ill man cruelly exploited by his employer. Stephen Gardiner is made to mouth an attack on More’s character in this regard, not only accusing him of feeding Patterson poorly, but also observing, “It would be just like More to keep a fool who wasn’t. Just to embarrass people” (episode 2).
These attacks upon More are utterly gratuitous with no basis in fact whatsoever. In reality More compassionately counseled a mentally troubled man dogged by thoughts of suicide. On the morning of More’s execution, this man came and cried out for the saint’s assistance yet again, to which More replied by promising to pray for him. From that day forward the man was freed from his illness. (15)
Wolf Hall’s slur of More’s family life is but a side show compared to how it depicts More’s response to the growing tide of heresy. In a scene that more than any other defines Mantel’s view of More, the saint is portrayed coldly reading in Latin to a heretic imprisoned in his home, James Bainham, a verse from the Second Epistle of St. Peter (2 Peter 2:1) regarding false teachers who promulgate heresies; at More’s command a giant metal pincher is tightened around Bainham’s torso as he cries out in pain.
In a subsequent scene, More is fictionally depicted threatening to charge Cromwell himself with heretical activities. When Cromwell tells of having heard that Bainham had been racked, More declares that he would stop at nothing to achieve his purpose: “To save his soul, I would have had him whipped. I’d have had him burnt with irons. I’d have had him hung by his wrists” (episode 3).
The myth of More torturing heretics is a very old slur that More energetically refuted almost as soon as his enemies began circulating this accusation against him. If More had been the kind of man that Mantel projects him to be, he would have boasted about such behavior. The real More was dismayed by these rumors and strove to set the record straight in his 1533 book, the Apology, by describing in great detail what he did and did not do. (16)
Rather than denying everything in the way that those with something to hide often do, More tells openly of having sometimes temporarily imprisoned heretics in his home, but without torturing them in any way.
He then describes two incidents when he felt he had no other choice than to inflict corporal punishment in the form of a lashing, one regarding a servant-boy in his home who was teaching another child of his household heretical ideas about the Eucharist, and the other a disturbed young man guilty of committing lewd conduct against women during Mass at the very moment that the women were adoring the Blessed Sacrament following the consecration.
But apart from these two cases in which More was essentially applying a strong dose of paternal correction to juvenile offenders, and thereby deterring both young men from getting into worse trouble, he is unequivocal in his denial of ever having physically punished any other heretic whatsoever, declaring:
“And of all that ever came in my hand for heresy, as help me God, saving [i.e., except] as I said the sure keeping of them . . . never had any of them any stripe or stroke given them, [not] so much as a fillip [a tap] on the forehead.” (17)
So in More’s case, the only evidence that can be adduced against him amounts to nothing more than the accusations of his angry ideological opponents, evidence so dubious that neither Henry VIII nor Cromwell made any attempt to use it against him in their efforts to entrap him. By contrast, the evidence of Cromwell’s recourse to torture is provided by the very records that he and his colleagues kept of their activities.

FOOTNOTES

1. Quoted in Anita Singh, “Hilary Mantel: Catholic Church Is Not for Respectable People,” Telegraph, May 13, 2012 (webpage).
2. 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.
3. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2009), p. 463.
4. See Dom Bede Camm, OSB, Lives of the English Martyrs (London: Burns and Oates. 1904-1905), volumes 1 and 2, passim; Bishop Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests and Other Catholics of Both Sexes (Philadelphia: John Green, 1839), volume 1, passim; John Hungerford Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs Hitherto Unpublished (London: Burns and Oates, 1891), passim.
5. Letter of Cromwell in R.B. Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press), volume 2, no. 161, p. 30; September 25, 1536 reply to Cromwell with prisoner’s deposition following torture in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1862-1910), volume 11, nn. 407, 495, pp. 166-167, 200. Hereafter cited as LP.
6. LP 12, pt. 2, nos. 78, 80, pp. 25, 28.
7. G.R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 384-385.
8. William Rastell, “Rastell Fragment,” included in Fr. Francis van Ortroy, SJ, ed., “Vie du bienheureux martyr Jean Fisher: Cardinal, eveque de Rochester (+1535): Text anglais et traduction latine du XVI siècle” (part 2), Analecta Bollandiana 12 (1893), p. 254 (spelling modernized).
9. LP 10, n. 661, pp. 248-249.
10. Ibid., n. 895, p. 345.
11. Ibid., LP 12, pt. 2, no. 91, p. 32.
12. Spanish Chronicle (c. 1550), chapter 36, in Martin Hume, ed., Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), p. 80.
13. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments, fourth ed., ed. Rev. Josiah Pratt (London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), volume 5, pp. 234, 236.
14. 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. 136-137.
15. Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, ed. E.E. Reynolds (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1966), chapter 6, pp. 66-67; The Lyfe of Syr Thomas More, Sometymes Lord Chancellor of England by Ro: Ba:, ed. E.V. Hitchcock and Msgr. P.E. Hallett, EETS, o.s., n. 222 (London: Early English Text Society, 1950), book 3, chapter 17, pp. 260-261.
16. St. Thomas More, The Apology, ed. J.B. Trapp, volume 9 of Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, chapter 36, pp. 116-120.
17. Ibid., p. 118.