"Hans the Most Famous"* by Mary Hoffman

 

Hans Holbein the Younger, Self-portrait

Think of Henry Vlll and what picture floats into yoir mind? Or Thomas Cromwell, or Thomas More? The likely answer is an image painted by Hans Holbein the Younger, a German-Swiss Master who spent more than a third of his life in England and weathered the stresses of the king's marriages, religious reforms and and the many shocks that Tudor England was heir to. In fact you can't really think of the Tudors at all without the man who became known as the King's Painter.

There is an exhibition on till 14th April at the King's Gallery in Buckingham Palace (though it was still the Queen's Gallery when we visited it in January) called Holbein at the Tudor Court and it is well worth your time to go and see it. 

Young Hans was born in the autumn/winter of 1497 in Augsburg, Bavaria the son of Hans the Elder, who was also a professional painter. His older brother, Ambrosius, was a painter too and their uncle Sigismund (or Sigmund) seems also to have worked in Hans the Elder's studio. The boys would have been brought up in an atmosphere of portraits and altarpieces, of oil paints and book design.

Augsburg had been passed over by the plague that ravaged most of Europe in earlier centuries and, with access to the forests and rivers of Bavaria, had become a booming centre for timber, metal, paper and textile industries.The Holbeins lived in a three-storey building by a narrow canal, reached  over a little wooden bridge.

Hans the Elder's art was largely devotional, paintings and murals on religious themes, painting textiles and carpets in exquisite detail, a technical skill inherited by his younger and more famous son. 200 sketches survive from Hnas the Elder, mostly portraits. But art at the time was not valued in the way it became in later centuries. An "artist" was an alien concept in the Renaissance; even Vasari in 1550 wrote his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects without use of that term. The social position of the Holbeins and other what we would now call 'artists" in both Northern and Southern Europe was that of an artisan, someone paid for his labours as piecework or on commission.

But the prosperous merchants and bankers of Augsburg were keen to have their likenesses commemorated, whether in portraits or as donors on lavish altarpieces.

Ambrosius and Hans, drawn by their father

 

By his late teenage years Hans the younger had moved to Basel with his older brother Ambrosius, where they became apprenticed to another Hans, Herbster, Basel's leading painting of his day. They found work making woodcuts for use in book production in the young industry of printing and one of their first jobs was to drawmarginal pictures for a work by Desiderius Erasmus, the leading Humanist of BNorthern Europe.

A few years later it seems that Ambrosius might have died, since nothing more is recorded of his work. Young Hans, on the other hand, thrived, marrying a well-off widow, Elsbeth, who already had one sone and started bearing more children to her second husband. And in 1923, Hans painted his first portrait of Erasmus, who recommended the artist to his friend Sir Thomas More in England.

Desiderius Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger

 

Three years later and Hans quit Basel to seek his fortune in London but this was just his first foray into England. He went back to Basel for four more years, painting his wife and their two older children, in the time between many commissions. But Basel was a hotspot for Protestant Reform and the political upheavals there made the city a dangerous place for artists, whose freedom to paint whatever they liked was strictly curtailed.

Perhaps this is why Hans went back to London in 1532, where another kind of upheaval was soon to rock the Tudor court. By then Henry Vlll had convinced himself that the lack of a male heir from his wife Katherine of Aragon was God's punishment of the king for marryting his older brother's widow. At least, that was Henry's justification for wanting to divorce his wife and marry a young lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, in the belief she would bring forth a prince to inherit his crown. Henry was infatuated with Anne and took his case to the Pope and to anyone that would listen. To make a long and complicated story short, he solved his problem by splitting from the Church in Rome and becomiong Supreme Head of the Church of England - a strategem suggested by Thomas Cromwell, who was becoming the king's right hand man.

Useless then for Holbein to play his card of introduction from Thomas More, who was opposed to the king's second marriage, and he might have returned to Basel with his tail between his legs, since More resigned his role as Lord Chancellor in May 1532.

Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger

The coming men were of the Boleyn faction and Thomas Cromwell himself; Holbein lost no time in making himself known to them and it seems as if art won out over politics as this former protegé of More's gained favour at the Tudor Court. He started modestly, with portraits of rich merchants, which must have recalled his early life in Augsburg, but in 1533, Holbein painted what is probably still his most famous work, The Ambassadors, now in the National Gallery. Aristocrat Jean de Dinteville and  Bishop Georges de Selve were French diplomats for Francis 1, who were both in London at the time. 

This enigmatic painting, with the elongated skull in the foreground, has led to much speculation. It is said to combine the Arts and Sciences, religion and politics and its technical skill is beyond doubt. Maybe it was this that established young Hans, not yet forty, as the premier painter of the 16th century in England.

1533 was a momentous year for England and Henry. He had married his Anne but his divorce from Katherine had not been sanctioned by the Pope and he was excommunicated. Holbein was commissioned to paint a portrait of Anne Boleyn, but after her fall from grace and execution in 1536, all memorials of her were expunged from the record. This charming drawing of her in a night cap survives and is in the exhibition:

By 1536, Holbein the Younger was designated "the king's painter" (not the only one) and paid £30 a year by Henry for his services. Franny Moyle's magnificent book The King's Painter (Head of Zeus 2021) suggests that the king had a genuine affection for the artist and held him in great esteem. But it was a dangerous thing to be a friend of Henry's as Thomas More and Thomas Wolsey had found to their cost and Thomas Cromwell would in time experience. 

Earl of Essex (Thomas Cromwell) by Holbein the Younger

 

Holbein was not so associated with the Boleyns that he suffered for the connection after Anne's death and he continued to paint the prominent men and women of the court. In 1537, the king gave Holbein the commission of depicting his whole family in a mural for Whitehall and, although this work is lost, a copy of it is the origin of all our ideas of the Tudor monarch in his heyday, sumptuously dressed, legs apart in perhaps the first "power stance" of English politics.

Copy by Remigius after Holbein the Younger

 

The mural featured Henry's parents, Henry Vll and Elizabeth of York, behind him and Jane Seymour, his third queen, on the right. Holbein also painted a full portrait of Queen Jane, the sketch for which is in the exhibition.

Jane Seymour by Hans Holbein the Younger

As, surely, everyone knows, Queen Jane died shortly after giving birth to Hanry's only legitimater son and heir, who became Edward Vl. This was when things became perilous for Holbein, who was tasked with depicting the candidates to be Henry's fourth wife. One of the king's early choices was Cristina of Denmark, whose half-portrait is in the exhibition (a copy - for the dazzling full-length portrait you must go to the National Gallery).

Cristina of Denmark by Holbein the Younger

Henry's courtship of Cristina was unsuccessful - she is said to have valued her head too much to accept him - and a later candidate was Anne of Cleves. Hans painted a most beguiling portrait of her but Henry found it untrue to life. The disastrous marriage and annulment that followed might have cost Holbein his head, since it contributed to the execution of Thomas Cromwell, who had brokered the match. But Hans kept his head down, and attached to his shoulders. He had lost all his patrons - More, Anne Boleyn and Cromwell but he survived in the torrid world of King Henry's Court, to fight another day.

Anne of Cleves by Holbein the Younger (Louvre, Paris)

 

There is a miniature that might be of Henry's fifth wife, the ill-fated and short-lived Katherine Howard. Certainly many of Holbein's paintinhgs were copied as miniatures and circulated among Tudor nobles. The exhibition is full of these and many, many exquisite drawings - Mary Shelton, Thomas Wyatt, Thomas More, to name just a few. But you might want to supplement the experience with a an add-on trip to the National Gallery to see Cristina and the Ambassadors. And the National Portrait Gallery for Thomas Cromwell and a copy of Sir Thomas More. The shop at the Monarch's Gallery will sell you the catalogue but I recommend Franny Moyle's book in preference. It is lavishly illustrated and you should not skimp but buy the hardback, as the paperback is inferior.

What were the qualities that made Holbein ther Younger so prominent and his work so enduring in its appeal? Flattery certainly wasn't among them. The king looks powerful, yes, but his tiny mouth and meaty face are far from attrractive and Jane Seymour is positively plain. (Even Holbein's own self-portrait at the head of this post, painted in the year before his death, does him no favours). It is of course possible that standards of beauty/handsomeness have changed somewhat since Tudor times.  

Holbein's technical skills afre beyond doubt, whether in depicting rich fabrics, furs and lace in detail or the modest folds of a simple gown. His main strength seems to be an unsurpassed ability to present us with the sitter itself. Whether the figure is noble, distinguished, sly or "looking like a murderer." as a character in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy describes his poirtrait, he or she looks out at us over the centuries, saying "this is who I am; take me or leave me."

Hans Holbein the Younger died in 1543, at the age of around 46, possibly of the plague that ravaged London in that year. His luck finally ran out but at the time of his death he was the "most famous" English painter (he had taken English citizenship so let us claim him as our own). Nearly six hundred years later his works are exhibited in a sell-out show, which you should try to see before it closes. 

 

* from a poem by Nicholas Bourbon

'Still they come' by Karen Maitland

Clooties hanging on tree above Madron's Well

Earlier this summer, I was travelling on a country lane just north-west of Penzance in Cornwall, when I spotted a sign to St Madron’s Well. I followed a surprisingly well-worn footpath twisting through a woodland of ancient, lichen-covered blackthorn trees and ferns, which seemed to go on for miles. I confess I was on the verge of turning back, thinking I had missed the well, because many holy wells in Devon and Cornwell are simply little springs trickling out of a bank and easily covered by summer vegetation. Then I saw a few rags tied to a tree. As I walked further along the path, the trees around me became festooned with rags, ribbons, single shoes, tiny fabric bags and messages written on cloth in many languages, including Chinese. Some were weather-faded to the colour of fallen leaves, others so vibrant they clearly been tied there yesterday.

Stone stile and walls of St Madron's chapel beyond.

Had it not been for these ‘clooties’, I could easily have missed the well itself which was little more than a shallow pool of clear water, just a few inches deep, surrounded by trees and muddy bog. But further on down the track, I came across mossy stone stiles, standing like the battlements of an enchanted castle, and beyond them was the rough-hewn stone walls of the chapel of St Madron, its entrance guarded by a huge yew tree. Water bubbles out into a baptistry in the far corner, which comes from the same spring as the well in the wood. The baptistry, and the stone altar were covered in crumbling posies of withered flowers, shells, three-armed and four-armed Brigid crosses, and other offerings visitors had laid there. It was evident that this place is as much revered in new millennium as it has been for the last thousand years.

Entrance to the ruined St Madron's Chapel, Cornwall

Those who first sought it out in pre-Christian times dedicated this spring to the Welsh Celtic Mother Goddess, Modron, who some authors link to the medieval Arthurian figure - Morgan Le Fay. When Celtic Christians arrived, they wisely didn’t try to prevent people coming for blessing and healing to this well, but quietly replaced the old goddess with St. Madern or St Madron. But whereas Modron had been a goddess, St Madron or Madern is thought to have been 6th century male Celtic saint, possibly a disciple of St Piran. The chapel probably began life as a cell for a Christian hermit. He or she would have ministered to those coming to the leech well for healing and would have received food or gifts from the supplicants.

Stone altar in St Madron's chapel.

The pagan and Christian traditions practised at this site seemed to have co-existed in peaceful harmony until the Reformation, when Thomas Cromwell ordered the destruction of the chapel. The roof was torn down and the statue, which probably occupied the niche, was removed. But whether from superstition or laziness, Cromwell’s men could not bring themselves to destroy the chapel itself, and the walls, baptistry, stone seats and altar remain intact until this day. It is still roofless, but the canopy of trees provides a far more beautiful roof than either thatch or slate.

Thomas Cromwell and the Reformers may have thought they’d put an end to St Madron’s well, but local people continued to use it. In 1640, John Trelil, unable to stand or walk because of childhood injury to his back, had a dream telling him to seek healing at the well. On a Thursday in May, the day the well’s healing powers were believed to be at their strongest, he crawled to St Madron’s well on his knees, spent the night at the altar in the ruined chapel, bathed in the holy water, then slept on a grassy hump nearby known as St Madron’s Bed, where he began to feel tingling in the nerves of his legs. He returned twice more on subsequent Thursdays and was cured to such an extent that he became fit enough to join the royalist army, though that was perhaps a mixed blessing for he was sadly killed in battle four years later in Lyme, in Dorset.

Baptistry or second holy well inside St Madron's chapel

By the Victorian era, they realised there was money to be made from such places and a keeper of the well charged visitors for access. On Thursdays, during the month of May, ailing children were dipped naked in the well three times and passed around it nine times, then dressed and left to sleep on St Madron’s bed. To effect a cure, the ritual had to be performed in silence. Unwed girls threw crosses and pins on the water counting the bubbles to discover when they would marry. It was also thought that by asking how long you had to live, you would be answered by a series of bubbles giving the number of years.

Today, on the first Sunday in May, people come to stand in a circle and take turns blessing the person next to them with health and peace using a mixture of the water taken from the baptistry and from the well outside. They ask for healing of Mother Earth and provision of water for all people. It would seem that given the current concerns about climate change, Madron’s Well is just as meaningful to people now as it was to our ancient Celtic forbears.

Clooties hanging in the blackthorn above St Madron's Well

Thomas Cromwell by Mary Hoffman (review)

Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger 1534

In Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, Thomas Cromwell shows this portrait to his son Gregory. It has recently come from the painter, Hans Holbein the Younger. Cromwell tells Gregory that someone has told him he looks like a murderer. "Didn't you know?" the boy responds.

Holbein has not flattered his subject, it's true, but we see here the real man, with a firm grasp on his work, and on England. It is the man that Dairmaid MacCulloch gives us in his thorough biography, Thomas Cromwell: a Life.

Especially during the last decade of his life, while working for the king, Henry Vlll, Cromwell was everywhere, as a civil servant and politician, a man with considerable power both in secular life and over the church. He was incredibly hard-working, intelligent and with an impressive attention to detail. As one of his servants says on looking at the portrait earlier, according to Mantel, he was not and did not look like a man to cross.

What characterises his work and his personality is what MacCulloch describes as his "omnicompetence." That made me ache with longing for such a politician to take today's situation in hand. (Although it is unlikely he would have let us get into today's situation in the first place). At the height of his career, no-one bothered to write an address of correspondence to the king's secretary, later Lord Privy Seal: "His name would find him more easily than his exact location."

MacCulloch is generous in acknowledging the interest in his subject generated by Hilary Mantel's two novels. In a rare appreciation of historical fiction by a "straight" historian, he says, "to call them 'historical novels' does them an injustice; they are novels which happen to be set in the sixteenth century, and with a profound knowledge of how that era functioned.'

Coming fresh to biography from fiction, I was surprised to discover that Cromwell's father was possibly not a blacksmith but definitely a brewer and, though he was a bit of a thug, there is no evidence that he was brutal to his son. Thomas, as a teenager at the turn of the sixteenth century, took himself off to the continent, ending up in Italy, but not to escape his father. It looks more as if he was escaping Putney, in order to spread his wings and learn more about the wider world.

If that is the case, he succeeded brilliantly well; his facility with the Italian language and with continental mores came in very useful later.

MacCulloch has scrutinised what remains of Cromwell's vast correspondence. You might naturally expect that to consist of what was in his in-box but in fact in Tudor times it was customary to keep copies or at least drafts of letters out as well. In Cromwell's case, there are massive gaps, attributable to his loyal servants having hastily burned many documents at the time of his fall from grace in 1540. It must have been hasty as Cromwell's downfall unfolded as rapidly as any he had brought about for others.

For all of what is missing, MacCullough has meticulously sifted through whatever was available and constantly turns the figure of Cromwell round to cast light on unexpected facets. There is a salutary reminder that it was Cardinal Wolsey, not Cromwell, who started the programme of systematic dissolution of the monasteries, so closely associated with Henry Vlll and his right hand man.

Because Cromwell had been Wolsey's right hand man until the cardinal's fall, as inevitable as, though less speedy than Cromwell's own a decade later. Cromwell's loyalty to his former patron is as unshakeable as it is occasionally unwise. Take the coat of arms (above) he took up to reflect the importance of his position in court in 1532, when he was granted lands in Wales. If you compare it with that of Cardinal Wolsey (below) you will see the similarity.

Cromwell took the 'chief'  (the headband) of Wolsey's coat and made it his 'fess,' (central band). In both cases there is a red rose, symbol of the king, between two Cornish choughs. MacCulloch calls this "a defiant statement of support" for the cardinal. (The chough, with its heraldic associations with Thomas Becket, had become the appropriate symbol for all Thomases).

In spite of his competent organising of events like Queen Anne's coronation in 1533 or the meeting with the French court in Calais and Boulogne in 1532, Cromwell was not made so much as a knight until after Anne Boleyn's death. No glamorous titles and robes for him; instead he was put in charge of sewers.

That meant something different in 16th century England from what it does today. It included weirs and waterworks and Cromwell tackled the commission with the energy and attention to detail he seemed to bring to every project that passed through his hands. As well as becoming the most powerful and dangerous man in England, he was certainly one of the busiest in Europe.

But what we want to know about is his relationship with Anne Boleyn and her fate. In spite of the profound effect Cromwell had on the running of England, some of which is apparent to this day, it is his involvement in the king's marital affairs that dominate the life of this remarkable man.

MacCulloch says that Henry's first marriage was "for dynastic reasons," which is a bit harsh. It was honourable and conscientious of the teenage prince to take on his late brother's widow and it seems as if that was not in accord with his father's wishes, whose treatment of Katherine of Aragon was less than kind.

However, there was no doubt by the end of the 1520s that Henry had set his mind on a new young wife, to give him the longed-for heir and this time the match was not dynastically valuable. Cromwell was as energetic in pursuing ways the king could annul his marriage as he was about every task he was given. But he and Anne had a complex relationship.

For a start, Cromwell could not forgive her the role she played in the downfall of his old mentor Thomas Wolsey. Then there was the fact that in all political manoeuvrings she favoured France, where Cromwell leaned more towards the Holy Roman Empire. In the delicate seesaw of continental politics and with the history of Anglo-French hostilities, the queen's personal preferences sometimes caused Henry to be at odds with his Secretary's advice.

Nevertheless, Cromwell did everything he could to bring the king's first marriage to an end and to facilitate the new union with Anne Boleyn. This was Cromwell as fixer and he was of course successful. After a clandestine wedding in at the end on January 1533 (and possibly an earlier even more clandestine ceremony), there was a triumphant coronation for Anne in May. All organised by Henry's most efficient minister.

There was a blip in Henry's plans in September when his first child with Anne was a girl (not knowing that "blip" would be one of England's most successful monarchs).

But opposition to the marriage didn't stop with the coronation and it was Cromwell's job to make sure that everyone fell into line with the king's decision to place his position of head of the Church in England above any ruling from the Pope. He had been excommunicated in July.

The recalcitrant clerics Thomas More and John Fisher, who baulked at signing the oath of Supremacy, did not stand a chance against Cromwell. In early 1535 he had been made "Vice-Gerent in Spirituals (note: not Vice-Regent, though the anagram has had an irresistible pull over the centuries), which enabled him to act for Henry in church matters. And this he did by means "complex and crabwise."

Fisher and More were beheaded in the summer of 1535, only months after the new Pope, Paul lll, had made Fisher a cardinal. This seems to have incensed the king even more against the stubborn bishop.

So, now we come to the central event of Henry's downward spiral into tyranny and cruelty (my words, not MacCulloch's) and this where I feel there is a lack in this biography. Just one chapter of 24 pages and of those only 17 devoted to the the most tumultuous four months of the king's reign, dispatch Queen Anne almost as rapidly and cursorily as happened to her in real life.

So Anne's life comes to an end but not Cromwell's - not yet - and in the summer of 1536 he is made Lord Privy Seal, the pinnacle of his secular influence. Henry has already re-married, to quiet, compliant Jane Seymour and is once gain enjoying marital happiness. Cromwell is created a baron and therefore a knight; there are even rumours that he might marry "Lady Mary," the deposed princess, now declared illegitimate but with the blood of kings and queens in her veins.

But Cromwell was pursuing evangelical reformation rather than marriage. It was his son Gregory, now seventeen, who was on the market – and he made a match almost as daring as his father's to Mary would have been: he married the king's sister-in-law.

Elizabeth Seymour, Queen Jane's younger sister, aged about twenty at the time, had been married and widowed already and had two children. In one swift stroke, Thomas Cromwell had made himself part of the Royal Family, not exactly the king's uncle, but pretty close. Not bad for the brewer's son from Putney.

Holbein, portrait of a lady, possibly Elizabeth Cromwell

In October, Queen Jane gave birth to Henry's longed for legitimate son and heir, Prince Edward. (His illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, had died shortly after witnessing Anne Boleyn's execution). The general joy was soon mitigated by the death of the queen. It was a blow for the king but it put him back on the market as a still very eligible groom.

Perhaps the death of Jane Seymour marks the beginning of Cromwell's slide down the ladder of his considerable achievements? Although further ennoblement awaited, it was the negotiations for a fourth queen that began the process that would lead rapidly to his disgrace and death.

Cromwell favoured a foreign wife for Henry, Archbishop Cranmer an English one. As we all know from the endless Tudor studies in school curricula, Cromwell backed the wrong horse. It was an uncharacteristic false step for such a shrewd man. Henry did not like his new bride. More specifically, he didn't fancy her.

In mid-March 1537, Cromwell was created Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain but two months later he was in the Tower for treason. What happened? The unsuccessful marriage to Anne of Cleves was part of Henry's deep disappointment with his chief minister – the king launched an annulment in early July – but also significant was the build up of Cromwell's enemies at court.

The king was cracking down on evangelicals too, which made Cromwell's position vulnerable. And Henry was already eyeing up a fifth wife, making presents to a pretty young lady-in-waiting called Katherine Howard, another niece of the Duke of Norfolk, by now Cromwell's sworn enemy. In the hectic spring and summer months of 1540, Cromwell's fate could have gone either way, honours and titles one minute, imprisonment the next.

Holbein Henry Vlll in 1540

But once Henry did make up his mind against someone he was implacable, as Cromwell had good reason to know. In spite of begging letters from the man himself and a defence by Archbishop Cranmer, who had also argued in vain for Anne Boleyn's life, Cromwell was executed on 28th July.

On the same day the king married Katherine Howard.

Everything else is aftermath but MacCulloch certainly hurries the new queen Katherine off the scene, without discussing the causes of her fate, and turns to the "eirenic" Katherine Parr. (It means something like "seeking peace" but also has a technical meaning in church matters involving the reconciliation of different denominations).

Gregory Cromwell was made a baron and was one of the six stave-bearers who upheld the canopy over the king's coffin in February 1547 and was made a Knight of the Bath at Edward Vl's coronation, the flow of honours not halted by the fate of his father. Indeed there is evidence that Henry soon regretted getting rid of his most competent and diligent minister.

Diarmaid MacCulloch saves any summing up of Cromwell's life to the last page and a bit of this 552 page book but sees his legacy as the confirmed Protestantism of first Edward and then Elizabeth l. He even suggests that this paved the way for the birth of the British Empire. It seems that Thomas Cromwell has a lot to answer for.


(Many thanks to Ann Jungman for lending me her copy when I had to send mine back to the London Library).

 









 

The Lady in the Tower by Lynne Benton

In 1503 Walter Hungerford III was born at Heytesbury, Wiltshire, the only child of Sir Edward Hungerford of Farleigh Hungerford, Somerset, and his first wife, Jane Zouche.  They lived in his family home, Farleigh Castle in Wiltshire, which I was lucky enough to visit recently.  And it was there that I learnt the story of the Lady in the Tower.

The remains of Farleigh Castle today

Walter was nineteen when his father died in 1522, and soon afterwards became squire to Henry VIII.  He married three times, but prospered only after his third marriage in 1532 to Elizabeth, daughter of John Hussey, first Baron Hussey of Sleaford.  Walter was keen for advancement, so he asked his father-in-law to recommend him to Henry VIII’s rising minister Sir Thomas Cromwell.  This Hussey did, and subsequently let it be known that Walter would like to become Sheriff of Wiltshire, a desire which was gratified in 1533.  Walter became Cromwell’s agent in the Farleigh area, a service which bore fruit in 1536 when he was created the first (and last) Lord Hungerford of Heytesbury.  Thus far his third marriage had served him well.

The Hungerford coat of arms

However, by that time his father-in-law, John Hussey, had fallen out of favour at court, so in punishment Lord Walter began to persecute his unfortunate wife Elizabeth.  His treatment of her was remarkable for its brutality.  He locked her in a tower at Farleigh Castle

The tower probably used for her incarceration

and kept her there for four years, during which time his chaplain, William Bird, brought her food and drink.  However, she didn't trust Bird, and in around 1539 she wrote an appeal for protection to Cromwell, saying that she was “continually locked in one of my Lord’s towers in his castle … these three or four years past … under the custody of my Lord’s chaplain, which has once or twice heretofore poisoned me.”  She claimed that she was often reduced to drinking her own urine, and that without the charity of “poor women of the country” who “brought me to my great window, in the night, such meat and drink as they had”, she would have starved to death.  Apparently they rigged up a basket and pulley system through a window in the tower, and provided her with food and drink.  This may have been the window they used.

The window in the tower

It is not known whether Cromwell ordered Elizabeth’s release on receipt of her letter, but by that time Henry VIII was becoming increasingly worried about uprisings in the country protesting about his break with the Roman Catholic Church and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  For this reason Thomas Cromwell, the King’s Chief minister, also fell out of favour. 

Sir Thomas Cromwell

Unsurprisingly it was not long before the king also caught up with Cromwell’s protégé, Lord Walter, and in 1540 he accused Walter, together with William Bird, of sympathising with the so-called “Pilgrims of Grace”, a popular uprising that had begun in Yorkshire in 1536 and was spreading.  The members were protesting not only about Henry’s split from Rome and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but also about Thomas Cromwell’s policies and other political, social and economic grievances. 

On 28^th July 1540 both Lord Walter Hungerford and Sir Thomas Cromwell were beheaded on Tower Hill: Cromwell for treason and Lord Walter for treason, witchcraft and the then capital crime of homosexuality.  Contemporaries noted that Lord Walter had gone mad by the time of his execution, ‘for he seemed so unquiet, that many judged him rather in a frenzy than otherwise.’

After her husband’s death Elizabeth was finally released from the tower.  She survived, and subsequently married Sir Robert Throgmorton, with whom she had five daughters.  She died peacefully in 1554.

website: www.lynnebenton.comwww.lynnebenton.com

latest book: "Danger at Hadrian's Wall"

'CRINGING' HISTORICAL NOVELISTS: Elizabeth Fremantle on Mantel at the Oxford Lit Fest

There has been a ruffling of feathers amongst the authors of historical fiction since Claire Armistead's piece in The Guardian suggested that Hilary Mantel, speaking at The Oxford Literary Festival, 'appeared to let slip the dogs of war against her fellow historical novelists'. Armistead's inflammatory article, it turns out, was based on a single comment about bibliographies, in a talk rich with fascinating detail about Mantel's writing, Cromwell, history and the imagination.

Mantel

I was there, in the god's at the Sheldonian Theatre, listening to Mantel and, as one of those historical novelists Mantel was supposed to be attacking, I couldn't have been less aware of the alleged assault. Indeed, I felt that Mantel was mounting a lively defence of historical fiction and its authors, implying that the novel about past events has a legitimacy all of its own. In her opinion it is not necessary for novelists to 'burnish their research credentials' with a lengthy bibliography, or engage in what she termed 'apologetic cringing' because they think they are 'some inferior form of historian.' She seemed to me to be saying that, far from inferior and purveying a misleading version of the past, much historical fiction stands on equal footing with the work of academic historians.

Armistead's piece had many of my historical novelist friends mounting their own defence of their use of bibliographies in their work and their reasons for doing so: all legitimate. Personally, with regards to my own work, I felt Mantel had hit the nail on the head. My first two novels included vast and unwieldy bibliographies precisely because I felt I needed to prove the depth of my research – was a little ' apologetic' and 'cringing', if you like. As my confidence has grown I have felt more able to allow my fiction to stand alone.

Of course Mantel's comments must be seen in the context of the talk itself which was a discussion with Diarmaid McCullough, the foremost Reformation specialist, whose biography of Thomas Cromwell will be out in the autumn. McCullough is one of those academic historians whose research must be backed up by a lengthy bibliography, that is the way academia works, and Mantel was bound to take an opposing position in the name of fiction. The novel, she said, interpreting the same material through the prism of the imagination, 'is not about misleading, it is seeing something differently' and tends toward 'symbolic application'. Research, for her, 'is not looking things up' but is dependent upon 'a whole other state of imagination being entered into,' that has its own 'authority'.

MacCullough

I understood this as a defence against those who suggest that historical fiction is an inferior form and I for one appreciated such defiance from someone with Mantel's illustrious credentials. I also enjoyed the fact that she referred to herself as a 'historical novelist', a term that is often sneered at, when she might just as easily called herself a literary novelist. So far from launching her attack dogs she seemed to me, in her own idiosyncratic way, to be using her considerable traction to support the genre.

What Armistead didn't mention is that those present were offered a tantalising glimpse of the long awaited third book in Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, which she made clear is still very much unfinished. She read the opening passage, which returns to the ending of Bring up the Bodies and the execution of Anne Boleyn but with a different emphasis, looking towards the fallout for Cromwell's part in the downfall of the Queen. It points to a satisfying intention to book-end The Mirror and the Light with execution scenes, as surely it will end with Cromwell's.

I for one am eagerly anticipating part three and will leave you with this line to whet your appetites: 'The blade cut through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk.'

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four Tudor set novels. Her latest, The Girl in the Glass Tower, is published by Penguin. You can find out about her work on elizabethfremantle.com

SEEKING THE TRUTH IN A 'BOGUS' HISTORY – Elizabeth Fremantle

A chance encounter with Toby Litt the other day made me go back and take a look at his essay titled Against Historical Fiction. It is an oft-quoted and gently provocative piece that frequently puts the noses of historical fiction writers out of joint by calling their work ‘deeply bogus’ and suggesting the term historical fiction is an ‘oxymoron’. But, though Litt is clearly not a fan of historical fiction, it is easy to take what he says out of context.

He suggests historical fiction is created in ‘bad faith’. Though it is clearly a critical point it is not intended to be insulting or derogatory but to describe the function of fiction about the past and the contract between reader and writer. He takes the term ‘bad faith’, in a philosophical sense, from Sartre, as to mean the vacillation between what is known to be fact and what is purely speculative. He opposes this with history books, which he deems are ‘written in good faith’, meaning by this that they aspire to truthfulness.

It would be tempting to argue that even documented historical ‘fact’ can be subject to unreliability and misinterpretation. We know ‘the truth’ is a slippery concept and that the writers of history often have their own political agendas at play in their work, but it is Litt’s statement about it being only, as it were, ‘proper’ history that seeks, ‘in an honest way,’ to say something ‘useful or truthful about the past’ that interests me more.

What he seems to be saying is that the intentions of the ‘proper’ historical writer and the historical novelist are in opposition to one another. This is tricky territory as it lumps together the aims of all those who set their fiction in the past. Each novelist surely has a different, subjective, aim for his or her fiction. Some may indeed be simply be using history as an exotic screen on which to project stories with contemporary sensibilities, wilfully flouting known 'truths' for the sake of the aims of their particular narrative. Others, though, might be seeking to exploit the imaginative space between the known 'facts' of the past as a way to tell the untold stories, or as attempting to use historical parallels as a way to better understand the present.

Take, for example Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, a fiction which used the Salem witch-trials of the 1660s as a way to speak about the McCarthy investigations into un-American activities that swept through Hollywood during Miller’s time. The parallels of these two events, and Miller’s fictional account of the former, allowed those living through the McCarthy witch-hunts to scrutinise a contemporary event through the lens of a historical parallel.There are many such stories from the past, which could be used to shed light on the present. The recent US election brought to my mind the vilification and downfall of Anne Boleyn – a woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking to operate in a misogynist political arena. Hillary Clinton, like Boleyn, was labelled a ‘witch’, crooked, corrupt, unwomanly, unfit and even as having committed treason. This, for me, makes Anne Boleyn’s story potentially relevant as a feminist narrative. And it is fiction that would have the power and license to put it to work as a mirror to contemporary political misogyny. In this way fiction can be a means to access another, different kind of truth.

The late great Lisa Jardine discussed the role of fiction in history in Radio 4’s A Point of View (2014) in which she talks about her response to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, a fictional account of a meeting between two scientists who each played a role in the development of the atom bomb. She said, ‘Sometimes it takes something other than perfect fidelity to sharpen our senses, to focus our attention sympathetically, in order to give us emotional access to the past.’ So, where the ‘proper’ historical author might be seeking an empirical truth the fiction writer might in turn be seeking an emotional truth; but there is an inevitable blurring of the boundaries between these apparently opposing positions. Facts and events do not occur in a vacuum without a human response. It is the feelings that events inspire that many fiction writers aim to access.

Fiction is simply another mode through which we can understand history. Take Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell, which go against the prevailing historical narrative of Thomas More as a ‘good’ person and Cromwell as ‘bad.’ Mantel does what a biographer cannot, she depicts Cromwell (a man about whom relatively little is known, given the enormity of his legacy) as a rounded individual, a vengeful and ambitious man who oversaw despicable acts yet also was capable of fierce loyalty and tenderness, who loved his wife and children. She places him as an entire person in her fictional world, extrapolating his love for his daughter from a touching line in his will. This view is assumption – plausible, yet not fact.

But Mantel’s choice of Cromwell as protagonist in her fiction allows us to look at ideas about social mobility, both then and now. The authorial admiration for a man who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from obscurity to high office bubbles up through the text but it doesn't make it any less relevant or useful as a narrative describing both the past and the present. This is not history in the conventional sense but it shines a light into the dark crannies of history making a valid and interesting depiction of an inaccessible past.

We can’t help but regard the past through the prism of our own particular time. So the Cromwell of Robert Bolt’s mid 1960s play and film A Man For all Seasons is different to the Cromwell of Wolf Hall, more than forty years later, precisely because they are speaking to different generations. So when fiction is historical it is also necessarily contemporary. Fiction exists to ask questions and it is a valid enquiry to ask about how we regard the past and how the past impacts on the present.

Many writers now look to the past to tease out the stories of those who lacked a voice in, or were deemed insignificant by, mainstream history. Often the historical record is partial when it comes to such narratives so fiction serves to fill in the gaps. Previous generations have focused on women’s stories almost exclusively from a romantic perspective, as this upheld the prevailing narrative of the time that women were politically unimportant. You only have to look at the way the Victorians chose to see a figure like Katherine Parr as an obedient nursemaid to a tyrannical husband when contemporary narratives see her as a highly intelligent political activist and author. It is possible she was both of these things but we reject the story of obedience now, as it doesn’t fit with our view of how women should behave in the twenty-first century. We increasingly seek out women from the past who sought to define their own existence in a world that denied them that right, as this chimes with our prevailing ideals of feminism. Using fiction to look between the lines of history urges us to scrutinise our present attitudes and better understand them.

The invisible stories are important. The fact that Homosexuals (even the term is only a century old) and ethnic minority groups barely existed in the received western historical narrative doesn't mean they weren't there. And it becomes the role of fiction to imagine a plausible narrative and fill in the empty spaces as authors like Sarah Waters and Toni Morrison have done to great effect. At this moment in our cultural history we are preoccupied with issues about gender identity and multi-culturism so it seems natural that we might also look to the past even if only to see how far we have progressed but also to ensure we don’t return there.

If we are to learn from the past then we must first seek to understand it and fiction is another tool by which we can do this. Jardine quotes Michael Frayn, to make her point. ‘The great challenge is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions, The only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’ For me this goes some way to demonstrate that though the term historical fiction may seem oxymoronic there is deception in history just as there is truth in fiction and both serve a useful purpose in helping us to understand the present.

References:

Litt, Toby – Against Historical Fiction – Irish Pages, Vol. 5, No 1. Language and Languages (2008), pp 111-115

Jardine, Lisa – A point of view: When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact, BBC 2014

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four novels set in the Tudor and Elizabethan period. For information about Elizabeth Fremantle's fiction see elizabethfremantle.com

Cromwell at the Swan by Mary Hoffman

Achieving the impossible - a review of the RSC productions of Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies

Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn

When I first heard that Ben Miles was to play Thomas Cromwell in the RSC adaptations of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, my instinctive reaction was "but he's much too good-looking."

I was wrong, of course. Miles has reached that point in his acting career where a piece of imaginative casting like this gives him the chance to throw off the shackles of early romantic lead swoonworthiness and show us what he's really made of. And on the days when both plays are done he has most of six hours to do it in.

From the opening lines of Mike Poulton's brilliant adaptation of Hilary Mantel's two Man Booker prize-winning novels, you know you are a safe pair of hands. After a wordless prologue of Tudor dance when we first glimpse  Henry Vlll, Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, the scene switches to Cardinal Wolsey's house, where a very wet Cromwell enters.

"Cromwell. Late," says Stephen Gardiner, Wolsey's Secretary.

"Yes - Isn't it?" answers Cromwell, pleasantly putting his rival firmly in his place.

You sense from the beginning that this is not a man to tangle with. And then you are with Cromwell and his master, the Cardinal, and their dialogue sweeps you into the life of this busy, loyal, calculating and intelligent man. You don't need the actual beginning of the book where the young boy Thomas is brutally beaten by his father; there are enough allusions to convey that.

Although Ben Miles really is outstanding as Cromwell, the whole ensemble is strong, with not a false note. Cardinal Wolsey is Paul Jesson, a towering presence even after death, the father figure that earns Cromwell's undying devotion and informs so many of his later actions and loyalties.

Henry Vlll is Nathaniel Parker, again not an obvious choice for the role, but this in an interpretation, not an impression and his growing menace, self-deception and unpredictability are well conveyed.

Just how do you set about adapting a 653 page novel into a three hour play, with interval? Mike Poulton describes it as "taking apart a Rolls Royce engine and reassembling the parts into a light aircraft." You don't get Mantel's voice, that tone that she described to us here on the History Girls as "something between first and third person," but you do get some of the flavour of her personal touches, through the inclusion of details like  Ambassador Chapuys' fantastical Christmas hat, rendered suddenly inappropriate at court through the news of old Queen Katherine's death.

You don't see Cromwell's daughters, snatched away by illness, but they are there  in reference and in the cracking of Miles's voice when he reads the name of Anne Cromwell, written in his late wife's prayer book. We do see Lizzie Cromwell, played by Olivia Darnley, who is also - amazingly - Mary Boleyn, and we get a strong sense of Cromwell's family life, as we do in the books.

Photo by Francesco Guidicini

Hilary Mantel has been criticised for being too kind to Cromwell, for making him too believably human, but surely this is right? We know he was married with three children, two of whom died young and that he was unfailingly loyal to his old master. However ruthless he might have been in his political choices and sense of expediency and self-preservation, that doesn't mean he couldn't have been a loving family man and faithful friend. What she does is present a controversial historical figure in the round and Mike Poulton's scripts do that too.

Only at one point, in Bring up the Bodies, in the scene where Cromwell makes his pact with the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk to bring about Anne's downfall, did I feel a lack of sympathy with the main character. And I didn't feel that in the book so maybe there was there a slight loss of nuance.

It apparently took Mike Poulton nine drafts to come up with this masterly transfer from page to stage. You don't sense the effort behind it. He says that members of the audience will miss some favourite scenes and that for me included the peacock-feather Angel wings and the huge Christmas star that so terrified Mark Smeaton when he was shut up with them in Cromwell's house. But the drama worked fine without them and that is the main thing.

The roles of Cromwell's clerk Rafe Sadler and his friend's son, the poet Thomas Wyatt are enlarged to give more opportunity  for confidences and a sense of whom Cromwell trusts. And who could have guessed that mousy little Jane Seymour, played by Leah Brotherhead, could be so interesting and savvy? Well, anyone who had read the books, I suppose.

Ben Miles with Paul Jesson as Cardinal Wolsey

I did wonder about that, about how many of the people in the sold-out Swan Theatre in Stratford would have actually read both titles. I think you probably get much more from the plays if you have, though it could be that people have just been drawn there by the books' and the writer's enormous reputation. And they would have enjoyed the experience too.

What you see is the story arc of the rises and falls of reputations and the fatal consequences when Fortune's wheel spins the characters down to the bottom-most part of their circulation. First Cromwell, then Anne Boleyn and of course, when the third book, The Mirror and the Light, comes out (we hope) next year, the whole pattern will be repeated with Cromwell himself. And that must surely be staged as well, completing his remarkable trajectory from blacksmith's boy to Earl of Essex and the most powerful man in England after the king.

After the king. That is the point. We see how Henry can turn on a sixpence (?a groat) when angered by Ambassador Chapuys. He rounds on Cromwell and the blacksmith's boy nearly wallops his monarch. As Henry's reign progresses, we know he will deteriorate into even more fits of temper and irrationality: Cromwell's fate is already written in the stars if not yet on the page.

This is a fine and subtle adaptation. I particularly admired the way in which we saw only the rehearsal for Anne's execution, not the bloody act itself. Almost every choice is the un-obvious, the rejection of sensationalism and horror in this most violent of love stories.

And the recurrence of the dead Cardinal was just right, reminding us of one of Cromwell's most powerful attachments, the older man who had, unlike the blacksmith, valued him and treated him well.

The plays are transferring to the Aldwych Theatre from 1st May to 6 September and it will be another sell-out. I shall go again, even though only the most expensive seats are left. It will be interesting to see the change from a thrust stage to proscenium. Or maybe the theatre will be adapted? 

Whatever happens, I can't wait.