- Good evening. I'm Susan Galassi, Senior
Curator at The Frick Collection. And it's my privilege to
welcome all of you here and our viewers on this live webcast to this very special event this evening. It's a great honor for The Frick to have Dame Hilary Mantel as our speaker, and to have her husband,
Gerald McEwen, with us as well. We've been very eager to have her here ever since the publication, in 2009, of her landmark historical
novel Wolf Hall, based on the life, um,
which was followed in 2012 by the spectacular sequel
Bring Up the Bodies. Both books, based on the
life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's powerful minister, were awarded the Man Booker Prize and took off into the stratosphere. They were translated into 36 languages and adapted for the stage by
the Royal Shakespeare Company in sold-out runs in Stratford-on-Avon in London's West End, and were made into an
award-winning BBC miniseries that will soon air here on PBS. She is currently at work on the last book in the Cromwell trilogy,
The Mirror and the Light. Earlier this year, Prince
Charles conferred on her the honor of Dame Commander
of the British Empire for her contribution to literature, an extraordinary achievement encompassing 14 books, 11 of them novels. In her non-literary life, recently, she has also played an important role in helping England save the
famous bronze sculptures, the Wolsey Angels, which are now on display at
the Victoria and Albert Museum. Now, here in New York this month, she is attending rehearsals
for the opening on Broadway of Wolf Hall Part One and Part Two, directed by Jeremy Herrin. Previews at the Winter Garden
begin in only two days. We are very lucky to
have her for this hour. For making this evening possible, I would like to extend warm thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust and to Mrs. Hines. For the past dozen years,
her Trust has funded a series of lectures by distinguished
artists, writers, and poets, who have brought contemporary viewpoints to our collection of Old Master paintings. She is also a longtime admirer
of Hilary Mantel's work. Thanks are due, as well,
to past and present members of the staff of Henry Holt and Company, Francis Codie, James
Meter, and, especially, Patricia Eisemann, and to the Frick's Manager of Education and
Public Programs, Adrienne Lei. Tonight, we have the pleasure
of hearing Dame Hilary speak in a special context. Right outside this door
hang the original portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger of the central figures in her trilogy, Thomas Cromwell and his
archenemy Thomas More. These iconic images were painted from drawings made from life in Holbein's meticulous,
highly illusionistic manner. In her fluid prose, Dame
Hilary lets the portraits circulate again in time, almost as characters in their own right. In one particularly
moving scene in Wolfhall, we look at the portrait of Cromwell through the eyes of the sitter as he takes in Holbein's image of himself, with a combination of
admiration and alarm. For the past century,
that portrait has hung face-to-face with the
portrait of Thomas More in the Living Hall, the heart
of The Frick Collection, where Henry Clay Frick placed them. More, the presumed saint, on the left, and Cromwell, the presumed
villain, on the right, until Hilary Mantel reversed their roles. (audience chuckles) After the lecture, we invite
you to view the paintings in the Living Hall and to
join us for a glass of wine in the Garden Court. Signed copies of the Cromwell books are also available in our bookstore. Now please give a very warm
welcome to Dame Hilary Mantel. (audience applauds) - Good evening. May I say it's absolutely
lovely to be here. People have said to me, "What, you've not been to The Frick? "You've not seen the two famous images "in that wonderful context?" And, uh, I had to confess
that until a few days ago that was the case. But I am here now. And I have been told by a historian I know that on at least one occasion the great Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton stood in front of the
fireplace by the portraits and said, "Here we have "one self-serving, ruthless, "and cunning politician, "and one far-seeing and
dedicated statesman." And then, of course, upset
the prejudices of his audience by indicating the hero and the villain. Elton, okay, it was a piece of mischief. But... Geoffrey Elton was the grandfather of modern Tudor studies and he placed Thomas
Cromwell where he should be, at the heart of the history
of the reign of Henry VIII, as a shaper of his age,
as a maker of history. My purpose is to introduce
him to a wider public as a modern hero or anti-hero, flawed and equivocal, to persuade us to look at the
world from behind his eyes, and walk a mile in his shoes. My purpose has never been to set up false oppositions nor to valorize one of these men at the expense of the other. Though, like Elton, I have my preference. And that's fair, because a novelist is not obliged to neutrality. Neutrality would make dull reading. She can be partisan I think as long as she's well informed. The choices she makes
must be considered ones. And as a novelist, I want to know how these two men experienced each other, and what was their
experience of the world. In Wolf Hall, this is what Thomas More thinks of Thomas Cromwell. "Lock Thomas Cromwell in a
deep dungeon in the morning "and by the time you come back that night, "he'll be sitting on a plush cushion "eating larks' tongues, "and all the jailers will owe him money." Well, that's the whole fascination of the boy from Putney. Time and time again, you would
look at him and you'd say, "How did he do that?" Where does he go when he goes off the map? How is it possible, his rise in the world? How did he think it might be possible? Unlike More, he's not a
self-revealing character. He's an expert communicator, but he never tells us
what we'd like to know. It's all questions,
questions, and no answers. One of our best Tudor
historians, Diarmaid MacCulloch, is writing a biography of him, which won't be out for a little while yet, but I think will be authoritative. It's much needed. Unlike so much writing about Cromwell, this will be different I think. Not just a recycling of
venerable errors and prejudices. There is an in-built
frustration to the task. Diarmaid MacCulloch says he's like Macavity the Mystery Cat. He's called the Hidden Paw. Wherever you think you'll
find him, you don't. Wherever you don't look
for him, there he is. Like Macavity, "he always has an alibi, "and one or two to spare. "At whatever time the deed took place, "Macavity wasn't there." These two men were not
enemies in the beginning. And perhaps not enemies in the end, in quite the way we think. And I've not written my
book to make them so, or to set up false oppositions. They were the two great
commoners who served Henry. Now, it's true, that Cardinal Wolsey, who was Thomas Cromwell's patron, was also from a humble background, but Wolsey climbed through the Church, and through the Church,
he dignified himself, so that in England he
was not only Cardinal, but, as the Papal Legate, he exercised a quasi-papal authority. And in the state, in its executive arm, Wolsey was Lord Chancellor, Henry's chief minister. Henry took the glory
and Wolsey did the work. Now, that status as
churchman elevated Wolsey into a different sphere from a layman, where his background didn't matter. Now, of course, the fact
that he was a butcher's son was held against him by the
noblemen he bossed around, and by the common people, too, who thought it was against nature for ordinary men to hold power, and frequently rioted in
support of their right to be governed by lords. Now, if you were not a churchman, then background did matter. Thomas More wasn't from a wealthy family, but he was from a
mercantile, legal background in the city of London. Comfortable, well-networked. So he was able to make
his way as a city lawyer and a member of Parliament. Cromwell's career was much less likely. It's often suggested that the Cromwells were originally a gentry
family who had decayed, fallen on hard times. Cromwell himself said not. When the heralds tried to foist on him a coat of arms to make
him look respectable, he wouldn't have it, he said, "There may be other Cromwells,
but they're not my people, "and I won't wear another man's coat." And for the age he lived in that was a very unusual reaction, as if he wanted to step,
not just out of his place but out of his time. He did eventually get a
coat of arms and more. He became the King's Secretary, his Deputy in Church Affairs, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor
of Cambridge University, a Knight of the Garter, and
eventually Earl of Essex. And the fact that the historians
tried to bump the Cromwells up the social scale shows how threatening we find the idea of the man from nowhere, even now. How disruptive it is to the way we still understand the world, where we can predict what
a man's interests are and his needs. I spoke to you of Geoffrey Elton. He was German in origin, so he was able to look at the English and their class fetishes with a sharp eye. And he thought that
Cromwell was the victim of several kinds of snobbery. Victorian scholars, which meant Oxford and Cambridge dons, couldn't grasp that Cromwell
hadn't been to University. It made them suspicious, because if you're not an Oxford man and you're not a Cambridge man, then what in God's name are you? Now, even a couple of
generations after his death, Cromwell was being reconstructed as more advantaged than he was. More advantaged,
therefore, less mysterious. There's an Elizabethan play, a really bad and chaotic play, which shows every sign of being written by several playwrights and the tea boy. And it is, however, highly entertaining, and informative about the way the Elizabethans looked at him. And it begins in Putney, in his father, Walter's, blacksmith shop. I think there are few
writers for the theater who could resist a blacksmith's shop and its sound effects. The stage direction is, "They beat with their hammers within." But as soon as the young
Cromwell steps onto the scene, it's obvious that you're looking at one of nature's gentlemen. He comes out and he says to the workmen, "Could you stop that hammering, please. "Because I am trying to get on "with my very important
studies at the University." And this is the key thing. This is how you know he's going places. The workmen speak prose, but he speaks verse. Now... it is, as I said, a very confused play, but what it does, it sets
up an interesting archetype. It's the boy who leaves
home and crosses the sea. The poor boy, who's got
only his wits to live by. Cromwell, in the play,
is a trickster figure, wandering through Europe with a trusty but stupid servant at his side. Suffering dire misfortunes, but outsmarting everybody. And, then, comes back to England and he falls from grace because of popish plots
among his fellow Councillors. And then, when he's on the scaffold, the King realizes how he has been misled by these evil Papist Councillors. And he sends a swift
message with a reprieve. Too late. The trickster's head is off. It's not too far from
what really happened. It took Henry a matter of weeks to express his dismay and accuse his Councillors of rushing him into executing. He said, "The most faithful
servant I have ever had." By contrast, no word of regret
survives for Thomas More, whom Henry had known since he was a child. The age set a great premium on friendship, on loyalty. Now Cardinal Wolsey had
been a patron to More, but Thomas More helped bring him down. More then agreed to succeed
Wolsey as Lord Chancellor even though he knew he
was in direct opposition to the chief object of the King, which was to have his
first marriage annulled. I suppose More must've thought that he was going to
save Henry from himself. He purported to be a man not moved by personal ambition. But nobody goes into politics by accident. I do believe he felt the call of
public duty very strongly. But it's hard to be a saint and climb the career ladder, so I'm skeptical about the saintliness. In our plays, Thomas Cromwell asks him how he happens to be wearing
Wolsey's chain of office. "It has fall from heaven
around your neck, did it?" When More resigned, he didn't say that he opposed the annulment of the King's first marriage. He didn't say he opposed Anne Boleyn or the break with Rome. In fact, he said as little as possible, which was a clever tactic and a new and startling departure for a man who was such
a gifted self-publicist. So relentlessly communicative. As Cromwell says in the books, "He never had a thought till now "but he took it to the printer." More refused to take an
oath to the succession of the children of Henry and Anne. And, in refusing that,
he refused to recognize Henry as head of the Church in England. In refusing that oath, Henry believed, he was resisting the break with Rome, he was resisting his title as
Supreme Head of the Church, he was asserting that England was not supreme in English affairs, he was derogating the
powers of Parliament, he was giving aid and
comfort to England's enemies who were threatening to invade. And in my unpopular view, Henry was right. Now, these two men are
studies in reputation. Posterity has been kind to Thomas More. He cultivated his legend in his lifetime and it stuck. Succeeding generations couldn't believe he died for a principle
that was, for them, so abstruse or so self-evidently wrong as papal supremacy, for the elevation of Roman jurisdiction and canon law over the law of the land. So they elevated his cause into freedom of conscience, which is not remotely a value
that Thomas More recognized. And art came to his assistance by way of Robert Bolt's famous play and subsequent film. A Man For All Seasons is
a very beautiful play. It's wonderfully
structured, it's eloquent, it's well judged, and
that's why it's lasted, and the film that was based on it carried More's name worldwide and it gave us a portrait of him, which is almost as indelible as this one. Sometimes art supplies the undiagnosed deficiencies
of the body politic. Robert Bolt was writing in an age where moral certainties were on the wane, the end of the 1960s,
and so he supplied us with what we wanted, a man of moral weight and conviction. As our play script says
of the silent saint, "Thomas More is a man of principle. "He just won't say what
those principles are." (audience laughs) It's funnier when Ben Miles does it. But this one, this is an age of faith, of blazing and violent collisions between systems and ideologies. So it's with a certain relief that we greet Thomas Cromwell, detached, pragmatic, sardonic, and with a realistic view of human nature. So I accept that when we deploy
our historical imagination, we're writing out of our own time, filtering the products of our imagination through the sensibilities of our age. But all the same, Robert
Bolt's recreation of More as a 1960s liberal doesn't
stand up to scrutiny. In the play, you may remember, Thomas Cromwell, his aid Richard Rich, he takes his hand and he holds it in a candle flame. Now somebody did do that. But not to Richard Rich, and
it wasn't Thomas Cromwell. It was Bishop Bonner, in
the reign of Bloody Mary, showing a Protestant heretic what was in store for
him if he didn't recant, showing him what fire felt like. Now, should a playwright do that? Offer a transposition so startling? We all draw the line in a different place 'round historical accuracy, and the transfer of material
from one context to another. Dramatically, the moment is beautiful. So I've no doubt Robert Bolt
would've said to himself, "All in a good cause." And that is exactly what Thomas More said about the heretics he persecuted. It's all in a good cause, it's all for the
solidarity of Christendom, the buttressing of good authority, the salvation of their souls. He sincerely believed this. But it was dismaying when
Wolf Hall was published, that readers asked me if
I'd made up More's record as a heresy hunter. Because he didn't hide
it, he was proud of it. Now the details of what he did to this person and that are disputed. And my novels, which are about, very much about the power
of rumor and gossip, always question the status of evidence, and they don't accept every
wild allegation about More, but there is no doubt that
he tormented and killed those who disagreed with him, and he gloried in it. Tolerance was not a virtue in that age. And we misunderstand him
if we seek to excuse him, as if cruelty were a flaw in an otherwise sound character. More thought that certain beliefs were so pernicious, so threatening, that the
normal rules didn't apply. Even before they were found
guilty by any formal process, a heretic was outside the
protection of the law. You could hurt them, you could trick them, you could make a promise and break it. All was permissible if you
could get them to recant, and if you couldn't, then burn them. It would be wrong to judge him by the standards of our age, but his contemporaries judged him. They argued with him strenuously through the 1520s and the early 1530s. And More was a stubborn
man, and he dug in. We always concede reluctant respect to a man who just goes on being wrong. And we respect More with
good reason, for being brave. He says in our plays, at the very end, before he's led out to his death, "I'm my own worst enemy. "I've been told that all my life." Because he was a writer and
an astute self-publicist, More's life, his career path,
his thought, it's accessible. Cromwell's, much less so. Cromwell's background,
it wasn't dirt poor, but it was disorderly. We don't know the name of his mother or his date of birth. His father, Walter, who some
think was his step-father, was a small businessman
and a parish bully. He had a brewery, he had an interest in a fulling mill, and a blacksmith shop, as I've mentioned. Now... Walter comes onto the historical record through his appearances in court, in the law courts, that is. He gets drunk, he assaults people, he falls foul of the authorities for watering his beer and for various other
anti-social nuisances. We don't know about Thomas' education or the exact circumstances
in which he left England when he was about 15. He was running away from the law, from his father, possibly both. He said to Archbishop Cranmer, "I was a ruffian in my youth." And he didn't tell large on that. He seems to have fought
in the French armies. He worked for merchant bankers in Italy. In Antwerp, he was a clerk to
the English merchants there, which meant he knew about
finance and commercial law, but we don't know where he learned it. When he came back to England,
he set up as a lawyer. He made a good marriage. And he went into the
service of Cardinal Wolsey. When Wolsey fell, he remained loyal, fighting a rearguard action to keep his master out of the Tower and to clear his name. On All Hallows' Eve, 1529, Wolsey's servant George Cavendish saw him standing in a
window recess at Esher, in the empty house where Wolsey had fled after being forced out
of his London palace. Cromwell was holding a prayer
book and he was crying. And if George Cavendish had not come on Thomas Cromwell at that point, we would understand even
less about him than we do. George didn't need to tell
us, to tell his reader, when he wrote his memoir later, he didn't need to tell us that those were the days of the dead, when the souls come back to
make contact with the living. In the last few years,
Thomas Cromwell had lost his wife, his daughters. Now his master was being pulled down and he thought that he was finished. Now, the original scripts for the plays didn't contain that scene at Esher. And it was the actor who
plays Cromwell, Ben Miles, who asked for it to be put back. "Not that I want more to do," he said. If you see the plays,
you will understand that, because he is on stage almost every minute of both plays. "Not that I want more to
do, but it is, "he said, "it is the man's lowest point." And George Cavendish, in his
memoir, recounts the scene. He tells us how Cromwell weeps. How he pulls himself together and he says, he'll go to London, and he says, "I will make or mar before I come again." "Make or mar." It was his common saying, George tells us. He was a calculating man, a strategist. He knew when the time for action had come, the time to take risks. And from that low point, he bounced, and he bounced high. This loyalty he showed to Wolsey was an extraordinary spectacle. And the King, who was perhaps
short of true friends, saw Master Cromwell at work, and took him into his confidence. According to the Spanish ambassador, "He was talking to him in private, "long before it became public, "long before Cromwell was
sworn in as Councillor." You can see why Henry was dubious. Cromwell was very different
from his other courtiers. He was a European. He'd been 12 years out of England. He was formed elsewhere. Yet wherever he got his education, he had a common background
intellectually with More. They were both guided, in a broad sense, by Renaissance humanism and its values. They both believed the
Church needed reform. More was a deeply religious man. Cromwell's letters, which
are what remain of him, seemed to be the letters of a man who takes his God very seriously. There's no justification
for describing him as the next thing to an
atheist, as some writers have. What we don't know is the
exact status of his belief. People are misled by his
having said on the scaffold, "I die in the Catholic faith." That doesn't mean he was a secret Papist, and that all those years he'd been working for the other side. He meant"Catholic" in
the sense of "universal." He meant that he regarded himself as a member of the universal Church, as perhaps the Pope wasn't. Is the Pope Catholic
was a very good question in the 16th century. He's often said to be a
Lutheran, my own belief. He was probably close to Swingli and the Swiss reformers, but he was careful not to be specific. When some German ambassadors to the Court urged him to commit and say that he was one of them, that he shared their Protestant beliefs, he indicated Henry and said, in effect, "I believe what he believes." After his wife died, round about 1527, Cromwell didn't marry again, though it was usual to do so. The fact of remaining unmarried caused a fatal complication late in his life. That story is for the next book. He wasn't lonely though. There's a modern belief that anyone as clever as Cromwell will be introverted and maybe a bit weird. But the 16th century didn't
share that prejudice. Cromwell was a gregarious man. He was good company. And people told him things. They were disarmed by him. None of the charm of which eyewitnesses speak comes over from the portrait. I'm very much preoccupied with working out what went on in that room where the picture was painted. And I will come back to it in the third book. We will go in there with Hans Holbein and negotiate this image. In the Holbein minature, in the National Portrait
Gallery in London, he looks more human, there's less of him, and he looks, frankly, like someone you'd pass in the street
and not look twice at. Hans was Cromwell's friend. And you would say, in that case, God save him from his friends. In my book, when he first sees the picture, his reaction is, "I look like a murderer." And his son Gregory says, "Didn't you know?" (audience laughs) As a novelist, writing about real people, you're always trying to work out where they met. What could that first contact have been? When Thomas More was 14, he was a page in the
household of Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. So he was living at Lambeth Palace. This was just before he went up to Oxford. Now at the same time, John Cromwell, Walter Cromwell's brother, was a cook in the Lambeth Palace kitchens. Thomas Cromwell would then, we think, have been about seven years old. So I thought, maybe, maybe, that's where their paths crossed. Because in real life Thomas Cromwell does appear to know about food, about cuisine. There's a bizarre episode, and I mean in real life, in which, before he's famous, he turns up in Rome as part of a delegation from the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, and makes a jelly for the Pope. Now, I know it sounds like fantasy, but it's well sourced. So where did he get his
dessert-making capacities? So I thought of Uncle
John Cromwell, the cook, and I thought where does a little boy from a disorderly home seek refuge? He goes where he'll get fed. So I found the child Thomas Cromwell a job as an occasional kitchen boy. So he is a scruffy seven year old looking in awe and wonder at Master More, the golden boy, sent upstairs with a supper tray, where he finds the young
scholar at his books. One day he brought a wheaten loaf and put it in the cupboard and lingered, and Master Thomas More said to him, "Why do you linger?" But he did not throw anything at him. "What is in that great book?" he asked. And Master Thomas replied, smiling, "Words, words, just words." And later the child stands
wrapped in a courtyard as Thomas More plays the recorder at an open window. It's a still evening and a blackbird picks up the note and sings from a bush by the water gate. And their lives wobble
to a moment's stillness, serenity, they draw to a point, and Thomas Cromwell
keeps the moment in mind as you might keep the image of an angel. But later, Thomas More doesn't remember having met him when he was a child. And Cromwell thinks, "That's just it, you never saw me. "You never even saw me coming." In the third novel, in
the book in progress, we go back to Lambeth Palace, to those days, in flashback, and a somewhat different picture emerges. There's a retelling. And what we find in this new version is the infant Cromwell exercising a reign of terror over the young scholar. Uncle John says to him, "See the trays? "That's the young gentlemen's suppers. "They're all studying hard. "So if they wake up in the night, "they're turning over in their heads "a hard problem about Pythagoras "or Saint Jeremy, "and it makes them peckish. "So they need a little bite
of bread in their cupboards, "and a measure of ale. "Now, you know the third staircase. "Up the top, you'll find "Master Thomas More. "He doesn't like disturbing. "So, Thomas, you creep in like a mouse. "If he looks up, "you make your reverence. "If he doesn't, "you just creep out again. "And not so much as a Bless You. "Have you got that?" He's got it. He's got the tray, too. What if he sat down on the bottom step and ate the bread and
drank the ale himself? Would he hear in the night Master More crying out
with pangs in his belly? "Oh, feed me, feed me," he whimpers, as he mounts the stair, "Oh, St. Jeremy, feed me." On the top step, the
devil enters into him. He kicks open the door and bawls, "Master Thomas More!" The young scholar looks up. His expression is mild and curious, but he circles his book with his arm, as if to protect it from molestation. "Master Thomas More, his supper." He rams it in the corner cupboard. The hinge wants oiling. He creaks it to and fro so it makes a double squeak. One high, one low. He wants to ask, "What's Pythagoras? "Is it a wild animal? "Is it a disease? "Is it a shape you can draw? "Master Thomas More, God
bless him," he shouts. "Good night." He is about to slam the door when Master More calls him. He intrudes himself back into the room. Master More sits blinking at him. He's 14, 15, skinny. Walter Cromwell would laugh
him out of the smithy yard. Master More examines him, says gently, "If I gave you a penny, "would you not do that another night?" He bounces down the stair, richer. He bounces on every tread and whistles. Fair is fair. He was only paid to be quiet in the room, not quiet outside it. Master More will have to
dig deeper into his pocket if he wants to live in
the silence of the tomb. He runs away towards his football game. When I wrote that last summer, our plays were already
in progress in West End. But one Saturday, lunch time, I left it at the stage door for Ben Miles. And he shared it with Jon
Ram, who plays Thomas More. And that very afternoon it rippled straight through their performance. Something they knew about each other, a shared memory. We are asking of actors, like the personnel in my book, to walk again the long road from Lambeth Palace to
the Tower of London, where the year 1535 finds them head to head. In the Tower, More was
asked to swear an oath to accept Henry as head
of the Church in England. He wouldn't swear, but Cromwell swore an oath, a terrible and heartfelt one. He said he would rather see his only son dead than see More refuse his cooperation to the King, because the King, he knew, would put the worst construction on this silence of his. And we know this from More's own account. From the letters he
wrote back to his family. It doesn't fit with the received picture of Thomas Cromwell as a
passionless functionary. It challenges us. In another letter, More describes Cromwell's efforts for him. He describes the moment he warned him, lawyer to lawyer, that he was about to fall into a trap. And he calls him "my special, tender friend." Now those words are sometimes
construed as sarcasm. But only by those who haven't read the whole letter, or seen it in its context. Of course, Thomas Cromwell's efforts
were self-serving. He had nothing to gain from More's death. He had everything to gain by his surrender. It would've been a propaganda coup for Henry's regime. And it was a coup that Thomas Cromwell couldn't engineer. Henry didn't seem to blame him for it. Nor did Thomas More's family see Thomas Cromwell as the agent of his destruction. That destruction came about, as More's wife said, "as such a long-continued "and deep-rooted scruple "as passeth his power
to avoid and put away." It was a lonely and eccentric sacrifice, which only he saw as necessary. The great irony is that our age preserves
its reverence for More only by comprehensively
misunderstanding him. He, the great communicator. We make him a martyr for a cause he would've despised. And it's our systematizing imaginations that set these two men in perpetual opposition. One of More's biographers, Richard Marius, sees More and Cromwell as fundamentally alike. Passionate men, fiercely repressed. And I think that's probably right. Once Cromwell became Henry's minister, he did what his old master,
Wolsey, couldn't do. He cut the knot that bound Henry to his first wife, and made it possible for
him to marry Anne Boleyn. He masterminded the
huge body of legislation that severed England from Rome, but he also put forward, from time to time, measures that would have
transformed his country. Comprehensive law reform, a new relation between state and people. A resistant Parliament and a sheer lack of time meant that most of his rejected reforms were not achieved. But the vision matters. He had a quality that's rare in politics, creativity. He could see the big picture, but he could also take care of every detail. The first quality made him audacious. The second made him effective. John Fox described him like this. "In judgment, discreet. "In tongue, eloquent. "In service, faithful. "In stomach, courageous. "In his person, active. "Nothing was so hard, "which with wit and industry, "he could not compass." Cromwell was a realist. He was a radical working in a profoundly traditional,
conservative society. And he knew that people
would not accept change unless it put them, as he said, "in better ease." We think of the pace of
life in his era as slow. But if you look at his letters, the words that come up again and again are "haste" and "speed." And sometimes "hasty speed." And the instruction,
"please accelerate this." This is what the writer
Nicola Shulman said of him in her recent Thomas Wyatt biography. "He came as his enemies
said, from the dunghill. "That is to say, a mushroom man. "Come up over night, you see. "The traditional routes to eminence "were blood and the Church, "but he rose without either "and subdued both. "A consummation more to be admired "in our secular, egalitarian age "than it was in his own. "The sheer executive competence. "He was a phenomenon, "on the scale of Mozart or Shakespeare. "A man who seems to have moved "in his own element of decelerated time, "to achieve a week's work in a day." Of course, we are less interested in executive competence than in sex and violence. So... wrongly, the year 1536 is seen as the important year in Thomas Cromwell's life. The year of Anne Boleyn's execution. Anne didn't make Cromwell's career, but they helped each other to the top. That spring, he ditched her. Or rather, the King did, and Cromwell facilitated the process. And who did what and why is the subject of my second novel Bring Up the Bodies. It's one of those episodes
in English history endlessly worked over by historians, by novelists, by filmmakers. You assemble all the facts. You tell yourself the story. And you still don't understand it. You start again. You tell it over. And still there's something missing. Perhaps it's the holes
in the documentation. Or something in the human
heart we're not grasping. Or, perhaps, it's the operations of Macavity the Mystery Cat. For me, as a writer, there is an impossible brief to fulfill. Real life is untidy. Historians impose patterns, and a novelist tries to negotiate with the ambiguities. But a reader understandably demands shape and form. The artist wants freedom. The consumer of art wants something tidy, a package, a book, a picture, a portable set of ideas. And then the process of adaptation into another medium imposes further constraints. Constraints can be good. They make you nimble. You have to think your way out of all sorts of problems while trying to keep faith with all the possibilities that you've glimpsed in the material. In the end, I offer my best guesses. And sometimes I have to say, "Look, this is Tuesday's best guess." On Wednesday, I may have
further and better particulars, and my best guess might be different. The time comes when you part with your version, but it goes on in your mind, still alive, still active and changing. What's on the page is only a report from the front line. Often it's a graveyard,
a graveside dispatch. Anne Boleyn died, I conclude, because she became a political liability and a threat to Cromwell, not just to his success but to his survival. And the men who died with her were collateral damage in some cases. And, in others, victims of Cromwell's ruthless, tidy mind. He believed in economy of means, and the removal of those men solved certain niggling problems for him and cleared the way for people of his own he could put around the King. And in 1540, Cromwell himself died because, I think, Henry became afraid of what he had created. But Henry soon knew that he had made a calamitous mistake. And the rest of the reign shows how bad the error was. From 1540 onwards, war, an emptying treasury, a debased coinage, vicious faction fighting, another dead queen. People ask why I have taken on this 10 year project. It started out as one novel. It's become three. And plays, and a TV series. Possibly, in the course of time, a third play, a third TV series. It's an act of reverence. And it's a work of mourning, not entirely for Cromwell, but for all my characters. It's because I can't bear it that they're dead. Simple as that. I want to talk to them. I want to keep open the possibilities of their lives. It was an age when flexibility was needed. And disputes, that in calmer times, in the 1520s, might have been settled over the supper table at
More's house in Chelsea, or in after dinner debate at one of the inns of Court, were settled in the 1530s on Tower Hill. The final arguments
were with the headsman. And I don't want him to have the last word. Thank you. (audience applauds) - [Susan] Do, um, would you like to take a few questions? - [Dame Hilary] Sure. - [Susan] The floor is
open for a few questions. We won't go on too much longer. - [Audience member] Uh, Miss Mantel, in Wolf Hall, after Wolsey's fall, there is a, there's a satiric farce performed, where there's an effigy of the Cardinal that is pulled down, and this offends Cromwell, and slowly he gets even. Which shows his tremendous cleverness. How much of that was history and how much of it was you? - That is a brilliant question because it goes right to the heart of it. The masque was real and the four men, they treated the Cardinal
as if he were an... well, it was an effigy, but it was the carrying of Cardinal Wolsey off to hell. So they had him by the hands and the feet. Four men, four masked men. And then someone was inside the Cardinal figure. And that intrigues me, you see. The masked men. No one knows who they were. So this is where the novelist can begin to operate. (laughs) And what we find is that they are Henry
Norris, George Boleyn... Will Brereton, Francis Weston. The four men who died with Anne Boleyn. In the book, the person inside the doll is the King's jester, Sexton. And Cromwell follows him behind the scenes and he sees him take off his mask. And he watches the other gentlemen unmask. In our plays, however, we have to move on, we have to come to a neater version still. So the person inside the Wolsey doll is the young minstrel Mark Smeaton, the fifth man who died with Anne Boleyn, so there you are. He's got 'em. (laughs) But it's the
essence of the process. You begin to invent, in my view, legitimately where the facts run out. If the identity of the
masked men ever turns up, I shall be deeply disconcerted. (audience laughs) - [Audience member] I was just commenting, unless all the characters prove accurate. - [Susan] Any more questions? Um, one more. - [Audience member]
What was your experience kind of taking all this history and then turning it into a novel, and then turning it into a play, and a TV series. How do you change history as you go through these different medias? - Well... in both cases, I haven't been primarily responsible. In the case of the TV scripts, I did work with a scriptwriter in the initial stages. In the case of the plays, I worked with the adapter for some two years. I went through 10 drafts before we got near a rehearsal room. And I haven't been involved in the development of the plays, and have now, in effect, taken over, because the adapter has moved on to other projects, quite naturally. I am still in the middle of my third book. I'm still with the project, so I've taken over as writer for the Broadway plays, which are a slightly different version. Now what you have to do, I think, is think not of the limitations but how can the medium, whether it's screen or the stage, serve the story best? Now, obviously, you've got to be highly selective. There are over 130 characters in the book, in the books. And multiple locations. Now in the TV series, multiplying the characters in the form of bodies, extras, is not a problem. But there is a limit to how many story lines the reader, the viewer, will follow. So you have to pick your way and think what will work for television. The decisions are different in the play and in the film, in the TV version. For the stage, we have 22 people to tell our story. Some of them play four parts and do a number of
alarmingly rapid changes, but that is all we have. And it is really, then, about selection, but we have always tried not to compromise the history. We've had to find a
different way of telling. And sometimes we have had to say, well, what do we do when we close the plays with a wonderful remark that Thomas Wriothesley makes at the end of Bring Up the Bodies. The remark that Thomas Cromwell feels like a knife between the shoulder blades. What do we do? We haven't got Thomas Wriothesley. Well maybe Stephen Gardiner can say it. Then I say, to my adapter, "Good idea, "but Bishop Gardiner was in France." Ah! Well, okay. How long did it take to cross the Channel? (audience laughs) Let's suppose the winds are in his favor. Okay, we're going to bring over Bishop Gardiner for a day trip. Those are the kind of
compromises you make. And yet I remember, going back to this gentleman's question, about the Wolsey masque. There is a voice, there was a voice, that cried out, "Shame, "shame on you." Who was it? We don't know. In the books, it's Thomas Wyatt. I really, really wanted
it to be Thomas Wyatt, but what do I find? I find he's in Calais. At least, he's in Calais
the previous week. And I can trace him up to two days before. I can't say for certain he was in England, but there's a possibility he was back. So I say, "Okay, good enough. "It's Thomas Wyatt who shall shout shame." Which if you are at the Winter Garden, you will hear him do from one of the balconies. You know, there is a special magic in bringing this to the New World. (audience laughs) Hearing these people speak in a land they never even imagined. - [Susan] Well, I think we should probably conclude, and thank you so much. (audience applauds)
