In anticipation of the release of “The Mirror and the Light,” the last book in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, I have been watching the “Wolf Hall” DVD for a second time. If anything, the viewing is better the second time than it was the first.
The highlight of “Wolf Hall” is an episode that is essentially a reworking of “A Man for All Seasons” from Cromwell’s perspective. If you’ve seen “A Man for All Seasons,” you know that More is portrayed as a witty, saintly prisoner of conscience who is sent to his death by perjured testimony that Cromwell obtains from his odious henchman, Sir Richard Rich. In “Wolf Hall,” More is an enthusiastic heretic burner and torturer who craved martyrdom and the positive press that would come with it and who probably actually made the fatal admission to Rich out of a misplaced intellectual snobbery.
Which side should we take in this battle? The portrayal of More in “Wolf Hall” as a conservative, not a prisoner of conscience, is accurate. Both men were highly articulate and spilled plenty of blood in their day, although the portrait of Cromwell as a thuggish mass murderer ignores the fact that the English Reformation was far less bloody than the religious wars elsewhere in Europe, which is testimony to his political skills, as well as those of Henry VIII. It really comes down to your view of the just society, and it is a battle that has relevance even today.
More defends his position in his closing statement at trial by saying, essentially, that he has a thousand years of history on his side–what have you got? That is the voice of a conservative at its clearest. Cromwell, for his part, was not a secular figure, but he made the Bible available to the entire population in English and promoted legislation to improve the lives of common people; he was as close to a liberal as you could get in a sixteenth century context. If More had prevailed, there would have been no Elizabethan England, and the country would have looked much like Philip II’s Spain, only without the wealth and sunshine. Would that have been an improvement? If you’re honest about it, you have to admit that we live in a Cromwellian world today, and the answer is no.
William Barr and his Flight 93 friends are undoubtedly admirers of More. It is easy to imagine Barr as a heretic burner in a different age. And while Donald Trump is a far less complex and attractive figure than Henry VIII, there are certainly similarities there . . . .