...to find Wolf Hall really hard going

[catslave]

I like a period drama, really I do - but I'm sorry to say that Wolf Hall was incredibly dull. For starters: hopping about all over the place in time, miserable, one of history's most interesting characters - Anne Boleyn - was a spoilt cow with an 'Allo 'Allo accent...

Nothing was explained properly, either, apart form the blindingly obvious. Loads of shots of Cromwell's dad being a wrong'un, in case you missed it the first 20 times, then 'Oh, I need to be an MP again' (Cromwell). Eh? When were you an MP the first time?

I 'did' the Tudors at A-level 20 years ago, so my memory of the period is ok, but the specifics are fuzzy, and there's no way I'd remember the ins and outs of Thomas Cromwell's parliamentary career. Argh! I've cancelled series link... Or is it just me?

I like Antonia Fraser's Six Wives as a good book of the time - interesting, readable and factual

Muddha

He was one of the victors for a time.

His pr is bad in part because he did/had terrible things done in the name of the king. Because henry VIII became increasingly tyrannical during the period Cromwell acted as his advisor, because he was a mere blacksmiths son and utterly despised by the gentry and aristocracy for rising far above his expected station. Because he was a true religious reformer when many of the aforementioned aristocracy were not. Not even Henry VIII was, he only broke with Rome to get his own way. By the time of his death he had gone some way to returning to Rome, subjects were expected to observe mass and son on.

Dismantling the medieval Catholic state was a hugely contentious issue at the time, it was not as simple as "making some changes".

I'm quite aware of that

Thing is, at the time, EVERYone did awful stuff in the name/pay of the king, More included

And there were other low born folk coming to positions of status. Wolsey for one

Still TC widely detested

A bit of a sidetrack here. Saw something interesting the other day on wiki re proceeds of dissolution of the monasteries- that TC and Anne Boleyn had a dispute over what to do with them- she believed the ££s should be put to charitable use, TC to the kings' coffers

Wolf Hall isn't for everyone tbh. The TV version is very faithful to the style and tone of the book and not everyone loved the book. I personally think both are utterly fantastic, but Mantel does make the readers work - she doesn't hand things out on a plate - and you do need to know a fair bit about the politics of the period, or be willing to go along with it and accept that some things won't be made completely clear.

Even if you know loads about the period, Mantel has a very strong style and it doesn't suit everyone. You either think she's a genius or you hate her I think. I'm very firmly in the former camp, but there are loads of lauded writers I just can't get along with.

Anne Boleyn spent a lot of time at the French court before coming back to England, so it's not unimaginable that she would have affected a French accent; she was known (and admired) for bringing French fashions and affectations to the English court. It was one of the reasons everyone thought she was so sexy...

Personally I'm fascinated by the way (mostly women) novelists go about reclaiming the characters of historical characters who have long been thought of as 'evil' - Mantel did it with Cromwell and Robespierre/Danton/Desmoulins; Sharon Penman did it with Richard III in Sunne in Splendour. I wonder whether women (who have after all been written out of history for thousands of years) are more open to the possibility that history written by the victors isn't necessarily accurate, and feel possible injustice more keenly and so set about trying to rebalance the record?

Was thinking about Gregrory and her portrayal of 'witchcraft' last night and it occurred to me - could she just be using it as another device to illustrate how women, stripped of almost all functional and political power, were reduced to trying to use personal/charismatic power instead?

Even in modern times, lots of people subscribe to slightly magical thinking - 'if you want it badly enough/work hard enough/ask the universe for it, you can make it happen', that sort of thing.

It's not inconceivable that some women used talismans or rituals just as a way of trying to give tangible form to something they very much wished for. And then sometimes the thing they wished for (an unlikely victory at Barnet) came about, and retrospectively they told themselves that their rituals had contributed to it by calling up a mist...

I watched this again this afternoon and found it very much improved. Mark Rylance's portrayal of Cromwell I thought superb, even down to that 'Yr' instead of 'Your' thing he does - that final scene with Henry had little shivers running down my back. Some fine screenwriting and direction there as well.

I'm now actually looking forward to Episode 2 - unusual for me these days when I'm quite ruthless about stopping viewing a series right away if I find it unrewarding. (There's simply so much around to see that there's little point in grimly ploughing through things for the sake of it.)

I very much like the idea of people who have no real power to change their lives subscribing to magical thinking,

I enjoyed it, but I had quibbles.

Anyway. Women of all backgrounds were powerless in every sense. They were mere possessions passed from their fathers to their husbands with no rights or powers of their own.

No, they weren't powerless, yes they did have rights.

I know it was really horrible back then, but I don't like this idea that women were utterly powerless.

One of the things I disliked about the TV series was Liz Cromwell being used for a cheap plot point about subversion and power (the imported book bit), too.

Yes, Jeanne, and Liz also nagging TC dutifully to go and see his father, which is out of character for the wry, observant, unsentimental Liz of the novel. Novel TC goes to see Walter because family members say he's changed, become respectable, and also to show him he's survived him, when he feels confident enough as a professional success and the father of a son he's determined not to mistreat. Not when he's deranged with grief and plotting to murder Walter.

Liz also has her own independent work life in the novel, and TC takes her account of what the city women are saying seriously - the first the knows of the seriousness of the king's relationship to Anne Boleyn is the gossip about the purchase of an emerald.

Yes, I agree - and I'd forgotten about the emerald gossip, but you're right, and that's one of the things Mantel does really well (IMO).

I wasn't comfortable with the way it all looked, either. I mean, it was utterly beautiful and I'd kill for that facsimile prayerbook, and so on. But it was a bit too pretty-pretty. We were all meant to sigh and think of Holbein and the National Gallery and so on, weren't we?

Women could instigate lawsuits (although they did have to do that through intermediaries, it's been known for women successfully to demonstate their marriages were not lawful because they were forced to consent, and forced consent to a marriage was, obviously, illegal). In theory, adultery would also be a reason to bring a lawsuit about invalid marriage, and I read of a woman who did.

So, no, strictly, fathers couldn't 'dispose' of their daughters in marriage.

I think the covert pressure to do what your father/husband insisted would have been absolutely enormous, but I also think it's important to be aware of what rights women did have.

Oh, and women could seek divorce on grounds of cruelty, too. It would have been very extreme and very rare, and highly unlikely to be successful - but it was possible.

I think it matters, because to think of women as possessions of men, who had no legal rights, is to over-simplify and misrepresent the real struggles they had. You can see parallels today (obviously, in kind and not degree!). We have all sorts of legal rights, yet you will still find that the difficult thing for a lot of abused women isn't the legalities, it's the actual leaving a marriage, and making sure you are protected from a violent man in practice. I find that absolutely terrifying. So I'm not making light of how enormously much harder it must have been to be a woman back then. If anything, the fact there were these laws even then, and still women suffered so much, makes it more frightening.

I love the story of Anne of Cleves - it's so powerful. The idea that this woman (whom male historians have recorded as being fat, ugly, smelly and humiliated) was actually very rich, powerful and happy - spent the rest of her life dancing and drinking apparently, no doubt hugely relieved to have escaped a violent psychopath with her life intact. And was the most high-ranking woman in the land besides the queen. All without having to please or obey a husband.

I didn't mean to imply that women had literally no power (and certainly not that they had no inner or intellectual life), but the power they had they mostly had to gain by personal means - bonds of affection, family, whatever they could cobble together via personal charisma and authority. Anne Boleyn is a good example of this: massively powerful, and then utterly powerless when she lost the King's affection.

As tiggytape says, wealth and widowhood - you almost had it made. So long as a powerful man didn't take it into his head that he was going to marry you whether you wanted him to or not.

I remember someone suggesting (maybe on here?) that a brilliant novel would be looking at Anne of Cleves' life as a happy Tudor lesbian, in the secret lesbian bars of Southwark.

I love that idea. Absolutely no evidence, but I love it!

I do agree with you about charisma etc., and I didn't think you were implying women didn't have inner/intellectual life, at all!

Haha, I would definitely read that jeanne. A rollicking feminist re-working of Anne of Cleves is long overdue!

We must get the MN fiction writers on the job! I know there's loads of people on here who've got novels out ... they should be doing this!

Bess of Hardwick - very strong Tudor woman

LowSlung

Agree re Anne of Cleves, she definitely had the happiest story of the 6 unfortunate women who married Henry.

Catherine Parr's story is terribly sad even though she did manage to outlive Henry.

Yes, poor Catherine. Finally managed to marry the man she wanted at the fourth time of asking and then died of puerperal fever almost immediately.

She's another one who had a very rich intellectual life - wasn't she a rather bold theologian?

I don't know which one of HVIII's wives I would least like to have been... tough choice!

I loved it.

@HolyTerror
"Doesn't it help us know something about Tudor life to realise how dimly-lit their world was after dark? Like how dangerous travel could be, or how difficult it would be to distinguish someone's expression clearly at a candle-lit dinner?"

This is a wonderful observation. For example, watching the dinner with Thomas More, I kept trying to read his face, as I am so unused to seeing him portrayed in an unfavourable light.

I'd struggle to choose between Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Howard, LowSlung.

The former horribly betrayed and the latter barely more than a child married off to a man so far past his prime it was pitiful. You would have thought the Howards might have learnt their lesson with the first neice they foisted onto Henry!

These comments by posters that Hilary Mantel "makes readers work, doesn't hand it to you on a plate, books are hard work but worth it, etc.", are coming across as incredibly patronising, implying that readers who dislike her style or the books somehow lack the intelligence or dedication required to read her books.

I didn't find the books hard work because I failed to understand the politics, quite the contrary I find Hilary Mantel's style simplistic and overblown. Parts of Wolf Hall read like a teenage diary entry about a crush on pop star.

Well said, Emotionsecho. My aversion to Mantel's writing has absolutely nothing to do with my intelligence (which is, obviously, vast!) and everything to do with her inability to string a series of coherent sentences together in, ideally, the past tense.