‘Wolf Hall’ Might Not Be Historically Accurate — So What?

Wolf Hall, the BBC-produced miniseries that premiered on PBS’s long-running Masterpiece last night, is poised to become the next Big British Thing in the United States. And it makes sense: it’s a mixture of the House of Cards‘ political intrigue, the prestige costume drama of Downton Abbey, with a dash of Games of Thrones‘ moody old-timeyness (without the dragons and the magic and the gore, of course). As an added bonus, it’s based on historical events that still capture the interest of Anglophiles across the globe: the doomed courtship between King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, and the ensuing English Reformation.

Based on the novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (both of which won the Man Booker Prize), Wolf Hall follows the true story of Henry VIII’s struggle to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon (with whom he did not produce a male heir), in an attempt to wed the younger, lovelier Anne. The proposed union would take much political maneuvering; Henry was convinced his marriage to Katherine was null and void, as she was first his brother’s widow and received special permission from the Pope to wed her brother-in-law. Henry’s advisors tried to coerce Katherine to enter a convent in order to free her husband to marry again, but she refused. The Pope, naturally, was on Katherine’s side, and refused to issue the marriage an annulment — especially after Rome was sacked by Charles V, head of the Spanish Empire and Katherine’s nephew, who sought to protect his aunt and cousin’s royal status.

Enter the infamous lawyer and political advisor Thomas Cromwell (played in Wolf Hall by Mark Rylance), who was an equivalent to Doug Stamper to Henry’s Frank Underwood. Cromwell was an advocate for England’s break from the political power of Rome. He not only helped maneuver Henry’s annulment from Katherine, but also his courtship and marriage to Anne Boleyn, a young woman with a surprising amount of political ambition under her sleeve, who will stop at nothing to become Queen of England — even if it resulted in her husband’s excommunication and the Church of England’s separation from Rome.

Mantel’s books, and the miniseries based on them, present a darker image of Boleyn — or at least for this writer whose knowledge of this whole business had been, until now, limited to the fact that Henry had his wife beheaded for treason after just a few years of marriage after she was unable to give him a male heir. What Wolf Hall accomplishes, of course, is giving a voice to Cromwell, who achieved high standing in the king’s court despite his commoner upbringing. He’s a sympathetic protagonist, one who simply does what he needs to do in order to keep his own head on his shoulders rather than to satisfy his own ambitions.

But it’s exactly that characterization of Cromwell that has made Mantel’s novels, and now the miniseries based upon them, as controversial as they are acclaimed. British historians have questioned Mantel’s motives since Wolf Hall‘s publication in 2009. One such historian, Simon Schama, writes in the Financial Times (via The Washington Post), “It grates a bit to accept that millions now think of Thomas Cromwell as a much-maligned, misunderstood pragmatist from the school of hard knocks who got precious little thanks for doing Henry VIII’s dirty work… When I was doing research for A History of Britain, the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture.”

History, of course, has not been kind to Cromwell, and has been much more forgiving to Boleyn (whose Mantel’s works present as the scheming adulteress that she was accused of being) — she was revered as a martyr once her daughter, Elizabeth I, became queen. (That should be Exhibit A for the case for history’s subjectivity — especially history that is based on interpretation of texts and letters rather than solid, hardened evidence).

Of course, Hilary Mantel’s books are not historical accounts — they are works of fiction, full of tension and suspense that take precedence over fact, as with every piece of art that’s inspired by true events. The hand-wringing that “millions” will reconsider the events that take place during the period of history presented in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is a bit extreme; these are events that took place five centuries ago — not five decades ago. That might sound like I’m dismissing historical events as trite, but honestly: how many people will be so swayed by a couple of novels and a BBC miniseries that the historical inaccuracies will affect how they see the period of England during Henry VIII’s reign — are people thinking that much about it day-to-day? I doubt it.

The success of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is not limited to book sales and a TV production: this week, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptations of the novels, retitled Wolf Hall Parts One & Two, open on Broadway. I saw a preview performance of the two-part production yesterday, and even though I had felt very Wolf Hall-ed out by the end its six-hour running time, I was still compelled to read about the true story — where else but on Wikipedia — when I came home from the Winter Garden Theatre. And that’s where I learned that Mantel and the play’s production team willingly and purposefully interpreted historical events to fit the narrative they wanted to tell.

I wasn’t offended to learn that what I had sat through wasn’t completely correct — if anything, it made me ponder the philosophical concept of historical accuracy in the first place. And while I’m not suggesting that every Wolf Hall viewer will do the same, the story itself was intriguing enough to interest me in learning more about its characters: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell. If the historically inaccurate miniseries does the same, then historians should be applauding it — not bemoaning its existence.

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Photos: BBC/PBS