How does Hilary Mantel’s Thomas More compare to other versions of More over the years? Not so good. Every generation invents its own More, Eamon Duffy writes in the Times Literary Supplement, but some are more accurate than others, and Mantel’s has some serious problems:

“Although More’s execution takes place at the end of Wolf Hall, he looms as a presence throughout the trilogy, a deliberate foil to the central character, almost a mirror image, reversing the roles traditionally assigned to the two men. The noble and sensitive face in the famous Hans Holbein portrait of More is for Mantel that of a religious fanatic and sadistic torturer, a man able to make ‘twisted jokes, but not to take them’, whose cruel humour masks self-loathing and a steely religious bigotry. Wolf Hall’s More is the polar opposite of Bolt’s man for all seasons, a sneering misogynist who specializes in humiliating the women in his household. He’s a religious fanatic, flogging himself in a fear-driven piety, obsessively writing vitriolic and obscene polemical books, implacably hunting down defenceless Protestants, imprisoning and torturing them in his own cellars, ‘a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God’. The novels harp on More as the supposed torturer – the theme recurs seven times in Wolf Hall alone, and in a flashback in Bring Up the Bodies he is portrayed questioning the evangelical barrister James Rainham on the rack. That More was a torturer is now widely believed to be true, mainly because of its prominence in Mantel’s novels or their adaptations. In all this, Bolt’s play is manifestly directly in Mantel’s line of fire.

“There is a real issue here. More’s detestation of heresy was deep and vehement, difficult for any twenty-first-century person to understand or sympathize with, and certainly incompatible with Bolt’s picture of the martyr for the individual conscience. In the 1530s he wrote thousands of pages of ferocious polemic against the Reformation, books in which he defended the execution of stubborn or relapsed heretics, in language whose violence now makes even his most ardent admirer quail. Recruited into Henry’s and Wolsey’s campaign against heresy, More led a series of nocturnal raids on London homes and warehouses to suppress the trade in banned Protestant books and, like other Tudor magistrates, he interrogated suspects in his house, in Chelsea. And yet we can be fairly certain that claims that More used torture against heretics are false. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, More was a truthful man. He was one of the very few Tudor Englishmen who refused to take the Oath of Succession, and he ultimately died rather than subscribe to it, because the oath implied that the King was the head of the Church. All but one of the Tudor bishops and most of the monks, priests and lay householders in England – even More’s beloved daughter Meg – signed up to that claim. But More died for refusing it, because he would not swear to a lie. So we can believe him when in 1533 he solemnly swore, “so help me God”, that he had never tortured anyone. In the Apology of Sir Thomas More, published the year before his arrest, he specifically denied all the charges of torture and maltreatment of Protestant suspects that are dramatized in Wolf Hall. ‘Of all that ever came into my hands for heresy’, he insisted, ‘as helpe me God, … never had any of them any stripe or stroke given them, so mych as a fylype on the forhed’. Yet the accusations More solemnly denied were recycled as fact by the martyrologist John Foxe, and passed from there into the Protestant historiographic tradition.

“The Wolf Hall trilogy, the most compelling historical fiction for decades, is worlds away from such vulgar exercises in sectarian demonology. But the same accusations of cruelty are central to Mantel’s characterization of More, and Mantel’s remarkable grasp of Tudor sources is deployed to heighten the picture, even where the torture theme is absent from the source itself. Early in May 1535, Cromwell visited More in the Tower to try to persuade him to accept, or appear to accept, the Supremacy. More wrote a detailed account of the interview to his daughter Margaret, and Mantel draws effectively on it for one of the most telling scenes in Wolf Hall. More declared to Cromwell, ‘I do nobody harme, I say none harm, I thynke none harme, but wysh everybodye goode. And yf thys be not ynough to kepe a man alyve in good fayth I long not to lyve’. As Geoffrey Elton remarked, ‘Cromwell was evidently impressed’ by this eloquent declaration: he spoke to More ‘full gently’ and said he would report to the King and discover ‘his gracious pleasure’. In Mantel’s reworking of this scene, however, Cromwell’s reaction is anything but gentle: he ‘cuts in on him, incredulous’: ‘You do nobody harm? What about Bainham, you remember Bainham? You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes … you had him back in your own house two days chained upright to a post … and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again, so that finally his body was so broken that they had to carry him in a chair when they took him to Smithfield to be burned alive. And you say, Thomas More, that you do no harm?’

“This turning of the source on its head to convey a precisely opposite meaning is itself, of course, artfully done, as it is again when Mantel portrays Cromwell weeping at the downfall of his master Wolsey. In one of the most moving scenes in Wolf Hall, Mantel shows that Cromwell’s tears are for his dead wife and child, not, as a contemporary reported him admitting, at his own loss of prospects. The treatment of sources, however, is surely uncomfortably reminiscent of Ford Madox Ford’s ‘provocative freedom with fact’. And spin of this sort in Cromwell’s favour pervades Wolf Hall: Mantel’s Cromwell is benignly omnicompetent, a social and religious reformer, a sincere supporter of the Protestant Reformation who nevertheless shies away from the fanatical enthusiasm of religious zealots of every stamp: ‘dear God’, Cromwell says, ‘More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men.’”

In other news: Joseph Epstein reviews What’s Your Pronoun: “Dennis Baron, a retired professor of linguistics, has set out the history of the pronoun issue, which goes back in American and English life more than 200 years. The issue gained new energy in the 1970s with what is now recognized as the second wave of femi­nism, and further steam was added with the rise in the number of people who are transgendered. (Professor Baron reveals that the latter includes roughly 0.6 percent of our population, or 1.4 million Americans.) So heated has the pronoun issue become, he goes on to suggest, that “intentionally using the wrong pronoun” may constitute hate speech.”

Jonathan Franzen will publish a new novel next year—the first of a trilogy. The Guardian calls it “the grandest-sounding novel of 2021.” I don’t know about that. It’s about an unhappy marriage. Perhaps the word “mythologies” in the title makes it sound “grand”? I don’t know.

Rupert Murdoch makes a bid for Simon & Schuster.

The friendship of C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers: “In a new book, Dorothy and Jack, Gina Dalfonzo delves into the correspondence between these two writers, which spanned more than a decade, beginning with a letter from Sayers to Lewis and ending with Sayers’s death. With this compact tome, Dalfonzo draws out the ways in which the writers might have helped spur each other to greater creativity in their work and to deeper understanding in their personal lives. The book features long quotations from many of their exchanges, following the thread of one topic or another through the course of several letters back and forth, but their text is set inside what is primarily a case Dalfonzo outlines: that the correspondence between them, illuminated by knowledge of their personal lives, illustrates how the friendship altered both for the better.”

A life of George Meredith’s wife: “There were three people at the funeral of Mary Ellen Meredith when she died at the age of forty, in 1861: two women servants and an acquaintance of her second husband, the poet and novelist George Meredith. No one else came. Not her father, the comic writer Thomas Love Peacock, then in his seventies, nor any of his family. Not one member of the family of her first husband, the late Edward Nicolls, nor their daughter, Edith, then in her teens. Not, obviously, the novelist, whom she had left in 1857 after eight years of marriage, nor their young son, Arthur. Not the man for whom she’d left him, the painter Henry Wallis, nor little Felix, who had Meredith’s surname (they had not divorced) but was in fact her illegitimate son by Wallis. Not one of the writers or publishers or public figures or friends whom she’d known during her sociable years as the daughter of a well-known literary figure and administrator in the East India Company, and as the wife of an ambitious and rising young writer. None of them came. The vicar did not mark the location of the grave in the Weybridge church where she was buried, and ‘in a few years no one [would] be able to find her grave.’”

Tom Hodgkinson reviews The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science: “We can probably blame George and Ira Gershwin. It was that brilliant duo who, in 1937, penned the memorable lyric ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.’ The song has been recorded by at least 15 artists over the years, from Fred Astaire to Lady Gaga, and is embedded in the consciousness of the West. But its headline message — medieval people are stupid — is total nonsense.”

Photo: Lugano