Posted on 04/23/2015 9:38:18 AM PDT by SweetAkitoRose
Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation of Hillary Mantel’s novel about early Tudor England, began airing on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” Easter Sunday night. It’s brilliant television. It’s also a serious distortion of history. And it proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere.
The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was to take down the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons—the Thomas More the Catholic Church canonized—and her instrument for doing so is More’s rival in the court of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell.
Hillary Mantel does not lack for chutzpah, for Cromwell has long been considered a loathsome character and More a man of singular nobility. In the novel Wolf Hall, however, the More of Robert Bolt’s play is transformed into a heresy-hunting, scrupulous prig, while Cromwell is the sensible, pragmatic man of affairs who gets things done, even if a few heads get cracked (or detached) in the process. All of which is rubbish, as historians with no Catholic interests at stake have made clear. Thus the president of the U.K.’s National Secular Society, historian David Starkey, finds “not a scrap of evidence” for Mantel’s retelling of the More-Cromwell tale; Mantel’s plot, he claimed, was “total fiction.” And as Gregory Wolfe pointed out in a fine essay on Wolf Hall in the Washington Post, historian Simon Schama has written that the documentary evidence he examined “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.”
So why did Hillary Mantel win Britain’s most prestigious award for fiction, the Man Booker Prize, not once, but twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies? Because the books are terrific novels. Because well-crafted novels that make a hash of history for the sake of defaming the Catholic Church and one of its English icons are, in today’s literary culture, quite all right, thank you very much.
And because Britain’s literary high culture is still in thrall to the Whig view of British history, and seems oblivious to the deep transformation that’s taken place in English Reformation studies since Eamon Duffy’s extraordinary book, The Stripping of the Altars, was first published in 1992. There, Duffy demonstrated beyond cavil what Simon Schama alluded to in his Financial Times article on the BBC version of Wolf Hall: that Henry VIII was a proto-totalitarian who, with his Protestant heirs, imposed his version of Christianity on England against the will of the great majority of plain folk, who stubbornly clung to the old faith until the overwhelming power of the state extinguished most of English Catholic life, and “anti-popery” got set in cultural concrete as modern nation-building went forward in Britain—often funded by expropriated Catholic properties.
Protestant anti-Catholicism in the U.K. has long since been superseded by secular anti-Catholicism, but the cultural afterburn remains virtually identical: to the Hillary Mantels of 21st-century Britain, Catholicism is retrograde, priggish, obsessive, fanatical, and, well, un-English. Where all this could lead was made clear in the run-up to Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Great Britain in 2010, when just about every hoary anti-Catholic bromide in the playbook was dusted off and deployed in the media—and with a few notable exceptions, the British Catholic hierarchy proved itself incapable of rising to the defense of the Church and the pope, a task that was left, in the main, to laity. Which is fine, but was unhappily reminiscent of the English bishops’ performance under Henry VIII, when all but John Fisher truckled to the spirit of the age and joined in declaring Henry “Supreme Head of the Church in England.”
Thus Wolf Hall, while bad history, is also a cautionary tale for today.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.
It is a television production...If you want history then do the research....
People are so sensitive these days
I’ve been watching it, and find the characters a little difficult to follow at times.
Long considered by those whose opinions are deemed worthy of considering, in other words.
I suppose centuries of killing “heretics” had nothing to do with anti-Catholic bias? We don’t have accurate numbers, but people died — even one was too many. The Protestants won’t forget, any more than the Armenians will forget what the Turks did to them.
Just a reminder to the universe at large that Mantel's accusations against "Saint" Sir Thomas are not new:
Rumours circulated during and after More's lifetime regarding ill-treatment of heretics during his time as Lord Chancellor. The popular anti-Catholic polemicist John Foxe, who "placed Protestant sufferings against the background of... the Antichrist" was instrumental in publicising accusations of torture in his famous Book of Martyrs, claiming that More had often personally used violence or torture while interrogating heretics. Later authors, such as Brian Moynahan and Michael Farris, cite Foxe when repeating these allegations.
-- Michael Farris,From Tyndale to Madison, 2007.
We do know that More imprisoned heretics in his own home, and we know that during his Chancellorship heretics were burned alive. The denials of More's defenders thus ring rather hollow. There were trustworthy gaols in England. Of what possible purpose could their captivity under his personal supervision have served, if not for his perverse sadistic pleasure? Arguments that More was a delicate soul who could not have done such a thing might satisfy those whose knowledge of More is limited to Robert Bolt's fiction [every bit as fictional as Mantel's] but will not satisfy anyone who has actually read his vile exchanges with Luther and Tyndale.
The "saint" had a very nasty streak. Pointing that out is neither "anti-Catholic bigotry" nor is it a revision of history.
I’m trained as a historian, and my specialization was the Tudor era. I most assuredly have done the research!
My research skills aren’t in question, rather the revisionist history/’history with an agenda’ movement, that’s all.
Very few people have the time or inclination to do research. They tend to assume what they see is accurate, just because it’s on tv. It’s more insidious when it’s a costume drama on PBS, because there’s an implication that it’s educational, and educational must automatically = 100% accurate & unbiased.
So I suppose it’s okay with you that Tyndale is also demonized as a fanatic in this new production as well. Also, if you want to read some really vile writings, try to find translations of Luther’s later works. They are so detestable that there has never been any real effort to translate them from the original German. He was a blasphemous pig.
I actually have no god in the fight. Tyndale and More argued pointlessly over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Both died as a consequence of the excesses produced by their deadly fantasies.
Prior to my joining FR I was mostly indifferent to Catholics and Catholicism. Then I started to notice a drumbeat of passive aggressive anti-Protestant postings by Catholics and sometimes I responded and was treated to scorn, ridicule, mockery, and insults.
Granted, there were some Catholics who were open to discussion and I’ve learned from them. Thank you.
Honestly it is still the negative comments that left the most impact on me and anymore I am no longer indifferent to Catholicism.
Detestable? Yes, like the ACTIONS of the Catholic church in the same period.
I’m sorry for your experience on this forum with Catholics. I always wince when Catholics behave badly.
But, speaking truthfully, I could write the very same words that you did in your post-—except where you write Catholic I would write Protestant and where you write anti-Protestant I could write anti-Catholic.
I, as well, am no longer indifferent-—to Protestantism.
not every one is as thoughtless as you suggest
Gee...that could just as easily describe Cardinal Wolsey, Queen Mary Tudor and the various and sundry inquisitors imposed upon the non-Catholic Christians in England.
“Long considered by those whose opinions are deemed worthy of considering, in other words.”
Feeling left out, Alex?
“Of what possible purpose could their captivity under his personal supervision have served, if not for his perverse sadistic pleasure?”
Are you kidding? Thomas More - like other men of his age - often kept prisoners close by for the most obvious of reasons” to keep an eye on them, gather information from them, and to convert them if possible. There is no hint whatsoever of “perverse sadistic pleasure”.
Concur, the FR Religion Forum reflects very poorly on Protestantism. The message presented is simple, and often vulgar, antiCatholicism.
“and sundry inquisitors imposed upon the non-Catholic Christians in England.”
Nice try but there really were no inquisitors in England. No inquisitors’ tribunal was established in England that I know of and certainly none by the papacy for instance. That was also the case in Ireland, Wales, Scotland (I believe), most of Scandinavia and most of Catholic eastern Europe.
” Tyndale and More argued pointlessly over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”
That’s a ridiculous thing to say.
“Both died as a consequence of the excesses produced by their deadly fantasies.”
No.
Yes, that is arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You, my FRiend, are the one holding and saying ridiculous things, not me. This is merely one of them.
Both died as a consequence of the excesses produced by their deadly fantasies.
Ironically, both men died because they believed that it was more important for the King of England to maintain a farcical "marriage" whose sole purpose had been arranged for political reasons, than it was to avoid another dynastic war that would probably kill tens of thousands more Englishmen.
This despite the fact that both men knew quite well that Henry had -- under the law of the Jews -- already invalidated his marriage by countless adulteries and the production of no one knows how many bastards.
Tyndale came to this opinion long before More, who was holding out hope that his master in Italy would find another argument about dancing angels that could allow him to support the king. Unfortunately, the Bishop of Rome understood that the marriage to Catherine was political, and gambled -- foolishly as history shows -- that because of a hundred years of Plantagenet mismanagement England was on the decline and he needed to tie his fortunes to the Continent.
He lost, and in losing, the Christians of England traded the Church of Tweedledum for the Church of Tweedledee.
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