Hilary Mantel, twice a Booker Prize winner, has given a lecture on the process of the historical novelist.
“It is quite possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence.”
And some nice comments …
“Evidence is always partial.
“Facts are not truth; information is not knowledge; history is not the past.
“History is the method we've evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It's the record of what's left of the record.
“It's the positions we've taken, when we stop the dance to note them down. It's what's left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it. It's no more the past than a birth certificate is not the birth, the map is not the journey, the script is not the performance.
“Its the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses combined with the incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them.
And it’s the best we can do ...
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The difference between a historian and an author is made plain as day in the first two books of Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bringing Up The Bodies'.
They are terrific reads, and the first book made great TV (and earned the brilliant Mark Rylance critical the popular acclaim he so rightly deserves), but they are not history.
According to such luminaries as Simon Schama and David Starkey, it flies in the face of the documentary evidence.
Mantel’s anti-Catholic stance is currently fashionable, and in her books she has reversed the long-standing view of the main players, that Thomas Cromwell (Protestant) was a loathsome character and Thomas More (Catholic) a man of singular nobility who stood up to the king and paid for it with his life.
In Wolf Hall however, More is a rabid, heresy-hunting, scrupulous prig, while Cromwell is the subtle, sensible, family-loving, man of affairs who gets things done. All of which, according to the historical record, is rubbish. Even David Starkey, the president of the UK’s National Secular Society, finds “not a scrap of evidence” for Mantel’s recasting of the More-Cromwell tale; Mantel’s plot, he claims, is “total fiction.”
Another famous 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.”
The English Reformation is one of those hoary old myth-clouded events that is well overdue for re-examination. Like the Crusades, Galileo and the Inquisition, it’s the go-to event in history for the Catholic critic, and most of what is said is the product of centuries of Protestant propaganda, so steeped as we are in this retelling of our past it has become for us a fact.
Eamon Duffy produced an extraordinary vision of those troubled times in The Stripping of the Altars. There he demonstrated beyond doubt what Schama had alluded to, that Henry VIII was a proto-totalitarian who imposed a version of Christianity on England, against the will of the great majority of plain folk, so that he could divorce and remarry.
By the time of Elizabeth I, the people were so fed up of Catholics burning Protestants and Protestants burning Catholics, that her wily old adviser Francis Walsingham suggested the crime be changed from being a Catholic to being a traitor — treason was far more palatable a reason to burn a man than the finer points of theology — and the torture and killing went on with renewed vigour. Elizabeth killed far more than 'Bloody Mary', and her father before her had done for ten times more! Mary was far more lenient than Elizabeth in cases of civil crime, but Mary was Catholic, ergo the Protestants spun the myth of her reign ...
“It is quite possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence.”
And some nice comments …
“Evidence is always partial.
“Facts are not truth; information is not knowledge; history is not the past.
“History is the method we've evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It's the record of what's left of the record.
“It's the positions we've taken, when we stop the dance to note them down. It's what's left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it. It's no more the past than a birth certificate is not the birth, the map is not the journey, the script is not the performance.
“Its the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses combined with the incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them.
And it’s the best we can do ...
+++
The difference between a historian and an author is made plain as day in the first two books of Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bringing Up The Bodies'.
They are terrific reads, and the first book made great TV (and earned the brilliant Mark Rylance critical the popular acclaim he so rightly deserves), but they are not history.
According to such luminaries as Simon Schama and David Starkey, it flies in the face of the documentary evidence.
Mantel’s anti-Catholic stance is currently fashionable, and in her books she has reversed the long-standing view of the main players, that Thomas Cromwell (Protestant) was a loathsome character and Thomas More (Catholic) a man of singular nobility who stood up to the king and paid for it with his life.
In Wolf Hall however, More is a rabid, heresy-hunting, scrupulous prig, while Cromwell is the subtle, sensible, family-loving, man of affairs who gets things done. All of which, according to the historical record, is rubbish. Even David Starkey, the president of the UK’s National Secular Society, finds “not a scrap of evidence” for Mantel’s recasting of the More-Cromwell tale; Mantel’s plot, he claims, is “total fiction.”
Another famous 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.”
The English Reformation is one of those hoary old myth-clouded events that is well overdue for re-examination. Like the Crusades, Galileo and the Inquisition, it’s the go-to event in history for the Catholic critic, and most of what is said is the product of centuries of Protestant propaganda, so steeped as we are in this retelling of our past it has become for us a fact.
Eamon Duffy produced an extraordinary vision of those troubled times in The Stripping of the Altars. There he demonstrated beyond doubt what Schama had alluded to, that Henry VIII was a proto-totalitarian who imposed a version of Christianity on England, against the will of the great majority of plain folk, so that he could divorce and remarry.
By the time of Elizabeth I, the people were so fed up of Catholics burning Protestants and Protestants burning Catholics, that her wily old adviser Francis Walsingham suggested the crime be changed from being a Catholic to being a traitor — treason was far more palatable a reason to burn a man than the finer points of theology — and the torture and killing went on with renewed vigour. Elizabeth killed far more than 'Bloody Mary', and her father before her had done for ten times more! Mary was far more lenient than Elizabeth in cases of civil crime, but Mary was Catholic, ergo the Protestants spun the myth of her reign ...
