Priscilla wrote:

I have been awaiting Temps take on the BBC production of Wolf Hall - so far - and you have gone quiet, Temps.

It were all right, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing.

I am quiet because I am having a massive huff at life in general. Someone I thought I liked very much (no one here, I hasten to add) told me on Wednesday (on balance, not a good day), that I talk too much   . So, I have decided to go all subdued and enigmatic for a bit, even though I am actually dying to talk about Thomas More being presented as an unpleasant, religious, middle-class, intellectual snob, Wolsey being a bit too likeable and Cromwell's impeccable taste in soft furnishings.


I'll be back to normal by tea-time tomorrow (probably).

Carry on Talking, Temps, we like it! Ear plugs for friend quite cheap at Boots for a thoughtful gift.  I could also knit a huge tea-head cosy muffler for said friend if required.

I assume several characters will go through our fine sieves of opinion during this series. So it's Wolsey and More for dissection if that would help you to recover - come on woman - speak up!

Temps, just a thought but if you want a a bout of the shudders, give Abbey Park, Leics. a go. Wolsey is buried somewhere within - try the car park. They seem to keep the dubious under tarmac there until a bit of publicity is needed. Not that you champion him is any way but he was another who did a few good things in his time..... thinking of tax reform and fairer law but otherwise had a damaged reputation.

If that doesn't work, Carters Little Liver Pills used to be recommended for assorted ailments.

Priscilla wrote:

If that doesn't work, Carters Little Liver Pills used to be recommended for assorted ailments.

Carter's Little Liver Pills, P.? Or Bile Beans perchance?







Bile Beans used to do an advert featuring the heart-rending announcement "Mummy Loves Me Now!". I can't find it anywhere, but I've definitely seen it. Imagine that as a new advert - mummy loves me now she's - er - had a successful evacuation of her bowels. Very odd.

Yes - strange no one has been poking around yet for Wolsey's remains.

I'm very interested in the class thing Mantel and Kosminsky are bringing out with both Wolsey and Cromwell - "butcher's curs" both of them were called. Norfolk certainly loathed Cromwell for a working-class smart-arse, especially when Henry made his chief minister a Knight of the Garter in 1537. But it's the conflict between More and Cromwell I'm really fascinated by. As Kosminsky said on the Newnight interview, two men of genius who just "didn't get each other". Cromwell tried to win More over in fact, but More wasn't having it. There's the line from the now discredited Man For All Seasons - More to Cromwell: "You threaten like a dockside bully." I'm afraid for all Mantel's brilliance, that's still how I interpret Cromwell, a dockside bully with a genius IQ, employed by a right royal bully descended from a long line of bullies.  It'll be interesting to see if the superbly subtle Rylance will make me change my mind.

In haste. Back tomorrow.

EDIT -  Found it:

She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

Tell whoever it was to keep their stupid opinions to themselves, Temp, and not to be so bluddy cheeky. Our Temp talks because she has something to say that's worth listening to.

And where can I get some of the wonder pills?

The Bile Beans seem an easier treatment than the French equivalent for purging the system:



It's interesting that while the British are always concerned about their bowels, with the French it's their liver that's of primary importance.

And for what it's worth Temp I got told this afternoon by the lady that runs the village shop, that I  seemed "very chatty today" - not quite the same as saying I talk too much but similar. Although in my defence it was the first conversation I'd had with anyone since I phoned my sister on Christmas morning, so maybe I was gabbling away a bit just to make up for a month of silence. Perhaps I should get out more.
 

Back on topic (Wolf Hall) I liked the comment by the reviewer for 'The Telegraph': "It's often said the test of a good actor is that you can tell what the character is thinking. What makes Rylance's performance so riveting, though, is that you can't."

ferval wrote:

She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

Oh, thank you for that, ferval. I came in late last night and your message cheered me no end. But, to be fair, we must add to the Proverb, "but she does go on a bit." (Not too sure about the wisdom bit, either...)The person who criticised my garrulity on Wednesday spent all last night trying to talk to me.  

Good Lord, MM, that is a long time. Next year, Deo volente (sorry, couldn't resist, but put it in Latin so as not to sound overly God-Squaddy), we shall all have to descend on you in the New Year (as paying guests, of course) for a Historical Foodies' Weekend. I'll wash up (or load the dishwasher).

But enough of the social chit-chat - back to us history stuff. Our Man of the Moment - Crum, as Henry VIII called him. (When at cards, Henry would declare, "I have a Cromwell!" when he played a knave.)

I've just reread the message I typed in such haste yesterday evening and thought ruefully that any decent history tutor would put a big red line straight through it: you do not make an assessment of a Tudor statesman based on your understanding of a play (however brilliant) originally written in 1954 (a year after Stalin's death), nor on a couple of novels (however brilliant), published in 2009. The earlier writer was reflecting on the yearnings of a Europe traumatised by a conflict of ideologies that produced two of the worst dictators the world has ever seen; the other set out to show us a Tudor world very similar to our own postmodern one - a world where everything is falling apart and all the old beliefs and certainties are failing. Survival is all that matters: pragmatism wins hands down over principle. What is principle anyway? A world where we have more respect for an honest fixer like Tony Soprano (he loved his kids too) than for dangerous, deluded, born-again Catholic like Tony Blair.

So on what should we assess Cromwell? The sources, as ever, are open to "interpretation". But, whose interpretation, written when? One intelligent and reliable recent biographer, John Schofield, tells us that the image of the man as the blood-stained henchman is "largely fictional". Cromwell was the father of modern democracy. Mmm. Depends what you mean by "modern democracy". Robert Hutchinson's equally convincing study presents a man who combined a blinding intellect with an ability to go about any task with "Stalinist efficiency". Firm and most definitely not fair. David Starkey picks a metaphor inspired by life in the jungle: for Dr Starkey, Cromwell was "the jackal to Henry's lion".

But, lousy, untrained historian that I am, I still prefer psychology and portraiture. Cromwell - we know for a fact - was an abused child, regularly beaten and humiliated by an alcoholic brute of a father. He spent his life, as such children do, trying to come to terms with that, having learnt - or rather honed -  his survival skills working first as a soldier of fortune and then as trainee fixer in Machiavelli's Italy. It was an unusual education, but effective. Thomas More went to Oxford. Cromwell was self-taught: he learnt the entire New Testament (in Latin) by heart, but I suspect he treated the work as a Latin primer rather than as a guide for life.

Here's how Holbein saw him. Holbein understood a lot about "capturing the intention of a man's soul".

"You've made me look like a murderer," Mantel has TC exclaim when he sees his picture. "Didn't you know?" is his son, Gregory's, comment.

Henry seems to have had a penchant for hijacking others' political agendas and taking them in directions and to extents their originators did not necesarily envisage, always with less regard for the actual consequences as the king did not see (and reckoned he did not need to see) beyond the short-term advantage this hijack conferred on his royal self. Woe betide anyone who was still in his employment and identified with one of these agendas when this occurred. In this sense Cromwell, Wolsey and More (and quite a few others along the way) could quite legitimately be imagined as members of the same club, one to which, in a mythical afterlife scenario, I would pay good money to attend their monthly meetings.

Cromwell always struck me as a man who decided he could ride this roller coaster once the hijack occurred, as did Wolsey, and in fact got further than most. He is still one of the many club members however who can check his head into the cloakroom on his way into their meetings.

So what was Cromwell's "political agenda"? And was it actually his job to have one? Starkey says not.

Here's Elton's (G.R., not David's hubby) assessment: "Among the men of his day he stands out not only by his ability, nor even by his undoubted ruthlessness, but by the singleminded purpose to which he put both ability and ruthlessness. In eight years he engineered one of the few successful revolutions in English history, and he did this without upsetting the body politic."

Discuss.

Personal advancement within a system predicated upon volatile royal favour. It's not much of an agenda these days but was terribly popular at the time, you must admit.

And within this agenda were to be found several others, or do you think Cromwell did not give a thought to the actual long-term political, social and financial consequences of dissolution? It is definitely something I'd bring up at the meeting (and I'm sure Edward Poynings would be right behind me).

Question to the right honourable Thos. Cromwell. Given our colleague's undoubted application of considerable intellect and attention to detail in formulating and prosecuting the political agenda of transferrence of power, influence, wealth and ownership of the souls of the king's subjects from the established religious agencies to the king's own office, and given that Mr Tweekes, our cloakroom attendant has just yet again complained about the unseemly and grotesque dripping of viscuous and other substances from that which our esteemed member has entrusted to his care on the way in, does not the once honourable ex-earl of what one time was Essex now admit that he feels a right bloody twat?

But was Cromwell's revolution to do with the dissolution? Wasn't that going to happen anyway, Cromwell or no Cromwell? Wolsey had made a start on it way back in 1518 (he got a Papal Bull, giving him the go-ahead). Wasn't the real Cromwellian revolution to do with the power he gave Parliament? And he invented the "Privy Council", the beginning of our idea of "Cabinet" government.

The legislation put through by Cromwell was extraordinary - ostensibly King working with Parliament, or Parliament just giving the King what he wanted at the time, but the long-term implications were surely something quite different? I've been told elsewhere I've got this all wrong, and when I asked Catty ages ago what he thought, he wriggled out of the question and put several smileys.

Norfolk never left his head anywhere, of course, although he nearly did. Escaped by the skin of his teeth. Stupid man, but good soldier, good Catholic, good survivor - and very, very lucky.

Yes, Poynings had Norfolk black-balled from the club, I have heard. He's actually a member of that other club, the "Two Finger Society", another one whose meetings I would love to attend. More wanted in when he arrived first, but rabids are excluded under the club's constitution for fear of contagion.

PS. Don't confuse pursuance of an agenda with origination of same. Cromwell was the guy who ran with it, and kept on running even when he saw the little patch of real estate on Tower Hill to which it suddenly started to lead.

PPS. I have it from the honorary president of the Two Finger Society, Stephen "Wily Winchester" Gardiner that Cromwell also applied for membership on arrival based on some vague letter from the French which, he claimed, would prove his qualification. Wily had to regretfully inform him, as he had told More, that unless one could produce the French Letter upon which qualification rested one must tote one's nut elsewhere.

Tonight, 9.00 pm BBC 2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0513ghb

nordmann wrote:

Yes, Poyning had Norfolk black-balled from the club, I have heard. He's actually a member of that other club, the "Two Finger Society", another one whose meetings I would love to attend. More wanted in when he arrived first, but rabids are excluded under the club's constitution for fear of contagion.

PS. Don't confuse pursuance of an agenda with orgination of same. Cromwell was the guy who ran with it, and kept on running even when he saw the little patch of real estate on Tower Hill to which it suddenly started to lead.

PPS. I have it from the honorary president of the Two Finger Society, Stephen "Wily Winchester" Gardiner that Cromwell also applied for membership on arrival based on some vague letter from the French which, he claimed, would prove his qualification. Wily had to regretfully inform him, as he had told More, that unless one could produce the French Letter upon which qualification rested one must tote one's nut elsewhere.

Why do I, when attempting to discuss anything with nordmann,  always feel like Agent Starling addressing Hannibal Lecter?

More was not a "rabid". You've been listening to Minette too much. Even Hilary had to laugh when I told her it's impossible for any lapsed Catholic to be fair to Thomas More.


Poynings in Ireland - "whole and perfect obedience"? Tyranny? Isn't that what More was fighting?

PS Poynings, not Poyning, H.L.

ferval wrote:

Tonight, 9.00 pm BBC 2.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0513ghb

Oh, goody! More Chateauneuf etc., plus peanuts.

Poynings' policy of isolating and emasculating the power of the Norman legacy in Irish politics was as welcome to the Gaelic Irish as to his boss, Henry Mark Seven (who was really intent on consolidating his hold over that which he had wrested from the baby-murderer rather than actually trying to achieve anything in Ireland beyond snuffing out the Pretender Production Line at that source). As an agenda therefore it was plain, pragmatic and in fact very popular, even in Ireland (except amongst three or four families of course). You must understand what within the English ambit represented "whole and perfect" at the time in Ireland. Otherwise you become Starkey, and no one in Ireland would wish that on you.

But yet this law proved the basis of Henry the Fat's complete takeover bid a generation later. Hence the lazy backward attribution of intent and meaning through which Starkey pays his grocery bills. Life is unfair, Ms Starling, and it is for us to gently pick our way between the pitfalls of complacent intellect. (makes Hannibal Lecter slurping noise)

And More was rabid, of course he was. Welded to one thought. Snapped in two by the slightest breeze, a brittle man of no substance. A man who confused principle with princedom and therefore could never survive, or be allowed to survive, in politics. I am not familiar with many Catholics who have "lapsed", as you say. But there are indeed many lapsed idealists who might tend to the above opinions - none of which I originated and all of which were expressed by near contemporaries.

What is a "lapsed Catholic" by the way? Having never been of the cat lick persuasion I cannot even begin to know what must be jettisoned in order to make Hilary laugh.

PS. Have rectified Poynings' singularity (having already twice rescued him from Porning).

nordmann wrote:

 I cannot even begin to know what must be jettisoned in order to make Hilary laugh.

Well, I'm sure she was laughing at me, not with me.

nordmann wrote:

Hence the lazy backward attribution of intent and meaning from which Starkey pays his grocery bills. Life is unfair, Ms Starling, and it is for us to gently pick our way between the pitfalls of complacent intellect.

Some of us are trying, sir, believe it or not. I can spell Poynings, but I don't know much about him, as you have realised.

Here's a lovely dig from Hilary/TC about More:

"This is what you forget, this vehemence; his ability to make his twisted jokes, but not take them."

He (Thomas More) thought Lucian of Samosata was funny, so he can't have been a complete prat. (Can he?)

Well, it's usually at this point and go and fume my way around Sainsbury's. Today is no exception. My acumen hasn't thrilled anyone, clearly.

Poynings went native before he was recalled (I imagine in some alarm) by Whitehall. There's a lovely dedication to him in Irish on the wall of a castle owned then by the O'Flaherty's in Galway, carved and erected by "The" O'Flaherty himself. To get this far in with those lads one at least had to belt out a song or two - better still while playing a harp. Monetary donations were welcome too of course. This is why "whole and perfect" require something of a refracted perusal in an Anglo-Irish context. In fact it still does.

Getting away from Poynings...

I've just found this. It is a dual review of Elton's book on Cromwell and Mantel's Wolf Hall by Professor Mark Horowitz. Not an easy task ( ) he's undertaken here, but the result is excellent:

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1168

Please note:


Perhaps the most important aspect of Cromwell’s personality and political outlook is, according to Elton, a belief and reliance in the efficacy of the law and its use to reform and transform England.

and


The medium Cromwell utilizes, with far-reaching effects for the development of the modern English state, is parliament, through which the laws of England are guided with his steady if not always successful hand.


See, that's what I said.


PS Thomas More is described as "Torquemada-on-the-Thames   . Minette used that expression ages ago on the PITT thread. So she pinched it from Horowitz - the minx! (Unless, of course, he pinched it from her.)

PPS Holbein programme on tele now. Another treat from the BBC.

Well, at least Waldemar Januszczack (not an easy name to type out after 2.5 glasses of Chateauneuf-du-Pape) agrees with me about More and Cromwell - and how Holbein presents them - even if El Nord doesn't. And, as Januszczack kept saying - Holbein was actually there. He knew both the blighters!

I'm not sure what we are in disagreement about. I said he followed political agendas. You said he didn't, but since then have itemised a few anyway that he did. And now you say even an art critic agrees with this, which makes three of us at the last count (four, if Januszczack is right about Hans the Painter). But I don't care - he's still barred from the Two Finger Society get-togethers. William and Robert Cecil asked me to pass it on ...

Rather disconcerting seeing that horrible thing staring at me at 3.35am.

I probably should leave this till tomorrow, but will try to send myself to sleep by responding to your rather odd post.

I did not say Cromwell did not have political agendas. I asked this:

Temperance wrote:

 

So what was Cromwell's "political agenda"? And was it actually his job to have one? Starkey says not.

This is the quotation from Starkey's Six Wives that I had in mind when I typed that. It actually occurs in the chapter dealing with the fall of Anne Boleyn, but, given what Cromwell is alleged to have said to Reginald Pole (see below), I wondered whether Starkey's comments should apply to Cromwell's dealings generally. I didn't make that clear.

There has been much speculation about Cromwell's personal motives...But essentially the question about Cromwell's motives is mal posé. It was not Cromwell's business to have motives of his own. Instead, it was his job to do what the king wanted. In breaking with Anne Boleyn, therefore, Cromwell was acting as jackal to Henry's lion.

Reginald Pole wrote about a conversation he allegedly had with Cromwell in 1535. Cromwell gave Pole details of an interview he had had with the king when, amongst other things discussed, he (Cromwell) had explained what, in his opinion, was the proper role of a councillor. Cromwell, according to Pole, declared that the "first concern of such a person must be to serve the honour and advantage of his prince, and if he does his work well, his master's ambitions will be achieved without any sign of discord in his realm."

Cromwell came unstuck when his own agenda - or ambitions - became more important than Henry's, or when, rather, he broke the cardinal rule: "Don't be smarter than your boss."

But then Starkey might be wrong. Who am I to say?

I don't understand why you mention the Cecils and all this two-finger nonsense. Are you suggesting that the question here is perhaps similar to the one posed ages ago on the thread about Elizabeth Tudor - did she control the Privy Council, or did the Privy Council control her? Who was the puppet, who the puppet-master - Cromwell or Henry? But that question is probably mal posé too. William Cecil and his son both died in their beds: Cromwell ended up being hacked to pieces on Tower Hill.

I don't think that was an item on Cromwell's agenda - not consciously anyway.

PS I shall remove my foolish bouncing thing. I respectfully ask that you remove yours - and that awful grinning computer-face.

PPS Poor Parallax and I have come in for a hammering today. It's a bit dispiriting, to be honest, but I'm not being sarcastic when I say I understand it's probably dispiriting for you too - no one can argue with you here at your own level. You must bear with us, you know.

Hammering? Oh, please! And Poor Parallax's permissiveness; if it makes sense to you, that simply means that you both must bear with me, not vice versa. Its meaning defeats me as used by the poster and I'm not ashamed to admit this.

But on the Cromwell front - let's discuss motive. I wouldn't quibble for a moment with the essential obvious veracity of Starkey's comment above. However I quibble a lot with why he thinks it has to be said at all. Of course Cromwell was not "free" to pursue purely personal motives. Who was, in his position and in an age when that distinction at that level of the political system simply did not exist?

If one examines the political life of any individual in a position of power - and one can say this is true for virtually every instance up to the Age of Enlightenment with its serious redesigning of the channels of power and responsibilities for formulating policy through contribution from the enfranchised - it is characterised almost universally by a non-distinction between these individuals' assessments of what constituted public and private benefit. It was assumed, from monarch down to the lowliest civic functionary, that one's political agenda by default included to a large part providing for one's personal security and advancement in the process. This was not seen as being in opposition to working for the good of the body politic, but in fact was an essential ingredient in pursuing that end.

Cue Cromwell. Or Wolsey. Or More. Or in fact anyone whose political career occurred during the reign of a monarch who also behaved according to this tenet but who, unlike most of his contemporaries, had absolutely no problem with policy u-turns and tangents suddenly adopted for what his peers regarded often as completely unpredictable reasons. This was the inherent weakness in the system - when the most powerful policy maker behaves erratically or vicariously and then those whose own agendas can not be pursued without some semblance of stability are consequently faced with a simple choice: Try to influence and becalm this volatile behaviour or alternatively hang on to its tail and hope to survive the ride. More did both, but is most famous for finally letting go of the tail and using this action to rescue some public dignity in the process. Wolsey also did both though seems not to have had a good Plan B for the aftermath. He died before we could find out (and probably before he could find out what a good Plan  might be in the circumstances).

Cromwell rode the course, strapped to the beast out of control and for a famously brief but incredibly important period in English history, with at least the illusion of holding the reins intact. For a man operating in completely unchartered territory he did an admirable job in fact, even if it was doomed to failure due to the king's erraticness never abating throughout - getting worse in fact. However the instincts and policies that kept him in survival mode were essentially ones personal to himself, by today's standards therefore self-serving and "bad", even if they led him to facilitate a magnification of parliament's role. But no one would have said this at the time or even thought it, and especially the astute members of the establishment who reckoned Cromwell's success in pursuing these policies was their own best chance of survival too.

So when Starkey makes the false distinction in his comment as cited above is he assuming he is talking to eejits who see every era only as comprehensible in modern terms and must have it explained accordingly, even if inaccurately? Or is he simply that silly himself? Either way he is doing both his reader and Cromwell a huge disservice - failing to actually inform the former and failing to properly interpolate the latter. I have noticed that about Starkey before on his TV programmes and have put it down to the constraints of the medium, a tendency to hop over an examination of behaviour which (as with Henry) could be capricious, ruthless to the point of sadism, and ostensibly crazy - diffiicult to slot into political theory except as cause for another effect. This is met therefore with a "hey ho, but we know that's just the way that king was" comment and then we are invited to sit back and admire the man's intellect as he dissects the effects.

No thanks, at least from this reader/viewer. Mantel's fictional treatment of the characters - being an unashamed imagining of how Cromwell himself might have rationalised the man and his apparent loolah behaviour - at least has the virtue of exploring this crucial aspect to those historical events. That is what made her books so novel and welcome - at last some attempted insight into the behaviour that others simply gloss over.

In doing this Hilary Mantel also had to, as a point of first principle, abandon the notion that there could be a dichotomy of interest between personal and political agendas in Tudor English politics. The distinction just did not exist, could not exist, and none of her characters wastes a single second even pondering this omission. Rightly so, I say.

Starkey is not my favourite historian, as you can tell.

PS: Jackals don't work for lions, but they do occasionally avail themselves of the scraps the lion might leave after having done all the hard work. A totally crap analogy of the Cromwell/Henry working relationship, in other words. In fact crap all round.

Thank you for removing the offending smileys.

"Hammering" was a bit of hyperbole from me, but it was 3.30am. I do tend to exaggerate at that ungodly hour. Lord knows what a real hammering from you would be like. I hope I never experience it.

Unfortunately, I have no time today to continue this conversation, but it is an interesting one, especially what you say about the King's unpredictable whims. I acknowledge (as did Cromwell himself) that he was dependent upon the royal favour. That was fine until 1539/40 - before then there had been no doubt that TC's actions represented the king's intentions. By 1539, however, there was doubt - over foreign policy and the Cleves marriage and, crucially, over Cromwell's patronage of religious reformers. Henry had developed cold feet over religion, and Cromwell's choice of an unattractive German bride for purely political reasons had uncovered the king's nakedness. A deadly combination.

Which left Cromwell wide open to the machinations of the conservative faction - Gardiner and Norfolk - who were not just leaders of an anti-Cromwell faction but were, as David Loades points out, "personal enemies".

Faction at the court of the king during Cromwell's time is an interesting topic. Was it always a competition for influence with the king, never for control of him? Monarchs surely could be manipulated (and worse) during the 16th century? Henry had shown himself to be susceptible man - certainly when he was younger. At the height of her power Anne Boleyn could control him. She certainly had him in tears (in public) at one point. And the wolves had been known to tear the leader of the pack apart - there were precedents in English history.

I still fret about Thomas More. He had given Cromwell what he thought was good advice when he entered the King's Council. "Master Cromwell, you are now entered in the service of a most noble, wise, and liberal prince. If you will follow my poor advice, you shall, in your counsel-giving to his Grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do. For if the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him."

Perhaps that's what Starkey had in mind when he made his "crappy" lion/jackal analogy.

This is a terrible muddle - typed in a rush, but will send.

Cromwell wasn't the only one who found himself, while pursuing what he imagined a straight and logical line of policy, suddenly not only having veered off the course set by his admiral Henry but so far off it that it could be portrayed as mutiny within the fleet. This happened so often under Henry that it was hardly worth Gardiner or Norfolk's effort using it for their own political ends. One gets the impression with both these men that they did so as much through reflex as spite in Cromwell's case (for Norfolk especially this was hardly new ground at all).

Influence and control are interesting in the context of which best describes the action of an important functionary in Henry's court while advising the monarch. Henry (and Charles II later) was brilliant at allowing you to believe you had a measure of the latter while feeding you the illusion you were receiving more of the former, when in fact the moment you fell for the ruse you were on an inexorable path to being little more than a sounding board for the man and therefore eminently expendable. This went for wives, courtiers, officials and just about anyone who came within close orbit of the man. In retrospect it is difficult to find anyone who even temporarily could be said to have had "controlled" him. And when it comes to influence then the task is even harder - the decisions he took were influenced as often by a recognition and rejection of the influence someone else was trying to bring to bear on him. This also covered just about everyone, from the silliest of his wives to the pontiff in Rome.

If there was a madness in Henry (who in political terms has good grounds to be reckoned one of the most intelligently astute practitioners of the art in English history) it was that of the second-guesser, the one whose self-reliance yields so obvious an advantage that he grows to only accept quibble from within. When one second-guesses one's own second guesses however one is in trouble. My take on Henry is that he went through a period when this in fact occurred, disastrously so for those at the time most prominently dependent on his attention and favour, but then actually settled down again in his last few years.

There is much criticism of Henry's attitude to his own legacy - his over-reliance on a sickly male child as culmination of his dynastical ambitions, his failure to set down hard rules governing the reinvented parliament's role and extent of influence, his inadequate measures taken to curtail the influence of the many enemies within the structure his policies had created and which could tear the kingdom apart except through his successor being obliged to rule even more harshly and dictatorially than he did. But actually I like to think there was method in all this madness too. Complete foresight might not have been available to him but it cannot be argued that the dynastic turmoil that came with the appointment of his immediate successors, by the standards of such turmoil as had existed in England prior to the Tudor takeover, was actually quite minimal and in fact did in the end lead to a strong, if unlikely, monarch who would continue cementing together this new system that he had started to create.

This is one of the reasons why I don't like seeing historians blithely dismissing Henry as a maverick, or for that matter inferring that he downed more capable or more intelligent men along the way for no better reason than to get his own way at the time. This is not what was going on, and definitely not what More or Cromwell bought into either - two notable people who fell so foul of his policies despite being proven as capable. At one point in Mantel's books (I don't remember where) Cromwell himself contemplates in a dark mood how much he can achieve before his execution for achievement becomes inevitable. This is not a criticism of the king on Cromwell's part but of the system and his potential failure to serve it, and he quickly rallies and resigns himself to doing his duty anyway. It was possible through honest and capable endeavour to achieve much that was good for the king and his realm, while at the same time in doing so reinvent one's own identity within the system to a point that one became a stranger within it, dangerously strange in fact, having no useful precedent to refer to when deciding what should be done with you. A king who did not play safe and remove you at this point would have been lacking in true majesty and what that entails regarding responsibility to the realm. There was no formula provided from before that could help you either (Gardiner and Norfolk wrote and employed their own, though their achievements for the good of the common weal are questionable). A much better insight into how these people thought, I reckon, than any jackal analogy could ever hope to convey. Henry himself, I imagine, didn't think too much differently about his own role and fate either.

Hard to dispute any of that - I recall Henry's comment: "If my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire and burn it."

I'm reading  a book, "The Examined Life", by psychiatrist (proper one, not a babbler) Stephen Grosz, at the moment. The case histories he recounts are fascinating, as is his comment: "We are all locked in our own histories."

Henry, like us all - and like Cromwell - was locked in his. This terrifying and complex man seemed to seek control, then reject - violently - the would-be controller, be it wife or adviser. I wonder what Grosz would make of this? Henry, of course, was rigidly controlled by his father and by his grandmother, but spoilt and indulged by his mother, whom he lost when he was still only a boy.

And Episode Two of Wolf Hall gives us more Henry, described thus in that reliable organ, the Radio Times: "...Henry is needy and surprisingly weedy, particularly when Anne starts making demands."

Hope this makes sense - I'm trying to have two conversations at the moment, one here, one elsewhere. It is not easy.

I would only question the assumption that he wished to be controlled. He valued advice, despite the apparent evidence others put forward to the contrary, and in fact more than any other monarch before him designed the machinery of state so that good advice found its way up through the structure. And he took advice from some strange sources (butcher boys and sons of innkeepers notwithstanding). In Ireland for example he continued his father's policy of seeking advice from beyond the Norman nobility, to an extent that he ended up amassing some very useful intelligence that could be employed against his Gaelic advisors militarily by his daughter's lieutenants later. But it was good advice that no other monarch in his situation would have courted in all likelihood, that's the point. His reform of town council legislation was also an example of this - on one level "divide and conquer" but with the effect that for the first time in English history a council could be constituted - with royal approval - based on a meritocratic system of appointment and never more to be simply an extension of a baron or earl's power base. Several notables in his court came up through this new channel too, along with their merchant-based opinions and experience. This was good too.

My point is that these are typical of the actions of a man who in fact despises or distrusts the notion of control by a select few individuals at all, and least of all should the attempt be directed against himself. And in fact it shows Henry not to be a prisoner of his history at all, except in the same sense that a child of an alcoholic vows never to subject their own offspring to the same upbringing. Especially at the start of his reign he was really committed to revolutionising and facilitating how merit in his realm should be encouraged and rewarded. I actually maintain that all which ensued afterwards, rather than show a collapse of this ideal, reveals that this obsession never left him. He stood for progress and anyone who stood in its way stood in his.

It was when he felt he had to fight to keep his own version of such progress going and keep everyone onside that things could get very ugly. As a fighter he was ruthless, as was his right and duty, he would have said.

nordmann wrote:

I would only question the assumption that he wished to be controlled.

I meant that the desire to be controlled was a subconscious wish. Henry as a child had been spoilt, but as a teenager he had been dreadfully repressed - kept secluded "like a girl", as one ambassador noted. Like all spoilt children, Henry craved boundaries, but like all overly-controlled teenagers he needed to assert his independence. The people he loved - or whose opinion he greatly respected - all attempted to "tell him what he ought to do". As you say, he seemed to listen. Certainly before the 1540s he seemed to want and welcome "guidance". Yet Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn. Wolsey, Thomas More, Fisher, Thomas Cromwell - strong, intelligent and determined men and women - all were either executed on Henry's orders, or were hounded to death by him. Katherine Parr very nearly came a cropper too, but dropped her "mummy really knows what you should believe" folly just in time.


Yet, again like a spoilt child, he ended up crying for what he had broken: he regretted all their deaths (possibly not Fisher's). It was almost as if, having proved his power by killing them, he was then astonished that his power was not sufficient to bring them back to life again. He sobbed for Katherine as "the best of women" (she had been "the old harridan") and months after Cromwell's execution he was "lamenting".


On 3 March 1541, the French Ambassador, Charles de Marillac, reported in a letter that the King was now said to be lamenting that "under pretext of some slight offences which he had committed, they had brought several accusations against him, on the strength of which he had put to death the most faithful servant he ever had".


Cranmer, dithery old fool that he was, survived. He genuinely seems to have confused Henry with God (see Book of Common Prayer) and that was his salvation.


I offer these thoughts as psychological speculations only. What good subjects for Dr Anthony Clare's In the Psychiatrist's Chair Henry and Thomas (Cromwell) would make.

As for Cromwell, we don't know how Mantel will end her final book - when she gets round to writing it. But my money is on the last scene being a re-run of the first. Walter Cromwell as executioner - blood, not on the cobbles this time, but on the scaffold.

I know you meant subconscious,Temp. But I still disagree. For all his expressed regrets on some of the occasions when he had to liquidate people on whom he'd previously depended he managed to rally pretty quickly and get on with things.

To be completely fair in assessing Henry in this regard one needs to compare the attrition rate of confidantes, advisors etc with other regents of the period. Not just high profile executions but also more quietly administered "permanent retirements", banishments etc. The House of Valois across the channel was as bad, though the monarch there tended to distance himself from the actual edict of execution. Henry was simply following a trend when it came to liquidating an advisor based on their last bit of bad advice.

Different times. Anthony Clare would have a lot of homework to do beforehand.

PS: Images of the clichéd mafia gangster shedding tears at the demise of made men he has rubbed out spring to mind.

And I still disagree. For all his expressed regrets on some of the occasions when he had to liquidate people on whom he'd previously depended he managed to rally pretty quickly and get on with things.

But isn't that absolutely consistent with
Yet, again like a spoilt child, he ended up crying for what he had broken:?

The possession of almost unfettered power allowing the emotionally damaged, immaturely sentimental and petulant inner child free rein to act out what it imagines to be its desires at the time?

It depends I suppose on the motive for the tears alright. As with the mafia example, a well-placed and orchestrated expression of remorse can actually have quite a strong effect in controlling the aftermath of the liquidation. The fools are fobbed off with an image of a humanity in their regent while the astute get the message intended - look, I'll even cry with remorse when I rub you out (I'm just a man after all), but rub you out I will if I need to (I am your king after all).

What we need is Anthony Clare here to cast a deciding vote!

I take your point about autres temps, autres moeurs, nordmann, but wasn't Henry VIII regarded as unusual, even in the 16th century? And don't psychological/personality problems present as similar, whatever the times?

I remember some lines from an excellent novel by Margaret Irwin - Young Bess. Thomas Seymour is talking to the teenage Elizabeth Tudor and he express astonishment at her  attitude to marriage.

"D'you think, then, we all play Great Harry with our wives?"

"You've not all got his opportunities."

Luther had recognised Henry's spoilt and very dangerous inner child when he famously said: "Squire Henry (Junker Heinz) just wants to be God and do what he likes."

And two of Henry's prospective brides were clearly not "women who loved too much". Christina of Denmark (that gorgeous lady in Holbein's portrait) wittily remarked: "If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England's disposal".  

Marie de Guise, who opted to go to Scotland - not the easiest of places for any ruler - seems also to have been extremely wary of life as consort to the volatile Henry. From Wiki:


The recently widowed Henry VIII of England...also asked for Mary's hand. Given Henry's marital history – banishing his first wife and beheading the second – Mary refused the offer. In December 1537, Henry VIII told Castillon, the French ambassador in London, that he was big in person and had need of a big wife. Biographer Antonia Fraser writing in 1968 said Mary replied, "I may be a big woman, but I have a very little neck."

Life at any European court was a risky business, true, but did the English court have a worse reputation than any abroad - even Italy? I suppose they were just more subtle there.




Thank you, but I'd rather not.

Re the character of Henry V111, for ten years he was second son. That may have had a telling effect on his outlook; envy is a powerful force that perhaps hones a 'damn it' attitude. I know nothing of hus formative years - we need Prince Harry's take on this, perhaps.

Prince Harry seems to think he was lucky to be second; Princess Anne might be a better subject.

I bet  Prince  Harry did not think that when he was ten. On the other hand, Caro you have sons and more experience of sibling rivalries. I get your point, though. I have a female relative who - I've recently learned - has been green envious of me all her life - and even more annoyed because I  never played the competition game. Henry V111 is aid to have been an all rounder in many strengths - but I ought read more on that. Temp probably knows.... nordmann also was raised with siblings - imagine the arguments there.

I think his upbringing with his mother and his sisters at Eltham - unusual for a Prince at the time - was more significant. He barely knew his brother Arthur.

Priscilla wrote:

nordmann also was raised with siblings - imagine the arguments there.

And guess who always won!  

PS Re tears. I remember a scene in the superb BBC series about Henry VIII which starred Keith Michell. I think it was after the arrest of Katherine Howard. A close-up of Michell's face showed tears in the king's eyes - but behind the tears was a look of infinite malevolent cunning. It was brilliantly done - confirms that others have agreed with nord's point above, I think.

In haste.

T.

PS That said, the opening chapter of Robert Hutchinson's "Young Henry" is entitled: "In My Brother's Shadow".
.
No more time at the present, as Gregory Cromwell always put in his letters (so did Henry VIII).

Some woman or other has written this ...

The Psychology of Henry VIII

There is also the possibility that he suffered from traumatic brain injury from his jousing accidents and I believe he was unconscious for some hours.  This can lead to personality changes and poor impulse control among other things.  It may help to partly explain the dramatic change from the golden prince to the later tyrant.

The nasty fall in January 1536 certainly didn't improve Henry's temper, but Thomas More, a perceptive and astute observer, had commented years before (in 1525, to his son-in-law, William Roper) on the capriciousness of the King's favour:  “If my head should win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.”

nordmann wrote:

Some woman or other has written this ...

The Psychology of Henry VIII

Until I saw who the "some woman" was I was thinking "Well nordmann may make jokes at the expense of the female of the species but I never thought he was a misogynist before" - but now I know who "some woman" is..............

I enjoyed the information Temperance posted about the two ladies who were wise enough to turn down overtures from Henry VIII (though I do realise that it might be more difficult for a member of the English minor - or even upper - aristocracy to turn him down than a foreign royal lady).

I have occasionally typed stuff about people who have had traumatic brain injury and they can indeed change personalities.  Makes me realise how precarious health is.  It might have been interesting if Henry's brain had been pickled - or preserved somehow - so that a relevant expert could examine it, but of course it wasn't so we'll never know if he was ruthless naturally or whether he was made worse by an accident he may have endured.

Surely Temp, More said that just to express his great loyalty to Henry .. as in, "if I could win him just one castle in France at the cost of my head, I would (gladly, loyally, resignedly...) let my head go". Easy to say in flattery but then such grand statements were the usual stock-in-trade amongst Henry's courtiers, no?  More - perhaps almost uniquely - might well have literally meant it ... but I doubt if many others of the King's Council, would have really meant it , nor liked to have been reminded of such a declaration ... especially should the King indeed actually gain a new French chateau.

I am rather reminded of the Roman consul, Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus, who, to curry favour when Caligula fell ill, publically declared that he offered his own life up to the Gods if they would but spare that of the Emperor ... only for Caligula to recover and then say: "well you offered your life for mine, and I'm still alive, so we can't both be here can we ...". And so forced the sycophant to take his own life.

Don't think so, MM. It was a remark made privately to William Roper. After a visit by the king More said he was much honoured by the king's favour, but...

Here's the whole quotation:

"Howbeit, son Roper, I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head should win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go."

Hmm yes, I take your point ... when said privily to the loyal husband of his beloved daughter Meg, the words do indeed have a different sound ...  On reflection I'll go with your interpretation.

Here's a question for a I'm-A-Wolf-Hall-Know-It-All badge. (I was awarded one at the weekend   .)

Oliver Cromwell was related to Thomas Cromwell, and through that connection possibly - even probably - to the Tudors. How so?

EDIT: I am not thinking of Gregory Cromwell's marriage to Jane Seymour's sister, Elizabeth. If Mantel is right, Tudor genes were passed, via the Cromwells of Putney, to Oliver Cromwell. Lovely irony in that.

David Starkey's bitching again:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/11369868/Wolf-Hall-is-deliberate-perversion-of-history-says-David-Starkey.html

But could he have a point? Mind you -

In an interview with Radio 5 Live, Prof Starkey said he had not read the books or seen the programme, questioning why he would want to as “someone who actually knows what happens” and is a “massive believer in fact”.

We all know The Tudors was, as Starkey noted, "gratuitously awful", and I agree Mantel has been unfair to Thomas More, but honestly, calling our Hilary's work "a perversion of history" is jolly mean - especially if Dr Starkey hasn't read the books!

Why does he bother?

Next thing he'll be telling us to be wary about the portrayal of Julius Caesar in the Asterix comic books as it is probably pure invention in places.

But he is incredibly sceptical, isn't he. Here for example he checks the historical veracity of the existence of a present royal incumbent using the "Doubting David" technique". Apparently he's still not convinced that it isn't all an invention ...

Actually there is a serious objection to Starkey's objection, phrased quite succinctly here in an excerpt from a recent New Yorker article about - of all things - Hilary Mantel's "Bring Up The Bodies".

"Any account of the past requires artistry in the telling, but those storytellers who proclaim their artifice, melding the stuff of history with the forms and conventions of art, are more honest about the illusory nature of their endeavors than those who seek to convey an impression of impartiality."

What a succinct, elegant and accessible expression of what so many others have taken books, full of jargon and convoluted references to Derida et al, to say. Halsall also puts it well when he says, in this http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-transformations-of-year-600.html:

The possibility that there may be a point where our accounts of aspects of the past might map directly onto the past as it happened may be a constitutive fiction for all historical activity, but we need overtly to recognise that it is a fiction, that it is a horizon that can only exist in the act of being motioned or gestured towards, not one that can ever be reached.

Take that, narky Starkey, when you're proposing your particular interpretation as fact.

I shall read that tonight, ferval - after I've had several Wolf Hall glasses of you-know-what.  

I hope I'll get to grips with Derrida before I die, but alas, I doubt that I will. I still think he overcomplicated everything (well, he was French). It's really quite simple: we see the world - or we read the history - not as it is or was, but as we are.

Isn't anyone interested in why Oliver Cromwell was a Tudor then?