Ja, ja, in German for instance: eine beschissene Arbeitgeber...
http://dictionary.reverso.net/german-english/beschissen

In Dutch for instance: 'n bescheten opdracht ( a shit mission)
In fact it is more Flemish as in "'n bescheten kommissche" (a shit  undertaking)

Kind regards, Paul.

PS. Sorry for the lowering of the standards, but it was you all who started...

I wonder if Mantel got Norfolk's expletive from Rabelais (d. 1553)? There is a dreadfully rude bit in Gargantua and Pantagruel about the wiping of bottoms. It is usually referred to as "the swab episode", and I was delighted to discover the translation includes our Word of the Week. It is all just too rude for me to copy here, but this is relevant, perhaps, to our discussion:


...they were bespangled and begilt with beshitten jewelry...

I regret I do not know what the original French word was that translates as "beshitten". Our English version is just so expressive - I'm sure the French mot would be inferior.

Et voila madame, en Français du XVIème siècle:

"Je me torchay une foys d'un cachelet de velours de une demoiselle, et le trouvay bon, car la mollice de sa soye me causoit au fondement une volupte bien grande; une aultre foys u'un chaprom d'ycelles, et feut de mesmes; une aultre foys d'un cache coul; une aultre foys des aureillettes de satin cramoysi, mais la dorure d'un tas de spheres de merde qui y estoient m'escorcerent tout le derriere; que le feu sainct Antoine arde le boyau cullier de l'orfebvre qui les feist et de la damoiselle qui les portoit. Ce mal passa me torchant d'un bonnet de paige, bien emplume a la Souice."

The "bespangled and begilt with beshitten jewelry", is a splendidly poetic translation, but unfortunately Rabelais' original French is basically just: "gilded with balls of shit", which, even expressed in 16th century French, rather lacks the alliterative resonance of your English translation.

But his following line is quite a good expletive, and it rolls nicely around the tongue equally well in the French too:
"... que le feu sainct Antoine arde le boyau cullier" ..... "may St Anthony's fire burn the guts of his bum hole!"



PS : The thing is that with English one has so many synonyms available to try and get rhymes, puns or aliterations. In just translating the above simple phrase I had a choice of: guts, bowels, entrails, intestines, innards ... to be linked together with bum, arse, bottom, rectum, etc  ... plus all the other usual euphemisms too. And of course one can readily play with English by easily turning nouns into verbs, into adverbs, into adjectives etc... as indeed in the phrase, "bespangled and begilt with beshitten jewelry!"

I think I've rather lowered the tone yet again, although frankly it was already fairly low. However was it profane, profound or just profond ?!

Oh, thank you for posting Rabelais' original text, MM, but to be honest, I do much prefer the English version. Nice alliteration and all that.

MM wrote:

I think I've rather lowered the tone yet again, although frankly it was already fairly low...

Well, I blame that awful ferval - she started all this vulgar beshitten stuff.  


Is our vulgarity the reason why no one is posting here on Res Hiss these days? I do hope not.


Any road up, let's have a bit of intellectual stuff to raise the tone. Mikhail Bakhtin looks at the significance of the love of obscenity during the Renaissance in this book.



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rabelais-His-World-M-Bakhtin/dp/0253203414

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabelais_and_His_World



It could be said (with certain reservations, of course) that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything. Both these lives were legitimate, but separated by strict temporal boundaries. (p.129-30)

The activities of the carnival square: collective ridicule of officialdom, inversion of hierarchy, violations of decorum and proportion, celebration of bodily excess and so on embody, for Bakhtin, an implicit popular conception of the world. This conception is not, however, able to become ideologically elaborated until the radical laughter of the square entered into the "world of great literature" (Rabelais p.96). The novel of Rabelais is seen as the epitome of this process of breaking down the rigid, hierarchical world of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern era.


Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is connected with that of the grotesque. In the carnival, usual social hierarchies and proprieties are upended; emphasis is placed on the body in its open dimension, in its connection to the life of the community. This emphasis on the material dimension which links humans, rather than on the differences and separations between them, allows for the consciousness of the historical dimension of human life: for every death, there is a birth, a renewal of the human spirit. This process allows for progress.

In the grotesque body, emphasis is placed on the open, the penetrative, and the "lower stratum." The open (the mouth, the anus, the vagina, etc.) and the penetrative (the nose, the penis, etc.) allow exchange between the body and the world (mostly through sex, eating, and drinking), but also to produce degrading material (curses, urine, feces, etc.). The lower stratum (belly, womb, etc.) is the place where renewal happens, where new life is forged, thus connecting degradation to renewal. The grotesque body is one of excess, rebellious to authority and austerity.



Or, as our Philomena would ask: "It's not just all jokes about bums, then?"



PS Another more recent book on literary theory stuff ( ) looks at this topic. It has an excellent title: The Anal Aesthetic: Regressive Strategies in Modernism. (  )


...scatological writing in modernism addresses this...with a unique form of "anal narration," derived from the concept that, from the infant's point of view, excrement is not abject waste, but a valuable extension of the self, a corporeal signifier that can circulate and convey meaning without recourse to the abstractions of language.

Psychoanalysis ultimately disparages anal formulations as reductive; the aim of this dissertation is to articulate a productive psychoanalytic theory of anality, and to make it available for literary-critical use by applying it to the work of modernist authors like James Joyce, Nathanael West, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Salvador Dali. I look closely at the last two authors because each has an overtly anal philosophy of language, based on the belief that linguistic representation is inherently distorted and that rendering words and identity into waste would be the greatest approximation of truth.

Chapter one is a survey of the critical literature (including works by Bakhtin, Bataille, Bersani, Freud, Klein, Kristeva and others), which establishes the terms of the argument and asserts anality's potential as a regenerative, articulate and even ethical communicative mode. Chapter two identifies a coprophagic narrative form in Dali's autobiographical work, wherein the author disseminates his own abject body as a signifier, rendered circulable and even curative by an alchemical process of aesthetic transformation. Chapter three uses Lacan's seminar on the psychoses to explain how the passive anal narrator in Beckett's novels reconstructs deficient authority as a bodily projection, effectively giving anal birth to himself in the absence of a legitimizing agency that would otherwise affirm his subjectivity.


Crikey - all that, especially the underlined bit in the last paragraph, has left me speechless.


So, MM, discussing poo and bottoms and things, far from "lowering the tone" at all, gives us the opportunity to discuss Lacan, Bakhtin, Freud and Beckett. Not to mention other "passive anal narrators" and their use of "corporeal signifiers". So there.  

Seems not everyone is enjoying Wolf Hall - viewing figures have dropped significantly since the first episode. The Telegraph - which at first was using words like "masterful" in its reviews - is now asking if it is "socially acceptable to switch it off". Seems Mark Rylance is just too subtle.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/11392623/Wolf-Hall-the-show-everyones-talking-about-for-the-wrong-reasons.html

I find scatalogical expletives are so common these days that nobody really notices ... and frankly who indeed gives a sh*t?
But even so, over 30 years ago, when Margaret Thatcher famously dismissed the accusations of her entrenched political position by 'innocuously' saying: "To accuse me of being too infexible is poppycock" (BBC News 01/11/1981), she was casually using the sort of extreme language that was then banned from the BBC, at least before the nine o'clock evening watershed. "Poppycock" is directly from the Middle English/Flemish, "poppekak", literally meaning "soft-shit". A succinct, though not necessarily very accurate, description of her supposedly malleable attitude.

MM wrote:

... and frankly who indeed gives a sh*t?

Who indeed, MM? See below.

"Bollocks" was the Duke of Norfolk's favourite expletive last night. This word was repeated several times in the scene just before More's "trial". It was Norfolk's response to the point of law, "Qui tacet, consentire videtur", and when this bit of Latin was translated for him, and then explained as being crucial to More's defence in law ("he that holdeth his peace seemeth to consent"), he replied: "It's still all bollocks."

Quite, Your Grace.

But shut up Daily Telegraph - this drama is just so good: last night's episode had all the tension of yer actual proper tragic hero stuff (see appropriate thread somewhere): Cromwell going bad - really bad - and realising it. Proper pity and terror response for the man is developing nicely in me.

Irony that it was Lady Alice More - usually seen as a woman of absolutely no importance - who really got to Cromwell. She delivered her devastating judgement on our hero quite calmly, matter-of-factly, and apparently without any intended vindictiveness:  "Does he think it’s clever to leave his family at the mercy of a man like yourself?" That clearly penetrated TC's defences far more than Henry's "You're a serpent" line.

And the sublime "It's just words" duel between More and Cromwell in the Tower - how that summed up everything somehow. When push comes to shove, does anything really matter - other than survival? More's story says "Yes", Cromwell's "No".

I'm still a bit stunned by it all, to be honest.

The Telegraph gets it right sometimes. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/11405206/Hoorah-for-Sir-Tom-Stoppard-and-dumbing-up.html

I've mentioned before the wonderful serendipity of W.H. and Smiley being broadcast on successive nights and the opportunity to see two masterful dramas with two actors at the top of their game portraying characters of complexity and subtlety. The parallels as so striking; Le Carre has class and betrayal, revenge and the vulnerability that love entails, power and the inadequacies of those with whom it is resides and a clash of ideologies, just as does Mantel.
I could ramble on about how the two men deliver their threats, the same quiet, controlled disposition of evidence and explication of consequences, the moral ambiguities and so forth but let's just enjoy both as examples of authors taking the conventions of genre fiction and elevating it to something so much more and two productions of such visual impact.

My only complaint - why only 6 episodes? Cash I suppose, it shrieks expenditure in every scene.

2 March 2015...........DVD release day

Excellent article, ferval.

Sir Tom Stoppard’s lament that he had to dumb down – my words – his new play, The Hard Problem, because the audience couldn’t get some of his references and allusions is not solely the fault of theatregoers, nor confined to the theatre. Part of the blame lies with an education system so hellbent on teaching to the test that the danger is all you are left with is a system without the education. Not to mention a culture that increasingly sneers at anything difficult, “elitist” or – heaven forfend – subtle.

That bit I have underlined sums up everything I feel - and why I left the state "system" in despair.

I don't think we are being snobby - are we?

A whole week to wait until episode five...

PS Kosminksky's presentation of More is perhaps not quite so harsh as Mantel's - but he certainly doesn't whitewash him. That scene from boyhood - young Cromwell's tentative wave of the hand - the offer of friendship - and More's rejection of him. Why did that closing of the casement window bring tears to my eyes (silly old fool that I am) and make me think of George William Russell's poem, Germinal?


In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed,
The world’s great sorrows were born
And its heroes were made.
In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed.

More as the great Christian intellectual, but an essentially cold man, lacking in charity? See St. Paul.

Temp wrote:

I don't think we are being snobby - are we?

Copia discipulinum subtilitas impeditur (to paraphrase Seneca)

Second series in the pipeline?

http://www.imdb.com/news/ni58276618/

nordmann wrote:

Copia discipulinum subtilitas impeditur (to paraphrase Seneca)

I'm confused by your "discipulinum". Either you've got the Latin wrong (unlikely), or I am being stupid (more likely).

Too much regimentation certainly hampers intelligence (is that what you mean??), but you can't have enough real teaching - "encouragement of growth" - or "drawing out".

I've just watched last night's Wolf Hall again. The scene near the end was so good - after the execution when young Ralph Sadler places More's prayer book on the table in front of Cromwell's piles of papers - More's prayers v. Cromwell's drafts of statutes? And his feverish ramblings about being bitten by the snake in Italy. It's just so brilliant. I do hope our Hilary is pressing on with the next book. I think I'm going to end up weeping for Cromwell (that started last night) - and I never thought I'd ever say that.

Temperance wrote:

 I do hope our Hilary is pressing on with the next book.

The Mirror and the Light, scheduled for publication later this year, Temp;


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_and_the_Light

Hi Temp. My Latin is always subject to being wrong but I then tend to take refuge in Dog Latin whenever accusations arise!

However that one, I thought, was relatively straightforward (nullus canis).

I don't actually understand this seeming backlash against the TV series in the papers based on "real-time" viewing figures, which are still quite healthy and only ailing in fact in direct comparison to Midsomer Murders, the traditional sleeping draught for half the UK population. I imagine the drop reflects those who are disappointed the story doesn't take up where "The Tudors" left off, and in fact on more than one newspaper website which invites comments I have seen remarks made by people who claim to have sat through at least the first episode and still think they are following the career of Oliver Cromwell.

discipulinum = Third Declension genitive form of discipulinus (studentry).

Triceratops wrote:

The Mirror and the Light, scheduled for publication later this year, Temp;


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_and_the_Light

Thanks, Trike. Let's hope she delivers The Mirror and the Light sooner rather than later. There have been distressing rumours of writer's block!

I've just watched Episode 4 again: that makes three times in twenty-four hours.

It's very hard not to conclude - Lady Alice More's "a man like you" verdict notwithstanding - that Cromwell is the only really honest man amongst this bunch of misogynistic aristocratic thugs/oafs, religious charlatans/hypocrites and scheming Plantagenet conspirators/liars. What an unsavoury lot these great ones of England are - at best utterly foolish (Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, "brain of a flea"), at worst completely without scruples (hard to name any one character here - so many from whom to choose). Cromwell is oddly different. He is simply the detached outsider: a man most definitely for our season, the working-class hero amongst the toffs, who goes quietly about his business, doing his job and doing it superbly. Helping the toffs destroy themselves, or being able to advise them that they had best "grovel" if they wish to avoid destruction, is a wonderful perk of that job. But he does not see himself as "cruel" - that judgement he reserves for Thomas More. Who is the one in denial, I wonder?

And talking of Thomas More and being in denial - have I been wrong about this man all these years? Was that famous integrity just a kind of arrogance - the worst sort of intellectual pride? Was More a man who was made a saint, but a saint who was actually utterly without charity? A fraud for all seasons? Oh, heck.

Clearly Mantel's prose, Kosminksky's direction and Rylance's acting have seduced me. This is drama at its best - but is it historical revisionism at its worst?

Whatever, it's certainly making me reconsider things - which can't be bad.

EDIT: oh, a post from nordmann - haven't read it, will send this first.

I'm very wary of putting Latin bits in my posts - haven't done any since "O" level. I live in dread of making "People called the Romans they go the house" type errors.

Temperance wrote:

I'm very wary of putting Latin bits in my posts - haven't done any since "O" level. I live in dread of making "People called the Romans they go the house" type errors.

Couldn't resist:

At the risk of being boringly repetitive, I still see More's action in refusing to assent as a calculated choice between execution and Hell and he opted, be it reluctantly, for death. Is that really integrity and a demonstration of his love of his church and his God or is it a rational, in his eyes, and  legalistic decision to attain Heaven and avoid eternity in the Pit? In the programme he quite baldly states that he must choose between his body and his soul. There may be courage there and intellectual rigour but is there any true goodness? Certainly it's not self-sacrificing from that point of view and indeed puts his soul's salvation way ahead of the feelings of his family.

That's where the distance between then and now, between the unshakable belief in a final judgement with dreadful consequences for the unfaithful and our present, and even among most of the believers watered down, concepts of judgement, and perhaps considerations of Grace, comes in. Why should he expect any more mercy from his God than he had shown to heretics?

ferval wrote:

At the risk of being boringly repetitive, I still see More's action in refusing to assent as a calculated choice between execution and Hell and he opted, be it reluctantly, for death. Is that really integrity and a demonstration of his love of his church and his God or is it a rational, in his eyes, and  legalistic decision to attain Heaven and avoid eternity in the Pit? In the programme he quite baldly states that he must choose between his body and his soul. There may be courage there and intellectual rigour but is there any true goodness? Certainly it's not self-sacrificing from that point of view and indeed puts his soul's salvation way ahead of the feelings of his family.

That's where the distance between then and now, between the unshakable belief in a final judgement with dreadful consequences for the unfaithful and our present, and even among most of the believers watered down, concepts of judgement, and perhaps considerations of Grace, comes in. Why should he expect any more mercy from his God than he had shown to heretics?

Well it's on record that he did say that - but that he decided to protect both body and soul by staying silent. An he was tempted to give in by the thought of never seeing his family (especially Meg) ever again - very much tempted. How cleverly TC played on that. But More would view being reunited with his family during this life as a very short-term benefit, the selfish option in fact. By not being mindful of his soul's salvation he would separate himself from his loved ones for all eternity. This is indeed what we find hard to get our post-Enlightenment heads around - the idea that one day we will all be united "merrily" in Heaven. More even hoped he would end up happily with his judges in the afterlife. Not sure whether he hoped Cromwell would make it there though.

I'm going to try and dig out later today (if I have time) the evidence for More's alleged "torturing" of heretics at Chelsea. I'm pretty certain he never racked anyone there, although he did conduct interrogations. Cromwell's torture methods were more subtle perhaps, but many times more effective. And Little Bilney and James Bainham - two of More's "victims" mentioned - were both let off: More managed to get them to recant their heresy. That wasn't noted at all. They then later recanted their recantations and so condemned themselves - the law did not allow leniency for a second time. And as for the six heretics who were executed when More was Lord Chancellor - it could be argued that he was just doing his job: as Lord Chancellor he was sworn to protect the realm, and heresy was seen by More as a clear and present danger to the State -  the way we see terrorism today. Again, that's hard for us to understand, but we must try. This was the 16th century, not the 21st.

And Cranmer was a terrible "juggler" (as More said in Episode 4): he took his oaths during his consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, a position to which he had been appointed officially - and ironically - by the Pope, who was still nominally in charge of the Church in England, knowing full well that it was all a lie. He had just sworn a secret oath denying his allegiance to Rome. The whole consecration ceremony had been a farce - to use the Duke of Norfolk's expressive expression - "all bollocks" in fact.

That was not More's way.

But I am still in a delightful state of confusion, unable to make up my mind about all this. But then being definite about anything these days is boring - and so last century.  

In haste.

Interesting posts here. I am with ferv on the value of brownie points in heaven quests.

I would like to see  WH again but set in the 21st C. Which is how my mind keeps switching as I watch and reflect. I think HM plucked notions and characters from her own time - we  look through today's lens at everything anyway.

I would like to see WH again but set in the 21st C.

Was Malcolm Tucker TC's reincarnation perhaps? Vocabulary by Norfolk though.

Here's a spot of evidence - got it from the following site:


http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/05/thomas-more-was-not-unnaturally-fond-of-torturing-heretics.html


I do however anticipate a shrill squeal or two of indignation when you all discover it is a Catholic site.    


It's another thing altogether to make the slanderous claim that More was "unnaturally fond of torturing heretics," for the scholarly consensus is that there is no historical evidence that More engaged in torture. As summarized by John Guy in The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Yale, 1980), "Serious analysis precludes the repetition of protestant stories that Sir Thomas flogged heretics against a tree in his garden at Chelsea. It must exclude, too, the accusations of illegal imprisonment made against More by John Field and Thomas Phillips. Much vaunted by J.A. Froude, such charges are unsupported by independent proof. More indeed answered them in his Apology with emphatic denial. None has ever been substantiated, and we may hope that they were all untrue" (165-66). See also G.R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Papers and Reviews 1946-1972, Volume 1, 158 ("It is necessary to be very clear about More's reaction to the changes in religion which he saw all around him. No doubt, the more scurrilous stories of his personal ill-treatment of accused heretics have been properly buried, but that is not to make him into a tolerant liberal.").

More was not, of course, a tolerant liberal and was an eager persecutor of heretics while Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. The number of heretics burned at the stake under More's chancellorship is generally agreed to have been six, with three cases in which More was himself involved directly. See Richard Rex, "Thomas More and the Heretics: Statesman or Fanatic?," in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge, 2011), 93-115. Obviously, we rightly regard that today as a gross injustice, but it's hard to see how that constitutes "unnatural fondness" for persecuting heretics, particularly in light of the many hundreds put to death under Mary I or Elizabeth I over the next few generations. Nor was More's involvement out of the ordinary for his time. As Elton writes (161-62), "There is every reason to think that among the purposes [More] hoped to fulfil when he accepted office he put high the protection of the Church against heretical enemies. In this, however, he was not at all out of step with the official policy of those years. At the time, in fact, both king and Commons repeatedly demonstrated their orthodoxy in order to rebut the charge that their actions against clergy and pope were equal to heresy. More was more zealous and almost certainly more sincere than most, but as an enemy of heresy he had, during his years as chancellor, nothing to apprehend from king or Council."


I must admit, though, that a night out with Thomas More wouldn't be much fun - give me TC (Mark Rylance, not the real one) any day!


Your Latin translation is all wrong, Temperance.

Something for you at the weekend, Temp;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0520t2t



a somewhat more sinister Thomas Cromwell, John Colicos in Anne of the Thousand Days;

This is a general question ... but how did More, realising/knowing the way things would go/were going once he was charged with the ultimate offence, treason ... how did he, as a lawyer par excellance, arrange his personal affairs? Knowing that if he was condemned for treason that, "all his goods and chattals and possessions", would be forfeit to the king ... what did he do, legally as a lawyer, to safeguard his beloved Meg and his dear wife Alice? This is not retorical ... I really do not know how he arranged his family affairs in advance of his almost inevitable death on charges of treason. But ever the lawyer I feel he should have known how to make provision, within the law, for his family. Or more to the point within the current discussion: did he give thought to the future life of his family when faced with the inevitable ending of his own? If so what?

And just another comment ... More's wife/widow Alice née Middleton ... she is often dropped from the story, being too often dismissed as an iliterate simpleton (Bolt's influence perhaps). Yet she was actually a widow of considerable personal wealth and standing BEFORE she married Thomas More. And incidently they (More and widow Alice) got married so rapidly after the death of More's previous wife (she'd been in the grave barely a month) that they had to get church permission to marry so quick. Now, bearing in mind that widow Alice was already well provided for by her previous marriage, this seems like a canny quick bit of manoevering ... but by whom: the wealthy eligible widow or the clever new lawyer on the make ?? 

In short I don't think the supposedly quiet, passive, illiterate Dame Alice was actually as thick as she has too often been portrayed. But what happened to her after More's execution?

And I still broadly go with ferval ... that people truely believed in the living God, and so why wouldn't one (especially if one was a lawyer) suffer legal death in obeyance of one's divine sovereign... in exchange for the certain knowledge of the life everlasting? Although at times I do also feel that More's extreme, even smug, correct obedience to God and the letter of the Law, does risk tipping him over into the sin of Pride!

Some interesting questions there, MM.

MM wrote:

And I still broadly go with ferval ... that people truely believed in the living God, and so why wouldn't one (especially if one was a lawyer) suffer legal death in obeyance of one's divine sovereign... in exchange for the certain knowledge of the life everlasting? Although at times I do also feel that More's extreme, even smug, correct obedience to God and the letter of the Law, does risk tipping him over into the sin of Pride!

I think it's a mistake to assume that More waited smugly and cheerily for death, looking forward to it, like some crazy, born-again fundamentalist. He was terrified of pain and of the gruesome end that he believed awaited him: his Dialogue of Comfort and his meditation on Christ's suffering, De Tristitia Christi, both written in the Tower, make that clear.

http://www.amazon.com/A-Dialogue-Comfort-Against-Tribulation/dp/1889334138

Throughout this work, More brooded about physical pain; he was fretting (who wouldn't - see below) about the possible death that awaited him, but he was also terrified that, if subjected to torture, he would give in and take the oath. He wrote elsewhere of his fear of "duress and hard handling". He referred often in Dialogue of Comfort to his favourite text from St. Paul, from Corinthians 10:13, which he translated as: "God is faithful which suffereth you not to be tempted above that you may bear but also giveth with the temptation a way out." And one of the major themes of the Dialogue of Comfort and of the stoic (?) Christianity that More embraced is that all men die soon enough and that anyone who tries to save his body at the cost of his soul is indulging in a fatal fantasy. Natural death, after all, can be prolonged and dreadful. But one very much gets the impression that he was working desperately hard to convince himself.

And most people don't realise that More, until very near the day he died, believed that he would be subjected to the full horrors of a common traitor's death. He was actually sentenced to die at Tyburn - the nightmare of hanging, drawing and quartering. It was just before July 6th that he was informed that his end would be more merciful and quicker -  a simple and hopefully clean and efficient beheading. "The King is good to me," he declared. The relief in those words is palpable. I don't know about anyone else here, but I would have signed anything, sworn anything, rather than have faced the hangman/butcher at Tyburn.

However, talking of "fatal fantasy", it must be noted that Lady Alice thought her husband was mad; she wrote as much to the King. She begged Henry to "remitte and pardon your moste grievous displeasure to the sade Sir Thomas," who now lay incarcerated "in greate continuall sicknes of bodye and heuines of harte." What is interesting is that, as Peter Ackroyd points out in his biography of More, Lady Alice repeats in her letter the family belief that her husband's obduracy was "a longe contynued and depe rooted scrupple, as passeth his power to avoyde and put awey." It was, in other words, an obsession of the same pathological kind as those which he himself had described in A Dialogue of Comfort. It was a "frantic fantasye" or "develysh fantasie" to use More's own phrases in that book. Lady More almost seems to have believed it was a "diabolic temptation". It's doubtful More himself would have thanked his wife for this judgement, having, according to Ackroyd, "spent the last eight months battling against those snares of the devil manifest in spiritual pride and the over-bearing desire for martyrdom."

As regards Lady Alice's financial position after her husband's death - she apparently kept all her own wealth from her inheritance from her first husband (that confused me, as I assumed that all her lands etc. would legally have become More's on her marriage) and, what is significant, she was awarded, in 1537, a government pension of £20 a year. I wonder if that was Cromwell's doing?

PS

MM wrote:

But ever the lawyer I feel he should have known how to make provision, within the law, for his family. Or more to the point within the current discussion: did he give thought to the future life of his family when faced with the inevitable ending of his own? If so what?

Just found this in Ackroyd's book:


"Dame Alice also lamented that  she was likely to be 'vtterlye vndone' if More's 'lands and tenementis' were confiscated; here we may suspect her of pardonable exaggeration, since she remained a wealthy woman from the inheritance of her first husband. She still possessed, for example, her estate in Hitchin. Her daughter and her stepchildren had also profited from good marriages, although it is true that John More was now held responsible for his father's outstanding debts to the king. There are one or two subtle allusions in More's correspondence from prison which suggest that the more valuable 'moveable goodes' had already been quietly taken by the family from Chelsea; he cared nothing for himself  now, but he was deeply anxious for the welfare of his household."


PPS And More was aware of the temptation of suicide too - especially assisted suicide, courtesy of Henry VIII. He ruminates on this in The Dialogue of Comfort. He knew he was following a course that would lead him to death, a death he might avoid by the simple expedient of swearing an oath that just about everyone else of importance in the realm had sworn. Was it legitimate to deliberately court death in such a way? He agonised over this. Richard Marius says this:

"Part of the enduring spell More has cast on succeeding generations lies in the human wrestlings he had with death - the hesitations, the terrors, the ruminations about his choice, the final sense of confusion about just what it was that made him die. He made his choice to lay down his life, not with the bold, unthinking and superhuman heroism common to legends and epics, but rather with the ordinary doubts and terrors that would afflict most of us in his situation. He is closest to us here, in these feeling of awesome ambivalence that we all share in dire moments of the human condition."

What did Cromwell really think of all this, I wonder? It is perhaps significant that More is the only person in Wolf Hall who can make TC lose his cool: his response to Thomas More is a mixture of anger, exasperation and baffled longing.

I am uncertain that there is any word for attempting to set a good example but surely that coursed through More's reasoning; that his act of defiance would be worthy enough example for others to  make some sort of stand. The worst part was probably having enough time o dwell on his circumstances and motives.

The stipend award to his family later is interesting. Is there a date to this? I am sure Mark R. would have done this but not so sure about the real TC. His stepping stones were both slippery and getting smaller. It would have been interesting to have somehow introduced more of his character moulding in Europe. he seems to be well suited for the detached 'I am a camera.' mode in HM's writing rather than one easily influenced. Regular beating in childhood must have made him wary; the art o f manipulation comes from shrewd observation, I suggest.

Priscilla wrote:

I am uncertain that there is any word for attempting to set a good example but surely that coursed through More's reasoning; that his act of defiance would be worthy enough example for others to  make some sort of stand. The worst part was probably having enough time o dwell on his circumstances and motives.

The stipend award to his family later is interesting. Is there a date to this? I am sure Mark R. would have done this but not so sure about the real TC. His stepping stones were both slippery and getting smaller. It would have been interesting to have somehow introduced more of his character moulding in Europe. he seems to be well suited for the detached 'I am a camera.' mode in HM's writing rather than one easily influenced. Regular beating in childhood must have made him wary; the art o f manipulation comes from shrewd observation, I suggest.

Priscilla and Temperance,


"I am uncertain that there is any word for attempting to set a good example but surely that coursed through More's reasoning; that his act of defiance would be worthy enough example for others to  make some sort of stand. The worst part was probably having enough time o dwell on his circumstances and motives."

Happy to see the More theme again in the thread. I know I promised a new thread about task, duty martyr to Temperance...but since some days "out of competition" due to flue...

Nevertheless Priscilla, Temp and MM I read your colloquium with great interest.

Kind regards and with esteem to the three of yours, Paul.

Hope your influenza is better now, Paul. Trike - thank you for alerting me to Mark Rylance on Desert Island Discs.

I've been thinking a lot about that bit of dialogue (scene in the Tower) from Episode 4 where the exasperated Cromwell tells Audley and Rich that More simply wants to be a martyr. Turning towards More the exchange continues:


Cromwell: Never understood where the line is drawn between sacrifice and self-slaughter.

More: Christ drew it.

Cromwell: You don't find anything wrong in the comparison?


Cromwell seems here to be accusing More of the worst sort of pride, but More's facial expression as he takes in Cromwell's question is interesting. To me it registers: "Of course I don't find anything wrong in the comparison. We must strive to imitate (follow) Christ in all things. But how would a man like yourself understand that?"

One of the works that had tremendous influence on More was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. He mentions the Imitation - along with the great mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing and Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection - as writings which "norysshe and increase deuocyon" and he alludes to them throughout his own work.

Peter Ackroyd (a Catholic) notes:

"To imitate Christ is to bear all the humiliations and the indignities of the world; there are wonderfully elaborate meditations on the passion of Christ for the world, and the necessity of discipline and suffering to be worthy of his love. Each man must find his own cross and bear it willingly into what à Kempis calls 'the valley of my nothingness'. More discovered in à Kempis an account of the worthlessness of this world and its rewards, together with the desire for solitude, prayer, and that longing for death as the gate to eternity."

This thinking is incomprehensible to the modern mind - and Cromwell's mind was nothing if not modern.

But then again - who really understood the true nature of suffering - as experience of life forced on one, to be lived through and survived with spirit intact, rather than as something embraced willingly, experienced as a rather interesting intellectual exercise: Thomas More or Thomas Cromwell? Words, words - just words, says Cromwell, anticipating Hamlet by some seventy years or so.

PS MM - re More's estate - you may find this interesting:

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol12/pp115-118

Thanks for that link Temp ... so it seems More did all he could to make provision for his family within the law, and indeed tried to do more. He was thwarted by Henry demanding his due, seizing all the remaining estate and annulling More's deeds  of feoffment (whatever that is*) by Act of Parliament. But clearly, while the main house and estate were seized, dame Alice and the Ropers were sufficently provided for, because some years later they were still living in the immediate area, and paying not inconsiderable tax, on properties they held in their own right. And as you've said elsewhere Alice had income arising from her previous marriage.

I have Peter Ackroyd's biography of More somewhere in a box in the attic ... I must dig it out. And roll on the release of the 'Wolf Hall' dvd's, so I can understand what you are all going on about.

*PS : Just found out that feoffment in English law, was a transfer of land or property that gave the new holder the right to sell it as well as the right to pass it on to his heirs as an inheritance. It was total relinquishment and transfer of all rights of ownership of an estate ... and hence presumably Henry's need for Act of Parliament to undo this attempt by More to dispose of some of his property which would otherwise fall to the King.

Feoffment was one way of disposing of a fee (fee being part or all of an estate, also known as fief). It was essentially a way of granting land to someone without money changing hands, a service being offered as payment instead. If I have a farm, for example, but for whatever reason wish you to farm it I can either rent it to you or offer it to you in feoffment (I "off", or rid myself completely of my "fee"). Under this exchange I am still entitled to some benefit this land accrues through your management and labour, but only during my life. At the end of my life the title and liabilities transfer completely to you. It was a popular way of bequeathing land during one's lifetime, especially land in which one might have invested heavily but for whatever reason (bad management, high tax liability, impending trial for treason etc) it was no longer advantageous to own outright. If someone else could make a better fist of it but lacked the resources to purchase it feoffment could be used to facilitate the deal.

Feoffment was a big step, it was normally not reversible. However its well defined legal status favouring the feoffee's right to the land's title (no third party could purchase or assume control held by the feoffer) made it a very good way of avoiding impending confiscation by the crown.

EDIT after your EDIT which was after this post, MM: Henry's Act of Parliament in 1536 which affected the transfer of the More estate was probably not designed to that end. Unlike his many Land Assurance and Exchange acts passed into law by the same parliament and which were designed to address just such cases, More's rather clever disposal in feoffment could not be addressed through such means. However it was his Treason Act that year, which extended attainture to close relatives of someone accused of treason and allowed its continuation even after that person had been executed, which allowed him to bypass a need for Assurance or Exchange in order to assume the right to grant the land. But even then this could not completely eliminate the rights of the feoffee, that would have been a catastrophic precedent and one which would also have scuppered the planned disposal of monastery lands in which feoffment was actually used by the crown to sweeten the deal for the monastery authorities. Alice probably benefited from this caution on the crown's part to avoid debasing entitlement through feoffment and in 1547 with the repeal of the Treason Act, which also removed attainture retrospectively for people in her situation, probably received quite a nice cash injection also in that she was now indisputably the potential feoffer and no longer the feoffee of those properties originally specified by More. Paulet would most likely have had to "buy her out" at this point to consolidate his own title to the estate, or of course accept them in feoffment himself.

PS: A more interesting development was Roper's continued retention of the manor as per More's wishes throughout this time, and that Paulet's eventual grant under Edward VI of More's estate did not include this manor at all. This seems very much like evidence that whatever Henry's original intentions with regard to confiscation some considerable backtracking and unofficial agreement was going on behind the scenes. Cromwell's plans vis a vis the monasteries are a very good candidate for such pragmatic benevolence, I reckon. People were watching what went on in Chelsea and the crown knew it. Best not risk anything than risk a precedent that screwed up the big project.

MM wrote:

And roll on the release of the 'Wolf Hall' dvd's, so I can understand what you are all going on about.

I'm sorry, MM - I'm rabbiting on here about facial expressions and such and I forget that most posters haven't seen Wolf Hall yet. I do so envy you having that treat in store. I've watched it three times now - practically know the script off by heart.

I also was interested in the feoffment stuff. Has it been rescinded - seem to it could be useful to offset inheritance tax.

That was a most interesting site,, Temps. set me to getting reflective yet again about the landed layers on history - and   how intransigent we are and how  little it matters. What does is that I get on and get my hungry family Sunday lunch. Sitting gazing into ancient depths just wont do.

I've been googling about idly this morning, as I do, and have found a couple of what I think are interesting articles:


http://www.standard.co.uk/news/a-man-for-all-seasons-sir-thomas-more-brought-low-by-fiction-6799985.html


For the simple-minded dinner-party liberal, the Thomas Cromwell that Hilary Mantel depicts is infinitely attractive: secular-minded, tolerant, contemptuous of superstition, sneery about religious credulity, a meritocrat of humble origins, fond of children and animals, multilingual, handy in a fight. Indeed, if the prevailing mindset in Britain right now is a kind of secular Protestantism then Thomas Cromwell as drawn by Hilary Mantel is its man.

Trouble is, there is a reason why Cromwell has had a longstanding reputation as a complete bastard. The tally of the executions over which he presided - including those for heresy - far surpassed More's. And unlike More, he was unlikely to have been swayed by the notion that what he was doing was for the good of souls.



http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/10/unquiet-mind-hilary-mantel

Priscilla wrote:

...set me to getting reflective yet again about the landed layers on history - and how intransigent we are and how little it matters.

That way madness lies, Priscilla...



PS I spent yesterday afternoon reading bits of Thomas à Kempis (like you do). I copied out a big chunk, complete with the Bible references that were helpfully given. Thought my chosen extract might help explain More's attitude to death. I was mystified to see two silly smileys appear in my preview. A rather disquieting moment - like something from Beyond Black    .  Anyway, decided to delete. After all, who's interested in Thomas à Kempis these days?


PPS "The proper sorrows of the soul" - what a lovely expression.

Temperance wrote:

MM wrote:

And roll on the release of the 'Wolf Hall' dvd's, so I can understand what you are all going on about.

I'm sorry, MM - I'm rabbiting on here about facial expressions and such and I forget that most posters haven't seen Wolf Hall yet. I do so envy you having that treat in store. I've watched it three times now - practically know the script off by heart.

The views of those on the Historum board are very positive as well.

http://historum.com/history-films-television/82940-reminder-wolf-hall-starts-bbc2-tonight.html

It's been picked up by Arte for showing in France & Germany. Denmark and Sweden have also bought it, (no word on Norway)

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/15/bbc-worldwide-showcase-wolf-hall

Temp, searching for Wolf Hall related stuff has caused the Bing search engine on my comp to come up with this.

Don't know if you've seen this one or not:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thomas-Cromwell-Untold-Faithful-Servant/dp/1444782886/

Good Lord, Trike, haven't read that one.

Seriously, thank you - just ordered it!

Temperance wrote:

Good Lord, Trike, haven't read that one.

Seriously, thank you -  just ordered it!

That was quick, Temp!!!

Hope it's a good enough book, most of the Amazon reviewers have given it 5 stars.

Triceratops wrote:

Temperance wrote:

Good Lord, Trike, haven't read that one.

Seriously, thank you -  just ordered it!

That was quick, Temp!!!

Hope it's a good enough book, most of the Amazon reviewers have given it 5 stars.

Well, I like Tracy Borman, Trike, so I ordered it straight away. It wasn't expensive. I'm looking for a balanced biography. I've read Robert Hutchinson's book (Cromwell as Stalinist monster) and John Schofield's (excellent, but very much Cromwell as misunderstood hero), so it will be interesting to see what TB has to say. Can't think why I haven't come across her account before now. I'm not too keen on the David Loades book - I find him very dry (always a sign of a good historian?   ).

Guardian descibes Borman's biography as "sketchy", but we'll see.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/21/thomas-cromwell-untold-story-review-tracy-borman-sketchy-portrait

I've been looking at the talk of sexy Yanis and it has struck me that the one weak link I see in WH is Henry, or more accurately, Damien L. I know I've already said I'm not a fan and in this production he seems just limp, possibly in every sense! Not only is he, to me at least, lacking any personal magnetism or even an aura of the aphrodisiac  properties of power but there's been no impression of a man in thrall to an overwhelming passion for AB, rather that of a child who quite fancies a new toy. Was he really so henpecked and prepared to appear so, so publicly?
Or is that the point?

TC on the other hand is quite the opposite. Swoon, thud.

Hands off, he's mine. (TC, not Henry).

I think Henry was hen-pecked, ferval. He knew it, and it infuriated him.

As for Henry's "limpness" -  yes, there was evidence. And repeating the limpness allegations out loud (during his trial) probably cost George Boleyn his life.

No time now, but interesting topic to discuss.

PS I remember one lovely remark from Thomas Howard - it was in the script of an earlier BBC production. Speaking of his king's sexual and emotional needs, the Duke of Norfolk sagely declared: "His Grace expects to find in one woman what most men look for in a wife, three mistresses and a brothel."

I think he had a point. Freud would have had a field day with Henry.

Temperance wrote:

Freud would have had a field day with Henry.

I blame the parents, a sentiment with which I'm sure Philip Larkin would agree.

Indeed!
I'm looking forward to your reactions to the programme, MM, I'm very much trying to judge it as a production and I find Henry's, or Damien's, lack of presence and charisma really disconcerting. He's no Keith Michell or Charles Laughton, he's just a bit wet. A Gideon (George) Osborne to Yanis when compared with TC.

I shouldn't really comment before seeing the whole thing, but you have a point in that all the publicity and newspaper photos of Damien/Henry that I've seen just make him look a bit 'flat'. He certainly doesn't seem to project the huge, unassailable, capricious presence and power of the 'historical' Henry ... and I have to put that in inverted commas because I accept I may be falling for all the Tudor (and later) propaganda, imagery and agrandised story-telling. But still, even in staged static photos the Damien Henry just looks a bit, well yes, limp. For all the expensive, fancy, and indeed very authentic wardrobe, he still looks more like the petty-minded, regional manager of a supermarket chain, rather than the CEO of a dynamic multi-national company ... and certainly not like an ambitious, arrogant King acting by divine right.

But as I say I haven't seen the whole package yet ... and I'm not just referring to the codpiece.

A little bit of last week's episode,MM.




Some very naughty people have posted entire episodes for online streaming, even the one due for transmission tonight.

MM wrote:

He certainly doesn't seem to project the huge, unassailable, capricious presence and power of the 'historical' Henry ... and I have to put that in inverted commas because I accept I may be falling for all the Tudor (and later) propaganda, imagery and agrandised story-telling.

Big, nasty Henry, viciously and dangerously sunk in fat and self-pity, really developed after the death of Cromwell. But the potential was always there - as Thomas More had realised pretty early on.  

I am reminded of something from a Henry James novel - Washington Square. When asked how it is she has become so cruel, the heroine of the story, a woman who in her youth had been a trusting, hopeful and loving soul, answers simply: "I have been taught by masters."

PS Re Henry the Hen-Pecked - David Starkey recounts something from Chapuys' despatches which is rather telling. Henry tells Anne Boleyn of a row he has had with Catherine. Anne, furious, berates her royal lover thus: "Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the Queen she was sure to have the upper hand?" Starkey, having related this incident, adds: "One almost begins to feel sorry for Henry, caught as he was in the cross-fire between two such women."

I saw the first episode yesterday and can now well understand why millions of viewers baled out between this and the second instalment. There is absolutely no concession to explaining character, the events, or indeed any worthwhile context through which a viewer not already acquainted with these facets having read or seen other treatments of this story can pick them up here as they go along. Rylance, faced with having to portray a man of no discernible character from the script provided him, delivers just that. This makes all the engaged character acting going on around him (some of which is superb) simply all the more puzzling. However it was nice to see at the end that Yosser Hughes finally got a job. I'm also impressed by Wolsey's dimensions - if he gets sacked as cardinal in the second episode as is looking very likely (though apparently only for a lot of emoting while not saying anything at a Blackfriars meeting in which some Spanish girl lithped a lot) he can at least forge a second career as fad diet inventor.

If it hadn't been for reading this website and starting the book, before setting it aside until after this series, I think I would probably have been lost as well. It was an odd directorial decision to opt for the total immersion approach and mess around with the chronology in episode one, was it some kind of test so that only the 'right kind of viewers' would stick with it?