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steepholmBefore returning Wolf Hall to my mother, I copied out this passage. It comes at a point when Cromwell is trying to get people to swear to the Act of Supremacy (or is it the Act of Succession? Darn - now I've forgotten and can't check):
This touches so many of my own strings that it leaves my head vibrating like a strummed lute. Here are just a few. First, there's the shadow country, or "Britain vs Logres" trope, which I discussed (though there's always room for more discussion) in Four British Fantasists pp. 29-31, and which I name in allusion to a passage from The Hideous Strength. "Behind every Milton, a Cromwell", as one character puts it there - although in the case of this Cromwell we are in default of a Milton and are forced to substitute - oh, I don't know - Thomas Wyatt? He doesn't really fit the bill, in truth. If only Spenser had had Cromwell to deal with, rather than Burleigh!
Second, it fits neatly the Dymchurch Flit/Fairy Farewell trope, inasmuch as it associates the hobs and boggarts with the saints of England's Catholic past, a world that Cromwell is in the act of casting into another mould. (At one point the monks who live next door to him are described as "good neighbours" - whether with any elfin insinuation on Mantel's part, I don't know.)
And then again, I find myself identifying with the sense that many things with which I have no real sympathy - say, monarchy (in my case) and Catholicism (in Cromwell's - okay, and in mine again) - have been prominent ingredients in a past of which I understand and feel myself, to an almost morbid degree, to be the product. And is there not a danger of cutting oneself off from the taproot? This is Cromwell's meditation, and often mine too.
However, England didn't cease to be England when it broke ties with Rome, nor will it when it finally comes to its senses again and re-decommissions the monarchy. And there's always a Cromwell to light the way.
They are dug into shallow graves, the Cornishmen who came up the country when he was a boy; but there are always more Cornishmen. And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sudden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future. (575)
This touches so many of my own strings that it leaves my head vibrating like a strummed lute. Here are just a few. First, there's the shadow country, or "Britain vs Logres" trope, which I discussed (though there's always room for more discussion) in Four British Fantasists pp. 29-31, and which I name in allusion to a passage from The Hideous Strength. "Behind every Milton, a Cromwell", as one character puts it there - although in the case of this Cromwell we are in default of a Milton and are forced to substitute - oh, I don't know - Thomas Wyatt? He doesn't really fit the bill, in truth. If only Spenser had had Cromwell to deal with, rather than Burleigh!
Second, it fits neatly the Dymchurch Flit/Fairy Farewell trope, inasmuch as it associates the hobs and boggarts with the saints of England's Catholic past, a world that Cromwell is in the act of casting into another mould. (At one point the monks who live next door to him are described as "good neighbours" - whether with any elfin insinuation on Mantel's part, I don't know.)
And then again, I find myself identifying with the sense that many things with which I have no real sympathy - say, monarchy (in my case) and Catholicism (in Cromwell's - okay, and in mine again) - have been prominent ingredients in a past of which I understand and feel myself, to an almost morbid degree, to be the product. And is there not a danger of cutting oneself off from the taproot? This is Cromwell's meditation, and often mine too.
However, England didn't cease to be England when it broke ties with Rome, nor will it when it finally comes to its senses again and re-decommissions the monarchy. And there's always a Cromwell to light the way.
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Date: 2012-08-03 08:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-03 11:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-04 02:01 am (UTC)It's also the difference between Mantel and some other writers. One of the reasons Britain is so wonderful to study and visit for foreigners like me is it has so very many layers and they shift and they're unpredictable and they only very occasionally play nicely with stereotypes. It doesn't have to be perfect (or even lovable) to be endlessly interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-04 08:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-04 02:37 am (UTC)Nine
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Date: 2012-08-04 08:16 am (UTC)