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Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies: A Novel
by Amy Boesky

Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up The Bodies: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 2012. 410 pp. ISBN: 978-0805090031. $28.00 hardback.

Hilary Mantel’s sixteenth century shimmers with ghosts. Bring Up The Bodies, the second in Mantel’s trilogy of Tudor novels, spans the death of one spurned Queen (Katherine) and the execution of another. We follow an Anne Boleyn reduced in power—“her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places” (36)—to one encircled, tried, and eventually executed, flattened to a “puddle of gore”(397). This is not a novel about Queen Anne, however, so much as a continuation of Mantel’s dynamic portrait of the man in charge of underwriting her doom, Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s Cromwell is a penetrating and unsettling portrait of a man who “has a way of getting his way . . . [who] will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and . . . introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn’t know existed” (6).

This second novel is at once leaner and grimmer than Wolf Hall, which won (among other illustrious awards) Britain’s Man Booker Prize in 2009. In Bring Up The Bodies, Mantel’s Cromwell is darkened by years of service to an irascible King, beleaguered by the accumulation of private griefs, chiefly over the death from plague of his wife and daughters. The England in which he moves is diminished, sadder. Cromwell retains his ruthlessness, yet Mantel’s admiration for him (as in Wolf Hall) runs through that ruthlessness like a vein of ore. In this second novel, Cromwell is a Machiavell who finds Machiavelli’s book “trite,” a statesman who can crush a man’s life with a single word (71). He is also brilliant, untiring, and capable of deep loyalty and surprising acts of kindness and charity. Through Cromwell’s gaze, we see an England teeming with beauty as well as with cruelty and death: a landscape where “each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, [hangs] like a golden pear” (8). Cromwell is, like many of Mantel’s fictional characters, an outsider—in this case, one that cannot forget his own history, retaining empathy for the maltreated, the poor and ill-bred. His is the oblique gaze of a modern: even as he carries out the King’s dark orders, Cromwell imagines an England with better roads built from taxes levied on the wealthy (43). The court may scorn him as “a blacksmith’s boy,” but Cromwell is convinced a man can rise from humble origins: “In a generation everything can change” (43).

In this world, the dead walk among the living. Mantel’s idiomatic, present-tense discourse heightens the sense that the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries rub up together; her characters think and speak as we do. When Cromwell remembers his old antagonist Thomas More, it is with bewilderment more than remorse; he sometimes forgets the man is dead: “It’s as if . . . the conversation stops, [Cromwell] says something, and no answers come back” (43). The past is richly, dangerously present. Though Cromwell keeps himself circumspect, his face “blank as a freshly painted wall,” he never forgets an injury (16). For instance, he will not forget the cruelty done to the late Cardinal Wolsey by the courtiers now keeping company with Anne Boleyn. Serving the King’s interests in the Boleyn case will allow Cromwell to exact personal revenge. Anger over the perceived mistreatment of Wolsey is for Cromwell “not one year’s grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief” (330). Cromwell has waited for his moment, and now the time is his. But even as he works to ensnare Boleyn, Wolsey’s phrases continue to reverberate in his head. Executing guilty men—guilty of something, even if not exactly of what they have been charged—will not bring the dead back. At 50, Cromwell walks among ghosts in a world drawing smaller and tighter around him.

Where do the dead live now?” Cromwell’s son Gregory asks him. “Do we have Purgatory or not?” (118). Mantel presents the England of 1535-36 dimmed by purgatorial shadows, a “no-place, [an] ante-room to God where each hour is ten thousand years long” (118). In this “flittering, flinching universe,” hawks circle their prey, “weightless” on “upper currents of air” (4). At his house in Stepney, Cromwell keeps peacock wings—“eyes gleam[ing]”—worn years earlier by his now-dead daughter Grace in a Christmas pageant (118). Some artifacts outlast their owners, some do not; the King has gifts retrofitted with new initials, reminding us of Mantel’s persistent theme: What has been made can be unmade. What has been given can be taken back and given again to someone else. Workers early in Mantel’s novel smash the stonework of great houses, reducing Aragon’s proud pomegranates to “squashed and flying seeds” and—“if there is no time for carving”—crudely painting “the falcon of Anne Boleyn . . . up on the hatchments” (5). History—like portraiture—works in layers, layering its living pigments over the dead.

In Wolf Hall, More was Cromwell’s chief antagonist. In Bring Up The Bodies, Cromwell’s opponent is only nominally Anne Boleyn, reduced now to a woman trapped and diminished, all elbows and bones. Mantel’s Boleyn has no heft. She may retain her cunning—“it is well to keep behind her in the hunting field,” Cromwell observes (41)—but Boleyn is on the losing side from the opening pages of this novel, when Henry VIII first spies “plain” Jane Seymour at Wolf Hall and, struck by desire for her, appears “stunned, like a veal calf knocked on the head by a butcher” (29). Once Boleyn has lost Henry’s affection, her battle is over. Much of the novel is dedicated not to Cromwell’s contest with Boleyn, then, but instead to encircling her, closing in on a fate that feels prescribed.

There does remain an antagonist for Cromwell in this second novel—barely glimpsed yet, but nevertheless present. In a dispute with Chapuys, the Emperor’s ambassador, the King’s rage erupts when he senses that Cromwell stands in his way. Furious, Henry shouts at Cromwell: “I really believe, Cromwell, that you think you are king, and I am the blacksmith’s boy” (232). His rage is palpable; Cromwell is struck almost dumb by it. As Cromwell steps back from Henry’s fury, trying to keep a cool head, he remembers his father’s advice on how to survive the pain of a burn: “Raise your hands and cross your wrists before you, and hold them so till you get the water or the salve: I don’t know how it works, but it confuses the pain” (233).

Confus[ing] the pain” caused him by the King’s fury, Cromwell is able to remain calm until the King cools down, but the awareness of Henry’s strength as antagonist rattles him. Later, George Boleyn, ticking off the names of the men Henry has destroyed, puts the question to Cromwell baldly: “What makes you think it will be any different with you, that are not the equal of any of these men?” (334). That question—“like an imp coiled beneath [his] chair”— casts its shadow over the later chapters of Mantel’s second book, while it presages the third (407). Cromwell knows full well that in this age, a rise as rapid as his own carries risk; Henry can turn on him, and will, and in a moment, a man can be unmade.

Moreover, Cromwell knows that his own identity is contingent on the lives and whims of others. At 50, he has solidified. But there are multiple versions of his portrait hanging in his hall at Austin Friars—not just the final one, in which he looks “like a murderer,” but earlier, extant “versions of himself in various stage of becoming: a tentative outline, partly inked in” (7). Often working at his dispatches, Cromwell is, like so many of Mantel’s characters, keenly aware of the tenuous nature of history. How are people remembered? As he explores legends of Queen Katherine’s early life after her death, Cromwell wonders “what else [he has] always believed . . . without foundation” (160). Like portraits, histories layer their truths. At court, people craft and revise versions of their lives: there are constant changes in status, in name, in dress. Partly for this reason, many of Mantel’s historical characters are presented to us as authors; we see Gardiner patting the manuscript Of True Obedience, Wyatt with his verses, the King imagining himself cast in a “tragedy” he is writing, “a book in the making” (317). But though Gardiner mocks Cromwell—“You should write a book yourself. That would be something to see. You with your dog Latin and your little bit of Greek” (33)—Cromwell is, in some sense, the authorial eye closest to that of Mantel.

If Cromwell were to write a book, he imagines, it would be titled The Book Called Henry. Like Mantel’s trilogy, Cromwell’s “book” would be a study of absolutism and the damage it wreaks. In this second novel, Mantel has deepened and complicated her portraiture of power. Her brilliance lies not only in the richness of her writing, but in her ability to make history seem as if it is still happening, as if the choices she narrates could somehow be made again with different outcomes. We pause, looking over Cromwell’s shoulder, as he lifts the nib of his pen. As we read, it seems as if the outcomes for these characters remain uncertain. We share in Cromwell’s brutality, we experience his fleeting moments of tenderness and loss, and as the novel ends, we feel his uneasiness—the lengthening shadows falling across the page.

Amy Boesky is Associate Professor of English at Boston College.

42.2.20

Cite as:

Amy Boesky, "Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies: A Novel," Spenser Review 42.2.20 (Winter 2013). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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