Hilary Mantel ‘falsified' history in Wolf Hall, historian claims

Telegraph

20-02-2025

Hilary Mantel 'falsified' history in her Wolf Hall novels, a historian has claimed.
Eamon Duffy, a professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, accused the late Booker Prize-winning author of turning sources 'upside down' and making them say the 'opposite' of what they originally had.
In her celebrated Wolf Hall trilogy, Mantel tracks the rapid rise to power and subsequent demise of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister.
The novel and its sequels were adapted into a BBC series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as the Tudor king.
As part of the narrative, Mantel describes the fall of Sir Thomas More, a devout Catholic who refused to swear an oath recognising Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.
In earlier portrayals, More is often 'mythologised' for his refusal to swear the Oath of Supremacy – but according to Prof Duffy, the novelist went to the 'other extreme' writing him as a 'torturer and a misogynist'.
The academic called her depiction of him the 'least successful bit' of her trilogy and claimed that Mantel was driven by her dislike of Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons, in which More was the main character.
In an interview with Idler magazine, the 78-year-old historian said: 'Hilary Mantel's trilogy was self-consciously an attempt to rehabilitate Cromwell, and to de-mythologise Thomas More away from his portrayal in... A Man For All Seasons, and which she hated and which she thought showed More as a patron of liberal conscience – which he certainly wasn't.
'But she went to the other extreme and portrayed More as a monster, a torturer and a misogynist whose wife and women folk were afraid of. And I think that portrayal was the least successful bit of Wolf Hall.
'[Mantel] and I were on good terms. The friendship cooled somewhat when I wrote an essay on fictional treatments of the English Reformation, which focused on the end of Wolf Hall.
'I looked at the sources she used – what they say about More and what they say about Cromwell – and I showed that on key issues, she actually turned the sources upside down and made them say the opposite of what they were originally intended to suggest.
'Now that's legitimate in fiction, but in her Reith lectures Hilary suggested that the literary novelist could bring genuine insight that the historian lacked. Maybe but I didn't think that was legitimate if you're actually falsifying the accounts.'
Duffy added that his 'final straw' was a subsequent newspaper article that used Wolf Hall as 'evidence' to say More, who was played by Anton Lesser in the BBC series, had tortured and burned people.
He continued: 'More actually took a solemn oath to deny this accusation. He said as God is my judge, I have never tortured anyone.
'Now, you have to ask yourself, here's a deeply religious man who had his head chopped off rather than take a false oath, who makes an oath, 'so help me God I didn't do this'.
'Do you believe him or do you believe the stories and the gossip.'
Mantel is an author best known for her Booker Prize winning Tudor trilogy. She passed away in 2022 at the age of 70.
Duffy is an expert on the English Reformation, which is the focus of his book The Stripping of the Altars, and is the former president of Magdalene College, Cambridge.