21 REASONS TO READ WOLF HALL by HILARY MANTEL
I’ve just re-read WOLF HALL by HILARY MANTEL, which ten years ago I chose as one of my ten favourite books. I’m glad to report my opinion hasn’t altered. This is in preparation for reading The Mirror & the Light, but next up it’s Bring Up The Bodies.
To show you what I love about the book, here are some passages that have made me laugh, cry or gasp.
P31: He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house, and fix a jury.
P37: The thing people don’t understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking.
P40: By seven, he is shaved, breakfasted and wrapped beautifully in fresh __________ linen and dark fine wool.
[Try and guess the adjective she uses to describe his linen, one word which magnificently encapsulates Cromwell’s rise from butcher’s son to Earl of Essex.]
P52: He’s never taken much notice of Cavendish, a sensitive sort of man who talks a lot about table napkins.
P117: The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they moved through. As if systematically, they performed every action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did between the battles that left its mark. They robbed and raped for forty miles around the line of their march. They burned the crops in the fields, and the houses with the people inside them. They took bribes in coin and in kind and when they were encamped in a district they made the people pay for every day on which they were left unmolested. They killed priests and hung them up naked in the marketplaces. As if they were infidels, they ransacked the churches, packed the chalices in their baggage, fuelled their cooking fires with precious books; they scattered relics and stripped altars. They found out the families of the dead and demanded that the living ransomed them; if the living could not pay, they torched the corpses before their eyes, without ceremony, without a single prayer, disposing of the dead as one might the carcasses of diseased cattle.
P118: There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old.
P121: ‘Are you bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought the Cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic booksellers.’
P219: May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing then buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. [ … ] The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don’t even teach them dog Latin. I don’t grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness — their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt.
P231: ‘Look there at my daughter-in-law Anne,’ More says. The girl lowers her eyes; her shoulders tense, as she waits for what is coming. ‘Anne craved — shall I tell them, my dear? — she craved a pearl necklace. She did not cease to talk about it, you know how young girls are. So when I gave her a box that rattled, imagine her face. Imagine her face again when she opened it. What was inside? Dried peas!’
P247: He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terracotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people’s saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no further.
P260: What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.
P277: ‘No father wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.’
P407, P414: Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.
P408: Two hours, two kings. What do you know, Walter? He stands in the salty air, talking to his dead father.
P446: ‘Hans wants to paint me.’
‘I hope he can run fast,’ Richard says.
P534: You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
P570: The rocking of the boat beneath them is imperceptible. The flags are limp; it is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green.
P605: ‘My husband used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he will be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.’
P610: The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.
P624: But Norfolk himself comes to him, when it is over, and says, Cromwell, I swear upon my life that one of the monks spoke when his heart was out. Jesus, he called, Jesus save us, poor Englishmen.
‘No my lord. It is not possible he should do so.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know it from experience.’
P634: ‘Are you not afraid of the pain?
‘Oh yes, I am very much afraid, I am not a bold and robust man such as yourself, I cannot help but rehearse it in my mind. But I will only feel it for a moment, and God will not let me remember it afterwards.’
