How Hilary Mantel wrote Wolf Hall, in her own words
This article was first published in 2012 and is taken from A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel, published in the UK by John Murray:
‘Show up at the desk’ is one of the first rules of writing, but for Wolf Hall I was about 30 years late. When I began writing, in the 1970s, I thought of myself simply as a historical novelist; I can’t do plots, I thought, so I will let history do them for me. I had an idea that, after the French revolution was done and dusted, Thomas Cromwell might be the next job. Blacksmith’s boy to Earl of Essex – how did he do it? The story seemed irresistible. I thought someone else would write it.
The 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession fell in 2009. Dimly aware of this, but not yet focused, in 2005 I proposed to my publisher a novel – just one, mind – about his great minister. Still, no one had told the story. The Tudor scholar GR Elton had established Cromwell as a statesman of the first rank, but Elton’s work had done nothing for his popular image. Holbein’s portrait shows a man of undistinguished ugliness, with a hard, flat, sceptical eye. In A Man for All Seasons, he is the villain who casually holds another man’s hand in a candle flame.
Biographies of him are cut up into topics: ‘Finance’, ‘Religion’ and so on. He seemed not to have a private life. It wasn’t that I wanted to rehabilitate him. I do not run a Priory clinic for the dead. Rather, I was driven by powerful curiosity. If a villain, an interesting villain, yes? My first explorations challenged my easy prejudices. Some readers think I’ve been too easy on Cromwell. In fact, it’s possible to write a version of his career in which he is, at worst, the loyal servant of a bad master.
The deaths of Thomas More and Anne Boleyn can be laid at the king’s door. In the end, this was not the story I chose to write. In my interpretation, Cromwell is an arch-plotter, smarter than Henry though not meaner. He had plenty ‘stomach’, said his contemporaries: not a reference to his embonpoint, but to his appetite for whatever life threw at him. He was, as John Foxe said, ‘given to enterprise great matters’. New wives, new laws, the split with Rome, the reformation of the church, the filling of the exchequer: there seemed no limit to his massive, imperturbable competence.
When I sat down to write at last, it was with relish for his company. The title arrived before a word was written: Wolf Hall, besides being the home of the Seymour family, seemed an apt name for wherever Henry’s court resided. But I had no idea what the book would be like, how it would sound. I could see it, rather than hear it: a slow swirling backdrop of jewelled black and gold, a dark glitter at the corner of my eye. I woke one morning with some words in my head: ‘So now get up.’ It took a while to work out that this was not an order to get the day under way. It was the first sentence of my novel.
In 2005, Hilary Mantel emailed her editor Nicholas Pearson the first 40 pages of a new book, which would transform not only her career, but our expectations of historical fiction. Here, he recalls how Wolf Hall came to life:
By the early 2000s, Hilary Mantel was deep into her literary career, many outstanding novels behind her. But while her reputation was considerable, her readership remained frustratingly modest. Her novels shuttled from the historical to the contemporary. They were thematically varied and carried within them parts of her own story: domestic dramas, an interest in revolutionary change, her Irish Catholic heritage, her years in Saudi Arabia, fertility, women’s bodies, ghosts. All these novels were individually intriguing but perhaps it was difficult for readers to understand the bigger picture.
Hilary settled down to write her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. In dealing with her past, by addressing the facts of her own life head on, perhaps she was closing out a phase of her writing life, readying herself to reengage with fiction with a new energy. Beyond Black, which followed in 2005, her slyly funny novel about Middle England, again failed to tip her into the readership those of us who were passionate about her writing felt she deserved. She said to her agent, ‘What more do I have to do?’
By 2005 I’d been at Fourth Estate, Hilary’s UK publisher, for some years. Christopher Potter – her brilliant and inspirational publisher who had brought her to the list with The Giant, O’Brien – had left and I had taken over as her editor and publisher. I made a contract with Hilary for two unwritten novels: a short, intense murder story set in Botswana, where she had lived for five years in the 70s; and a novel about Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who had been a source of fascination to her for 30 years.
Hilary embarked on the former but quite quickly put it aside and turned to the latter. And then, out of the blue, her agent Bill Hamilton and I received an email from her with 40 pages attached, its first line showing us Cromwell’s father goading his son whose bloodied face is pressed against the cobbles: ‘So now get up.’
That sentence crackled like gunfire, a taunt that would hang over everything Hilary poured herself into over the next decade, a sentence she would return to hundreds of pages later as she would finally take Cromwell to the scaffold in The Mirror & the Light. It was a switch into a fresh way of treating historical fiction, showing us characters living in the moment, attended to in the present tense, unaware of what the future holds for them. As a reader, one felt embedded somewhere in the back of Cromwell’s skull, alert to the brutal world of Tudor England, events unspooling before him while we looked on. As she says in her short essay ‘Night Visions’, which features in a new collection of her writing, A Memoir of My Former Self, she was dealing ‘in metaphors, symbols and myths. [Fiction] multiplies ambiguity. It’s about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively.’
In truth, Hilary didn’t really need assurance from me and Bill – she instinctively knew this new path was the right path. In my mind, ‘So now get up’ accrued a weight beyond its catalytic service to the story itself. It seemed like a prod from Hilary to her writerly self; a message to her editor and beyond to her readers. Suddenly she was into her stride and so it began. Over the next three years, Hilary would periodically send completed sections as the story accumulated, all the promise of those opening pages blossoming and flowering.
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