Hilary Mantel, the Catholic-educated, Booker Prize-winning author, has created her own Reformation by changing popular perception about Thomas Cromwell, usually seen in history as a cold and ruthless manipulator.
Nearly four million people have tuned in weekly since Wolf Hall, the dramatisation of her two novels on Cromwell, was adapted for television by the BBC, starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as Henry VIII.
But reformation provokes counter-reformation. Now, a number of Catholic bishops have led calls that Mantel is herself guilty of historical injustice by blackening the name of Thomas More, the man Cromwell helped send to the block.
In Wolf Hall, More – who was made the patron saint of politicians in 2000 by Pope John Paul II – is portrayed as self-regarding, cold and inhuman, while Cromwell holds kittens in warm embrace.
In the Catholic Herald, Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury stood to the colours to defend More's reputation, cautioning viewers to remember that Wolf Hall is a work of fiction.
“It is an extraordinary and perverse achievement of Hilary Mantel and BBC Drama to make of Thomas Cromwell a flawed hero and of St Thomas More, one of the greatest Englishmen, a scheming villain,” he said.
People do not have to share More’s faith to recognise his integrity, he said: “It would be sad if Thomas Cromwell, who is surely one of the most unscrupulous figures in England’s history, was to be held-up as a role model for future generations.”
His episcopal colleague in Plymouth, Bishop Mark O’Toole, is not alone in finding “a strong anti-Catholic thread” in the TV series, with 16th- century Catholicism portrayed as the religious fundamentalism of today.
The sin of heresy
Heresy was the biggest sin of the age. The brutal judgmentalism of the time, impossible for most to understand today, was displayed by Catholic unto Protestant as well as Protestant unto Catholic, Bishop O’Toole said.
“It was the big wrong on both sides,” he said. “It is hard for us in our modern mentality to see it as wrong. They looked on heretics as we look upon drug traffickers. But it is inaccurate to say that he [Thomas More] condemned people to death.”
Wolf Hall charges that More burned heretics. Here, history has no common record: More certainly harassed and spied on those who tried to import Martin Luther's works into England before Henry VIII's split with Rome.
More's Utopia (1516)offered all the promise of a six-hour working day, national health, state education, universal suffrage, and even the ordination of women.
He later helped Henry organise his thoughts when the monarch published his own attack upon Luther, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, in the days before Anne Boleyn caused the king to fracture the ties with Rome.
Bishop O’Toole, who celebrated his elevation to the Plymouth diocese last year by kneeling before More’s hair-shirt, is on less sure ground when he declares that More condemned no one.
Rumours circulated even then that he tortured Protestants, a charge that was driven home by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs (1563). Initially, More had holders of Protestants books publicly humiliated and jailed, rather than killed.
During More’s time as Lord Chancellor, however, Richard Bayfield, a Benedictine monk turned Lutheran, was captured while possessing the works of Luther and Huldrych Zwingli.
More, whom described Bayfield as “a dog returning to his vomit”, was in command when the former monk was interrogated by others and then burned at the stake in Smithfield in London.
Sir Thomas Hittin was another of the six burned during More’s time as Henry VIII’s lord chancellor. More condemned Hittin “as the devil’s stinking martyr, who hath taken his wretched soul with him straight from the short fire to the fire ever-lasting”.
Five centuries on, the argument will never be settled, but the passions unleashed by Mantel’s works are illustrated by Bishop O’Toole’s coldly expressed account of the stories surrounding the death of More and Cromwell.
“Thomas More approached his death with serenity and even a degree of humour . . . whereas Thomas Cromwell was shouting out loud all night in the Tower and begging for mercy,” the More loyalist describes. “He saw his death as a deep failure, whereas More transcended his.”
In the battle for historical supremacy, little is safe – even the manner of a man’s death.