29 August 2012

Commonplacing: Hilary Mantel on Thomas Cromwell on Thomas Wyatt

This is from Hilary Mantel's excellent work on the reign of Henry VIII, Bring Up the Bodies. Following up on the first book in the series, Wolf Hall, Mantel explores this turbulent period through the eyes of Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, an enigmatic figure who went from being the low-born son of a drunken blacksmith, to a mercenary fighting on the continent, to the most powerful man in England short of the king himself. Indeed, Cromwell pulled the strings in the empire, until, that is, he fell out of favor with Henry, suffering the fate all such people who experienced a similar fell, a grisly and public spectacle of a death. 

Cromwell has fascinated me for a long time, mostly because I felt that he never got a fair shake from historians who most often associate him with his heir, Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Puritan revolution (or English Civil War, depending upon your preference) and executioner of King Charles I. Cromwell is an incredible character and this series of books told from his perspective are wonderful storytelling and wonderful history (though speculative, of course, as anything from this period must be). The following quote is his feeling toward Thomas Wyatt, the most beautiful of poets from the Henretian period. For those of you who have read and loved Wyatt, these words will ring true and say what you have always seemed to feel about him:


“It is not easy to explain to a young man like Wriothesley why he values Wyatt. He wants to say, because, good fellows though you are, he is not like you or Richard Riche. He does not talk simply to hear his own voice, or pick arguments just to win them. . . He writes to warn and chastise, and not to confess his need but to conceal it. He understands honour but does not boast of his own. He is perfectly equipped as a courtier, but he knows the small value of that. He has studied the world without despising it. He understands the world without rejecting it. He has no illusions but he has hopes. He does not sleepwalk through his life. His eyes are open, and his ears for sounds others miss.” 

It is the latter part of Cromwell's internal monologue, beginning with Wyatt's unblinking yet hopeful assessment of the world, that most appeals to me. This is poetry, this is humane: to look into the world in all of its vice and sin and fallenness and fallibility and yet to hope. To have your eyes open as you walk through life and to see and hear things that others are too jaded, hurried, blind or deaf to see. 

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