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Snippet reviews and thoughts due to Darth Real Life: Wolf Hall ep 2 and 3: like it without being enthusiastic about it, which is the reaction I had to the original novel as well (will be interesting to see if my feeling changes correspondingly once we get into Bring up the Bodies territory with the plot. BTW, as with the book, the characterisation of Thomas More is so hopelessly over the top that you keep waiting for the "and then Thomas More kicked a puppy!" scene, but what I had forgotten is that while there isn't a kicked puppy (about the only thing there isn't re: TM in Wolf Hall), we do get a scene where Thomas Cromwell cradles a kitten. Oh, Hilary Mantel. Seriously though, seeing this book played out on screen hammered it in fo rme that I actually prefer Sansom's Shardlake novels when it comes to this period and these characters, because Sansom's Cromwell, while a sincere reformer as opposed to Just Looking Out For No.1, is actually allowed to make mistakes and be in the wrong a couple of times, and there's an equal amount of sympathetic Protestant, Catholic and just-trying-to-survive-Henry's-ever-changing-opinions characters around.

(BTW, one last thing re: Evil!More in Wolf Hall, book and tv series, perhaps the most unnecessary change/omission both Mantel & Kominsky (unnecessary because you could have shown More as the orthodox enemy of heresy versus Cromwell the champion of Protestantism while including it) made is the utter lack of a sense of humor. And you can't really have a plausibly historical More without the wit. I mean, this was a man able to joke on his way to the scaffold and cheer up his executioner. To quote from the most famous contemporary account, Hall's chronicles: “About Nine he was brought out of the Tower (...) (A) Woman came crying and demanded some Papers she said she had left in his Hands, when he was Lord Chancellor, to whom he said, Good woman, have Patience but for an Hour and the King will rid me of the Care I have for those Papers, and every thing else. (...) When he came to the Scaffold, it seemed ready to fall, whereupon he said merrily to the Lieutenant, Pray, Sir, see me safe up; and as to my coming down, let me shift for myself. Being about to speak to the People, he was interrupted by the Sheriff, and thereupon he only desired the People to pray for him, and bear Witness he died in the Faith of the Catholic Church, a faithful Servant both to God and the King. Then kneeling, he repeated the Miserere Psalm with much Devotion; and, rising up the Executioner asked him Forgiveness. He kissed him, and said, Pick up thy Spirits, Man, and be not afraid to do thine Office; my Neck is very short, take heed therefore thou strike not awry for having thine Honesty. Laying his Head upon the Block, he bid the Executioner stay till he had put his Beard aside, for that had committed no Treason. Thus he suffered with much Cheerfulness; his Head was taken off at one Blow, and was placed upon London-Bridge, where, having continued for some Months, and being about to be thrown into the Thames to make room for others, his Daughter Margaret bought it (...).)

(BTW, same chronicler, i.e. Edward Hall, on Thomas Cromwell's execution a few years later, recording Cromwell's death speech: "I am come hether to die, and not to purge my self, as may happen, some think that I will, for if I should do so, I wer a very wretche and miser: I am by the Lawe comdemmned to die, and thanke my lorde God that hath appointed me this death, for mine offence: For sithence the tyme that I have had years of discretion, I have lived a sinner, and offended my Lord God, for the whiche I aske him heartily forgiveness. And it is not unknown to many of you, that I have been a great traveler in this world, and being but of a base degree, was called to high estate, and sithes the time I came thereunto, I have offended my prince, for the whiche I aske him heartily forgivenes, and beseche you all to pray to God with me, that he will forgive me. O father forgive me. O son forgive me, O holy Ghost forgive me: O three persons in one God forgive me. And now I pray you that be here, to beare me record, I die in the Catholic faith, not doubting in any article of my faith, no nor doubting in any Sacrament of the Church. Many have slandered me, and reported that I have been a bearer, of such as have maintained evil opinions, whiche is untrue, but I confess that like as God by his holy spirit, does instruct us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us, and I have been seduced: but bear me witnes that I die in the Catholic faith of the holy Church. And I heatily desire you to pray for the King's grace, that he may long live with you, may long reigne over you. And once again I desire you to pray for me, that so long as life remains in this flesh, I waver nothing in my faith."

And then made he his prayer, which was long, but not so long, as bothe Godly and learned, and after committed his soul, into the handes of God, and so patiently suffered the stroke of the axe, by a ragged and Boocherly miser, which very ungoodly performed the Office."

(Re: "I die in the Catholic faith", Cromwell is using "Catholic" as in "universal" - the original meaning of the term - , not "Roman-Catholic; he uses the term in the same sense as Luther, Melanchthon and Thomas Cramner did when they spoke of the "Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church" of the New Testament. Cromwell having the bad luck of an inept executioner who "very ungoodly performed the Office" rubs it in that as cynical as it sounds, Anne Boleyn getting that expert sword executioner from Calais actually was a mercy. Mind you, for the swordsman from Calais to arrive in time to execute Anne he must have been sent for before her trial ever started, which tells you something about good old Henry. No swordsman for Thomas Cromwell, though, and no trial, either; at that point Henry didn't even bother anymore.)

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Have you read or seen the Sir Thomas More play by Shakespeare-and-some-other-people? It's charmingly hagiographic (we did a readthrough of it and by the end everyone was shouting "Oh, get on with it!" during his death speech), but that warm wit really comes across as his biggest character trait. He bribes a petty thief to embarrass a supercilious judge and Teach Him A Lesson, swaps clothes with his servant to play a practical joke on Erasmus, and a few other episodes in that line I can't remember.

I don't remember Jeremy Northam's More in The Tudors being very witty/amusing either (intentionally for the character at least - I did really enjoy Northam's sulky look sideways when Henry asked him how many heretics he'd ordered killed)/

Sir Thomas More: No, I've neither read nor seen it. I did see A Man for all Seasons, of course, on the hagiographic side; on the critical side, Margaret George's novel about Henry VIII. has a go at him not for the killed heretics (since the novel is in Henry's pov, that would have been tricky to pull off, considering Henry was still going after heretics after both Thomas', More and Cromwell, were dead), but for the hairshirt and the self flaggelation, which reliably seem to freak modern readers out and which George's Henry is appalled by as well.

re: Jeremy Northam's More - I think for a mixture of both generally sympathetic but also fiercely intolerant re: heresy, but yes, not particularly (intentionally) witty. Then again, neither are the other characters. Now Robert Bolt's script completely edited out the intolerance and the going after heretics, but he had the celebrated playwright advantage with the dialogue, not just for More himself but also the other characters. I mean:

King Henry VIII: Thomas. I chose the right man for chancellor!
Sir Thomas More: I should in fairness add that my taste in music is reputedly deplorable.
King Henry VIII: Your taste in music is excellent. It exactly coincides with my own!

Perhaps More saved up all his jokes for one final blow-out...

Cromwell's execution was the one stand-out scene in the Ray Winstone TV series a few years ago - and even then they spoiled it by having two courtiers sharing malicious gossip beforehand about the untrained axeman. That was completely unnecessary, because you could tell exactly what was going on from Danny Webb's face when he was confronted with the miserable-looking boy who had been told to kill him, and the way he tried to coach him in the job.

Ian McKellen is very fond of a speech from Sir Thomas More, apparently appealing to the better nature of a crowd of Pegida supporters - have you heard it? He's recited it at the end of various public appearances, one of which is on Youtube here.

re: Cromwell's execution, The Tudors were even more obvious, they had the courtiers conspiring the night before and getting the executioner drunk deliberately so Cromwell would suffer, and it worked. Guys, rl was cruel enough!

re: More saving his jokes, not according to Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote to our local boy Ulrich von Hutten in 1519 about TM: From boyhood he was always so pleased with a joke, that it might seem that jesting was the main object of his life; but with all that, he did not go so far as buffoonery, nor had ever any inclination to bitterness. When quite a youth, he wrote farces and acted them. If a thing was facetiously said, even though it was aimed at himself, he was charmed with it, so much did he enjoy any witticism that had a flavour of subtlety or genius. This led to his amusing himself as a young man with epigrams, and taking great delight in Lucian. Indeed, it was he that suggested my writing the Moriae, or Praise of Folly, which was much the same thing as setting a camel to dance.

Indeed, the wit and humour of More are a long tradition. I suspect what we're getting now is a backlash against the more hagiographic version of More familiar from Bolt's play and the classroom. And it's not a time when religious fanaticism goes down well.

No kidding, though if one looks for a non-fictional hero who practiced religious tolerance in that day and age, one has to wait at least two more generations and for Henri "Paris is worth a mass" Quatre to show up, surely? (Elizabeth I. wasn't a fanatic herself, but she did licence persecution in the later part of her reign. Isn't there a famous Cecil quote to the effect that "state could never be in safety where there was a toleration of two religions"?) Because on either side of the religious divide, you get fervour and a demonization of the respective other side, and, when the people in question get into a position of power, sooner or later persecution. If Mary Tudor had never reigned, she might be hailed as some sort of heroine for freedom of conscience today due to some spirited things she said in brother Edward's reign re: her own freedom to worship the way she wanted. As it is...

We have a big Martin Luther anniversary coming up next year and the essays already written all have to grapple with the fact hat the hero of the Reformation and founder of the dominant Protestant faith in Germany was also a vicious antisemite who wrote extensively on the subject. Btw, to connect him to the original subject, he absolutely loved duking it out via pamphlets with Thomas More, especially since he didn't accept Henry VIII. had written the original "Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum" because he thought "Junker Heinz" wasn't intellectually capable, it had had to ghost written by Sir Thomas.

It's not really a Pegida crowd, more UKIP - they're London tradespeople whose main beef is immigrants undercutting them. They're more bothered about economics than religion.

But I think McKellen is using it as something else.

Not to mention the Murderous Thieving Hordes of the Peasants... Oddly enough, or maybe not in present circumstances, Luther's anti-semitism came up in a Radio Four programme on free speech I heard on Monday.

We got to the death of More tonight, and to my surprise I found that they had sold me the Cromwell-More relationship after all, as an unrequited intellectual love story*.

They're still not selling me Anne, though, apart from that scene where she dared Cromwell to parade with her in front of More. There, you could see how she might capture someone's interest, but most of the time she just seems so stupidly obtuse.

* Still no jokes, though.

Edited 2015-02-12 01:21 (UTC)

I watched the video and I still think he's more talking about working-class UKIP-style anti-immigrant sentiment (sorry if I've misunderstood what you meant!). He introduces the speech by describing the riot as being about "the usual complaints about strangers - they eat our food, don't speak our language, take our jobs, take our houses, better send them back where they came from." He cuts the religious part of the speech ("What do you, then, rising gainst him that God himself installs, but rise against God? What do you to your souls in doing this?") and leaves in the economic images: pictures the foreigners with "poor luggage" worried about "costs for transportations", the Londoners wanting to "kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses", and "not at all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them".

I mean I think anti-immigrant feeling is nearly always a fun cocktail of racism, religious prejudice and economic anxiety, but there's not an explicitly religious element in the speech as he performs it.

Oh good lord yes, Luther and the Peasant's revolt. But it's the antisemitism that's especially hard to cope with because of subsequent German history. Incidentally, Luther is another one whose sense of humor did exist ("where there is faith, there is also laughter", quoth he, and associated the devil with depression - and writer's block, apparantly, since he famously threw an ink pot at him). I think people are just conditioned by pop culture to accept religious fanatics in only two flavours: either deadly serious throughout or, if they do smile, moustache twirling and making unfunny sadistic jokes, while somewhere a tortured victim cringes. That you could have a sense of humor including at your own expense and still be all "my way or the high way" and revile your opponents just goes against everything tv and many a book teaches.

Haven't seen the latest episode yet, but I dimly remember from the book Cromwell is frustrated when he realises More genuinely does not remember their first encounter at all, while it was unforgettable to young C. (This is something Hilary Mantel does more than once. In A Place of Greater Safety, school boy Robespierre is selected to make the big learned welcoming speech when the King and Queen visit his school, and a bored Marie Antoinette leaves early on, with teenage Maximilien resolutely continuing with the wretched speech. And remembering for the rest of his life, but guess who doesn't?) I'm not surprised they didn't include More's jokes en route to the scaffold and to the executioner, though, because Mantel doesn't, either, that much I do recall.

re: Anne: I had seen Claire Foy previously playing a thinly disguised Unity Mitford in the "Upstairs, Downstairs" sequel, and so far the performance is rather similar, which, well, not a parallel I can see.

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