Quote of the Day (Simon Schama, on ‘Supremely Accomplished Art’)

“A great deal of supremely accomplished art has been created by artists who have preferred self-effacement to heroic self-dramatization, and who have wanted more modest goals for their work: the imitation of nature, the representation of beauty, or both at the same time.”— English historian Simon Schama, The Power of Art (2006)

(Photograph of Simon Schama at Strand Book Store, New York City. taken August 15, 2006, by David Shankbone)

Quote of the Day (Simon Schama, on the Real Cromwell of ‘Wolf Hall’)

“[W]hen I was doing research for A History of Britain, the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture. He also unleashed small-minded bureaucratic ‘visitors’ to humiliate, evict and dispossess thousands of monks and nuns, not all of whom had their hands up each other’s robes or were passing off pig bones as holy relics. On at least one occasion he had the fake relic and the custodial friar burnt side by side. Witty, that. The fact that Thomas More (who could use some help right now) was likewise not averse to burning people as well as books, if they strayed from sound doctrine, does not mean that Cromwell, in comparison, was a paragon of refreshing straightforwardness. Sure, he was a good family man. So was More. So was Himmler.”— Simon Schama, “What Historians Think of Historical Novels,” The Financial Times, February 13, 2015

Perhaps no greater contrast can be drawn between Sir Thomas More and the man who pursued him to his death, Thomas Cromwell, than in the manner of their falls from power and executions. More, disagreeing with King Henry VIII’s decision to divorce Queen Catherine of Aragon and wed Anne Boleyn, resigned as Lord Chancellor and retreated into silence. His successor, Cromwell (in the accompanying image, the famous painting by Hans Holbein), unsuccessful in making More bend to the new state of affairs in England, pushed to have him indicted, tried and convicted for treason. On the scaffold, More told the crowd assembled that he was “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Cromwell’s end on this date in 1540 did not come with anything like this kind of dignity. Unlike More, he sought to give his aging, sybaritic monarch exactly what he wanted: a toothsome new bride. Was it his fault that Anne of Cleves turned out to be what Henry angrily called his “Flanders mare”? Someone had to pay, and it was going to be the key's chief matchmaker, diplomat and henchman.

And, unlike More, Cromwell begged for pity (“Most gracyous prynce I crye for mercye mercye mercye!” he pleaded in his last letter to the king), all to no avail. A bill of attainder—an act passed by Parliament against a person for a crime, or supposed crime, usually treason, speeding a defendant to punishment without the right to a trial—was used against him. Cromwell was almost certainly innocent, but that mattered as little to Cromwell’s enemies as More’s innocence had mattered to him. Ruthless is as ruthless does.

Oh, and one other detail, rather surprising in its way: this enormously shrewd political operative, who did more perhaps to uproot Roman Catholicism from his country in his century than any other individual, appears to have been reconciled to the Church at his death.

For years, a historical consensus against Cromwell and for More gradually took shape, until it was given harder form in the popular imagination with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. All well and good, except that ours is an age that eventually finds flaws in its heroes, and soon enough it was discovered that More had had heretics put to death.

That attitude and policy will not be affirmed or excused here. (Indeed, it is impossible to explain it away when More included the fact that he was “troublesome” to thieves, murderers and heretics on his tombstone.)

But it takes an iconoclast not merely daring but downright foolhardy to revive the reputation of Cromwell while casting More’s in shadow. For all the consummate literary skill of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, she has only provoked arguments from what might be termed “counter-revisionists” such as Schama that are lethal as much for being based on common sense as on historical evidence.

I commented previously on Mantel’s Cromwell novels (with the third book in the trilogy, we are told, to arrive soon) in posts about More’s birth and Anne of Cleves. But now, with Cromwell a minister of all media, if you, will, with adaptations of the first two Mantel novels for Broadway and public television’s Masterpiece, it becomes more important that her views be challenged.

The most obvious error in Mantel’s manipulative recasting of history is this: Just because More hardly qualifies as a perfect man does not make Cromwell a remotely good one. In successfully highlighting the fact that it’s hard to make More a hero of conscience when he punished others for upholding theirs, Mantel forgets to apply the same yardstick to Cromwell. He had as much blood on his hands—and probably more—than More when it came to putting to death those of a different faith.

Even more devastating to Mantel’s case is the naked self-interest exhibited by Cromwell in pursuing Catholics. More was scrupulous about not taking advantage of his legal and political positions for personal gain.  Mantel makes much of Cromwell’s harrowing childhood and rise as a self-made man, but Richard Nixon came from the same background. What the two shared was an instinct for corruption.

Cromwell’s opportunity came in what has become called “The Dissolution of the Monasteries”—or, more graphically (and truthfully) by historian Eamon Duffy, “The Stripping of the Altars.” More than 800 houses of worship in England and Wales were shut down in only four years. Years later, Shakespeare spoke of these "bare ruin'd choirs." The creative carnage involved--mutilated or destroyed statues, frescoes, mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, and shrines--amounted to "a frenzy, obliterating the artistic patrimony of centuries of indigenous craftsmanship with an intensity of hatred for imagery and depicting the divine that has strong and resonant parallels today," according to a

Dominic Selwood article for Britain's Telegraph, which likened the Lord Chancellor's actions to the deprivations now perpetrated by ISIS.

Cromwell facilitated this enormous transfer of land wealth to Henry—a course of action that made him, as one of the king’s favorites, in a prime position to receive corollary wealth.

Not long before his death, the up-from-the-streets Cromwell received a title he had long craved: Earl of Essex. But the grasping architect of state terror didn’t have long to enjoy becoming a noble before his own fall.

Was Cromwell a true believer in the Reformation? Assessing this is far more ambiguous than Mantel would have you think. His motives may have derived less from religious skepticism than from an acquisitive instinct.

Guiding readers through a serpentine political intelligence, Mantel proves a far more subtle and seductive commentator on history than Oliver Stone, but she remains all the more spurious for all that.

Quote of the Day (Simon Schama, on History)

“History is more than a kind of stroll down memory lane in a nice frock.” —Simon Schama quoted in Elizabeth Jensen, “The Historical Becomes Personal,” The New York Times, March 23, 2014

Simon Schama—who, I’m happy to say, now graces the faculty of my alma mater, Columbia University—was born on this date 70 years ago in Marylebone, in the United Kingdom. The above quote indicates both his belief in history’s continuing relevance to the presence, and the asperity that spices up his print and visual observations on the subject.

Schama achieved his greatest prominence with the release, on the bicentennial of the French Revolution, of his bestselling narrative of that transformative event in world history, Citizens. He has since appeared on TV, especially in A History of Britain and The Power of Art.

But perhaps his quirkiest book—and the one that caused the most consternation in his profession—was probably Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1992). This consisted, essentially, of two novellas, each centered on memento mori involving Harvard’s Parkman family: Benjamin West’s famous painting The Death of General Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec (given stunning literary force by historian Francis Parkman) and the sensational 1849 murder of his uncle George Parkman.

Using these events as springboards, Schama sought to demonstrate how historians reconstructed—frequently to the point of speculation—events that happened years ago. Members of his profession, he wrote, were “left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness, however thorough or revealing their documentation. Of course they make do with other work: the business of formulating problems, of supplying explanations about cause and effect. But the certainty of such answers always remains contingent on their unavoidable remoteness from their subjects. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot."

This did not go down well with fellow historians, as he recalled two years ago in this article for Britain’s The Independent newspaper. But he--and they--have managed to move on pretty nicely after all the fuss and feathers.

(Photograph of Simon Schama at Strand Book Store, New York City. taken August 15, 2006, by David Shankbone)

Quote of the Day (Simon Schama, on ‘2 Special Things About the Jews’)

“I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we’d endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell. And somehow that these two things were connected, that we told our story to survive. We are our story.” ―Historian Simon Schama quoted in Elizabeth Jensen, “The Historical Becomes Personal,” The New York Times, March 23, 2014

(Photograph of Simon Schama at Strand Book Store, New York City. taken August 15, 2006, by David Shankbone)

Quote of the Day (Simon Schama, on the ‘Merry Mind’ of JFK)

“[John F.} Kennedy knew better than to hide his wiry Irish mop beneath a titfer. It was the crest, the crown, the brand. Everything about him was calculated to give the impression of an almost casual ease beneath the weight of power: the splashing around on Cape Cod; the kid daughter romping through the Oval Office, the droll wit which came as naturally to him as his habitual satyrism. Of the acute physical pain, the relentless drug treatments, the hospital visits, Addison’s disease, spastic colitis we knew nothing. Horsing around with the brothers and the children on the Massachusetts beach, he was President Fine Fettle, rough-house glamour with the bonus of brains. When we looked around at our own [U.K.] politicians we saw pipes, tweeds, the brandy snifter or the mug of tea. So of course we took his murder personally, angry at being robbed of the merry mind; a big chunk of the future blown away in the Dallas motorcade.”—Simon Schama, “Signed With Honour” (review of The Letters of John F. Kennedy, edited by Martin W. Sandler), Financial Times, November 16, 2013

Quote of the Day (Simon Schama, on Writing as a ‘Fight Against Loss’)

“[W]riting has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing.”—Historian Simon Schama, “Why I Write,” The Financial Times, September 15, 2012

(Photograph of Simon Schama at Strand Book Store, New York City. taken August 15, 2006, by David Shankbone)