Tags
Anne Boleyn, BBC Radio 4, Bookclub, Bring Up the Bodies, Henry VIII, Hilary Mantel, Man Booker Prize, Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall
Just listened to Bookclub on Radio 4, with Hilary Mantel talking about ‘Bring Up The Bodies’ and looking forward to the third volume in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Well worth tuning in if you liked ‘Wolf Hall’ or ‘Bodies’: certainly an appetiser for Vol 3. As she described it, ‘Wolf Hall’ led up to Thomas More’s demise, ‘Bodies’ to Anne Boleyn’s, and Vol 3 will take us to her hero’s own, with the focus on his relationship with Henry VIII. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c2mys is the link to the Radio 4 page; the programme will be repeated on Thursday at 3-30 pm and will soon be available on I-Player.
Advertisements
Many thanks for flagging this up, Ed; I didn’t know it was on. I listened on iPlayer, and was struck by how beautifully HM expresses her thoughts, and how impressive those thoughts are. Her description of Anne Boleyn thinking that she was ‘selling’ her mind and wise counsel, when in the truth of the times she was selling her body and its ability to procreate, crystallised the tragedy of it perfectly.
If I understood HM (and the book) correctly, Thomas Cromwell knew that Anne Boleyn and her alleged lovers were innocent of the actual adulteries they were charged with, and so they were indeed judicially murdered. TC rationalises this to himself with notions of their ‘guilt’ in other areas. And the reader has already been primed to think ill of the men concerned, so we don’t mind this too much – or at all.
Yes, that’s what I gathered from the book, and from HM. From the book, it also seemed clear that TC was determined to avenge the humiliation of Wolsey by those specific men. We’re lead to feel a kind of awful admiration for TC’s loyalty to the man he saw as a father. No wonder Henry ended up being scared of him.