The Wolf Hall Weekend will feature an amazing lineup of speakers and panel members including Dr Owen Emmerson. We were privileged to speak to Owen last week and explore the topic he will  focus on at the weekend in June 2024 at Cadhay House.

Here is a recording of that interview, where Owen reveals his personal and professional interest in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy. The Holbein portrait of Thomas Cromwell features as a special vignette in her novel and Owen and his colleagues at Hever Castle have proved the provenance of Cromwell’s Book of Hours as seen in his portrait. (The painting resides poignantly side by side with Hobein’s painting of Thomas More in the Frick Collection in New York.) 

Here’s more information about how you can book to participate in our Wolf Hall Weekend.

To hear more from Dr Owen Emmerson in conversation with Melanie V. Taylor about Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell and the Book of Hours, listen HERE https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/holbeins-hidden-gem/id1308062825?i=1000627721000

Transcript of interview with Dr Owen Emmerson. December 2023

David Holland: Welcome everyone. This is the first in a series of short podcasts that we’re recording as a promotional effort to bring awareness of a wonderful weekend that will be taking place in 2024 on Sat June 22nd and Sun June 23rd called The Wolf Hall Weekend, which is a tribute to the trilogy written by Dame Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall,  Bring up the Bodies, and the Mirror and the Light, and I am thrilled to say that the support that we’ve been receiving from distinguished and prestigious experts and guests to speak at the weekend has been overwhelming, and it’s going to be a fabulous event and one of the people who’s very generously offered their time and energy to this is Dr. Owen Emmerson. Welcome Owen.

Owen Emmerson: Thank you it’s a pleasure to be here.

David Holland:  We’re thrilled that you’re going to be at the weekend, but even more thrilled because of your amazing discovery along with some of your colleagues at Hever castle of the provenance of the Book of Hours that has been sitting for centuries in a portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein, and congratulations to you and the people that you work with there in to prove in a way that’s been accepted by all your academic colleagues worldwide, that the book that is actually sitting in Cambridge University Library is in fact Thomas Cromwell’s edition of the book of Hours which has been a mystery indeed. We’re thrilled that you’ll be coming along and talking in much more depth about that. I thought that today one of the things that would be useful  is for people to know a little bit about you and about your work. Please tell us a bit more about what you do.

Owen Emmerson: Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, I am a social and cultural historian and my field of specialism is actually in the history of emotions. I’m absolutely fascinated by what motivated people and how we can trace people’s agency from sources and really sort of investigate how important and central emotion was in the political sphere. Shall we say of the Tudor Court for example.  I have a feeling it was very central indeed, particularly when you have a rather irascible monarch dictating what is happening with his subjects.

I’m focused on the Tudor Court in my research and I have studied Anne Boleyn extensively, but I will say, I have some firm favourites outside of the Boleyn faction, and one of those would definitely be Thomas Cromwell. So it’s going to be an absolute joy to be discussing Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy at your wonderful event.

David Holland: And I understand that you’re filming your own series at the moment. Tell us just a little bit more about that.

Owen Emmerson: I’m part of a patron group and I’ve done quite a few documentaries in the past with people like the BBC and Netflix but yes, I’m currently working with Dr. Nicola Tallis and Kate McCaffrey. We have our own patrons. We’re going to lots of wonderful historic properties and bringing them to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to see them and having a lot of fun with that.

David Holland: One of the things I wanted to ask you today is can you remember the impact that reading Hillary’s Trilogy had on you the first time around?

Owen Emmerson: Yes I can and funnily my grandfather lived very close to where Hillary lived in Devon and she was fairly good friends with my grandad’s neighbour and I was very privileged to meet her before Wolf Hall came out and my grandad said to me that I  should talk to her because she’s writing about Thomas Cromwell and  he had a very very interesting cat. If only I had known at that time. how remarkable both Wolf Hall and the other two books would be, but yes, I very distinctly remember the first time that I read Wolf Hall and really being amazed that a story that I knew so very well could feel so different to every other time that I had explored it. 

And I’d always been fascinated by Cromwell particularly in popular culture. but I felt like I was being introduced to a man that had been with me for many years, but whom I’d never known and it was just thrilling. I have to say I read it very shortly thereafter. and in tandem with the audiobook, because I felt it’s such an immersive experience listening to the words as well as reading them, and I have to say that has become a favoured method for me in both reading Hillary’s work and others now. So yes, I remember it distinctly and I have many happy memories with those books.

David Holland: Fantastic, I agree. I often recommend the audio version which is narrated by Ben Miles who’s going to be at our weekend next year of course and we’re  over the moon about him reading Hilary’s work from his experience of this on the stage, as well as also co authoring the stage production of the Mirror and the Light. But for those people who find it difficult to concentrate later at night, certainly the audiobook version is an entry point.

David Holland:  Owen, as a professional historian then how important do you think works such as Hillary’s are to our understanding of history from your professional perspective?

Owen Emmerson: I think they’re really important and not just because I’ve worked at a heritage site and understand how important they have been in gendering a love of that period that perhaps people hadn’t experienced before. That in and of itself is incredibly important and the amount of conversations that I’ve had with people who visited Eva purely because they had read or seen the TV production of the Wolf Hall series.

From a professional point of view they are important because I look at emotion. I want to try to get under the skin of these individuals and see what certain things meant to them, what annoyed them, and why they did things in the way they did. And Hillary actually opened up a sort of a new frontier or held up a new lens for me. And of course, I’m not always going to agree with her conclusions, not least because it’s a very specific lens that we’re presented with through Cromwell’s perspective on things.

David Holland: Yes. uniquely.

Owen Emmerson: Absolutely, but it reinforces for me whose truth matters and I feel forever indebted to her in a way because the experience of reading those books has forced me to consider other people’s opinions, other people’s perspective, and ask why the same event can look so different through different eyes and their nuance. That central question of what really happened because actually from many people’s different perspectives a great number of differences can have occurred in recounting stories and there’s a reason for that, and so I’ve been transformed by Hilary’s approach I think

David Holland: That’s wonderful. I’ve just made a mental note that we’re definitely going to get you to present Hilary’s view of the Boleyns and what do you think Anne would have said about the view that she took of her. How did you become fascinated with Thomas Cromwell and the Holbein painting in particular?

Owen Emmerson: Initially my fascination with Cromwell began through popular culture and I’m thinking of Paul Schofield (as Thomas More), and Leo McKern as Cromwell (in a Man For All Seasons movie) and Donald Pleasance (in movie Henry VIII) as Cromwell, these were amazing actors who all brought to the table very different Cromwell’s actually and then of course, I became very much interested in portraiture –  that’s always been a huge passion of mine. And of course reading biographies and  reading works on Anne Boleyn we are encouraged to read characters into portraits in a way that I don’t think the Tudors intended us to. I have read accounts that Holbein portrays Cromwell’s body to show him to be an unreliable person or an untrustworthy individual, and I find those conclusions really quite problematic for a number of reasons. 

I don’t think we can read characters from the looks they are born with and of course portraiture  conveys so much, but Holbein tended to do that perhaps with posture or indeed with those all important clothes and objects that he littered his subjects with. I was always very  passionate about reading messages through the placement of objects and it became very central to my life for a good couple of years. So yes my fascination with Cromwell has always been that so many conclusions about him have been made and through his appearance and I’ve got a bit of a mission on my hands to challenge that.  I similarly work very extensively with Anne Boleyn’s  portraiture and the same issue occurs there. I’m really enjoying working on that subject at the moment and hopefully challenging it.

David Holland: You write yourself. What are you writing and has Hillary’s Trilogy inspired you in any way?

Owen Emmerson: Yes. There’s an intensive and long-term project that I’m embarking on. I’m going to be analysing the Tudor Court through the lens of emotion purely looking at what role emotion played in the political, social, and spiritual landscape of the Tudor Court, and that won’t be out anytime soon. But that book that hopefully will be out quicker is a full history of Hever Castle from it’s building date through to the present day, which is something I’ve been threatening to write for many years now and thoroughly enjoying.

David Holland: Let’s just say a little bit about what you’re going to be focusing on at the event in June next year on,  your journey of discovering the provenance of Thomas Cromwell’s book of hours in the Hobein portrait.

Owen Emmerson: I’m going to be talking about the journey.I went on with the wonderful Castle historian and assistant curator at Hever: that’s Kate McCaffrey. We embarked on sort of a year-long project really trying to prove that in the Cromwell painting by Holbein was the very same book that is held in the Wren Library and we were very engaged in that project and there was sort of a lot at stake. I think we’ve pretty much proven them for it to be one in the same thing. 

So I’m really excited to share sort of the inside story of what that was like and how it felt  to get that approval and also to be able to place that book into the hands of some amazing people who have written about it and people like Professor Susan Lipscomb and Dr.Tracy Boreman and the director of the BBC Wolf Hall series, Peter Kosminsky, who was wonderful enough to come to the launch of the book. So it was a sort of bittersweet end to our adventure because we would have loved to have had Hillary there. But It was lovely to meet people who admired Hillary as much as myself, perhaps even more so being able to experience it in her place.

David Holland: Hillary is famous in the trilogy for writing exceptionally long chapters, but one chapter the only lasts three pages, and it’s her description of the Holbein portrait with the Book of Hours in it, which she didn’t know sadly was the book a Book of Hours, so that’s definitely a topic that will explore – different views on what that book actually was before it became public knowledge that it was in fact the Book of Hours. Congratulations on all your work Owen, and best wishes with your writing. We very much look forward to having you with us in Devon next year. 

About the Wolf Hall weekend. www.wolfhallweekend.com

With an amazing lineup of speakers and panel members, our focus will be very much on not just the history of the Tudor period and Hillary’s take on that, but we’ll also be examining her literary skills, and some of the nuances and innovative things that she brought to novel writing during her lifetime. So it will be a great celebration. Thanks so much Owen for your time today, and we look forward to seeing you there and looking forward to hopefully seeing many of the listeners to this podcast as well. Thanks, everyone. 

David Holland – HarperCollins Publishers (Retired). Founder of Wolf Hall Weekend.