From the Wolf Hall Weekend Event – June 2024, Cadhay.
We’re thrilled to share this transcript of the talk given by Aurora Dawson-Hunte at our Wolf Hall Weekend, June 2024 at Cadhay House, East Devon. Aurora has kindly allowed us to reproduce it here and we hope you will find it as inspiring as did the audience at the weekend event.
Almost 10 years ago now, I woke up from a long, long sleep. I was still living at my mum’s, it was a familiar environment to me. And as I woke up, and tried to clear the sleep out my eyes, I sat up on my bed. It was June, a very bright day, and I went to the loo, came back, and sat on my bed again. Through the open door walked a woman dressed all in black, with black slippers on and a pink turban. She looked at me, and the sensation I had was that she was watching me, checking on me, almost like she was asking me whether I was ready to get ready for the funeral. A few years earlier I had lost a member of my family, and it was like reliving the memory of that day and how it began. After a moment of looking at each other – and I have to stress that in this moment I felt nothing strange, if anything I felt almost comforted – she walked out of the room. It was at that moment that a terrible sense of dread came over me, and my whole body went cold, almost like an ice cold bucket was being poured from inside my head and down my body. I jumped off my bed, closed my door, picked up my phone and called my mum. “Have you let anybody into the house?” I asked her. And she replied, sounding panicked, “No.”
So I explained what had just happened.
Without doubting me, without even considering if there was an intruder in the house, she told me to double bolt the door, grab the rosewater she kept on a shelf in the hallway, and rosewater every room in the house. “You’ve seen a ghost,” is what she explained.
I will caveat all of this by saying my foot is always half in and half out the door when believing this stuff, even with my own eyes. I will also say that, years later, a strange and eerie moment of confirmation occurred. I grew up in a Victorian house converted into 3 flats, and we are on the top floor. My mum came home and passed by the ground floor neighbour who asked, “Do you have someone staying with you right now?” My mum was perplexed – she didn’t. “Oh,” the neighbour replied, “It’s just, when I got home there was a woman going through the post. She in black with a pink turban.” To this day, my mum remains pretty miffed that this spirit hasn’t come forward to her. We call her the guardian of the house.
All of this is to say, I was delighted when I got an audition through for one of my favourite novels, The Mirror and the Light. Even better was getting the job because, obviously, I was then able to hear Hilary Mantel speak about her vast wealth of knowledge, and share her imagination and most crucially share her inspiration. I cannot remember exactly when, but at some point in rehearsals she spoke of a moment the ghost of Thomas Cromwell materialised before her eyes. Even her explanation of this was a moment that gave you goosebumps. It gave me goosebumps because of my aforementioned ghostly experience. I loved her explanation because what she said made me realise something. Hilary was someone who was able to reach back into the past, take the vespers of memory and transform them into the present moment. Or guide us down the hallways of history, under the illusion that the ghosts of the past were here living with us in the present. And even more so, was the success of bringing these people from the page to the stage, because that made them living in a visceral, tangible way. All of us on stage were ghosts of sorts, or channeling ghosts. And even more than that, Cromwell’s ghosts, the people who haunt him through memory or appearance in the novels, came into living flesh through the actors that played them. Cromwell’s father in work, the Cardinal, and his father in blood, Walter. These are the two men who accompany him to block, to the moment where he becomes the ghost and goes to join them. I always had a feeling, whenever we were rehearsing, that Cromwell the ghost was somewhere in the corner, watching, observing, taking notes and planning feedback on our various misinterpretations – and I say “us” the players, not Hilary. With her, I imagine he is secretly pleased that someone, finally, was able to slip into the centre of his elusiveness and let us see the dangerous, exciting, sexy and bureaucratic world of the Tudor court through his piercing eyes.
Now, as I work my way through the vast and rich body of Hilary’s work, I find myself coming back to the notion that she took ghosts seriously, as seriously as the historical figures she wrote about, because they were people who believed in ghosts, and in prophecy and witchcraft, and magic, and believed these powers and presences to be real, and alive, and fleshy and important. Even portents of death, as the Cardinal’s ghost is from Cromwell.
I always found, from the moment I started reading Wolf Hall, the treatment of the dead by the living completely fascinating. At times they were alive and real – “Thomas More stands before him, more solid in death than he was in life.” (Chapter 3, Wolf Hall). At times they were memory, and grief – like when Cromwell stands at the bottom of his staircase, bargaining with this late wife to show herself: “Liz, come down. But Liz keeps her silence. She neither stays nor goes. She is always with him, and not with him. He turns away.” (Chapter 2, Wolf Hall). And then there are ghosts who represent more than than the sum of their parts – they begin to transcend who they were, and carry us into figurative space, into a space of understanding more about living, more about the philosophy of who we are, who we want to be, or what we desire that we cannot have. In her essay “Touching Hands with the Lost” (2007), Hilary writes: “When we talk about ghosts, we are speaking in layers of metaphor. We are not usually speaking about wispy bodies in rotting shrouds, but about family secrets, buried impulses, unsolved mysteries, anything that lingers and clings. We are speaking of the sense of loss that sometimes overtakes us, a nostalgia for something that we can’t name.”
What I found really striking, on my first reading of the novels, was the way in which the dead were a reflection of Cromwell. In a way, our most intimate moments with him are when he is with the dead. This is when we get a window into his soul, into his ever-changing self. Again, in “Touching Hands With the Lost” (2007), Hilary writes: “There are some ghosts who would not be welcome, even in thought form, and these ghosts include the past selves, the former selves of people who were alive in those years and who are alive today, but who we have made great efforts to unremember.” And Cromwell’s father Walter is so often cast into this role, in the “nagging” memories, like “that day when his father mashed him into the cobblestones, his sideway view of Walter’s boot.” (Chapter 2, Wolf Hall). In a way, Cromwell’s ghosts and memories never allow him to forget where he came from, and never stop guiding him towards his own death. Cromwell is constantly making sense of himself, and his new positions, of his new power and enemies and dangers, new skills and talents and sense of self, in relation to the ever growing pile of bodies around him, especially of those he loved, or those he betrayed – like when Anne Boleyn passes him in the night in her shroud. It’s almost as if it’s the very memory of the dead who tell him who he is. And it’s in the shadow of the Cardinal’s ghost that Cromwell walks his life in, to the very end. Cromwell learns who he is, how to be great, but also how to tumble and fall, from the Cardinal, well beyond the Cardinal’s life and into his death.
And Hilary writes it, she writes it clear as day in front of us, both what her characters do, but also what she herself is doing. From Wolf Hall, “It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths. We edit their writing. We rewrite their lives.” (Chapter 3, Wolf Hall). I think at the heart of what I found beguiling about the ghosts in the books is the way we chase the dead through memory, and how the dead chase us through life. And actually, it’s something Hilary spoke about a lot. In her lecture “The Day Is For Leaving”:, “St Augustine says, the dead are invisible, they are not absent. You needn’t believe in ghosts to see that’s true. We carry the genes and culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think about ourselves, and how we make sense of our time and place.”
We get 3 gorgeous, long novels to witness the evolution of Thomas Cromwell, before evolution was even a thing! The reflection of his evolution is so much in shadow, in how his memory reflects on the present, in his introspection. And the ghosts are always part of his introspection. About writing the first novel, Hilary said, “Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian’s chronology but the way memory works, in leaps, loops, flashes. (“How I Came to Write Wolf Hall”, 2012). Cromwell constantly meets himself this way. In Bring Up the Bodies, “…he comes into his hall to find versions of himself in various stages of becoming, a tentative outline partly inked in.” (I Falcons, BUTB). For me, the conversations with the dead always told us so much more about the iteration of the Cromwell we were seeing than anything else could. There’s a moment in Wolf Hall where Cromwell stands in the ascent and asks, “‘What do you know, Walter?’ He stands in the salty air talking to his dead father.” (Chapter 2, WH).
Before I begin to speak on the play I was in, I’d just like to say that Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles were a creative match made in heaven, and they did such a fantastic job adapting The Mirror and the Light for stage. So a huge round of applause, and much praise, to them. One of my favourite, favourite things about the play, as a reader before even being in it, was the living embodiment of Cromwell’s ghosts. There was so much wit and light and spark to the Cardinal, a knowingness and unknowingness to his own mortality – or lack thereof. When he first comes on stage, hurrying across, he blesses Cromwell with, “Dominus vibiscum. Just passing, can’t linger.” But he also comes with a warning, that he couldn’t help himself, how everyone but Cromwell turned on him, which foreshadows Cromwell’s own downfall – because who will stand by Cromwell, when he himself is on the block? I liked that the ghosts brought death onto stage. We all walked into that theatre knowing that we had an invitation to a beheading, and I wanted to believe it wouldn’t happen at the end. And there had to be a certain quality to the ghosts that entertained us, comforted us but also chilled us – it was like the death breeze had to be there, but not to present we could smell the rotting. Just a whiff of something uncanny. It’s to remember that we are following in a long tradition of ghosts on stage, stretching back to Hamlet seeing his father, to Juliet seeing her cousin, and back and back and back. The ghost is always a reflection of the viewer’s conscience, of their mindset in that moment, to the secret fears and worries they can’t even tell themselves.
When Wolsey comes back, again it’s never overstated but the urgency of the danger Cromwell is in heightens. The conversation is about the ring the Cardinal gave Cromwell, a ring that process the favour of princes, a ring that makes princesses fall in love with you – it hints just enough at the danger Cromwell is as he finds himself in just too much proximity to power, just too close to Henry’s daughter Mary, just some of the reasons that people will snatch up to turn on Cromwell and bring him down. And though we never see Henry converse with Wolsey because we are living the play through Cromwell’s eyes, when Henry is wracked with guilt about Wolsey, it’s so much easier to imagine the night talks the king might be having with Wolsey, because we have the living embodiment of him on stage with us. And one point he even dances, what a treat! But the closer Cromwell comes to death, the less he sees the Cardinal. There are moments towards the latter end of the play that Cromwell cannot see the Cardinal’s shadow because he doesn’t have enough distance from the plane of death the Cardinal is in.
One of my favourite scenes is a last confession of sorts between Cromwell and his mentor. Cromwell unburdens himself – the fact that Dorothea the Cardinal’s daughter thinks he betrayed Wolsey, the human inability to follow the law of God. Cromwell’s reckoning with his conscience, on the verge of death and, in coming to terms with his end, Cromwell asks the Cardinal where he is: “I can’t put a name to it. No place you’d understand.” Cromwell: “Are you in purgatory?” Wolsey: “That would be embarrassing wouldn’t it, now that you and Cramner have abolished it?” He sees Anne, he sees Moore. And his parting words: “I feel I never was. I feel I dreamt me.” This is some of the magic of the ghosts in Cromwell’s world: to know him the better; of the historical figures of the novels: to bring back the dead, and make us know them anew.
Hilary gives us the opportunity, through her writing, to unbox the dead of the long past. The same way we might look at old photos, hold an urn of ashes or scatter them in the ocean where we have fond memories, or pick up a treasured item of clothing and smell the traces of someone once loved. And always, always through Cromwell’s eyes, a mise-en-abyme where we get to know him better by edging closer to his grief. In BUTB: “Grace was so beautiful, her features so fine. They blur in his mind these days. This is what death does to you, it takes and it takes, so that all that is left in your memories is a faint racing of spilled ash. … But he cannot escape the feeling that Grace has slipped further from him. She was dead before she could be painted and drawn. She lived and left no trace. Her clothes and her cloth ball and her wooden baby in a smock are so long ago passed to other children. But his elder daughter Anne, he has her copy book. Sometimes he takes it out and looks at it.” Hilary did this for us. She made a copybook where we can go back and remember this man called Thomas Cromwell and, through him, all the people he ever knew and loved, like the Cardinal. But also the people he hated, or maybe loved, or had a complicated relationship to. The main defining one being his father, Walter.
I’ll admit that I’m completely obsessed with the first scene in the play and if I could justify sitting here and read you the whole thing, trust me – I would. But I can’t. To me, Walter represents so many things. He brings with him a constant element of danger. The danger of violence that always existed between father and son, but also the danger of violence that exists within Cromwell. Cromwell’s shady past, stabbing a boy, working as a mercenary – a reminder that he turned his will to survive from physical prowess to strategic prowess. In their first scene on stage, they revisit that defining memory in Cromwell’s life, of being kicked by his father’s boot on the cobblestones and the best advice: ‘So get up.’ Which is of course how Wolf Hall begins. It gave me such a sense of the danger Cromwell ran from, and the danger he was running towards. And when Walter comes back, it’s then Cromwell takes out his knife. It’s though Walter is a projection of the fact that his father’s brutality is something Cromwell seeks to distance himself from, but simultaneously needs to survive the cutthroat world of the British aristocracy. And in the end, theatrically, it was Walter who played the Headsman, a final “live by the sword, die by the sword” goodbye. And Walter’s final words: “Now get up.” There was such a poetic cycle to the structure of the play and, to be fair, to the trilogy as a whole. At the end of the novel, in Cromwell’s final moments, he relives that moment in the gutter under his father’s boot: “He lies broken on the cobbles of the yard of the house where he was born.” (Light, BUTB). And we’re with him through the infinitesimal moments of the beheading until he vanishes and enters the realm, the light, where he too becomes a spirit. So that, in Hilary’s words, “He seemed to be occupying the same physical space as me, with a slight ghostly overlap.” (“How I Came to Write Wolf Hall”, 2012).
There is a longer extract from “Touching Hands with the Lost” (2007) that I’d like to read for you now:
“There is a way in which the question ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ is unnecessary to ask: we all know a few, and they walk at all hours, if only through our memories. Our ancestors are encoded in our genes. Look at your face in the mirror, and one day you will see one of your parents, moving under your own skin; the next day it may be a grandparent who has come to visit. Within you, there are people you have never been able to mourn because you never knew them, people from the distant past; the traces of your animal ancestors still live in your instincts, in your physiology. As products of evolution, we carry all the past inside us; we are walking repositories of the lost. I have written a memoir called Giving Up the Ghost, which is about my own childhood, but also about my ancestors and children who were never born, and about the ghosts we all have in our lives: the ghosts of possibility, the paths we didn’t take, and the choices we didn’t make, and expectations, which seemed perfectly valid at the time, but which somehow or other weren’t fulfilled. I describe ghosts like this: ‘They are the rags and tags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don’t know what to do with, knowledge that you can’t process; they’re cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page.’ As a historical novelist, I’m a great user of card indexes. I like to write about people who really lived, and try to wake them up from their long trance, and make them walk on the page. When you stand on the verge of a new narrative, when you have picked your character, you stretch out your hand in the dark and you don’t know who or what will take it. You become profoundly involved in this effort to clothe old bones. The work of mourning is real work, like shovelling corpses, like sifting ashes for diamonds. When someone dies, we exist for years on a thin line, a wire, stretched tight between remembering and forgetting. When something touches that wire and makes it vibrate, that’s a ghost. It’s a disturbance in our consciousness, in that deep place where we carry the dead, like the unborn, sealed up inside us. You need not believe in life after death to believe in ghosts. The dead exist only because the living let them. They are what we make them’ … When I began to write, it was my first ambition to write a good historical novel and my second to write a good ghost story, and I didn’t then see that these ambitions were allied. Technically, it’s possible that the ghost story is the more difficult. If the author leaves events unexplained, the reader feels cheated. But if you explain too much, you explain away. A ghost story always exists on the brink between sense and nonsense, between order and chaos, between the rules of existence we know and the ones we don’t know yet. When I was a child, I lived in a haunted house. I was brought up in a family that not only lived among ghosts but also manufactured its own. … For some years I lived in Africa, in Botswana, and people there used to say that to see ghosts you need to look out of the corners of your eyes. If you turn on them a direct gaze, then, like Eurydice, they vanish. … Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written, is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist’s head. Art brings back the dead, but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. … It is almost the definition of being human to want what is impossible. We want the child of twenty-two weeks’ gestation to live and thrive. We want to live for ever, without infirmity and without the evidence of the destructive march of the years. We want to play games with time. We want to undo death; we love the idea of the soul, but we are incurably addicted to the body, and we want the dead back, or at least we want a ghost to walk. But perhaps a ghost is not something dead, but something not yet born: not something hidden, but something that we hope is about to be seen. We want to go to the underworld, back into the darkness of our own nature, to bring back some object of impossible beauty: we know it probably won’t work, but what matters is that we keep trying. The consolation lies in the attempt itself, the mercy that’s granted to the hand that dares to stretch out into the dark: well, we say, I am only human, I’ve gone to the brink, I have done all that I can.”
Extract reproduced with permission from A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel. Editor, Nicholas Pearson. Published by John Murray 2023.
Hilary let us “meet the dead alive” in The Mirror and the Light.