Dan Snow's History Hit - Remembering Hilary Mantel

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Dame Hilary Mantel died on 22 September 2022 at the age of 70. Her acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy - which brought the life of Thomas Cromwell so vividly to life - has sold more than five million copies worldwide. She won the Booker Prize twice - for Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and History Hit's Dan Snow pay tribute to one of the greatest English-language novelists of our century.The Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.Complete the survey and you'll be entered into a prize draw to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books- including a signed copy of Dan Snow's 'On This Day in History'.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Sad news for all of us in the history community. Dame Hilary Mantel has died aged 70. She was most famous for winning the Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 for the first two of her Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. The Mirror and the Light was long listed remarkably for the booker as well. I think they're three of the best books that I have ever read. In an author's note she wrote in one of her three Cromwell trilogies, she says that Professor Susanna Lipscomb was an inspiration to her. Her books on Henry VIII were really important to Hilary Mantel's understanding of the period. Incredibly

high praise. Someone, of course, on History Hit we know and love very well, Professor Susanna Lipscomb has been on this podcast many times. She's a great friend and colleague of mine. And of course, Susanna also has the Not Just the Tudors podcast here on the History Hit Network. So it felt like the right time to catch up with Susanna Lipscomb to ask her all about Hilary Mantel and the loss that everybody in the history community is feeling, and ask Susanna just how good was the history in those books. The answer, as you'll hear, was very good. So from everyone here at History Hit, we want to extend our huge sympathies to Hilary Mantel's

family and friends, and tell them what they already know just how loved she was and how admired in this community here's my chat with Susanna enjoy We have recently learnt that Dame Hilary Mantel died on the 22nd of September. Dame Hilary was a masterful writer of historical fiction. You'll know her Wolf Hall trilogy. You might well also know her amazing book set against the French Revolution. In fact, the revolutionaries are the protagonists, a place of greatest safety. Maybe you've read some of her modern novels, her memoir, her collections of short stories, her journalism in places like the LRB. But it is with the story of Thomas Cromwell, set against Henry VIII's court in the 1530s, that she is most familiar to us.

And she brought that period, a period I love so much, to thrilling, pulsating, fizzing life. She did for that period in historical fiction what I, Claudius, did for the ancients, what Tolstoy did for the War of 1812. And it is absolutely tragic that we have lost such a fine writer and thinker and person. To commemorate the impact that she has made on us, on historical fiction and on history, Dan Snow and I met to talk about the work of Hilary Mantel. Hi Susie, sad news. Every time I think of Hilary Mantel, I think of the tribute that she

paid you. You are too modest to admit this, but I mean, that was unbelievable. In the last of her gigantic 16th century trilogies about the life of Thomas Cromwell, she said that you were like her sort of guiding hand for the history. You've won prizes and become professor and had best-selling books and been on TV. That must have been one of the best moments

of your career, surely. Yes, I mean, I think it's fair to say that, you know, I don't even have any pretensions to ever write as well as Hilary Mantel. Although I tell you what, the most totally sort of self-absorbed thing that has come to me over the last few days is that I was thinking, damn it, you know what, I was really hoping that my next book would be good enough for me to feel like I could send it to her. You know, that sort of sense of like she was someone who sort of aspired to win her approval because her mind was so incredible well Susanna it's not a turn for that kind of podcast but obviously your last book was very

much as good enough to send her as all your books are so I hope you did do that but I mean I felt the 16th century children I actually thought was one of those rare things it deserved the credit and the attention and the obsession that it generated the minute a copy landed on my doorstep I gorged on them. I was absolutely the same. I had a strange thing happened in 2009. I'd organised this big conference for Tom Betteridge at Hampton Court. And Hilary Mountel attended as one of the delegates. And of course, I had no idea who she was. And I was busy running around organising the whole thing. And it's only later that you notice among the photographs of the delegates, around organizing the whole thing and it's only later that you notice among the photographs of the delegates when that book became huge that year like oh she attended this academic conference that

we held on Henry VIII and she came along to another event later that year and I got a copy sent to me when I was working there and I remember reading it as I was walking to my car and just those opening words and now get up and then just extraordinary sort of picture that was conjured up of Thomas Cromwell being beaten by his father Walter I just remember thinking this is utterly thrilling and finding it really hard to put it down in order to then drive home they were so so good I just loved the moments where Cromwell would just sit there musing and he'd just think about the Battle of Towton and he'd talk about the House of Plantagenet.

Like, it showed that not only was her grasp of the 16th century so complete, you can talk a lot better than I can about that, but what I loved was the sort of, I guess you would call them Easter eggs if they're in film scripts, the kind of tiny, tiny references to Richard III delving back into the 15th century and even before that. And it made me think, God, that is probably how people in the 16th century thought about their slightly more recent history.

And I found those sort of references electrifying in the same way that I love, you know, Lin-Manuel Miranda when he's writing those rap battles between Jefferson and Hamilton and he talks about 18th century military and diplomatic history and I find that super thrilling because the forensic grasp of those periods that allows you not just to write it as a historian

but to imagine it as well as an author and make it more real I think Yes, I think that's right There was a sense in her writing about the 16th century that we were in the present. I mean, it was written in the present tense as well, but there was a sort of sense of the immediacy and the urgency and the contingency of the whole thing.

Like it could go either way. It was totally uncertain. And so much as you're saying how the 16th century would have thought about Towton, there was also this sense of being able to experience with her the horror of things, the hope of things, being in that moment and not knowing

how it's all going to work out. And what an amazing thing to do with a series that's premised, and we all knew from the beginning, premised on the fact that its protagonist is going to die. Like, we knew that, and yet we were carried through. And the sort of great antagonism he has towards Anne Boleyn,

and we know obviously she's going to die as well, but bring up the bodies, carries us through until that moment in the most extraordinary way. My sense about her is that she completely changed the reception of historical fiction. She uniquely elevated the genre. And I say that as someone who's read lots of wonderful historical fiction. She uniquely elevated the genre. And I say that as someone who's read lots of wonderful historical fiction. And, you know, I love some of the things that

had come before, Anya Seaton, for example, Catherine, stuff like that. But just the sense that you can raise it to this literary level and know the past so well. I mean, she just knew the history so well. As the person she cites whose work she used, Professor Lipscomb, how good was her grasp of history? I'm sorry, I'm still just recovering from you just saying that. It's just ridiculous because, I mean, she knew everything as well, if not better than I did. Apparently she and Dermot McCulloch, to give him his full title, the Reverend Professor Sir Dermot McCulloch, would exchange conversations where they'd be like, what are you doing now?

Well, I'm on the 17th of May, 1537 or something. And they would both know what that referred to. That's what her husband said to me once. And, you know, she just absolutely knew her stuff. So she had a deep, a profound engagement with the sources. Every detail, every fact. She had read the books. She'd read the books about the books. She'd read all the primary sources, every detail, every fact. She had read the books, she'd read the books about the books, she'd read all the primary sources, you know, whether it's

Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey or Roper on Thomas More or whatever it was, just these phrases would come out. And she said, I think on record at one point, that she had a conviction that things that were said on record had at some point previously been said off the record so she would put expressions little snippets from the primary sources in places that they might not be in those sources because she thought people would try out something first and it was a revelation it was like when I was writing about Anne of Cleves I was reading The Mirror and the Light so I just knew everything that was in there that she got from the sources and also knew everything where she questioned them. And she just managed to meld together that in a most extraordinary way, that combination of diligent research and imagination, so that she could

accurately represent the past and simultaneously undermine it and question our record of it. In her imagining of the 16th century, what was different to the way that you'd previously imagined it? I'm sure presented with the power of those books, you probably fall into line now with her interpretation of it, but I mean, not in total. But what I was really struck by, and I should have known this from the reading I've done, but I was struck by the difference between the king's courtiers

and social circle and the sort of worker bees. So even Cromwell at his absolute peak, there are still gentlemen of the bedchamber who he's never confident that he knows everything that's going on at all times in and around the king's person. Access to the royal body, to the royal chambers, always felt like he was entering a different world to me. And that's something that her writing just brought alive that I don't think I'd properly appreciated enough. I'm sure you had. But is there anything like that, that she was able to awaken and deepen your understanding or just raise questions in your head? I guess the thing that really surprised me was seeing the way in which some of the things that

we discuss and debate as historians of the things that we discuss and debate as historians of the 16th century could sort of both be true. So she would say, for example, there's a huge discussion since the days of Geoffrey Alton onwards as to whether Henry VIII was the puppet or the puppeteer, you know, whether he was being led. And I think she says at one point, you know, he cannot be led, but he may be enticed, you know, you get different people's perspectives. And so she allowed everything that we say about this and have debated hotly over the decades to be true. Or in a similar sort of way, where Cromwell, who of course is our protagonist, and we see everything through his eyes, and we

love him. And we see everything as if he's benevolent and yet you can get kind of tiny intimations along the way that people who encounter him don't feel like that about him that they find him terrifying and how he's a bit surprised at that so I suppose it just made me think about our verities you know how the divisions the way that we kind of categorize things or people in the past and it just allows for that complexity I'd always just thought of Cromwell as the person who wrote item the abbot of Glastonbury to be tried hanged and executed you know he's somebody who is happy to order a trial and then the conclusion and execution without any having assured said abbot that he

would not have his monastery touched the year before if I remember rightly right? That's absolutely right Dan exactly so that just that sense you know I think he was this terrible thug basically and she allowed us to think of him as something more. To be continued... Mormons, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's half-remembered past you know whether it's the work in the flemish trade being in italy the relationship with europe the kind of importance of italy in that period and then the death of his daughters you know in that first book it's just like electrifying it's the extent to which the

extraordinary infant mortality or general mortality in the period. Were they like us in that that was a deeply traumatic event that would be triggered through the rest of their lives and change the way they lived? Or because everyone was having lots of kids and lots of them were dying, did they somehow feel differently about those deaths and they were different in their intimate relations? And you and I have discussed this and I read sources sometimes that talk about how the death of a daughter sent men crazy for good. Their loss of a wife and a child could be just as devastating as it would be today to you or me. And then you read sources that imply that actually it is different and people would sort of bounce back a bit quicker

than perhaps they would today because of many, many reasons. And I found that, again, interesting in Cromwell's character. It's like, in a way, the death of his family, to what extent that sort of hardened him and sort of gave him that quality of living without fear because nothing that was ever going to happen to him could be as bad as what he'd been through. So she touched on that aspect. That was just another tiny part of the past that I found so fascinating.

I think that's right. I think there was a sense of real humanity and empathy and that kind of, you know, not allowing us to reach these kind of truisms about the past or they didn't really feel anything so much. She wrote to me once, I'm just bringing up this email, where she wrote to say it's a few years ago that she had been thinking of the thousands and thousands who must have survived childbirth but with disabling injuries, talking about the sort of truly hidden part of the feminine experience. It was just a little exchange about this sort of thing.

And I feel like she was very good at engaging with the pain of the past. You know, I'm not a psychologist. I don't want to sort of overread things, but I read her wonderful memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, and she was very public about the pain that she lived with from her 20s onwards a severe endometriosis and the pain of not being to have children and it just felt like that infused her work in that she drew on it to tell the reality of other people's lives and to help us engage with them on that deep level in a way that so often it's easy to skate over and so often you hear

they had two children died in infancy that will be the line as if that wouldn't have been utterly devastating to them and a kind of tipping point like i've always felt that description of his daughters dying getting the sweating sickness and just basically dying in the space of 24 hours felt like that as you say if it's some historians care two children died anyway the following year he became ambassador in milan something like but what if that, as you say, if some historians go, two children died, anyway, the following year he became ambassador in Milan. But what if that moment that you've just described is the event on which the rest of the life hinges or pivots, as it would be for me, if it happened to me today? And I think she helped explore that in that first book in particular. Simon Sebag Montefiore, I interviewed him the other day, and he said it's quite a sweeping

comment. He says he feels he can get closer to the historic truth when he's writing his fiction about Stalin than when he's writing his history, which I suppose suggests that if you want the best version of the past, get an amazing historian like Simon Sebag Montefiore or you or Hilary Rantel to then write a fictional book about their subjects, their specialist subjects. I mean, do you feel that if you said to your students, if you want to understand the early to middle reign of Henry VIII, go and read that trilogy? Or would you say go and read Elton? I'd say go and read Mantel. Because that's the thing about fiction, isn't it? That's what the imagination can do. What storytelling can do is it can take you into a world. And apart from the

fact I'd say, okay, remember, it's all from Cromwell's perspective. And remember, it's fiction. And it's very deliberately from his perspective. and she always would point that out when people would say hey oh there's judgment on Thomas More she's like no it's what I think Cromwell might have thought of Thomas More but it evokes the past. She via Cromwell was vicious about Thomas More. Well I think it's trying to resurrect the real Thomas More who did have heretics burned from the sort of sadist the man of conscience as he'd been depicted in A Man for All Seasons I mean obviously he was that as well but that's the complexity of the thing but then there's also her amazing book about the French Revolution well as an 18th century so when I met her very briefly and I think I have nothing like the

relationship you did she said well if you liked Wolf Hall but I think the best book I've nothing like the relationship you did. She said, well, if you liked Wolf Hall, but I think the best book I've ever written is A Place of Greater Safety. And my head nearly fell off. And so I went and bought it that very day and I read it. And it's a huge tome. I preferred the Cromwell trilogy, but it's a magnificent book. And it takes you through the revolutionary leaders

in the early phase of the French Revolution. The rise and fall of the first crop of leaders, like Danton. And it is astonishingly good, as you'd expect. And it's nice to read it after Wolf Hall and the others because it really, you get the way that she writes and it's all about the relationships. But it's that lovely thing that,

the reason you and I love her so much, because all great novels, of course, are about relationships and journeys of individuals. But we got lucky enough to have Hilary Mantel write those things against the backdrop of gigantic events as Tolstoy did for the 1812 invasion of Russia. Whereas other lovely, wonderful novels that I've read take place in more neutral environments

and sometimes more anonymous environments. That A Place Greater Safety brings in the fall of the Bastille and the death of marianne twitter shall never forget her description of her last hours on earth and her being taken to the guillotine and it is just such a wonderful thing to read brilliant fiction but about the people that you and i study and think about all the time in our day jobs spend too much time thinking about truth be told. And so it's so exciting that this passing genius

just chose to kind of give us a hand. And also, I guess, A Plate to Carry Safety, written in 1992. And what's so exciting and wonderful about being creative? And there's many historians that you and I know, and my auntie Margaret Millen is one, I think Mary Beard perhaps could be another one, who've enjoyed astonishing success quite late in their careers and lives. And how wonderful to be in a job where you could always believe your best work is lying

ahead of you. And, you know, deep into your 70s, 80s, and sometimes even 90s, some of our colleagues and friends are writing amazing books. And you think, well, that's good. I'm glad I'm not a footballer who basically by age 27, you need to be very, very good or you're in big trouble. Because I love the idea that you and I are doing something where the best years can be ahead. For Hilary Mantel, that was certainly true. I mean, she was not a household name.

And you didn't even know her in 2009 when you met her. To my shame, to my shame. And here she is 10 years later, she's the most famous author on earth. So I think that's an inspiring and interesting part of her career as well. It certainly is. Although her loss is great in all sorts of ways, and it's sudden and my heart goes out to her husband and to her family and friends. But also there's a loss for all of us. She was working on things. The last time we talked about work things was when I had asked her if she would contribute to the book that Helen Carr and I edited, which is a kind of recent take on E.H. Carr's What is History? And we asked if she'd write about historical fiction and she said that she wouldn't.

But that was because she herself was writing a book on historical fiction. And that would have been amazing to read. And I think she was writing another novel as well and just the idea that there was so much more to come and 70 is young and as you say historians or historical novelists you know we can get better with age we're like fine wines so just the wine should have been spilt too early is just dreadful yeah it was spilt far too early. And her wreath lectures were very brilliant. Sort of on that topic, she talked about sort of how historical fiction she felt could contribute to history and make the past come alive. And she was as electrifying, curiously, in the way she

spoke, I found. She could hold an audience, couldn't she? Which sometimes very, very brilliant novelists can't. I enjoyed her pamph pamphlets her articles her broadcasting contributions as well yes i think you're right those wreath lectures at least give us a taste of what she would have said and there are so many lines from that that stay with me there's one about what she says about history not being the past and it's what is left in the sieve after the centuries have run through it. I love that. It's just such a brilliant way of cleaving between these two things, history and the past. And given all of the debates about history being rewritten over the last few years, it's just listen to Hilary Mantel's Ruth Letchers and you can clarify in your own mind the distinction between the two.

She had such great clarity of thought and she just melt through these difficult things like hot knife through butter. I agree that I feel terrible that she's taken too early. I'm today overwhelmingly just feeling just grateful that she lived, grateful that she left us with those works. And when you're growing up, you assume that all the great work has been done a little bit. And Mozart and Beethoven, they got that bit right. And then, you know, we caught the tail end of Nelson Mandela, who was a global historic statesman. That was quite cool to see.

And then you realise that genius kind of still lies among us. That's rather exciting. And I found that, again, she made it really clear to me, those books will be read in 200 years' time. They're going to be up there with Dickens. They're better than Dickens. They're better than Dickens. Sounds like we should pull on that thread some other time, Suze. I wouldn't say they'd beat Tolstoy.

Not much does for me, but I think that they certainly rank, well, higher than Dickens. The other thing, of course, is that she was a person who was immensely generous to others. The number of books that she endorsed, she must have just been thinking, I just want to get on with my writing. Here's one of my favourite things that she said

when someone asked her if she wrote every day. She said, do you think I'm some sort of hobbyist? But, you know, she was very generous and very much made time for other people and elevated other people. about her producing her great work later in life. She bucked the trend also in that the publishers stayed with her. They gave her the opportunity to do that. She produced these wonderful works, and everyone said they were great literary works, and I've read now quite a lot of them and love them, like Beyond Black and Eight Months on Gaza Street and others. But the fact is they weren't selling in huge numbers,

and it's only with Wall four that she had that great breakthrough and let's hope that the industry continues to be able to support people until they do that because that was extraordinary after all that time to suddenly do something that huge is it interesting that have we not talked about her as a woman because these things matter less in contemporary fiction and a generation or two ago we'd have called her a pioneer if a woman won Booker Prizes like that. What's that tell us? Or should we have done? I think she brought her experience of being a woman to her writing. And I think that is what brought it much of its humanity in certain things, as I've already said.

But her genius seems to be one that transcended gender. And I don't chiefly think of her as a woman writer. That's for sure. I think her as one of the finest writers we've known. Yeah, ever. Is that also because we no longer have to go, you know, brackets, even though she was a woman, she wrote this book. Have we reached a place of greater safety? There you go go when it comes to thinking about literary genius the place we haven't yet got with politicians we still hold their wardrobe choices completely different standards have we got to a place with authors where that doesn't feel to be in the conversation as much i don't know i hope that's true dan i'm not sure it always is but i think that it could be that you just have to get so well

acclaimed. I mean, when she came to my university a few years ago to receive her 13th honorary doctorate, and by that point, I think she'd received something like 22 literary prizes. Surely there gets to be a point where people are just like, you're just the best. But perhaps when you're the experience of women often often or people of minorities in various ways it's often that it's noticed a lot when you're climbing up the ladder and perhaps then not paid attention to when you're at the top but it's an interesting question and something to wonder just on that note and it's pointless to even say it but i found she wrote about war and about violence and men like you know it was with such power.

And I mean, one of my favourite characters in those books is her rendition of the Duke of Norfolk. It's just unbelievably brilliant, isn't it? And Henry himself. I've got her description of the Duke of Norfolk in front of me, actually. It so happens. She says, he's now approaching 60 years old, but concedes nothing to the calendar.

Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is as lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe head. Isn't that wonderful? And then I love it in book three when Cromwell, who spends quite a lot of time being rather worried about Duke Knopfort with good reason, during the pilgrimage of grace,

he just goes, now is when you call on the Howards. So brilliant. To finish, what do you love most about her work? What is the thing that you'll say when you press them into your hands of your children? Curiously, I think it's the way she writes English. I think it's the prose. I don't think I'll say, oh, brilliant, happy days. You really climb inside the 1530s with these lovely books. I actually just think it's the way she

used the language. It was just poetry. And that bit you've just read out, it's just what an astonishing description of that hardcore warrior and courtier. And so I don't think you'll ever read anyone using the English language as brilliantly as this. That's why. The fact that it was on a period of history that you and I are both fascinated by just added such wonderful luster to it. But I think the reason I would give it to my kids is the reason that nearly everyone else read her is for the language, the I completely agree and that was why when sometimes not always I like lots of historical fiction but sometimes it feels like a busman's holiday I just couldn't wait to read those it was quite the opposite genius totally and I'm just thrilled that we still have her work and it's not as good as having her, but goodness me, she left such an extraordinary legacy. Susanna Lipkin, it's so great to have

this chat and to hang out in this sad time. Dan Snow, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you to my producer, Rob Weinberg, and researcher Esther Arnott. And thank you to you for listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. If you haven't already done so, do sign up to our weekly newsletter, Tudor Tuesday, so that you never miss out on the history you love. There are details in the notes below this podcast. you