Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, History, Literature

(Biography) Book Review – Thomas Cromwell: A Life

REVIEW

IT is generally through Hilary Mantel’s inspiring and prize-winning novels, such as Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, that most people today have come to know the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell. TV adaptations of the books, through the glowering performances of Mark Rylance, have also added to our understanding of Cromwell’s character.

But, what kind of man was the real, historical Cromwell? Six years in the making, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental biography attempts to answer that question in painstaking, and even in excruciating and fine detail.

It comes as no great surprise that some of the most memorable scenes in Wolf Hall have no basis in fact. Novelists do that as they are prone to make things up.

The book’s opening sequence has a young Cromwell taking a terrible beating from his father. Not true, according to MacCulloch. There is no real evidence that the father was a brutal bully. There is little record of Cromwell’s early life at all. He was a little-known and obscure brewer’s son from Putney.

What is striking is how often and how closely Mantel did follow the historical record.

Cromwell’s most notable trait was his ruthlessness in pursuit of power. Both novelist and biographer make that abundantly clear. He achieved it because he found a solution to what was known as “The King’s Great Matter”.

Henry VIII had decided that he had breached a biblical prohibition in marrying Katherine of Aragon, who had been his deceased brother’s wife. The lack of a male heir was proof of God’s wrath.

Henry’s eagerness to annul his marriage was increased by his passion for Anne Boleyn. Unexpectedly, Anne insisted that she would not share Henry’s bed unless she was his wife. (Her sister Mary, an earlier lover of the king, had displayed no such scruples.)

It was Cromwell who found a way to fulfill the King’s wishes. He smoothed the path to Anne’s royal marriage.

Yet, when she also failed to produce a male heir, he turned on her. Anne already resented her husband’s chief minister. She was heard to say that she would see “his head off his shoulders”.

But it was Cromwell who saw her to the scaffold. Henry already had his eye on a young noblewoman named Jane Seymour.

He complained that “he had been seduced and forced” into marriage with Anne “through spells and charms”. The speed with which Anne was toppled is remarkable. Cromwell was behind charges, almost certainly untrue, of adultery. She was even accused of incest with her brother.

She was executed in the Tower in front of a thousand spectators. Prominent amongst them was her nemesis, Thomas Cromwell. Eleven days after her death, Henry married Jane Seymour.

Throughout this biography, MacCulloch suggests an element of sadism in Cromwell’s character that is absent in Mantel’s depiction. He recommended the torture of a prisoner with the words, “pinch him with pains”.

When he heard that some monks from the London Charterhouse had died in Newgate prison, he was furious. He swore that he’d had something far more unpleasant in mind for them.

Cromwell’s own tragedy was that he served a master even more ruthless than he was.

Mantel will tell of her hero’s downfall in the third, as yet unpublished, volume of her trilogy.

MacCulloch’s final chapters show Henry’s willingness to cast off his chief minister as soon as his usefulness came to an end.

Anne of Cleves was the unwitting catalyst of his downfall. After the death of Jane Seymour in childbirth, Cromwell was determined that the King should next marry a German Protestant. Anne fitted the bill.

Unfortunately, when she arrived in England, Henry was appalled by her.

To his embarrassment, he couldn’t make love to her either on his wedding night or on any succeeding night. Cromwell had to face the fact that “his own protracted diplomacy had resulted in the King’s humiliation”.

Even worse, Henry came to believe that his chief minister was gossiping about his problems between the sheets. Cromwell was doomed.

 

HE was arrested on June 10, 1540. From prison, he wrote to the King, ending his letter with the words, “I cry for mercy! mercy! mercy!”

The only mercy he was given was the privilege of being beheaded rather than facing burning at the stake (for heresy) or hanging, drawing and quartering (for treason).

Even then, one account suggests that the executioner botched the job and took several swipes of the axe to kill him.

On the very same day that Cromwell died on the scaffold, Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard.

There is a paradox at the heart of this epic work of scholarship. Despite the relentless accumulation of detail, Thomas Cromwell himself remains a mystery. He is as unknowable at the end of the book as he is at the beginning.

It might even need a novelist of Mantel’s exceptional gifts to bring such an enigmatic character fully to life.

– ‘Thomas Cromwell: A Life’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch is published by Allen Lane for £30

Standard
Arts, Books, History

Book Review: Endeavour

REVIEW

Endeavour

“Endeavour” by Peter Moore is a factual historical insight into the ship’s discovery of the New World. The ship was led by Captain James Cook.

THERE are many books about Captain James Cook and his circumnavigation of the globe whilst aboard HMS Endeavour. Cook’s biographer, JC Beaglehole, wrote: “Really, that voyage makes most of the other Great Occasions of the 18th century seem pretty silly.”

Peter Moore is the first to concentrate on the ship itself, which set sail 250 years ago this week, having begun life as the Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby-built collier: flat-bottomed, round and sturdy, with a broad and voluminous hull, launched in 1764 to ship coal from Newcastle to London.

Moore’s approach is lavishly digressive, and he is inclined to foreground his subject’s background. So, he gives a detailed account of Whitby’s development from a fishing village, and of the career of the master shipbuilder Thomas Fishburn. Nor does he neglect the oak trees used for the Earl of Pembroke’s floors, futtocks and so forth, beginning with their growth from acorns to oaklings, “capped with a pair of helicopter leaves that tilt and turn and thrill to the sun”. After rather a lot of this, Moore turns to the transformation of an “utterly ordinary” ship into a “completely extraordinary” one, and his story takes wing.

 

IN 1766, the Royal Society resolved to send astronomers to North America, Norway and the South Seas to observe the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun, on June 3, 1769. To lead the South Seas mission it chose Alexander Dalrymple, a thrusting young Scot determined to discover the rumoured southern continent of Terra Australis.

However, in March 1768, the Society’s clerk and collector absconded with all its money. It appealed for funds to the King, who provided £4,000. That meant that the voyage would be a joint venture between the Society and the Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty, which vetoed the civilian command of a king’s ship. Dalrymple was ousted in favour of James Cook, a seasoned naval commander, joined by the 25-year-old Joseph Banks, “a remarkable botanist and intrepid man of science”.

The Earl of Pembroke was not an elegant ship, and had no great cabin for officers, but she was strong, and her massive hold was suitable for the storage of necessary provisions. She was duly acquired and refitted at Deptford with a new internal deck and cabins, including a great one. As “a hybrid of a transport and a sloop”, it was given the more dashing name of Endeavour, and stock with great quantities of bread, salt beef and pork, oil and sugar, beer and spirits and, to remedy scurvy, “a proper quantity of Sour Kraut”.

In 1767, Samuel Wallis, commanding HMS Dolphin in search of the elusive Terra Australis, had claimed Otaheite (Tahiti) for Britain as King George’s Island, to which the Endeavour set off on August 25, 1768. When it landed the next April, Cook set about building Fort Venus, with an observatory, telescopes, clocks and astronomical quadrant.

During its three months on the island, the expedition met the formidable Purea, known to them as “Queen Oboreah”, and her lover, Tupaia, who became their fixer and prepared them a dinner of roast dog to celebrate King George’s birthday. Tupaia insisted on accompanying them on their departure, and guided them through the 250-mile archipelago that Cook named the Society Islands, and onwards to New Zealand.

Initial contracts with the Maoris were violent, and Cook shot four of them, but after Tupaia addressed them in his own language, and was understood, Cook and a Maori “saluted by touching noses”, which Moore inevitably calls “an iconic first encounter”. With great accuracy, Cook then charted the 2,400 miles of New Zealand’s coastline. In April 1770, the expedition had its first view of the eastern coastline of New Holland, failing to realise that it had found Terra Australis, and landed at what would be called Botany Bay, where the natives seemed indifferent to the Endeavour and its proffered trinkets.

Cook decided not to explore the bay to the north, so missing what became Sydney Harbour, and Endeavour set off on her return voyage. On the night of June 10, she crashed into the Great Barrier Reef and was badly holed. It put in for repairs at what would become the Endeavour River, in what is now Queensland, where many of the ship’s company died, Tupaia among them. Before they left, they sighted a strange new creature, “as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour and very swift.” The natives called it a kanguru.

The Endeavour’s return to London in July 1771 was met with general acclamation, but Samuel Johnson was unimpressed. “They have found very little, only one new animal, I think,” he told James Boswell, who recalled his imitation of it: “He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.”

In 1776, after three voyages to the Falkland Islands, the by now rather decrepit Endeavour was patched and plugged and renamed the Lord Sandwich, and carried Hessian mercenaries to defeat Washington’s army in New York. The next year she became a prison ship at Newport, Rhode Island, and in August 1778, to obstruct the French fleet that had come to the aid of the Americans in the Battle of Rhode Island, she was scuttled. In 1971, a fragment of her travelled to the moon on Apollo 15.

Much of the story of Cook’s ship is familiar, and Moore’s telling of it makes for quite heavy going, but it is, undeniably, a rollicking yarn.

– Endeavour, by Peter Moore, is published by Chatto & Windus for £20, EBook £9.99

Standard
Asia, Books, Britain, China, History

Book Review: Imperial Twilight

DARK TRUTH OF THE OPIUM WARS

THE Opium War began in 1839 in which the British and Chinese faced one another. It was a one-sided affair: The Royal Navy was the most powerful military force in the world, while the Chinese possessed weaponry that was centuries out of date.

The Chinese were reduced to desperate measures. One commander hatched a plan to strap fireworks or pyrotechnics to the backs of monkeys and catapult the poor primates onto the British ships in the hope that they would blow up their powder magazines. In the event, nobody could get close enough to launch the monkey bombs at the enemy.

The war was the end result of a decades-long, often fractious relationship between China and Britain, characterised by misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides.

Eighty years earlier, in 1759, there was only one British national, James Flint, who knew how to speak and write in Chinese. His attempt to present a petition to the Chinese emperor on behalf of the East India Company ended with Flint imprisoned for three years and the man who had taught him Chinese decapitated.

In 1793, Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing, bearing gifts from King George III including telescopes, a planetarium and a hot air balloon. The Emperor announced that they were “good enough to amuse children”. Macartney left Beijing having achieved little.

It was trade that finally brought the two nations together, but there were, unfortunately, two kinds.

One consisted of legal commodities such as cotton, silks and tea. The other was in opium, which the East India Company smuggled from India into China, where demand was high.

The two countries had very different attitudes to opium. In Britain, the drug was legal and sold by apothecaries and tobacconists. There was even a tonic for teething babies called Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.

But China’s growing addiction problem was devastating its cities. Opium was illegal and punishments for using it grew even harsher.

The war was precipitated by the Imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, who confiscated vast amounts of the drug and threw it in the sea. (He wrote a prayer to the god of the sea apologising for his defilement of the waters.)

Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of the British in Canton, sent a furious dispatch to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, demanding military action. Some months later Elliot got what he wanted.

The Opium War was not the British Empire’s finest hour. The Times newspaper described it as “nothing less than an attempt, by open violence, to force upon a foreign country the purchase of a deadly poison”.

But the twilight of Stephen Platt’s title was not that of Britain’s empire. It was China that was in decline – and worse was to come. Now that China is once again one of the world’s great powers, knowing the history of its relationship with the West becomes ever more important. Platt’s book makes a scholarly, but enjoyable, contribution to that knowledge.

– Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt is published by Atlantic for £25

Standard