The Wolf Hall Picture Book

By Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles and George Miles

A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel’s bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy

‘At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’’ The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles, the stage’s celebrated Thomas Cromwell, and his brother, photographer George Miles, spent many years exploring the locations we know Thomas Cromwell visited and inhabited – Putney, Austin Friars, Wolf Hall, the Tower of London – to capture the faint traces of Tudor England and his extraordinary life. Accompanied with extracts from The Wolf Hall Trilogy, some of them published here for the first time, and including a stunning new essay by its author, these photographs reveal a world that is shadowy, frightening, sometimes whimsical – a portrait of a country in conversation with its past.

‘The present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives’ Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780008541033

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.

Book preview

Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2022

Text copyright © Tertius Enterprises Ltd, 2022

Photographs © Ben Miles and George Miles, 2022

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008530341

Ebook Edition © June 2022 ISBN: 9780008541033

Version: 2022-08-22

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

The Pictures

Final Words by Hilary Mantel

Picture Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Hilary Mantel

About the Publisher

Foreword

These pictures were taken by Ben and George Miles over a period of seven years. Commentary apart, the text comes from the novels of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, and in some cases from unpublished out-­takes. Thomas Cromwell is the focus of our three-­way collaboration. Loosely, the images track his life, from what are now the satellite towns west of London, through the City and to the Tower, where he died in 1540. The Thames is the great artery that feeds these places, as in the sixteenth century it sustained England’s chief city. Moving beyond the capital, we have noticed woods and fields, gateways and doorways, neglected corners of unloved rooms: all the furnishings of the private imagination, ­whether ancient or modern.

The project began before two of the authors met the third, at around the time Ben was cast as Cromwell in the stage versions of the first two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. It was never intended to be documentary in any simple sense. It began in a spirit more playful than profound, the first morning yielding thirty-­two pictures of car parks. When the double enterprise became a triple one, and we set aside whole days for the pursuit, the object was always to sneak around a location and get behind the obvious – to see what Historic Royal Palaces left out for refuse ­collection, or to catch a glimpse of a ghost’s coat-­tail whisking away from multi-­purpose conference rooms or banqueting venues. We believe that you don’t attune yourself to the spirit of place by earnest enquiry. You just hang about, make yourself available. You show willing.

Sometimes all three of us were present when an image was made, sometimes one or two, but our response was always shared. Sometimes it is easier to show than to tell. When I am asked about the writing process, I want to be honest, but sometimes I feel my replies don’t go home; they sound either complacent, or mysterious. It is hard to be articulate about what arrives before the words do – hard to trace that network of neural connections that holds a novel together. I hope that by taking part in this project I can show how the creative process works for me. But the pictures are not a service to the text. They are not explanations or illustrations. They are images that exist in their own time and their own right. They talk to the text. They ask questions, as I try to do. When I come across a piece of evidence, even the baldest fact, I find it useful to ask, ‘What is this?’ And then, ‘What else

could it be?’

When I saw the initial batch of pictures, I was in a rehearsal room with the cast of the plays. At that stage Ben and George had made an edit and gave me the pictures in a form I subsequently called The Red Book. I recognised that what was emerging from river mists and green spaces was a visual psychobiog­raphy of the man at the centre of the story. The images seemed to be drawn from memory, but not from mine. They reflected the inner world of the first two books, as if they were pictures from the novels’ dreams or their unconscious. But they also prefigured the third novel, at that stage unwritten.

The first two books in the trilogy were adapted for the stage by Mike Poulton. Not all the characters were names famous in history, and sometimes they spoke of incidents that are long forgotten by most people. In the rehearsal room I asked myself, what happens when the names of the dead are spoken aloud, perhaps for the first time in centuries? What peculiar resonance is set up? In rehearsal it was my practice to keep two notebooks open. One was for the scene unwrapping before me. The other was for scenes unwrapping in my imagination – projections