However, Mantel maintained that her works were fiction. As a novelist, she claimed she could take her story where “the historian and biographer can’t go.” She added, “However much you learn, factually, there is plenty of scope for imagination.”
In 2017, John Guy, a Tudor historian, noted that many students had begun to assume the Wolf Hall series was 100% accurate — which he saw as troubling. “We are starting to get people coming up who want to talk about Thomas Cromwell,” he said while appearing at the Hay Literary Festival. “This blur between fact and fiction is troubling.”
Guy went on to explain that Mantel’s novels twisted certain historic figures for artistic reasons. More, he explained, was not “a misogynistic, torturing villain,” nor was Anne Boleyn a “female devil.”
Rebecca Rist, a professor of religious history, echoed these thoughts.
“If you want to enjoy a period yarn with plenty of intrigue, sex and drama then by all means watch Wolf Hall,” she wrote in 2015. “The costumes are beautiful; there are some salty acting vignettes.” But for “serious history,” she recommends biographies by the likes of Geoffrey Rudolph Elton and George M. Logan.
Wolf Hall, season 2: how historically accurate is the show?
Ok, so the source material is extremely well-researched and fairly accurate — though it does take some artistic liberties. Just how accurate is season 2 of the hit BBC show?
Anne Boleyn’s execution
Although Wolf Hall offers a fictionalised version of events, the execution of Anne Boleyn features a number of historically accurate details. For instance, it is known that Henry chose beheading as the method of execution as a mercy, as it offered a swift death. He also chose a sword rather than an axe and even imported a French swordsman as French beheadings were thought to be more civil.
We don’t know exactly how many people would have attended Anne’s execution — while some accounts indicate that over 1,000 people were present, Wolf Hall‘s depiction seems to show a much smaller number. Some accounts suggest that this might actually be more accurate, as organisers of the execution may have wished to stop too many onlookers from attending and later writing sympathetic accounts of the event that might diminish Henry’s popularity with the public.
Henry’s wedding to Jane Seymour
Season 2 opens with Henry’s wedding to Jane Seymour — it is historically accurate that this occurred just 11 days after Anne’s execution. In Wolf Hall, Jane is depicted as a gentle force in Henry’s life who often tries to help him make peace with members of his family. For instance, she encourages Henry to mend his relationship with his daughter, Mary. According to historic accounts, Jane was close with Mary — in fact, after Jane died of complications during childbirth, Mary was her chief mourner.
Nick Briggs/BBC
Henry’s courtship of Anne of Cleves
According to historic accounts, Henry chose to marry Anne of Cleves in order to strengthen political ties with Germany and to produce a “spare” after fathering Edward with Jane. It is true that Henry disguised himself in order to see Anne before their official meeting and that Anne didn’t recognise him, leaving him insulted. In Wolf Hall, we don’t get to see this disastrous meeting, but we do hear about it. Henry would later claim that Anne was “ugly” and didn’t look like her portrait — and for centuries, this has been what many historians believed to be true. However, more recently, historians have reconsidered these accounts and hypothesised that Henry simply didn’t get along with Anne — and it is this version of events that Wolf Hall presents us with. Eventually, Anne was said to have accepted the annulment graciously and without much fuss.
