Christmas 2010 and Wolf Hall turns up as a stocking-filler. But the moment the word Tudor loomed up from the back cover, the hefty tome was promptly consigned to the bottom shelf. The BBC had well and truly destroyed any residual curiosity I may have had in that infamous Welsh clan. But this Christmas, with time on my hands and nothing looking to match or better Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, I opted for Wolf Hall, Mantel’s 2009 Booker prize winner. What a Christmas it turned out to be. From the opening sentence through to the very last some six hundred and fifty pages later I was mesmerised. Caught as they say, hook, line and sinker.

The story unfolds through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a Putney street kid and son of a viscous drunken blacksmith. From these desperately inauspicious beginnings, the young Cromwell rises and rises eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in England and possibly the most influential. That is if Mantel’s historical interpretation is anywhere near accurate. But what intrigued me most was not the comings and goings of the royal court – the usual shallow preoccupation of endless BBC historical dramas – but the tectonic shifts in the socio-economic world of medieval Europe and beyond that were just coming to the boil. Religious torments may appear to take central stage but Mantel, in a thousand subtle, almost imperceptible touches, slowly but surely paints a picture that is, paradoxically, almost irrelevant to the comings and goings of Thomas Cromwell, Henry Tudor, Thomas More, the Boleyns, not to mention Luther, Pope Clement and the Spanish Emperor. They may have been the key players but the real central character of the tale is capitalism itself.

Surrounded by feudal brutality and backwardness on all sides, Mantel plants for her readers the first tiny but virile shoots of embryonic capitalism making their way, unpredictably and unplanned, onto the European stage. Not capitalism in its developed wage labour stage but capitalism in its very first stage that of primitive accumulation. Consider the following passage between Cromwell and his erstwhile master, Cardinal Wolsey:

He sighs; is the cardinal his only work? No; he is just the patron who demands the most constant attendance. Business always increases. When he works for the cardinal, in London or elsewhere, he pays his own expenses and those of the staff he sends out on Wolsey business. The cardinal says, reimburse yourself, and trusts him to take a fair percentage on top; he doesn’t quibble, because what is good for Thomas Cromwell is good for Thomas Wolsey and vice versa. His legal practice is thriving, and he is able to lend money at interest, and arrange bigger loans, on international market, taking a broker’s fee. The market is volatile the news from Italy is never good two days together but as some men have an eye for horseflesh or cattle to be flattened, he has an eye for risk. A number of noblemen are indebted to him, not just for arranging loans, but for making their estates pay better. It is not a matter of exactions from tenants, but, in the first place, giving the landowner an accurate survey of land values, crop yield, water supply, built assets, and then assessing the potential of all these; next putting in bright people as estate managers, and with them setting up an accounting system that makes yearly sense and can be audited. P90

Ah, Karl Marx himself would be proud of that description something that could have been lifted directly from Capital itself! The passage continues spelling out with high definition how the political pendulum was swinging towards those who had a handle on the emerging capitalist markets of Europe, particularly the Italian city states of Florence, Siena, Lucca and Bologna as well as the port cities of the Netherlands. Of Cromwell, Mantel explains:

Among the city merchants, he is in demand for his advice on trading partners overseas. He has a sideline in arbitration, commercial disputes mostly, as his ability to assess the facts of a case and give swift impartial decision is trusted here, in Calais and in Antwerp. P91

The seeds of capitalism could be said to be germinating as early as the 14th and 15th centuries but it was not until the 16th century that those seeds sprouted roots, and that those roots could be confidently described as capitalist, and even then the defining feature of capitalism the production of surplus value through the exploitation of wage labour still had some way to go. (See The International Working Class Movement: Problems of History and Theory, Vol 1 Progress Publishers, Moscow 1976 Chapter 1 for a useful discussion on the origins of capitalism)

Mantel offers her readers an even more explicit description of the emergence capitalism in an imagined polemic between Cromwell and the feudal earl, Harry Percy – one of the King Henry’s many stubborn adversaries. Cromwell offers Percy this blunt message:

How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortress, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. P378

That is truly a passage worthy of Marx, one that says everything about the new era that is tearing asunder the old feudal order.

Whether these are the legitimate thoughts of Cromwell or just the imaginings of Mantel is immaterial. If Cromwell was not a harbinger of capitalist trade, then many others were. Because bourgeois historians prefer not to imagine capitalism coming into being least they might be forced to admit that it may one day be swept from the stage of history altogether, much of the history we are forced to imbibe at school and in the popular press is devoid of any analysis of the transition from the feudal epoch economic epoch to the capitalist one. Capitalism is presented as the god-given natural order of things. AS such popular history as served up by the BBC contents itself with outlining the machinations of the Royal courts and the ensuing Reformation of the Church in northern Europe but has little or nothing to say of the economic transformations that were driving the so called religious reformation. Mantel does not fall into this ahistorical swamp. She sees what too many historians refuse to see that the feudal relations of production have, by the 16th century, begun to exhaust themselves, all the easier for the new, more dynamic capitalist mode of production to impose itself on the world stage.

Mantel has served up a near faultless piece of historical drama a thousand times more perceptive than most standard historical texts. All that remains is for her to await her further volumes, oh that they be swift and plentiful.

PS. Don’t neglect to read the Mantel interview and associated notes at the conclusion of the book.