‘All four who carried the cardinal to Hell and also the poor fool Mark who made a ballad of their exploits.'”. Hilary Mantel has Cromwell conspiring against George, Norris, Weston, Brereton and Smeaton out of pure vengeance for their parts in the play about Wolsey: “‘All the players are gone, ‘ Wriothesley says.George probably was there, but the notion of an aspiring courtier, diplomat and politician demeaning himself by performing in a farce is… farcical! There is no mention of any of the men even being present when it was performed, let alone acting in it. In reality, Thomas Boleyn commissioned the play, which was performed at a private meal for the French Ambassador, and the Duke of Norfolk arranged for the play to be published. In Bring Up the Bodies, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton performed in a play about Wolsey being dragged to Hell.He’s portrayed as a bit of a dandy or a fop with his clothes “braided and tasselled, stippled and striped and slashed”, not as an intellectual reformer, diplomat and poet.He begged only that his debts would be paid out of his estate prior to confiscation by the crown so that no one would suffer financially because of his death.
Following his condemnation, he met his fate with composure. George Boleyn cries at his trial and has to be helped to a chair for fear that he will collapse – In actual fact, George’s defence was so impressive that a number of people commented on it.“Why have we bothered to do this when it’s only a novel?”, you may ask well, in historical fiction there is a blurring of fact and fiction, and when a book is being applauded for its accuracy then it is important to know just what is true and what is not. Well, I’m not going to review it because I don’t feel right doing that when I’ve also written a book on Anne Boleyn’s fall, but my good friend Clare Cherry and I have made a list of some of the things in the book which are not true or that are, at best, questionable. Since Hilary Mantel’s novel Bring Up the Bodies has been published, I have been inundated with emails asking me if I was going to review it and also asking me whether certain things are true.
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