The Prospect from Wolf Hall

For eight whole dreadful years, more dreadful than any in our history, this fellow Cromwell had ruled the country with a fist of steel. Cunning, determined, and utterly unscrupulous, he had acquired such a power, as no man in England had ever wielded, for everywhere English, men and women were caught in his system of silent, ubiquitous espionage and delation like animals in some gigantic net.

Christian Mawson, Ramping Cat (Jonathan Cape, 1941) p.37.

Advertising for Ramping Cat, Yorkshire Post, 17 October 1941

A couple of years ago, I came across a review for a book that piqued my interest. Published in 1941, Ramping Cat by Christian Mawson was a story of Thomas Cromwell and his downfall. All the names so familiar from Cromwell’s time were present - Henry VIII, Stephen Gardiner, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, Jane Rochford - and the Cat of the title was Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII. So far, so similar to many novels and histories of the Sixteenth Century, including of course Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light.

But there is a key difference. Ramping Cat is set in 1940, and the fall of Thomas Cromwell is played out against a backdrop of 10 Downing Street, the London Underground, telephone calls, and aircraft. Oh - and crucial scenes also take place at Wolf Hall. In the words of the Croydon Times on 8 August 1941:

If you are partial to thrillers, you will hate to put it down before you have reached the last page. But if, in addition, you know your way about English history, it will not be long before some of the characters strike a familiar note. From that moment you will realise that you are reading the story of perhaps the most harrowing among the the many crises through which the English people have passed. Yet you would hardly call Ramping Cat an historical novel. Its characters do not move about in period rooms dressed in period costume; they are merely real, exciting people faced with problems that seem singularly modern at the present time. When we told the author what a pity this was, he said, ‘Historians write so well these days that for novelists to try to compete with them is absurd’. Those who like their historical fiction furnished in period may find Ramping Cat makes them very angry, but they will have to admit that nothing quite so vivid has been achieved before.

The review intrigued me, but the book has been long out of print. I managed to borrow a copy and started reading it - and it was in fact the subject of the last email exchange I had with Hilary. Had she come across it? No, but she was glad to be told of it, even though it was clearly an unsympathetic portrait of Cromwell. Sadly she died just a few days later.

I didn’t have the heart to finish reading Ramping Cat in 2022, but a few weeks ago I managed to get hold of my own copy - with some difficulty as it seems to be rare. I had hoped to be gripped by yet another version of Thomas Cromwell, but having just finished reading this evening, I have to say it was “interesting” rather than “vivid” - a fascinating idea lacking execution.

A large part of the problem lay with the choice of narrator. Ramping Cat is told from the point of view of Edmund Howard - father of Catherine and younger brother of the Third Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard. (Or “Uncle Norfolk” as he is known to Mantel readers. In Ramping Cat he’s known as “Spanker”, a reference to his time as Admiral of the English Fleet.) Catherine Howard’s biographer noted that she

had the bad luck to be born to a man who peaked long before he became a father. Edmond was a toxic combination of corrupt, unstable and pathetic, but he had not always been that [...] he had his father’s and brothers’ athletic capabilities but lacked their acute social intelligence.

Conor Byrne, Young and Damned and Fair (William Collins, 2017), p.31.

Had Spanker Norfolk been the narrator of Ramping Cat, it might have been a more satisfying read. Edmund is problematic: he vacillates, is never really fully informed of the plots in which he is involved, and his confusion is passed on to the reader. It’s difficult to follow the machinations of Stephen Gardiner and his Home Office police; to establish the extent of Catherine Howard’s agency; and to disentangle what Edward Seymour is up to at Wolf Hall. Edmund tells us that “I had joined with my brother and his friends with the object of ridding the country of the loathsome creature who now oppressed and misruled it” (p.74), but he’s somewhat half-hearted about it. Perhaps the narrator’s voice works in that it’s never sure - but it makes for a frustrating read.

But there were things I did enjoy. I liked Mawson’s descriptions of Cromwell, and his manner of speech. He peppers his pronouncements with “You see?” and “Do you get me?” He’s in league with the Germans - also referred to as the Reich - a word that carried extra meaning when the book was published. And he’s a ruffian:

The Prime Minister and Vicegerent of the English Church under the King was not a man of the cloth like his predecessor, and he certainly did not look one now. I had no difficulty in recognising either the broad, thick-set figure or the face with its small, hard mouth and piercing eyes. But the man had aged a lot since I saw him last and looked more than his fifty-five years. For a fraction of a second I felt sorry for him, for I could not help thinking of the agonising wear and tear to which that stocky frame and those tough nerves must in recent years have been subjected. I remembered how Wolsey too had been worn down by work and the vast and interminable cares that lay upon him; but whereas in Wolsey the strains of office had had a fining-down effect that brought a certain nobility into his arrogant features, I could see that the effect upon Cromwell had been the other way round. All the low, dirty, unscrupulous cunning came out in that face now as never before. The man who was unchallenged head of the civil and ecclesiastical government in England had about as much of the spiritual about him as a promoter of dud companies or a common racecourse crook. (pp.75-76)

To Edmund, Cromwell is “the worst thing that ever happened to England or ever will happen, pray the Lord” (p.33) His one redeeming feature is his love for his son Gregory, “a weedy, narrow-shouldered young man” (p.139). His enemies know that the way to get to Cromwell is to threaten Gregory, although Gregory himself is happy to place distance between himself and his father:

I was struck with his extreme unlikeliness to his father, for you could tell at once that this young man was nothing out of the ordinary, and there was an almost flabby gentleness about him that made it difficult to believe he could be the son of that powerful, evil man. Edward [Seymour] noticed my movement. ‘Gregory is attached to his father,’ he remarked, ‘but they do not see eye to eye on many things.’ The young man took the pipe out of his mouth and scratched his head with the stem. ‘I suppose you’re like Edward here,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t approve of my father. Well,’ he went on, ‘I can’t say I think such a hell of a lot of him myself […] I don’t trust anybody in this government. They’re just a bunch of acquisitive capitalists and my father is the worst of the lot as far as I can see.’ (p.141)

Ramping Cat was the only novel published by Christian Mawson, and it is not clear why he decided to write about Cromwell. Perhaps he simply wanted to mark 400 years since Cromwell’s fall. He also published a history anthology - Portrait of England - in 1943. But under his real name, Christian Barman, he published many articles and books about architecture, was the founder of the journal Architecture: The journal of the Society of Architects, and the editor of various other journals. He produced designs for HMV, worked as Publicity Officer for the London Passengers Transport Board, and became Assistant Director of Post-War Building at the Ministry of Works, before returning to the field of transport. His biography and picture can be seen here.

I will leave Ramping Cat with an insight from Mawson’s Catherine Howard - a view which was later echoed - unknowingly - by Hilary Mantel in the Wolf Hall trilogy:

He’s a problem, Hal is. He will keep on wobbling. You see, he owes an awful lot to Cromwell. He says it’s Cromwell who’s put him where he is. He’s not an ungrateful man for a King, and yet in his heart he knows the German crowd are wrong ones, all of them. He’s big enough to see through Cromwell, and what he sees is not pleasant. And so he not only feels grateful; he feels afraid as well. Yes, I’ve got an idea Cromwell frightens him sometimes. (pp.319-320)