I'm Susan Galassi, Senior Curator at The Frick Collection.

And it's my privilege to welcome all of you here

and our viewers on this live webcast

to this very special event this evening.

It's a great honor for The Frick

to have Dame Hilary Mantel as our speaker,

and to have her husband, Gerald McEwen, with us as well.

We've been very eager to have her here

ever since the publication, in 2009,

of her landmark historical novel Wolf Hall,

based on the life, um, which was followed in 2012

by the spectacular sequel Bring Up the Bodies.

Both books, based on the life of Thomas Cromwell,

Henry VIII's powerful minister,

were awarded the Man Booker Prize

and took off into the stratosphere.

They were translated into 36 languages

and adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company

in sold-out runs in Stratford-on-Avon

in London's West End,

and were made into an award-winning BBC miniseries

that will soon air here on PBS.

She is currently at work on the last book

in the Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light.

Earlier this year, Prince Charles conferred on her

the honor of Dame Commander of the British Empire

for her contribution to literature,

an extraordinary achievement encompassing

14 books, 11 of them novels.

In her non-literary life, recently,

she has also played an important role

in helping England save the famous bronze sculptures,

the Wolsey Angels,

which are now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Now, here in New York this month,

she is attending rehearsals for the opening on Broadway

of Wolf Hall Part One and Part Two,

directed by Jeremy Herrin.

Previews at the Winter Garden begin in only two days.

We are very lucky to have her for this hour.

For making this evening possible,

I would like to extend warm thanks

to the Drue Heinz Trust and to Mrs. Hines.

For the past dozen years, her Trust has funded a series

of lectures by distinguished artists, writers, and poets,

who have brought contemporary viewpoints

to our collection of Old Master paintings.

She is also a longtime admirer of Hilary Mantel's work.

Thanks are due, as well, to past and present members

of the staff of Henry Holt and Company,

Francis Codie, James Meter, and, especially,

Patricia Eisemann, and to the Frick's

Manager of Education and Public Programs, Adrienne Lei.

Tonight, we have the pleasure of hearing Dame Hilary

speak in a special context.

Right outside this door hang the original portraits

by Hans Holbein the Younger

of the central figures in her trilogy,

Thomas Cromwell and his archenemy Thomas More.

These iconic images were painted

from drawings made from life

in Holbein's meticulous, highly illusionistic manner.

In her fluid prose, Dame Hilary lets the portraits

circulate again in time,

almost as characters in their own right.

In one particularly moving scene in Wolfhall,

we look at the portrait of Cromwell

through the eyes of the sitter

as he takes in Holbein's image of himself,

with a combination of admiration and alarm.

For the past century, that portrait has hung

face-to-face with the portrait of Thomas More

in the Living Hall, the heart of The Frick Collection,

where Henry Clay Frick placed them.

More, the presumed saint, on the left,

and Cromwell, the presumed villain, on the right,

until Hilary Mantel reversed their roles.

(audience chuckles)

After the lecture, we invite you to view the paintings

in the Living Hall and to join us for a glass of wine

in the Garden Court.

Signed copies of the Cromwell books

are also available in our bookstore.

Now please give a very warm welcome to Dame Hilary Mantel.

(audience applauds)

- Good evening.

May I say it's absolutely lovely to be here.

People have said to me,

"What, you've not been to The Frick?

"You've not seen the two famous images

"in that wonderful context?"

And, uh, I had to confess that until a few days ago

that was the case.

But I am here now.

And I have been told

by a historian I know

that on at least one occasion

the great Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton

stood in front of the fireplace by the portraits

and said, "Here we have

"one self-serving, ruthless,

"and cunning politician,

"and one far-seeing and dedicated statesman."

And then, of course, upset the prejudices of his audience

by indicating the hero and the villain.

Elton, okay, it was a piece of mischief.

But...

Geoffrey Elton was the grandfather

of modern Tudor studies

and he placed Thomas Cromwell where he should be,

at the heart of the history of the reign of Henry VIII,

as a shaper of his age, as a maker of history.

My purpose is to introduce him to a wider public

as a modern hero or anti-hero,

flawed and equivocal,

to persuade us to look at the world from behind his eyes,

and walk a mile in his shoes.

My purpose has never been

to set up false oppositions

nor to valorize one of these men

at the expense of the other.

Though, like Elton, I have my preference.

And that's fair, because a novelist

is not obliged to neutrality.

Neutrality would make dull reading.

She can be partisan I think

as long as she's well informed.

The choices she makes must be considered ones.

And as a novelist, I want to know

how these two men experienced each other,

and what was their experience of the world.

In Wolf Hall, this is what Thomas More

thinks of Thomas Cromwell.

"Lock Thomas Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning

"and by the time you come back that night,

"he'll be sitting on a plush cushion

"eating larks' tongues,

"and all the jailers will owe him money."

Well, that's the whole fascination

of the boy from Putney.

Time and time again, you would look at him and you'd say,

"How did he do that?"

Where does he go when he goes off the map?

How is it possible, his rise in the world?

How did he think it might be possible?

Unlike More, he's not a self-revealing character.

He's an expert communicator,

but he never tells us what we'd like to know.

It's all questions, questions, and no answers.

One of our best Tudor historians, Diarmaid MacCulloch,

is writing a biography of him,

which won't be out for a little while yet,

but I think will be authoritative.

It's much needed.

Unlike so much writing about Cromwell,

this will be different I think.

Not just a recycling of venerable errors and prejudices.

There is an in-built frustration to the task.

Diarmaid MacCulloch says

he's like Macavity the Mystery Cat.

He's called the Hidden Paw.

Wherever you think you'll find him, you don't.

Wherever you don't look for him, there he is.

Like Macavity, "he always has an alibi,

"and one or two to spare.

"At whatever time the deed took place,

"Macavity wasn't there."

These two men were not enemies in the beginning.

And perhaps not enemies in the end,

in quite the way we think.

And I've not written my book to make them so,

or to set up false oppositions.

They were the two great commoners who served Henry.

Now, it's true, that Cardinal Wolsey,

who was Thomas Cromwell's patron,

was also from a humble background,

but Wolsey climbed through the Church,

and through the Church, he dignified himself,

so that in England he was not only Cardinal,

but, as the Papal Legate, he exercised

a quasi-papal authority.

And in the state, in its executive arm,

Wolsey was Lord Chancellor,

Henry's chief minister.

Henry took the glory and Wolsey did the work.

Now, that status as churchman elevated Wolsey

into a different sphere from a layman,

where his background didn't matter.

Now, of course, the fact that he was a butcher's son

was held against him by the noblemen he bossed around,

and by the common people, too,

who thought it was against nature

for ordinary men to hold power,

and frequently rioted in support of their right

to be governed by lords.

Now, if you were not a churchman,

then background did matter.

Thomas More wasn't from a wealthy family,

but he was from a mercantile, legal background

in the city of London.

Comfortable, well-networked.

So he was able to make his way as a city lawyer

and a member of Parliament.

Cromwell's career was much less likely.

It's often suggested that the Cromwells

were originally a gentry family who had decayed,

fallen on hard times.

Cromwell himself said not.

When the heralds tried to foist on him

a coat of arms to make him look respectable,

he wouldn't have it, he said,

"There may be other Cromwells, but they're not my people,

"and I won't wear another man's coat."

And for the age he lived in

that was a very unusual reaction,

as if he wanted to step, not just out of his place

but out of his time.

He did eventually get a coat of arms and more.

He became the King's Secretary,

his Deputy in Church Affairs,

Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University,

a Knight of the Garter, and eventually Earl of Essex.

And the fact that the historians tried to bump the Cromwells

up the social scale shows how threatening

we find the idea of the man

from nowhere, even now.

How disruptive it is to the way

we still understand the world,

where we can predict what a man's interests are

and his needs.

I spoke to you of Geoffrey Elton.

He was German in origin,

so he was able to look

at the English and their class fetishes

with a sharp eye.

And he thought that Cromwell was the victim

of several kinds of snobbery.

Victorian scholars,

which meant Oxford and Cambridge dons,

couldn't grasp that Cromwell hadn't been to University.

It made them suspicious,

because if you're not an Oxford man

and you're not a Cambridge man,

then what in God's name are you?

Now, even a couple of generations after his death,

Cromwell was being reconstructed

as more advantaged than he was.

More advantaged, therefore, less mysterious.

There's an Elizabethan play,

a really bad and chaotic play,

which shows every sign of being written

by several playwrights and the tea boy.

And it is, however, highly entertaining,

and informative about the way

the Elizabethans looked at him.