Why Henry VIII was king of the lockdown – by Hilary Mantel
IT’S a sobering thought for anyone who thinks the current lockdown has been strict.
Author Dame Hilary Mantel believes that life in a crisis under King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, the subjects of her Wolf Hall series of novels, would have been even tougher.
The Booker prize winner, 67, was asked during the virtual Hay Literary Festival what Cromwell, the King’s chief adviser, would make of the current Covid-19 crisis.
She said: ‘They were very good at quarantine in those days. They took it very seriously. I think he’d probably have locked us down for a bit longer.’
And Dame Hilary said Henry VIII would have been only too aware of the risks posed by scourges such as the plague and sweating sickness.
‘The King himself was extremely conscious of risk and if there was anything that looked like a feverish illness in your household, even if you didn’t think it was plague, you and everyone in that household were banned from going to Court.’
She explained that the Tudors knew far more about medicine and disease than they are often given credit for.
‘They did know a lot. They didn’t know the causes of diseases but they knew how disease worked.
‘They knew that infections spread among the poor, that one should be clean, one should avoid dirt at all cost. They knew that cities were a focus for infection and they knew to ban crowds.
‘So no public ceremonies when the plague was suspected.’
Dame Hilary said she hoped that the current crisis might give people a greater understanding of what their ancestors had to cope with.
She said: ‘It’s hard to see any upside to this but maybe it expands our imagination a little bit more. Their life in the past was so unstable and short and perilous compared to ours. I think the present crisis gives us a little bit of fellow feeling with those sufferers.’
Dame Hilary, who is respected for her meticulous historical research, also revealed she had not cooked any of the lavish Tudorstyle meals she has famously described in her books.
She said: ‘I am afraid I am a paper cook. I read all these recipes. I think them through, as it were. I don’t cook them.’
The virtual Hay Festival features free live broadcasts and interactive events from more than 100 awardwinning writers.