Religious strife is a recurring theme for London. While the city’s chattering classes are busy discussing today’s hot question - whether Muslim women can wear veils to teach children and, more generally, whether wearing a veil is a mark of difference and isolation that means a Muslim woman can’t properly play a proper part in British society (and while one supposedly tolerant Labour minister after another jumps on board the bandwagon to make clear that they think the answer’s a stern “no” to the veil) - I went this week to puff my novel about Catholic-Protestant discord in 16th-century London among the literati of Notting Hill.
There was a skull on the table where I put my notes, and a giant tin model aeroplane jostling for space next to the chandelier above. Miller’s Academy, a new-born arts club offering grown-up lectures, dinner and wine in a romantic, antique-crammed, candelit interior. Millers is hoping to give the frivolous media watering-holes, the Groucho Club and Soho House, a run for their money in these more serious times, when chattering-class card-holders are likely to want to discuss the issues of the day as well as to drink in dim lighting. It was turning out to be a perfect, timeless setting for drawing parallels between the 16th century and today.
My book, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, is set in 1527, when the English Renaissance was in full swing under the young King Henry VIII. The young German painter Hans Holbein, who has come to London to seek his fortune, is delighted when he gets a commission to paint the family of Thomas More, one of England’s leading statesman and men of learning, at his country home in Chelsea. More is London’s most popular lawyer, and he’s famous too for being one of Europe’s tolerant humanists, a group of men encompassing England’s Dean John Colet, who set up St Paul’s School, and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, 16th-century Europe’s intellectual superstar, who’ve begun reforming the Church and infused the new Classical learning and a new spirit of tolerant debate into their understanding of God.
My story is about More’s adopted daughter, Meg, and her growing feelings for her tutor, a man of mysterious background called John Clement, whom she will marry, and for Holbein himself, whom she will love. But this complex of emotions is played out against a sinister backdrop of worsening intolerance. It is a turbulent period, when the whole of Christendom’s commitment to traditional Catholicism is being called into question by new thinkers following Martin Luther in Wittemberg, who are bringing into existence the new form of faith we know today as Protestantism. By 1527, mainland Europe is in religious uproar. There have been religious riots and peasants’ revolts in the German lands. There are image-burnings and church-burnings. To Meg’s growing horror, More, a devout Catholic, abandons his old friendships with the humanists who have brought the Renaissance to England, and devotes himself to hunting down Protestant heretics.
“I find all heretics absolutely loathsome, so much so that unless they regain their senses I want to be as hateful to them as I can possibly be,” the new, hard-hearted More writes to a bewildered Erasmus, who was clinging to the old-fashioned notion of tolerance, as the novel begins. And hateful More becomes, using his new high rank as Lord Chancellor to order more burnings of heretics than have been seen in a century – even old personal friends -- running a spy network that infiltrates London’s taverns and docks, eavesdrops on workers, and tortures and arrests anyone suspected of the great religious crime of the day: reading the Protestant Bible in English.
More’s descent into something very like fanaticism was fuelled by fear. Even though he had once been part of a modernising reform movement, he remained mediaeval in his outlook in many ways. He believed, explicitly, in Heaven and Hell, in Purgatory, in Limbo, and in the prospect of the Antichrist stalking the earth. In his mind, and in those of like-minded Catholics, anyone who questioned those articles of faith was courting damnation. To save the faith, and the rest of the faithful, he was more than willing to ensure that these sinners got dispatched to their eternal damnation ahead of time. More was nothing if not sincere in his belief that he was saving the world from evil.
More’s take on the religious problems of the day – combining holy terror and utter brutality with his undoubted intellectual acumen and personal charm – has not stood the test of time. We find it hard to understand his politics today, so much so that we’ve had to airbrush his political cruelty out of our memory of him altogether to make sense of his reputation for personal kindness and intelligence (this is the glossed-up, no-persecution version of Thomas More that you see in A Man For All Seasons, for instance).
Yet it wasn’t impossible to find something positive in the 16th century’s religious clashes. In contrast with More, the painter Holbein was energised by the debates. What he took from the Lutheran faith, with its emphasis on the private relationship between God and worshipper, was a new, naturalistic, way of painting the human form with respect, so that people could see the workings of God in the faces of his sitters. He became an enthusiastic supporter of the English Reformation being brought about by Thomas Cromwell. Yet he also found it in his heart both to admire and respect his fiercely Catholic first patron in England, Thomas More. And, as anyone who’s visited the wonderful exhibition of Holbein’s work at Tate Britain this autumn will know, Holbein’s intellectual openness and skilful enthusiasm allowed him to paint pictures that seem almost to live and breathe, images that we remember the Tudors by, a legacy that has translated effortlessly down the ages.
It was the modern resonance in the story of More and Holbein that appealed to the Notting Hill audience. Over supper, every conversation I heard or took part in ended up coming back to the question of whether it’s intolerant to denounce Muslim women who wear veils. Is doing so part of being more vigilant against terrorism? People were asking, and, do these women have anything to do with terrorism anyway? Or are they just the weakest link in the Muslim world, the people it’s safest to kick if you’re feeling hostile? I don’t know the answer. But I’ve learned one lesson from finding out about my bit of the past. If you’re a good hater, you’ll get plenty of publicity now, just like More did. But in the end it’s the people who look for good – the Holbeins - who will be remembered with most respect. Something that many leading members of our government might usefully think about is this: hate doesn’t stand the test of time.
