We asked writers and thinkers associated with Blue Labour for their reading suggestions for lockdown. The choices both reflect the strange circumstances we now find ourselves in and provide the intellectual and cultural backdrop to the wider politics of Blue Labour. The sixth and final selection in this series is by Maurice Glasman.

You can read the first selection, by Jonathan Rutherford, here. The second selection, by Tobias Phibbs, here. The third selection, by Jack Hutchison, here. The fourth selection, by Liam Stokes, here. And the fifth selection, by Paul Embery, here.

Lockdown, for me, has been a time of great sadness and loss.  My beloved friend Rabbi Pinter died of the virus and the sense of grief disturbed my soul.  My oldest friend, Patrick, died far away.  No funerals, no conversations.  There is a dreamlike element to the length of this that fills me with dread; the idea that I will wake up and it will all be true.  Netflix, Facebook and Zoom dominating social and working life, an utter dependence on my phone and the end of intimacy and real physical presence.  It feels sometimes that not only my friends but my previous life has died and drifted into historical obscurity, like the history of our country, subsumed into the homogenising morgue of white privilege.  An object of contempt and disdain.  Long ago and far away.  It feels a bit like the death sentence has already been passed and I am merely awaiting execution.  I don’t know about Labour but I am certainly feeling blue.  Sadness and yearning permeate the time. 

I have found it hard to watch television or even listen to music, as if the pleasures of distraction are sinful.  A sense of stillness descended around me and it seemed impertinent to disturb it. 

In all this, there has been plenty of time for reading, and that has kept me company. 

I received the third part of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, on my birthday, March 8th.  That was when lockdown started for me.  The City of Bergamo, where I had spent a lot of time when I lived in Italy, was dying.  A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that had formed over Wuhan was beginning to darken the sky around me.  That was the day I knew it was coming and that social distancing and self-isolation lay before me.  As Don McLean once said, that was the day the music died.  When people grew distant and reality was mediated through a screen.  I turned to my new book as if it were a surviving remnant of a previous civilisation, a means of connecting to a life that I had lost, a history that no longer mattered.  I thought it through.  There is no vaccine, and there will not be one for maybe another year.  The virus is highly contagious and from what I could make out the scientists did not know very much about it at all.  Football, concerts, pubs, meals, Parliament, politics and conversation seemed to fade away, no festivals with family, no punctuation; and the long dreadful quiet nightmare began.  The seamless days of no beginning that never really end.  The only way of dealing with the plague in the sixteenth century was lockdown and it was still the only remedy we had. 

And that brings in Thomas Cromwell who has loomed large in my imagination since I was 16.  He was the object of devotion of my first favourite historian, G.R. Elton, and I always thought Cromwell was the prototype for his nephew, Ben Elton, when he created Blackadder.  Thomas Cromwell as an eternal figure of English history, clearing up the mess of aristocratic incompetence and vanity.  Elton’s book, Reformation Europe, made a huge impression on me and that led me to read his Tudor Revolution in Government and Reform and Reformation in which Thomas Cromwell shines as the architect of Tudor Statecraft.  He framed the trilogy of Parliament, Protestantism and Monarchy that defined the ideology and institutional framework of the English state for the next four centuries.  He oversaw the first English translation of the Bible.  He endowed Trinity College with chairs in Maths, Natural Science, Greek, Hebrew and Latin that set the frame for the King James Bible and the pioneering role of science within our universities.  The Greenwich Maritime College set the scene for naval supremacy and the county hundreds, justices of the peace and grammar school system were expanded and defined the body politic.  The whole idea of the Ancient Constitution, of the King in Parliament was established so that Henry could not quite rule by divine right.  All that palaver had to go through Parliament.  All this combined with the work scheme to build fortifications and the first national welfare system delivered through the census and the parish.  This gives a clue as to why I was interested in Tudor Statecraft in the development of Blue Labour.  It created a decentralised set of endowed institutions embedded within localities that transformed the condition of the country. All this, and Cromwell was the son of a ironmonger from Putney who had Machiavelli translated into English.  Hilary Mantel was definitely on to something. 

I had read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies when they were published and I decided to read them again so that I could place the Mirror and the Light in its proper place.  I felt I had the time.  While Hilary Mantel does not delve too deeply into the institutional transformation of the realm, it is the case that Thomas Cromwell was vice-regent of the Church and vice chancellor of Cambridge University so we do get glimpses of the transformation.  Who else could have invented a Church, ‘Catholic and Reformed’?  He lived in the City of London and was instrumental in cementing the emerging bankers into the new polity.  The Lord Mayor and the Alderman have walk on parts, particularly during public executions but there is little of their lending to the Crown in return for the maintenance of their ancient liberties.  All of that is political economy and statecraft, but the liquidation of the monasteries is well described, and it was city merchants who were the chief beneficiaries.  The Crown always needed their money.  Richard Riche is the central City character there and he comes over more like Dick Dastardly. 

What Hilary Mantel does do is resurrect the dead.  Her depiction of Cardinal Wolsey is magnificent in its vivacity.  In his every appearance his scale and grandeur is present, his mentoring of Cromwell evoked in some detail.  Between them they invented the civil service and an educational system.  As is the systematic removal of all who brought Wolsey down, except one, Henry VIII.  Cromwell’s loyalty to Wolsey, in his life and death, is the fundamental theme of the trilogy and when Cromwell is rejected and accused by Wolsey’s daughter of rejecting him, that is when he feels his death approaching, that is his moment of desolation and prescience.  He sees himself in the mirror, in the light, and it is transient.  That is the moment when the emptiness of his own life is revealed, and its precariousness. 

Henry is also evoked generously, with a skittish sense of menace, a demented sense of honour and the emptiness of his exclusively public persona is paraded.  His doomed yearning for an heir is embedded in his musical sense of romance and his sinister threat of death.  And the centrality of women to this story is located there.  Catherine and Mary hover between discarded extras and central characters and Cromwell is thoughtful with both.  Jane Seymour is described with a brutal intimacy that eludes Anne Boleyn, who cannot quite escape the genre of calculated seductress surrounded by a corrupt family.  She never quite comes to life.  Cromwell describes her as a merchant who demanded the highest price for her product but the presence of her body remains elusive.  She simmers but she doesn’t shine.  Her murder is sudden but even after 2000 pages, so is Cromwell’s.  And somehow rushed.  After three months of reading I felt that Mantel was too quick in the end.  I wanted to know more of Cromwell’s thoughts, of how he fell and was outmanoeuvred by Gardiner and Norfolk.  For all its magnificence, the end felt sketchy and unresolved.  Maybe it took his great nephew Oliver Cromwell to settle the score and bring resolution.  It took 100 years for that story to play out. 

To my mind Hilary Mantel has written the greatest English novels of our time.  Her description of the English countryside, the houses, most particularly the sky is unrivalled.  Her intimate understanding of the reviled and despised Cromwell is sustained in its sympathy and understanding.  His tone and language ring true and he is present throughout, trying to set England straight, to give it a structure, a story, a method.  That is the meaning of the census, the Church, the laws and the Bible.  Her description of Sir Thomas More is seen through Cromwell’s eyes, and through that our concern with class is dealt with well.  The same cannot be said of Catholicism, which was retained in much of the Anglican structure and cannot be summarised as too many Saints days and a reluctance to control the mob.  The novel is an act of sustained understanding and imaginative empathy that moved me greatly and left me full of admiration.  Its achievement can be grasped in the sense that it felt a bit short. 

During these times of historic erasure I wonder if anyone will be interested in it in a decade.  One of the curiosities of a King as greedy as Henry is that he was disinterested in the colonisation of America.  While the Emperor Charles was plundering his way through South America, decimating the population and stealing their gold, Henry was entirely uninterested in his father’s expedition to New Foundland by John Cobbett.  While the gold flowed back to Spain, Henry plundered the monasteries for money and relied on the City of London for loans and grants.  His main interest in Atlantic voyages was trying to find ways to sail to China. 

Above all, Mantel places Cromwell as the embodiment of an England that had never before exerted its power, of the emergence of a new class that both aped and despised the aristocracy.  He had to become the Earl of Essex before he could be killed.  And along the way he generated a new story and a set of institutions that constrained and controlled divine right.  His legacy could not be killed and in the description of his nephew, Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s grandfather, Hilary Mantel has set the scene for a new novel, that I doubt she has the inclination or energy to write.