Hidden in Plain Sight

Michael Carter, a properties historian at English Heritage and the man who oversees, among others, the ruins of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, is troubled by the effect that Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has had on the public imagination. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, for which Thomas Cromwell, the ‘hero’ of Wolf Hall, was primarily responsible, has, Carter argues, ‘become part of a narrative which is somehow about saving England and putting it on an enlightened path to what will eventually become secular liberal democracy’.