For many years our firm of booksellers handled the sale of Dame Hilary’s archive. During our centenary last year I sent out monthly musings and this was my account of our dealings with her.
… Finally, this is the story of the archive of Dame Hilary Mantel. I name her because she fully expected me to write about it at some point. Firstly my father and then I had been visiting her every five years to take away, list, value and send each tranche to the Huntington Library (a truly wonderful place) in California. Payments were then made directly to Hilary, so our fees were based on time engaged. For the most part, each transaction went relatively smoothly. For one part though the Huntington offered a very low sum indeed, saying pretty much that that was all the money they had. I recommended not accepting that and Hilary mentioned to me that another dealer was “snapping at her heels”, which I passed on. The full sum we had suggested was quickly found.
I think it is fair to say that Hilary and I got on very well. Certainly we made each other laugh in our e-mails and there was always a warmth to our dealings. She visited me at our home to drop off an additional box of papers just a week before her shockingly sudden death. I felt a very real sense of loss.
What turned out to be the very final part of the archive was ready for me to collect, when Covid struck. As restrictions eased though I was able to drive down to Budleigh Salterton again. Hilary had kindly agreed that Naya, our eldest daughter, could join us for lunch since she was about to begin a degree in History at Edinburgh University. Who better to learn from? With great grace and in very few words, she imparted profound thoughts about the nature of historical truth. Naya and I combined the trip with a visit to the Donkey Sanctuary at Sidmouth with a view to promoting my own book, Animal Trust, about which Hilary had been very complimentary, and researching for a sequel (coming soon). That was its own rather tortuous experience as it unfolded …
After lunch though, we followed Hilary and her husband Gerald to an outdoor storage space on scrubby wasteland. The container was opened and Naya and I carried, under strict supervision, around twenty boxes to the car. I remember Gerald’s being adamant that we would never fit it all in – but we had done this before. Just before we left, Hilary looked worried. “I can’t find Ben’s head.”
When Ben Miles played Thomas Cromwell in an adaptation of the Wolf Hall trilogy, a replica of his head had been made for the execution scene. He had asked Hilary to store it for him on the basis that his young children might come across it and be terrified. Hilary continued, “I know I put it in a box, and I know I labelled it in huge letters. He had to breathe through a straw for hours whilst it was made, he won’t be happy if he has to go through that again.” I asked if she was sure it couldn’t have been in one of the boxes we had already loaded. “No, that’s quite impossible.” We drove away leaving Hilary and Gerald to continue their search.
For reasons I have never been able to fathom, but apparently related to the pandemic, the Huntington instructed me that I must supply a copy of every single piece of paper in advance of shipment, with the contents of each envelope, folder, notebook, e-mail and box file listed in detail. The shipping boxes were to be labelled in great detail too. It took me a full week. It was pretty tedious (in spite of the great interest of the contents of course), and frustrating in the sense that it seemed so utterly pointless. I worked quickly with the aid of specially purchased rubber finger pads, a copy stand and a camera with a remote control, to produce over 7,500 photographs and a 16,500 word document. Additionally, I bought some good watermarking software, planning to use a thick, bold “HM” monogram to obscure some of the content – otherwise we would simply be handing over a free version of the archive, albeit digital. When it finally came to shipping time, I asked how best I should send the images. I was told that none of it was any longer required. Mine not to reason why and ah well, I was paid for my time.
I am currently reading a posthumous collection of her short pieces, Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self, a Life in Writing, John Murray, 2023. She is best known for her historical fiction, especially the Wolf Hall Trilogy, but that isn’t really a genre for me. Which slightly reminds me of a co-director of the bookshop once saying to a customer, “Good Lord no, we don’t read the books.” Customers do sometimes expect us to know every word of their favourite author’s output though. One such in New York, a client of Simon Finch who was my employer at the time, would open some valuable eighteenth-century work of philosophy at random, stab his finger equally randomly at the page and demand to know the meaning of a particular phrase. I knew how great a writer Hilary was just from her correspondence but now I really get it. She writes like a dream. Not a word is out of place, not a word is wasted. And she has no fear of controversy, nor of a sharp tongue. Writing a review of a biography, for example, there is this classic example of damning with faint praise: “His astonishing career could stand a more sumptuous treatment than this modest and workmanlike book affords.” The royal family, Margaret Thatcher and many others are not spared withering comment. Writing of the eighteenth-century childhood of the future Duke of Orléans, she says that “the child was inducted into a protocol intended to squeeze out of him any vestige of warmth or humanity … All signs of emotion, in his presence, were to be erased; he should neither express feeling, nor see it expressed. Above all, the child who would grow up to own a tenth of France was to be protected from his fellow countrymen; he should never glimpse a common, hungry Frenchman … His world was to be as remote as if he inhabited another planet, with rarefied air.” Which all sounds very much like the British private education system, of which I am a product, and absolutely bang on in particular for the way in which our governing Etonians were raised.
Hilary and Gerald spent several years in Saudi Arabia. Of that she writes with her usual concision and elegance: “When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the compliment of hating it.”
Hilary was kind enough to give me a signed copy of The Wolf Hall Picture Book, 4th Estate, 2022, a book of photographs by Ben and George Miles (see above) with text by Hilary. The images “loosely track” the life of Thomas Cromwell, looking at neglected corners, behind the scenes and not eschewing the presence of modern artefacts.
Animal Wild 
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