The Janus Prize is awarded by Lapham’s Quarterly each year to a distinguished historian or writer who has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the past. At this year’s Decades Ball, held on April 4, the 2022 Janus Prize was presented to Hilary Mantel. In 2015 Mantel told an interviewer, “I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian. So it began as second best.” Mantel did not miss her chance. Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & the Light, her trilogy of novels telling the story of Thomas Cromwell’s unlikely rise from a fifteenth-century gutter to the court of King Henry VIII, form a magisterial work of history without peer.

Mantel’s friend Richard Cohen, a Lapham’s Quarterly contributor and editorial board member, introduced her at the event. Cohen is the author of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past. 

Good evening. My name is Richard Cohen. Not that that is unusual in this city. When I left London for New York, in 1999, I was almost immediately invited to a party…which only people called Richard Cohen could attend.

I have also been invited to the Lapham’s Quarterly party, having joined its editorial board in 2011. And now it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce tonight’s winner of the Janus Prize, Dame Hilary Mantel, for her contribution to our understanding of the past.

I have known Hilary—Dame Hilary—for almost exactly twenty years. In 2002 my first book was published, a history of swordplay through the ages—duels, samurai warriors, Olympic fencing scandals and so on—Simon Winchester told me he was delighted to read that of all the nonhuman animals in the world only one can be taught to fence—elephants.

Well, that Christmas I was surprised to see, in a seasonal roundup in The Spectator, that Hilary had chosen my book for special mention. I wrote to her, and she told me that in her youth she too had fenced. And obviously enjoyed it.

But then Hilary is constantly surprising. Did you know she is president of the British Authors Cricket Club? Founded in 1892, it had Arthur Conan Doyle and P.G. Wodehouse playing for it, and now has Sebastian Faulks and Tom Holland. Hilary loves the game and has read more books about cricket than Henry VIII had chancellors and wives combined.

Did she actually play? Well, remember cricket is like baseball but without the fun. I asked her if she would have been a demon bowler, or elegant, attacking bat. She said she would have been “a lobster” —meaning a player who bowled underarm, confusing the batter with trickery and awkward flight. That fits.

Some years ago I interviewed her before an audience at the Rose Theatre in West London. Every reply was perfectly phrased. No ums, errs, hesitations, just wonderfully interesting comments that could have been transcribed without any correction.

But I suspect you all know that. A legacy, in part, of her reading law at college. She’s written eleven novels—just five of them historical works—two collections of short stories and one of the most moving memoirs I have read, Giving Up the Ghost, in 2003.

She’s also not afraid of getting into trouble. In a 2012 lecture, she dared criticize the Duchess of Cambridge as “without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character…precision-made.” It created a furor, leading her to quote her husband saying she could kiss goodbye to a damehood. But the gods played fair, and in 2012 she became a Dame.

How could she not? Her mastery of detail, her sinuous prose, her sheer humanity and understanding of the human heart has meant she has changed people’s appreciation of Tudor times. She had done for Thomas Cromwell what Shakespeare did for Richard III and Cleopatra. She has shaped history.

Lewis Lapham tells me he has read each volume of the Cromwell trilogy three times, but The Mirror & the Light he tossed aside fifty pages from the end, as he couldn’t bear to experience Cromwell’s death. I suspect he is far from being the only one.

Sadly Hilary Mantel cannot be here tonight, much though she longed to. Not least she is moving house—from Devon to southern Ireland.

I haven’t mentioned her wonderful essays. In a collection of them, Mantel Pieces, she writes about a New England minister, John Williams, captured by Mohawks in 1703. She ends the piece: “Williams wrote: ‘God can make dry bones, very dry, to live.’ So can historians; that must be their job.” It has certainly been hers, triumphantly.

Good evening. I wish I could be with you in person to tell you how much this award means to me. When I began my novels about Thomas Cromwell, I didn’t know they’d be a trilogy, and during those first five years of writing my fear was always that I’d please no one, because it’s very hard for a historical novelist to balance her efforts. The literary critic thinks, “Why is this text weighted with so much real-life detail?” And the historian thinks, “How could she bear to leave out all those battles, all those theological squabbles, all those legislative twists and turns?”

Well, I knew the peril, but I took courage, I pushed on with the project, and in the end I did please a great many people. The books, particularly the final novel, were by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and they took about fifteen years out of my life. Actually, I don’t regret a day of it. Partly because they were the spur to so much creativity in other media. There was a TV series, and there will soon be a second; there were three stage plays, a painting, a Thomas Cromwell tapestry in progress; and later this year there’ll be the Wolf Hall picture book, a collection of photographs. But what pleases me most was the book captured the attention of historians, and they led to rethinking and refocusing, and in due focus that fed into new academic work. So this contact between the archive and the imagination has proved a productive one, and that is the ultimate reward for someone who has thought about the past for as long as she’s been a sentient being.

All my work has been an effort to show my readers that history is not a discrete discipline, separable from our ordinary lives. We live in history. We breathe it in and breathe it out. As I record this, the news is dominated by Ukraine, but it’s just one of many corrosive global conflicts based on clashes of interests and values that we must somehow resolve before we are destroyed. It’s not enough to express horror—we must understand as well as denounce and recoil. We must think, and to think we need context, and to have context we need history, history at the center of our teaching and learning. I can’t say that historians are better men and women than other people, and I don’t claim either their expertise can save us, but I do believe the practice of history encourages the cardinal virtues of which we’re so much in need at present: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. But not too much temperance, not this evening. I hope you have a most enjoyable time. Thank you for honoring me with this prize. I’m truly grateful.