It is nine years since I wolfed down the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. I read those two books in quick succession, coming to them late thanks to the television dramatisation of 2015. It is four years since The Mirror and the Light was published and it has been languishing on my e-reader all that time. I decided that I wanted something familiar to read, so finally picked it up.
Reading Mantel’s prose is like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. I had loved her writing style in Wolf Hall and the way it took me into Cromwell’s mind, and The Mirror and the Light did the same. It opens in the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution, with Henry VIII already betrothed to her replacement, Jane Seymour, and Cromwell steering the ship of state through the wake of the scandal, drawing on his network to keep tabs on those jockeying for position, both in favour of the king and against. He is rewarded by the king for ridding him of his unwanted second wife, elevated to a Lord, holder of the Privy Seal.
This final installment in the trilogy is concerned with the succession. Henry has two daughters, now declared illegitimate, and a genuinely illegitimate son. He has hopes that Jane Seymour will bear him a son, but can’t count on it. Cromwell is tasked with bringing Mary, Henry’s daughter with Catherine of Aragon, under control and obedient to her father as head of the new Church of England. Elizabeth, Henry’s daughter with Anne Boleyn, is a months-old baby. From the other end of history, knowing what happens next, it is interesting to read Mantel’s framing of the unknown in the moment she was writing about. There are hints in these daughters of what they would become, in their demeanours. There are hints, too, in Henry’s niece, Margaret Douglas, of how the crown would eventually pass from Tudor to Stuart.
When I read the first two books, Cromwell was a handful of years older than me. Enough time passed between Mantel writing Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light that now Cromwell and I are more of an age. I understood him better in this novel. Mid-50s was, of course, older in terms of life expectancy than it is today, more so for the likes of Cromwell, subject to the moods of a king willing to execute those close to him as soon as they displeased him. Cromwell has half an eye on living his remaining years as well as he can manage, and so there are more scenes with his family, his son Gregory, nephew Richard and servant-ward Rafe Sadler, where Cromwell is chaffed by the younger men as a father figure who is respected but not feared.
Gregory is an interesting contrast to his father, well liked at court and much sought after across the land.
From Somerset to Kent, from the midlands to the northern fells, castles and manors compete to entertain him: a pleasant youth of competent good looks, never over-familiar but at ease with great men, discreet with servants and gentle with the poorer sort …
There are hints here, too, of Gregory Cromwell’s future. He is increasingly involved in court life over the course of the book, schooled by his father, who is also writing a secret book full of ways to understand the king that he intends to leave for Gregory or Richard or Rafe. And this, among other things, is a hint that Cromwell has a sense of his own fate. How could someone so close to the king and so involved in the ways Henry deals with those who displease him not understand that he is only ever one misstep away from his own end?
In her research, Mantel discovered a reference to an illegitimate daughter of Cromwell’s. She weaves her into the story differently to the documentary evidence of her real existence. In The Mirror and the Light, she is Flemish, from Antwerp, the child of a relationship in Cromwell’s youth and a grown woman when Cromwell meets her. Janneke acts as a vehicle for Cromwell to reflect on his past, to think about where he has come from and how he has become the man he is. The Cromwell of this novel is full of reflection, with a hint of doubt from time to time that he has made the best choices.
Cromwell’s life grows increasingly complex over the course of the narrative. He is at Henry’s beck and call, partly through his previous usefulness to the king, partly because he needs to maintain that usefulness in order to maintain his position. It’s a tension that will be familiar to anyone who has made work the greater part of their life, fearful of the loss of employment, seeking meaning for their existence, missing the bigger picture. It’s in my nature to be that person. Towards the end of the novel, there’s a conversation between Cromwell and Margaret Vernon, the Prioress who educated Cromwell’s son. Cromwell says something I have been guilty of believing, too.
Margaret says, ‘You are stouter, Thomas. You look as if you don’t get any fresh air.’
‘Sometimes I try to get out with my falcons,’ he says. ‘But the king might call me back at any time. The Venetians, you know, they draw a line on their ships to see that they don’t overload them. I have no load line. Or none that the king can see.’
‘You don’t have enough help? All these boys …’
He thinks, no one can help. It’s just Henry and Cromwell, Cromwell and Henry.
I felt his lack of load line and understood his belief that no one could take any of his load from him. I have to stop myself ignoring my own load line; I see others at work believing no one can help and taking on more and more until they burn out. It’s one of the great lies of the modern workplace, that you are simultaneously the one person responsible and also entirely expendable and replaceable. Who knows if Cromwell ever truly felt what Mantel applies to her version of him. Management theory didn’t exist then, neither did notions of work-life balance. But we should all try to get out with our falcons from time to time and disregard any attempt by the king to call us back.
Cromwell is a bureaucrat rather than a man of the sword. He is in contrast to the men of noble birth as a consequence, and they do not understand or trust him. This difference also means that, in the absence of an adversary such as Anne Boleyn in the previous books, occasionally Cromwell’s bureaucratic approach to statesmanship makes the narrative drag. Occasionally, too, it means that things that could have injected drama, such as the rebellion against Henry in the north, become background to Cromwell’s adminstration of the realm and alteration of the legal landscape. It is a reflection of who Cromwell was, though – a lawyer elevated to high office thanks to his administrative skills and dedication to enacting change.
I felt sorry for Anne of Cleves, referred to by the court as Anna in order to put some distance in the king’s mind from the previous Anne. Mantel portrays her as a quiet, sheltered young woman, not without knowledge and understanding of the world but ill equipped to deal with a man such as Henry VIII. I felt her confusion at the life she had entered for the sake of politics.
Anne is, of course, Cromwell’s downfall. I thought Mantel got across the suddenness of his change in circumstance very well. I was shocked and also saddened because it meant the end of my time with him as a character. Mantel makes sure never to forget that he wasn’t always a nice man but she also captures his complexity and humanity, and the driving force behind his climb to power and his attempts to secure the future of his family. But of course, Anne isn’t really his downfall. The vanity and changeability of the king is Cromwell’s downfall, as it has been for others before him. Except then he engineered the manner of their fall. Mantel has Rafe Sadler express why Cromwell fell so quickly from Henry’s grace.
‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’
Despite knowing the story of Cromwell’s end, I still wished for a different one. Mantel made me care about this figure from the past. I wished he had had a better outcome. Mantel makes Cromwell’s ending noble but sad. As across the trilogy, in his final days he is haunted by people from his past, seeking approval, wanting to do what is right and stubbornly true to himself. He, Cromwell.
Read 25/02/2024-22/03/2024
06/40 books to read in 2024
What I Think About When I Think About Reading 
Mantel made you wish Cromwell had had a different end.
You led me to start a blog post which has a working title, ‘The power of the pen to alter history’, as I thought about how a good writer of fiction can make readers believe something… UNproven. Because we wish we had the level of intimacy a good author imbues a story with – and we THINK we don’t hold fiction to an absolute truth standard, but maybe we do – when there is nothing else.
Good post.
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I read Tracy Borman’s biography of Cromwell soon after I’d read the first two installments in Mantel’s trilogy. Borman interprets the historical record in an engaging way and delivers a less romantic Cromwell than Mantel but one who is more human than previous readings of the evidence have produced. The biography by the historian confirmed the depth of research that went into the fiction by the novelist. As a historian, historical fiction can be a tricky read for me, and any tampering with the accepted facts has to have an interesting or entertaining reason to keep me engaged.
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I just wrote a blog post about The power of the pen to alter history – about this exact point.
I hadn’t even considered the ‘tampering with history’ aspect – the post is about the responsibility a writer has with historical characters when the writer is trying to take the known history into account as accurately as possible!
Tampering goes off in another infinity of directions, including fan fiction and propaganda.
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