Mantel’s finale to
THOMAS Cromwell — son of a Putney blacksmith; brawler, fixer and merchant; a man whose opinions on apple cultivation are as trenchant as those on the English Bible — is in the ascendant. The
Mirror and the Light, which concludes Hilary Mantel’s majestic
Wolf Hall trilogy, begins as the second novel, Bring Up the Bodies, ends: with Anne Boleyn’s sleek black head on the block. Cromwell, whose machinations did much to bring about the severance of head from body, queen from king and England from Rome, remembers to thank the executioner: “It is important to reward good service with encouragement, as well as a purse.”
So the reader returns to the Tudor court, and there’s the immediate pleasure of arriving at a familiar place and greeting familiar faces: there’s that sap Mark Smeaton fiddling with his lute; and would you look at little Jane Seymour, with her small white hands! Here’s Stephen Gardiner, cunning as a viper, slippery as an eel; here too are the Reformers Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, already with the faintest whiff of burning martyr rising from the folds of their coats.
The king grows stout. His gilded hair fades; his ardent eye, so fatally married to princely ambition and a malleable faith, does not.
And in every corner, at every table: the inevitable Cromwell, whose consciousness the reader inhabits — the king’s right hand, and his right foot also. He plays both ends against his majesty’s middle: a morning with Margaret Pole, behind whose “long Plantagenet face” ticks scheming for the throne; an afternoon with Archbishop Cranmer, and his Lutheran tendencies. Wider still and wider shall his bounds be set: he is Lord Privy Seal, he is the first Earl of Essex, he could follow you into a revolving door, and come out in front. Still, what goes up must come down, and “the king never made a man but he destroyed him again”.
The Mirror and the Light is so closely joined to its antecedents you cannot see the seam, but I found the faintest alteration in the treatment of Cromwell. It is not a question of sentimentality, but rather a deepening of his humanity, extending him still further in the direction of both virtue and villainy.
When Cromwell makes fum