Power play for a king’s favour
inescapably, given the arc of his story, Cromwell must contend with his own downfall. It may be a fact well known to the reader but it is merely suspected by Cromwell. He is more haunted and weary here than in the two earlier novels. Then he was a blur of activity, saddling a horse and riding for miles and hours on the king’s business.
Here he is soured by a reign that has seen one queen divorced, one beheaded, one dead from post-pregnancy complications and one put aside by a now-corpulent, corrosive, middle-aged king who is cranky with pain from an unhealed leg wound, and anxious about the future of his Tudor dynasty. Mantel’s nuanced portrait of Cromwell is vivid. He’s an unforgettable 50-year-old with a “thickset, imperturbable body” and small quick eyes in a face that makes him look like a murderer, even if he’s happily thinking of his beloved son Gregory; even if he’s pondering the failed, unripe apricots in his garden. It’s a virtuoso character study of a man so well informed that he is seemingly at the centre of everything, infiltrating aristocratic households and embassies with his men who are indefatigably “spying and prying and copying and purloining from chests and thieving keys” and passing their findings on to him.
Amid the machinations and manoeuvres, he’s also capable of a dark, wry bleak humour that makes his perspective on unfolding events so enthralling.
It is all so brilliantly done, a suspenseful and tantalising unfurling of a life that ends after 48 days in prison with the chop of an axe, leaving the reader bereft of his enigmatic presence.