Published in 2020, this is the only part of the trilogy about Thomas Cromwell that Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) didn't win the Booker Prize for (although it was longlisted). Wolf Hall won in 2009, and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012.

I acquired a printed copy of Wolf Hall, and read on my own. For this third part -- as for the second, Bring Up the Bodies -- I listened to the audio-version (narrated by Ben Miles, whose absolutely masterful performance I lack words to adequately praise), and I followed along with Simon Haisell's Footnotes and Tangents reading group.

This corporate approach definitely enhanced my appreciation of the work. Every week, Haisell offers interesting insights and supplementary material to support the block of text we've covered; and every week, fellow-readers share their reactions and comments. Both elements have been valuable.

Also, the schedule forces you to slow down. Well, it doesn't really -- you can read ahead, of course, if you want to. But I prefer not to. If I can, I stick to the plan. I did fall behind at one point, when we were moving and setting off to Europe, and then I binged to catch up again. But basically, you're reading, reviewing, pausing, and then reading again. I've enjoyed the different dynamic. Rather than powering on through, and then moving on to something else, you live with these characters for a long, long time.

I didn't listen to Wolf Hall, but if I had done, it would have taken just over 25 hours. Bring Up the Bodies, which I did listen to, is a mere spithag, at a little more than 16 hours. The Mirror and the Light takes in excess of 38 hours... As a group, then, we started reading it on 22 July, and we finished on Christmas Eve.

And -- although we always knew that Henry VIII's minister, Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), was not a lily-white character, and although we always knew, because it's history, that he was going to be publicly beheaded on Tower Hill on 28 July (the same day that Henry married his fourth wife) -- I think there would have been few members of our reading group who weren't emotionally attached to him, and saddened as he lost ground, and angry at those who betrayed him, and horrified to follow him to the bitter end. There was tension all through this novel, despite our prior knowledge of its outcome. Mantel is an expert in creating what Haisell calls "that low drumbeat of dread".


Henry VIII, 1542

We pick up the story with a bloody reprise of Anne Boleyn's death (the 1536 event that closed the second volume). And we follow the king's remarriage to Jane Seymour, the eventual birth of the much-longed-for male heir, the consequent death of Jane, and Henry's disastrous marriage to Anna of Cleves, whom the king disliked on sight (Mantel would have us believe because she could not repress a shudder on first seeing him). We follow the moves of other players on the chessboard of Europe, not to mention the real-deal threat from the internal rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the constant challenge of the Plantagenet Pole family. We follow the ebb and flow of Protestant and Catholic strands of doctrine, and the misery of those deemed to be heretics, and condemned to be burnt alive. And we follow Cromwell's apparently inexorable rise, only to see his grip start to fade, and his enemies grow stronger and more difficult to elude, so that, finally, they bring him down.


Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, with a splendiforous cat. He's the grandson of the untrustworthy Wriothesley we know from the book


Cardinal Reginald Pole: "In each novel," Haisell points out, "the king tasks Cromwell with destroying an obstruction in the royal design. Thomas More in Wolf Hall. Anne Boleyn in Bring Up the Bodies. In this third book, the king’s opponent is Reginald Pole... Unlike with More and Anne, we are unsuccessful in the king’s service. Pole survives and, as cardinal, returns to England under the reign of Mary to be her Archbishop of Canterbury, and England’s last Catholic archbishop."


Broad Street, Oxford, 2024. Monument to the three martyrs (Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer), burnt at the stake in 1555 and 1556 at the behest of Cromwell's arch-scourge, Stephen Gardiner

Talking of heresy, you do, of course, have to ask whether The Mirror and the Light is too long. Is it too baggy? Is Mantel being self-indulgent? Would it have benefited from some brisk action with a pair of editorial clippers?

Initially, I sometimes wondered. But the more I went on, the more I thought every single page was needed. This book, like the previous two, looks through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. It's not an "I" narrative; Cromwell is "he, Cromwell". But what we see is what he saw; the way we experience people is the way he experienced them.

And this is the book in which his past catches up with him. More and more, we re-live, re-interpret, and re-evaluate the events that have made Cromwell who he is: His father; the eel-boy; all that hard Putney life; the burning he witnessed at way too early an age to process such a thing. His relationship with Wolsey; his relationship with Henry; all the battles he has fought to get where he is now; all the collateral damage... And all the people who, whether he likes it or not, tell him THEIR versions of his life, many of them much more negative than the one he -- though never one to spare himself -- has believed to be true. Increasingly, therefore, Cromwell finds it hard to throw off the ghosts of his past.

Mantel picks each of these pieces up, and turns it, like a prism, to show us its different facets. How could we appreciate any of this fully, without lots of detail, lots of recapping, lots of reflection?

As Haisell points out: "Cromwell’s story is not linear. Time does appear to roll forward, but his past is full of gaps and half-rememberings. The Mirror and the Light has a story, but it requires the backstitch and the loop of thread lost beneath layers of cloth. To go forward we must go back."

There's no stopping the memories, says Mantel: "Months, years have gone by, when Lord Cromwell has never thought of his early life; when he has pushed the past into the yard and barred the door on it. Now it is not Gardiner's questions about Italy that trouble him: Italy keeps its secrets. It is Putney that works away at him, distant but close. When he was weak from fever the past broke in, and now he has no defence against his memories, they recapitulate themselves any time they like: when he sits in the council chamber, words fall about him in a drizzling haze, and he finds himself wrapped in the climate of his childhood."

As one fellow-reader said in the comments, we encounter whole new worlds in every section. And it's true that the detail in all this going-back is beautiful: The clothes, the hats, the food, the music, the landscapes, the running images.

Ghosts are never far away. The specific ones, of course: Wolsey, Thomas More, Cromwell's father, Anne Boleyn, and so many others. But also the whole haunted backdrop of England: "Can you make a new England?" Cromwell wonders, "You can write a new story... You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep cold wells. It's not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it's those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand years before that... They bubble out of the ground, wear away the shoreline, sow weeds among the crops and erode the workings of mines."

So many worlds beneath our own...


There are a lot of fish in this book, and they don't always get a good press. Cromwell's cook: "Englishmen were never made to eat fish. Salt water gets in your brain." The picture, appropriately disconcerting, is The Allegory of Water, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1566


The Whitehall mural of Henry VIII, a triumph of propaganda


Robin Hood's Stride, Derbyshire. Who knew that Henry VIII enjoyed dressing up as the man of the greenwood?


Anna of Cleves. Her painting has been beautifully restored

***

So what's with the title? At root, it's a bit of flattery from Cromwell for Henry: "'Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.' Henry repeats the phrase, as if cherishing it: the mirror and the light."

But, of course, the image spins off into all corners of the book, transforming itself as it moves. "In Wolf Hall," says Haisell, "it was the play. In Bring Up the Bodies it was the chase. The metaphor that holds together the third novel is the mirror: reflected light; the image doubled; the world reversed."

Such beautiful imagery: "Father and son [Cromwell and Gregory] ride out together in the evening, the sun a perfect crimson orb above the line of the downs. The sky has become a mirror, against which the sun moves: light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world. Gregory’s chatter stills; the creak of harness, the breathing of the horses, seems to muffle itself, so they move in silence, outlined against silver, tall against the sky; and as the upland fades into a pillowy distance, he feels himself riding into nowhere, a blank, where only memory stirs." (These evocative passages recur throughout the book. Mantel conjures landscape and atmosphere superbly.)

The mirror/light contrast also exquisitely illuminates the role of Cromwell: "If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone."

Even in his last moments of life, Cromwell is still looking for the light: "He has vanished; he is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall."

***

A couple of times, the image of Icarus crops up, and Haisell draws our attention to a painting (Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder), and a poem (Musee des beaux arts, by W.H. Auden). Both emphasize the idea that great events play out against the background of an ordinary world, in which we don't always have someone to point and say, "Pay attention, because this will make history."

Almost at the end of the book, the image occurs again, as Cromwell ponders: "He sees Icarus, his wings melting, plummeting into the waves. It was Daedalus who invented the wings and made the first flight, he more circumspect than his son: scraping above the labyrinth, bobbing over the walls, skimming the oceans so low his feet were wet. But then as he rose on the breeze, peasants gaped upwards, supposing they were seeing gods or giant moths; and as he gained height there must have been an instant when the artificer knew, in his pulse and his bones, This is going to work. And that instant was worth the rest of his life."

It's Daedalus that Cromwell identifies with, Haisell points out: "'Why do we blame Daedalus for the fall, and only remember his failures?' Daedalus is the inventor, the master craftsman who outwitted King Minos by escaping the labyrinth on wings made from feathers, thread and beeswax. Daedalus designed the labyrinth that became his prison. Cromwell perfected the machinery of justice that will kill him."

Haisell continues: "This quotation is one of my favourite passages from the entire trilogy. Cromwell asks us to forget for a brief moment the death of Icarus and the failure of the fall. It is what Mantel has been doing throughout the books: letting us feel the full ecstasy of the fleeting moment while simultaneously seeing the shadows on the future. How do we capture the vitality of that instant, while knowing its sad conclusion? That has been Mantel’s task, and her accomplishment."



***

At the end of my audio-version we're also offered a closing conversation between Mantel and Miles. She explains that she "hears" her books in her head as she writes. That's obviously one of the reasons they work so incredibly well as audio-books.

Historian and biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch says Mantel's version of Thomas Cromwell is really quite close to his own. Which is interesting, in that both of them worked with a one-sided set of sources (most of Cromwell's outward correspondence has disappeared -- presumably destroyed when he was arrested), and had to read everything against the grain, as it were.

What an achievement the recreation of this figure has been. Haisell again: "I don’t think Hilary Mantel’s trilogy is about rehabilitating his reputation or lionising Master Secretary... It is about seeing Cromwell as a man who was alive. Mantel said, 'History is not the past -- it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.' Historical fiction is not the past either, but it is the imaginative work that must be done so that we can meet the dead as we do the living: listening with our full selves."

François Villon gives us the opening epigraph to The Mirror and the Light:

Brother men, you who live after us,
Do not harden your hearts against us.

And it closes with Petrarch:

"For you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. When the darkness is dispelled, our descendants will be able to walk back, into the pure radiance of the past."

Hilary Mantel certainly played a starring role in making that happen.