The Mirror and the Light

Hilary Mantel

Harper Collins

Otago Daily Times, April 18th 2020

“Somewhere – or Nowhere, perhaps – there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.”

These few succinct sentences from the glorious conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy capture the essence of the man at the centre of Britain’s transition to a modern nation-state: a self-professed ‘common man’ with the power to shape the royal will for the betterment of his fellow countryman and convinced of in his moral authority to do so.

The Mirror and the Light cover the last four years of Cromwell’s life, from the beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536 to his own execution for heresy and treason on 18 July 1940, the day of Henry’s marriage to Anne’s cousin Katherine. At its opening we see the man at the height of his powers, with spies in every noble household and international court, second only to the king himself in power and authority. But whether it is publishing an English bible so that people can see with their own eyes that “nowhere in the scripture does it mention penances and popes and purgatory and cloisters and beads and blessed candles, or ceremonies and relics…not even priests”,  or requiring the recordings of births, deaths and marriages so that the lowliest peasant can know his lineage in the same way as a man of noble birth, the general populace see only a man intent on enriching himself at their expense, whilst his rivals at court use his own tactics against him to sour the affections of an increasingly erratic and fractious monarch. It is a balancing act that can only end in one way, and his downfall, haunted by the ghosts of Thomas Moore and Cardinal Woolsey, is even faster and more precipitous than his ascendency.

As in the previous two novels, Mantel combines comprehensive research with a keen understanding of the human condition in her evocation of the man behind the mythos and explores the way events can be interpreted for good or ill depending upon the lens through which they are viewed. Are Cromwell’s desire to free his countrymen from superstitious priests beneficent or arrogant? Is saving those who have fallen from Henry’s favour evidence of kindness or complicity? And when does protecting the king from what he does not wish to know move from the art of a courtier to that of a traitor?

Reading between the lines of letters and documents by his contemporaries to add flesh to the facts and supplementing the historical record as needed to allow him to explain his thoughts and beliefs, she paints a picture of a complex and conflicted character: calculating and cruel on his dealings with his enemies, loyal and compassionate with his friends and family, and a man whose vision of the future is increasingly burdened by the shades of the past.

The result is to render both Cromwell and his king in a much more sympathetic light than they are traditionally portrayed; the former driven by a genuine belief that he is acting in the interests of king and country, the latter desperate to reconcile his position as a favourite of God with a string of personal tragedies and the physical changes wrought by age and injury. But where Henry is oblivious to his flaws, Cromwell is exquisitely aware of the contradictions of his position, the compromises and calculated risks that will eventually spell his ruin, an ending all the more tragic because he sees but fails to register the seeds of his own undoing.

That Mantel can do all this whilst managing a cast of characters whose internecine relationships make the Kardashians seem like the Cosbys, and in prose of an effortless beauty that bespeaks years of labour, is astonishing. That she has managed to sustain it across three substantial novels even more so. Forget the Man Booker hat trick; this is a Nobel-worthy achievement.