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Hilary Mantel: The Mirror and the Light (Book Review)
Aka the third and final volume of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy. Overall: the same virtues and flaws as the two previous installments. The prose is still elegant and intense. Mantel can be fantastic with both black humor, from on early set piece onward, the conversation between Jane Seymour, her brothers and Cromwell after her wedding night with Henry, in which you're never quite sure Jane (Mantel's Jane is still the most interesting fictional Jane Seymour in Tudor literature) isn't trolling the men in order to make them squirm. And the way she describes the horrible violence of the era somehow manages to be both visceral and never feel voyeuristic or for shock effect, or the opposite, violence between treated as "well, that was how things were" and therefore to be shrugged off; cases in point being an execution by burning Cromwell watches (not in flashback, as in Wolf Hall, but in the present) and of course the ending of her novel. Because Hilary Mantel stays with Cromwell's pov all the way, through his ending. His ending being - ! - a botched execution where the executioner had to try several times before succeeding in separating Thomas Cromwell's head from his body, this allows her to let the dying Cromwell flash back to the very first scene of Wolf Hall, his father beating the child Thomas and shouting at him to get up, and it's a horrid and yet fantastic symmetry achieved. Not to mention that not many writers would have the confidence to write this particular event from the pov of the participant and manage to pull it off in a way that feels real.
Flaws: well, as expected. Mantel's Thomas Cromwell is more haunted in this last installment, with the dead Anne Boleyn and the five men who died with her being on his mind long after after Henry's already looking for wife No.4, but he's still Cromwell Our Contemporary, kind to children, championing women, a Renaissance superhero fluent in most European languages (it's a big surprise when he admits that he only knows a little German, picked up from Nuremberg merchants in Venice), always outwitting everyone else (until events out of his control overtake him), with not a single Renaissance attitude that would sit uncomfortably with the reader.
He pushes the cause of religious reform and developing Protestantism, but he's not in any way religious the way the rest of his contemporaries are. (This is especially noticable when Mantel lets her Cromwell reflect that he doesn't follow "Brother Martin", i.e. Luther, he's more inclined to the Doctors in Geneva (i.e. Calvin and Zwingli). But do we see Cromwell actually show Calvinistic beliefs, like, say, the predestination doctrine (one of the key differences to Lutheran Protestantism and the Catholic faith alike)? We do not, because Cromwell believing that some were chosen and others were not goes directly against Mantel's conception of him. Then there's Cromwell and sex: The Mirror and the Light introduces an illegitimate daughter neither he nor the reader had had any idea about, a product of his time in the Netherlands. Now Mantel does actually some interesting things with her, as well as with Cromwell's legitimate son Gregory, to show Cromwell's image of himself as a father clashing with how he is perceived by his offspring. But when I read in the afterword that the character of Jenneke (the Dutch illegitimate daughter) is fictional but that there probably was a real illegitimate daughter, born shortly after the death of Cromwell's wife, you should have seen me roll my eyes. Because again, it's our author avoiding or prettifying something that otherwise would not sit well with the reader (in this case, cheating on his wife, which the historical Cromwell must have done if he had a daughter born shortly after her death). Also, ever since learning about Hungersford I had been wondering whether she would bring up Cromwell introducing a law against buggery in Parliament to begin with. Nope. Can't have Cromwell actively making life for gay people worse.
Given Thomas More died two books ago, you'd think she and Cromwell would have other fish to fry, but no: The Mirror and the Light doubles down on something hinted in Wolf Hall and raising eyebrows even there, since the dates just won't fit: More being personally responsible for the death of Tyndale. (Who outlived More by a year.) (No, Mantel doesn't change the date of Tyndale's death, she just has Thomas More, while locked up in the Tower and on trial for his own life, organize and finance a spy ring to go after Tyndale. (My favourite summation of novelists, not just Mantel, letting More bring down Tyndale comes from![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sonetka, who said: Undoubtedly he would have if he could have, but seriously: he couldn't have.) Being without your head is an alibi even for Tomas More, you'd think. Not in The Mirror and the Light, though, where Cromwell and his newly discovered daughter talk about how he's gone too easy on More who thus was able to organize Tyndale's death from beyond the grave.
(To be fair: More gets also used in a more unexpected way late in the novel, I get to that.)
Then there's the "Pilgrimage of Grace", the uprising explicitly directed against Cromwell and triggered, but not exclusively so, by the dissolution of the monasteries as well the tremendous social injustices of the 1530s. This was a popular movement brutally repressed. But since Mantel's Cromwell is the man of the people versus any number of petty aristocrats, the Pilgrimage of Grace is inspired by a few selfish Catholic aristos exploiting superstitious peasants, and none of its demands justified. Now this I could buy as something Cromwell (both in Mantel and in history) genuinely believed, and it is tricky to get across that what your pov character whose pov you never leave might not be the truth, but she manages it on other occasions, so considering the rest of the three novels, I'm assuming this particular assessment is one she shares.
And naturally, Mantel's Cromwell still only threatens torture and uses psychological terror to get his way. (In Bring up the Bodies, he does this with Mark Smeaton, in The Mirror and the Light, with Geoffrey Pole.) He never is responsible for physical cruelty; the London Carthusian monks who according to history were hung up to die of starvation and in their own excrement in Mantel's novel died only of prison fever. Cramner might ask for someone to be burned (in a bit of irony foreshadowing, given Cramner's own death years after Cromwell's), but Cromwell never does. He watches, and is ashamed. Because he's our contemporary.
And then there's the way Cromwell is made to look better (at least I assume that's the intention) by disdaining people the author deems worse. The Mirror and the Light opens directly after Anne Boleyn's execution. Cromwell is appalled that Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, didn't kneel with the rest when the woman got executed and is still trash talking her. A few months later, when George Boleyn's widow, Jane, Lady Rochford, is back at court, serving Queen Jane Seymour and talking about her with Cromwell, he thinks "Isn't destroying one Queen enough for you?" This evidently is meant as historical foreshadowing unrelated to Jane Seymour, and Katherine Howard will show up in the last third of the novel, but the sheer self righteousness from a man who in Mantel's continuity took Jane Boleyn's testimony and used it against Anne is breathtaking, without the author seeming to realise it.
This said, you can tell that between Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, Mantel had read and reviewed Julia Fox' groundbreaking book on Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. Because while she couldn't alter one basic premise she'd followed in Bring up the Bodies, the assumption that Jane had reported on her husband and Anne to Cromwell (which was pre-Fox a commonly held belief until Fox demonstrated there's actually no contemporary evidence for it, more here, the newly revised Lady Rochford is actually a far cry from the standard issue jealous and abused wife depiction Mantel shared in the previous novel. She's smart, cynical, yes, but in a witty way, which is new for fictional Jane Boleyns, doesn't let Cromwell get away with platitudes and homilies, and their conversations are highlights of the novel. Mantel also uses the background of her father, Lord Morley, the Latin and Greek scholar, which pre-Fox I don't think anyone did.
Speaking of conversations that are fun to read: Cromwell and the Imperial Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, are depicted as Worthy Opponents who really enjoy spending time together but also constantly are aiming at outwitting each other, due to their different political agendas for their respective realms.Many of these conversations take place over dinner, and Mantel is great with Tudor food depiction. Having read a biography of Chapuys which includes a great many of his dispatches, I'm not sure I buy him as another mastermind, but he was certainly smart, and did like Cromwell despite considering him a heretic and opponent.
On to the way Mantel does allow her hero to experience his view not matching with others without the others being vilified for it. Even in the earlier part of the trilogy, there's that scene where Cromwell sees his portrait by Hohlbein and says that Hohlbein has made him look like a murderer, whereupon his son Gregory says "You didn't know?" This turns out to have been but a prelude. In The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell's possible remarriage is a constantly talked about subject (with some named by rumor candidates, like the Princess Mary, just being used by his enemies against him), so when he asks Edward Seymour for Seymour's other sister, Elizabeth, without specifying he wants her for his son Gregory, the Seymours naturally assume Cromwell is proposing for himself, and acccept in this spirit. What at first seems a comic misunderstanding and leads to a deliciously awkward scene between Elizabeth "Bess" Seymour - who is a clever pragmatist, as befits the one Seymour sibling to survive various regimes and husbands intact and with her fortunes - and Cromwell in wich he finally realizes his mistake - turns out be not so funny anymore when Gregory, post marriage, reveals he knows what his new wife had originally assumed and asks his father to stay away from her. Which leads to Cromwell being shocked that his son could even consider him doing something as vile as making a pass at a daughter-in-law. Which leads to the revelation that there isn't much his son doesn't believe him capable of doing, and that he's scared as hell of Cromwell and has been for a long while.
Now, this would work even better if the reader weren't in Cromwell's position of knowing that naturally, Cromwell wouldn't, and hadn't seen him only as a dedicated father to Gregory, never once treating him harshly (as opposed to how he himself was treated). But still, given Cromwell usually knows everything about everyone and how they see each other, the revelation that he had no idea how his own son sees him is a true emotional shock. And there's more. Cromwell meets one of the late Cardinal Wolsey's illegitimate daughters, and is horrified to learn she blames him for her father's death, when he had been the most loyal of the loyal. (This is also the one point where Cromwell thinks, without equivocating, that he murdered the five men executed with Anne for Wolsey and that he knows they were all innocent of the charge he got them killed for.) The truly horrifying element in this for him, though, is that he never finds out where she got this idea from, and that he has to consider the possibility she got it from her father, the late Cardinal, i.e. that his beloved mentor died believing Cromwell to have joined the ranks of his enemies.
The biggest challenge to Cromwell's ability to get into people's heads, though, and his belief he can master events accordingly, is Henry. Mantel had kept Henry VIII mostly off stage in her first two novels, but in this one, where Cromwell spends the majority of the time as the second most powerful man in the kingdom, he's present, and it's an excellent rendition: you get the capriciousness, the self pity, but also the intellect which is there, the ability to rewrite reality in his head at any time, and all that married to absolute power. So Mantel's Henry in one moment can wistfully sing a Spanish song he'd learned from Katherine of Aragon as a youth, and still remembers, reflecting that he did love her after all, and in the next go on about how she betrayed him by not giving birth to any living children after Mary but killing them in her womb. He can decide he wants to personally argue with too Protestant Preacher Lambert to bring him back to the light (i.e.faith according to Henry, however Catholic or Protestant that might be at any given point), with even Cromwell being impressed by Henry's theological arguments (he did so write his Luther-attacking book himself, he'll have you know!), and by the fact Henry bothers to make them, which lets Cromwell reflect that no other European prince would bother to, that Emperor Charles or the French King Francis would just hand over Lambert to the executioner), - and in the next have Lambert executed anyway, by the flames. One of the many things I was curious about was whether Mantel would let Cromwell mean his famous letter to Henry from the Tower, with its "most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!" plea, or whether she'd present it as a strategem to protect his son, daughter-in-law and grandkids. Turns out she does let him mean it, and not just to protect his family: Cromwell doesn't want to get burned, and by "mercy" he asks for the same mercy Anne Boleyn got, getting beheaded rather than burned at the King's pelasure. I can buy that, and not just in Mantel's novel; that she allows her hero to be truly afraid of the fire is a very human trait, and it's also why the earlier burnings depicted in this novel have a plot point.
Checking out other reviews, I spotted one that has Cromwell disgusted by the King. Which wasn't my impression, rather, I thought Henry was one of the few people Mantel allows Cromwell to be genuinely wrong about at times, and one of the things he's wrong about is that a part of him keeps believing Henry, flaws and all, is truly "the first gentleman of Europe", as Cromwell puts it in Bring in the Bodies, the best of the European monarchs (even if the competition isn't great). Shortly after his fall, when he still runs mentally through scenarios where he gets out of this alive, he imagines Henry in time realising he won't be able to rule without Cromwell and taking him back, only for Cromwell to decline the honor and retire with "I've head enough", but as soon as he's thought this he ruefully acknowledges he'd be back within two days begging for Henry to employ him again. The title of the book is a compliment Cromwell pays Henry repeatedly, calling him "the mirror and the light" of European princes, and while it's flattery meant to soothe Henry, it's also, fataly for Cromwell, something a part of him still believes.
Like Philippa Gregory and an increasing amount of other Tudor novelists, Mantel explains Henry's dislike of Anne of Cleves, wife No.4, the immediate cause of Cromwell's fall, not by Anne lacking beauty but by Henry's attempt to play out one of the romantic masques he used to indulge in as a young monarch - show up in disguise - when Anne was on British soil going horribly wrong for him, because Anne of Cleves, not prepared for the King of England, saw a middle-aged, bloated stranger and was disgusted. This particular bit of mirroring in Anne's eyes is one Henry - who as the novel earlier claims has a hundred mirrors in his various palaces, and has Hohlbein depicting him with increasing weight, but still splendid and expressive - can't forgive, either Anne or Cromwell who made it possible. All of Cromwell's attempts for damage control fail. This is where Mantel has to explain why Cromwell doesn't attempt the obvious, end the marriage somehow instead of trying to save it, and comes up with a plausible scenario by having it made clear already to Cromwell that his old enemy the Duke of Norfolk has already placed the next niece, Katherine Howard, as bait to the King, and that if the Cleve marriage goes, reformed England might go with it and a return to Rome could be impending. This is where a key bit of Cromwell characterisation in her novels - that the cause of reform is more important to him than his own life - really pays off, since Cromwell can see the increasing risk he runs the longer the marriage lasts. This is where the novel turns into a true tragedy.
There are flashbacks throughout the novel, both to earlier already described events and to events we haven't seen described yet. At first, I thoughout they were there to avoid an obvious problem: one big part of Mantel's Cromwell's appeal is that he's an underdog at the Tudor Court, and during the last few years of his life, he just isn't, he's the most powerful man around after Henry himself. So by flashing back to a time when he was still one of the powerless, or even the less powerful, she manages to retain audience sympathy. But might be one reason, but not all; the flashbacks equal hauntings and eventually after Cromwell' fall become literal, for him, that is. When he's brought to the Tower, he sees George Boleyn, he sees Thomas More (who frustratingly won't speak to him) and he sees, one friendly ghost, Wolsey, who reassures him a bit on the "did you believe in my loyalty?" front but can't help him or stay all the time with him. More's silent ghost, who fades when Cromwell enters his old chamber in the Bell Tower, isn't the surprising use of More I mentioned earlier, though, it's yet another flashback to ye olde school days. As opposed to the one in Wolf Hall, this one doesn't have teenage Thomas More snub kid Thomas Cromwell. It actually shows More in a good light, for the first time in three novels, and yet the way it does is what irritates and frustrates Cromwell about More most of all. In the flashback, kid Cromwell brings teen More, a student at Lambeth Palace, his meal as loudly as possilbe despite being warned to do it quietly, and this does literally pay off becaue teen More gives him some money to in the future bring in food and drink as silently as possible. Naturally, kid Cromwell sees this as encouragement to be even noisier outside. He's expecting More to either pay more money or complain about him to the authories, and given his dastardly father's daily beatings, isn't afraid of more punishment. But More does neither. He just mild-manneredly ignores kid Thomas' making a nuisance of himself and doesn't complain about him at any point, just as, adult Cromwell reflects, he never actually did persecute Cromwell later as an heretic despite the threat being in the air in Cromwell's mind all the time. And when Cromwell asks the guard Martin, who'd already served in the Tower when More was a prisoner there, whether More ever mentioned him, Martin says no. Few things are as frustrating as your chosen arch nemesis never really doing you the justice of hating you, obsessing about you or even noticing you. And his ghost still refuses to talk.
Incidentally, I didn't take the ghosts to be literally there, or as signs Cromwell was losing his mind. They work as symbols of what he's occupied with emotionally in his last few weeks of life, in an age where belief in ghosts was normal. It's here, near the end, where Mantel's Cromwell finally stops being our contemporary and becomes that of his age. Just in time for a truly haunting finale.
Flaws: well, as expected. Mantel's Thomas Cromwell is more haunted in this last installment, with the dead Anne Boleyn and the five men who died with her being on his mind long after after Henry's already looking for wife No.4, but he's still Cromwell Our Contemporary, kind to children, championing women, a Renaissance superhero fluent in most European languages (it's a big surprise when he admits that he only knows a little German, picked up from Nuremberg merchants in Venice), always outwitting everyone else (until events out of his control overtake him), with not a single Renaissance attitude that would sit uncomfortably with the reader.
He pushes the cause of religious reform and developing Protestantism, but he's not in any way religious the way the rest of his contemporaries are. (This is especially noticable when Mantel lets her Cromwell reflect that he doesn't follow "Brother Martin", i.e. Luther, he's more inclined to the Doctors in Geneva (i.e. Calvin and Zwingli). But do we see Cromwell actually show Calvinistic beliefs, like, say, the predestination doctrine (one of the key differences to Lutheran Protestantism and the Catholic faith alike)? We do not, because Cromwell believing that some were chosen and others were not goes directly against Mantel's conception of him. Then there's Cromwell and sex: The Mirror and the Light introduces an illegitimate daughter neither he nor the reader had had any idea about, a product of his time in the Netherlands. Now Mantel does actually some interesting things with her, as well as with Cromwell's legitimate son Gregory, to show Cromwell's image of himself as a father clashing with how he is perceived by his offspring. But when I read in the afterword that the character of Jenneke (the Dutch illegitimate daughter) is fictional but that there probably was a real illegitimate daughter, born shortly after the death of Cromwell's wife, you should have seen me roll my eyes. Because again, it's our author avoiding or prettifying something that otherwise would not sit well with the reader (in this case, cheating on his wife, which the historical Cromwell must have done if he had a daughter born shortly after her death). Also, ever since learning about Hungersford I had been wondering whether she would bring up Cromwell introducing a law against buggery in Parliament to begin with. Nope. Can't have Cromwell actively making life for gay people worse.
Given Thomas More died two books ago, you'd think she and Cromwell would have other fish to fry, but no: The Mirror and the Light doubles down on something hinted in Wolf Hall and raising eyebrows even there, since the dates just won't fit: More being personally responsible for the death of Tyndale. (Who outlived More by a year.) (No, Mantel doesn't change the date of Tyndale's death, she just has Thomas More, while locked up in the Tower and on trial for his own life, organize and finance a spy ring to go after Tyndale. (My favourite summation of novelists, not just Mantel, letting More bring down Tyndale comes from
sonetka, who said: Undoubtedly he would have if he could have, but seriously: he couldn't have.) Being without your head is an alibi even for Tomas More, you'd think. Not in The Mirror and the Light, though, where Cromwell and his newly discovered daughter talk about how he's gone too easy on More who thus was able to organize Tyndale's death from beyond the grave. (To be fair: More gets also used in a more unexpected way late in the novel, I get to that.)
Then there's the "Pilgrimage of Grace", the uprising explicitly directed against Cromwell and triggered, but not exclusively so, by the dissolution of the monasteries as well the tremendous social injustices of the 1530s. This was a popular movement brutally repressed. But since Mantel's Cromwell is the man of the people versus any number of petty aristocrats, the Pilgrimage of Grace is inspired by a few selfish Catholic aristos exploiting superstitious peasants, and none of its demands justified. Now this I could buy as something Cromwell (both in Mantel and in history) genuinely believed, and it is tricky to get across that what your pov character whose pov you never leave might not be the truth, but she manages it on other occasions, so considering the rest of the three novels, I'm assuming this particular assessment is one she shares.
And naturally, Mantel's Cromwell still only threatens torture and uses psychological terror to get his way. (In Bring up the Bodies, he does this with Mark Smeaton, in The Mirror and the Light, with Geoffrey Pole.) He never is responsible for physical cruelty; the London Carthusian monks who according to history were hung up to die of starvation and in their own excrement in Mantel's novel died only of prison fever. Cramner might ask for someone to be burned (in a bit of irony foreshadowing, given Cramner's own death years after Cromwell's), but Cromwell never does. He watches, and is ashamed. Because he's our contemporary.
And then there's the way Cromwell is made to look better (at least I assume that's the intention) by disdaining people the author deems worse. The Mirror and the Light opens directly after Anne Boleyn's execution. Cromwell is appalled that Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, didn't kneel with the rest when the woman got executed and is still trash talking her. A few months later, when George Boleyn's widow, Jane, Lady Rochford, is back at court, serving Queen Jane Seymour and talking about her with Cromwell, he thinks "Isn't destroying one Queen enough for you?" This evidently is meant as historical foreshadowing unrelated to Jane Seymour, and Katherine Howard will show up in the last third of the novel, but the sheer self righteousness from a man who in Mantel's continuity took Jane Boleyn's testimony and used it against Anne is breathtaking, without the author seeming to realise it.
This said, you can tell that between Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, Mantel had read and reviewed Julia Fox' groundbreaking book on Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. Because while she couldn't alter one basic premise she'd followed in Bring up the Bodies, the assumption that Jane had reported on her husband and Anne to Cromwell (which was pre-Fox a commonly held belief until Fox demonstrated there's actually no contemporary evidence for it, more here, the newly revised Lady Rochford is actually a far cry from the standard issue jealous and abused wife depiction Mantel shared in the previous novel. She's smart, cynical, yes, but in a witty way, which is new for fictional Jane Boleyns, doesn't let Cromwell get away with platitudes and homilies, and their conversations are highlights of the novel. Mantel also uses the background of her father, Lord Morley, the Latin and Greek scholar, which pre-Fox I don't think anyone did.
Speaking of conversations that are fun to read: Cromwell and the Imperial Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, are depicted as Worthy Opponents who really enjoy spending time together but also constantly are aiming at outwitting each other, due to their different political agendas for their respective realms.Many of these conversations take place over dinner, and Mantel is great with Tudor food depiction. Having read a biography of Chapuys which includes a great many of his dispatches, I'm not sure I buy him as another mastermind, but he was certainly smart, and did like Cromwell despite considering him a heretic and opponent.
On to the way Mantel does allow her hero to experience his view not matching with others without the others being vilified for it. Even in the earlier part of the trilogy, there's that scene where Cromwell sees his portrait by Hohlbein and says that Hohlbein has made him look like a murderer, whereupon his son Gregory says "You didn't know?" This turns out to have been but a prelude. In The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell's possible remarriage is a constantly talked about subject (with some named by rumor candidates, like the Princess Mary, just being used by his enemies against him), so when he asks Edward Seymour for Seymour's other sister, Elizabeth, without specifying he wants her for his son Gregory, the Seymours naturally assume Cromwell is proposing for himself, and acccept in this spirit. What at first seems a comic misunderstanding and leads to a deliciously awkward scene between Elizabeth "Bess" Seymour - who is a clever pragmatist, as befits the one Seymour sibling to survive various regimes and husbands intact and with her fortunes - and Cromwell in wich he finally realizes his mistake - turns out be not so funny anymore when Gregory, post marriage, reveals he knows what his new wife had originally assumed and asks his father to stay away from her. Which leads to Cromwell being shocked that his son could even consider him doing something as vile as making a pass at a daughter-in-law. Which leads to the revelation that there isn't much his son doesn't believe him capable of doing, and that he's scared as hell of Cromwell and has been for a long while.
Now, this would work even better if the reader weren't in Cromwell's position of knowing that naturally, Cromwell wouldn't, and hadn't seen him only as a dedicated father to Gregory, never once treating him harshly (as opposed to how he himself was treated). But still, given Cromwell usually knows everything about everyone and how they see each other, the revelation that he had no idea how his own son sees him is a true emotional shock. And there's more. Cromwell meets one of the late Cardinal Wolsey's illegitimate daughters, and is horrified to learn she blames him for her father's death, when he had been the most loyal of the loyal. (This is also the one point where Cromwell thinks, without equivocating, that he murdered the five men executed with Anne for Wolsey and that he knows they were all innocent of the charge he got them killed for.) The truly horrifying element in this for him, though, is that he never finds out where she got this idea from, and that he has to consider the possibility she got it from her father, the late Cardinal, i.e. that his beloved mentor died believing Cromwell to have joined the ranks of his enemies.
The biggest challenge to Cromwell's ability to get into people's heads, though, and his belief he can master events accordingly, is Henry. Mantel had kept Henry VIII mostly off stage in her first two novels, but in this one, where Cromwell spends the majority of the time as the second most powerful man in the kingdom, he's present, and it's an excellent rendition: you get the capriciousness, the self pity, but also the intellect which is there, the ability to rewrite reality in his head at any time, and all that married to absolute power. So Mantel's Henry in one moment can wistfully sing a Spanish song he'd learned from Katherine of Aragon as a youth, and still remembers, reflecting that he did love her after all, and in the next go on about how she betrayed him by not giving birth to any living children after Mary but killing them in her womb. He can decide he wants to personally argue with too Protestant Preacher Lambert to bring him back to the light (i.e.faith according to Henry, however Catholic or Protestant that might be at any given point), with even Cromwell being impressed by Henry's theological arguments (he did so write his Luther-attacking book himself, he'll have you know!), and by the fact Henry bothers to make them, which lets Cromwell reflect that no other European prince would bother to, that Emperor Charles or the French King Francis would just hand over Lambert to the executioner), - and in the next have Lambert executed anyway, by the flames. One of the many things I was curious about was whether Mantel would let Cromwell mean his famous letter to Henry from the Tower, with its "most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!" plea, or whether she'd present it as a strategem to protect his son, daughter-in-law and grandkids. Turns out she does let him mean it, and not just to protect his family: Cromwell doesn't want to get burned, and by "mercy" he asks for the same mercy Anne Boleyn got, getting beheaded rather than burned at the King's pelasure. I can buy that, and not just in Mantel's novel; that she allows her hero to be truly afraid of the fire is a very human trait, and it's also why the earlier burnings depicted in this novel have a plot point.
Checking out other reviews, I spotted one that has Cromwell disgusted by the King. Which wasn't my impression, rather, I thought Henry was one of the few people Mantel allows Cromwell to be genuinely wrong about at times, and one of the things he's wrong about is that a part of him keeps believing Henry, flaws and all, is truly "the first gentleman of Europe", as Cromwell puts it in Bring in the Bodies, the best of the European monarchs (even if the competition isn't great). Shortly after his fall, when he still runs mentally through scenarios where he gets out of this alive, he imagines Henry in time realising he won't be able to rule without Cromwell and taking him back, only for Cromwell to decline the honor and retire with "I've head enough", but as soon as he's thought this he ruefully acknowledges he'd be back within two days begging for Henry to employ him again. The title of the book is a compliment Cromwell pays Henry repeatedly, calling him "the mirror and the light" of European princes, and while it's flattery meant to soothe Henry, it's also, fataly for Cromwell, something a part of him still believes.
Like Philippa Gregory and an increasing amount of other Tudor novelists, Mantel explains Henry's dislike of Anne of Cleves, wife No.4, the immediate cause of Cromwell's fall, not by Anne lacking beauty but by Henry's attempt to play out one of the romantic masques he used to indulge in as a young monarch - show up in disguise - when Anne was on British soil going horribly wrong for him, because Anne of Cleves, not prepared for the King of England, saw a middle-aged, bloated stranger and was disgusted. This particular bit of mirroring in Anne's eyes is one Henry - who as the novel earlier claims has a hundred mirrors in his various palaces, and has Hohlbein depicting him with increasing weight, but still splendid and expressive - can't forgive, either Anne or Cromwell who made it possible. All of Cromwell's attempts for damage control fail. This is where Mantel has to explain why Cromwell doesn't attempt the obvious, end the marriage somehow instead of trying to save it, and comes up with a plausible scenario by having it made clear already to Cromwell that his old enemy the Duke of Norfolk has already placed the next niece, Katherine Howard, as bait to the King, and that if the Cleve marriage goes, reformed England might go with it and a return to Rome could be impending. This is where a key bit of Cromwell characterisation in her novels - that the cause of reform is more important to him than his own life - really pays off, since Cromwell can see the increasing risk he runs the longer the marriage lasts. This is where the novel turns into a true tragedy.
There are flashbacks throughout the novel, both to earlier already described events and to events we haven't seen described yet. At first, I thoughout they were there to avoid an obvious problem: one big part of Mantel's Cromwell's appeal is that he's an underdog at the Tudor Court, and during the last few years of his life, he just isn't, he's the most powerful man around after Henry himself. So by flashing back to a time when he was still one of the powerless, or even the less powerful, she manages to retain audience sympathy. But might be one reason, but not all; the flashbacks equal hauntings and eventually after Cromwell' fall become literal, for him, that is. When he's brought to the Tower, he sees George Boleyn, he sees Thomas More (who frustratingly won't speak to him) and he sees, one friendly ghost, Wolsey, who reassures him a bit on the "did you believe in my loyalty?" front but can't help him or stay all the time with him. More's silent ghost, who fades when Cromwell enters his old chamber in the Bell Tower, isn't the surprising use of More I mentioned earlier, though, it's yet another flashback to ye olde school days. As opposed to the one in Wolf Hall, this one doesn't have teenage Thomas More snub kid Thomas Cromwell. It actually shows More in a good light, for the first time in three novels, and yet the way it does is what irritates and frustrates Cromwell about More most of all. In the flashback, kid Cromwell brings teen More, a student at Lambeth Palace, his meal as loudly as possilbe despite being warned to do it quietly, and this does literally pay off becaue teen More gives him some money to in the future bring in food and drink as silently as possible. Naturally, kid Cromwell sees this as encouragement to be even noisier outside. He's expecting More to either pay more money or complain about him to the authories, and given his dastardly father's daily beatings, isn't afraid of more punishment. But More does neither. He just mild-manneredly ignores kid Thomas' making a nuisance of himself and doesn't complain about him at any point, just as, adult Cromwell reflects, he never actually did persecute Cromwell later as an heretic despite the threat being in the air in Cromwell's mind all the time. And when Cromwell asks the guard Martin, who'd already served in the Tower when More was a prisoner there, whether More ever mentioned him, Martin says no. Few things are as frustrating as your chosen arch nemesis never really doing you the justice of hating you, obsessing about you or even noticing you. And his ghost still refuses to talk.
Incidentally, I didn't take the ghosts to be literally there, or as signs Cromwell was losing his mind. They work as symbols of what he's occupied with emotionally in his last few weeks of life, in an age where belief in ghosts was normal. It's here, near the end, where Mantel's Cromwell finally stops being our contemporary and becomes that of his age. Just in time for a truly haunting finale.
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Conversely, Thomas Cromwell was committed to reform beyond seeing it as a useful strategem, he was also one of the few people remaining loyal to Wolsey after the Cardinal's fall (we have the letters between them as well as the testimony of George Cavendish, Wolsey's secretary, who wrote this years after Cromwell's own death and as a Catholic really had no reason to make Thomas Cromwell, of all the people,look good). So the depiction of him ass a princple-less go getter without any loyalties in Man of all Seasons is the same kind of vilification More gets in Wolf Hall and onwards. Otoh, Cromwell also was someone decidedly not above using torture when it suited him, he rigged both the More and the Boleyn trials in just the way Henry wanted and not by giving both More and Anne enough rope to hang themselves with, and, see above, his attitude re: homosexuality was definitely not that of an ally.
Basically, if you mix and mingle the sets of Mores and Cromwells from both Bolt and Mantel, you get an idea of what the originals may have been like, warts, virtues and all.
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And also I started reading Wolf Hall, I think just the first chapter, and the writing was so gorgeous that I knew if I just read WH I'd be really cross having to wait for the next two :)