Shortly before lockdown, as a birthday present to myself, I pre-ordered the final book of the Wolf Hall Trilogy and, on the day of its release, travelled down with a hammering heart to my local Waterstone's to pick it up. I lost no time in starting to devour it. When lockdown hit, I spent even longer on it, staying up late into the night letting that rich, earthy voice, like no other in texture except perhaps Heaney's poetry, guide me painstakingly through Thomas Cromwell's final months, weeks, hours, seconds. Only Mantel, really, could describe with such microscopic detail the ridiculous whims, pettiness and complex politics of people dead nearly five hundred years and make it at once so fascinating and insightful. Her historical fiction was not marked by the sweeping candour of Robert Graves's, say; it burrowed with shrewdness and bold intellectualism into the smallest detail, and made of it a poetic feast.
It didn't take me long- perhaps about a month- to finish the final book of the Wolf Hall trilogy, and awed me enough to elicit a rare book review- one I sadly lost after my then laptop broke, but whose spirit of fervent admiration lingers still. Mantel will go down in history as one of the greatest writers of her era, for sure.
Update: In a miracle, I found that review of The Mirror and the Light! Here it is:
Review: Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light
One of my earliest forays into the rich dark world that is Thomas Cromwell’s was through a slim illustrated book on art, called A History of the Renaissance in Venice. Paintings leapt out of the page, gabbling of banquets and bankers, travellers and tycoons, myths and maidens. It was the first time I felt the history of that period stir from its grave, speaking, urging its relevance.
Slow, majestic and forever in the present tense, Hilary Mantel works the same spell in her trilogy- very much, it must be said, against similar landscapes. Thomas Cromwell’s last moments, as lived in his fragile head, are divided between the cobblestones of Putney and the gates of Italian noblemen. He was Tommaso as well as Thomas, Cromwell alias Cremuel. It is a novel preoccupied with Englishmen’s ties to the continent, to shifting relationships, precarious bonds- on a personal as well as political level. However callous, calculating and cruel, Cromwell is not a man above his obligations- to the cardinal, to the king, to his family but also to Europe, his haven from his father’s hobnailed boot. The Mirror and the Light brings us the nostalgic restlessness of an old man whose internal geography straddles the Channel, conjuring up spectacular images of Antwerp and Florence, Venice and Calais, sumptuously phrased, irresistibly alive. We roll in the piss and the mud, inhale fragrant orange peel and spices, bruise in street fights and bawl tuneless war songs. If I had stayed in Italy, wonders Cromwell. If I had married my Antwerp mistress. If I had not come back to England, to lose my family to the plague and become Henry’s lapdog. Cromwell is not by nature insular- unfortunate for a man governing an island. He is not a man to stand still, also unsuited to one bound to serve. In marked contrast to the swaggering confidence of the previous books, we now see him plagued by self-doubt, whether the course he chose is really what he wants.
Europe is not the only unstable ghost of Cromwell’s past. It is his very roots, his blood. The feudal system is alive and well in Tudor England; it does not explode for the sake of a lone upstart who has wormed his way into the king’s favour. ‘Now get up,’ opens Wolf Hall, as the blacksmith’s bloodied son staggers to his feet; they are the last words ringing through his head on the block. The rise of this sly parvenu from the Putney docks can only be unsustainable; poverty may have taught him plenty but endears him to few. The higher you rise in the king’s service, remarks a friend, the more you speak of your roots; he notes, correctly, that he must refrain. He upends too brutally ancient notions of blood privilege and rank. Notice the giddy instability of names in the novel- mark the tension between titles, the riots over rank. ‘It is hard to keep up,’ remarks many a character, and yes, it is beyond both Cromwell and the court- sir, lord, majesty, grace. When his earldom is granted he imagines going back home, amazing his father, stupefying his neighbours. Astonishment rather than pride dominates his feelings on his rise. As for Henry, who spends years decorating Cromwell like a wedding cake, his own creation terrifies him. He is afraid of you, the imprisoned Cromwell is told. Afraid of what he has made you. Class eradication, it seems, is after all beyond the scope of Henry’s imagination.
There is, after all, very little that Henry can do himself- that is, at once nothing and everything. Cromwell spends many secret hours on his answer to The Prince, entitled A Book Called Henry (burnt by his friends after his fall). Never let him know how much he owes you, he writes; suggest and let him think it was his own genius. Sensible advice which, however, fails Cromwell at the crucial juncture. For hundreds of pages Henry is content to watch as cogs miraculously turn the lives of the English. The northern rebellion is squashed without the king having to show his face; the Reformation sweeps England guided by a toiling, invisible hand- monasteries disbanded, relics disproved, corrupt fortunes parcelled up. Yet increasingly, especially on the marital front, we see sudden tensions between Henry and his courtiers, wills straining in opposite directions. Henry has many good qualities, we are told once, except consistency, reason and sense. Cromwell knows this; even as he digs up saints’ bones he stores them in his house, in case the king should run back to Rome. Yet no minister can wholly shield himself against the royal wrath, especially the wrath of one transformed by love; as Cromwell reflects in the Tower, courtiers scheme and plan and calculate, only for it all to be upset by women. Anne of Cleves breaks two crucial, delicate balances. Firstly, that of will, between the indulgence of the king and his subordination to the public good. She suggests to him his pleasure has been too long checked, too long waved aside for the public good as imagined by an incomprehensible schemer. Secondly, (as a consequence) that of power- he realises that while Cromwell may run the country, a flick of his own finger can burn a man, send him to the rack, raise him from the dead seconds before the axe falls. Cromwell’s death, which Henry comes to regret, is as much a flexing of royal muscle as a callous betrayal; Machiavelli may well have endorsed it, though, as our narrator says, Henry will have to answer to Him for it.
Of Henry’s betrayal as portrayed by Mantel, the most debated aspect is the time it is coming. The first half of the book is in parts painful, especially the over-laboured northern rebellion. We wait far too long for the birth of Edward. However, we do not watch too long as Henry claps Cromwell on the back and embellishes his name a few gilded letters further, even after Jane’s death, even after Cleves. The length of that friendship (Cromwell shakes his head), fine, understanding (Cromwell’s skull rattles) fine, favour, only serves to emphasise the abruptness of his disgrace. I watch in wonder as the number of remaining pages dwindles but Henry has barely growled. When I turn to the page of his arrest it takes several seconds to digest. He is taken while simply heading to a council meeting. It may feel like jarring pacing, uneven development. But Mantel, earthy realist as she is, makes a harsh point about human capriciousness, the fickleness of fortune. Il n’a jamais jamais connu de loi- least of all that of a novelist.
And we feel that cut. Living Cromwell’s last night we realise that we have grown into his flesh. We lie awake pleading with the cardinal’s ghost, we crave cold fowl for breakfast, we wish the infernal drum in the crowd would shut up so we can die in peace. We cradle our basket of Italian memories in our head like a tender child, miss the cold of a knife concealed against our chest. That is the truly astonishing revelation from the trilogy- that a man who was previously no more than a cardboard cutout, a storiless politician, one more of Henry’s victims, can walk and talk, can win our hearts, can bring his life screaming and kicking into ours. It is somewhat akin to what Lin-Manuel Miranda did to dull, obscure Hamilton. It is how we find ourselves in the crowd with foul-mouthed Christophe, shouting for a man we have never met: ‘Henry King of England!... I hope a leper spits on you. I hope your whore has pox…. May rot rise up from your heels to your head, going slowly, so you take seven years to die [he does].’
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