Now that it's all done, we can see the missed opportunities, overlooked hints, the signs the wind was changing. They also reject Cromwell’s proposed registry of births, marriages and deaths: He believes it will dignify ordinary folk by enabling them to trace their lineage as the nobility does they regard it as a ploy to collect taxes.In Hilary Mantel's 2020 novel The Mirror and The Light, the conclusion of her epic trilogy fictionalising the rise and fall of Tudor courtier Thomas Cromwell, the final stages of the story draw together what has up to that point been a sprawling and sometimes disjointed-feeling narrative into a whole that coheres only in hindsight - ours, and Cromwell's. Dissolving the monasteries and leasing their land to wealthy laypeople, he knows, will cement the Reformation: “Prayers may be rewritten, but not leases.” But the dissolution of the monasteries sparks a popular rebellion that further shakes Henry’s faith in Cromwell and shows that the common people he wants to help do not necessarily share his religious views. (Eustace Chapuys, suave ambassador of Emperor Charles V, is Cromwell’s favorite sparring partner, the prole-hating Duke of Norfolk the most odious.) He remains shrewd about laying economic foundations for the lasting change he seeks. In May 1536, as Cromwell walks away from Anne Boleyn’s headless body, Mantel sets him on a collision course with the limits to those ambitions.Ĭromwell is still a nimble operator, and Mantel provides many scenes - a few too many, in the novel’s overstuffed middle section - of the elaborate maneuvering that also enlivened her first two Booker Prize-winning volumes.
His thoughts turn increasingly to the miserable childhood he has sought to leave behind and to his happy years in Antwerp and Florence, where he discovered a new world that offered a blacksmith’s son from Putney the chance to get ahead on the basis of brains and ferocious ambition. In “ The Mirror and the Light,” as Cromwell grapples with aristocratic foes who want to send him to the same fate, his own inner voices clamor for attention. The dead have been slowly gathering around him since his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, died in 2009’s “ Wolf Hall.” Their voices grew insistent in “ Bring up the Bodies,” when the moral consequences of Cromwell’s allegiance to King Henry VIII became apparent as he railroaded Anne Boleyn and five personal enemies to execution so that Henry could marry Jane Seymour. The past catches up with Thomas Cromwell in the searing finale of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent trilogy.
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