The Mirror & the Light

I absolutely loved Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, so my excitement for The Mirror & The Light was on par with many of yours. I ordered the 4th Estate hardback, got the Kindle edition and Audible audiobook as soon as they became available, and got going.

I'm putting this on hold for the time being. I'm almost 200 pages in, and it's been quite a slog. The first two books had such fervent momentum going on that I'm finding it quite difficult to get this one going.

I'm rereading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and loving every page of it (halfway through the second volume after starting the first one in late February), which offers an interesting counterpoint to my experiences so far with this book. I'll return to this later, maybe in the summer.

Thus ends the Shakespearean tragedy of Cromwell, the brilliant man hoist on his own Machiavellian petard. Unlike the first two novels, The Mirror and the Light shows us the Cromwell that history remembers: ruthless, violent, all-powerful, and, ultimately, undone by vindictive enemies and a paranoid king.

Mantel's achievement here (and across the trilogy) is monumental if for no other reason than she makes the reader sympathize with Cromwell. This is, of course, narrative sleight of hand as her limited third-person perspective is really just first-person in disguise: we only get to see and hear what Cromwell sees and hears, and we only get to understand events through his understanding of them. And while we know what is ultimately going to happen, we are still surprised when, seemingly out of the blue not long after being made Earl of Essex and Lord Chamberlain, Cromwell finds himself in the Tower on charges of treason and heresy.

Mantel plants the seeds early. In the moments after Anne Boleyn's execution at the beginning of the novel, Wriothesley, loyalties divided, tells Cromwell,

“People have been talking of the cardinal. They say, look at what Cromwell has wreaked, in two years, on Wolsey’s enemies. Thomas More is dead. Anne the queen is dead. They look at those who slighted him, in his lifetime – Brereton, Norris – though Norris was not the worst . . . They ask," Wriothesley says, “who was the greatest of the cardinal’s enemies? They answer, the king. So, they ask – when chance serves, what revenge will Thomas Cromwell seek on his sovereign, his prince?”

The answer comes during his interrogation:

“Let me remind you,” Riche says. “At the church of St Peter le Poor, near your own gate at Austin Friars, on or around …” Riche has lost the date, but no matter, “… you were heard to pronounce certain treasonable words: that you would maintain your own opinion in religion, that you would never allow the king to return to Rome, and – these are the words alleged – if he would turn, yet I would not turn; and I would take the field against him, my sword in my hand. And you accompanied these words with certain belligerent gestures – . . . You also stated,” Riche says, “that you would bring new doctrine into England, and that – and here I quote your own words – If I live one year or two, it shall not lie in the king’s power to resist.”

The cards thus stacked against him - by none less than Richard Riche, whose perjured testimony cost Thomas More his head - Cromwell understands that he has lost. But it's not due to any trumped-up charges of treason - no, he gets that all the crazy talk of aspiring to be king by marrying Mary, of sorcery, of conspiracy with the Emperor, and seeking to raise a "pauper army" is all just a smokescreen for the king's true grievance:

“The king hates a man who breaks his word. You said you would kill Reginald Pole.”

“Not a drop of his blood is shed,” Gardiner observes.

He thinks, now we come to it. This is why Henry faults me. And so he should. This is where I have failed.

This is life in Henry's capricious court. Henry, assessing Cromwell's almost superhuman accomplishments, finds him lacking because he failed to kill the pretender. Norfolk, resentful that a commoner should be ennobled, and Gardiner, vengeful at being replaced as Master Secretary and shipped off to France, conspired to light the fuse.

Mantel gives full rein to her imagination in this novel, the longest of the three (in fact, almost as long as the other two combined). Cromwell is given to increasing flights of memory of his childhood and his years of apprenticeship in Italy. He continues to be haunted by Wolsey, tormented by More and guilt ridden over his mysterious daughter, Jenneke. Her canvas is huge - the economics of the dissolution of the monasteries, the diplomatic intricacies of the marriage to Anne of Cleves, the religious crisis over the Pilgrimage of Grace - and reveals her thorough research and deep understanding of the period. Clearly she had great passion for the story, and saw in Cromwell some kind of archetype of hero/villains throughout modern history: his own great nephew Oliver Cromwell; Maximillian Robespierre; Otto von Bismarck; Vladimir Lenin; J. Edgar Hoover; Richard Nixon. Men who rose to great heights; who sought to reshape the world in their own image; who ultimately destroyed themselves.

Are we to draw lessons from Cromwell's story about the dangers of pride and self aggrandizement? If history is truly written by the victors, has his story been accurately told? Is Cromwell Macbeth or Lear? These are tough questions and I think Hilary Mantel wants us to see, in the mirror and the light, something of our own place and time. Mantel's Cromwell, really, is a projection of our own worst instincts and the embodiment of modern homo politicus; and perhaps what she wants us to understand that there will always be a Cromwell, the one with the dirty fingernails and bloody knife; the one who takes care of the jobs no one else can stomach; the one we ultimately can't keep around because he reminds us too much of our own base nature. Cromwell, hero or villain, is not so much a man as a matter of perspective.