The Mirror And The Light – Hilary Mantel

Last night I finally finished the great tome that is The Mirror And The Light. It’s taken me ages. Not because it’s rubbish, far from it, but because of life getting in the way. But now, with relief and a little sadness, the trilogy is done.

Hilary Mantel herself says that ‘It was the hardest to write and it’s probably the most demanding for the reader’. That is definitely true. This last book has been more poetic and the viewpoint often leaves Cromwell’s head and swoops up to survey the wider geo-political landscape

It also dives back into his past more often, introspectively recollecting his earlier lives, in Putney, in Italy, in Antwerp, etc., drawing together a more solid shape of a man who previously seemed to have come out of nowhere. A blacksmith’s son from the backwaters of the Thames now the second most powerful man in the country.

The narrative commences where Bring Up The Bodies left off: the moment after Queen Anne’s execution, in the same way that one flowed from Wolf Hall. The books seem like nominal dividers at first, but all three end with an important beheading. Firstly Thomas More, then Anne Boleyn and finally in this one, the man himself.

That is not a spoiler, or maybe it is if you’re not up on your Tudor history? I’m a terrible one for looking up the main protagonists on t’internet, just to see how much their histories match up to the book. As with her previous two, Mantel makes sure the facts are all in the right places. They’re the skeleton around which she has built her hypotheses.

There is no record of the boy scholar Thomas More being harangued by the boy servant Thomas Cromwell, but it’s a sweet idea. And one that encapsulates the two men’s stark differences. Not only in their birth and paths through life, but it shows up More’s intransigence and Cromwell’s adaptiveness.

However, his remarkable abilities, to adapt and always to be one step ahead of his rivals, fail him in the end and he doesn’t foresee that his enemy’s enemies have become comrades for the purpose of his downfall.

He begins his incarceration in the Tower, initially in the same rooms as Anne Boleyn when she was about to be coronated and when she was about to be beheaded. It was Cromwell who, seven years before had had them rebuilt in time for Anne. It was Cromwell, who had had the eyes of the goddesses changed from brown to blue when Jane stayed here before her wedding to the King. A quote comes back to haunt us from the second book, where Anne warns Cromwell that ‘Those who are made can be unmade’.

The ghosts, that have occasionally accompanied him, have multiplied, especially when he is then moved to the Bell Tower, still a grand room, but more spartan, and used for high-ranking prisoners. George Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and others, all flit around for his last few days on Earth.

I’ve always been fascinated by history, much more so than current affairs, as for me, with history, the chaos has passed and can be explored less emotionally. But this trilogy has brought alive a period of time to such a degree where my emotions were engaged and I was rapt by the characters and the chaos and the machinations and the politics even though I knew how it would all play out.

The ending, though macabre, is poetry, and resurrects the words spoken by Walter, his father at the beginning of Wolf Hall. There is some evidence that Cromwell’s beheading was botched and took several blows, and Mantel uses this possibility to extend his voice for a few painful seconds more until he breathes his last and I closed the book for a final time.