I am nearly done with (yes, the ever-ready pun) The Mirror and the Light,(2020), the third and final installment of the late Hilary Mantel’s trilogy (the first trilogy ever to win Booker prizes for two of its installments), following Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012).
It is a masterful work, offering an entirely credible depiction of a man of action engaged in his daily tasks, both in the “backroom offices” of Henry VIII’s administration and in intimate give-and-take as Henry’s most trusted advisor (for the time he was that).
The Author
Thomas Cromwell: as Bad as We Think?
Was he or wasn’t he?
The mind you enter into is the mind of a man born a commoner in Putney, a district of South London bordering the Thames, to an enterprising, physically powerful, but brutal father, a blacksmith and brewer, and to the world of workingmen, chancers, toughs and street brawlers.
Fleeing abroad, he comes under the civilizing influence of Italian warlords and Antwerp merchants, learning discipline, soldiering, accounting and trading, learning also multiple languages, scholarship in works worldly and liturgical, the governance of materials and manufactures, of productive and organizational processes, and, most importantly, the fine art of controlling the expectations, fears and hopes of men — equally of those who stand below him and above him — in other words, the fine art of persuading and deceiving, enlightening and directing the thoughts of those around him, his peers, his followers and his overlords.
He does all this knowing that he is resented by anyone of noble blood who feels he has put them in the shadows, whether by deliberate act or simply by comparison, all of whom are ever watchful of a stumble of his that might bring them back into the royal light, at cost of little more than Cromwell’s head.
One or two voices have accused author Hilary Mantel of being too sympathetic to Thomas Cromwell, who was a cruel and efficiently ruthless man.
I’d need to research this farther than I have time for, but I have three reasons to resist that view.
1. He came from the largely illiterate working class, while our knowledge of him comes almost entirely from the 1% of his time, the literate classes of the nobility , the clergy and the gentry.
2. He headed the more moderate and cautious wing of the Protestants in the Protestant/Catholic struggle for the throne of England. So when he was overthrown, his successors had every political motive to vilify him.
3. Anyone exercising powers like his in a time of polarization and sectarian persecutions– like that of all the Cromwells known to history — would have to be cruel and ruthless, as any astute reader of Machiavelli, or history, for that matter, would know.
I have never read a better representation of how the inner thoughts of a man weave in and out of his actions — especially of a man whose historical impact overshadows whatever private life went on behind the composed poker face of a royal minister and diplomat.
Author Mantel depicts him as walking a tightrope and surrounded by enemies who would cherish his downfall and friends whose lightning disfavor would separate his head from his shoulders.
And yet, in his occasional moments to himself, he is flooded by memories of his wife and daughters, lost to the English sweating sickness that plagued London and Henry’s court, and yet farther back, memories of the brutal attentions of his drunken brawler of a father, Walter, and of mentors and lovers on his path from then to now.
Oliver Cromwell, first among English republicans, but not the kindest…
Henry VIII: A Man I Love To Hate
A man I love to hate
Henry VIII was a clever, well-educated, contentious and self-indulgent man, with a changeable temperament and a charming whimsicality that turned quickly into seething anger when rebuffed, for who dare rebuff a king born and bred?
His art of governing was to find someone thoroughly competent to become his right-hand man, and then — too vain and proud to admit his own mistakes — to cut off his own right hand (Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell) when he came to feel a course of action no longer served him.
Lesser courtiers were pieces on the chessboard, to be shuffled into and out of exile at Henry’s whim, discarded or beheaded when they grew inconvenient to his purposes.
He came from the usurping line of the Tudors, Welshmen resented by the remnants of the Plantagenet line of Norman invaders, and saw — perhaps rightly — potential usurpers all round him.
He finally created, after much toing and froing — and entirely by unwitting accident — his perfect successor, the wily Elizabeth, who thought and acted like one born with her head in a noose or, more precisely, with her head laid out cleanly on the headsman’s block, ever anticipating the downward stroke of the axe.
Elizabeth the Unwanted, the bastard daughter of headless Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, whose right to rule Henry despised, who took England into its golden age, as Henry himself never could have done.
When All Is Said and Dunn 