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.
But the scientists learned nothing — nothing! They set about improving the animals. Improving us! Dogs that could talk, cats that could play chess! Human beings who were going to be all geniuses and never get sick and live five hundred years! They did all that, oh yes, they did all that. There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me. I can’t stand talking dogs.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes, p. 15
One-track minds
This quote is from a book I’m reading now by Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of one of my favorite and most unique sci-fi novels, The Left Hand of Darkness. She’s a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and science fiction with the mind of an anthropologist (being the daughter of one).
Her Book Changing Planes is essentially a modern-day version of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels — both being science fiction novels in the form of travelogues permitting the authors to write multiple vignettes of social commentary, each vignette being a wildly exaggerated caricature of the societies and trends of their times.
A very different read I’m now immersed in — just like with music, I have on tap different reads for different moods (a solid benefit of retirement!) — is Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, the second in her double-Booker Prize trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, that begins with Wolf Hall.
There was a wonderful 2015 BBC Wolf Hall miniseries based on these two books, starring Mark Rylance in the tile role, with Damian Lewis as Henry VIII and Claire Foy as Ann Boleyn.
There is controversy among historians (e.g., Simon Schama) that Mantel’s portrayal of Cromwell is too favorable. I have not the authority to have an opinion on that, but I’ve heard much the same said of Shakespeare, who, after all, was tied to a Tudor court. The value of his historical plays does not hinge on whether they count as historically reliable reporting.
What I love about the Wolf Hall trilogy is that you see the world through the eyes of a man of his times in a kind of stream of consciousness (not the often semi-coherent subconscious fragmented streams and eddies of a Faulkner or a T.S. Eliot) composed of his perception of his surroundings, workaday sights, conversations with persons of high and low estate, and the recurring memories of a husband and father stripped of his wife and two daughters by sudden death from the Plague.
Mantel’s writing has the same texture as my own daily swim through my daily routines, interspersed with personal interactions and my grapplings with big thoughts. Mantel captures the way we all skid back and forth from inside our own heads to engagement with worldly routines and then our patient working away at our long term projects and the on-again off-again revisiting of our values, of how they’re faring in the world, how well we’re living up to them, and whether or not our collisions and communings with others — friends, strangers and enemies — require us to look again and adjust some of our erstwhile values, and with them the value of our erstwhile goals.
And through all of this, in Mantels’ writing, we see the mind of a man risen from lowly estate to a place in the royal court and a role in the great political issues of his times, shaping his speech to the needs of the moment of varying moments from the diplomatic to the intimate to the candid to the wary. Never wholly unaware of the manipulative nature of human interaction which outside the family is clearly maneuvering while inside the family is more a matter of guidance.
When All Is Said and Dunn 