'The Mirror and the Light' (2020)

What the cat sees.

Early in The Mirror and the Light there is a scene with a cat up a tree that has stayed with me ever since I first read the novel, on its 2020 publication. Thomas Cromwell is at his London house, Austin Friars, one summer evening. He has successfully facilitated Henry’s separation from Anne Boleyn—the novel starts at the very moment of Anne’s death, its opening sentence: ‘once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away’—and he is almost at the apogee of his power, as adviser, chancellor, soon-to-be earl. ‘His chief duty (it seems just now) is to get the king new wives and dispose of the old’ [15]. With him is his adult son Gregory; his hot-tempered young nephew Richard Cromwell (grandfather, in the fulness of time, to Oliver Cromwell, concerning whose army Elvis Costello sang); his secretary Rafe Sadler; his manservant, the passionate, loyal, impetuous Frenchman Christophe—a character Mantel has invented, without historical analogue—and Thomas Wriothesley, an ambitious courtier, Clerk of the Signet, known to all as ‘Call-me-Risley’. Cromwell’s star is rising, but he has powerful enemies—Stephen Gardiner the Bishop of Winchester, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk—and the king’s favour could be withdrawn at any time. The party consider the events of the day: the execution of Anne, politics. ‘“Sir,” Call-Me leans forward, “You should move against the Duke of Norfolk. Work his discredit with the king. Do it now, while you have him at a disadvantage.”’ [19] But Cromwell does not think the time is right. Later in the novel Call-Me will betray Cromwell to his enemies and facilitate his downfall and execution. After Cromwell’s death Wriothesley will be made Earl of Southampton, and his grandson, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, will have an affair with, and patronise, William Shakespeare. Mantel doesn’t mention that: her novel is constrained by the point-of-view of Cromwell himself, and he can’t see what happens after he dies. Which makes the moment with the cat so notable.

‘Is that a cat?’ Wriothesley is amazed. ‘That striped beast?’

‘She has come all the way from Damascus in a box,’ Cromwell says. ‘I bought her from an Italian merchant for a price you would not believe. She is supposed to stay indoors, or she will breed with the London cats. I must look out for a striped husband for her.’ He opens the window. ‘Christophe! She’s up the tree!’

The cat is a status symbol, and Cromwell, so much of whose business is tied up disposing of and finding wives for the king, naturally thinks of marrying it to one of its kind. Mantel is also characterising her protagonist: he is a cat person, not really a dog person (his aristocratic enemy Norfolk is a dog person [I am corrected in the comments: Cromwell does own some dogs]). In Wolf Hall, Cromwell has a pet cat called Marlinspike, that he had inherited from his old master Cardinal Wolsey, but by the time of The Mirror and the Light Marlinspike has run away. Cromwell’s servants aren’t having much luck retrieving this new cat. ‘“Look at Christophe shaking the tree,” Richard says. “Stupid little fucker.”’ Cromwell and the others stand at the window.

Below in the darkening garden, the cat-hunters raise their arms as if imploring the moon. High in the tree, the cat is a soft shape visible only to the educated eye: limbs dangling, she is perfectly at one with the branch on which she lies. …

I have risen above this, he thinks: this day, this waning light, these snares. I am the Damascene cat. I have travelled so far to get here, and nothing they do disturbs me now, nor disquiets me, high on my branch. [22]

He is, we could say, a cat-person in more than one sense. He worries about the situation with the Bishop of Winchester and Norfolk: his own precariousness, anxiety ‘in his mind a chilly trickle of dismay.’ Christophe brings out a net to catch the cat, whilst other servants are trying to coax her down. Then the moment that stands out, the only time when the point-of-view of the novel shifts from Cromwell to someone, something, else (although the shift is mediated via Cromwell’s imagination).

Richard draws the window shut. ‘My money is on Purser to catch her.’

"Mine is on the cat.” He imagines the world below her: through the prism of her great eye, the limbs of agitated men unfurl like ribbons, yearning through the darkness. Perhaps she thinks they are praying to her. Perhaps she thinks she has climbed up to the stars. Perhaps the darkness falls away from her in flecks and sparks of light, the roofs and gables like shadows in water; and when she studies the net there is no net, only the spaces between.

‘I think we should have a drink,’ he tells Wriothesley. ‘We will have lights. And a fire, by and by.’ [22]

It’s an extraordinary piece of writing: the beautiful estrangement of it, arms unfurling like ribbons, yearning upwards. The feline uncanny, the creature, not caught yet (like Cromwell) but about to be caught (again like Cromwell) yet seeing through the darkness with her cat-eyes, apprehending reality in sparks and flecks of light—light, the titular quality to which this novel returns so repeatedly—that turn the net into a matrix of ways-of-escape. A net defined in terms of its holes. A prison wall defined in terms of its doorways, this last the very final image of the novel. After this gorgeous moment, the novel moves from epiphany back to mundanity, to politics and plotting.

‘Mr Wriothesley, what do you think?’

‘What do I think?’ It is almost a snarl worthy of Gardiner himself. ‘I think, Norfolk is against you, the bishop is against you, and now you are going to take on the old families as well. God help you, sir. You are my master. You have my service, and you have my prayers. But by the holy bones! Do you think these people brought the Boleyns down so you could be cock of the walk?’

‘Yes,’ Richard says. ‘That's exactly what we think. It may not have been their intention. But we aim to make that the result.’

How steady Richard's arm, stretching to hand him the glass. How steady his own, accepting it. ‘Lord Lisle sends this wine from Calais,’ he says.

The steadiness is worthy of remark because this open statement of ambition is dangerous, and perhaps they should tremble in fear or apprehension. The Cromwells are common people, and although he has risen in the world, and will be made Earl of Essex before he dies, Thomas is base-born, and despised by the aristocratic ‘old families’ as such.

The Mirror and the Light is a very long novel: 875 pages—too long, really. Wolf Hall (650 pages) covered the years 1500 through to 1535; Bring Up the Bodies, a leaner 410 pages, brilliantly evoked the fall of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell’s part in it over one year, 1535-36. The Mirror and the Light’s corpulence is partly explained by the fact that the remaining years of Cromwell’s life, from May 1536 to July 1540, were ones in which lots happened. Anne Boleyn executed; Henry marrying Jane Seymour, finally having his son, mourning Jane’s death; the dissolution of the abbeys, threats from Germany and France, alliances and counter-alliances, the northern rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry VIII’s infected and cankered leg growing worse and his haleness and temper corroding with it, Cromwell’s plan to marry the King to Anne of Cleves to secure an alliance with German princes against a feared French invasion, Henry’s dislike of the actual Anne when she arrived and the annulment of that marriage, Norfolk’s scheming to get Henry to marry his niece, Katherine Howard, and so bring his family back into eminence, and through her children perhaps to rule the land. All of this is in the book, and the detail is sometimes too much. Colin Burrow thinks that ‘Mantel avoids the “and then and then and then another damn thing” of the artless chronicle principally by making The Mirror and the Light continue the long, diffuse revenge plot that unifies the first two volumes of the trilogy.’

That plot is a double-one: through the first two books we saw Cromwell take revenge on the people he blames for the downfall of his beloved master Wolsey, many of whom are executed alongside Anne Boleyn. Alongside this is a shadow plot, or possible-plot, by which Cromwell seeks the downfall of the king himself—for it was Henry, ultimately, who brought Wolsey down: to overthrow Henry, marry Henry’s daughter Mary and so rule England as king. Cromwell’s enemies persuade the king that this is what he is trying to do, which is what leads to his arrest and execution. The question which is not answered in the novel is: does Cromwell seek this? It’s not answered because, it seems, Mantel’s Cromwell doesn’t even know himself.

‘People have been talking of the cardinal,’ [says Wriothesley]. ‘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 ...’

Cromwell says, ‘If I wanted revenge on Wolsey's enemies, I would have to strike down half the nation.’

‘I only report what people are saying. 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?’

It’s this question that ‘seeps into him, and leaves in his mind a chilly trickle of dismay, like water creeping into a cellar.’

He is shocked: First, that the question can asked. Second, because of who asks it. Third, that he does not know the answer.

This last seems unlikely to me, I must say; as a piece of characterisation, for this particular character. Indeed, it’s an evasion, one forced upon Mantel by her approach to her subject. If she writes a Cromwell who is consciously plotting to bring down and replace the king, then we lose sympathy with him, and the arraignment and execution at the story’s end becomes justice, not tragedy. But if Mantel writes a Cromwell who has no such ambition, who has forgiven Henry and abandoned the memory of Wolsey it would run counter to what we know of him, what the previous two volumes in the trilogy have told us about him. And so Mantel goes with: he does not know himself, whether he is plotting to revenge himself against the king or not. Unlikely..

It’s a criticism sometimes made of Mantel that she was too in love with her subject, Cromwell. He is too intelligent and perceptive, too aesthetically refined and wonderful. He needs to be more Beria, and less Leo McGarry from The West Wing. More of a brute, the high-rank hired thug of a police state (which is what he was, and more to the point what Mantel’s other characters all think he is) and less of an infinitely subtle consciousness parsing memory and human complexity via social wisdom and a rich humanity. I’m prepared to believe that Mantel thinks him the latter, and thinks that his reputation for the former is mostly unjustified, but the novels suffer from his frankly improbable virtue. He menaces us not, though he ought. ‘Faces are not incidental,’ says Lady Rochford in Bring Up The Bodies (2012). ‘Our sins are written upon them.’ When Cromwell replies ‘Jesus! What have I done?’ it provokes laughter; because Mantel doesn’t really believe that sins are written upon faces. But we need to believe they might be, if we are properly to enter into a Tudor mindset. Cromwell remembers, as a lad, butting his head against his father’s stomach, trying to hurt him, not realising that the old man was wearing armour upon his torso.

He often thinks about it, that iron belly. And he thinks he had got one, without the inconvenience and weight of metal. ‘Cromwell has plenty of stomach,’ his friends say; his enemies too. They mean he has appetite. Gusto, attack: first thing in the morning or last thing at night, a bloody collop of meat would not disgust him, and if you wake him in the small hours he is hungry then too. [Bring Up The Bodies, 226]

Mantel captures some of the gusto (though not so well as she captures the reflective stillness) of Cromwell; but she captures the bear-like raw bloody collops of meat devouring side not at all. The TV adaptation, by casting fine-featured, slender Rylance as Cromwell is even less effective in that respect.

In The Mirror and the Light, the revenge plot linkage is stretched too thin by the sheer length of the novel, which does not, whatever Colin Burrow says, altogether escape the “and then and then and then another damn thing” problem. The BBC adaptation slims and trims the whole, and for all that it takes 6-hours to get through everything the shape of the overall story is more cleanly and briskly rendered. And, as with the Wolf Hall series to which it is a sequel, it has much to recommend it. The acting is extraordinarily good: Rylance, though (as I say) he’s a poor casting choice in terms of sheer physicality, is a superb actor: he does stillness extremely well, and modulates his moods expertly. He conveys Cromwell’s intense sensitivity and intelligence, features of Mantel’s characterisation (though we may wonder if the historical Cromwell possessed those qualities to such a degree). The costumes are lovely, and though the scenes—all filmed in real locations—are a tad ‘Greatest Hits of the National Trust’, rather flatly lit and framed, it is all immersive and believable and powerful drama. Much of the dialogue is lifted straight from the novel, and it is always, without exception, well-delivered by the cast. One thing is that the adaptation leans much more into the ‘Wolsey was the father Cromwell never had’, paternal-filial dynamic than does the book. In the TV Wolsey’s ghost keeps popping up all through the story, offering advice and connecting Cromwell to his past. In the novel the ghost only appears at the very end, when Cromwell is in the Tower of London, a place the novel portrays as saturated with ghosts—Thomas More’s ghost also rises and flies through a wall, and others appear. The TV version takes us to the scaffold, and gives Cromwell a dignified speech to the crowd, which, as it goes on, is revealed to be a speech directed specifically at Wolsey’s ghost, standing amongst the mob, and addressed as father. There’s nothing like that in the ending of Mantel’s novel, to which I’ll come back.

What the series doesn’t have, what it can’t replicate, are the epiphanic moments Mantel works into her prose, like the cat’s-eye-view above. Or the other, non-plotty ways Mantel works to unify her lengthy book: the weave of imagery and symbol, worked carefully and sometimes strikingly through the whole. Animals—wolves, birds—and angels; water, especially the London Thames, and weather. Works of art, from books of hours to portraits and frescoes, beautifully described and evoked. These are positioned, I think artfully, throughout the long trek of pages, and provide patterning and structure, tying things together.

Then again, the sheer length of the books militates against this, somewhat, as a unfiying textual strategy. A complete taxonomy of all the ways light figures in The Mirror and the Light, the many ways and places where it is described and evoked, would be book-length itself; and the other half of the title, the mirror, reoccurs in multiple meshes of signification. On the one hand, the mirror is a self-reflexive signifier: it is Mantel’s novel, reflecting history back to us, and making is see in the light of fiction, to see Cromwell in a new light. The very non-Tudor modernity of form and focus, here—the interiority and psychological verisimilitude, the poetic fluency of the writing, the dialogue, all quite unlike the literary forms and conventions of the early 16^th-century—means that The Mirror and the Light is a post-Romantic version of the medieval past. I even wonder if Mantel’s title is a deliberate nod to M H Abrams venerable study of Romantic poetics, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). Abrams’ argument is that, in pre-Romantic times, art was thought primarily to be a kind of mirror, reflecting the real world—holding, as Hamlet says, the mirror up to nature. But, Abrams argues, for the Romantics art was a kind of lamp: reality illuminated by the light of the artist’s imagination and soul. Mantel’s novel is both a scrupulously-researched reflection of the facticity of her period, and an imaginative illumination of Cromwell’s mind and character.

Then again, the title nods towards the medieval and Renaissance genre of specula principum, books that were ‘mirrors of princes’, ‘mirrors to princes’, how-to works advising princes and kings the best way to rule, like Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, William of Pagula’s Speculum regis, written for Edward III of England, or John Skelton’s Speculum principis (1501), ‘the mirror of a prince’, written in 1501 for the then future Henry VIII. The trilogy is full, inter alia, of advice, some offered by characters, some apothegms of Wolsey that Cromwell recalls, sometimes quoted from actual specula principium:‘Cromwell looks at Riche. “Niccolò’s book says, the wise prince exterminates the envious, and if I, Riche, were king, those claimants and their families would be dead’ [Wolf Hall, 488]. Then again, the trilogy is an unusual speculum principis, not just in the sense that its focus is on how not a king or prince should act but a politician—a secretary, a chamberlain, a chancellor, a privy seal, a councillor, Speculum consilarii. And the fact remains that Cromwell falls, so Cromwell His Boke is a mirror reflecting not ultimate success, but failure. When he is locked in the Tower, Cromwell reflects ‘that he has read a library of those volumes called Mirrors for Princes, which state that a wise councillor must always prepare himself for his fall ... but he covets nothing more than to be in his garden on this soft evening’ [812].

A book is a mirror of life, but not a neutral one: we see in it what our preconceptions shape us to see. In Wolf Hall, Gregory Cromwell is reading Le Morte d’Arthur, and his family ‘crowd round him, looking over his shoulder at the title page.’ The frontispiece shows ‘two couples embracing. There is a small castle, not much taller than a man, with a plank for a drawbridge. On a high-stepping horse is a man with a mad hat, made of coiled tubes like fat serpents ... behind this man, a woman rides pillion.’ [221] The Cromwells see not Arthur and Guinevere, but Henry and Anne Boleyn. ‘“Do you think this represents Lady Anne?” Gregory asks. “They say the king does not like to be parted from her, so he perches her up behind him like a farmer’s wife.”’

[The frontispiece of the third edition of Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, printed in 1529 by Wynkyn de Worde, who succeeded to Caxton's press]

Mantel works a number of these moments of ekphrasis into her writing, moved as she was by her intensely visual imagination, and her expertise at vividly rendering the visual in prose. In Wolf Hall, Holbein paints Cromwell’s portrait, and Cromwell, looking at it, sees it as accurate and inaccurate: ‘Hans has made the skin smooth as that of a courtesan’, though he has, at the same time, accurately captured his hands, ‘the motion, that folding of the fingers, as sure as that of a slaughterman when he picks up a killing knife’. Cromwell wanted the portrait to include his Bible, but Holbein rejects this ‘as too plain, too thumbed’, and so a much showier volume, a book of chess puzzles by Pacioli, is the one in the picture. Early in the same novel, Cromwell is grieving his wife Liz, and his young daughter Grace, both recently dead. He holds Liz’s prayer book in his hand, and turns the pages. ‘Grace liked to look at it,’ the novel tells us, ‘and today [Halloween] he feel the imprint of her small fingers under his own.’

He turns the page. The office is Lauds. Here is a picture of the Visitation. Mary, with her neat little belly, is greeted by her pregnant cousin, Elizabeth. Their foreheads are high, their brows plucked, and they look surprised, as indeed they must be; one of them is a virgin, the other advanced in years. Spring flowers grow at their feet and each of them wears an air crown, made of gilt wires as fine as blonde hairs. [Wolf Hall, 155]

Pregnancy, and specifically pregnancy destined to bring forth a boy prince, is a major theme of the novel (and of The Mirror and the Light); but the irony of this mirror is that the young supposed-virginal Anne Boleyn and the elderly Katharine, both impregnated by Henry, produced girls, not the wished-for boy. And then this:

He turns the page. The office is Vespers: a dagger sent by Herod makes a neat hole in a shocked infant. A woman throws up her hands in protest, or prayer: her eloquent, helpless palms. The infant corpse scatters three drops of blood, each one shaped like a tear. Each tear is a precise vermillion.

One moment like this piece of writing is worth hundreds of pages of plotting and politicing and historical research. This is so beautiful: as a description of a vividly imaginable piece of visual art, and as an image that encapsulates the themes of the novel. Children, alive and dead, the eloquence of the mother ‘throwing up her hands in protest, or prayer’, so fitted to a novel about the birth of Protestantism, the trinitarian three drops of blood, the colour not just red but intensely red, vermillion. In The Mirror and the Light Cromwell returns to this book, having, one winter’s day, an intense vision of his dead daughter, ‘turning over, in a flood of splintered sunlight, the Book of Hours that belonged to Lizzie Wickes’ [417].

Holbein’s various portraits of Henry figure through the trilogy as well: the image of the king, foursquare, powerful. ‘When the king sees the mural Hans has painted he says nothing. It is not for him to thank a mere artist. But he glitters, not merely augmented but enhanced ... [Holbein] seems awed by his own creation. “He looks as if he would spring out of the frame and trample you.” Henry expresses the wish that the kings of France, Germany and Scotland could see the image, and be intimidated by his potency. ‘“There can be copies, Majesty,” Hans says, modestly. Mirrors of his lively image, ever larger, more active with every telling’ [Mirror and Light, 491].

And again, the ‘mirror and light’ is a phrase more than once applied to Henry VIII himself. Assuring his monarch that he is loyal only to him, and not the French emperor Charles V, Cromwell says: ‘what should I want with the Emperor, were he emperor of all the world? Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other princes.’ [544] Henry likes this, ‘repeat[ing] the phrase as if cherishing it: the mirror and the light.’

Still, to repeat myself, a reader would need an unusually capacious and accurate memory to hold in her head all the various instances of mirrors, of light and its effects, placed carefully through the whole. It does not mitigate the sprawl of a nearly 2000-page text, with scores of characters hundreds of incidents and scenes.

Cromwell, of course, does have an extraordinary memory for facts, figures, names, details; although what Mantel focuses on is less this workaday business and more his memory working, as it were, more reflectively. Interrogating him after his arrest, alongside Norfolk and Gardiner, Wriothesley accuses Cromwell of conspiring with the French Spanish ambassador to marry Mary. ‘I was present at your house in Camberley,’ he says, ‘when you conferred with Chapuys in the garden tower. You made him certain promises. About Mary, her future estate. [Mirror and Light, 824]. Wriothesley’s question is a threat, and Cromwell denies making promises, but it provokes in him a purer memory:

He remembers the ambassador [Chapuys], his folio, on the grass among the daisies. The marble table, the envoy’s suspicion of the strawberries. The gradual clouding of the day, so that Christophe said that in Islington they feared thunder. Then Call-Me, at the foot of the tower in the twilight, a sheaf of peonies in his hand.

This is one of—many!—moment in the book when Mantel casts back to a specific earlier episode: all these elements are described in lavish, vivid detail from page 121 (‘after supper, as a hush falls and the long midsummer day folds itself and disposes to dusk, he and the ambassador climb to one of the garden towers’) through to page 128. Cromwell and Chapuys discuss Mary. The Frenchman is worried he has left his folio of papers below, so Cromwell has Christophe fetch it (‘the boy erupts from among them, slaps down the Imperial folio: the black eagle flies against white marble. “What kept you, Christophe?” “One came from Islington and says they fear thunder, the cows are lying down in the fields. I pray you, come down at the first spot of rain. If lightning strikes you are undone. Only a fool would stay at the top of a tower.” “I shall watch the skies,” Cromwell says.’). When Christophe descends, Cromwell shows Chapuys a letter from Princess Mary. The text gives us the content, but the novel is more interested in the effects of light:

‘Shall I have Christophe fetch a light?’

‘I will puzzle it out,’ the ambassador says. ‘It is her hand,’ he allows. He squints at the paper. The arch behind him fills with the evening’s lustre, a pale opaline glow. [Mirror and Light, 125]

Opaline is ‘like an opal in having a milky white iridescence’. As this last volume in the trilogy comes to an end, Mantel ramps up the call-backs. Walking towards the scaffold where he will die, Cromwell ‘moves to the beat of a drum, boro borombetta, Scaramella to the war is gone ...”’ [Mirror and Light, 872]. This recalls a scene in Wolf Hall, a full 1700 pages earlier, Cromwell recalling his time as a youth in Florence, working in the kitchens of a great man, and hearing ‘a young boy—younger than him—on hands and knees, scrubbing the steps. He sang as he worked:’

Scaramella va allla guerra
Colla lancia et la rotella
La zombero boro borombetta
La zombero boro borombetta. [Wolf Hall, 206]

The end of Mirror and Light continues: ‘his heart thuds as if it will break out of his chest. Behind him another drum-beat, rat-tat-tat ... Scaramella fa la gala’. And at the very end, as he kneels and puts his neck on the block, ready for the axe to fall, the ghost of his father, the savage Walter Cromwell, appears ‘as a voice in the air. “So now get up.” [Mirror and Light, 875]. This is a call-back to the very start of the first novel in the series. Chapter 1, page 1 of Wolf Hall:

‘So now get up.’

Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

This is Cromwell remembering being beaten and knocked to the floor as a lad by his violent blacksmith father. ‘“So now get up!” Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and moves forward, on his belly, trying to do so without exposing his hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. “What are you an eel?” [Wolf Hall, 3]. The ‘getting up’ that will follow his death is of a different kind that the physical getting-to-his-feet, and the longer-term social rise that the first novel describes.

What are you, an eel? Eels are another of the elements Mantel uses to unify and tie together the immense bundle of stuff that the trilogy is. The first time Cromwell kills, it is to stab an ‘eel boy’ who was taunting him. Early in Mirror and the Light Cromwell is anticipating Chapuys as a dinner guest. ‘At his feet, eels are swimming in a pail, twisting and gliding; interlacing in their futile efforts, as they wait to be killed and sauced. He asks Thurston: “what are they saying on the street? About Anne?’ [Mirror and the Light, 50]. It is Cromwell who is twisting and gliding, in his efforts to avoid being killed—at the very end we get: ‘he can taste his death: slow, metallic, not come yet ... he is an eel, he is a worm on a hook’ [Mirror and the Light, 875]. Rather than eels as such, it is this twisting, or writhing, that is one of the key gestures or momentums of the novel as a whole, as with the limbs of agitated men unfurling like ribbons that the cat sees. This links, I think, to a passage in the first chapter of Part 3, ‘The Bleach Fields’. This whole portion of the novel is given over to the—fictional, ahistorical—character of Jenneke, whom a younger Cromwell fathered upon a Dutch woman. After her mother’s death Jenneke travels to England and seeks out her father. In an already historically over-busy novel, I fear the long Jenneke section adds too much extra and unnecessary material. Cromwell is regretful that he did not marry her mother (he would have done, had he known she was alive) and promises to find Jenneke a wealthy husband in England; but she is not interested, believing the apocalypse is imminent: ‘she is one of those who think, what is the use of marrying, or giving in marriage? These are the end times.’ This leads Cromwell to considerations on how narratives of redemption—Lazarus, the crippled and blind men Jesus healed—can only ever be temporary interruptions in the inevitable. Cromwell remembers seeng Lazarus’s tomb, when he happened to be in the Holy Land on business:

Lazarus, of course, died twice. The second time it was for good and all. Travelling east for his bank once, he visited his second and final tomb. It is guarded by ferocious monks, who stick a collecting bowl in your face and make you empty your pockets to see something that, after all, is only proof that miracles do not last. The crippled man walks, but only twice around the churchyard before he collapses in a flailing of limbs. The blind man sees, but the faces he knew in his young days are altered; and when he asks for a mirror, he doesn’t recognize himself at all. [Mirror and the Light, 434]

Those eel-like flailing limbs, like the men observed by the Damascene cat. The blank unrecognition offered by the mirror. (That reference to pockets is rare lapse in Mantel’s historical accuracy). In Wolf Hall, Cromwell looks into the mirror in his home: ‘he looks into the glass and the whole bright room comes bouncing back to him: lutes, portraits, silk hangings.’ Bouncing back. This reminds him of a banker Cromwell had known in Rome, Agnosto Chigi, reputedly the richest man in the world. ‘When Agnostino had the pope round for dinner he fed him on gold plates. Then he looked at the aftermath—the sprawled, sated cardinals, the mess they had left behind—and he said, stuff it, let’s save on the washing up’ [Wolf Hall, 313]. The guests all toss their gold plates out of the window and into the Tiber, the table linen too. ‘Peals of Roman laughter unfurled into the Roman night.’ But the story has a moral: ‘Chigi had netted the banks, and he had divers standing by for whatever escaped. Some sharp-eyed servant of his upper household stood by the bank when dawn came, and checked off the list, pricking with a pin each item retrieved as it came up from the deep.’ Appearance is not reality. Spontaneity is practised. One doesn’t simply throw away gold plates and expensive linen, not even to impress the Pope.

This brings us to endings. The BBC adaptation veers from the novel: it gives, as I mentioned, Cromwell a speech from the scaffold, directed at the ghost of Wolsey standing in the crowd, where the book has neither speech nor spectre. Nor does the adaptation show Cromwell’s decapitation, segueing from Mark Rylance, with his head upon the block, to a scene in which he walks, in slow-motion, in the gardens of one of his country estates, through summer beauty, past beekeepers busying themselves with the hives. This has already been established in the series as Cromwell’s vision of heaven: his hope that he will eventually escape the coils and toil of court, politics and plotting and retire to this beautiful place. Mantel’s novel also includes Cromwell’s vision of heaven, but immediately before rather than after his death, and modelled not on an earthly house but in art:

When he thinks of Heaven he imagines it as a vast party arranged by the cardinal; like that field in Picardy, the Field of the Cloth of Gold … perhaps, he thinks, this time tomorrow [ie after his execution] I will inhabit some kinder city: the blue shadows lengthening, the sun’s final rays softening the lines of bell towers and domes; ladies in niches at their prayers, a small dog with a plumed tail strolling the streets; indifferent doves alighting on gilded spires. [Mirror and Light, 866]

Indifferent doves alight on gilded spires would be a perfect iambic pentameter; though Mantel throws in an extra syllable to stop the prose flowing too facilely. Gorgeous writing. Cromwell contrasts this warm vision of heaven with a vision of hell, the cold Thameside wharf where Wolf Hall opens. Hell is ‘a cold place, a wasteland, a wharf, a marsh, a landing stage; Walter distantly bawling, then the bawling coming nearer.’ Hell, he thinks, ‘is not pain itself, but the constant apprehension of pain’. The novel itself takes us in a different direction, into the afterlife.

We come to the end. In this final paragraph, the phrase ‘beneath him, the ground upheaves’ must be the moment that the axe cuts through his neck, and his head falls: and everything after that is Cromwell’s postmortem experience.

He is very cold. People imagine the cold comes after but it is now. He thinks, winter is here. I am at Laude. I have stumbled deep into the crisp white snow. I flail my arms in angel shape, but now I am crystal, I am ice and sinking deep; now I am water. Beneath him the ground upheaves. The river tugs him: he looks for the quick-moving pattern, for the flitting, liquid scarlet. Between a pulse-beat and the next he shifts, going out on crimson with the tide of his inner sea. He is far from England now, far from these islands, from the waters salt and fresh. He has vanished; he is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall. [Mirror and Light, 875]

Blinded, in that last sentence, by the light, presumably. From the chill of mortality—flailing arms, again!—thawing into fluidity. The river that tugs him is the river of death, and the river of his own blood (‘liquid scarlet’) spilled by the axe-cut. The wall is the city wall of the heavenly vision he has had, I suppose. Walls defined not by exclusion, but the doorways through them. Nets a matrix of holes through which to evade inevitability, mortality, and get free.

There’s one more thing in the novel, after Cromwell’s death: a quotation from Petrarch’s Africa (1343), which Mantel has as:

For you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. When the darkness is dispelled, our descendants will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.

This is from the very last bit of Petrarch’s Latin epic: Scipio Africanus has travelled to Carthage, made war on Hannibal and defeated him. In book 9, he and his fleet sail back to Rome, with Carthaginian prisoners, for a grand triumph, having saved Rome and destroyed the African city. On the voyage, Scipio speaks of a vision he has of the poet Homer, and then, in a self-reflexive turn, he has another vision, this time of the future, the Italy that will be, and of Petrarch himself, sitting on verdant turf with a pen in his hand, writing the Africa, the very poem in which he is being conjured forth. The poem ends, in Petrarch’s own voice, lamenting that he has endured many troubles and that he will soon be dead, but saying that it will be different for you and me.

At tibi fortassis, si quid mens sperat et optat,
Et post me victura diu; meliora supersunt
Saecula; non omnes veniet Lethaeus in annos
Iste sopor; poterunt discussis forte tenebris
Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes. [Africa 9: 453-7]

But perhaps for you, who, as is my hope and desire,
will live on long after me, better times will come:
the years will not remain forever in this Lethean
stupor. Perchance, having dispersed the darkness,
our descendents will return to the pure and ancient sunlight.

It’s a self-reflexive moment in The Mirror and the Light as Mantel’s last novel: she died less than two years after it was published. But we live on, and can, thanks to her artistry, step back into the pure sixteenth-century sunlight.