The Mirror and the Light: 2020’s highly anticipated conclusion to the best selling, award winning Wolf Hall series (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3)

by Hilary Mantel

  She spread out her hands. ‘I can only appeal to the history that lies between us. I am a feeble woman, who never wore plate armour, nor links of mail. I have no breastplate, but faith in God. I have mounted no defence against my detractors – but trusted in the king, and in his skill to recognise those who are fit for his company and service.’

  ‘But now you see me,’ he said, ‘in his company and service. And you wonder if Henry knows anything at all.’

  ‘You are useful to him. How could I doubt it? And I did not mean to deprive you of your title just now. I am elderly and it takes one a while to become accustomed to new usages. We think of you as plain Master Cromwell.’

  ‘Well,’ he had said cheerfully, ‘if you could learn to think the Tudors rightful kings of England – and you say you could – I am sure you can come to think of me as Lord Privy Seal. And should I ever forget that I was born one of the lower sort, I will presume upon our friendship, madam, and beg you to remind me.’

  That jolts you, he thought: ‘our friendship’: that sickens your stomach. That a Putney boy should presume! He says, ‘You claim that your son is not ambitious to rule. But others may be ambitious for him. Others may plan and intrigue for him, at home and abroad.’

  Her eyes dart like birds in their nest of violet shadow. ‘I? You mean, I would do it? You accuse me?’

  ‘Great families are subject to reversals. For a decade, they climb; then their enemies hurl them down; then they overthrow their enemies, and lead them in a Roman triumph, in chains. It used to be that, if you and your kind stuck doggedly to the wheel of fortune, you would rise as far as you had fallen. But then comes a fellow like me, and knocks you clean off the wheel. Be advised, I can do it.’

  ‘There is a proverb,’ she said, ‘the truth of which is hallowed by time. “He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.”’

  ‘A feeble saying, and feebly expressed. It leans on that same conceit, the wheel. What I say is, these are new times. New engines drive them. Still,’ he smiled, ‘I congratulate you. You have said what my lord of Norfolk would say, but he dare not.’

  ‘The duke is a time-server,’ she said coldly. ‘He forgets, there were lords of Norfolk, before Howards held that title.’

  ‘But there were no lords Cromwell. Not before this. You hope there may be none after. But it is the present you must reckon with. You cannot pray nor curse me away – your women’s weapons are no use against me, nor the weapons used by priests, I am proof against them too. If the men of your family would relish an open fight, I am ready – I will fight any day for Henry against papists and traitors.’

  Stock-still against the window’s light, she had stood with hands clasped, her voice frigid. ‘I am glad we have spoken plain. What Reynold has done against the king – God knows, I have never felt so sharp a sorrow; not when his father died, not when some other of my children have died. I shall write to him and advertise him of this. And I am sure you will read my letter by some means, either before it leaves these shores or after – so I shall not detain you now, while I write it. But I shall counsel you, my lord, and I beg you to hear me out. You speak of new times and new engines. These engines may rust before you have wheeled them to the fight. Do not join battle with the noble families of England. You have lost before you ride out. Who are you? You are one man. Who follows you? Only carrion crows, bone-pickers. Do not stop moving, or they will eat you alive.’

  The low civil tone in which the countess said this had left him without a rejoinder. She had inclined her head, and walked out of the room.

  He possessed the ground. The writing box gaped open; but she was right, he had no interest in its contents.

  Outside his escort waited, marshalled by Richard Cromwell. His people carry clubs and daggers, and are ready to move on anyone who casts them a second glance. From Dowgate it’s but a step to Austin Friars, but death threats come in daily, some of them in verse. The Londoners who jostle them, the Londoners whose indifferent eyes skim over them, see no more than a sober merchant with his household about him, hurrying to a ward meeting or guild dinner. But there are those who have his features engraved in memory: so they claim, when they threaten to strike him down as he walks. Thank God I am not memorable, he thinks. One coarse-featured sway-belly, like my father in his prime: better clothes, though.

  He says to Richard, ‘I have no illusions about the countess. Her sons have been feeding our secrets to the Emperor for years. Young Geoffrey Pole, the brother – he was so often at Chapuys’s house that Eustache had to beg him to stay away.’

  The bell at All Hallows gives tongue, then St Mary’s after it. Richard says, ‘But you can see why the king fights to think well of them. It was he who restored their fortunes, and he does not want to take himself for a fool.’

  St John Baptist rings out; then Swithun strikes up; further off, the bells at Paul’s. Across the street Richard shouts: ‘Humphrey Monmouth, or do my eyes deceive?’

  The merchant, his old friend, halloos in reply. With his companion, he threads between two carts, steps over a stream of horse piss. He, Cromwell, claps their shoulders: ‘Will you come up to Canonbury to hunt?’

  ‘I will hunt with you,’ Robert Packington says. ‘Old man Monmouth can come and watch.’

  Monmouth elbows him. ‘Old man! You’ll not see forty again, sir! I shall ride out with my falcon in your company, Thomas.’

  It is a usual conversation. They raise the name of Tyndale, as he knew they would. He says courteously that he has done all he can through official channels, and now awaits the outcome. He turns the subject – the family, are they all well? But Packington turns it back: ‘Any visitors from Antwerp?’

  ‘The usual,’ Richard says, cautious.

  ‘No one new?’

  He says, ‘No one who can tell us anything we don’t know.’

  They part with hearty farewells. The merchants go chattering away. He and Richard walk on, silent. He says to Richard, ‘What?’

  ‘They sound as if they are planning a surprise. Perhaps it’s a present?’

  He doesn’t need to say, I don’t like surprises.

  Richard looks at him sideways. ‘So will you? Kill Reynold?’

  ‘Not in the street,’ he says.

  It is a conversation for Austin Friars: for his private rooms. He says, ‘Francis Bryan would do it. He would rise to a challenge. Make a name for himself. He must sometimes wonder, what is the point of my life?’

  ‘Bryan?’ Richard makes a tippling motion.

  ‘True.’ He thinks, what other desperate men do I know?

  ‘I’ll go.’

  Fear touches him. ‘No.’

  ‘I would need a company of rogues, but from what you say I could find them easy, in any Italian town. There are some gentlemen who might try to manage the business from afar. Now, I am not saying I would put the knife in myself. But I am saying I would see it done.’

  ‘I need you here, Richard,’ he says. God knows how much. ‘Tom Wyatt would do it. The king would forgive him everything. He would make him an earl.’

  Richard hesitates. ‘The people about Pole … they might turn him. There are some subtle wits at Rome. I love Tom Wyatt, no man more, but he is not proof against sudden persuasion.’

  He says, ‘When we ride to Kent to join with the king’s party, we will visit Allington, you and me, whether the king goes there or no. Sir Henry writes that he is failing. I am his executor, and should consult with him. And Tom Wyatt would be glad to see you.’

  Richard slides a paper out of his pocket. ‘This came.’ He has been carrying it near his person. ‘Another verse. Not stolen. Offered freely.’

  This time he knows it: Wyatt and none other. It is not strange if, once again, he laments those lost. Call it two and a half months – late May to Lammas-tide. The dead are no longer fresh, but copper-green flesh is still adherent to the
ir bones. The verse is about slippage, fall, reversal of fortune, the casting down of the great by the great: around the throne thunder rolls, circa regna tonat; even as he sits under his canopy of estate, the king hears it, he feels it shudder in the stone flags, he feels its reverberation in the bone. He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame, they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; till they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey’s dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.

  The Bell Tower showed me such sight

  That in my head sticks day and night.

  There did I learn out of a grate …

  He cannot tell if Wyatt writes lean or learn. From the Bell Tower, no use to lean: you cannot see the scaffold on Tower Hill. But then, what had he to learn? He could not be ignorant of what was to pass. He did not think the men would come back with their heads on their shoulders.

  He thinks, I didn’t have to go to the Bell Tower. This sorry procession to extinction – it was always in my sight. Chapuys had said, ‘You went to your house and dreamed it, then it came to pass.’

  On the day of Anne’s death, Gregory saw Wyatt standing at a window; Wyatt looked down at him and made no signal. Did he watch the deer on her last run, her heart labouring, her gait failing? One supposed his eyes were inward, his gaze trained on nothing: where nothing soon would be. He has an image in his mind – and either it is a distant memory, or it is inserted there by a verse – of Wyatt’s hands scratched and bleeding, a tangle of roses in his grasp.

  But surely, he thinks, it is Wriothesley I remember, at Canonbury: standing at the foot of the tower in the garden, the light fading, a sheaf of peonies in his hands.

  They are in Kent, and the king calls him at dawn: he comes in, the locks rattling open, to free his prince from the oppressions of the night. Henry sits in his nightgown on a gilded and fringed stool, while a pale, perfect morning dawns outside the panes, and his features emerge from shadow, as if God were making him for the occasion.

  The king begins, as he often does, as if they had just been speaking, and for some slight cause had broken off: a door opening, or a spark flying from the fire. He says, ‘In the days when I wanted her, and could not have her, when we were apart, Anne Boleyn and I, let us say I was at Greenwich, she was here in Kent – in those days I used to see her standing before me, smiling, just as if she were real, as real,’ the king stretches his hand out, ‘as real as you, Cromwell. But now I know she was never truly there. Not in the way I thought she was.’

  The room smells sweetly, of lavender and pooled beeswax. Below the window, across the gardens, a boy is singing.

  ‘The knight knocked at the castle gate

  The lady marvelled who was thereat.’

  Henry lifts his head, listening. He sings:

  ‘She asked him what was his name

  He said, Desire, your man, madame.’

  When he steps forward into the full light, he sees Henry is crying silently, tears running down his cheeks. ‘The archbishop has given me a saying to guide me. It comes from the book of Samuel. “When the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept … But now he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.”’

  Some fool comes in with a ewer of hot water. He waves the man back again. ‘A child’s loss is grievous, sir; it is as if we drag their corpses with us, all our days. But it is best to lay down your sorrow in some safe and consecrated place, and then walk on, looking to better times.’

  ‘I thought I had been punished enough,’ Henry says. ‘But it seems I will never be done being punished.’

  ‘Sir –’

  ‘You cannot know. You have only lost daughters, not sons. When my own day comes …’

  He waits. He cannot guess how the king will conclude.

  ‘… you understand my wishes, and should you survive me I charge you to honour them. I wish to be buried in the tomb that the cardinal prepared for himself.’

  He inclines his head. There is a sarcophagus of black touchstone, in which the cardinal never lay. All the parts are preserved, laid up in store. They await use, by someone who values himself in the sight of God and man, and wishes his name continued. Wolsey brought the artist over. Benedetto worked on it year after year, but as soon as he put in his account, the cardinal thought of something else. There are twelve bronze saints, and putti bearing shields emblazoned with the Wolsey arms. There are sober angels who bear in their hands pillars and crosses, and dancing angels with curly hair, their garments floating about them as they caper and skip.

  ‘You should be glad, Crumb,’ Henry says. ‘You always want to save money.’

  ‘Only if it sits with your Majesty’s honour.’

  ‘The angel who bears the cardinal’s hat,’ Henry says, ‘he will bear a crown instead. The griffins at the feet – I thought they might be wreathed in roses. Golden roses.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Benedetto.’

  The artist has never gone home. Perhaps he has been expecting the cardinal to rise from the dead, with fresh suggestions? By now one of the skipping angels has developed a crack, between the fingers of his left hand. Benedetto says, no one will know, Tommaso. Not when he’s gilded and dancing up there on his pillar. But I’ll know, he says.

  The king tells him, ‘Erasmus is dead.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘I saw him first when he came to Eltham when I was a child. You would have seen him at Thomas More’s house, no doubt.’

  The great man’s eyes passed over him, over Thomas Cromwell: saw him and forgot him. He says, ‘He civilised us.’

  The king says, ‘Then he died with work to do.’

  Henry seems frightened of himself, frightened of what he might say or do next. He seems weary, as if he might leave off being king, and just walk out into the street and take his chances.

  The knowledge of this collapse of morale must be kept from the court. William Fitzwilliam catches him, outside the king’s door. ‘Before we left London,’ Fitz says, ‘he told me he thought he would have no more children.’

  ‘Hush,’ he says. ‘He is ashamed of himself. He thinks he is done for, only because he cannot follow the chase as he did when he was young.’

  This summer, the king will not hunt on horseback. The game will be driven to him as he stands in the butts, crossbow loaded, poised to shoot. He can ride well enough, keeping an ambling pace, but not across rough country, because of the jolting to his leg.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Fitzwilliam says, ‘that he has some principle of rotation in his head, by which he humiliates his councillors in turn.’

  ‘True. At the moment it is Norfolk’s turn.’

  ‘At the council board he walks about behind us. He hovers like a cutpurse. If I met such a man in Southwark, I would turn and knock the felon down.’

  He laughs. ‘But what would you be doing in Southwark, Fitz?’

  ‘When he gets himself behind us, we must rise and kick our stools away and turn and face him, which throws us off, makes us forget what we were saying – and then, if we address him, is it kneeling or standing?’

  ‘Kneeling is safest.’

  ‘You don’t.’ Fitz sounds accusing. ‘Or not so much as you did.’

  ‘I have too much business with him. He knows not to cripple me.’

  ‘Even the cardinal knelt.’

  ‘A churchman. He was trained to it.’

  The cardinal, in his days as master of the realm, had spoken of God as if He were a distant policy adviser from whom he heard quarterly: gnomic in his pronouncements, sometimes forgetful, but worth a retainer on account of his experience. At times he sent Him special requests, which the less well-connected call prayers; and always, until th
e last months of his life, God fell over Himself to make sure Tom Wolsey had what he wanted. But then he prayed, Make me humble; God said, Sir, your request comes too late.

  His servant John Gostwick has been checking the inventories of the Duke of Richmond. Among Fitzroy’s effects he finds a doll: no wooden mammet for a common child to play with, but the lively image of a prince.

  ‘Item: a great baby lying in a box of wood, having a gown of white cloth of silver and a kirtle of green velvet, the gown tied with small aglets of gold, and a small pair of beads of gold and a small chain and a collar about the neck of gold.’

  Gostwick had called him to see it: he stood looking down at the likeness of the dead boy. ‘Wolsey gave him this. Keep it carefully, in case the king wishes to have his son in remembrance.’ The infant, he recalled, did not know his own father; the king gave me titles, Richmond had said, but the cardinal gave me a striped silk ball.

  The summer passes. The king’s entourage winds through the leafy shires. In the deep woodlands, where the king may not venture, you meet the wily shades of boars and wolves, extinct forms: the stag who, between his antlers, bears the cross of Christ. He says to Fitzwilliam, ‘If he cannot hunt, we must teach him to pray.’

  On the last day of July they are at Allington Castle. The king has wondered aloud if it might be time for Thomas Wyatt to receive the honour of knighthood. His father would like to see it, he says, as he enters into his old age, and whatever has lain between us, Wyatt and I, it is forgot; I know his faithful mind to me.

  What he disliked was the short silence, among the gentlemen of the privy chamber, when the king mentioned Wyatt’s name.

  Henry Wyatt says to him, ‘Thomas, I doubt I shall see another winter.’ One by one, those gentlemen depart, who served the king’s father, whose memories stretch back to King Edward and the days of the scorpion; men bruised in the wars, hacked in the field, impoverished, starved out, driven into exile; men who stood on foreign quays and swore great oaths to God, their worldly goods in sacks at their feet. Men who sequestered themselves in musty libraries for twenty years and emerged possessed of inconvenient truths about England. Men who learned to walk again, after they had been stretched on the rack.