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

  When the men that were then look at the men that are now, they see companies of pretty painted knights, ambling through the meadows of plenty, through the pastures of a forty-year peace. Not, of course, if you live on the Scots border, where the raiding and feuding never stops, or on the Kent coast within sight of France, where you hear the war drums across the Narrow Sea. But in the realm’s heart there is a quiet our forefathers never knew. Just see how England is breeding: go out into the town, and the faces you see are those of children, apprentices, shining young maids.

  Don’t look back, he had told the king: yet he too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slip into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow. You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself – slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself, undone myself, have I forgotten too well; must I apply to Bishop Stephen, who will tell me how transgression follows me, assures me that my sins seek me out; even as I slide into sleep, my past pads after me, paws on the flagstones, pit-pat: water in a basin of alabaster, cool in the heat of the Florentine afternoon.

  Time was when the cardinal knelt in the dirt, and he saw he was mortal, flawed and old. On Putney Heath, Harry Norris stared down at him, bemused, and his people had to hoist him on his mule; his heart and will had failed him, and with his heart, his joints. The jester Patch stood by cracking jokes, and he almost struck him, he should have struck him – but then how would that have helped the cardinal, his goods confiscated, his chain of office torn from his neck, and now his fool rolled in the Surrey mud with his skull cracked?

  When they came to Esher, to the empty house, he had climbed to the top of the gatehouse, wanting to know if they were pursued. New-built when Wayneflete held the see of Winchester, improved by my lord cardinal, no place was more pleasant, when it was staffed and scrubbed; when the fires were blazing and the beds made and the arras hung, when the buffet was stacked with gold and silver plate; when meat was slapped and seared, fruit chopped and skewered and basted in butter, and all the air perfumed with scorching and sweetness. No one had known, even yesterday, how brutally they would set his master on the road, on the river, propel him to these gaunt rooms, the ovens cold, the fires ash, the thick walls not so much repelling the cold as encasing it, like a reliquary.

  From the top of Wayneflete’s tower, the countryside beneath him was more imagined than real, stretching away in the darkness. It will soon be All Hallows, he thought. It seemed to him time had shuddered and slowed, as if the transit of heavenly bodies was retarded by the catastrophe that had overtaken his master and all England. It was drizzling. There were lights in the river. As he climbed down, the voices of those below curled up to him – rounded, as if in song. But when someone spoke his name – ‘Thomas Cromwell’ – it was very close, as if in his ear.

  Some trick the building has, he thought. The staircase was a spiral of brick, and he had seen it by day, flesh-coloured, flowing from floor to floor. In the dimness where the torch-light failed, the brick was the hue of stale blood, but each twist held a slit of light, like a promise. Delivered to the foot, he emerged and blinked, a child born into a harsh world.

  They had found candles to light the lower chamber. ‘Who will cook my supper, Tom?’ the cardinal enquired.

  ‘I will, I can cook.’

  ‘Come here, you’re cobwebbed.’ It was George Cavendish, one of the cardinal’s gentlemen. ‘Allow me, Thomas.’

  He let George brush him down, passive as an animal: his eyes on his master, a bereft old man in borrowed clothes. He stood with his back to the brick, feeling the beating of his own heart: waiting to see what he would do next.

  PART TWO

  I

  Augmentation

  London, Autumn 1536

  The dead man comes out of the Well with Two Buckets, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, and stands looking up and down the street. He pulls up his hood, checks to see who is watching him, then strides towards the great gate of Austin Friars.

  There is a new guard, who lays a hand on the visitor, and rifles through his wallet of papers. ‘Blade?’

  The corpse stretches out his arms, pacific, allows himself to be patted down. An elder porter steps out. ‘We know the gentleman. In you go, Father Barnes.’

  Inside they say, ‘His lordship’s expecting you.’ The corpse runs upstairs.

  Go back ten years. Winter, 1526, the friar Robert Barnes is brought before Wolsey on suspicion of heresy. Through a frozen day, no light but the ice-light from standing pools, Barnes stands in an anteroom, clad in the black habit of his order. Beneath it, his flesh creeps. The cardinal, they tell him, is making his preparations. What kind of preparations could they be?

  Christmas Eve last, at St Edward’s in Cambridge, Barnes preached at midnight Mass against the pomp and wealth of the church. It is impossible to do that, obviously, without preaching against the pomp and wealth of the cardinal.

  Now it’s February: dies irae. As he waits the cardinal’s people watch him, and a low flame sputters in the grate. ‘Cold,’ Friar Barnes says.

  ‘Didn’t you bring your own firewood?’ There is a rustle from the onlookers, a snigger. Barnes moves, edging away from the cardinal’s ruffian.

  In Wolsey’s room a great fire blazes. Barnes stands away from it, against the painted wall. ‘Prior Robert,’ Wolsey says. ‘Come where you feel the heat, man.’

  He feels he has walked into a joke, set up to torment him. ‘I am not here on trial,’ he bursts out. ‘Your man Cromwell is out there, taunting me, talking about firewood.’

  ‘Of course you are not on trial.’ The cardinal is civil. His purple silks flash in air smoky with resins. ‘They say you are a heretic, yet it seems you have no difficulty with the teachings of the church. Your only difficulty is with me.’

  Outside, a bell pierces frozen air. A man comes in with a tray of spiced wine. The cardinal pours it himself, from a jug gaudily enamelled with a Tudor rose. ‘So what do you want me to do, Barnes? You want me to leave off the state and ceremony which honours God, and to go in homespun? You want me to keep a miser’s table, and serve pease pudding to ambassadors? You want me to melt down my silver crosses, and give the money to the poor? The poor, which will piss it against the wall?’

  There is a pause. After a time, faintly, Barnes says, ‘Yes.’

  The ruffian Cromwell has come in behind him and is leaning against the door. Wolsey says, ‘I am sorry to see a scholar ruin himself. You must grasp that it is no use to avoid heresy, only to fall into sedition. Oppose the church, you will burn at Smithfield. Oppose the state, you will choke at Tyburn – and for present purposes, I am the church and I am also the state. But both fates are avoidable, if you repent now.’

  Prior Barnes begins to shake. The interrogatory stare of the cardinal is enough to bring a man to his knees. ‘Your Grace, pardon me. I do no harm. Truly. I could not kill a cat.’

  The man Cromwell laughs. Barnes blushes; he is ashamed of his own words. The cardinal says, ‘There are four bishops coming presently to examine you. All men who drown kittens for their pleasant recreation. For my part, I will be good to you, Dr Barnes – as much for the sake of your university as for yourself; my secr
etary Stephen Gardiner has been earnest with me in that regard. If you satisfy the bishops with your answers – please make them brief, and make them humble – I will recommend you do penance. But it must be public. Then afterwards there will be a good deal of fasting and praying, but you won’t mind that, will you? Of course you cannot continue as prior of your house. You must quit Cambridge.’

  ‘My lord cardinal –’

  The cardinal turns his face, mild: ‘What? Drink up, Dr Barnes. And take the chance. You only get one.’

  Ejected from the warmth, Barnes weeps like a woman, his face to the wall. Wolsey has not raised his voice, but he is broken by the encounter. Thomas Cromwell walks up to him. ‘Dry your tears. You can make a better story to tell among your friends. You can boast you gave bold answers. Confounded him.’

  Barnes huddles into himself. He finds Cromwell incomprehensible. He looks like the kind of fellow who chucks drunks out of taverns.

  On Shrove Tuesday, the friar abases himself on the flags at Paul’s, and Wolsey looks down on him from his golden throne. A score of great churchmen, in their vestments stiff and bright with gems, watch as Barnes kneels among certain merchants of the Steelyard, foreigners, who have been trapped by Thomas More with heretic books. They have been led through the streets on donkeys, set backwards in the saddle with their faces to the tail. Torn sheets of the writings of Luther are pinned to their coats, and now flap like grey rags. Lashed to their backs, as to his own, are faggots, dry sticks tied up for kindling – it is to remind them the stake is ready, if they offend again. Like Dr Barnes, they have recanted. If they backslide they will die in terror and pain, in public, and their ashes will be thrown on a midden.

  Outside the church, a crowd has gathered. Their faces rain-blurred as if melting, their forms indistinct in winter light, men are tented under oiled canvases that seem to rest on their shoulders, making them a beast with many legs. ‘Stand aside,’ officers call. Big baskets are lugged and bumped into the centre of the crowd. Their contents are tipped out; they make a brave enough pile, heaped on a gridiron. One of the executioner’s apprentices sets a torch to them. His fellows poke at the books with iron bars, to let air into the pile, and under their skilled attention the pages ignite, despite the sheeting rain. The suspect men are herded together and driven round and round the fire, close enough to flinch from the heat, their faces jerking away as sparks fly into their eyes. The texts sigh as the paper curls, and disintegrate into a mute sludge.

  Dr Barnes is sent to a friary in the city of London. His keeping is none too strait, and he is allowed visitors. One day Thomas Cromwell comes in. ‘I live near here. Come to supper.’ On the bench he drops a copy of William Tyndale’s Testament, single sheets loosely tied. ‘Arrived from Antwerp,’ he says. Barnes looks up. The cardinal’s heretic, he thinks.

  ‘I have twenty copies. I can get more.’

  It is not long before the Bishop of London suspects where the Testaments are coming from. Another difficult interview: but with Bishop Tunstall, who is not by choice a persecutor. Barnes is not as overawed as he was by Wolsey. ‘How would I bring in Tyndale’s books? I go nowhere. I see no one.’

  He gambles that Cromwell’s name will not be raised. Nor is it. Tunstall just shakes his head, and presently sends him to Northamptonshire. It’s a long way from any port. You can’t run from there, out of the cardinal’s jurisdiction. Nor can your fellow gospellers visit you, without all the countryside knows it.

  One night Barnes steals out of the monastery where he is confined. Next day in his cell the monks find a letter, addressed to the cardinal, in which the miserable man says he means to drown himself. On the riverbank they find his folded habit. No body is found, but the poor sinner has made his intention clear.

  And that’s the last of Robert Barnes: till the times change, and the Pope goes down, and he surfaces in a new England, his past failures washed away.

  ‘Come in, old ghost,’ the cardinal’s heretic says. ‘God’s work is marvellous. You bobbing up from your watery grave.’

  ‘You never tire of the jest,’ Barnes says.

  ‘But your feet not even damp!’

  Barnes was never in the river. He swam up from his ruse somewhere in the Low Countries, and found friends, protectors, brothers in Christ. Years pass, he comes back proficient in many tongues; the world turns, and now he is a chaplain to the king, and carries his letters abroad. ‘And Tunstall gone up to Durham,’ his host says. ‘And my lord cardinal dead.’ He sits back in his chair. ‘And me a lord.’

  ‘Brought you these.’ Barnes lays engravings on the table. Fat Martin.

  ‘You spoil me,’ Lord Cromwell says.

  In the older portraits, Luther is spiritual, attenuated. In the newer ones, porky. His tonsure grew out years ago. Sometimes he wears a beard. Barnes tells him, ‘When the papists burn his books they pin his picture on top, as if it were Martin himself. But the country people in Germany, the simple people, they believe his image can resist the fire.’

  Lord Cromwell stabs one likeness with a finger. ‘I notice he wears a halo.’

  ‘That is not his choice. He does not set up as a saint. But it is wonderful, what the printers can do. All Europe knows his features. Every ploughboy.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘His life has been attempted many a time. Once,’ Barnes smiles, ‘by a physician who could make himself invisible.’

  ‘Oh, those,’ he says. Secret assassins with scalpels of air. ‘I have been looking over my shoulder for invisible men since Wolsey’s day. I’ve got ears like a fox and my head on a swivel. One sniff of a papist or a Yorkshireman and it swings right round and eyeballs him.’ He broods over the engravings. ‘Is his temper not improved?’

  ‘Worse, I would say. Vain and touchy as a woman.’

  Luther fleshes out, since he wed an ex-nun. Marriage doesn’t have the same effect on our archbishop. Cranmer remains lean and pallid. ‘Because he must be worried,’ Barnes says. ‘In case the king finds out.’

  ‘The king already knows.’

  ‘Likely he does. But I mean, in case he finds himself in a position where he cannot deny the knowledge.’

  Our king is vehemently opposed to clerical marriage. Cranmer wed when he was among the Germans, brought Grete back, keeps her secluded. Celibates are busy gossips; many would pull Cranmer down if they could. But then they have their own secrets, that do not bear telling: their mistresses, their children. He says, ‘We work it all between us, Cranmer and I. The archbishop tells Henry how to be good, and I tell him how to be king. We do not cut across each other. We try to persuade him that great kings are good kings, and vice versa.’

  Barnes says, ‘Luther speaks frankly to rulers. Harshly, if need be.’

  ‘But in the end he defers to them: as he must.’ He examines Luther’s homely features, and lays him face-down. ‘Look, Rob, we do what we can do. We are in concord, Cranmer and myself. We are leaving Henry his rituals and he is giving us the scriptures. I think it is a good trade.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ Barnes says, ‘our prince thinks the purpose of scripture is to allow him to marry new wives. You claim he will license a Bible, so why does he delay?’

  He sweeps the engravings together like a pack of cards and tucks them in his writing box. ‘Thomas More used to say, all translators crave something from their text, and if they do not find it they will put it there. The king will not let us use Tyndale’s version. We are obliged to pass it off, give other men the credit.’

  ‘If Henry is waiting for a translation with God’s thumbprint on it, he will wait a long time. Luther would labour three or four weeks on a single phrase. I never thought he would get his work out, and yet two years back at the book fair in Leipzig he was selling a complete Bible for under three guilders – and they have reprinted twice since then. Why should the Germans have God’s word, and not Englishmen? You may stare at th
e text till your eyes bleed, consume a stack of paper as high as Paul’s steeple – but I tell you, no word is the last word.’

  It is true. No text stays clean. Yet one must part with it, send it to the printer. The trick is to get them to set the line right to the edge of the page. It does not make for a good appearance, but no white space means no perversion by marginalia.

  ‘You will forgive me if I am indignant,’ Barnes says. ‘I have been toiling these many years for the king, trying to patch up an alliance, trying to come into some agreement with the German princes and their divines – and the news from England comes, and you have cut the ground from under me.’

  By cutting off the queen’s head. True. It is autumn, and Barnes is still shocked. ‘She, who believed in the Word.’

  ‘She was a Howard,’ he says. ‘You know what Howards believe in. Themselves.’

  ‘Cranmer doesn’t believe she was guilty.’

  ‘Cranmer is like me. He believes what the king believes.’

  ‘That is not true either.’ Barnes is bubbling like the hot springs at Viterbo. ‘They know in Germany that Cranmer is a Lutheran – whatever he may say to Henry. Cranmer is the only card I hold. I have waited and waited for some word from our English bishops that I can represent as an advance on papist superstition, and at last they issue their ten articles – and they give with one hand, take with the other. Every word is ambiguous.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘They mean everything and nothing.’

  ‘You can say to the Germans … how to phrase it? … that though the articles are a statement of our English faith, they are not a complete statement.’