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

  He nods. Fathers and sons. At the age when lords were perched up on their first quiet pony, he was playing in the forge within range of flailing hooves. ‘Just let him get kicked once,’ Walter used to say, ‘and he’ll learn.’ He did get kicked, but he doesn’t know if he learned.

  Gregory says, ‘Mary Fitzroy is at Kenninghall with her family. She scolds night and day about her settlement from Richmond’s estate. She has all the figures in a book, what she should have as his relict. The duke is surprised she has such a good wit, he has barely spoken to her till now, he does not think a man should dally in idle talk with daughters. She says, “If you will not go to the king and get my settlement, I will turn to Lord Cromwell, he is gentleness itself to widows.”’

  Mr Wriothesley suppresses a snort of laughter. But then when Gregory has cantered off, Call-Me follows him into his closet and says, ‘You want Gregory to be wed. Have you thought of Mary Fitzroy? You could secure the duke’s friendship for ever.’

  ‘That’s a turnabout, from you. You said I should destroy him.’

  Mr Wriothesley looks penitent. ‘I did not understand your methods.’

  Norfolk depends on him now, to speak up for him to the king. Henry glowers whenever he hears Norfolk’s name. The row over Tom Truth, and Richmond’s death, his scant poor burial … the king’s grievances have accumulated. Norfolk sees himself in the Tower. By the gridiron of St Lawrence, I never deserved such treatment, the duke says. When did I ever thwart Henry or cut against him? Always my loyalty, always my best endeavours, my money and my men and my prayers. I am full full full, he writes, of choler and anger. When you read his letters, you picture tongues of fire bursting from his head.

  As for Norfolk’s daughter, ‘Not for us,’ he tells Wriothesley. ‘Norfolk will look higher. The Howards don’t think about the future, not the way we do. They want it to look like the past.’

  Seven Wise Men, he tells Gregory: here are their sayings. Moderation in all things, nothing to excess (those two are the same, wisdom can be repetitious). Know yourself. Know your opportunity. Look ahead. Don’t try for the impossible. And Bias of Priene: pleistoi anthropoi kakoi, most men are bad.

  This summer, the Court of Augmentations is busy turning monks into money. Only the small houses are dissolved: the court has capacity for more work, should Henry wish it. When its clerks move into their new rooms at Westminster they will have a garden, where they can recreate themselves in fresh air and sit amid birdsong and the fragrance of the herb beds. Yarrow and camomile comfort the scrupulous, who stay late re-adding the columns. Betony cures a headache, blue borage lightens the heart. Oculus Christi, infused, is good to bathe the eyes of those who spend long hours at their books, and the scent of a rosemary hedge strengthens the memory.

  Bishop Hugh Latimer says to him, it were pity the monasteries should close and the poor gain nothing from it. But it is not likely the pauper will lay his head where Father Abbot once reposed. More likely a gentleman will knock down Father Abbot’s house, and build himself a bigger house with the stone. No doubt it is good policy in the king, not to keep all the gain for himself. The Pope’s name is taken out of the service book, but parishes have simply glued strips of paper over it, thinking the world will turn and Rome rise again. But once the lands are given out, no subject will want to give them back to the church. Prayers may be rewritten, but not leases. Hearts may revert to Rome, but the money never will.

  So even after Henry dies, he thinks, our work is safe. After a generation, the name of Pope itself will be blotted out of memory, and no one will ever believe we bowed to stocks of wood and prayed to plaster. The English will see God in daylight, not hidden in a cloud of incense; they will hear his word from a minister who faces them, instead of turning his back and muttering in a foreign tongue. We will have good-living clergy, who counsel the ignorant and help the unfortunate, instead of a scum of half-literate monks squatting in the dust with their cassocks hauled up, playing knucklebones for farthings and trying to see up women’s skirts. We will have an end to images, the simpering virgin saints with their greensick faces, and Christ with the wound in his side gaping like a whore’s gash. The faithful will cherish their Saviour in their inner heart, instead of gawping at him painted above their heads, like a swinging inn sign. We will break the shrines, Hugh Latimer says, and found schools. Turn out the monks and buy horn books, alphabet books for little hands. We will draw out the living God from his false depictions. God is not his gown, he is not his coat, he is not shreds of flesh or nails or thorns. He is not trapped in a jewelled monstrance or in a window’s glass. But dwells in the human heart. Even in the Duke of Norfolk’s.

  As the days shorten Norfolk writes to him, to ask him to be an executor of his will. Not that he thinks of dying; but of course, sic transit gloria mundi, and he will be five-and-sixty soon, though he doesn’t know where the time has gone. He seeks a meeting, at the convenience of the Lord Privy Seal. He wants to talk about Mary Fitzroy. ‘It’s a shame that Richmond didn’t go and die a few weeks sooner. For then the king could have wed my daughter, who is some of the best blood in the kingdom, instead of John Seymour’s girl. And my girl is a maid, you know, pure as the day she was christened, for I never let Richmond near her.’

  It is precisely because the match was not consummated that the king is saying it was no marriage, so the bride does not merit a pay-out. But as the duke is so well-disposed, he does not interrupt him with that news. ‘You know who came to see me?’ Norfolk says. ‘The Emperor’s man. Begged audience. Wanted to give me money. Well,’ the duke says benignly, ‘that’s all in order. I used to have a pension from the Emperor, till my niece came along and fouled up every reasonable arrangement.’

  ‘Then your Grace is restored to your rights,’ he says gravely.

  The duke eyes him. ‘Have I you to thank?’

  He waves it away. ‘Chapuys well understands your great lineage and your long experience. He knows what you are and will always be, to both the king and the commonwealth.’

  ‘That may be,’ the duke says. ‘But he doesn’t regard them as much as the dinners you give him. He speaks about you as if you have all to rule. Cremuel this, Cremuel that. Still. You have done me service. I acknowledge it.’ The duke stumps away on his little legs.

  In answer to his summons, Master Holbein comes. He trails with him traces of his occupation, the scents of linseed and lavender oil, pine-resin and rabbit-skin glue. ‘Now you are a milord, shall I paint you again?’

  ‘I am content with what you did before.’ If a portrait may serve as an act of concealment, then he has effected one, he and Hans between them. He says, ‘I thought I might have a whole wall of portraits. The past kings of England.’

  Hans sucks his lip. ‘How far you wish to go back?’

  ‘Back before King Harry who conquered France. Before his father Bolingbroke.’

  ‘You wish to include those murdered?’

  ‘If it does not take up too much space.’

  Hans crucifies himself against the wall, then spins about and about, using his wing span to measure it. ‘You can build a new room if need be.’ Below the window, the tramp of bricklayers: scaffolding is lashed together, dust rises into the air. ‘Write them down, their names. You want a picture of Henry? You standing beside him, whispering sums of money?’

  He knows what Hans is hinting at. If Henry is to be painted this year, he wants the commission. Hans says, ‘He can no longer ride hard, nor play at tennis. So look now.’ He pats his belly.

  ‘True. The king is augmented.’

  Hans strides along the gallery, squaring off with his hands the notional space for each king. ‘When you come home from the court you will come in and greet them. They will say, “God bless you, Thomas,” as if they were your uncles. You do this because you have no people of your own.’

  True again. ‘I wish you had painted my wife.’

  ‘Why? She
was pretty?’

  ‘No.’

  If he had been able to afford Hans when his wife and daughters were alive he could have painted them as he had Thomas More’s family, along with their house spaniels and any other little pets they had then: he with his book in hand, and Gregory playing with a child-sized sword, and his daughters with their coral beads. He can almost see the picture; his eyes move around it, to where Richard Cromwell leans on the back of his chair, and Rafe Sadler sits to the right of the frame with abacus and quill, and a door is open for Call-Me to come in when he pleases. When he tries to bring the faces of his girls to mind, he cannot do it. He knows memory tricks but they don’t help with this. Children change so fast. Grace changed every day. Even Liz’s face is a blurred oval beneath her cap. He imagines telling her, ‘A German is coming to draw us, and we shall be doubled, as if we carried a mirror.’ When you went to Chelsea you made your bow to the Lord Chancellor – the one seated on the wall, wearing the grave expression of the councillor. Then the real one would sidle up, with his blue chin and his frayed wool gown, rubbing his cold hands and letting you know you were interrupting him. Thomas More looking at you twice: a dirty look both times.

  He says, ‘Hans, I am not expecting you to paint these kings yourself. Send a boy. It doesn’t matter what the faces look like, because nobody knows.’

  They shake hands on it. There is nothing against the recreation of the dead, as long as they are plausible. He, Lord Cromwell, will provide bed and board for two apprentices, who will stay till the kings are dried and hung, and Hans will charge for materials, and a nominal sum for labour, ‘but rich man’s rates’, Hans says. He digs a finger into his patron’s plush person, and goes out, whistling.

  His jester Anthony comes to him: ‘Sir, when was it heard of, that a man was fool to the Lord Privy Seal, and was not hung with silver bells?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Richard Cromwell says. ‘You can ring them to let us know when you make a joke.’

  ‘I may be the saddest jester born,’ Anthony says, ‘but I don’t go parading around the taverns and giving your secrets away, and I am cheaper than Will Somer, that is the king’s fool now, for he has a man to attend on him, and I need no keeper. Except in the spring when I am melancholy, and need someone to keep me away from sharp knives, and streams and ponds where I might drown myself.’

  Will Somer is a hunchback who falls asleep while he is talking. He sits at table and slam goes his head, right down into his platter. He is not safe in the street; if he did not have a servant to check him he might fall under the wheels of a cart. He might slump to the ground while he is mounting a stile, his feet entangled, his hair trailing in mud. Every moment of his day is interpenetrated with night, and when he sinks to the ground in the precincts of the court, spaniels run up and peer at him, and wave their tails as they lick his ears. Somer is harmless, an innocent. But the man Sexton, or Patch, remains in Nicholas Carew’s house, where they say he tells stories about the queen that was, calling her a harlot, and for each slander Carew augments his living; and the ingrate talks about the cardinal too, his former master, and defames him every waking hour.

  He says to Anthony, ‘Tell Thomas Avery to give you a budget. Then you can buy your own bells.’

  Three great ships, it is reported, have docked in the river port of Seville, and are unloading treasure from Peru to swell the coffers of the Emperor: whose forces now advance into Picardy, into the territory of the King of France. King Henry offers his services as mediator, and declares he will remain neutral. ‘By which he means,’ Chapuys says, ‘he will go to the side that promises him most and costs him least. That is what he means by neutrality.’

  He says, ‘What prince would do anything else? He must seize his advantage.’

  ‘But then,’ Chapuys says, ‘Henry talks so much of his honour.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘they all do.’

  The Venetian ambassador, Signor Zuccato, calls on him beaming with pleasure, to explain the Senate has voted him fifty ducats for the purchase of horses – a perquisite all former ambassadors have enjoyed, but which in his case had unaccountably been forgotten. So the Venetian can hunt if he likes, cantering after the king and Madamma Jane into the dappled misty mornings. There have been years of hunting par force: while gentlemen lie abed the questers are at work to find a runnable stag, who stirs in the glade and wakes and sniffs the air of a new day. When the beast is chosen the hounds are relayed on the line of his run, grey and lemon and tawny and white; and when the hart is unharboured, the huntsman feels the grass where he lay – if it is cold, if it is warm. At sun-up the chase begins. Hart may ruse and he may flee, he may plunge into the chilly stream, but the hounds run on and never change, till he is brought to bay, and as they run they revile him, baying their taunts in a language he can understand, calling him a varlet and a knave: and the hunters cry ho moy, cy va, ho sto, mon amy: sa cy avaunt, so ho. And when the sword strikes him, through the shoulder into the heart, then hart is turned on his back, his antlers in the earth; and the horn, which has blown mote and recheat and prise, now blows mort. When he is unmade, disassembled, then the hounds are thrown bread soaked in his blood, and certain bones, cast aside for crows, are called the raven’s fee; and the head is set on a spear and carried home, foremost, as it was in life.

  But this year, to save the king hard riding and so he may enjoy the society of delicate ladies, the harts are driven to the hunters where they stand against the trees, dressed in silken green, their crossbows in hand. Henry, dragging his new weight, is easily fatigued, his face furrowed sometimes by pain from his leg, which his servants bind every morning as tight as he may endure, bandaging round and round the patch of fragility where the damage strikes into the bone. The queen is silent beside him, her steady eye on the deer. If the quarry should swerve to left or right it takes discipline for the hunters to hold fire lest they wound each other; if the beast cannot be shot head on, it is better to let him break through the line, then place the arrow forward to anticipate his path. If the kill is not clean the hunter tracks the wounded hart, knowing by the quality, colour and thickness of the blood how long the pursuit will last. Hunters, it is said, live longer than other men; they sweat hard and stay lean; when they fall into bed at night they are tired beyond all temptation; and when they die, they go to Heaven.

  II

  The Five Wounds

  London, Autumn 1536

  Rumours of Tyndale’s death seep through England as smoke leaks through thatch. Are we to believe them? The privy chamber gentlemen say that the king has asked the Emperor for assurances – one sovereign to another – that this Englishman is really dead. But if such an assurance is given or denied, it is not in any document that passes across his desk. ‘I thought we got everything,’ Call-Me says tetchily.

  When our people abroad write to the king, they send a copy to my lord Privy Seal – often with a covering note that says more than the original. Henry likes to treat with monarchs brother to brother; ‘Crumb,’ he says, ‘I cannot fault your management of my affairs at home, but some matters should lie between princes only, and I cannot ask my fellow kings to deal with you, because …’ The king looks into the distance, perhaps trying to imagine Putney. ‘Not that you can help it.’

  Some maintain Tyndale is still alive, and his keepers are trying to torment him into a spectacular public recantation. But our Antwerp contacts are silent. Perhaps we are missing something, and news is encoded in some merchant’s invoice? Call-Me-Risley says, ‘In Venice they have men who spend every day working at ciphers. The more they do it, the better they get.’

  ‘I’m sure that could be arranged for you,’ Rafe says. ‘But then Lord Cromwell would put you on a per diem, and you would not get the fees from the office of the Signet, and what would Mistress Call-Me say about that? She would not put her views in cipher – they would hear her scolding in Calais.’

  Henry is restless; as
if trying to prolong the summer, he tows Jane from house to house. He tries to make sure either he or Rafe is by the king’s side. He says to Chapuys, ‘These talks with the Scots – they will never happen. Henry will not go further north than York. He apprehends bad food and bandits and no proper baths. And the King of Scots will not come south, for the same reasons.’

  They are at Whitehall. Chapuys joins him in a window embrasure. The ambassador’s entourage backs off, but he feels them watching. ‘Is Tyndale truly burned?’

  ‘Henry has not spoken to you? He knows your attachment to that heretic.’

  ‘I couldn’t abide the man,’ he says. ‘Nobody could.’

  But then, we didn’t require Tyndale for a supper guest, or a companion in a game of bowls. We required him for the health of our souls. Tyndale knew God’s word and carried a light to guide us through the marsh of interpretation, so we would not be lost – as Tyndale himself put it – like a traveller tricked by Robin Goodfellow, and left stripped and shoeless in the wastes.

  Ambassador Chapuys, you notice, has not exactly said he is dead; he has only let him fall, as it were naturally, into the past tense.

  He visits the convent at Shaftesbury as a private gentleman, as if attending on Sir Richard Riche, the Chancellor of Augmentations: with Christophe, as a boy attending him. Begging the favour of an interview with Dame Elizabeth Zouche, he expects to be kept waiting, and he is.

  ‘Laughable,’ Riche says, gloomily. ‘You the second man in the church. And me, who I am.’

  ‘King Alfred founded this abbey,’ he tells Christophe. ‘They are rich because they have the bones of Edward the Martyr.’

  ‘What tricks do they do?’ Christophe asks.

  ‘The usual miracles,’ Riche says. ‘Perhaps we shall witness one.’