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

  Aske? There are gasps of surprise – simulated, as Lord Cromwell has taken care to prepare the councillors. After all, it’s his idea.

  ‘It is Aske who has chief credit with the rebels,’ the king says. ‘I shall probe his heart and stomach. And he will see that I am a monarch both generous and just.’

  The only danger – and we cannot get around it – is that Aske will also see that Henry is not the puissant warrior of ten years ago, and he will carry word back to Yorkshire. The king wishes to be known as Henry, Mirror of Justice. But perhaps he will be known as Henry the Bad Leg.

  Still: the game is worth the candle, and there is nothing to lose from sport with the chief Pilgrim. In our forefathers’ time, the rebel Jack Cade had a good run before he was quartered, and his fractions sent back to his shire. The king will dandle Aske like an infant. Large presents, large promises: a gold chain and a crimson jacket. He will overawe him: trust the king for that. A man’s dealings with Henry are a measure of him. They are a mirror to his weaknesses and vanities. You believe you are a man of ready address, you have rehearsed the encounter in your mind, but such is the overwhelming effect of his presence that you are overcome by holy fear and not able to utter a word.

  ‘What shall I do, sir?’ he says. ‘I should not meet Aske.’

  ‘Keep the feast with your own people.’ The king adds: ‘Be at your Stepney house. Then if I want you, you can get to Whitehall in an hour.’

  He, the Lord Privy Seal, instructs Bishop Gardiner in France to quash the rumours that are rolling abroad. It is not true that Henry is besieged in Windsor Castle. Nor that he, or any Cromwell, has been stabbed to death in London on Chancery Lane. On the contrary, Cromwells are looking forward to the feast. Richard returns from the north; he comes with the plaudits of his senior commanders, Suffolk and Fitzwilliam.

  By mid-month the rebel armies are dissolving themselves. Aske is to come to court under safe-conduct. News comes that the King of Scotland has compacted for his match with the French king’s daughter; he and Madeleine will be married at Notre Dame on New Year’s Day. The match will see hearty accord between Scotland and France, which is much to our disadvantage. ‘What can I do but wish him joy?’ the king says. He dictates a letter, waving aside offers to phrase it for him. ‘Having certain knowledge … your determination and conclusion for marriage … daughter of our dearest brother and perpetual ally the French king … et cetera, et cetera … congratulate with you in the same … desire Almighty God to send you issue and fruit thereof …’ the king’s voice drips disdain, ‘that may be to your satisfaction and to the weal, utility, and comfort of your realm.’

  ‘Bravo, sir,’ Wriothesley says. ‘A wonderful powerful phrasing.’

  The king says, ‘James has already nine bastards that I know of.’

  Edward Seymour: ‘Majesty, I think he shall have no issue by Madeleine. I hear she is dying.’

  ‘Then why would Scotland want her?’

  No one answers. Perhaps to have a daughter, any daughter, of so great a king. And to get a hundred thousand crowns, which is more money than James has seen in his life. The king says, ‘We will see how she likes the voyage to Caledonia, and the rough manners when she gets there.’ But his voice yearns for her: ‘They say she is beautiful …’

  ‘James must have wooed her with jewels,’ he says, ‘because he cannot speak the simplest word of French. All that shopping was not for nothing.’

  ‘So does Madeleine speak Scots?’ Henry says. ‘That seems hardly possible. Would you not want to talk to your wife? Have some companionship with her? Still, he will not need her instruction in the bedchamber. He seems to know his business there.’

  At Stepney, hedgerow berries are humble jewels, bright as beads of blood. The walls are hung with pine boughs, and the great wreaths of vines take two men to carry and hang; they were woven in autumn, when the branches would still flex. Blossoms from the drying rooms are bundled and gilded and ribboned, and as the weather grows dry and sharp, the panelled rooms fill at dawn and sunset with washes of blush-coloured light. He has been waiting for a clear day to see the apple trees pruned, and he goes out with his gardeners. ‘Do not venture on the ladders, sir. Do you stand back, and watch the shape as we cut.’

  The middle of the tree we call the crown. We take out any shoots that are frictious against each other, those that are growing backwards, inwards, any way they shouldn’t. We thin the new shoots and as we cut we are aiming for the shape of a goblet. When the balance is right, we clip the shoots, cutting back to an outward-facing bud. By three in the afternoon, though sweat is running in channels inside our jerkins, our gloved hands are stiff as clods and our voices in the air are faint, like birdsong in a distant paradise. We say, all done lads, and we get under cover and warm our hands around hot spiced ale. We have come through queasy days, his gardeners say. Please God all our builders and our cooks will be back with us for the feast, and Mr Richard in his glory.

  We raise a cup to the warriors, picking their way south through the frightened shires. Then we sing a song, and cross ourselves, and pray for the apple trees. Indoors, we unlock the room called Christmas, with its costumes for mermen and magi and talking animals. We fit together the spikes of the great star that hangs in the hall.

  What survives from this year past? Rafe’s garden at midsummer, the lusty cries of the child Thomas issuing from an open window; Helen’s tender face. The ambassador in his tower at Canonbury, fading into twilight. Night falling on the rock of Windsor Castle, as on a mountain slope.

  In back alleys not yards from where the martyr Packington died, sailors offer nutmegs stolen from their ships’ holds at three times the November price – which is already a duke’s ransom. To show seasonal goodwill, a party of London rascals have set on members of the French embassy as they are enjoying a Christmas drink at the Cock and Keys in Fleet Street. They chase them, shouting ‘Down with the French dogs!’ The day ends with one dead Frenchman and another in a grave condition from stab wounds.

  Gifts by the cartload roll up to his door: fat swans, partridges, pheasants. And Ambassador Chapuys, chuckling at the misfortunes of the French. He sits him down over a quiet supper and evades his close questions about the north. They are not really questions; because of his links with Darcy and other slippery souls, Eustache probably has better information than we do.

  ‘Well,’ the ambassador says, ‘the writers of the almanacs said this would be a great year for secrets.’

  He grunts. ‘Greater for expenses.’

  ‘Henry must eat his Christmas dinner from pewter. All his plate is melted down to coin.’

  He shrugs. ‘We have a great host to pay off. We must have turned out fifty thousand, at short notice.’

  Chapuys does not believe the king had fifty thousand men, but all the same he cannot help working out the expenditure.

  ‘I tell you, Eustache,’ he says, ‘you are much deceived about Englishmen, their temper. You talk to the wrong people. The Poles and the Courtenays don’t know what is happening, I know what is happening. The Emperor boasts of what he will do here when his troops come. But Charles will do naught, because it is a bad precedent when a prince helps another prince’s subjects to rebel. It gives his own people the idea they might do the same.’

  ‘Go on thinking that,’ Chapuys says, ‘if you find it comfortable.’

  They eat in contemplative silence: spiced venison, teal, partridges, and oranges thin-sliced like sunbursts. A shaft of light makes its way over the fallen snow, picking a path to the year ahead. The court rides through the city of Westminster and east to Greenwich, a moving trail of darkness against the frost. The Thames is a long glimmer of ice: a road in a frozen desert, a trail into our future, a highway for our God.

  When the ambassador leaves him, it is three in the afternoon and feels much later. He sits down in gathering dusk to work through his day-books, compile his memoranda fo
r the first council meetings of the new year. Christophe brings him wine in a goblet of Venetian glass. He says, ‘This belonged to the cardinal. I bought it from the Duke of Norfolk.’

  He buys the cardinal’s property when he can, wherever he sees it, hangings and plate and books from his library: the new owners feel so guilty at the sight of him that they do not refuse his offer, which he pitches insultingly low. If things are not for sale he gets them back somehow. Look at this tapestry, under which he now sits, which depicts the Queen of Sheba in bold colours and gilt thread, her mild face like the face of a woman he once knew. Wolsey owned this hanging; the king took it when Wolsey fell: one day, in an overflow of generosity, the king gave it to him. Or, as he thinks of it, gave it back.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he says to Christophe, ‘I am like you, I imagine other lives I might have had.’ If Henry has a princely double, perhaps he has one as well, leading a safer life in Constantinople. Compared to Henry, a sultan is placid.

  ‘I could have been a Frenchman like you,’ he tells Christophe. ‘I could have been a Lowlander.’

  Christophe glances at the wall. ‘If you had married that woven lady.’ He does not mean the Queen of Sheba: that would be more outrageous than marrying the Princess Mary. He means Anselma, the Antwerp widow whose likeness has got into the weave. Maybe it is not so surprising to find her there. A master must have models. Perhaps the man who made the design passed her one day, running with a message to the quayside, or glimpsed her as they left Mass together at the church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe: and thought, who is that supple widow, with that slab of an English on her arm?

  He says to Christophe, ‘Will you bring The Book Called Henry? I think I will write down my thoughts. And more lights, if you will.’

  ‘Do not miss your supper,’ Christophe says. He sees how his household are trying to take care of him. Fussing over me, he says, as if you were my godparents.

  He takes up his pen. God bless the work.

  You cannot anticipate or fully know the king. Thomas More did not grasp this. This is why I am alive and he is dead.

  This is not a book you could take to the printer. It must be for the eyes of the few.

  Your enemies will continually belie you, and fix you with the blame for the malfeasance of others or for simple misfortune. Save your breath: any exculpation is too late. Do not be weakened by regret, and do not let regret weaken the king. Sometimes a king must act on imperfect information, and afterwards sanctify his impulses.

  He thinks, suppose I fell ill, and were like to die? What would I do with the book then?

  Do not be afraid to ask for what you want. Ask and it shall be granted: but first cost it out. The king wishes to appear magnanimous at the least expense to himself. This is a reasonable position for a ruler to adopt.

  I could leave it to Gregory or my nephew or to Rafe Sadler. But I will not leave it to Ricardo or Call Me. I doubt if there is much I can teach them. Or much they can learn.

  The king believes that even if he were not king, he would still be a great man. This is because God likes him.

  He needs to be liked and he needs to be right. But above all he needs to be listened to, with very close attention.

  Never enter a contest of wills with the king.

  Do not flatter him. Instead, give him something he can take credit for.

  Ask him questions to which you know the answers. Do not ask him the other sort of question.

  This year has been what every year is: one long royal day, from the king’s first stirring to his slumber. Yet it has drawn to one singular moment, as glass concentrates the rays of the sun. Time has distilled to a single heartbeat, to the instant of the cut: the Frenchman with his sword, his perfectly calibrated motion. Then the women holding up their hands, their fingers stiff with loathing; bending their backs, lugging the corpse away, tears glistening on their cheeks.

  In the old stories, a great mirror is set before the palace of the king. It is as wide as the sky, and three thousand warriors guard it. It is reached by five-and-twenty steps of porphyry and serpentine. Even by night they guard it, when it reflects nothing but a kingdom blanketed in darkness, and perhaps the faint etched line of a star.

  Keep your eyes clear. Remember he is a king first and a man second. This is where Anne went wrong. She began to think he was only a man.

  He looks up. The room is empty, except for those who do not count. At such moments the phantom Wolsey would walk in, and peer over his shoulder, and tell him what to write, large white hands with their glinting rings heavy on his shoulders.

  Sometimes he needs to imagine how it would have been, if the Cornish had come to Putney, bellowing and drooling and trampling everything in their path. Sion Madoc’s dad had told him, ‘They’ll take a child like you and roast him on a spit.’ He had laughed and said, ‘I’ll spit their arses.’ In his black heart he wished for them, he wanted to hear their tread. Hear it, and you don’t have to imagine it. Let the face of their giant crest the rise; or just see the crown of his head, and then you don’t have to think about him any more, you don’t have to picture him, you know the worst: walk with him one red mile, as he tears apart the neighbours and tosses their limbs into ditches.

  And what then? Either he kills you, or you are one of those left, picking up remnants of Putney and gathering it into baskets.

  Do not turn your back on the king. This is not just a matter of protocol.

  He is about to close the book, but he dips his pen, adds a final line:

  Try and keep cheerful.

  PART THREE

  I

  The Bleach Fields

  Spring 1537

  When you become a great man, you meet kinsfolk you never knew you had. Strangers turn up at your door claiming to know more about you than you know yourself. They say that your father helped them in their misfortunes – unlikely – or that your mother, God rest her, knew their mother well. Sometimes they claim you owe them money.

  So when among a crowd of petitioners he sees a woman who looks familiar, he takes her for a Cromwell of some sort. Seeing her again next day, and it appearing she has no protector, he has her fetched in.

  She is a young woman, robust, sober. Good wool, he thinks, looking at her gown. He does not look at her, as looking at women gets him into trouble. ‘I am sorry you had to come back for a second day. As you see, half of England is out there.’

  ‘It has been a longer wait than you know, sir.’ Her English is fluent, her accent Antwerp. ‘I have come from over the sea, from Meester Vaughan’s household.’

  ‘You should have said so, they would have brought you in at once. You have a letter?’

  ‘No letter.’

  Messages that can’t be put in writing are usually bad news. But she seems unperturbed: her eyes sweep over his coat of arms painted on the wall, and the set of pictures made by Holbein’s apprentices. ‘Who are those?’

  ‘Princes of England.’

  ‘You recall so many?’

  He laughs. ‘They are long gone. We have invented them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As a reminder that men become dust, but the realm is continued.’

  ‘You like to think about old days?’

  ‘I suppose I do.’ I prefer the common history, he thinks: in my own life and times, certain themes must be elided.

  Her questions are simple ones, her manner open, and surely her message is nothing – snippets of Antwerp gossip too trivial for a courier. Still, he is interested to sweep them up. ‘Christophe, wine for this young lady – will you take some wafers and spices, some raisins? An apple?’

  ‘It was by eating of an apple that sin came into the world.’ But she smiles as she says it, and as she takes her seat, raises her eyes to the Queen of Sheba, behind him on the wall: where she with her kindly expression and modest diadem offers a cup to the wisest of kings.

  Her eyes flit to his face. She
looks shocked. ‘Where did you get that tapestry?’

  ‘Our king gave it to me. For my services.’

  Her glance moves back. ‘And where did he get it?’

  ‘From my patron, Wolsey.’

  ‘And where did he get it?’

  ‘Brussels.’

  She looks as if she is calculating its value. ‘So you did not have it made yourself?’

  ‘It would have been beyond my means. I was not always a rich man. You see that it is Sheba and Solomon. You know your scriptures, I venture.’

  She says, ‘Also I know my mother.’

  The cup in his hand is part-way to his lips.

  She says, ‘I am Anselma’s child. I do not know how she is in this tapestry, but we can ask ourselves that some other day.’

  He rises to his feet. ‘You are welcome. I did not even know that lady had a daughter. I also have asked myself how it came about that her picture is in this weave. It is for her sake I always coveted it. I would look and look, and one day the king said to me, “Thomas, I think this lady should go and live with you.” He turns back to her, smiling. ‘So your father must be –’

  He knows who Anselma married, after he left her to return to London. He knows the man’s banking house, his family. Yet his name has always stuck in his throat.

  She says, ‘I know the gentleman you mean. My mother married him after I was born.’

  He frowns. ‘So he is not your father?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘You are.’

  He puts down his cup.

  ‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘Do you not see yourself?’

  Her sectioned apple lies on her plate; he studies its green peel; he studies the plate beneath it, blue and white, Italian, the design half-hidden by the fruit. His mind completes the hidden picture.

  She says, ‘I came because I heard from Meester Vaughan there was revolt here, and that you were in danger from certain pilgrims. I wanted to see you, even if it was only once.’