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

  ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘not bleach fields, you mean the tenter-grounds. Where they pin out the cloth to dry.’

  But she has put in his mind an image of Tyndale strolling in the open air, the ground dissolving into a pale radiance, the city walls whispering into vapour: his shabby cross-grained countryman transfigured, and Meester Vaughan beside him, hood pulled up, his secret instructions hugged to his heart.

  ‘Tyndale lodged with the merchant Poyntz,’ she says. ‘He lived quiet, like the poor apostles, working to make his Bible, and he sought no payment for the great pains he took. The merchants fed him, they gave him a little money in his hand, and out of that he gave charity. He made no trouble, so the city magistrates were content.’

  ‘Your overlords, of course, were aware of him.’ The Emperor’s black double eagle flies over the walls; Antwerp is not a free city, though it has free men in it.

  She says, ‘He was careful, he drew no attention. The English language is not much understood of them, nor did they know his face. But then the man Phillips came, the man who sold him.’

  ‘Harry Phillips,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I know who paid him. Everybody knows.’

  ‘Meester Poyntz misliked this person. From the first he warned, beware of that one, you do not know his intentions. But Tyndale was not of that suspicious sort. His mind was only on his book. No one who knew him would have given him away. Only a stranger, and a paid stranger. Phillips learned his habits, where he would walk and with whom converse. He enquired, how far along with his holy work? Then he took the word to Brussels. The councillors did not listen at first but he had money to buy their attention. He brought them papers of Tyndale that he had stolen, letters, and he put them into Latin so that those councillors could understand, and always he was urging how the Emperor would recognise their services, and reward them. And so they decided to seize up Tyndale. They waited for a day when the quarter was empty, when all the merchants were out of town, gone to the Easter market at Bergen. They wished, you understand, to do it quietly and without any disturbance on the street.’

  ‘Poyntz would be away,’ he says. ‘Everybody.’

  ‘You will hear he was taken outside the English merchants’ house. This is not true. It was outside the house of Poyntz.’

  ‘The first news is always wrong,’ he says.

  ‘Phillips led the soldiers, and they blocked the way. He pointed: “That is the heretic, take him.” The good man went with them like a lamb. Even the soldiers pitied him.’

  That narrow place, he can picture it as if he stood there. He has lived and worked in that same net of streets. He sees Tyndale – a little man, irate – turning desperate between gate and wall.

  ‘When they returned from Bergen the English merchants made their protest. But they could not do anything.’

  ‘Thomas More paid for Tyndale’s death,’ he says. ‘He vowed he would follow him to the world’s end. He planned it from his prison, and he had plenty of time, the king was patient with More and so was I. You must not think he was straitly confined. His friends sent his dinners in. He had good wine and good fires and good books. He had visitors. Letters came and went.’

  ‘I would have kept him closer,’ she says.

  ‘We were remiss, I see that now. Killing Thomas More did not avail because the payments were already in the pocket of that shabby knave Phillips.’

  Early dark has fallen. He rises, lights a candle, closes the shutter against a night of steel-tipped stars. His daughter’s eyes follow him, every move. She would make a good witness, he thinks. ‘Thomas More wrote his epitaph in his lifetime,’ he tells her. ‘He was that sort of man.’ Words, words, just words. ‘He wanted it engraved in stone: Terrible to heretics. He was proud of what he did. He thought if you let the people read God’s word for themselves, Christendom would fall apart. There would be no more government, no more justice.’

  ‘He believed this? Truly?’

  ‘That we needed the constraint of ignorance? Yes.’

  ‘He did not give much credit to his fellow man.’

  ‘But then – I dare say that unless you knew him you could not understand – his own sins lay heavy on him. And at the end, I think he had lost faith in his own arguments. Those people who now claim to be his followers – he would not recognise the painted papist they make of him. I can remember a time when he was no great friend of popes. And you know that blood-truffler Stokesley is still at work? Stokesley who is Bishop of London, I mean. It was a protégé of his that was vicar of Louth – that is in the east country, where these late troubles broke out. It all goes back to More.’

  She frowns. So many names, too many; too much geography, the terrain of a strange land. ‘Nothing ended with his death,’ he says. ‘It only began. When he was alive and Lord Chancellor, Stokesley used to aid him, raiding houses, hauling men and women to prison.’

  ‘Dismiss this bishop. You have power.’

  ‘Not that much.’

  ‘Shall I see him?’

  ‘Stokesley?’ He is amused. ‘If you like. He is a blustering fellow. Not worth the seeing, in my opinion. I have better bishops to show you. And noble dames, if you like. And their lords.’

  ‘Shall I see Henry, where he is throned?’

  He hesitates. ‘Tell me about Tyndale. After his arrest.’

  ‘He was not hurt in prison. I can say at least that. They respected his scholarship and they tried by reason to convince him. They treated him as a Christian man.’

  More, he thinks, would have tormented him with bitter words and with scourges.

  ‘He wrote much in his own defence. They brought against him the worst people they had.’ She spits out their names. ‘Dufief, who is a corrupt lawyer. Tapper. Doye, Jacques Masson. All the great papists of Leuven.’

  ‘They wanted to destroy him in argument,’ he says. ‘I admit, I have wanted that myself. If he would have come to the king’s side in his great matter – I mean, the matter of his marriage – he would have been safe, perhaps sitting here with us now. I tried to save him, but I am only a private man. I was not even Lord Cromwell then. The Emperor did not heed my appeals.’

  ‘Your king might have saved him,’ she says, ‘but he would not. Some would ask why, when your ears are open to the gospel, you would serve such a master.’

  ‘Who else should I serve? A man cannot be masterless.’

  The door opens. Young Mathew. Letters. ‘Put them there.’

  ‘They stay for an answer, sir.’

  ‘Leave them. Say I am with my daughter.’

  ‘I should say that?’ Mathew asks. ‘As you please, sir.’ He goes out.

  She says, ‘My tale is almost done. Tyndale gave no ground. They could not shake him. All the weary months they say he prayed for his gaolers, and I believe we shall presently hear that some of them were brought to Christ.’

  ‘That would be good hearing.’ More likely, he thinks, they stripped his cell after he was gone, stealing even a threadbare coat or candle-end. ‘They say he tried to work even while he was shut up.’ He imagines the word of God, damp and slimy, slipping from the page and pooling on the stone flags.

  ‘I can’t see that could be possible.’

  She says, ‘He left certain writings behind him, in the city, in the secret places of the wall.’

  ‘Who has them? I shall buy them.’

  ‘I cannot tell you. Your king might rip them from your hands.’

  True, he thinks.

  ‘We thought they would burn him as soon as the trial was done, but they kept him a little space – to give him more chance to recant, we suppose. Then we thought they might burn him inside the prison, but it was done in the market. They chained him to the stake, and put a halter around his neck. They arranged this mercy, as they call it – to be strangled first. They make a hole in t
he stake – do you know this? – and pass the rope through, so the executioner is behind him, and when the flame is set, he heaves backwards on the rope, and so kills the good soul. But often of course he does not.’

  ‘I have heard he was not dead when the fire reached him. That he spoke from the flames. He said, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”’

  She says, ‘He spoke nothing. How could he speak? He was choked. He stirred and moved and cried with the pain.’ She is angry. ‘Who is King Henry, to occupy his last thought? And what is England – except the realm that turned its back on him?’

  They sit in silence. Tyndale has left us his New Testament and some of the Old; the Law and the Prophets, the records of Israel’s fearful wars, God’s long campaigns against His chosen people. ‘The king sees …’ he begins. But he lapses into silence. Smoke is what he sees; hears the distant bellowing of a crowd. ‘He sees that an English church needs a Bible. We have worked long to bring him to it. We have agreed a translation, and it is Tyndale’s, as far as we have his work, but it goes under another scholar’s name. We have put Henry’s own image on the title page. We want him to see himself there. We need him to set forth a Bible under his own licence, and set the scriptures up in every church, for all to read who can. We need to get it out in such numbers that it can never be recalled or suppressed. When the people read it there will be no more of these armed and murdering Pilgrims. They will see with their own eyes that nowhere in the scripture does it mention penances and popes and purgatory and cloisters and beads and blessed candles, or ceremonies and relics –’

  ‘Not even priests,’ she says.

  Not even priests. Though we do not stress that point to Henry.

  ‘Jenneke,’ he says, ‘you have come so far to bear witness. Now it is done, you will not abandon me? This place is strange to you now but you will soon feel at home. I will make you a marriage, if you think you could love an Englishman.’

  Sometimes it is years before we can see who are the heroes in an affair and who are the victims. Martyrs don’t reckon with the results of their actions. How can they, when their mind is only on how to endure pain? A month after Tyndale, the merchant Poyntz himself was arrested, on the word of Harry Phillips. Poyntz was accused of being a Lutheran and he would likely have burned, but he escaped and is now in London. His wife Anna has refused to join him. Why should she leave her life, her language, to dwell with a man whose name is besmirched and who has abandoned her and his children, and whose livelihood has gone too?

  As for Phillips: with Thomas More dead, he is seeking other paymasters. He has been in Rome, and our man there, Gregory Casale, reports him trying to worm into the Pope’s favour by claiming to be one of More’s relations. Now he is in Paris, they say, looking for who he might destroy. Phillips is plausible, none more: a witty, conversible young man, easy to like, with a bagful of hard-luck tales, and a treasury of names he can mention from his time at Oxford. It is easy to see how he insinuates himself, the ever-helpful youth with his mastery of several tongues.

  He says, ‘Do not go back, daughter. Life will be harder. Antwerp will be less free. The city magistrates – the sway they thought they had, they do not have. There will be more arrests. The printers must take care.’

  There are more English books printed in Antwerp than in London, but those who print without a licence are branded, sometimes an eye is gouged out or a hand cut off. And informers are everywhere. Even, no doubt, amongst our own merchants.

  He says, ‘Your mother –’

  ‘The Queen of Sheba?’ She smiles.

  ‘– she knows this is her home, Austin Friars. I never move her. If I quit this house for the summer I roll her up and put her in store.’

  Anselma’s woollen self has never aged. But he fears if she is carried too much across country, her features may fuzz and blur. She came into his house only after his wife was dead. He is not the sort to run two women at once, or, like Thomas More, to marry a second wife before the sheets of the first are cold.

  The fire is low; he throws a log on it. ‘My wife’s mother, Mercy, she is aged now. A house needs a mistress. I am always hearing that I am about to marry, but I never seem to do it.’

  He pictures Meg Douglas swishing across his threshold. Or Kate Latimer, which seems a lot more likely, if old Latimer would go and die. He pictures Mary Tudor blundering in, flailing around her as she did at Hunsdon, her tiny feet grinding his Venetian goblets to dust.

  ‘Or you could live with Gregory,’ he says.

  ‘Gregory has a house?’

  ‘He will have. I will marry him this year.’

  ‘He knows?’

  ‘No,’ he says shortly. ‘I shall tell him when I have found a bride.’

  ‘Would it be the same with me? This Englishman you say I might wed?’

  He looks up. ‘I will give you your choice of bridegroom, of course. Gregory is my heir, it is not the same. I will make you a good settlement.’

  She says, ‘I am like poor Anna Calva. Poyntz’s wife. She would not live among strangers.’

  ‘But think of Ruth, in the Bible. She adapted herself.’

  She laughs. ‘You mistake those times for these? We live in the last days, they at the dawn of the world.’

  So. She is one of those who think, what is the use of marrying, or giving in marriage? These are the end times.

  He thinks of Wolsey’s daughter, knocking him back. He is not sure he has got up again.

  ‘I shall leave you,’ she says. ‘I mean, for tonight only. I shall not go without a goodbye.’

  She came to tell a story, and she has done it; to see a father, and she has seen one: what’s to keep her now?

  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 recognise himself at all.

  After his daughter has left, Mr Wriothesley comes in. ‘So what about Harry Phillips? Could she tell you anything you didn’t know?’

  He says, ‘I see he is a useful man. And mobile.’

  ‘One might send him after Polo. I do not think Phillips is a papist, sir, for all his pretences. I think he will work for anybody.’

  He nods. ‘But I fear only direct force will do for Polo, and a man like Phillips leaves the killing to others.’ He pauses. ‘But no harm to sound Phillips out. Interest him a little. One never knows if there might be a use for him.’

  ‘After all,’ Call-Me says, ‘you employ Dr Agostino. Even though –’

  ‘Yes.’ He cuts him off. He uses him even though he suspects him of selling the cardinal. Dr Agostino travels Europe, and sends much useful intelligence back.

  He thinks of Tyndale in the bleach fields, his human sins whited-out, speaking from within a haze of smoke. He thinks of the river at Advent, its frozen path. There is a poet who writes of winter wars, where sound is frozen. The soil beneath the snow seals in the noise of stampeding feet, the clank of harness, the pleas of prisoners, the groans of the dying. When the first rays of spring warm the ground, the misery begins to thaw. Groans and cries are unloosed, and last season’s blood makes the waters foul.

  Now Tyndale has put on the armour of light. On the last day he will rise in a silver mist, with the broken and the burned, men and women remaking themselves from the ash pile: with Little Bilney and young John Frith, with the lawyers and the scholars and those who could barely read or read not at all but only listen; with Richard Hunne who was hanged in the Lollards’ Tower, and all those martyrs from the years before
we were born, who set forth Wyclif’s book. He will clasp hands with Joan Boughton, whom he, the Lord Privy Seal, saw burned to bone when he was a boy. In those blessed days the whole of creation will shine, but till then we see through a glass darkly, not face to face.

  Somewhere – or Nowhere, perhaps – there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

  II

  The Image of the King

  Spring–Summer 1537

  Hans does not like the pavonazzo. You cannot have a king who is purple from one angle, blue from another, green from a third, who shines and shimmers wetly as if evading the artist. Stick to crimson, sir, Hans says: it is my earnest loyal advice.

  The king has not decided yet what kind of portrait he wants. He might ask for anything, from a picture that covers a wall to a miniature you can hold in your palm. But he agrees to be crimson. Each ruby is a tiny kindling fire.

  In the kitchen at the Rolls House, the Lord Privy Seal holds a white basin, within it a pool of green oil, in which he is dipping pieces of bread, and giving them to passing boys to taste. Mathew, bustling in for his portion, sneezes loud enough to crack an egg. ‘That will be the plague,’ Thurston says.

  ‘Too early for plague.’

  ‘Then I blame our diet. Englishmen were never made to eat fish. Salt water gets in your brain. A German can live on vegetables, he eats what he calls crowte. A Frenchman eats roots and herbs – if he’s famished you just turn him out to grass. But an Englishman is bred on bacon and beef.’

  ‘An Englishman may ask,’ Mathew says, ‘why we still have Lent. Now we’ve kicked the Pope out, you would think we could enjoy a dish of tripe every day.’