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

  ‘Your reckless tongue,’ he says. ‘I may not always be able to save you.’

  ‘Save me? Is that what you do?’ Jane Rochford shakes out her black skirts, and rubs her back to ease its ache. Sometimes he sees an expression of concentration in her eyes, as if she is trying to fathom where she mistook her turning. You leave a trail of bread and the ravens eat it. You drop cherry stones, and they grow into trees. ‘Are they happy,’ she asks idly, ‘your newly-weds? Bess looks as if she carries a secret. She has the shadow of a double chin. Unless I mistake, you are on the way to becoming a grandfather.’

  He is at that age when one loses old friends. November saw Humphrey Monmouth’s funeral; he wanted to follow the burial party himself, but Rafe said, ‘Careful, sir, Monmouth was Tyndale’s protector once: do not antagonise the king, do not take a risk for the sake of a dead man.’

  Other mourners brought him word of what passed: a simple interment, before dawn. Monmouth refused candles or papist emblems, but he left money in his will for sermons. He wanted no funeral bell, but provided for the bell-ringers to have their fee: which was like him, a man who considered the humble and the poor.

  He, the Lord Privy Seal, had packed up the silver cup Monmouth bequeathed him, and ridden down to Mortlake to be at home with Gregory and his wife. He gave notice that for the next fortnight he would see no one, do no business but the king’s. Till now, Cromwell no more refused work than a dog refuses mutton. But he had felt bruised: not only by the queen’s loss, but by his failure to lay hold of Reynold.

  Henry says, ‘You promised me you would put an end to Pole. When he returns to Italy, you told me, I will have him struck down as he leaves his lodging, or ambushed on the road.’

  ‘Majesty, I do not know how to intercept a man who is never where he is expected. My people wait for him at some chosen place, but then he falls from his horse, and is carried into a refuge, and is three days nursing his bruises. We anticipate him at the next town, then we hear he has missed the way, wandered off in a circle, and ended where he began. He is too stupid to be killed.’

  Henry says, ‘You’ll have to learn to be stupid too, won’t you, Crumb?’

  He is bound to show his face, whether he feels better or not, at the Christmas court at Greenwich. It is a small court still in black, where Master Johan the tumbler tries to raise a smile. Rather than music and dancing, there are plays, mounted and devised to pique the king’s interest: masques with fantasy castles, with princesses inside them. The king’s eye follows Margaret Skipwith, a blithe little maid of honour. ‘He wouldn’t, would he?’ the Lord Chancellor says. ‘He wouldn’t give the Lady Mary a stepmother younger than herself?’

  The Lord Chancellor chirps, ‘Anne Bassett is a pleasant sight – Lady Lisle’s girl.’

  ‘She has enjoyed a French upbringing,’ he says. ‘Like Anne Boleyn.’

  Audley frowns. ‘But she seems a biddable wench, and I have seen him looking at her, and her English is fluent enough.’

  ‘She cannot write it,’ he says. ‘She can barely write in French.’

  ‘What?’ Audley goggles at him. ‘You read her letters? Little Anne Bassett?’

  Of course he does. He needs to know everything that goes into Calais, or comes out. On the chance of unguarded information, he can endure accounts of what buttons and fringes Mistress Bassett craves, and what cramp rings and ribbons Lady Lisle sends.

  He says, ‘The king will not be happy with a maid of sixteen, whatever he thinks. He needs a woman of competent age, who will get on briskly with breeding, and knows how to keep him entertained meanwhile.’

  He turns his attention back to the play. There is a party of boys from Eton, and Charles Brandon’s players, and Lord Exeter’s men. Sometimes Pride and Folly speak, as if they were persons: Humblewise and Good Council answer them, in verse.

  The common people who gather in inn yards and barns have plays of their own. Not a village that does not boast King Arthur on a hobby horse, or Robin Hood. Robin Hood in greenwood stood/Good yeoman was he. He wears garments of the same colour as the trees, so he can steal like a sprite through copse and dell. He takes to wife one Marion; they make their promises beneath the green bough. He ambushes friars who deviate from the beaten track, knowing them by the scent of cheap wine and loose women that creeps before them through the sweet air; their bags are full of money, screwed out of poor folk for pretended forgiveness of their sins.

  Robin Hood sings ballads about his deeds while he is doing them. A hundred times he escapes the noose and the sword. In the end he is betrayed and bled to death by a false prioress. His blood runs into the soil, red into green, and another Robin springs up, to wear his jacket and bear a quiver of arrows at his back.

  The man who takes Robin’s role must be broad in the shoulder. He must speak with some accent of education, not mouthing his lines like Arthur Cobbler. If he plays with skill in his home village, he will be asked to the next: and so to the town, where he will become famous.

  There are other outlaws whose deeds are renowned: Clym of the Clough, Adam Bell, Will Scarlet, Reynold Greenleaf and Little John. Old stories can be rewritten. It is good to get such personages harnessed in the king’s cause. Besides the green men we recruit knights of old, like Sir Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick: they cross the plains and forests on intelligent horses which sometimes talk.

  All these men have a reason for leaving home. Sometimes they are booted out of it, by the malice of a stepmother or a witch; sometimes they are wrongfully set up for a crime. If traduced, they will strive to clear their names; if betrayed, they cannot rest till they have revenged. In the course of their wanderings they battle giants. They are sold to pirates. They are locked up and they burst the locks. They hide in caves with hermits. They lead armies against Rome. Sometimes they go mad, and no wonder. They get the girl and lose her again – or else, at the point of consummation, she turns into an animal, or her flesh falls to ash.

  But in stories the odds are evened. The devil knocks down our hero, and up he gets. The outcast is restored to his rights. The youngest brother, called simple, becomes the richest of all. The gruel-fed serf feasts on the sweet flesh of the roe, and the swine boy strides from his hovel and builds a crystal house.

  He calls up John Bale: a Carmelite, eloquent and embittered, who has thrown off his habit and married a wife. Could you, he asks, write a play about the villainous Archbishop Becket, who defied his king? About the sorry end he came to, knocked on the head like a calf by three stout and loyal knights?

  ‘A play in English?’

  ‘Latin is no good to us here.’

  Bale asks for time to think about it. At court, Queen Jane’s Players give their final performance, before their troupe is broken up.

  At Candlemas the court goes out of mourning and the talk is of an Imperial bride: Christina, Duchess of Milan, the Emperor’s niece. ‘A very pretty little widow,’ Chapuys calls her: married at twelve to Francesco Sforza, widowed at sixteen, believed still a virgin.

  Christina’s father was once King of Denmark, but was dethroned. At present Denmark has a Lutheran king, who has seen the Bible translated, and has already made links with the German princes. The Emperor aims to bring him down, and perhaps put Christina in his place. Though England would lament the loss of an ally against the Pope, she might gain, through Christina, not only Denmark but Sweden and Norway, those fields of snow and ice with their harbours and great shining shoals; their waters where a thousand whales can feast on cod and bring a thousand friends, and still tomorrow there are more fish than there were yesterday. And their forests of which we hear, stretching in low lines below bare mountains, with store of timber for building ships.

  Besides, they say she is of a sweet disposition and might suit him.

  ‘I would emphasise the sweetness,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘The rest is conjecture.’ He pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘You could feel out the
terrain, Crumb.’

  Sometimes the king, in playing chess, hesitates with a piece in his hand, while in his head he plays out a series of fantasy moves, which he would never attempt in life. As black to his white, one must simply wait it out; Henry is more averse to risk than he pretends. After long deliberation, a nudge to a bishop is the most he ventures, or a pawn unleashed to its limit.

  Now the king’s negotiators are ready, the canon lawyers and linguists, the theologians and the accountants. In a dozen cities of France and the Low Countries, quartering Europe from Lisbon to Düsseldorf, they will meet with their peers, earnest and expert men, their dark garments relieved by a single, weighty gold chain: men who are followed by their own line of clerks with folios, with maps and charters, with trees of precedence and lineage. When negotiations are at their stickiest, the team can be reinforced by emissaries from home, bringing news of the king’s good health and his hopeful disposition to whichever match is in question.

  He, the minister, must move on all fronts: bustle from board to board, pushing six queens at once. In the space of hours, the game may be kicked over. One might bring arrangements to a point, only to be knocked back by a coup within some foreign chancellery. Or just as you are signing off the finances, the girl might die. Sometimes a returned envoy will say, ‘Go yourself, Lord Cromwell, you would speed the business along.’ But he sets his face against it. His appearance in any foreign city would cause amazement and consternation and lead to inflated expectations, lending too much weight to one set of negotiations at the expense of others.

  February, the king sends Philip Hoby into France. Hoby is a gentleman of the privy chamber: a gospeller, good-looking and keen, and well-briefed by himself, the Lord Privy Seal. The king thinks he has a chance of Madame de Longueville, despite the King of Scots’ claims that they are affianced. But there is no harm in looking at her sister, Louise. There is another sister, Renée, who they say is bound for a convent; perhaps she could be enticed from her beads by the prospect of becoming Queen of England?

  And while Hoby is across the sea, he might call on the Duke of Lorraine’s daughter. Don’t fret, he tells his clerks, you don’t need to remember all these ladies individually: not till the king chooses one, and changes her fate. They are all cousins, mostly papists, and mostly called Marie or Anne.

  The Duchess Christina is at the court in Brussels, with her aunt, who is regent in those parts for her brother the Emperor. Early in March, he commissions Hans to go out with Hoby and paint her. On 12 March, Hans is granted a three-hour sitting.

  ‘I think,’ Henry says, when he sees the drawing, ‘that we might have a little music tonight.’

  Christina is straight and tall, clear-eyed. When I have made the painting, Hans says, you will see she is so young she has dew on her. She is grave, she is poised: but there is a hint of a smile. You imagine she might put down the gloves that she twists in her fingers, and slide a warm palm against yours. Our envoy Hutton says she has three languages besides Latin. She speaks softly, gently, in all of them, and lisps a little.

  The king craves her, the privy chamber gentlemen tell him. He says we should remember her in our prayers, as if she is our queen already.

  But also he says, ‘Madame de Longueville has red hair. So I would feel I knew her, as if she were my family. And she has a tried and tested womb.’ He looks at Christina’s drawing again. ‘Now I do not know which lady to love.’

  ‘Yon Christina has a look of my niece Mary Shelton,’ Norfolk says.

  ‘I think he has had enough of your nieces,’ Charles Brandon says.

  But Shelton is still free. Henry always liked her. He could wed her right away. Thomas Boleyn is soon back at court, perhaps to press the case: they are very close, these families, very greedy. Boleyn is still Earl of Wiltshire despite all. He is grey, drawn, less flesh on him than doctors like to see. He wears his Garter badge and a gold chain, but he wears them against the subdued garments of a private gentleman, and neither he nor his small entourage boast nor strut nor pick fights with the servants of the Seymours. He speaks to my lord Privy Seal in a low confidential tone, as if they were old friends. ‘We have seen such times, Lord Cromwell,’ he says, ‘if I consider what has befallen in England, since my late daughter came up – we have seen events crowded into a week, that in ordinary times would have sustained the chroniclers for a decade.’

  Rather than waste time he, Lord Cromwell, decides to force the point: ‘Majesty, you are thinking of Mistress Shelton?’

  Henry smiles. ‘Perhaps it is time she was married. Though not necessarily to me.’

  He bows himself out. The king is not in a mood to confirm or deny. He thinks, the late Harry Norris had a daughter, did he not? She must be of age now to come to court. Useless to say to her, stay away; stay in the country, keep yourself intact. Brides frisk like silly sheep to the slaughter; like martyrs to the circus, when they hear the lion roar.

  The new French ambassador, Castillon, presents himself. He is one of those good fellows who parade their honesty, always showing you the palms of his hands.

  He looks him up and down. ‘Monsieur, I think your accord with the Emperor, it is only a winter truce?’

  Monsieur Castillon sighs. ‘We must try to settle a permanent peace, when the chance offers. My master is keen to show the world he is a Christian king.’

  ‘Mine too,’ he says. ‘But I wish François would show a little more warmth about our marrying a Frenchwoman.’

  ‘You are not set against it? Personally?’

  ‘I only want to make my king happy.’

  Castillon says, ‘Your king must be very clear what he offers.’

  ‘You can talk to me about that. I do the money.’

  ‘But I am speaking of a pact, a military alliance –’

  ‘Talk to Norfolk. He does the soldiers.’

  ‘Norferk is far more friendly to us than you.’

  ‘Perhaps because you pay him more, ambassador.’

  In dealing with the French he always feels he wants Wolsey’s advice. The French were terrified of the cardinal. They called him le cardinal pacifique, in the hope he wouldn’t smite them.

  Since new year, the rich and fertile county of Kent has been swept by rumours of the king’s death, which are passed between the patrons of the Checkers in Canterbury, and carried by fish-sellers door to door. They say he is dead of a flux, a fever, a cough, and that it is a pity he did not die seven years back. They also say that a tax will be placed on every horned beast, as well as a poll tax on their owners, and it will be set high so as to enrich Thomas Cromwell, and bring honest farmers to their knees.

  Anyone spreading such a rumour can expect to be nailed to the pillory by his ear on market day. But the origin of such lies can seldom be traced. Nor has he found who made the wax child. Mr Wriothesley had followed a trail of names, but they led to ruined or empty houses, or to men who call up such a blizzard of nonsense when questioned that you are driven out of their workshops, your head aching from verbiage and mercury fumes. The London wizards bear a grudge against Lord Cromwell, and no wonder. He has watched them since the cardinal’s death. He has confiscated their alembics and retorts, their snakeskins and secret bottles containing homunculi, their orbs and robes and wands. He has impounded their Clavicula Salomonis for calling up the dead, and read their texts in mirror writing; he has tossed to his code-breakers their almanacs in unknown tongues. Anyone who wishes may open his chests and inspect their cloaks of invisibility: which they claim he has converted to his own use.

  The north is quiet as winter ends. But then from York comes a report of one Mabel Brigge, attempting to witch Henry to death. She is a widow, aged thirty-two, so robust that every year when Lent comes her neighbours pay her to fast for them. For a fee, she will fast for a godly purpose, like the recovery of a sick child. But she will also make a black fast, that aims to waste its victim. Now she is fasting
against the king and the Duke of Norfolk. Every hour Brigge goes without food, king and duke will dwindle.

  ‘She is not fasting against me?’ the Lord Privy Seal asks. He is surprised.

  But his informants say, ‘She has seen the duke face to face. She feels she knows him. She says he is a promise-breaker. She says he has spoiled the north.’

  When the duke hears this he will be spurring north to hang Brigge in person. The king has flesh enough to see out any widow, but Norfolk has not an ounce to spare. You know my will and testament, Norfolk writes, that I gave you in a box? Send it back to me, Crumb, I must remake it. I am so short of money I shall have to sell land, and that comes hard. For God’s sake put some abbeys my way.

  He, Lord Cromwell, almost rips up the paper in a rage. Has he not just made a bargain with the duke for the abbey at Castle Acre? Can nothing sate the brute?

  February goes out with stormy weather, bringing down the west pier at Dover. In far-off lands they are preparing for war: the Venetians and the Emperor are to go against the Turks, with the Pope’s loud encouragement. But with a scent of spring in the English air, Lord Cromwell feels more himself. In the council chamber he is the focus of calm, though the king continues skittish, contrary. Henry says, ‘I will open my mind to you,’ and you can see him busily packing its contents into strongboxes, like a man stowing his assets against thieves. He says, ‘Do feel you can speak freely to me,’ and already he is adding up the bill. Gregory says, ‘He is a king after all, he does not think as we think, he does not know what we know. I would be afraid to argue with him as you do, father, lest God strike me dead.’

  I argue, he says, to make him argue back: to make him say what he thinks and what he wants. Seven years I have stood at his elbow while he sets a course. I found him in low water, the cardinal gone who was captain of his ship: bereft of good advice, gnawed by intermittent lusts, frustrated by his advisers, hamstrung by his own laws. I filled his treasury, made his coinage sound; I packed off his old wife and got him a new one of his choosing; while I did this I soothed his temper and told him jokes. If like a princess in a fairy tale I could have spun a babe from straw, I would have worked a year of nights. But he has his prince now. He has paid a price for him, but good fortune never comes free. It is time he knew that; it is time he grew up.