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

  While her kinsfolk are interrogated at the Tower, Margaret Pole remains in custody at Fitzwilliam’s house. When Fitzwilliam goes from home, his wife Mabel makes him take her with him. She will not stay alone under that cold Plantagenet eye.

  Once a thorough search is made of Margaret’s castle at Warblington, papers come to hand which perhaps she wishes were burned.

  ‘And I doubt not,’ Castillon says gaily, ‘that more will come to hand, as you require them.’

  Chapuys says, ‘Cremuel is happy enough if the evidence follows the trial.’

  ‘Margaret Pole is not on trial,’ he says, expressionless.

  She is the head of the family. It is she who carries the bloodline. She will never walk free again, but time will take care of her; he does not relish explaining to the ambassadors why the king chose the headsman, to rid an ancient lady. Geoffrey’s wife Constance is not to be charged. He has left Thomas More’s family out of the indictments, and Bishop Stokesley: for now. The net spreads wide, but at its extremities it is cobweb-thin.

  Riche says, ‘We have no actual thing against them, to convict them of treason. No actions. Only words. But we have done it before. We have done it under the statute.’

  Our law of treason is capacious. It encompasses words and bad intentions. We let More bring himself down that way, we let the Boleyns do it. Is a man a victim, who walks onto a knife? Are you innocent, if you set up the damage for yourself?

  ‘Thank you, Riche,’ he says, ‘for your confidence.’ But it is up to him, as ever, to make sure the king does nothing he regrets.

  Henry says: ‘Lord Montague and Lord Exeter have worked against me seven years past. They have perverted my daughter Mary to their cause. Her safety ensured,’ he inclines his head, ‘only by your efforts, my lord Cromwell.’

  He waits: allowing the king to hold a trial inside his head. At last he says, ‘Geoffrey Pole, sir? Without Geoffrey’s help we would have not much matter to stand up in court.’

  ‘A pardon, I suppose. Hold him for now.’

  He makes a note. There is no doubt as to the outcome of the trials. ‘Will your Majesty grant them grace as to the manner of their deaths?’

  ‘Noble blood,’ Henry says. ‘I cannot send them to Tyburn, though God knows – would François be as merciful? Would the Emperor endure to be laughed at, as I have been? Because they did laugh at me, my sore leg. Said it would kill me. And if it did not, they would speed nature. I ask myself, what would they have done to my son Edward? The day he was baptised, Gertrude Courtenay carried him in her arms. She held him against her heart. How could she, with such malice in it? God knows she has deserved a death.’

  ‘No, sir,’ he says firmly. ‘We will spare the women. By themselves they can do nothing. Gertrude may be lodged at the Tower in a chamber near her son. He is still of a tender age. And Henry Pole is not yet ten.’

  ‘They will be companions for each other,’ Henry says. ‘They can walk in the gardens. They can have a target to practise archery. Who knows? A time may come when they can be let go. Though I hope my son’s heart will not be as soft, to nourish traitors decade after decade. In truth, I hope none of my heirs will have hearts as pitiful as mine.’

  The captive children will need to be shown occasionally to witnesses, so no one can say they have been disappeared, like King Edward’s heirs. As with those tender princes, it is inheritance condemns them. Though he, Thomas Cromwell, has nothing to say against inheritance. Already the name of his grandson Henry is beginning to appear on title deeds. And the child as yet has no teeth.

  In early December the order goes to the Tower: bring up the bodies for trial. Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, is condemned, and Lord Montague too, led to the scaffold at Tower Hill on a day of howling wind and heavy rain.

  Geoffrey Pole will be released before spring. He is pardoned by the king, but not by himself. On the fourth day of Christmas he tries to kill himself again, this time by eating a cushion. The feathers fail to choke him.

  For the season the king goes to Greenwich as usual. The Pope’s bull of excommunication is now to be carried by Reginald Pole through Europe, and for a man doomed to Hell, Henry keeps a merry court. From Brussels, our envoy Mr Wriothesley writes he has seen Christina. He never thought he could like a woman as tall as himself, but he does like her, and he understands the king would not object to a tall bride. When Christina smiles, dimples appear in her cheek and chin. He thinks she would smile more often if she were given cause. When he asks her how she would like to be Queen of England, she says, alas, it is not for her to decide.

  Henry shows off her picture. Everyone who sees it smiles. ‘She looks kind,’ the king says wistfully. ‘What if she is not so white as Jane? Jane was white as Staffordshire alabaster.’

  All souls must make the passage, Dante tells us. They flock on the riverbank to wait their turn: the mild, the defenceless, crossing in the weak light.

  On the last day of 1538 Nicholas Carew is arrested: the king’s Master of the Horse, old Carve-Away, the hero of the tilting ground. A cache of letters in possession of Gertrude Courtenay shows him as one who has not only urged on the conspirators but broken the king’s confidence repeatedly over the years, revealing freely what is done and said in the privy chamber.

  Henry says sadly, ‘The cardinal always warned me against Carew. I didn’t listen. I should listen to my advisers, shouldn’t I?’

  He feels it is not for him to comment.

  ‘Carew was always a partisan of my wife. I mean, of Katherine. Then of Mary, crying up her rights.’ Henry is thoughtful. ‘Carew’s wife is still a beautiful woman.’

  He almost drops his papers. He imagines the words dragged out of him: Majesty, I know you had to do with Eliza Bryan in your young days, but you cannot order a man’s death and then marry his widow. King David sent Uriah into battle to be killed: thereafter, he impregnated Bathsheba, who gave birth to a dying child.

  He thinks, somebody else will have to tell him. Lord Audley. Fitz. I have had enough of refraining him from what will hurt him, slapping away his hand like a nursemaid.

  The king says, ‘I gave Lady Carew diamonds and pearls. I never saw her wear them. I suppose Nicholas locked them away in his coffers.’

  He says, ‘His coffers will be emptied now. They will come back to the Wardrobe. By your Majesty’s leave I will send Master Cornelius to make a special inventory.’

  ‘Yes, do that.’ Henry looks into the distance. ‘These men, you know, Carew, Lord Exeter – they were the friends of my youth.’

  He bows, waits, then begins to withdraw. The end of the Round Table, he thinks. Henry says, ‘Reginald called me the enemy of the human race.’

  The boy Mathew comes to him: ‘My lord, an old woman has brought a nightingale in a cage. I gave her one mark.’

  Christophe says, ‘You gave her one mark, for a singing bird? You rustic dolt. My lord should send you back to Wiltshire. I suppose it is all the entertainment you are used to, down at Wolf Hall.’

  Nicholas Carew is held in custody, pending his indictment on Valentine’s Day. The king does not mention his name again.

  Ou sont les gracieux galans

  Que je suivoye ou temps jadiz,

  Si bien chantans, si bien parlans,

  Si plaisans en faiz et en diz?

  Such singers, such dancers, their words and deeds false to the core: when our prince went hunting they whispered to each other, ‘When will the Tudor break his neck?’

  The gaoler Martin tells him that Carew has begun to read the gospel. He laments the life he has led, and wishes to be a new man. ‘Will you not do something for him, sir? Now he has come over to us?’

  Before Lambert was burned he would have protested against the trial of a fellow evangelist, thinking it his duty to prevent it, knowing that until he had done his utmost his conscience would not rest. But he has got over that now.

>   They say the cardinal in the days of his power had a wax image of the king, which he talked to and bent to his will. He keeps a waxen Henry in the corner of his imagination, painted in bright colours and fitted with gilt shoes. He lives with it but he doesn’t talk to it. He is afraid it will answer back.

  PART FIVE

  I

  Ascension Day

  Spring–Summer 1539

  ‘Call-Me wants a picture of the king,’ Rafe says. ‘We must get one on the first boat. He needs to show it to Christina.’

  Does Call-Me know his business? It seems perilous, to open a gap between a young girl’s fantasy and a man who is past his prime. But then, she must have heard Henry described, by those whose pleasure it is to rip up her dreams.

  He sits with Rafe and goes through a sheaf of drawings. Sometimes a child emerges from behind the king’s eyes: an alert little boy, who expects the world to do him pleasure. Henry owns more than a hundred looking-glasses. If they had a memory, we could send one that reflected the prince as he was at Christina’s age: tumbling curls, broad shoulders, damask skin.

  Henry rides up to Waltham to see his little prince. Edward’s limbs are firm and sturdy. No spells or conjurations have withered him. His pallor he gets from his mother, his shy blue eyes and pointed chin. His coats are of tawny and crimson, his winter gowns lined with miniver and trimmed with ermine. He makes full use of his Christmas present from the old Earl of Essex – a rattle combined with a bell. The Earl of Essex is stone deaf.

  Every dispatch from Wriothesley reassures us that yes, he knows his business. He visits Christina in her chambers hung with damask and black velvet. The atmosphere is hushed: our handsome envoy whispers to her, enticing. The king’s character, he tells her, is naturally benevolent. In all his reign, few have heard angry words fall from his lips.

  Christina’s colour rises, Call-Me says. She looks as if someone has tickled her.

  Majesty, he advises, take her on any terms: you cannot do better.

  But Call-Me is chagrined that the courtiers in Brussels do not understand his lineage. They imply that anyone who serves Cromwell must be of base degree himself. He assures them that he is proud to walk behind the Lord Privy Seal, carrying his pen, ink and paper. He doesn’t mind their aspersions, he says.

  Rafe says, ‘He does mind, really.’ Call-Me has always been touchy, quick to take offence; easily rattled, and proud of his good blood. But the new year has begun well for him, because he has laid hands on that coveted master-spy, Harry Phillips.

  How did this happen? Phillips has simply walked into our embassy and handed himself over. He craves Henry’s pardon for anything he has done or seemed to do against England and Englishmen. Now he is ready to tell the truth about his life, and is able to lead us straight to Master Traitor Pole. And then, Wriothesley believes, Phillips can be interrogated and turned, sent back into Europe to work our will – drawing the king’s enemies gradually towards him, then spilling them into the hands of the executioner.

  Call-Me’s dispatch has scarcely been read at Westminster when he is obliged to write a follow-up. Though placed under guard, Harry Phillips has absconded in the night, taking with him a bag of money belonging to our English delegation.

  Call-Me has spent four futile months standing in anterooms and absorbing insults, and now a trickster has gulled him. He is eaten up with humiliation, gnawed with anxiety till he knows if the king and council blame him. He should bear the blame, of course. But his fellow envoys write home on his behalf: for God’s sake, comfort him, my lord Cromwell – he will be ill if you do not give him a good word. Never was son so anxious to please his father, as Mr Wriothesley is to please you.

  Perhaps it will be a lesson to him, Rafe says, not to think he has the most penetrating wit in Europe: to realise he can be as big a fool as the rest of us.

  It is a cold winter. No sooner have floods abated than the first snows blanket us. In the warmth of Toledo, the Emperor and the King of France ratify their treaty. They mean this concord to last their lifetimes, they say, and they swear to make no agreement with England – marital, military – without the support of the other. Which will not, of course, forthcome. Who can deal with an excommunicate king? No Christian man can give him bread if he is starving – let alone provide him with a wife.

  Henry’s subjects are now released from their obedience to him. The Pope reminds the faithful that for sectaries and schismatics, the normal rules are suspended. You may break your contracts with them and seize their goods. All Englishmen abroad, whether students, merchants or ambassadors, are at risk of arrest. It is true there has been no formal declaration of hostilities. But it feels like war. The King of Scots is preening himself; he thinks that if France invades, they will partition the kingdom and give him the north, if not the whole.

  The men around our king live by what they call honour: skill in arms, prowess on the battlefield. Their appetite is not slaked by the cutting up of northern rebels, or the attrition of border feuding. Norfolk calls war business. ‘If we have business with the French,’ he says, or ‘Should some business with Charles ensue …’ Now church bells are cast into cannon, ploughshares beaten into swords, the cross of Christ becomes a bludgeon, a club to beat out the brains of the opposition. What’s ink in Whitehall is blood in the borderlands, what’s a quibble in the law courts is a stabbing in the streets. Mild monkish blessings are turned to curses, and the giggling of courtiers tails off into an uneasy hush. Each man is watching the other, for signs of treason, signs of weakness. You cannot greet the world in the morning with anything less than ferocity, or by evening you will be destroyed.

  It is not our custom in England to maintain a standing army. Using former church revenues, we could raise one. But then Henry would want to use it, as monarchs do, to carry war beyond the seas: which, Master Secretary says, is a thing I will never permit. For our defence we can mobilise swiftly. Ready cash oils the wheels. The best men are appointed in every region, to draw up muster rolls, build beacons, recruit gunners, captain ordnance. Can our friends in Cleves, the king asks, send a hundred expert cannoneers?

  The king’s ships stand in the Thames: the Jesus and the John Baptist, the Peter, the Minion, the Primrose and the Sweepstake, the Lyon, the Trinity, the Valentine; the Mary Rose and the Mary Boleyn. The king’s tabletop is papered with charts and plans. He draws forts and blockhouses, and he, Cromwell, sends out surveyors to map the coastline. All the maps are to be sent to the king. He dreams of laying them out in Westminster Hall, a pattern of these islands.

  The message to the world is: we can withstand a sudden invasion, and we can sustain a long war. He, Cromwell, writes letters into Europe, explaining the recent executions. Every prince will understand that the dead men were dynasts; Henry is keeping his line safe. Within a year our country will be a giant fortress, guns trained on the sea lanes: more like a castle than a realm.

  A castle is a world in little. Everyone inside it must work together. If it falls it is because it is betrayed from within. The Duke of Norfolk rides north, to stamp out sedition where the king’s writ is weakest: a querulous old man, taking to the winter roads. ‘Take your time,’ he advises: he, Lord Cromwell.

  ‘I’ve no choice, have I?’ Norfolk snarls. But then he turns, relenting: ‘Look here. When you write to me, you need not address me as “your Grace”. It doesn’t seem fitting these days. You being what you are.’

  He bows. Perhaps Norfolk has received a prompt from the king? ‘Most humbly I acknowledge your lordship’s condescension.’

  But, he thinks, I won’t start calling you Tom. He never sees the duke with a sword at his side, without imagining himself run through: ‘Beg pardon, Lord Cromwell, was that your heart?’

  The king says, ‘Ask the German princes what they will do for us, if we find ourselves under attack. Ask them to send engineers. If they must send more scholars, naturally we will receive them, but our n
eed is for fighting men.’

  You can hire soldiers, of course. The king’s father hired the army that knocked the throne from under Crookback. They will fight as long as they are paid or rewarded with plunder, but they will not stir one foot unless they hear the chink of coin. He, Cromwell, puts out scouts through Germany and Italy. He is not interested in a poxy rabble of Irishmen or Scots, only in proven captains from nations where war is a science.

  This winter the council sits every day. The king presides, except when he rides off in person to inspect the Channel ports. The exigency has given him a new briskness, a vigour. ‘My lords, I am weary of reading long letters. You must digest them for me. Unless they come from my brother kings, when I shall read them entire.’

  The King of Scotland sends his compliments, and asks for a lion. A lion! ‘The temerity of the man!’ the councillors exclaim. ‘The presumption!’

  ‘I have plenty of lions, I suppose,’ the king says mildly, ‘in the cages at the Tower. I would not refuse to do him pleasure. My lord Cromwell, will you see to that?’

  Someone laughs, and stifles the laugh. Any odd tasks, the king always says they are Cromwell business. And they always are.

  The king’s council is smaller now. It is compacted to an effective body, so there are no makeweights. But every man who sits has a strong will and strong interests. The king begs for concord amongst his advisers. But Henry himself cannot walk a line: he leans violently one way, then violently the other, and it takes a robust man to support him. Intemperate councillors fail. We have all seen Gardiner flouncing from the royal presence, looking like a plaice, with his mouth turned down and his underlip thrust out.

  The king’s temper is no mystery. The astrologers say it is his moon in Aries that makes him explosive, confrontational – but really what matters is the state of his leg. Some days it hurts more, some days less, but there are no days it does not hurt at all. As the king’s doctors remark, the ailments of great men have too little credit, when their lives are passed in view. They inherit thrones, but so much else. When the Emperor speaks, his words rattle like pebbles in the cavern of his overshot jaw. François is paying for his sins: he has lost so many teeth to the mercury cure that his wishes are expressed as spit, and his parts are ulcerated in a fashion that would repulse the lowest whore.