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

  ‘Tom Culpeper,’ Gregory explains. ‘We are studying what he will do. He is the king’s favourite, he has money laid on him. Richard is drawn against him in the foot combat. He does not come against him in the joust.’

  The foot combat is the most ruthless of all the tournament games. It is ad hominem. There is no place to hide.

  ‘A likely young man,’ he says. ‘He is handsome.’

  ‘Not when I’ve finished with him,’ Richard says.

  Both Suffolk and Norfolk are present when the contests open, and they greet each other with their usual empty civility. Suffolk would rise from the dead, he declares, to be at such an occasion, because in his day he held the palm: myself and the king, he says, always Harry and me. Gods, we were, in our time.

  If you sit close to the king, under the canopy with the arms of England and France, you feel his body rigid with tension, his muscles jumping as if he were himself in the saddle. Henry sees, notes, scores every move, and at the end of a bout he drops back in his chair, releasing his breath as the winner and loser are led away, their lathered horses sidestepping and curvetting, their helmets off to acknowledge the crowd.

  Young Surrey rides seven times: he has no special success, but he is not unhorsed either. Norfolk, he suspects, prefers proper fighting. The Howard entourage make a good deal of noise, but provided a show is made, and the family honour is upheld, the duke seems little interested in the finer points. He is not one to pine for old times, when it comes to a contest of arms; given his choice, he would haul up a cannon, and blast the foe to Jerusalem.

  Between the contests musicians play. They sing ‘England be Glad’, their voices lost in the open air. Then they play the Bear Dance, and Montard Brawle, which makes the ladies jump in their seats and beat time, and all those who are not in armour clap their hands. The queen is sedate, her hands folded, but she watches all that passes with a wide and interested gaze; she looks to the king for a signal for when to applaud and when to despond.

  He, Essex, goes in and out, as messengers call on him. ‘News from Ireland,’ he says briefly to the king. While the silk pennants flutter and the trumpets call, he is crawling through bog and brush, after the O’Connors, the O’Neills, the Kavanaghs and the Breens: the wreckers, burners and despoilers, ready to open their ports to Pole’s ships.

  When Richard makes his first run, his lance lifts his opponent clean out of the saddle. It is the cleanest strike seen in years. You have seen a vulgar boy plunge his knife into a loaf, and wave it around on the point? That is how the enemy is hoisted, flying into the air while his horse carries on without him. You hardly hear him hit the ground because the courtiers are yelling like drunks at a bear-baiting.

  Richard collects his horse and turns him. His grooms rush to the end of the barrier to make sure he wheels wide of the tilt. Richard shows the crowd his mailed glove, empty, as if they did not know his lance was splintered. Henry is on his feet, a blaze of gold. He is beside himself, laughing and crying. They are waving Richard back to the king, but through the narrow slit in his helmet most probably he cannot see the signal; now a squire takes his bridle, and his mount flecked with lather steps up, snorting, harness ringing. The king takes a diamond from his finger: he is mouthing something; Richard’s mailed arm reaches out.

  Next day is Sunday. Richard Cromwell kneels, and rises Sir Richard. Henry kisses him. He says, ‘Richard, you are my diamond.’

  On 3 May the challengers and the answerers fight on horseback, with rebated swords. Fitzwilliam, Lord Admiral, sits beside him and talks below the clatter. ‘The word from the border is that the Scots are gathering a fleet. Their ambassador says James plans to sail to France to visit his kin. But our agents say he is bound for Ireland.’

  He glances across at Norfolk. ‘A pity the Scot does not come by land. My lord is always looking to fight his father’s battles over again. He is short of glory these days.’

  Fitzwilliam says, ‘I want twenty ships. I must be at the Irish coast before James, to chase him back to the open sea.’

  He nods. ‘I will see you supplied.’

  A great roar rises from the crowd: another knight spilled from his saddle to the green and springy ground, crunching in his weight of mail and tumbling arse-over-pate. The winner removes his helmet: the spectators applaud: Cromwell! they shout. Fitzwilliam says abruptly, ‘You are popular in this arena.’

  ‘It’s my nephew they are shouting for. I should send Richard to the council in my stead, to explain what I have spent.’

  The bills are coming in for the conveyance of the queen by land and sea. Her thirteen trumpeters alone have cost us near a hundred pounds. Just this morning he had a chit for more than a hundred and forty pounds for work on the king’s tomb – which is unfair, considering that Henry is never going to die. He complains, ‘It has cost us two thousand marks to honour the Duke of Bavaria as we waved him goodbye.’

  The Lord Admiral says, ‘Surely that would be a sound investment for you? Even if you found it from your own purse.’

  He does not ask Fitz to enlarge on what he means. He is thinking about the tomb: one hundred and forty-two pounds, eleven shillings and tenpence. Have you ever seen the Wound Man, in a surgeons’ manual? There is a caltrop beneath his foot, a spear through his calf, and between his ribs an arrow, the shaft snapped. There is a cleaver in his shoulder, a sword in his gut, a dagger through his eye. He is bleeding money. Just as well he has persuaded Parliament into a two-year subsidy for the king. It will not be popular in the country. But there are forts to build, as well as ships to fit. He never believed in the amity between François and the Emperor, but he does believe they would put aside their quarrels for an immediate object: the invasion of England. He says to Fitz, ‘They will come in by Ireland if they can, either one of them. Conciliate them, the king says; but he is a fool if he believes anything they say.’

  ‘I’ll tell him you said so, shall I?’

  Down below, the arms of Cromwell snap in the breeze. For Richard, these are the greatest days of his life. More than his marriage, the birth of his sons, his grants of lands, his commissions under the king; more than his prosperity, his security, are these moments when muscles and bone and the conqueror’s eye are indefeasible; when the heart leaps and the sight dazzles and time seems to stretch on all sides and cushion you like a snowfield, like a feather bed. He thinks of Brother Frisby, tumbled in the snow at Launde, shining like a seraph.

  Richard is a hard-headed man. He knows this way of knocking a man over is arcane, expensive, obsolete. But he wants to rise in this world, as Cromwells do. His grandsire was a Tudor archer. His father plied the law. Now he is a knight of the realm. Surrey’s expression, beneath his helm, can only be inferred.

  Fitz says, ‘Did you ever don helm and harness, my lord?’

  By Christ no, he thinks. We pikemen were too poor for mail. We went in boiled leather which we hardened by prayer. We wore other men’s boots.

  Blowing in from the coast, Wyatt does not even sit down before he says, ‘Bonner is Bishop of London? You think that serves you?’

  ‘He is. I did. I doubt him now.’

  Bonner is a plump pink man; he looks foolish, but his brain is as sharp as a sharpened nail. He is back from France, installed in his see, and already it seems he may be an ingrate, or double. He, Essex, is not easy to mislead, but these days men are friends at the gate and foes at the door. ‘I thought he was one of us. Perhaps he’s everybody’s. But still,’ he says, ‘Bonner knows things. About Gardiner, his practices in France.’

  ‘You should not promote a man because he hates Gardiner. That is no safe way.’ Wyatt walks about. ‘I hear you dined.’

  ‘I dined. Stephen looked as if he were swallowing tadpoles.’

  ‘You have had Suffolk here, your people say. Be warned. He will not stand with you if you need a friend.’

  ‘You and Brandon have been at odds for ten ye
ars. And I have forgotten why.’

  ‘So have I. So has he. It does not mean we can make peace.’

  ‘Go home to Bess Darrell,’ he says. ‘Go down to Allington and enjoy the summer. Bess has helped me. And I am now able to help you in your turn.’

  ‘You owe me nothing,’ Wyatt says. ‘The obligation is all the other way. I have been in agony, as to what you would think of me. I obeyed my instructions. Make a breach, you said, tear François and the Emperor apart. I have done it, but I fear I have not helped you.’

  ‘Their enmities were so old, so ingrained,’ he says, ‘that you should not give yourself all the credit. They only reverted to the pattern they knew. Anyway, you followed your instructions, what else could you do? Be assured, it is no detriment to me.’

  ‘Except you stand to lose your queen.’

  So Wyatt knows everything. The waves of the Narrow Sea rustle like sheets, whispering through Europe the news of Henry’s incapacity. ‘It will be a poor game without her, it’s true.’

  Wriothesley comes in. ‘Wyatt? I thought it was you.’ They embrace, comrades-in-arms. ‘You can explain to us what is happening here.’

  ‘But I have been out of the realm,’ Wyatt says.

  ‘That does not weigh. In it, out of it, we neither walk on the earth nor swim nor fly, we do not know which element we dwell in. Summer is coming, but the king rains and shines like April. Men change their religion as they change their coats. The council makes a resolution and next minute forgets it. We write letters and the words expunge. We are playing chess in the dark.’

  ‘On a board made of jelly,’ he says.

  ‘With chessmen of butter.’

  Wyatt says, ‘Your images upheave me.’

  ‘Then make us better ones, dear heart,’ Wriothesley says.

  When they embraced, he saw Call-Me’s eyes over Wyatt’s shoulder. They were like Walter’s eyes, one day when he had burned himself in the forge. He had walked away, silent, to plunge his arm in water: he uttered nothing, neither oath nor self-reproof, but sweat started out on his forehead, and his legs buckled.

  This year, business tears him away from the feast. The Lord Deputy of Ireland must be replaced, and the need is urgent. It is four or five years since he backed Leonard Grey for the post: well, there again he was mistaken. There are councillors who say the only way forward is to depopulate the island and resettle it with Englishmen. But, he thinks, the Irish would shrink into the interior, and hide in holes where rats could not live.

  He says to Audley, ‘There are rumours that Pole’s army has landed in Galway. Or else in Limerick. I doubt Reynold could tell them apart, or say if he was in Ireland or the Land of Nod. If his past wanderings are any guide, he will try to invade us by way of Madrid.’

  Audley looks at him: how can you make a joke? He is solemnity personified, now he has been elected to the Garter, and has a chain and a new George shining on his breast.

  When Lord Lisle got a permit to leave Calais for the Garter feast, he thought it a mark of favour. He is surprised to be ordered before the council, and questioned. It is an open secret that members of his household have quit their posts and made their way to Rome. The boy Mathew, among others, has brought home fat files of evidence. But the Lord Privy Seal has not got what he wants – one damning document, to link the Lord Deputy to Pole.

  Rafe says, ‘At this point we usually arrest Francis Bryan, do we not? When we cannot make the answers fit the questions?’

  He smiles. Bryan knows all about Calais, it is true. He could help bring Lisle down, maybe also the ambassador Valloppe. But who will believe Francis? The Vicar of Hell has drained too many cups. He has played too many hands, he has given too much offence: if you think in vino veritas, look at Francis. Yet he knows everybody’s secrets, and appears to be everybody’s cousin. He has friends in every treasury, watchmen at every port.

  Rafe shrugs, as if trying to shift an ill-balanced load. We servants of the king must get used to games we cannot win but fight to an exhausted draw, their rules unexplained. Our instructions are full of snares and traps, which mean as we gain we lose. We do not know how to proceed from minute to minute, yet somehow we do, and another night falls on us in Greenwich, at Hampton Court, at Whitehall.

  The king wonders aloud, what shall we do when knights of the Garter are found to be traitors – men like Nicholas Carew? Certainly their names should be stricken from the volumes that contain the history of the order. But will that not mar the beauty of the pages?

  The decision is that the disgraced name should remain. But the words ‘VAH! PRODITUR’ should be written in the margin, so the man is branded for ever.

  Vah! He thinks of Gardiner, trying to cough up his tadpoles: by now his evil mind has swollen them, he will have to spew them as frogs. ‘The man he needs is St Aelred,’ Gregory says. ‘When the saint met with a swollen man clutching his belly, Aelred at once stuffed his fingers down the patient’s throat; he vomited, with his frogs, seven pints of bile.’

  He says to his son, ‘I have some news for you. It is a blow, I must confess.’

  In making him earl, the king has granted twenty-four manors in Essex, besides holdings in other counties. But in return he wants the manor of Wimbledon, and the house at Mortlake.

  Gregory blinks. ‘Why?’

  ‘You know he cannot ride so far now. He wants to join one great park to another, so he can move west of London and still be on his own ground. I will show you the map. You will see the sense in it.’

  He does not open his account books to work out how much money he has spent on his Mortlake house. He thought it would be his for life.

  Gregory says, ‘You won’t miss your old haunts, surely?’

  Since he was a child Gregory has moved in the orbit of princes. Putney’s nothing to him, those fields that Walter scrabbled for, the sheep-runs for which he fought his neighbours.

  Gregory says, ‘Take heart, my lord father. Not only was Aelred good for stomach pains, he was sovereign for broken bones. He made the dumb to speak.’

  He asks, ‘What did they say?’

  When he judges the time is right, he sends men for Lisle: ten at night, to rouse him from his bed and take him to the Tower. He will order Bishop Sampson moved there too. It will be convenient to get their confessions together, as the facts are so enmeshed. He does not need the bishop arraigned, just in ward, out of the council and out of the pulpit. Cranmer will take the vacant place in the rota at Paul’s: it is time the lovers of scripture had their say. The other bishops should take warning by Sampson’s arrest. He has five names on his list. He lets that fact be known. Which names they are, he holds back.

  Lisle, too, can be held till the evidence fits. In Calais he can be replaced with a man more active and competent. He thinks about Wyatt: why not? The French are frightened of Monsieur Hoyet. Though, as someone says, they hardly fear him as much as the English do.

  The day after Lisle’s arrest, the man John Husee waits for him at dawn, to implore. He says to him, ‘Keep yourself out of this, Husee. You have been a good servant and deserve a better master.’

  Honor Lisle is still in Calais. Mr Wriothesley says, ‘On consideration, sir, we should have secured her with her husband; of the two, she is the more papistical.’

  ‘She can be held at home,’ he says. ‘Arrange it, would you?’ He sees, in an instant and for the first time: I am not ruthless enough for Sir Thomas Wriothesley.

  Now he tells Husee, ‘Lady Lisle were better, if she has letters, to surrender them rather than burn them. I am adept at construing the ashes.’

  After the king gives permission for his uncle’s arrest, he retires to prayer. But he will not see Lord Lisle, for all his begging. The news has come from Scotland that his new wife has given King James a son. ‘I could have married that lady,’ the king says. ‘But my councillors were too slow to act, and unwilling.’

/>   In the noble city of Ghent, the Emperor sits in a hall draped in black, dealing out fates. He strips the guilds of their privileges, levies a fine, impounds weapons and knocks down part of the walls as well as the principal abbey, announcing that he will build a fortress garrisoned with Spanish troops. He parades the chief citizens barefoot, in the smocks of penitents, nooses around their necks. The executions have gone on for a month.

  In times past you have thought, if you have to get into bed with Charles or François, Charles is the less diseased. But now who can choose: two loathly partners, sweating and seeping? ‘They call our king a killer,’ he tells Brandon, ‘but when I compare –’

  ‘By God, they have gall!’ says the duke. ‘With all of his troubles with men and women both, with traitors and rebels and councillors false, I call him an anointed saint.’

  Norfolk and Gardiner visit each other as they did before the duke went to France. His informants say, ‘Norfolk has the girl Katherine with him. At Gardiner’s house they played a masque. It was Magnificence. Sir, they played it against you.’

  It is an old thing of Skelton’s, written against Wolsey in his time. When carters become courtiers, is the burden of it: how the upstart vaunts, how he sins, how the commonwealth is abused. The players are Collusion and Abusion, Folly and Mischief, and Magnificence himself, who proclaims:

  ‘I reign in my robes, I rule as me list,

  I drive down these dastards with a dint of my fist.’

  But at length Magnificence is brought low, he is beaten and shamed, spoiled of all he has and plunged into poverty. Enter Despair, tempting him to make an end by stabbing or hanging himself, the sorriest knave that ever was damned.

  Just in time comes Good Hope, and saves him.

  But if you think your audience would prefer it, there is always the choice to end the play early, leaving Magnificence in the dust.

  Rafe says, ‘Call-Me was there. At Gardiner’s masque.’

  ‘Was he?’ He is disturbed. ‘Looking after our interests, I am sure.’