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

  ‘And what do you draw from that?’ he asks. ‘That I am the right size for king? What is the right size, my lord Suffolk? Are you not nearer it than me?’

  He is saddened by Brandon. To Norfolk, a Cromwell is just a blot to be erased, like a discrepancy in book-keeping. But Brandon’s family made their name by audacity. He hoped there might be some fellow-feeling. Charles cannot settle to his questions, but walks about, and in time walks out of the room, calling sharply to his folk to accompany him, as one whistles to a dog.

  Wriothesley says, ‘You are aware that Lord Hungerford is arrested?’

  ‘Hungerford?’ He thinks that, in dwelling on Brandon, he has missed something. ‘What has Hungerford to do with me?’

  ‘That is something we mean to find out,’ Riche says. ‘He has written you many letters, and you have written him many replies, copies of which Master Secretary Wriothesley has extracted from your files.’

  Hungerford is a West Country gentleman: a good enough lieutenant, active in his district’s affairs. He is a wife-beater too, and his lady wants to be free of him; only a few days before his arrest, he, Thomas Essex, had set in train a process of official separation. He says, ‘One must use such people. The king cannot be served only by saints.’

  ‘An old woman has laid grave accusations against him,’ Wriothesley says. ‘She is called Mother Huntley.’

  Christ help him, he thinks. We all have a Mother Huntley in our lives. Mine is called Richard Riche.

  ‘The charges involve sorcery,’ Norfolk says. ‘Well, Cromwell here, he knows all about that! Conjurers’ books in his cellar, were there not? When the wax doll was found, of our little prince, Cromwell could not wait to lay his hands on the culprits and their villain texts. And yet he told young Richmond, God rest him, that there were no such things as witches! When we all know that witches have done the king harm.’

  ‘I remember that day,’ Riche said. ‘It was at St James’s, at the time Fitzroy fell ill. Cromwell sent me out of the room, and I often wondered what passed. That is how it has always been – Wriothesley, you will bear me out? He seems to confide in you, then suddenly excludes you from his councils.’

  ‘Now we see why,’ Wriothesley says.

  ‘However, to the matter in hand,’ Riche says. ‘Lord Hungerford has employed a conjurer to find out the date of the king’s death.’

  He thinks, Henry does not fear a false horoscope. He fears a true one: a fate that he must walk towards. He says, ‘A man like Hungerford makes enemies among his neighbours. It is an easy thing to allege.’

  ‘Do not take it lightly,’ Lord Audley says. ‘I assure you, the king does not.’

  Hungerford may be a brute, but he is hardly a danger to the commonweal. Two weeks ago he would have been sweeping such charges off his desk and onto some lesser desk.

  Riche says, ‘He is also charged with violating a member of his household. Per anum.’

  ‘God save us – not Lady Hungerford?’

  ‘A servant,’ Norfolk says. ‘Luckily his own, not some other gentleman’s. He will die for it.’

  ‘But more to the point,’ Wriothesley says, ‘he is detected as a papist. A chaplain in his household had contact with the rebels in the north. We have it documented.’

  ‘Why did you not know?’ Riche says.

  ‘Because he lied to me?’ he says. ‘If I could detect every lie, I could set up in a temple as an oracle.’ He pictures himself in an olive grove. ‘Far away from you.’

  It is past dinner time and he is hungry. The duke is hungry too, but those days are gone when they might have shared a table. Christophe comes in with a chicken. A half-hour passes, in which he eats heartily enough. When his guests return, Riche follows the others with an affected dawdle that means he has something to say. He takes time in setting his papers down, squaring them up. ‘Wyatt is much enriched.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He is granted land from Reading Abbey. From Boxley and Malling. And here in London, St Mary Overy, and the Crossed Friars, and St Saviour in Bermondsey.’

  ‘He has long coveted those properties.’

  Riche smiles. ‘I believe he has more than he thought he would get.’

  ‘He will take it as a challenge. He will soon run through the income, believe me.’

  Wriothesley leans forward. His face is flushed. ‘My lord, do you not ask yourself, why now? It is done by his Majesty’s direct command. He finds Wyatt deserves well.’

  As he did at Anne Boleyn’s fall. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what is unlucky for others is lucky for Thomas Wyatt. God smiles on him.’

  Wriothesley mutters, ‘Again, ask yourself why.’

  ‘Is that a question?’

  Wriothesley is mute.

  He, Lord Cromwell, turns to Riche. ‘No man knows better than you that grants like these are not made by snapping the fingers. Wyatt’s grants were set in train months ago, when I recalled him from his embassy. They needed only the king’s signature.’

  ‘He could have withheld it,’ Wriothesley says, ‘if Wyatt did not please him. Clearly he did.’

  Of course Wyatt would be questioned: how not? It seems he has given answers, helpful or at least not disagreeable to the king. But under what constraint, under what pressure? Perhaps Bess is having another phantom child?

  ‘Wyatt knows your secret dealings,’ Wriothesley says. ‘And, as he has often boasted, the thoughts of your heart.’

  ‘Not that they are anything to boast about,’ he says. ‘You strain my charity, Wriothesley. Still, when I am set at large, I will try not to hold these things against you.’

  Once again that fluttering, behind his ribs, of the organ whose workings have cost Wyatt himself so much pain. Love slayeth my heart. Fortune is depriver of all my comfort … My pleasant days, they fleet away and pass, But daily yet the ill doth change into the worse.

  He says – the words emerge suddenly, unguarded – ‘What will you do without me? When a man such as Wyatt goes to work, he works for those who appreciate him. Without me you will read the lines as written, but you will never read between them. Marillac will make fools of you, and Chapuys too, if he returns. Charles and François will scramble your brains like a basin of eggs. Within a year the king will be fighting the Scots, or the French, or likely both, and he will bankrupt us. None of you can manage matters as I can. And the king will quarrel with you all, and you with each other. A year from now, if you sacrifice me, you will have neither honest coin nor honest minister.’

  The clerk says, ‘Lord Cromwell is ill. We should perhaps pause?’

  He turns his eyes on the boy. ‘Bless you for your courage.’

  He is sweating. Norfolk says, ‘Oh, I think he is fit enough. It is not as if he has endured any pains – which are spared him, at the king’s direction, even though he is not nobly born.’

  So the day passes, and another. Treason can be construed from any scrap of paper, if the will is there. A syllable will do it. The power is in the hands of the reader, not the writer. The duke continues with his outbursts, and Riche with insinuations that seldom connect one line of questioning with another. Mostly he can answer them; sometimes he has to refer them to the papers they have impounded, or lost. The truth is, as he confesses, he has meddled in so much of the king’s business, that it is impossible even for a man of his capacity to recollect everything said and done. ‘It is hard to live under the law,’ he says. ‘A minister must, unwittingly, transgress at divers points. But if I am a traitor,’ he wipes his face, ‘then all the devils in Hell confound me and the vengeance of God light upon me.’

  Left alone at the end of the afternoon, he sits unpicking the fabric of the recent past, and always the thread leads him back to May Day. Thomas Essex at Greenwich, coming and going from the tournament ground, clerks following him with the king’s business; the earl – that is, myself – throwing out a command her
e and there. Richard Cromwell in the arena, knocking down all comers. Our feasting of our friends and enemies, our style and courtesy, our sprezzatura, our lavish display: May Day undid us, for the envy and rancour it bred could no longer be suppressed. Richard has compounded with some Italians to paint a mural of his triumph in his house at Hinchingbrooke; they mean to decorate the whole room. The time may come when the scene is bitter in his eyes, but he should paint it anyway. He should not give backword to the Italians – it is how they get their living.

  Within nine days of his arrest, they have put together enough matter against him to bring a bill of attainder into Parliament. They question him about religion, in order to add further charges. They ask about what he did in Calais, who he protected there. They delve further into their cache of forgeries, out of which they can adduce what they like. Norfolk says to him, ‘When Mr Wriothesley went through Antwerp on the king’s business, you gave him messages for heretics.’

  ‘I gave him a message for my daughter. My own blood.’

  Norfolk says, ‘You think that makes it better?’

  He says, once again, ‘Let me see the king.’

  Norfolk says, ‘Never.’

  He supposes that Henry, for an hour or two together, believes firmly in both his heresy and his treason. But surely he cannot sustain the delusion? For the rest of his hours, he does not care what is true. He cultivates his grudge and grievance. No councillor can ever placate him, assuage this sense of grievance, slake his thirst or satisfy his hunger.

  Before he has been a week in prison, Rafe brings him word of how the Emperor received the news. Charles seemed dumbfounded, dispatches say. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Cremuel? Are you sure? In the Tower? And by the king’s command?’

  One day the door opens; he expects Gardiner but it is Brandon again. Charles sits down, sighing heavy, on a little upholstered stool, so his knees rise absurdly under his chin. ‘Why doesn’t your lordship take this chair?’

  But Charles sits like a penitent, puffing and sighing and looking around the room. His eyes search the painted walls, those scenes of paradises, verdant hills and brooks: ‘Is she behind there? The other one?’

  ‘Not in her own person, my lord. She lies in the chapel, at rest. As for the picture, I painted her out.’

  ‘What? Personally?’

  ‘No, my lord. I had a professional do it.’

  He pictures himself, sneaking by night with a huge obliterating brush. ‘You’re a good fellow, Charles,’ he says. ‘I’d rob a house with you, if I had to.’

  Brandon grins behind his big beard. ‘Have you robbed many houses?’

  ‘In my wild days, you know.’

  ‘We all had those,’ Charles says.

  ‘I wouldn’t rob a house with the king. You’d say to him, “Stand there and whistle if the watch comes,” and at the first footfall he’d scramble off and leave you to it, your leg over the sill.’

  ‘I don’t think he’d go robbing, in all conscience,’ Charles says. ‘He’d be breaching his own peace, wouldn’t he? And who would he rob? He can distrain our goods if he likes, and pauperise us all.’ He rubs his forehead. ‘I’m glad to hear you make a jest, Crumb. Look here …’ He levers himself to the vertical. ‘Look here, and this is my advice. Confess you are a heretic. Claim you have been misled. Ask Harry to see you face to face and reason with you, to bring you back to true religion. He’d like that, wouldn’t he? You remember how he enjoyed himself, at the trial of that fellow Lambert? Sitting above the court, all arrayed in white?’

  ‘Lambert was burned,’ he says.

  Charles is deflated. ‘Well, that was my idea, and now I’ve delivered it, so I …’ He heads for the door, plunges back. ‘Your hand?’

  He gives it. Charles pummels his shoulder, as if they were watching a dog fight.

  When Brandon has gone he thinks, he is right, Henry would take pleasure in converting me. But there is a reason why Charles’s solution will not answer. His enemies will show (to their own satisfaction) that he denies the Eucharist, and no heretic of that sort can save himself, even by recantation. What condemns him is the first of those pernicious articles they passed through Parliament last year when he was sick. His Italian fever is killing him after all.

  The bill of attainder has its second reading on 29 June. Between the first reading of the bill and its second, between the second and the third, he is a dying man. When the bill passes, then by law he is dead. The only thing uncertain is by what process they will make him a corpse. If the king prefers to punish him for heresy, he will die by fire, perhaps beside Robert Barnes and his friends; if for treason, then likely enough he will go to Tyburn, to be cut up alive. Even the bugger Hungerford will get such grace as the headsman offers, but he, God knows. He dreams he is facing a door painted scarlet, or not painted but bathed in scarlet, and the wall is the same hue; the surface is wet, the floor, the wall, and the room behind the door is wet and scarlet too.

  It has stopped raining. Looking out from his windows in the queen’s lodging, he can see the summer dying back. He remembers the whole world a-swill, in those years before the cardinal came down. He remembers fetching Rafe to the house at Fenchurch Street, and how he dripped on the floor, and Lizzie unwrapped him from his layers. He thinks, she died before I had anything. I had Austin Friars, but it was a lawyer’s house. When I was the cardinal’s man she never saw me for weeks on end. I might as well have been a sailor on the sea. She stood at the head of the stairs, wearing her white cap. She said, ‘Let me know when you are coming home.’ I wrote my will, after she was dead, and what I had to leave to my son, in those days, was six hundred pounds and twelve silver spoons.

  On the day the bill of attainder passes, Stephen Gardiner comes back. He wraps his coat around himself as if he is chilly. ‘I have come to ask you about the king’s so-called marriage.’

  The turn of phrase is enough to make him understand what is required. ‘I will write it all down for you. From the beginning.’

  ‘Omit nothing,’ Gardiner says. ‘From your first negotiations with Cleves to the night of the supposed marriage. You must set forth all you heard of the lady’s pre-contract with Lorraine, and record faithfully what you know of the king’s dislike of and unwillingness to the marriage.’

  He raises an eyebrow. Gardiner says, ‘Lady Rochford and others will testify that there was no consummation. The doctors will confirm it. If she came here a maid, she leaves as one, as the king – entertaining doubts that the match was valid – refrained himself from carnal copulation.’

  He thinks, I could be like George Boleyn: I could set down such matter as would raise blisters on Henry’s face. But I have a son, and two grandsons, and a nephew, and my nephew has heirs. George had no children. He says, ‘Getting a new wife was always my task. It falls to you now, does it? I suppose it will be Norfolk’s niece? What has happened to the queen?’

  ‘The lady of Cleves has already left the court. The king has sent her to Richmond. He has promised to join her there. But of course, he will not. It was necessary to stop her womanish lamentation – or at least, to allow it to go on at a distance.’

  He thinks, she must have been frightened, poor soul. And no one to look to her welfare. ‘I suppose money will salve the smart.’

  ‘There will be a settlement. I will come to that. The annulment comes first. The king says, Cromwell knows more of the matter than any man, except my own self. You must write the truth on the damnation of your soul. You will be required to take an oath.’

  ‘Why would I refuse?’ he says. ‘I would also take an oath I am a true servant and that my faith is the catholic and universal faith, not varying from that professed by the king. It were strange if my word should hold good in the one matter, but not the other.’

  ‘You are a dying man,’ Gardiner says. ‘They are known not to lie. Do you want me to send Sadler, to help you write?’

 
He does not want Rafe to see him do this last act. He thinks, the annulment will annul me. ‘I know what is required,’ he says coldly. ‘Leave it with me, my lord bishop. Now kick yourself out.’

  He sits down. The facts marshal themselves in his mind, the phrases form themselves in order, but before he can write, he sheds a tear and thinks, I am in mourning for myself: with these papers, my usefulness gone. I could not do it again: the years of sleepless toil, the brute moral deformation, the axe-work. When Henry dies and goes to judgement, he must answer for me, as for all his servants: he must account for what he did to Cromwell. I never strove to replace him. All over England there are standing stones, petrified forms of men who hoped to rule: Stick stock stone, As King of England I be known. For their presumption they are condemned to stand for a thousand years, two thousand, in wind and rain; around them are smaller stones, the forms of the wretches who were their knights. Count them and – by a peculiar enchantment – you never get the same number twice. The destruction goes beyond counting. It goes beyond what the pen can record.

  His narrative is the work of many hours. Sometimes Christophe comes in and peers at him, and offers a dish of raspberries, or wafers, or comfits. But he is absorbed in his story: Rochester, the bull-baiting, the lady from Cleves at the casement; the king blustering and hot in his disguise as English gentleman. The play at Greenwich, where the Romans tottered and fell; the king abed, kneading his bride’s belly and breasts.

  Sometimes his mind drifts away, as it must: far from this room, beyond the city walls, across the fields and into the forest. The cover is dense, as in the years before trees were cut down for houses and ships, and all the creatures now extinct are alive again, for good or ill: the beaver in the stream, the wolf gaining on you with his long stride. When a man does not know which path to take he scatters crumbs from the loaf he carries in his hand, but the birds swoop behind him and eat them. He takes off his shirt and tears it into strips, and ties a strip to a branch at each fork in the road, but the ogres who live deep in the wood tread after him and steal the linen to bind their wounds: for ogres are always fighting. He labours on, and talking trees snigger about him, hiding their expressions of contempt behind their leaves.