A few years ago, I read Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall. I was captivated both by Mantel’s superb writing and her complex protagonist: Thomas Cromwell. In Mantel’s historically grounded telling, Cromwell is the son of a brutal blacksmith. Improbably, he rises to become a top advisor to England’s King Henry VIII – he of the many ill-fated wives. I liked Mantel’s sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (another Booker Prize!), even more.  Both novels made me feel immersed in the texture of life of 16th-century England – its food, fabrics, fractious politics, and fierce religious conflicts. Mantel accomplishes much of that immersion through dialog: Cromwell talking with his wife and his daughters (all painfully lost in a plague), with Cardinal Wolsey (his political mentor), with the king and his queens, with allies and enemies, diplomats and courtiers,  clergymen and jailers, boatmen and cooks. This summer I eagerly read The Mirror and the Light (henceforth TMTL), the final novel in Mantel’s trilogy. TMTL is much longer than its predecessors (784 pages), but I found it just as compelling and ultimately more moving, perhaps because Mantel’s magic had made me a Thomas Cromwell fan, rooting for him in his Machiavellian efforts to guide England toward better governance. 

The first two novels, focusing on the years 1529-1536, lead the reader through Cromwell’s rise, gradually becoming the vain, impulsive king’s indispensable adviser and chief executive officer – the equivalent of his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Religious Matters, and  Parliamentary Relations, plus his divorce lawyer and his marriage counselor. In TMTL (1536-1540), Cromwell  accumulates even more responsibilities, more titles (Lord Cromwell and Earl of Essex), more wealth and more jealous enemies. In TMTL also Mantel takes us more deeply into Cromwell’s ruminations, memories, dreams, and moral doubts. She provides glimpses of her tough-minded hero’s vulnerabilities -- but with such subtlety that I (like Cromwell) didn’t perceive their significance until his  sudden and fatal fall from King Henry’s graces. The book’s extraordinary final passages, on Cromwell’s last days and thoughts, left me feeling devastated  because Mantel had made Cromwell so real, so admirable, that his death felt like a tragedy.

TMTL’s dramatic intensity wells up from the epic political and religious conflicts through which Cromwell sought to steer the English ship of state.  When Henry VIII inherited the crown in 1509, the gruesome War of the Roses (1455-1485), when feudal dukes and earls and their families conducted lethal battles to claim the kingship, was still a recent memory. The losers remained sore losers. Throughout Henry’s reign, therefore, the political fate of the nation, its hopes for peaceable transfers of power, depended on having a predictable line of royal succession, in short, on the king having a healthy legitimate oldest son. As Wolf Hall opens, Henry still has not been successful in that regard. Thus all three novels’ portray a strange (to us) but deadly serious kind of politics.  Court gossip and Cromwell’s work revolve around what’s happening in the royal bedchamber, the level of the king’s libido, and the king’s periodic desire for a new queen who (a) he finds attractive, (b) is likely to be fecund, and (c) whose family, once allied with the king, will bolster the monarchy’s political security. Working that tricky terrain, Cromwell reads King Henry’s moods, gathers intelligence from the current queen’s ladies in waiting. He figures out how to “legally” dispose of queens who disappoint. He arranges the disposal. And he tries to mollify or sideline powerful English nobles whose candidates for the successor queen are demoted to also-rans. 

The last-mentioned challenge is a big one. The English monarchy still depends for income and military force on the feudal nobility. Those nobles and their families resent and resist the king’s desire for centralized power and autonomy – a desire that Cromwell adeptly works to fulfill. Throughout the trilogy, Cromwell’s goal is to move the monarchy onto firmer political and financial footing, greater capacity to resist foreign interference, a more professional style of central governance, and less dependence on the still potent feudal nobles. But that goal and the issue of royal succession both are complicated by their intersection with England’s intense religious conflict – a conflict triggered by the Protestant Revolution’s assault on the centuries-old dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

InWolf Hall, King Henry is eager to divorce his first queen, Katherine Aragon. In 20 years of marriage, she has given birth to only one child who lived, a daughter, Mary.  The king is hot for the young, attractive Anne Boleyn. But Katherine is the Catholic daughter of Spain’s Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand; a divorce would alienate the powerful current Spanish Emperor.  The Pope will not consent to a divorce or to Henry’s subsequent request for an annulment. Moreover, England is still a Catholic country, as it has been for centuries. Throughout Wolf Hall, the king’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, is rounding up “heretics” suspected of being or sympathizing with Protestants, torturing them for confessions, and burning them at the stake. 

When Cromwell was younger, he spent some years in Protestant-leaning Antwerp. Mantel portrays him as privately repelled by much of Catholicism. He says to More, “Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” He deplores the landed wealth and corruption of England’s monasteries, and he supports the secret translation of the Bible into English. Once Cromwell becomes King Henry’s trusted agent, he wields his lawyerly and political skills to push through Parliament a law that cuts England’s financial obligations to the Pope and makes the king head of the church in England. The king then can decree his own divorce and marry Anne Boleyn. Cromwell then embarks on a sustained campaign of abolishing monasteries, transferring their properties and their revenues to the monarchy, thus reducing its dependence on the old feudal nobles. According to another Cromwellian statute, refusal to sign an oath acknowledging the king (not the Pope), head of the church was both heresy and treason, with fatal consequences for the unyielding Thomas More. 

Those changes, however, do not end England’s religious schism, or wholly subdue some of the feudal noble families.  In TMTL, an armed peasant rebellion erupts in England’s eastern and northern regions. The “pilgrims” protest the break with Rome, the dismantling of statues of Catholic saints, and the dissolution of the monasteries. They demand the dismissal of Cromwell, the chief dismantler and dissolver. Some pro-Catholic noble families back the rebellion, hoping it would motivate the Spanish Emperor to invade England and displace King Henry. The monarchy has no army to put down the rebellion, it is quashed only after Cromwell mobilizes feudal lords and their private armies.   

Cromwell persuades King Henry to allow the publication of the Bible in English – a key Protestant desire.  Cromwell himself pays for the printing and arranges for a copy to be placed in every parish church. But King Henry is not a Protestant; he accepts a Parliamentary law, passed when Cromwell was sick and absent, that preserves Catholic rituals in the Church of England. Cromwell’s downfall at the end of the novel comes by the hand of pro-Catholic nobles and clergymen who resent the upstart, power-grabbing commoner who has usurped their influence on England’s governance and religion.

Thomas Cromwell would have been disappointed, although probably not surprised, to learn that it would be another 150 years before England would have a consolidated, well-financed, religiously pluralistic monarchy. In 1553, King Henry’s and Katherine’s Catholic daughter Mary became Queen – the infamous “Bloody Mary” in whose five-year tenure hundreds of Protestant “heretics” were burned at the stake. The long reign of Mary’s successor – her half-sister Queen Elizabeth I, a Protestant -- was punctuated by (a) an unsuccessful armed rebellion led by her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots; (b) a Papal bull that declared Elizabeth a heretic and excommunicated not only her but any English Catholic who obeyed her orders; (c) a stream of undercover Catholic missionary priests dispatched from the Continent; (d) repeated Catholic conspiracies that threatened the life of the queen,  whose countervailing spy system produced censorship and scores of executions.  In the 1640s,  a “Puritan Revolution” led to civil war, the execution of King Charles I, and a dictatorial “protectorate” (1653-1658) headed by Oliver Cromwell (a descendant of Thomas’s sister and nephew). 

The monarchy, once restored, soon was reshaped by the Glorious Revolution (1689), which established  Parliamentary supremacy, enacted a Bill of Rights and statutes that guaranteed freedom of worship, and created the Bank or England, an autonomous central bank that stabilized governmental finance. Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, I am pretty sure, would have approved.