Cromwell and Mantel; hand in hand
Hilary Mantel is Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII and all of his wives and everyone else in her extraordinary Tudor trilogy.
So here we are. It’s May 1536 in London and here is Anne Boleyn, kneeling down to meet her end. The sword, wielded by an executioner from Calais, its blade inscribed with a prayer.
This cutting through of life, between one heartbeat and the next. Anne Boleyn, alive, then not. She is exsanguinated, her body stowed in an arrow chest for want of a coffin, her bald head tucked in by her feet. A rush to the day’s end, and Thomas Cromwell raises a glass with Henry VIII’s Clerk of the Signet, Mr Wriothesley. Cromwell smiles, says, ‘‘Drink my health”.
‘‘There are no endings,’’ Hilary Mantel wrote here, at the end of Bring Up the Bodies (2012), the second volume of her telling of Cromwell.
And we left him there, glass raised, Anne Boleyn put out and Jane Seymour coming in. Eight years ago now in our world, and a matter of seconds in his.
Now, Mantel’s next, third, last excursion with Cromwell begins. It’s May 1536 and here is Anne Boleyn, in the instant her head is severed from her body, on the first page of The Mirror and the Light.
The sword, the prayer, the blood – but there is more now about her women, how they support her, how they move themselves, how they hold their skirts away from that seeping rush of red. We have stepped back into this story, and we move through this day – a little more shape, a little more conversation, a different suite of observations – towards the same point.
Cromwell and Wriothesley share wine. ‘‘Drink my health,’’ says Cromwell – but he commands himself this time; commands his own reflection in the window onto night.
And the story rolls forward.
You know the way memory works, the way it ducks and weaves, skates over and embellishes. An order — or a cycle —– may be apprehended or imposed for want of any explanatory shape. Moments held and moments rejected.
A man stands in evening light with the brightness of a handful of flowers. A scruffy boy darts through mucky Putney streets. A secretary plans his regent’s summer: ‘‘Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall’’, as it went in Mantel’s first volume, Wolf Hall (2009). A king thinks about taking a wife.
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In Show Your Workings, the penultimate chapter of her 2003 memoir, Giving up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel tells us the following things.
At the first university she attended, reading law, her tutors imagined for her a future exploring questions such as ‘‘how do we delimit authority, where do the powers of the state begin and end?’’. At the second, she ‘‘got into trouble by claiming mischievously that jurisprudence was all an elaborate bluff and that legal language was cognate with magic’’.
She was once described as ‘‘one of those quiet invaluable people in the back room, unseen, industrious, unsung – a mind for detail’’. She thought ‘‘the whole of a Catholic life is lived in the shadow of the happy death – as if your life were to be enacted through a silvered, speckled mirror, ancient and flattering’’.
When you were a child you had to create yourself from whatever was to hand. You had to construct yourself and make yourself into a person … Much of what happened to you, in your early life, was constructed inside your head.
All these things make me think of Thomas Cromwell — I mean Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell — and to be honest, I haven’t stopped thinking about him since I first met him in Wolf Hall.
It’s not that I think of Mantel as Cromwell. I think of her as a 67-year-old woman, very much alive, with large and brilliant eyes. Cromwell is solid, craggy, jowly, fierce — and dead 480 years.
Except of course Mantel is Cromwell. She is Henry VIII too, trying to do the one thing a king is supposed to do and produce a string of healthy babies and reliable male heirs – and trying to profess love and make music and proffer jewels and arrange accords.
She is Henry’s first, second, third and fourth wives, his two daughters, Mary and the teethingly squawling infant Elizabeth, his sons Richmond (illegitimate, deceased) and Edward (legitimate, short-lived). She is every character in every page of these three mighty books, inasmuch as she has breathed life – whoever’s life – into them.
I believe in them ferociously: visiting London after Bring Up the Bodies had been published, I went to see the Hans Holbein portrait in the National Portrait Gallery there. But I stood before Cromwell with my head angled so that I would not see the fixed and certain end date of his life. As if this could change what might happen to him, not in history, but in imagination, in the book I knew Mantel was working on about him – for me – at that time.
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With Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies Mantel became the first author to win the Booker Prize for back-to-back books. There are highly successful stage and television adaptations of both, and sales of The Mirror and the Light ran at one every 2.7 seconds in the week of release – 95,000 copies in the UK in just three days.
That ‘‘quiet’’, ‘‘unsung’’ person is well and truly in the spotlight, using her ‘‘mind for detail’’ to recreate the complexity of Cromwell’s life.
In 2014, Mantel delivered the BBC4 Reith lectures, describing
the artist’s work of turning history inside out and telling us what’s under the skin. Despite what Marx said, I don’t believe history ever repeats itself, either as tragedy or farce. I think it’s a live show and you get one chance. Blink and you miss it. Only through art can you live it again.
If we witness strange dances between truth and lies, alternative facts and fiction, fakes and imaginings these days, then perhaps every word in Mantel’s trilogy is political in the way of Cromwell himself. He is all means to an end, and for an outcome.
They creep forward, character and author, hand in hand, bit by bit, towards a conclusion that is inevitable, inexorable; that one fixed point. Perhaps it felt that way to Cromwell and his contemporaries as well.
What’s seductive and unnerving in The Mirror and the Light is the way Cromwell’s own gaze, his apprehension, shifts. We are as close to him as we have ever been, but as this last instalment unfolds, we begin to sense, uneasily, that he can’t see in all directions anymore; he cannot know everything that’s afoot.
Somehow, somewhere, something has shifted, damaging or damning him. He is as busy as ever – ambassadors, dispersals, legislation framed, and a swath of England’s beliefs and codes remade. He is Lord Great Chancellor; Earl of Essex.
But more slivers of his own past flash before him. Perhaps they distract him from the present moment, from the schemes, inquiries and revenges that he has in play. He returns to the first time he pulled a knife on someone; the dotpoints of a summer’s evening in a pleasant garden; an ethereal moment in Venice; one winter in the beauty of new snow.
He plans Henry’s next summer: this time, it’s ‘‘mid-August. Five days. Wolf Hall’’. But we know there’s no chance of a cycle, a safe loop of repetition.
Jane Seymour, who drew Henry to that place the first time and from there towards the instant of Anne Boleyn’s beheading, is dead, and the king moves towards marriage in the next match Cromwell has helped to bring about.
So much has changed.
It’s a glimpse of movement in his peripheral vision that alerts Cromwell that his own last act is now in play. Exhausted by 10 years with his king, he cannot hold all of his world’s material inside his head; tendrils have slipped out of control to weave their own versions of him.
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‘‘So now get up.’’ The first line in Wolf Hall and that’s what his father, Walter, the battering Putney blacksmith, always told him. Walter, whose ghost – with so many other ghosts – stalks Cromwell. The second time we enter the day of Anne Boleyn’s beheading, ahead of that same toast with Wriothesley, the story also holds a cat who’s being rescued from a tree: a small point, domestic.
And it would be exhausting, year after year, recrafting a nation’s space through the mighty mechanisms of treasury and law and threat and religion and royal wives, crunching rosemary to remember, or speculate on, the whereabouts of everybody’s secrets, their dead bodies, their dirty drawers – even if that’s only a little magic for effect.
I think of Mantel’s Cromwell and I think of power, of hubris, but of kindness, something generous as well. Or is that just what he, and she, have determined I should think in this great triumph of a tale?
These books build into one great story of ambition and malleability, opportunity and revenge. Mantel shows us her Cromwell and we inhabit him; but there are as many other versions of him in play as there are those who crossed his path, and they can fight for precedence.
And all this, between one heartbeat and the next – a whole life, or at least one telling of it.
To try to catch the dazzle of this multiplicity, this richness, is to try to catch the extraordinary thing of being human, of the passage through as well as the record of life lived.
These books tell big stories of new ideas made natural, normal, everyday – for better or for worse – and of what this changed, not just five centuries ago, but still now. Thomas Cromwell said that things could be different, and made them so. We can’t all join a king’s retinue these days, but we can all insist on that potential, on that possibility.
Ashley Hay is a novelist, essayist and editor of Griffith Review.
The Mirror and the Light