It is testament to Mantel’s powers that Cromwell, who, we are reminded, has killed (directly and indirectly) many innocent people, has become something of a sympathetic character. The slipperiness of truth, for so long Thomas’s greatest weapon, has now become his foe. But it is this novel’s closing sequence that forms the trilogy’s most stunning achievement, as the full force of the state machinery Thomas has engineered is brought to bear against him and, as we always knew would happen, he goes to the executioner’s block. Here Cromwell finds himself constrained by an increasingly volatile reality: rebel armies are rising against the king, France and Spain are conspiring, and Henry is dissatisfied with Cromwell’s choice of Anne of Cleves as his new queen.
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies captured this too, of course, but it is felt more powerfully now because the victim of fake news and alternative facts is none other than Thomas Cromwell himself.
Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the Light, the third and final instalment in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy. Mantel calls him, turns out to have been simply waiting to be taken up and issued a soul.I t is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. But “sleek, plump and densely inaccessible” Thomas Cromwell, as Ms. His portrait by Hans Holbein might be summed up as a depiction of inscrutability, while his lowly origins caused the great men of his day to emphasize his nobody-ness.
Elton, Thomas Cromwell, as a person with feelings and private thoughts, has been a cipher from the start. Along the way we have been granted chilling glimpses into the mercurial mind of Cromwell’s master, Henry VIII, upon whose fluctuating desire, uneasy conscience and increasingly corpulent, ailing body the fate of the realm rests.Ī villain to Cobbett, a hero to hagiographer John Foxe, a legislative genius to historian G.R. Getting there, however, has been a lengthy meander through the consciousness of one of Britain’s greatest statesmen and legislators, a key player in the establishment of the Church of England and the creation of the modern state. Without turning a page, we have known the “plot”: who will rise, who will fall, who will die-and when. It has taken Hilary Mantel 11 years, three volumes and more than 1,700 pages to dispatch, at last, the man William Cobbett called the “bloody ruffian, THOMAS CROMWELL.” Starting with “Wolf Hall” (2009), whose title sounded the death knell for Anne Boleyn, a sense of inevitability and doom has pervaded the novels.
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