The world still moves at the command of shadowy men, bent over their quills and inkpots. Heretics are still burned, now for adhering too strictly to Catholic dogma as well as for straying too far from it.

The king is still the king, killing and marrying as he likes. Despite the upheavals, rebellions, and executions of the past decade, despite all his work and reforms, nothing essential seems to have changed at the moment of Cromwell’s execution. He may have been instrumental in bringing about one of the most significant events in English history, the schism from the Roman Catholic Church, but at a personal level this revolution has led him round in a circle to re-enact the downfalls of both his mentor Cardinal Wolsey and his enemy Sir Thomas More. And when there are no more words left to write – no more letters, accounts, transcripts, or pleas – he is sent to the block.Īt the end of this long narrative, Cromwell finally realises what the reader has always known: that he has been speeding towards his death all this while.

Cromwell is condemned to die not by a trial of his peers but by the pen a tactic that he himself has employed more than once. Having made the marriage, Cromwell’s memory and eye for detail are needed to unmake it, and before the last words of his account have dried on the page, Parliament will have drafted and debated the bill of attainder for his execution. Despite having fallen from King Henry’s favour, his days in the Tower of London are still spent in the king’s service, writing a detailed account of the negations he conducted for the hand of Anne of Cleaves. We are always dying – I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears they are all dying.Īt the close of the Mirror and the Light, Cromwell dies, if not at his desk, then at least not very far from it.

He recalls the poet’s words:īetween one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed towards death. Late in Wolf Hall, the first novel in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, a weary Cromwell briefly contemplates dying at his desk as the poet Petrarch did.

Book review the mirror and the light