![]() ![]() ![]() His gilded hair fades his ardent eye, so fatally married to princely ambition and a malleable faith, does not.Īnd in every corner, at every table: the inevitable Cromwell, whose consciousness the reader inhabits – the King’s right hand, and his right foot also. So the reader returns to the Tudor court, and the novel’s immediate pleasure is that of arriving at a familiar place and greeting familiar faces: there’s that sap Mark Smeaton fiddling with his lute and would you look at little Jane Seymour, with her small white hands! Here’s Stephen Gardiner, going out as he is coming in – cunning as vipers, slippery as eels here too are the Reformers Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, already with the faintest whiff of burning martyr rising from the folds of their coats. Cromwell, whose machinations did much to bring about the severance of head from body, queen from king and England from Rome, remembers to thank the executioner: “It is important to reward good service with encouragement, as well as a purse.” The Mirror and the Light, which concludes Hilary Mantel’s majestic Wolf Hall trilogy, begins as the second novel, Bring Up the Bodies, ends: with Anne Boleyn’s sleek black head on the block. ![]() Thomas Cromwell – son of a Putney blacksmith brawler, fixer and merchant a man whose opinions on apple cultivation are as trenchant as those on the English Bible – is in the ascendant. ![]()
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