The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel is the last book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy which was published in 2020 and this was a re-read for me as I had been waiting impatiently for years for its publication, unusually for me I bought it as soon as it hit the bookshops. At 882 pages it’s a tome and a half. I think that Mantel said that she was putting off the inevitable execution of Thomas Cromwell as she had become so close to him.

However there’s a lot to fit in from 1536 to 1540 – three of Henry VIII’s marriages, one annulment, unrest within the population due to many of them not wanting to give up their Roman Catholic saints and holidays, and wanting to cling on to the comfort of their beliefs, things get violent. I think that the book should probably have been edited to slim it down a bit, but that was never going to happen. Although I enjoyed this book I don’t think I loved it as much as I did at my first read of it, but that’s possibly because I had been anticipating it for years. You can read my original and more detailed blogpost here.

There is a mistake of sorts on page 561 when it’s written that Madame de Longueville (Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots) has landed at the town of Fife. In fact Fife is a county and it was the village of Crail in Fife that she sailed to after her proxy marriage to the Scottish king James V.