Tag Archives: Thomas Cromwell

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

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The Mirror and the Light cover

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.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

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Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel was a re-read for me, I originally read it back in 2012, you can read my thoughts on it then here.

I enjoyed the book just as much this time around. Again I was amazed at the behaviour of Anne Boleyn, not that I think she was guilty as charged, but that she was so sure of herself where Henry was concerned and had arguments with him, and threw tantrums. I read the love letters between the two of them, which you can read on Project Gutenberg here. Considering that she strung him along for seven years it’s no wonder Henry was more than a wee bit disgruntled.

I don’t think I noticed at my first reading of it that there were a few mentions of Cromwell’s father Walter going out of his way to help his son out of difficulties, but he had kept it secret from Cromwell, so he didn’t discover his father’s kindness to him until he was an adult and well on his way in his career. Cromwell had hated his father, with good reason as he was abusive and brutal, especially when drunk. But Cromwell’s harsh upbringing helped form the man he became.

I couldn’t help thinking about the Johnny Cash song – A Boy Named Sue.

Another thing that struck me was the number of men called Thomas who were around the Tudor court of that time. It’s not a very common name nowadays, Thomas seems to have been like the ‘John’ of the early 20th century. There are almost no Johns nowadays, but plenty of Jacks.

So why were so many men named Thomas in Tudor times? I can only think that they might have been named after Thomas Beckett. As biblical names go Thomas isn’t a great one to choose as the Thomas in that was ‘doubting.’ It’s a mystery to me, do any of you have any thoughts on the matter? For some reason names have always interested me.

If you’re interested you can read Jack’s thoughts on Bring Up the Bodies here. I’m now reading The Mirror and the Light.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – a re-read

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I decided to read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall again, I rarely re-read books but in my mind this is a book that I remembered loving, imagine my surprise when I looked back on my 2012 thoughts on it and discovered I wasn’t that enthralled with it. You can see what I thought of Wolf Hall here. I suspect that when I watched the TV series with all the sumptuous costumes, settings and good acting I was enamoured.

Anyway, this time around I did really enjoy it. As it happens I discovered that late at night on TV Wolf Hall was being shown again, so I ended up watching it at the same time I was reading the book and realised that all of the dialogue is exactly as it was in the book.

Wolf Hall begins in 1500 and ends in 1535, but does slip back to the 1520s for a few chapters early on. It was definitely interesting times. I very much doubt that a neglected and abused child in the 20th or 21st century could have risen to the heights that Thomas Cromwell did, which is quite depressing really. Cromwell was definitely a flawed human being (which of us isn’t?!) but especially within his family and personal life, he comes across as being a good guy with really likeable traits.

You can read Jack’s thoughts on the book here.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

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I finished The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel this afternoon, so that took me eight days to read the 882 pages, I could have been faster, but I savoured every word. This last book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy was well worth waiting for, but I can hardly believe that it has been eight years since Bring Up the Bodies was published. I don’t go in for much in the way of re-reading but I intend to read the whole trilogy again at some point in the future.

If you’re at all interested in the history of the Tudors then you obviously know how this story ends, but despite that 874 pages before Cromwell’s execution are still a riveting read and from about half-way through I slowed down my reading, not wanting the book to finish and at the end I felt quite bereft, knowing that I was going to miss being in Cromwell’s company.

Well, none of us is perfect and he had a lot of flaws, but given the circumstances he could have been an awful lot worse than he was and in the end it was his lack of brutality and cruelty to others at Henry’s court that brought his downfall.

Cromwell had always been able to see that given Henry’s nature the possibility of swiftly falling out of the king’s favour was almost inevitable, he could have sailed to Italy or some other European country with some of his wealth, but he left it too late as he loved being at the centre of power.

Throughout the book Cromwell thinks back to scenes in his life from his childhood on, replaying the abuses that he had to put up with from his blacksmith father Walter, and his life in Italy as a young man, the loss of his wife and daughters and before that the loss of his ‘Anselma’, for me this had the effect of a man drowning and seeing his past life playing out in front of him. He could clearly see where he had gone wrong, what he should have done differently in his incredible career but at the time he didn’t think he could do anything different. In reality though he knew that if Henry wanted rid of someone it was going to happen, there was no getting away from it.

I was really glad that Hilary Mantel wrote three and a half pages of author’s notes explaining what had happened to many of the other characters in the book, as it saved me from having to look them all up. She explained that she had been given encouragement from many historians, academics, curators and actors over the years which had included many distinguished names but had decided not to compile a list of acknowledgments. She thought that it would be like a vulgar exercise in name-dropping. I think that’s a bit of a shame as I imagine that if I had been one of those people I would have been expecting such an acknowledgement, and as a reader I would have been interested to know who had contributed help over the years.

Anyway, I suspect that this one will also win the Booker, it’s a great read.