The EconomistFebruary 29th 2020 691A
fter morethan ten years, three books
and 2,000 pages, as well as two stage
plays and a television series (starring Mark
Rylance, pictured above), Hilary Mantel’s
monumental novelisation of the life of
Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief min-
ister for much of the 1530s, has reached its
conclusion. In hundreds of thousands of
minds, he has firmly displaced his distant
relative Oliver as the best-known Cromwell
in British history.
At the opening of “The Mirror & the
Light”, the final instalment in Ms Mantel’s
trilogy, Cromwell has reached the apogee
of his powers, having just witnessed the
dispatch on the scaffold of his frenemy
Anne Boleyn, the king’s second wife, along
with a claque of hoity-toity courtiers who
had disdained him as the jumped-up son of
a blacksmith. The book ends with Crom-
well himself kneeling before the axe. In be-
tween he labours unceasingly in the king’s
service, brokers an ill-starred fourth mar-
riage to Anne of Cleves, dissolves monas-
teries and sows discord between foreign
adversaries, all the while trying to mollify
Henry’s would-be successors, lest his head
be first on a spike when the king dies.
The stunning success of the novels is in
large part the result of Ms Mantel’s skill in
fashioning a voice and persona that, while
never anachronistic, make Cromwell seem
eerily contemporary. But then, the politics
of his rise and fall are liable to resonate in
almost any era: if his rival, Sir Thomas
More, was a man for all seasons, Cromwell
is a character for the ages.
Had Ms Mantel been writing in the early
1950s, Cromwell’s career might have been
seen primarily as a parable of freedom of
conscience and Stalinist repression. More
refuses to acknowledge the king’s suprem-
acy over the Church of England, and is be-
headed. Religious dissidents are flambéed
at the stake. In “Bring Up the Bodies”, the
second book in the series (published in
2012), Cromwell contorts his victims’
words to damn them like a remorseless se-
cret-police interrogator. “Construction can
be put on silence,” he tells one. “It will be.”
In the 1960s or 1970s his story mightabove all have seemed to be about meritoc-
racy, a tale of the up-and-coming sort seiz-
ing control from a complacent noble caste.
In the 21st century, it is both those things
and more. Brexiteers have sought to draw
parallels between their cause and Henry’s
break from the papacy, which features in
the novels. More fundamentally, Ms Man-
tel’s saga has chimed with modern neuro-
ses about the nature of government.
Geoffrey Elton, one of the leading histo-
rians of Ms Mantel’s period, argued that
Cromwell’s time in office marked the tran-
sition between the medieval model of gov-
ernment based in the king’s household,
and a professional bureaucracy with its
own institutional apparatus. The Crom-
well of the novels straddles both arrange-
ments. He suavely manages the monarch—
“One must anticipate his desires,” he ex-
plains in “Bring Up the Bodies”—while
attacking his awesome workload with Sta-
khanovite zeal. He personifies two related
features of modern politics: the return of
courts and courtiers, and a veneration of
professionalism that is in part a response
to those informal networks.The Tudor West Wing
Since the 1990s, in both Britain and Ameri-
ca, the influence of advisers to prime min-
isters and presidents has expanded at the
expense of cabinets, legislatures and civil
servants. Bill Clinton entrusted his (failed)
health-care reforms to his wife, and devel-
oped policy in all-day spitballs with his
staff. The situation was fictionalised, even
celebrated, in “The West Wing”, a televisionThomas Cromwell, special adviser
The bedchamber and the axe
The hero of Hilary Mantel’s masterful trilogy is an avatar for contemporary
anxieties about government
The Mirror & the Light.By Hilary Mantel.
Henry Holt; 784 pages; $30. Fourth
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