The Economist 29Feb2020

TheEconomistFebruary 29th 2020 67

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ftermorethantenyears,threebooks
and2,000pages,aswellastwostage
playsanda televisionseries(starringMark
Rylance,picturedabove),HilaryMantel’s
monumental novelisation of the life of
ThomasCromwell,HenryVIII’schiefmin-
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.

Thestunningsuccessofthenovelsisin

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 might

aboveallhaveseemedtobeabout meritoc-

racy,a taleoftheup-and-coming sort seiz-

ingcontrolfroma complacentnoble caste.

Inthe21stcentury,itisboththose things

andmore.Brexiteershavesought to draw

parallelsbetweentheircauseand Henry’s

breakfromthepapacy,whichfeatures in

thenovels.Morefundamentally, Ms Man-

tel’ssagahaschimedwithmodern neuro-

sesaboutthenatureofgovernment.

GeoffreyElton,oneoftheleading histo-

riansofMsMantel’speriod,argued that

Cromwell’stimeinofficemarked the tran-

sitionbetweenthemedievalmodel of gov-

ernmentbasedintheking’s household,

and aprofessional 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 television

ThomasCromwell,specialadviser

Thebedchamberandtheaxe

TheheroofHilaryMantel’smasterfultrilogyisanavatarforcontemporary
anxietiesaboutgovernment

The Mirror & the Light.By Hilary Mantel.

Henry Holt; 784 pages; $30. Fourth

Estate; £25

Books & arts

68 Ugandanphotography

69 AbrahamLincoln’soratory

70 Johnson: The bilingual dividend

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