82 APRIL 2020
Mantel stopped writing and asked herself, “Where am
I?” The answer, of course, is behind Cromwell’s eyes,
which lie inches from the ground. “At that point,” she
said, “all the decisions about the book were made, about
how to tell the story.”
The one-person perspective gives the books their
grip, because Cromwell’s charisma is never allowed to
dissipate. At the same time, Mantel has plenty of room
for invention. The Cromwell record has large holes
in it, probably because as soon as he got into trouble,
his supporters burned or carted away as many papers
as they could. Mantel works hard to root her imagi-
nation in the material and psychological realities of
the period. “I’m very concerned about not pretending
they’re like us,” she told The Paris Review. “That’s the
whole fascination —they’re just not. It’s the gap that’s
so interesting.”
And yet, Cromwell is like us. At least, it feels that
way. His angle of vision on his late-medieval world is
oddly familiar, even if his Tudor mores are alien. We
can identify. He’s an early-modern globalist, Homo
economicus. He understands that the age of the brave
and noble knight is being brought to an end by capi-
talism. In Wolf Hall, the profligate Harry Percy, Earl
of Northumberland, informs Cromwell that he,
Percy, is immune from financial ruin and loss of title
by “ancient rights,” and because “bankers have no
armies.” Cromwell muses,
How can he explain to him? The world is not run
from where he thinks ... Not from castle walls, but
from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but
by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click
of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the
pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for
the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.The paradox of Mantel’s historical trilogy is that
Cromwell’s anachronisms strengthen his credibility
as a character. He has a more highly developed class-
consciousness than a man of his era ought to have. But
we are willing to suspend disbelief, because his uncanny
powers of observation have been so well established
that he transcends his world, immersed in it as he is.
It would be going too far to call Cromwell a femi-
nist, but he does have a rare ability to see past kings to
queens—to their miserable lot and uncredited impor-
tance. In The Mirror & the Light, a diplomat advises
Cromwell not to “pull the women into it.” “The women
are already in it,” he replies. “It’s all about women. What
else is it about?” In 2013, Mantel published an essay
in the London Review of Books titled “Royal Bodies,”
which begins with Kate Middleton (the Duchess of
Cambridge), then moves on to the grim existence of
princesses and queens, especially in the Tudor era.
“Women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities,
their animal nature, are central to the story,” Mantel
wrote. Like his author, Cromwell understands that the
royal enterprise rests on women’s backs, their opened
legs, their wombs.
Mantel doesn’t use Cromwell’s insights about
women to preach, however. On the contrary: His
empathy contributes to his undoing. Over 50 and wid-
owed, Cromwell is lonelier than he realizes, and lack
of self-knowledge is perilous for a man in his position.
Acting out of pity, or so he tells himself, as well as an
oath to her mother and the desire to restrain his “can-
nibal king,” he steps in to help the Lady Mary, Henry’s
spurned first daughter, who has enraged the king and
risks execution. The intensity of his efforts gives rise
to rumors that he presumes to woo her, which could
arouse the king’s wrath against him. But he ignores
warnings, and his enemies will make use of a friendship
that does have undertones of deeper feeling.
More personally devastating evidence of Crom-
well’s emotional purblindness comes to light when he
arranges a match between his son, Gregory, and Bess,
Queen Jane’s sister. During negotiations with Bess’s
brother, Cromwell somehow forgets to say which
Cromwell is getting engaged, father or son. Mantel has
already suggested that Thomas Cromwell is attracted
to Bess, who is witty and perceptive. Eventually the
comedy of errors sorts itself out, but at the wedding,
Cromwell’s mild-mannered son sharply requests that
his father stay away from his wife.
It was a mistake, Cromwell protests. Then he prom-
ises to avoid Bess. “I am a man of my word,” he adds.
“So many words,” Gregory says.So many words and oaths and deeds that when folk
read of them in time to come they will hardly believe
such a man as Lord Cromwell walked the earth. You do
everything. You have everything. You are everything.
So I beg you, grant me an inch of your broad earth,
Father, and leave my wife to me.Cromwell is stunned. What should he make of it, “that
a son can think evil of his father, as if he is a stranger
and you cannot tell what he might do”?Our problem, as readers, is what to make of
Cromwell’s lapses. Does he know what he’s doing? Does
he know why? Or does he know and not know, like an
analysand in a state of disavowal? A self so divided gives
Cromwell a depth at once Shakespearean and modern-
ist. He could be Hamlet, or the title charac ter of one of
Freud’s case studies. The hero of Wolf Hall and Bring
Up the Bodies was a man of action. “I think it was
Faulkner who says, Write down what they say and write
down what they do,” Mantel said in The Paris ReviewTHE
MIRROR
&
THE LIGHTHilary MantelHENRY HOLTCulture & Critics