Over the first two books, Cromwell’s talents have a way of making him indispensable, first to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and then to Henry VIII. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be 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 world is run from Antwerp, from Florence … from Lisbon, where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. As Mantel puts it in one memorable passage from Wolf Hall: This Cromwell is a Renaissance man in every meaning of the term in his mind, we can detect the first stirrings of modernity. In this, he faces off against a series of upper-class twits who’ve fooled themselves into believing their privileges of birth actually mean something. Her Cromwell is the self-made son of an abusive drunken blacksmith, who uses his polymathic gifts to attain ever-greater political power, yes, but also to usher in a more meritocratic age. Most prior fictional treatments of Cromwell depict him as a conniving backstabber, but Mantel’s version is much more sympathetic.
The books tell the story of Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry VIII’s most trusted advisers. Thinking about jumping back into the Tudor pool? Here’s a refresher on everything you need to know before you do: Rejoice - the long-awaited conclusion to a best-selling series of popular fiction based on late-medieval British history is here! I am of course talking about The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to 2009’s Wolf Hall and 2012’s Bring Up the Bodies, which has finally arrived after an eight-year wait. Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall.
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