Cromwell! Crommers. The Cromster. His Royal Cromulence. El Cromerino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing. We've met a couple of times before, of course.
Cromwell is very much The Man among those in the orbit of King Henry VIII as our story begins in May 1536. Much of this credit derives from his extricating the king from his first two marriages, to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn - indeed as the book opens Anne's blood is still dribbling around on top of the scaffold where she has just met her end at the hands of a French swordsman, and various flunkies are chasing her head around trying to put it in a bag.
The king has various reasons for wanting to be rid of troublesome wives: most obviously their inability to provide him with heirs, and specifically a male heir, but also his roving eye, tendency to boredom, inability to keep it in his codpiece and general sense that he's the bloody king and should be able to do what he likes. So part of his eventual desire to get rid of Anne Boleyn was her troublesome penchant for female babies (the future Queen Elizabeth I in particular), part of it his distaste for her outspoken feistiness - exciting and a little bit sexy in an illicit mistress, less so in a Queen where quiet demureness is more the thing - but also, more specifically, his fancy for the bashful gaze and shapely calf of young Jane Seymour, one of the current Queen's ladies-in-waiting.
So for the moment the king's marital turmoil is settled and other concerns take priority. One of them is the deterioration in Henry's physical state following his jousting accident in early 1536 - formerly an enviable athlete, unusually tall and imposing by 15th/16th-century standards, Henry's chronic leg injury makes him frustrated and irritable and, without his lavish eating and drinking habits being moderated by lots of hunting and jousting and general roister-doistering, he starts to put on weight. Not only that, there are rumours of unrest up in the wild and distant north of England. Mainly a protest against the Reformation by those still keen to do a bit of the old Catholicism, it soon becomes a general vehicle for lots of disparate and ill-focused grievances against both Henry and Cromwell, a man suspected of having an undue influence over the king. This is eventually put to rest by some flexing of military muscle and a few well-chosen beheadings, but it all occupies time and effort.
Better news is in the offing, though: Henry has managed to impregnate Jane, and she successfully delivers him a son, the future Edward VI. Worse news is in the offing pretty hot on the heels of this, though, as Jane suffers some post-birth complications and eventually dies a couple of weeks later.
So Henry is single again - not, for once, of his own volition. And so thoughts turn to another marriage. Not as simple as just swiping right on Tinder, though - there are complex political factors to be considered in choosing the right match. Make a marriage that cements a beneficial political alliance and everyone's happy - well, as long as the king is also happy, and the chosen lady stimulates the king's interest in the right ways, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Another factor in all this is that Mary, the king's daughter by Catherine of Aragon, briefly estranged but now (largely at Cromwell's instigation) back in Henry's good books, is of marriageable age.
Mary is a tough nut to crack in terms of finding a potential suitor she's prepared to give the time of day to, though, and the delay sparks some scurrilous rumours that Cromwell is trying to manoeuvre things so that he gets to marry her himself. Meanwhile a complex series of negotiations has resulted in the selection of Anne of Cleves, daughter of an influential German house that would be a valuable ally against France and the Holy Roman Empire, as a bride for Henry, and court artist Hans Holbein is dispatched to paint her portrait and deliver it to Henry.
This is where the wheels start to come off - Henry pronounces himself delighted with the portrait, Anne commences the long trek westwards to England, and when she arrives Henry has the delightful idea of visiting her in disguise, which goes about as well as you might expect. Basically upon Henry's ta-dah transformation from some wheezing middle-aged fat geezer disturbing her for no clear reason to her king and future husband, Anne fails to rearrange her face quite quickly enough to register her delight, and Henry, sensitive about his age and appearance, notices. Furthermore (possibly just as a self-justifying reaction, or maybe genuinely) Henry feels that the Holbein portrait was a bit flattering and that she is not perhaps All That in the looks department herself and despite a bit of unenthusiastic firkytoodling in the royal bedchamber he is unable or unwilling to hoist the royal standard, knight her with the royal sceptre and consummate the marriage.
Eventually an agreement is reached to annul the marriage, honour is seen to be satisfied all round, and Anne is packed off to a country house with a generous pension. Henry's confidence in Cromwell's infallible judgment has taken a knock though, and when an ill-timed bout of illness lays Cromewll low at home for an extended period, those keen to see Cromwell ousted get to work in the king's ear: those who have always resented a low-born type rising to such an exalted role, those who want his job(s) and titles for themselves, and those with something to gain by encouraging the king's newest fancy: a likely-looking teenage strumpet by the name of Catherine Howard.
Once the king's mood has turned against you, things move fast, and Cromwell soon finds himself carted off to the Tower to face a host of trumped-up charges of treason and heresy. Cromwell's letters to the king go unanswered (and probably unread, and quite possibly undelivered) but the king's residual regard for him does at least extend to allowing him a reasonably dignified death by the executioner's axe instead of by being publicly burned or disembowelled. And so it is that on July 28th 1540 Cromwell ascends the steps to meet his maker, and his story ends.
And with Cromwell's fairly abrupt end the three-novel series that started with Wolf Hall and continued with Bring Up The Bodies also ends. These were hardly slim pamphlets at 650 and 482 pages respectively, but The Mirror And The Light comfortably outdoes them at a mighty 875 pages. That said, it covers a considerably greater period of time than Bring Up The Bodies - just over four years compared with about nine months (Wolf Hall covered about six years). "Historical fiction", to the extent that it exists as a definable genre, isn't really my thing, but all three novels in this series are tremendously enjoyable, largely down to the fascination of Cromwell as a central character, and also of Mantel's perfect judgment of tone - no-one's conversing in off-puttingly flowery language, but at the same time no-one's doing anything jarringly out-of-place like referring to Anne of Cleves as well mingin' innit. That said, The Mirror And The Light is quite an intimidatingly chunky door-stop of a book and weighs in as the third-longest book on this list after Infinite Jest and Until I Find You. Despite various reviewers' assumption that it would be a shoo-in for the Booker Prize (as its two predecessors had been) it only made the longlist in 2020 (Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain won that year).
Anyway, I daresay this kind of stuff isn't for everybody, and you could certainly say that some sections are quite slow and feature a wide cast of characters that it's sometimes hard to keep track of, and there aren't any car chases, but in general I would heartily recommend having a crack at the entire series. It was dramatised for TV in 2024, with Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis reprising their roles as Cromwell and Henry VIII respectively from the earlier series (which mashed together the first two books).
Incidentally, if you're wondering, as I was, what (if any) the relationship was between Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell, the answer is that Thomas Cromwell's nephew Richard, who features as a peripheral character in these books, was Oliver Cromwell's great-grandfather, which I think makes Thomas Oliver's great-great-great-uncle.
