Hans Holbein finds the king easy to paint because “his face shines with the wonder of himself.” Nonetheless, his body is turning gross and feeble. On the throne for a quarter century by now, Henry is a very human Big Brother, not without shame but bathed in self-pity, and reaching new heights of grandiosity. Falls from grace are sudden and frequently fatal. Fantastic rumors and royal whim generate its weather.
Henry’s court is a little world of terror, more Orwellian than antique for all of Mantel’s splendid period ornamentation. Keep all channels open.” Past so inhabits present that Mantel includes the dead in the trilogy’s dramatis personae. “My master Wolsey taught me, try everything,” Cromwell says. Festooned with new titles and heaped with new properties, he is a widower “too useful to be sad,” at least for long, and a compulsive seeker of advantage who will always “glance around a room to note the exits.” He is not one of those men who “can make a tidy parcel of their past.” Amid all the marital and theological calamities unleashed by the king, Cromwell is ever agitated by childhood memories of his brutal blacksmith father his youthful days in Europe as a mercenary soldier and fixer and his later service to Cardinal Wolsey, the all-powerful Lord Chancellor who was finally brought low by Henry. “The Mirror and the Light,” the third and final book in a series that began with “Wolf Hall” in 2009, is another crowded Tudor panoply viewed entirely through the eyes of Cromwell, whose nature is as labyrinthine as the palace corridors he superintends. “They will find him armored, they will find him entrenched, they will find him stuck like a limpet to the future.” “Let them try to pull him down,” Mantel writes. Near the end of “Bring Up the Bodies,” the second novel in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, Anne Boleyn’s executioner picks up her head from the scaffold and “in a yard of linen he swaddles it, like a newborn.” Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII’s secretary, who orchestrated Boleyn’s demise, is left fearing that he may soon fall victim to his enemies’ manipulation of the king’s fluctuating affections. THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT By Hilary Mantel
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