‘The Mirror and the Light’ is a triumphant end to her trilogy that chronicles the life of the blacksmith’s boy who became the king’s aide
Cromwell was “Put an edge on it” when he was a boy in Putney, the son of a blacksmith; “Ercole”, and later “Tomasso”, when he worked for the Frescobaldi banking house in Italy. He was “Cremuel” when he was the confidante of Anne Boleyn, concubine, queen and, finally, decapitee. He is “Crumb” to his household and friends, including King Henry VIII.
The intrigues of the Tudor Court being what they are, these categories are malleable. Thomas Cromwell is a man for whom the portmanteau “frenemy” could have been coined. ended — with the beheading of Anne Boleyn. Cromwell is high in Henry’s esteem: over the course of the previous novels, he has seen off the king’s first two wives ; facilitated his acquisition of a third, Jane Seymour ; and conducted much other state and church business besides.
All narrators are unreliable, even Thomas Cromwell. One of the several accusations levelled against him as he sits in the Tower is that he had designs to marry Lady Mary, the king’s first daughter . Cromwell denies this; it is another trumped-up charge. Cromwell may have many frenemies, but he keeps his accounts. He has the measure of each of them, or so he thinks. A chink in his armour is spied early in the novel when, in one of those invented incidents that is the prerogative of a historical novelist, he meets Dorothea Clancey, the illegitimate daughter of his erstwhile master, Cardinal Wolsey, whom he has not seen since her childhood.
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