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| Cromwell by Holbein. Cromwell thought it made him look like a murderer. His son agreed. |
The second of Mantel's trilogy ends with the decapitation of the second one, Anne Boleyn. Even though we know for a historical fact that's it's going to end badly for Anne, Mantel takes us on a journey through the court of 16th century England so magnificently that it still comes as a shock.
The harrowing account of that execution encapsulates everything that is brilliant about her books. Anne's mad terror and hope of a last-minute reprieve; the gambling of ordinary, baying Londoners at the scaffold; the queasiness of the younger courtiers at the horror of the beheading; the cold politics at the heart of the murder; the bundling-up of the severed head by Anne's ladies-in-waiting; even the price paid by the absent Henry to hire a suave French swordsman to carry out the execution so Anne would be spared an English axe - over twenty-three pounds.
So it is that Mantel breathes vivid life into dark brown National Gallery portraits and fleshes out names on dense royal family trees. She provides the missing thoughts, feelings and emotions of long-dead, long-nosed dukes and duchesses, of servants, cooks and innkeepers.
Most brilliantly of all she turns the king's right hand man Thomas Cromwell into a living, scheming smooth-talker who would be as at home on the news channels and social media of today as he was in the candle-lit court of Henry VIII.
She does it all using only the language of the time. No King James Bible and no Shakespeare to borrow words and phrases from. But it never feels archaic. Its present-tense prose, its contant use of "he" to refer to Cromwell gives it an intimate urgency, and it's littered with aphorisms that are as relevant today as in 1536:
"Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters."
"But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys."
I stopped history lessons aged 14. In my hopeless, now-shutdown school the choice was history or geography O-level. You couldn't learn about kings and grykes. It was one or the other. I opted for the limestone pavements.
So I only knew of Cromwell through his role in the execution of half-remembered saints in the film version of Thomas Bolt's A Man For All Seasons (can you believe that won six Oscars in 1966?). Thanks to Mantel, I now know him better than any historical figure I can think of. Not only that, I like him, empathise with him, understand him and want him to get the better of the fops and power-hungry conspirators who surround Henry and his first and future wives.
I was on his side from the opening page of the first book, when he's getting a right old kicking from his beer-making blacksmith dad in Putney. I willed him on as he fled to Europe and befriended some Belgian cloth traders at the start of an educational European odyssey that took him back to England and is gradually revealed over the rest of the books.
He becomes the trusted right-hand man of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a grandiose Stephen Fry-figure who falls foul of the king and dies a confused and broken man. His death and disgrace should have been the end of Cromwell. Instead it was the making of him.
The politics of Cromwell's revenge are at the heart of Mantel's story. He ensures the king's opponents are tortured and killed without bloodying his own hands, even when the torture is happening under his own roof. Many of those opponents were once Wolsey's enemies. Cromwell ticks them off.
He fails in his best efforts to persuade that murdering old hypocrite Thomas More to back Henry's first divorce. So be it, More's head comes off and pragmatic Cromwell moves on. More and Wolsey were never the best of friends anyway. Revenge.
Politics aside, some of Mantel's most moving moments are deeply personal to Cromwell. The death of his beloved wife and young daughters during the annual outbreak of the London plague. The way he treasures the angel wings made out of peacock feathers that his youngest, Grace, wore at her last nativity play. His love of his eldest, Anne's copy book full of drawings of griffins and mermaids. His kindness and generosity to the waifs and strays who come his way and stay. His life-saving loyalty to friends.
And when, towards the end of the second book, you sense the sand starting to shift slightly beneath his feet, you fear for him. As he says, "You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."
The minute it ends, you miss him and every one of the occasionally confusing cast of multi-named and multi-titled characters. At least there is one more book to come. But it's a crying shame it's only a trilogy.
