Gertrude Courtenay was pardoned and begged Cromwell to protect her and her husband from further censure. Mantel’s Cromwell advises her what to write in a letter to Henry; he recommends that she grovel, but Gertrude’s real letter to Henry was contrite and well-crafted as she took the blame upon herself. From 1533 onwards, Cromwell’s relationship with conservative factions such as the Courtenays and the Poles improved as his own relationship with Anne deteriorated and they played a small part in the machinations which contributed to her fall. It was an alliance borne of necessity, but one from which Cromwell was quick to extricate himself once Jane Seymour became queen. The two sides soon reverted to mutual suspicion and hostility, with Mantel’s Cromwell sending Thomas Wyatt’s mistress, Bess Darrell, into both the Pole and Courtenay households to glean any talk of treason. For now, Cromwell remained master of everything.
SUCCESS AND SUCCESSION
The year 1536 had been an extraordinary one. The country witnessed the death of one queen, the execution of another and the creation of a third – and all by the end of May. In The Mirror and the Light it is Thomas Boleyn who profoundly encapsulates what everyone must have felt: ‘We have seen such times, Lord Cromwell, events crowded into a week, that in ordinary times would have sustained the chroniclers for a decade.’ Cromwell now had an unprecedented, overarching view of the entire governmental system. His offices included: Lord Privy Seal, Master of the King’s Jewels, Keeper of the Hanaper, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Principal Secretary. Henry also allowed him to retain his religious title of Vicegerent or Vicar General, granted the previous year, thus an enormous degree of political power was now in the hands of a single minister of the king, rather than several. As Jane Seymour notes: ‘It is a thing never seen before, Lord Cromwell is the government, and the church as well.’
Socially, Cromwell was equally in demand – he hunted, hawked, gambled and enjoyed dice in particular, he put on elaborate entertainments for the king at his own expense, his kitchens received game from Lubeckian merchants and ambassadors. He also spent a small fortune on wine. He continued to work well with those he had placed close to the throne, namely the Seymours, and the new queen and her family knew to whom they owed their success and their ever-rising fortunes. Cromwell and the court hoped the novelty of this peaceful new life would last, and that Henry would be less fractious, less unpredictable. But Henry was no longer the fit, athletic man of his youth; his leg had never healed following the jousting accident in January, and, through Cromwell’s eyes, we see the more mercurial Henry emerging – autocratic and increasingly difficult to predict.
Mantel’s Cromwell keeps a journal, The Book Called Henry, in which he writes advice for his protégés on how to deal with the king, but as time goes by, he finds he has less and less to write, and what he has written is of no use in managing an increasingly dangerous monarch. Jane, on the other hand, begins to prove herself far more adept at managing Henry, though she struggles to convince him to allow his daughter Mary back into the fold. In this matter, both she and Mary underestimated Henry’s absolute determination to force Mary to submit, as her mother never had. Mary believed that with Anne’s death, Henry would welcome her back at court, but this notion was quickly dashed by Henry’s vehement insistence that Mary recognize that her mother’s marriage had been invalid, and that therefore that she is illegitimate. The second Act of Succession of 1536, declared both Henry’s daughters bastards, thereby removing them from the line of succession – and that, if he had no legitimate male children, Henry could nominate his heir.
Heirs become a frequent theme in The Mirror and the Light, as Henry thunders into middle age, increasingly unwell, with aches and pains, petulant and bad-tempered, ‘dragging his new weight’. We are drawn into the personal lives of the young contenders around Henry: Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy and his young wife, Mary Fitzroy, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk; the king’s niece, Margaret Douglas; and his eldest daughter, Lady Mary. In The Mirror and the Light, their various intrigues are laid across Cromwell’s desk roughly at the same time, dramas so entwined that it is difficult to pick everything apart.
T
HE
L
ADY
M
ARY
The Lady Mary is Cromwell’s chief concern, and he has been grappling with her rehabilitation since 1535. In Bring Up the Bodies, she is uppermost in his mind as Henry lies unconscious following his jousting accident, much to Anne’s displeasure. But as Cromwell argues reasonably with Anne, he cannot hold a country with her baby in the cradle, therefore the young Mary is his first choice. Mary and her relationship with her father and with Cromwell form a large part of The Mirror and the Light, a reflection of her growing importance following Anne’s death after years of neglect and exile.
Without her mother to continue her fight against Henry, Mary grew into a role of a beloved daughter, revered throughout the country and valued by her father. By 1536 the line of succession had become tangled: an illegitimate son, two illegitimate daughters, a nephew and a niece. Cromwell believed that if Henry were to die only Mary could unite the country. We know that within weeks of Anne’s execution the real Mary wrote to Cromwell begging him to intercede with her father on her behalf, but in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell tells Chapuys that Mary must recognize that
