Two-time Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel wraps up her blockbuster Tudor trilogy with The Mirror & the Light
CBC Radio | Posted: May 1, 2020 7:27 PM | Last Updated: September 23, 2022
The celebrated British novelist died on Sept. 22, 2022 at the age of 70.
Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Wolf Hall saga of historical novels, died at 70 on Sept. 22, 2022.
Mantel was one of the few writers to win the Booker Prize twice: first in 2009 for Wolf Hall, and again in 2012 for its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. The novels — which together have sold more than five million copies — centre on the previously little-known figure Thomas Cromwell, the powerful intimate and fixer to King Henry VIII.
Mantel concluded her extraordinary chronicle with the long-awaited third volume, The Mirror & the Light. It charts Cromwell's continued rise and precipitous fall in the final years of his life, while England was experiencing political, social and religious turmoil and Henry was going through more wives. Cromwell himself was executed in 1540.
The Mirror & the Light was released in March 2020 and sold more than 95,000 copies in its first three days. The novel was praised by critics as "majestic," "breathtakingly poetic" and "a masterpiece."
The Mirror & the Light won the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.
In 2020, Mantel spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from her home in Devon, England.
A childhood trip to Hampton Court Palace
"It was a hot day. A beautiful and splendid summer day. I went with some of my extended family down the river from Richmond, which is really the way you should approach Hampton Court. I suppose I knew little about the Tudors. I knew a little but not much about Cardinal Wolsey.
"I went to a couple of rooms that were rather meagerly proportioned by the standards of a palace — little panelled rooms — and the atmosphere seemed to me very intense, very thick.
I don't know quite what it was, but I had a feeling of having arrived somewhere — and that really, I need never leave.
"I don't know quite what it was, but I had a feeling of having arrived somewhere — and that really, I need never leave. I had a very strong impulse to sit down in the corner and just stay there, as if some pageant or play were going to unfold before me. But of course there's no way of putting this into words — and even now I can't do it very well — so we just passed on.
"But I have to say, the atmosphere of that day never left me. It was a kind of locator when I began this project. I always had that atmosphere, those small rooms, at the back of my mind — as if I could see the Cardinal sitting by the fireplace and Thomas Cromwell leaning by the window."
Curious about Cromwell
"When I moved toward the project and began seriously weeding around it, I started with the biographies that exist, just trying to size up the topic. I was thinking, 'Is this someone I can work with?' I found the most astonishing stuff; there were constant references to him being lowborn, which seemed very odd in a 20th century text.
The first thing I did then was to get back to the historical record — to try to forget what I'd been reading in biographies — and I began to access a very different story.
"I realized what they were doing was applying to him the standards of his own day [and] taking on the vocabulary of his own day. I began to find that the same cliches were being repeated, over and over again.
"The first thing I did then was to get back to the historical record — to try to forget what I'd been reading in biographies — and I began to access a very different story. I saw how historians have rolled along not just prejudices but error, from one generation to the next.
"So I felt as if I were wiping the slate clean and trying to see Cromwell as if for the first time."
Cruel to be kind
"If you look at what his contemporaries said about him, and you look at the record of his actions, it's obvious at the time that no one thought of him as a man who was vindictive. They thought of him as a man who was very efficient — and who would stop at nothing to make the King's will operate. But they didn't take him as particularly self-interested or in any way enjoying the ruthless actions that he pushed through.
"When you look up his past, when he was a lawyer, before he worked for Henry, he was an arbitrator. Cromwell arbitrated in commercial law disputes between French, Flemish and English merchants. So that gives you the key to his character: he can arrive at a settlement that everyone will accept.
They thought of him as a man who was very efficient — and who would stop at nothing to make the King's will operate.
"He was a great negotiator. He knew that he could not take on the nobility…he had to work with them. So his style, his success, was based on co-operation and talking people around.
"So the idea is to persuade: find out what people want and see if you can give it to them. And if you can't, and if they won't cooperate, only then go in hard.
"None of this detracts from the ruthlessness — but it gives you an idea of what it was like to deal with him, day to day."
A fall from grace
"We know very little about Cromwell's wife, Elizabeth Wyckes, and his daughters. We don't even know for sure their date of death. All we know is that his will is rewritten with each death. We assume that they died in the epidemics that ravaged the country in the later part of the 1520s. He didn't marry again, which was rather surprising because he had a young family at that stage. It would have been the usual thing for him to remarry. We don't know the reasons for that.
He didn't marry again, which was rather surprising because he had a young family at that stage. It would have been the usual thing for him to remarry.
"One of the accusations levelled against him, at the time of his fall, was that he had remained unmarried because he wished to marry Mary, the King's daughter, and he wished to replace Henry as king.
"I don't think there was any shred of truth to this, but when you look at his life with the benefit of hindsight, you think [people] around him would tell him, 'Just go out and marry anybody. Just ask the first woman you meet. Because it will be better than, in the end, being exposed to this slander which works so powerfully on the king's imagination.' This probably seals Cromwell's fate, as the rumour that he wanted to marry Mary had been current in Europe for a few years.
"But it was just gossip. He could have stamped on it by marrying someone. But probably he just didn't take it seriously at all. So the story of his widowerhood, and his serial failures to become a husband again, run right through The Mirror & the Light. It's mostly treated in quite a light vein, right through the trilogy.
"And then, at the end, there is this awful reckoning."
Hilary Mantel's comments have been edited for length and clarity.