here for the moment: reflection mostly on Bring up the Bodies. Spoiler alert for the Mirror and the Light

Both the recent Tudor novels of Hilary Mantel have, rightly, received particular credit for portraying a history that is felt to be, peculiarly, this country’s common heritage. Bluff King Hal and his Harem are as widely as unnecessarily taught, and, often despite such lessons, still resonate in the echo chamber of folk memory. Mantel has among other things rehung an old tapestry, and stitched into it a protagonist new to historical fiction, if not to the loving eulogies of GR Elton.

Yet her very success risks overshadowing her greatest achievement: the independent historical scheme her novels live in and by. Certainly Mantel operates by ‘novelistic intelligence’, as James Wood has said; but Wood is wrong to go on to suggest that ‘Mantel seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties.’ No such parlour-game switch, comparable to the shifting of the TV map’s colours after an election, is required by Mantel’s technique, which is simpler and more effective. Her history is absolutely authentic because she has reared it all up herself.

Picture three trees, resembling each other in their interspersing leaves, their windblown shapes, even their ageing rings, but freestanding for all that. One old ash is recorded history, some of its boughs irreparably scorched by storms, much of its sap long since dried up, but impressive in age and stature. The tree of our contemporary preconceptions, our expectations, is probably a sycamore. It is green and hearty, but its seeds have helicoptered to inconvenient spots and it gets in the way of the light, as if our first tree didn’t have enough trouble already. Out of the way of either, the youngest tree stands, enjoying the best of the sun for now, a silver birch, the envy of the orchard, its sequin-leaves stirring. This last tree stands in Mantel’s relation to the ash boughs and sycamore saplings, whether represented by Eric Ives, Philippa Gregory, or Jonathan Rhys-Meyers – benevolent alliance, but sovereign independence.

Wolf Hall is horizontal and immersive, Bring Up the Bodies frenetically ordered, so the lines of Mantel’s alternative historical structure are more urgent, easier to spot, in the latter. In Wolf Hall there was a tendency to let such lines be mistaken for mere researched evidence and historical fact – that autentico cafe in the past’s foreign land. Not nearly enough attention, for example, was accorded to the passage that begins the section entitled ‘An Occult History of Britain’ –

Once, in the days of time immemorial, there was a king of Greece who had thirty-three daughters…they landed on an island shrouded in mist…The giants were defeated, and their leader thrown into the sea. Whichever way you look at it, it all begins in slaughter…Before London was called Lud’s Town, it was called New Troy. And we were Trojans…

Arthur…married three women, all called Guinevere, and his tomb is at Glastonbury, but you must understand that he is not really dead, only waiting his time to come again.

His blessed descendant, Prince Arthur of England, was born in the year 1486…If he were alive now, he would be King of England. His younger brother Henry would likely be Archbishop of Canterbury…

Beneath every history, another history.

It is vital to observe that, in the world where Mantel asks us to reside for a time, none of these assertions is deniable. Some of them are even verifiable. The unchanged British mist, the lost prince’s birthdate, the potential and entirely feasible Archbishopric, all these lend their weight to the rest, as the rest lends its mythical essence to them in return. Readers are inclined, it is true, to leave Mantel’s dozens of references to Galfridian, Arthurian fancy in the back of their minds. But there is a good reason for this, for that is the very approach taken by their companion and guide. Startlingly familiar to our contemporary world in his tastes, prejudices, and, perhaps, weaknesses, Cromwell regards these skeins of folklore as the housewife does the cobwebs, with proactive tetchiness or weary tolerance. But spiders spin straightest through empty cupboards, and the indifference of Mantel’s Cromwell to Mantel-England’s magical foundation may yet be his undoing.

By Bring Up the Bodies Cromwell is the King’s vice gerent in Church affairs. At first this seems ironical for the man Wolf Hall cast in a recognisable mould of 21^st century secular thought; impatient, for example, even with the Protestant ideologues in his own presumed camp. But Cromwell’s attitude and policy towards the Church in the new novel is as principled as it is consistent. In church and state alike, he is the scourge of superstition. Compare his internal scorn for the common people’s nostalgia for their dethroned queen –

If the king would take back his lawful wife Katherine, the rain would stop. And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends…

- to his quizzically amused view of a country church’s traditional decoration:

                        ‘Is that a mermaid?’

‘Yes, my lord. Must she come down? Is she forbidden?’

‘I just think she’s a long way from the sea.’

In such strokes Mantel reveals Cromwell as a man who does not even condescend to hate the past. He sees himself, indeed, as its overmastering despot, later inwardly telling Queen Anne ‘If need be, I can separate you from history.’ But history tells us in turn that of course he could not do that, anymore than he could liberate himself from her constraints. If we submit to Cromwell’s creator’s tempting proximity in full, step too unmodulatedly into his consciousness, we risk missing many truths about the universe Cromwell inhabits. Yet Mantel surely intends for us to fall into this trap of too much affinity with her protagonist, to share Cromwell’s blindness as well as his percipience. Many readers and critics have commented on Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies’s curious power to produce suspense, despite the fact that its plot’s denouement is theoretically available in the classroom, or on Wikipedia. This supposed mystery has a ready answer. The really alluring query in historical fiction of this calibre, just as in the plays of Shakespeare, or even well-written history itself, is not what happens, but how, and why. Mantel aims, by cocooning the reader inside Cromwell, disdainful of and impatient with England’s folkloric past, to preserve inviolate her secret plot development, the nemesis of the supernatural upon GR Elton’s rational hero.

The new novel differentiates itself most obviously from its predecessor in its almost breathlessly compressed and quite precise length of time. We know that Wolf Hall ushered in problems of space for Mantel; she has confided that she had to rely on cue cards, as screenwriters do, to remind herself where her many characters were at any given moment. Conversely, Bring Up the Bodies’s logistical challenges must have manifested themselves about time - not where, but when characters might be, in relation to their beginnings and their fast approaching ends – the hero’s included.

There is a third temporal phase which this novel begins to consider more explicitly, the future. Diane Purkiss has some historically grounded objections to Mantel’s Tudor corpus, calling her ‘an extraordinary novelist, a remarkable stylist, and rather a commonplace historian: a careful 2.1 and not a daring First.’ The university tutor terminology grates, and it should: Mantel is, after all, part of that majority of important English stylists who evaded English literature degrees. Purkiss’s specific examples are worth addressing, but more important is what she does not say. She finds fault with Mantel, and Mantel’s Cromwell, for conspiring with historical royal oppressors, and their deceptive, ‘fictional’ documentation, to libel monastic life – for example, by coarsening homoerotic breaches of the Rule to paedophiliac ones. Purkiss here does not accept the truth that Mantel is writing a more undivided kind of fiction, which must be accepted in full, just as we accept Macbeth, the stealthy murderer, or Crookback Dick. But more surprisingly, for a scholar and writer of the 17^th century, she fails to mention Mantel’s awareness of the near future of her characters’ country, namely the English Civil War.

‘This is the Tudors’ covenant; peace is what they offer.’ Mantel’s cast are naturally traumatised by the hangover of the War of the Roses, the tragedy of the 15^th century English nobility and gentry. Geoffrey Hill’s Funeral Music is perhaps the most haunting modern re-imagining of that conflict’s scars, but even its livid lines can hardly excel, for shock value, its stark epigraph:

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483

Several characters Mantel shows us are left over from the pre-Tudor ancien regime; haughty Norfolk, so proud of his ancient duchy, and his equally self-important poet son Surrey; chivalric relics like Nicholas Carew and Harry Norris; half-mad, over-bred Harry Percy; the scheming ‘old families’ of Pole and Courtenay in whose blood sweeps the strain of Plantagenet.

One of Mantel’s most affecting evocations takes place within Cromwell’s imagination, as he invites this whole faction, ‘the flower of England’, to a banquet of metaphor. Though he uses them to break the Boleyns, ‘the old families’ are Cromwell’s natural enemies, and Mantel, too, pays short shrift to their glamour in decline – hereditary magic is not her preferred branch; she recently ruled out ever writing about Elizabeth I on account of an aversion to princesses and privilege. The Wars of the Roses were of this class’s making, and to new men like Cromwell, as to modern readers, Henry VIII’s increasingly infantile caprices are preferable by far to the divisive rights claimed by the old nobility. But even Thomas Cromwell’s solutions cannot hold off a recurrence forever:

We still have, every Englishman and woman, some drops of giant blood in our veins…Think of the great limbs of those dead men, stirring under the soil. War was their nature, and war is always keen to come again.

Cromwell has some drops of that giant’s blood too, after all. Even after Mantel’s heroic restoration of his reputation to the foreground, he is still only the second most famous Cromwell in British history. The future fate of the House of Cromwell’s distinct strands is only hinted at in Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, but that menace is nonetheless quietly present throughout. Mantel refers the Civil War of the future in the same low-key, consistent way as she does to the fate of the younger Cromwells – the very posterity that Thomas thinks he has rescued from the aristocratic wars of the past.

Thomas’s son Gregory is such a dim figure that Mantel can count on our relative ignorance to hang suspense about him. The suggestion in Wolf Hall that Thomas Cromwell may seek to marry Jane Seymour works entirely through dramatic irony – most readers will be aware it cannot happen. When, in the opening of the newer novel, it seems Jane will be sought for Gregory instead, this has more drama – we know it will be thwarted, but not quite how, as Gregory is probably still terra incognita. And when Bess, the Other Seymour Girl, is introduced, there are enough esoterica in play to make the reader actually, factually, speculative. Thomas Cromwell appears to fall for Bess swiftly and understandably, with a pragmatism that is almost romantic:

He is struck by her overview of his situation. It is as if she has understood his life. He is taken by an impulse to clasp her hand and ask her to marry him; even if they did not get on in bed, she seems to have a gift for précis that eludes most of his clerks.

Like all her highly-sexed hero’s aristocratic tendresses, though, this attraction is an example of Mantel’s skill with fata morgana. Most readers would only find out for sure by looking it up, but Thomas Cromwell did not remarry; throughout the two novels, Mary Boleyn, Mary Shelton, Lady Worcester, and both Seymour girls exist to tease Cromwell (and us), quite as Anne Boleyn does the King. It is for dim, gentle Gregory that clever Bess is destined. But in a second stroke of Mantel’s legerdemain, this direct line – who inherited Cromwell’s barony and estate, granted at the end of Bring Up the Bodies – are themselves doomed to irrelevance and defeat, at their hands of their cousins. Thomas can already tell that his Welsh nephew, Richard Cromwell (né Williams) is his true successor in ruthless ability:

Richard is a solid boy with the Cromwell eye, direct and brutal, and the Cromwell voice that can caress or contradict. He is afraid of nothing that walks the earth, and nothing that walks below it…

Richard, Gregory, and Rafe Sadler, another surrogate son, are constantly compared in Thomas’s paternal but impartial sight. He is stern about maintaining the boys’ upward mobility: ‘Cromwells do not exhaust themselves on menial work. If they ever did, that day has passed.’ This conviction appears to contradict our impression of Richard’s natural physical strength, and to suggest that Cromwell’s rise has trapped his descendants in the same decadent structure as any Courtenay or Pole. In the end, Oliver Cromwell, Richard’s direct descendant, would exact a ruinous fine from his cousin the Earl of Ardglass, Gregory and Bess’s direct descendant and a defeated Royalist. Presumably Mantel’s intimations of this outcome will continue to be understated in The Mirror and the Light, as her reader’s eye will not stretch so much further past her hero’s downfall; but they are none the less present as a prophetic mood, and an ominous moral.

We have already seen Cromwell making mock of the superstition around Katherine’s quasi-magical status as ‘rightful queen’, and in this respect, Katherine becomes united with her supplanter, Anne (for whom Cromwell develops an instinctive, misogynistic loathing beside which his pitiful, professional antagonism to the Spanish wife quite pales). Both queens deploy the last desperate rituals of the cornered noblewoman, exerting themselves in stereotypically feminine and irrational spheres, in direct apposition to Cromwell’s alpha-male reason. More instinctively than consciously, they seem to reach for the matriarchal power of anthropology rather than history, The White Goddess or The Golden Bough. Are the common people after all so mistaken when they claim in their cups that the rain will fall till Katherine is restored? Anne doesn’t seem to think so; she uses the same trope, though as ever she seeks to invert Catherine’s position –

‘I am the queen and if you do me harm, then a curse will come on you. No rain will fall until I am released.’

Still fixated on her potential for fertility, Anne develops Katherine’s cruder, more atavistic magical repute. Katherine’s rain has a brutal threat, like her nephew the Emperor’s armies; to pound the land and destroy the crops. Anne’s subtler drought identifies that land with her womb; it presents a longer-term menace, of poverty and heirlessness, barrenness in a clincher of a pun. It also reflects her Englishness; unlike Katherine, she knows better than to curse her people with that everyday nuisance, English weather, but holds out the far more sinister prospect of its withdrawal, potent to this day when our rare heat waves plunge us into suspicion of unnatural global heating.

But of course the most important difference between the two queens is that Katherine is a passive, and therefore effective, promoter of her myth, a suffering queen; Anne’s railings form an active and so ineffective publicity campaign by a suspected witch. It is the difference between the enchantment of a Hermione and that of a Lady Macbeth. Anne’s shrillness has tired the king, the people, and soon palls on her gaoler’s wife; Lady Kingston wearily fails to recall by the end whether Anne calls down rain, drought, or both. Another exasperating over-interpreter of meteorology is Anne’s ghastly sister-in-law Lady Rochford, who will survive even Cromwell to fall with Katherine Howard:

If someone said to Lady Rochford, ‘It’s raining,’ she would turn it into a conspiracy; as she passed the news on, she would make it sound somehow indecent, unlikely, but sadly true.

This is of course arguably a sly joke by Mantel, as much as Cromwell, against readers who would place too much trust in queenly maunderings about precipitation. But at the same time, it seems rash and over-simple to dismiss feminine magic from the pen that produced Beyond Black as wholly satirical in intent. This is doubly true when one compares Katherine’s mortal illness and Anne’s terrifying position to that of Mantel suffering, still at university, from undiagnosed endometriosis; a complaint dismissed by her doctors as some psychological and feminine ill, for which they prescribed tranquillisers and a complete halt to writing. Cromwell’s equally masculine prejudice against the queens may not have any tighter a monopoly on the truth. For what it’s worth, Henry VIII himself can’t shake off his nagging belief in this kind of thing, for instance in his veneration for the Glastonbury Thorn.

Cromwell’s nemesis is most conclusively signalled by the way in which, like it or not – and, fatally, he begins to – he too is on the way to becoming a Golden Bough archetype. The rule of ‘the King must die’ is well known; the ancient matriarchal society (Mary Renault’s Eleusis, for example) accepts its queen’s favoured consort as king, war-leader, hero, stern father, golden son – for a year – then, after his twelfth month of the best of the meat, the clothes, the women, it sacrifices him. Cromwell falls into the fatal position of the year-King, without even noticing. Henry, ‘the Book Called Henry’, draws so much of his attention. After all, Henry is in his outer attributes so like a golden year-King; like Dryden’s David/Charles II in Absalom and Achitophel, he aspires to people the land while being thwarted in the marriage bed:

Then Israel's monarch after heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command,
Scattered his Maker's image through the land.
Michal, of royal blood, the crown did wear,
A soil ungrateful to the tiller's care:
Not so the rest; for several mothers bore
To godlike David several sons before.
But since like slaves his bed they did ascend,
No true succession could their seed attend.

And when Henry apparently dies for two hours after being unhorsed, it seems that the terrible, kingly price has been paid.

…still laced in his tournament jacket of wadded black, as if in mourning for himself…

King Arthur of blessed memory could not have a son. And what happened after Arthur? We don’t know. But we know his glory vanished from the world.

But Henry recovers, to return to his destined catalogue of gross appetites and quotidian old age, showing himself, unlike his elder brother the lost Prince of Wales, to be after all no Arthur; unlike Cromwell, to be after all no sacrifice. Possessed in Wolf Hall of a barbarous vitality (who could forget the rubies gleaming like drops of blood on his huge hands?), by the very beginning of Bring Up the Bodies Bluff King Hal is already shown up as more Bluff than King. He surrounds himself with frivolous young water-flies, Osrics like Francis Weston and George Boleyn, on the grounds that ‘he thinks they keep him young’; and when he falls asleep at the Seymour luncheon, the water-flies laugh aside into their courtly beards. Cromwell eloquently exalts his master’s reputation when musing on the Book Called Henry, but we can see this is a deception and even a self-deception – the Book in question is a matter of managing a coincidentally despotic baby.

Cromwell, on the other hand, is the intermediary and the absorber of royal power, even for the high aristocracy. No one can breeze through him and survive. At critical moments King Henry goes into seclusion, almost house arrest, while Cromwell runs everything. He can rebuke the Duke of Norfolk about his marriage, or thrust about the Duke of Suffolk’s massive bulk. Henry’s own bastard son Richmond pretends to visit the King when he actually wants to ask Cromwell for permission to consummate his marriage – a fatherly matter if ever there was one. Naturally, the court imagines Lady Worcester is carrying Cromwell’s child. Indeed nearly every noblewoman at court seems to treat him to a speculative glance of comehitherliness. Anne Boleyn only stays away because she knows, to her intense annoyance, that her wiles would do no good:

He is not indifferent to women, God knows, just indifferent to Anne Boleyn. It galls her. He should have pretended.

Cromwell is not very ironically credited with sorcerous omnipotence, of the kind that the Stuarts would claim for the touch of Kings -

‘Look.’ He shows his turquoise ring. ‘You see this? The late cardinal gave it me, and I am known to wear it.’

‘Is that it, the magic one?’ Grace Bedingfield takes his hand. ‘Melts stone walls, makes princesses fall in love with you?’

‘This is the one.’

And an early statement exceptionally hard to identify for sure as the authorial voice or his own transmutes Cromwell, not his master, into Henry V:

If you would defend England, and he would – for he would take the field himself, his sword in his hand – you must know what England is.

While this does again seem to beckon to Thomas’s collateral and spiritual descendant, Old Noll, Our Chief of Men, it also – by anointing him in the ultimately unenviable role of King of England – lays seal to his doom.