![]() ![]() She is at one with the complex, often fragmentary source material of Cromwell’s life. Her genius as a novelist is bound up with a phenomenal historical rigour and imagination. We sit behind his eyes experiencing the new Tudor world that he attempts to drag into being. In Cromwell, Mantel has created a character with a fully realised interiority. It was recorded for posterity by, among others, the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador to England, Eustace Chapuys, who notes in a dispatch, two days after the reconciliation took place: “It is impossible to describe the king’s kind and affectionate behaviour towards the princess, his daughter.” Impossible, that is, until seen through the eyes of Mantel’s Cromwell. ![]() ![]() But – like so much in Mantel’s extraordinary Wolf Hall trilogy – the reconciliation did in fact happen. This is a scene from The Mirror and the Light, and this is Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell: one of the most powerful fictional creations of the early 21st century. As he looks on, Cromwell ponders how future chroniclers might reimagine the reunion: “They will not have witnessed, they could not record, the Lady Mary’s wobbling curtsy, or how the king’s face flushes as he crosses the room and sweeps her up… his gasp, his sob, his broken endearments and the hot tears that spring from his eyes.” Among those present was the meeting’s fixer, Thomas Cromwell. In JPrincess Mary, Henry VIII’s estranged daughter, was reconciled with her father in an emotional meeting at Brooke House in Hackney. ![]()
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