Book Review: The Mirror and the Light and the Unsettling Nature of History

The last book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell brings the great man’s life to a satisfying conclusion.

Having achieved such phenomenal success with her first two novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell — Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies — Hilary Mantel certainly had a lot of pressure to bring this narrative to a conclusion that would do justice to what she’d already accomplished, showing how one of the most brilliant political minds of the English Renaissance was brought crashing down into ruin as quickly as he was able to rise.

She has succeeded marvelously.

The Mirror and the Light begins where the previous volume left off. Anne Boleyn is dead on the scaffold, a victim of Henry’s capriciousness and desire for the demure Jane Seymour. It then follows him through the ups and downs that follow the death of Jane after she bears Henry his long-awaited heir. Unfortunately, the vultures are circling, and they look for every opportunity to bring Cromwell down and plunge him into ruin. They finally find their weapon in Henry’s failed marriage to the German princess Anne of Cleves. In the end, Henry turns against the man who did so much for him, manipulated by the nobles and…