Cromwell’s Last Act: Finishing What Wolf Hall Started
By the time I picked up The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel’s final volume in her Cromwell trilogy, I’d already spent years with Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, watching him go from a blacksmith’s son who got beaten half to death by his own father to the second most powerful man in England. So if you’re wondering whether you can start here, at the ending, let me answer that honestly: you can’t, not really. This is a trilogy that has to be read in order, and I want to walk through all three books, because the ending only lands if you know what it cost to get there.
So, What’s It About?
The Mirror and the Light picks up Cromwell’s story at what should be the height of his power. He’s Henry VIII’s chief minister, indispensable, feared, and rich beyond anything his origins would have promised him. The book follows his final four years, as he manages the fallout of Anne Boleyn’s execution, negotiates the king’s increasingly complicated marriages, and tries to hold together a religious reformation that’s making him more enemies by the day. I won’t tell you how it ends, though if you know your Tudor history, you already do. What I’ll say instead is that Mantel makes you feel every step of Cromwell’s fall coming, long before he lets himself see it.
The first two books cover roughly a decade of his rise. Wolf Hall introduces him as a young survivor clawing his way into Cardinal Wolsey’s household and then into the king’s own court, using memory, patience, and an unnerving gift for reading a room to make himself indispensable. Bring Up the Bodies is tighter and meaner: Anne has failed to give Henry a son, the king has already moved on to Jane Seymour, and Cromwell is handed the job of making Anne’s downfall look inevitable. I won’t tell you exactly how far he’s willing to go to manage it, but it made me put the book down more than once just to sit with how coldly efficient he becomes. The Mirror and the Light is the longest of the three by a wide margin, and once you’ve lived through the first two, you understand why. There’s simply more to unravel.
Why Has Everyone Been Reading This Trilogy for Over a Decade?
Part of it is timing. Tudor history never really goes out of style, and Mantel arrived with something genuinely new to say about a period readers thought they already knew. But the bigger reason, I think, is that she made a deeply unfashionable historical figure sympathetic without ever excusing him. Cromwell burns heretics and destroys his enemies, and you still find yourself rooting for him, because Mantel never lets you leave his head long enough to judge him from the outside.
She captures Tudor-era England with the kind of vivid, specific detail that makes you feel like you’re actually standing in those cold stone halls, listening in on courtly intrigue you have no business overhearing. And her characters are never simple. They have real flaws and real moments of triumph, which is what makes them feel less like historical figures and more like people you know. At one point in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell reflects on how to manage the king, thinking that above all, Henry “needs to be listened to, with very close attention.” That’s the whole trilogy in miniature: a study of a man who has made a science out of understanding exactly what powerful people need from him.
Okay, But How’s the Writing, Really?
This is the part I most wanted to dig into, because Mantel’s prose is doing something unusual across all three books, and it’s worth naming directly. She writes almost entirely in the historic present tense, which drops you into scenes as they’re happening rather than as something already settled into the past. It’s disorienting at first. Stick with it, and it starts to feel like the only honest way to tell this story, because it strips away the comfort of already knowing how things turn out.
Then there’s the pronoun, and this one genuinely trips people up if nobody warns them first, so let me walk through it. In a normal novel, “he” refers to whichever man was named most recently in the sentence before it. Mantel breaks that rule on purpose. Picture a scene with Cromwell, the Duke of Norfolk, and Cardinal Wolsey all in the same room. Norfolk speaks. Wolsey reacts. Then the next line starts with “he,” and by the usual grammar rules, you’d assume it means Wolsey, since he was just mentioned. Instead, it almost always means Cromwell, no matter who else was talked about in between.
It sounds like a typo the first few times it happens. It isn’t. Mantel is using “he” as a kind of permanent spotlight on Cromwell, so that even when he’s silent in a crowded room, the sentence itself keeps circling back to him. It’s her way of keeping you locked inside his point of view without ever switching to first person, “I.” Readers argue about whether it works; some find it maddening enough to put the book down, others (myself included) find it the most elegant trick in the whole trilogy once it clicks. By the third book, she leans into the joke of her own device, having Cromwell referred to at points as “he, Cromwell,” almost admitting how confusing she’d made it and turning that confusion into style.
My honest advice if you’re new to this: the first thirty or so pages of Wolf Hall are the hardest. Once you internalize that “he” means Cromwell unless the sentence is genuinely impossible to parse any other way, it stops being a puzzle and starts feeling like you’re inside his head, which is exactly where Mantel wants you.
What ties it together is what critics call her free indirect style, the way Cromwell’s private thoughts and the narration blur into one voice, so you’re never quite sure where his observation ends and the author’s begins. That’s how she gets you to sympathize with a man who does genuinely terrible things. You’re not being told he’s sympathetic. You’re just never allowed to see him from the outside.
I’ll be honest that the pacing of The Mirror and the Light slows in places, especially in the middle stretch, where the political maneuvering piles up faster than I could always track it. But it builds to a climax so tense I found myself reading the final chapters with something close to dread, even knowing exactly how it had to end.
Who Should Actually Pick This Trilogy Up?
Be honest with yourself about two things before you start. First, this is a real commitment: three books, well over 1,700 pages combined, dense with names, titles, and court politics that shift by the paragraph. Second, Mantel does not hold your hand. There’s no glossary, no family tree in most editions, and the “he” trick I mentioned above will trip you up more than once.
That said, if you loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for its immersive period detail but want something with real political teeth, or if you’ve read straightforward Tudor romances and want to see the same era through a colder, sharper lens, this is your next read. It’s a trilogy for people who like their history morally complicated rather than tidy. If you want clean heroes and villains, look elsewhere. If you want to understand how a smart, dangerous man convinces himself he’s doing the right thing right up until the axe falls, start with Wolf Hall.
The Verdict
The Mirror and the Light closes Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy exactly the way it needed to: not with triumph, but with the quiet, inevitable weight of a man who built an empire out of other people’s downfalls finally facing his own. It’s slow in places and unforgiving of readers who skim, but it earns its length, and it earns its ending. If you’ve already read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, this is not optional. If you haven’t started yet, know what you’re signing up for: an epic, morally tangled story about power, ambition, loyalty, and religion, and one of the more remarkable feats of historical fiction I’ve read. Start with Wolf Hall. Give it the thirty pages. It’s worth it.
AWARDS (across the trilogy)
Wolf Hall: Man Booker Prize, 2009; National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
Bring Up the Bodies: Man Booker Prize, 2012 (making Mantel the first woman, and only the third novelist ever, to win the Booker twice); Costa Book Award
The Mirror and the Light: Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, 2021; shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction
First Editions: Author: Hilary Mantel Genre: Historical Fiction Publisher: Fourth Estate (UK) Wolf Hall: April 30, 2009 · Bring Up the Bodies: May 10, 2012 · The Mirror and the Light: March 5, 2020
Justine Castellon is a brand strategist with an innate ability to weave compelling narratives. She seamlessly blends her professional insight with her passion for literature. Her literary works include romantic drama novels—Four Seasons, The Last Snowfall, Gnight Sara / ‘Night Heck, and I Love You, Sunday Sunset. With her ability to tell stories that linger long after the last word, Justine leaves a mark not only in the world of branding but also in the hearts of her readers.
www.justcastellon.com
