The Mirror and the Light

The author portrays Thomas Cromwell as the mirror image of both the king and the country. This implies that he is both a reflection of England and an inverted representation of it. On the one hand, Cromwell symbolizes the essence of the English character—stoic and principled, logical and loyal. Early in the book, he is described as such: “Thomas Cromwell is now fifty years old. The same small quick eyes, the same thickset imperturbable body; the same schedules. He is at home wherever he wakes [...][wherever] Henry happens to be” (13). Cromwell is intelligent and sturdy, welcomed throughout the realm via his attachment to the king. On the other hand, Cromwell signifies the usurper, the commoner who does not quite belong in the illustrious circles in which he finds himself, and who might not actually belong solely to England at all. As Cromwell himself is aware, his rivals “[n]o doubt assume Thomas Cromwell can be cancelled too, reduced to the clerk he used to be: a useful man for getting money in, but dispensable, a slave that you trample as you stride up the stairway to glory” (18). Occurring so early in the book, this observation is prophetic.

Further, Cromwell operates as a liminal figure; he is not purely of England, having honed his skills battling for other nations, working and learning overseas. The fact that he is a polyglot marks him as an outsider; knowing languages beyond those of the established court—French and Latin—puts one under suspicion of foreign sympathy. When Cromwell reflects upon his past, he remembers his time in France, Florence, Antwerp, and beyond. Those he served elsewhere noticed that “[h]e is not as other Englishmen [...] does not brawl in the street, does not spit like a devil, carries a knife but keeps it in his coat” (57). His common origins also keep him from joining the highest echelons of the English aristocracy with whom he mingles: “Not all his craft and guile can make him a Howard, or a Cheney or a Fitzwilliam, a Stanley or even a Seymour: not even in an emergency” (263). Thus, while Cromwell represents and reflects the crown under which he serves, he is set apart from it, both by his background and by his nature.

Even at the moment he is compelled outward to the scaffold where he will meet his end, Cromwell is marked as an outsider. The day is magnificently bright, an atypical English day, and that is out of order for an execution: “An Englishman dies drenched, in the rain that has enwrapped him all his life. Then he lurks about his old haunts in the drizzle and mist, so you cannot be sure whether he is quick or dead” (750). Cromwell is executed in the bright light of day, and the above truism about how an Englishman dies implies he is not a true Englishman. When rumors spread about his deeds earlier in the book, he is also rendered a chameleon: “The further he travels from London, the stranger Cromwell gets. In Essex he is a scheming swindler, a blasphemer and renegade Jew. Spread him east to Lincoln and he is notorious for his knowledge of poisons. In the dales of Yorkshire, he is a magus” (276). The metaphorical Cromwell is a shape-shifter, an inveterate traveler who “has been everywhere” (276). He is even rendered a kind of epic hero, compared to the crafty Greek who wandered far from the shores of home: “And I [Cromwell] like wandering Odysseus, salt-hardened, befogged, making my long way home to a house full of raucous strangers” (427). The implication is that Cromwell is a stranger in England, ever a wanderer from foreign shores.

By the same token, however, Cromwell is often conflated with the king, the perfect mirror image of the realm. When Jane Seymour dies, Cromwell thinks, “[I]f Jane had married me, she would be alive now; I would have managed it better” (445). These are treasonous thoughts, but they are the thoughts of someone who considers himself the king’s equal—or, at the least, an extension of the king. As they work together late into the night, “he allows his body to confuse with that of Henry, so that their arms, lying contiguous, lose their form and become cloudy like thaw water” (394), intermingled physically and intellectually. Further, Cromwell picks up a limp as the king’s leg wound grows worse. He also acquires the habit—heretofore rarely seen in his long narrative over the course of three books—of speaking in the first person when relaying the triumphs of the kingdom: “Seven years I have stood at his elbow while he sets a course. I found him in low water [...] I filled his treasury, made his coinage sound; I packed off his old wife and got him a new one of his own choosing” (462, emphasis added). Later, he notes, “no one can help. It’s just Henry and Cromwell, Cromwell and Henry” (513). It is as if the two are interchangeable, and Cromwell takes full credit for the workings of the crown.

Thus, if as Cromwell asserts, “Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings” (467), then Cromwell himself is also the mirror that reflects the realm (darkly) and the light that represents the true way. In executing Cromwell for treason, the author suggests, King Henry extinguishes his own noble light.