The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)

by Hilary Mantel

Recently his son was sent off to learn the art of public speaking, and the result is that, though he still lacks the command that makes for rhetorical sweep, he has become more interested in words if you take them one by one. Sometimes he seems to be holding them up for scrutiny. Sometimes he seems to be poking them with a stick. Sometimes, and the comparison is unavoidable, he seems to approach them with the tail-wagging interest a dog takes in another dog’s turds.

we think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?’

Torturers do not need extraordinary means, or special instruments. Opportunities for pain lie all around, in items of common use. His gaolers pulled Wyatt’s head back and wedged a horse’s bit into his mouth. They poured mustard and vinegar into his nostrils, so he was half-drowned in the acrid brew, spewing out what he could, inhaling the rest.

I reach the crossroads and I throw the dice, and whichever comes up, it is the same—it is the swamp, or the abyss, or the ice.

For six or seven years, male children live with the women. Then without choice or discussion, one day they are plucked away, their hair cropped so their ears are always cold, and thrust into the sullen world where everyone finds fault and visits punishment, and until you are married there is no kindness unless you pay for it.

King Edward’s disappeared sons, if they had lived, would have looked like this, the gleam in the eye like light on the blade of a sword;

I don’t have a history, only a past.

Reginald’s plain exterior gives no idea of the elaborate, useless nature of his mind, with its little shelves and niches for scruples and doubts.

Do you think only weak people obey the law, because it terrifies them? Do you imagine only weak people do their duty, because they dare not do other? The truth is far different.

A line of Wyatt’s comes to him: For I am weak, and clean without defence. In Wyatt’s verse there is a tussle in every line. In the verse of Lord Thomas, there is no contest at all, just a smooth surrender to idiocy.

Amor omnia vincit, she said.’ ‘Perhaps for a season it did.’ ‘Love conquers all?’ Poor gentle creature, she bends her head. ‘With respect, my lord, love couldn’t conquer a gosling. It couldn’t knock a cripple down. It couldn’t beat an egg.’

‘Thomas More used to say, all translators crave something from their text, and if they do not find it they will put it there.

‘I sin,’ he says, ‘I repent, I lapse, I sin again, I repent and I look to Christ to perfect my imperfection. I cling to faith but I will not give up works.

Hunters, it is said, live longer than other men; they sweat hard and stay lean; when they fall into bed at night they are tired beyond all temptation; and when they die, they go to Heaven.

My list of sins is so extensive that the recording angel has run out of tablets, and sits in the corner with his quill blunted, wailing and ripping out his curls.

Pastors warn their flock that if they do not send tribute to Rome, trees will walk and crops will blight. They make them dread the fire of purgatory, which eats to the bone; they ask, can you bear to see your dead folk burning—your helpless old mother, your dead little children, bound in agony and screaming for your prayers? Now it is hard for them to hear the gospel news: there is no purgatory, only judgement. God is not a market trader, selling mercy by the pound. You cannot buy salvation, nor can you delegate a monk to work out your salvation for you.

He has arranged a stipend for a young woman, Cat Champernowne, whom he knows to be kind and a good Latinist. He trusts Eliza will live to thank him. It is important a child’s first tutor should be gentle and like a mother, so the child is not afraid of making mistakes.

The blind man sees, but the faces he knew in his young days are altered; and when he asks for a mirror, he doesn’t recognise himself at all.

The role needs honest force and honeyed words, and a certain willingness to obfuscate about the intentions of the King of England: and as Wyatt says that to him nothing is ever clear, and no truth is a single truth, he seems the man for the job.

What do priests know about marriage? The king bars them from it. It is time they were put out of the business entirely. They have no more to do there than cripples in a footrace.’

When Mary gave birth to her Saviour and ours, did she suffer as other mothers do? The divines have sundry opinions, but women think she did.

From behind the papist virgin with her silver shoes there creeps another woman, poor, her feet bare and calloused, her swarthy face plastered with the dust of the road. Her belly is heavy with salvation and the weight drags and makes her back ache. When night comes she draws warmth not from ermine or sable but from the hide and hair of farm animals, as she squats among them in the straw; she suffers the first pangs of labour on a night of cutting cold, under a sky pierced by white stars.