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

by Hilary Mantel

the dreams of kings are not the dreams of other men. They are susceptible to visions, in which the figures of their ancestors come to speak to them of war, vengeance, law and power. Dead kings visit them;

‘If there was a crime, it is an old crime. If there was a sin, it is stale.’

I don’t have a history, only a past.

dog eat dog, but no man eats England.

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.

Pole’s folly is, that he thinks aloud. Some apprentice phrase, modelled on Cicero, trembles in the air; he believes no one hears. He writes, and he thinks no one reads; but friends of Lucifer look into his book.

When he lies down at night, the horsehair in his mattress and the feathers in his bolster are eavesdropping on England’s behalf, as he supplicates, in hedging, quibbling terms, whatever form of God he believes in that day.

Let their designs play out. We should stay our hand. They will hang themselves.’

I could perhaps win a brawl in the street, though I would rather stop one. ‘I have aged into accommodation,

A prince cannot be impeded by temporal distinctions: past, present, future. Nor can he excuse the past, just for being over and done. He can’t say, ‘all water under the bridges’; the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace.

As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up. ‘Bear in mind his Majesty’s remarkable foresight, at the trial of the late queen. He knew the sentence before the verdict was in.’

Henry would have killed her one day, but in the event some other man saved him the trouble.

‘False report as grass doth groweth.’

Truth becomes irate and tense, like any author whose work is under scrutiny.

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.

Queen Katherine always said, “Cromwell keeps his promises, for good or ill.”’

All I will say, my lord—beware of gratitude.’

You pick your way over the battlefield with prayers for the wounded and water for the dying.’

Lord Cromwell is the government, and the church as well. The ambassador said the king will flog him on to work till one day his legs go from under him, and he rolls in a ditch and dies.’

‘The king never does an unpleasant thing. Lord Cromwell does it for him.’

He thinks, the dead are crowding us out. Rather than not speak ill of them, how if we don’t speak of them at all? We don’t speak of them, we don’t think of them, we give their clothes to beggars and we burn their letters and their books?

‘With respect, my lord, love couldn’t conquer a gosling. It couldn’t knock a cripple down. It couldn’t beat an egg.’

He thinks, why must you bed on white linen? God gives you a whole realm for your pleasures: you would be safer in the park against a tree.

‘His clothes, his verses, his manhood? He must live with his shame now, and you must live with him. You will have to build him up again, as you can. You and the Seymours.’

You, or me, or Master Wyatt—who took the greater share in the work? I think it was you. We pricked out our little pattern, but you cut the cloth.’

She is like a starved child, he thinks. Offer her a morsel of attention and she feeds till she is sickened.

He thinks, when fire breaks out you run to the rescue with a bucket. But it’s not the smoke and flames that kill you, it’s the bricks and timbers that fly out when the chimney blows up.

Most of us do wrong, if we know it or not. Enquire into any man’s conduct, and I am sure some charge will lie.’

Anne is always in the room.

It is only one man’s opinion. But it is one more blow to our faith in our judgement. We did thus, and thus: we might have done less, and let guilty tongues speak for themselves.

If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.

But we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain.

The dead wander the lanes of the next life like strangers lost in Venice.

‘You’re as twisty as a skewer, Thomas. Where will you end up?’

“He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.”’

‘You went to your house and dreamed it, then it came to pass.’

One supposed his eyes were inward, his gaze trained on nothing: where nothing soon would be.

The cardinal, in his days as master of the realm, had spoken of God as if He were a distant policy adviser from whom he heard quarterly: gnomic in his pronouncements, sometimes forgetful, but worth a retainer on account of his experience. At times he sent Him special requests, which the less well-connected call prayers; and always, until the last months of his life, God fell over himself to make sure Tom Wolsey had what he wanted. But then he prayed, Make me humble; God said, Sir, your request comes too late.

In the golden age the earth yielded all we required, but now we must dig for it, quarry it, blast it, we must drive the world, we must gear and grind it, roll and hammer and pulp it.

Moderation in all things, nothing to excess (those two are the same, wisdom can be repetitious). Know yourself. Know your opportunity. Look ahead. Don’t try for the impossible. And Bias of Priene: pleistoi anthropoi kakoi, most men are bad.

Ambassador Chapuys, you notice, has not exactly said he is dead; he has only let him fall, as it were naturally, into the past tense.

‘Your person is not defective,’ she says. ‘At least, not so defective as your nature and your deeds.’

‘You are angry. Innocence is tranquil.’

Dorothea has rewritten his story. She has made him strange to himself.

Not prayer nor Bible verse, nor scholarship nor wit, nor grant under seal nor statute law can alter the fact of villain blood. 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.

looks more worn and gristly than ever, like a man who has chewed and digested himself.

He knows this is true. But he would prefer if there had been a special Adam and Eve, as forebears to the Howards.

‘Give a pike to some tosswit and he is more dangerous than the greatest general, because he has nothing to lose.’

But slaughter is their trade. Like butchers in the shambles, it is what they were reared for. Peace, to them, is just the interval between wars. Now the stuff for masques, for interludes, is swept away. It is no more time to dance. The perfumed paw picks up the sword. The lute falls silent. The drum begins to beat.

Love wants no more peace.