If the souls roasting in hell are aware of what’s happening on earth, Thomas Cromwell may find his torments eased for a bit. The Mirror and the Light, the final volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Henry VIII’s first minister and enforcer of the English Reformation, is in the shops on Monday, and it’s another cracker.

If the souls roasting in hell are aware of what’s happening on earth, Thomas Cromwell may find his torments eased for a bit. The Mirror and the Light, the final volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Henry VIII’s first minister and enforcer of the English Reformation, is in the shops on Monday, and it’s another cracker.

Cromwell would be highly gratified to see himself depicted as the ultimate Renaissance man – a scholar keen on taking up Hebrew, a practical genius who can’t see a fowl roasting on a spit without thinking up a mechanised version; a handy man with a knife; a soldier and self-made man; the omniscient king’s counsellor. Plus a committed Protestant whose first concern is to get the Bible in English into the hands of the ordinary man and whose second is to establish some sort of social service to replace that provided by the monks. Cromwell, has, it is fair to say, never featured in such an attractive light. He is perhaps the least likely pin-up in fiction.

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