I’ll be honest. I thought Hilary Mantel was never going to finish this trilogy. It’s been how many years since the last one was published?
I’m so glad she finally got around to finishing it, though, and the finale did not disappoint!
I had actually forgotten how much I enjoyed Mantel’s writing. I went back and reread my reviews of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies to try to remember where we left off, but it turns out I didn’t write about the plot in either of those reviews, just the writing.
One of the things I complained about in my previous reviews was that Mantel didn’t use quotation marks to differentiate dialogue from Cromwell’s inner monologue. This time around, I chose to listen to the audiobook, both for lack of time, and because I figured a good narrator would make it easier to tell both when there was dialogue and who was speaking. Ben Miles narrates the audiobooks, and apparently he played Cromwell in the stage productions of both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in London, so, yeah, he did a really good job. I highly recommend listening to this one on audio if you get the chance.
This book picks up right at the moment the headsman chops off Anne Boleyn’s head. Cromwell has a strong enough stomach to watch to the end, but his son, Gregory, has to look away and is incredulous when his father suggests getting some lunch.
When we’re reunited with Cromwell in this book, he is at the height of his power and influence with King Henry, but there are plenty of flashbacks to his childhood to remind the reader that this is a rags to riches story.
What’s strange is that one of the things that struck me most about Wolf Hall was the fact that other characters made comments about Cromwell looking like a killer, but Cromwell himself can’t remember killing anyone – although he’s not sure enough to say he has never killed anyone.
In this book we get a flashback of Cromwell as a boy killing another boy who was bullying him. He also talks about his life as a soldier and admits that killing is part of that life, so I guess that was one inconsistency Mantel missed.
With Anne dead, Henry loses no time in marrying Jane Seymour, who, of course, bears him a son and then promptly dies, leaving Cromwell to try and arrange yet another marriage for Henry.
It’s easier said than done, not only because of the usual diplomatic BS (who are our friends this week?) but also because Henry has now had 3 wives and they’re all dead, which does not bode well for wife #4. There’s a fair amount of talk around him marrying another Spanish princess, but we all know that’s not going to happen.
When I first heard about Anne of Cleves, I was told she wasn’t as pretty as her portrait had made her out to be, and when Henry saw her, he didn’t want her. Mantel tells a different version.
In this telling of the story, Anne is not beautiful, but pretty, but Henry has the stupid idea to go to their 1st meeting in disguise. He’s used to doing this at court where everyone knows him, recognizes him immediately, and plays along. But Anna has never met him before, and although she is warned that he is coming in disguise and she should act surprised, she is genuinely surprised when she finally recognizes him… and not in a good way.
She is apparently repulsed by his age and extra weight and Henry sees it on her face immediately, and that is the downfall of their relationship. Of course, Cromwell had strongly urged Henry to abandon the plan to go in disguise, but Henry wouldn’t hear it, and when it went horribly wrong, he blamed Cromwell for organizing the union in the first place.
That was the beginning of the end for Cromwell, and since almost all of the most powerful families of nobility were aligned against him, they seized their opportunity to turn the king against Cromwell… with the help of one of Cromwell’s own men, who betrays him.
At the very end of the book, Mantel has a kind of epilogue in which she briefly describes what happened to the other main characters. The audiobook concludes with a brief discussion between Ben Miles and Hilary Mantel, in which they discuss the book’s real-life inspiration, and the plays. It was interesting, but not quite the in-depth interview I for which I had been hoping.