“The dead do not negotiate”: Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light, and Britain’s obsession with history

ABSTRACT

Why do we remember the dead with such intensity in Britain, as if they were still among us? I argue that Hilary Mantel makes a critical intervention in this debate with her historical fictions Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020). Her novels are theoretical and political interventions that allow us to critically evaluate historiographic, heritage and commemorative practices in contemporary Britain. I argue that they demonstrate the harmful consequences of commemorations centred around the continuous revival of the dead, because this practice justifies injuries against and negligence of the living through an appeal to imagined ancestors, who cannot engage in compromise or change their minds. This mode of knowing the past results in social standstill and the perception of social and political change as a threat. Thinking through the characteristics of this historical epistemology with Martin Davies, Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche, I go on to argue that Hilary Mantel’s intervention exposes the violent consequences of such a mode of knowing the past and proposes a radical alternative: rather than negotiating with the dead, it reminds us to focus on the needs of the vulnerable living in the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical fiction
• neo-historical fiction
• Hilary Mantel
• history
• historicised world
• critical heritage studies

There is no lack of public memorialisation in contemporary Britain. The centenary of the First World War proved a particularly popular occasion for remembering the dead, and some of these commemorations were quite literally embodied. To memorialise the Battle of the Somme, a ‘volunteer army of non-professional performers’ (Higgins 2016) were enlisted by Turner-winning artist Jeremy Deller to participate in the performance We’re Here Because We’re Here. Dressed in uniforms, 1500 volunteers congregated at train stations and in public places all over Britain, handing out cards to passerbyers informing them of the fate of individual soldiers at the battle that claimed the lives of 19,240 men fighting in the British Army (Higgins 2016). Living bodies of non-professional actors were enlisted in the service of reviving the dead in an artwork partly funded by the British government.

Why do we remember the dead with such intensity in Britain, as if they were still among us? Heritage and history projects such as We’re Here Because We’re Here still seem to fulfil a ‘core function as a bedrock of mono-cultural nation-building projects’ (Lähdesmäki, Thomas, and Zhu 2019, 1), asking the dead to possess the bodies of the living to corroborate the central role of the First World War in British collective memory, but what are the psycho-cultural consequences of continuing to revive the dead to build and sustain a coherent sense of national self?

I argue that Hilary Mantel makes a critical intervention in this debate with her historical fictions Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020). Her novels are a theoretical and political intervention, as well as an instance of social analysis that allow us to critically evaluate historiographic, heritage and commemorative practices in contemporary Britain. Thinking through her intervention with the work of other theorists of history such as Martin Davies, Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche, I argue that Mantel’s novels demonstrate the harmful consequences of commemorations centred around the continuous revival of the dead. This practice justifies injuries against and negligence of the living through an appeal to imagined ancestors, who cannot engage in compromise or change their minds. Such a mode of knowing the past results in social standstill and the perception of social and political change as a threat: we look at the present and see only the graves, but are comforted by the fact that these are the graves of people we loved, and who loved us. In favour of caring for their graves, we elect to always remains in the graveyard, turning our gaze away from what lies beyond its walls.

Mantel’s intervention develops and specifies a critical approach to heritage, commemoration and history that is both urgent and timely. As Martin Davies argues, we live in a ‘historicised world’ (Davies 2006, 1), where a consciousness of the past takes priority over the immediate experience of the living in the present.

But wherever history stands, it stands in the way of experience. […] It keeps attempting to take precedence over the one, real, unprecedented issue: each person’s own encounter with the world in which all other persons live. (Davies 2006, 247)

In such a society, the present becomes defined through history, through how the present came to be rather than through the people who live in it, as Martin Davies argues. The present is turned into no more than a ‘historical reproduction’ (Davies 2006, 230) – into the consequence of the past and no more.

Davies’s intervention makes up part of a well-established tradition in modern criticism of the way past and present interact, and to what ends we write histories. Walter Benjamin, while on the run from Nazi persecution, warns us against tradition – what we would refer to as history – in his Über den Begriff der Geschichte in 1940 and points out how history may prop up fascism (first published in English as ‘On the Concept of History’ in 1968):

Die Gefahr droht sowohl dem Bestand der Tradition wie ihren Empfängern. Für beide ist sie ein und dieselbe: sich zum Werkzeug der herrschenden Klasse herzugeben. In jeder Epoche muß [sic] versucht werden, die Überlieferung von neuem dem Konformismus abzugewinnen, der im Begriff steht, sie zu überwältigen. (Benjamin 2010: 95–96)

Both the endurance of the tradition and its recipient are facing the same danger: to become a tool of the ruling class. Every generation must once again try to wrestle tradition [Überlieferung] from the conformity that is always just about to overwhelm it.¹

What Benjamin argues here is that a conformist past is an instrument of totalitarian power regimes. Such regimes require the status quo to be rooted in history, to be the norm inevitably resulting from the past and the complicity of the ruled in this narrative (Benjamin 2010: 97–98).

The connection between totalitarianism, history and social standstill inflects the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche on the ‘antiquarian past’, that historical consciousness which ‘preserves and reveres’ (Nietzsche 2011 (1873–1876]: 77), and necessarily ‘undervalues that which is becoming because it has no instinct for divining it […]. Thus it hinders any firm resolve to attempt something new’ (Nietzsche 2011 (1873–1876]: 77). Benjamin specifies that the only change permitted is a change in fashions, a pursuit which ‘takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands’ (Benjamin 1968, 7), keeping existing power regimes intact and unchallenged. In other words, change is allowed to take place only insofar as it does not pose a challenge to power. Fashions may change, but the substance of the existing social order must remain intact.

In line with Benjamin, Davies is critical of a ‘prevalence of historical consciousness’ (Davies 2006, 230) because he argues that it functions as a ‘social anaesthetic’ (Davies 2006, 8). ‘Identifying with what was, history ultimately enforces public acquiescence in what is’ (Davies 2006, 8), he argues. While Davies conceives of history as a global currency, and of the historical epistemology he describes as one that would be damaging everywhere,² I argue that Mantel’s work allows us to interrogate a specific twenty-first-century British inflection of ‘antiquarian’ historical consciousness that promotes a ‘grand illusion’ (Davies 2006, 247), namely the idea that the ‘totality of dead humanity means more than its living representatives’ (Davies 2006, 247)). The underlying logic of historics uses the past to show that the present is plausible, and in fact the only plausible result of past developments (Davies 2006, 3), and to say otherwise would dishonour the dead. This in turn stifles the social imagination and the political will for change. The future, this mode assures us, may look grim, but at least it will be familiar, and we will not have to change. Perhaps all we have to look at are ruins, but at least they are ruins of a building we used to know.

Mantel has crucial insights to offer into this critical tradition. Her work allows us to understand the psycho-cultural consequences of the specific inflection of antiquarian historical consciousness that has taken shape in contemporary Britain: a mode that mobilises the dead in order to prop up the status quo and cast political and social change as a threat to our survival.

1. ‘But your job as a novelist, is not to be an inferior sort of historian’: Hilary Mantel as a theorist of history

The work of Hilary Mantel has been the subject of extensive literary criticism regarding their genre and aesthetics (Burkinshaw et al. 2020; Fletcher 2017; Funk 2020; Johnston 2017; Knox 2010) as well as in relation to trauma studies, hauntings and the consequences on individual psyches of our relationship with the past (Arnold 2020; Class 2018; Pollard 2019). Her Cromwell novels are considered key novels in British literary history since the 1980s (de Groot 2018), and their success led to a critical re-evaluation of her role as one of the most important novelists of twenty-first-century British literary fiction (Bavidge 2018; de Groot 2016, 22; Pollard and Carpenter 2018b).

However, I argue that her contributions to the theory of history and critical heritage studies remain underexamined, with some notable exceptions, such as Matthew Hart’s study on Wolf Hall as redefining national history on international terms, reconfiguring history as an international process (Hart 2020), or Susan Strehle’s study of Mantel’s work in the context of postcolonial historiography (Strehle 2020), as well as Harvatt’s convincing argument on Mantel’s role in shifting cultural memories of the past (Harvatt 2024, 80) and Saxton’s demonstration of Mantel’s nuance and self-reflexivity in incorporating primary historical sources (Saxton 2024, 65). There have been systematic attempts to correct for this oversight, for example in Richard Cohen’s analysis of Hilary Mantel and other novelists as ‘past masters’ (Cohen [2022] 2023, 256, 288–289) and through Eileen Pollard’s and Ginette Carpenter’s rigorous effort to produce more ‘critical material interpreting the rich and varied content of her work’ (Pollard and Carpenter 2018b) in Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Pollard and Carpenter 2018a), but the link between the emerging field of critical heritage studies and Mantel’s work in particular deserves closer attention, one that goes beyond considerations of ‘historiography […] [as] a spectrum, on which the historical novel has a place’ (Harvatt 2024, 82) and interrogates the specifically political dimension of history-making.

One example of such a study is Siobhan O’Connor’s contribution to Pollard’s and Carpenter’s collection, focusing on Mantel’s interventions on national history, memory and heritage (O’Connor 2018). Read in connection with Saxton, Harvatt and Cohen, we see the emergence of a systematic effort to understand Mantel’s work in the context of historiography, power and critical heritage studies, pointing to the crucial critical work that historical novels and historical novelists do, whose real job it is, after all, ‘not to be an inferior sort of historian’ (Mantel 2023, 270). O’Connor’s contribution demonstrates that Mantel was aware of and emphatically attempting to intervene in critical debates around nationhood, power and history, because ‘those who control the national memory are able “to say what England is, her scope and boundaries”’ (Mantel 2009: 338 in O’Connor 2018, 29; see also Saxton 2024, 55). Echoing arguments made by Davies, Benjamin and myself, O’Connor demonstrates that in Mantel’s work, ‘memories are reworked as convenient national stories that rationalize present structures’ where ‘History is a political creation whose purpose is to justify the way things are’ (O’Connor 2018, 28–29). In O’Connor’s analysis, history is a tool that upholds the status quo, and in line with Benjamin, she argues that this status quo is upheld precisely to prop up those already in power: ‘both Tudor and contemporary narratives have decontextualized and de-democratized the past: where the story of global shifts has been nationally inflected to consolidate minority control’ (O’Connor 2018, 41). Mantel’s work demonstrates, according to O’Connor, how history is continually reshaped according to the designs and desires of the powerful. It is not (only) a reflection on Tudor politics, or even on present-day historiography; it is, most importantly, a reflection on the present-day politics of history.

In line with O’Connor, I argue that Mantel’s work must be read as both a reflection on and criticism of social and political power structures, and the use of history as a coercive power regime in the present; coercive because it incarcerates us in a mode of thinking that casts change as implausible and the present as an inescapable status quo. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, we are always made to look backwards, even as we propelled forward into an uncertain future (Benjamin 1968, 5). This propulsion (referred to as ‘progress’ by Benjamin) hurls us forward in time without the ability to look ahead, preserving the ruins of the past to blind us to transformations in the social, political and natural world. Hilary Mantel’s novels function as crucial critical interventions because they demonstrate the collective, and collectively harmful, psycho-cultural consequences of this mode of knowing the past.

2. Questioning the authority of the dead: Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (2020)

As Walter Benjamin points out, the ruling class has a vested interest in social standstill because it upholds their privileges in the status quo (Benjamin 1968, 97–98), and Martin Davies illustrates how historical consciousness or epistemologies and their resulting sense of stability may serve as a tool to achieve this end (Davies 2010: 46pp.), but neither of them writes on the immense appeal that this power regime seems to hold for the individuals and communities incarcerated in it and whose complicity is required in upholding it. As Raphael Samuel points out in Theatres of Memory,

history as a mass activity – or at any rate as a pastime – has possibly never had more followers than it does today, when the spectacle of the past excites the kind of attention which earlier epochs attached to the new. (Samuel 2012, 26)

An extensive body of research in history and heritage studies has pointed and continues to point out the evident appeal of looking at the past (Wesseling 1999, 473–474; de Groot 2008, 43; 63; Lowenthal 2015: 117pp.). It makes loss appear purposeful and backwardness attain a sense of ‘glamour’ (Samuel 2012, 12). David Lowenthal explores the persuasive psychological and psycho-cultural power of a focus on the past in his seminal study The Past is a Foreign Country: ‘Personal continuity is psychically rewarding, providing certitude and agency; social continuity extends mortal lives into the communal past and future’ (Lowenthal 2015, 117). In other words, the appeal of such a historical epistemology is that it promises immortality – if not to the individual, then to the collective.

While Lowenthal also explores the dangers of constructing a ‘stifling past’ (Lowenthal 2015, 132), a past ‘too revered’ (Lowenthal 2015, 133) that can only ‘inhibit change, embargo progress, dampen optimism, stifle creativity’ (Lowenthal 2015, 133), he seems to accept that the past is a natural source of legitimacy for groups and individuals alike (Lowenthal 2015, 144), feeding into the coercive historical epistemology described by Martin Davies and reinforcing history as a mode of self-incarceration.

If Benjamin and Davies challenge the epistemology but do not consider its appeal, while Samuel and Lowenthal explore its appeal but do not propose alternatives, I argue that Mantel synthesises these concerns in her trilogy of historical novels on Thomas Cromwell set in the Tudor period, considered one of the defining historical periods of the British nation (O’Connor 2020, 180–181). Particularly in The Mirror and the Light, her last novel, she stages the practical impact of a coercive historical epistemology focused on the dead on the living and our collective psyche in the present. I argue that this demonstration produces radical insights into the harmful individual, social and political consequences of a mode of knowing the past that makes of memory a ‘ditch in which we drown’ (McGuire 2020, 286), puts the dead in charge and conceives of the past as a source of security.

Mantel’s twice-Booker winning trilogy consists of Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020) and centres on the life of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to King Henry VIII. In The Mirror and the Light, Thomas Cromwell goes to his death on the scaffold. The novel makes the powerful case that his downfall is brought about by an excessive, obsessive exaltation of the authority of ancestors and command of the dead by Cromwell and his compatriots reminiscent of the early twenty-first-century historics diagnosed by Davies.

From the start, The Mirror and the Light delves deeply into the ways that the dead may coerce the living, how they may even come to harm them physically and emotionally. Thomas Cromwell, who has orchestrated the execution of Anne Boleyn, the former Queen, thinks that ‘she may be dead, […] but she can still ruin me’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 8). Throughout the novel, the dead retain an immense presence in the mind of the living, even in Cromwell’s, who initially considers himself free of ghosts. Since he is of low birth, Cromwell thinks, he does not have to account for the ghosts of his biological or imagined ancestors, such as his father Walter:

Ghosts don’t oppress the Cromwells. Walter does not rise by night, ale pot in hand, chisel in his belt, roistering by the wharves and showing his bruised knuckles to Putney. I don’t have a history, only a past. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 102)

This distinction between an oppressive history made up of ancestors and a liberating past consisting of lived experience is striking. It implies that history is something that makes demands of the living, demands purportedly made by unforgiving, unmoving dead that cannot be bargained with, whereas lived experience does not make those same demands, echoing Davies’s central arguments.

However, it is crucial to note that it is the living who turn to the dead in The Mirror and the Light, not the dead that haunt the living. King Henry feels this acutely when he reports that he is still haunted by the ghost of his brother Arthur, whose widow he married after his death:

Cranmer and I believed we had vanquished that spectre: in one winter’s night of persuasion and prayer, refined Arthur into thin air. But it seems Henry withheld something. We took him for the helpless victim of a spirit, rudely appearing. We did not know his shame fetched it. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 328)

We learn here that it is the living that fetch the dead, not the dead that come to the living. Henry’s shame summons the ghost of his brother, conjuring up a hostile ancestor in the king’s mind. As Harvatt points out, the ‘unreliability and subjectivity of memory is […] used to highlight further the subjective nature of history and the sources we too easily equate with the “past”’ (Harvatt 2024, 79), but memory here does more than that: it creates a coercive relationship with his ancestors which is characterised by a mode of obligation, a debt owed, a sense of guilt. ‘He thinks he killed him’, the queen says of the king, referring to his brother, ‘[he] killed him with envy – with wishing against him’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 328). I argue that the novel critically explores the implications of such a relationship, first with regard to the subject or self, then to the Other and in a third step to society at large.

To illustrate the implications for the self, it is instructive to look at one of the central conflicts of the novel: Cromwell’s struggle with the coercive power regime of a historicised world comes to a head in the case of a young person that Cromwell wishes to protect. He positions himself as the champion of Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragorn and Henry. He wishes to reconcile her with her father as well as place her in a position to one day ascend to the throne. Cromwell claims to have been prompted into caring for her when he met her as a young girl and was confronted with her vulnerability:

He battled that day for the sick, narrow body, and he won. […] He steadied her: he remembers her tiny bones, her weightless body quivering, her forehead sheened with sweat. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 120–121)

This passage underlines the frailty of the living, the care they require to flourish. Cromwell thinks of himself as a caretaker, a guardian entrusted with protecting the frail existence of Mary: ‘Set me to guard something, and I will’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 159). He frames Mary as a thing rather than a person, but Mary seems unaware of this and does not perceive his help as objectifying; on the contrary, she is ‘astonished and grateful’ when she receives Cromwell’s help, and keeps looking to him as a possible protector: ‘until the interview was concluded and he bowed himself out of the room, her eyes followed him everywhere he moved’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 121).

Conflicting with Cromwell’s wish to protect Mary is a promise she gave to her dead mother, an oath which forbids a reconciliation with her father. In her case, too, a history made up of noble ancestry, of her royal lineage, prevents her from improving her circumstances. While still alive, her mother makes this explicit: When her daughter suffers, a ‘spasm of pain’ going through her (Mantel [2020] 2021): 120), her mother speaks to her in Castilian to remind her that ‘You are a daughter of Spain. Stand up’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 120). Rest is denied the living, vulnerable girl, because of the sense that justice needs to be done to her noble history.

In a conversation with Thomas Cromwell, the French ambassador Chapuys suggests that this hold the dead have on the living is particularly pernicious: ‘Vows to the living may be set aside, with their permission. But the dead do not negotiate’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 124). While Chapuy is a character prone to such comments, and his comments are used by Mantel as meta-fictional elements to comment on the unreliability even of primary historical sources (Harvatt 2024, 78; Saxton 2024, 66), Cromwell himself evidently shares his assessment. When Mary finally relents and agrees to compromise, going against the vow given to her mother, what Cromwell thinks is: ‘the living beat the dead’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 129). In his view, Mary has chosen her lived experience of vulnerability over the history of royal ancestors imagined for her by her mother.

The case of Mary complicates the distinction between history and the past, because her identity as a princess of England is inextricably intertwined with an imagined noble lineage. I argue that what Mantel stages here is crucially a conflict between an obligation to the dead, to history and the responsibility to the precarious living in the present, who require care to survive. In the historicised world of The Mirror and the Light, where ancestry takes precedence, Mary believes her priority should be the oath she has made to her dead mother, not the immediate experience of her isolated, unhappy and physically harmful existence.

Cromwell and Chapuys frame this as a conflict between the ability to compromise – a skill possessed only by the precarious living with vulnerable bodies – and the total demands made by the dead. In a historicised world, the novel argues, the living turn to the dead to justify negligent actions against the living. In Mary’s case, this is an action against herself: She increases her precarity and ignores her vulnerability and mortality to keep a promise to her dead mother. This negation of her vulnerability nearly costs her her life and does considerable physical and mental damage to herself.

In the case of Cromwell himself, however, the harm he does is to others. Whilst Cromwell claims that he is free of the kind of oppressive history created by noble ancestors, there is a dead man to whom he turns to justify his violent actions, a history he constructs to himself: his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, who dies in Wolf Hall (2009) after Henry abandons him. Cromwell considers himself responsible for Wolsey’s death, or at least considers himself to have failed in his care towards his mentor:

He wonders, can you help seeing ghosts? Don’t they just turn up and make you see them? When people raise the cardinal’s name, he asks himself: if I had been with him in the north, would he have succumbed – to poison, to fear, to whatever? Some say it was self-slaughter. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 174)

Just like Henry, Cromwell feels shame. He has failed in his care for Wolsey, so he sees Wolsey’s ghost when his name is mentioned. His guilt conjures Wolsey’s ghost and puts Cromwell into a mode of obligation to a dead man. This sense of obligation leads him to project his sense of guilt onto others, and he embarks on a killing spree to execute Wolsey’s enemies, one by one, framing them as guilty of crimes that are punishable by death.

This motivation is transparent to others even while Cromwell denies it: ‘“People have been talking of the cardinal. They say, look at what Cromwell has wreaked, in two years, on Wolsey’s enemies. Thomas More is dead. Anne the queen is dead … ”’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 22). Cromwell pursues the enemies of his mentor, even the king himself:

He, Cromwell, moves back towards his master, the knife in his grip. He stands in the doorway, words on his lips: Majesty, I find I have this knife in my hand, though it belongs to you. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 223)

The thought of delivering a just revenge allows Cromwell to break and bend social norms, even to back away from the king with his back turned, ‘assured as a man in his own house, turning from someone in mid-conversation, quitting the room and leaving the door open’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 223). It prompts him to drive numerous people, some of whom he knows to be innocent, to the executioner’s block.

A crucial insight is produced in Cromwell’s relentless revenge. In taking the Cardinal’s side, Cromwell considers himself to be in the right. The history he constructs legitimises his actions. It is this which allows him to seek the death of others while feeling justified in doing so. When he speaks to Wolsey’s daughter, he thinks:

Don’t speak to me of innocence […]. I pulled down certain men who insulted your father, as an example to others – call them innocent, if your definition stretches. […] I made each one a bridegroom. I married them to crimes they had barely imagined, and walked them to their wedding breakfast with the headsman. […] I thought Mark is a feeble child, I will go down and free him, but then I thought, no, it is his turn to suffer. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 287)

In this passage, The Mirror and the Light demonstrates how an imagined obligation to the dead creates a sense of righteousness that justifies violence against the living. Cromwell knows that the men he led to their execution are innocent of the crimes they were accused of, he knows that one of them was a child who required protection. Through imagining an obligation to Wolsey to assuage his guilt, through imagining an invented ancestor and creating a history for himself, he justifies the need to make them suffer and indeed turns their death into an exigency.

The Mirror and the Light argues that a relationship of obligation to dead ancestors is harmful to the living, both the self and the Other. In a third step, it takes this argument further, applying it to society at large and demonstrating how tenuous it is to build history on the purported demands made by the unforgiving dead, to build history as a temple to the righteous and construct a narrative that places the collective self on the right side of history.

The fragile nature of such a history is demonstrated through an encounter between Cromwell and Dorothea, Wolsey’s daughter. During this encounter, the temple of his history collapses under Cromwell’s feet when he discovers that Wolsey’s daughter considers him a traitor (Mantel [2020] 2021, 286). Upon his return home, Cromwell realises that Dorothea has ‘rewritten his story. She has made him strange to himself. “Who could have told her I betrayed her father – except her father himself?”’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 290) A protégé assures him that the Cardinal knew of Cromwell’s devotion, but he thinks: ‘We must hope so. You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 291).

This is the rub that The Mirror and the Light is concerned with: The dead do not negotiate. They cannot relent or compromise. If we mobilise them as a justification for our actions, they incarcerate and coerce us, they anaesthetise the self against change, against vulnerability and precarity. Dorothea deprives Cromwell of his anaesthetic. He cries, even though he has not cried since the death of Wolsey (Mantel [2020] 2021, 288). He realises his care for the dead does not supplant the care he could have provided the living, and dying, Cardinal. ‘“I should have gone up to Yorkshire with him. I should have been with him when he died. I should not have let the king get in my way”’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 290).

The history Cromwell has built for himself – the ancestor of choice he created in Wolsey – placed him in a coercive, restrictive relationship with the memory of a dead man, but it also inoculated him against the recognition of the precarity and vulnerability he shares with other living beings. When this building crumbles, he is faced both with his own mortality and that of others, and he is overwhelmed by it: ‘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’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 293). Cromwell’s focus on death grows stronger, as he begins living towards death in a Heideggerian sense. He remembers going to war in Italy through an Italian song,

‘Io non trovo arma forte\Che vetar possa morte … \Which weapon is strong enough, to shield me from death? He leafs through the manuscript, which is illuminated with larkspur, vine leaves and leaping hares. ’I am the tree the wind casts down, because it has no roots … ’ And Scaramella goes to war, boot and buckle, lance and shield”. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 319)

Cromwell has known loss, bereft of his wife and daughters, but it is Dorothea, her crumbling of his history, that delivers the fatal blow: ‘Five wounds. Wife. Children. Master. Dorothea with her needle, straight between his ribs’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 319–320). Crucially, it is not the loss itself that shakes Cromwell to his core but the loss of a sense of righteousness, of the conviction that he is in the right and on the right side of history. As Laura Saxton points out, the characters in Mantel’s novels prefer ‘to protect and inflate the accomplishments of their ancestors […]. Transgressions are, in turn, forgotten’ (Saxton 2024, 55). The Mirror and the Light suggests that this mnemonic action is essential to upholding a stable sense of the self in this fictional England. With little experience in the practice of vulnerability, Cromwell loses all sense of himself:

His dreams are oppressive: he finds himself at a landing stage, the opposite bank out of view. The river widening, nothing but the grey still water stretching away, polished pewter reflecting a silver sky: no bank in view because there is no bank, because the water has become eternity, because his flesh is dissolved in it: because his stories merge, all memories flatten to one. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 349)

In his dreams, he loses his sense of bodily integrity, his being in time and space. This loss is unbearable in that it deprives him of a future. Cromwell realises he needs to regain a vision of the future, ‘a space in which he can watch the future shaping itself, as dusk steals over the river and the park, smudges the forms of ancient trees’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 504), but living as he does within the static historical consciousness of the royal court, with everyone waiting for a prince to take his father’s place and continue the realm, Cromwell can only find ‘familiarity in a familiar form’, in the terms of Martin Davies (Davies 2006, 32).

Disillusioned and decentred from a position of righteousness provided by a dead ancestor, Cromwell realises that the future he has worked towards seems stale and undesirable because it takes exactly the same shape as history: ‘Why does the future feel so much like the past, the uncanny clammy touch of it, the rustle of bridal sheet or shroud, the crackle of fire in a shuttered room?’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 505) As Cromwell loses all sense of a glorious or righteous history, he realises that the presence of the dead, conjured by the living, is to blame: ‘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?’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 202)

Through Cromwell’s loss of an imagined ancestor, The Mirror and Light considers the implications of a coercive relationship with the dead for the whole of society rather than the individual. The novel suggests that Cromwell’s loss weighs particularly heavily in England, where ancestry takes precedence. He thinks, ‘[y]oung men, and Riche is young enough, do not understand that to this very day, nothing in this kingdom counts so much as how your forefathers behaved on the field at Bosworth’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 340). Cromwell lives in a society where the actions of ancestors matter, matter in fact above all else – male, noble ancestors on the battlefield. If they did not behave well, one keeps quiet about it (Saxton 2024, 55).

In a world where the dead are afforded such power, they do not help in forging new ways of being in the world, Henry agrees: ‘If the dead can see us, be sure they do not like the world to change from what they knew. Nor do they like their power disrespected’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 364). However, it is not the dead who shirk from change, but the living. Instead of focusing on the future or their actions in the present, Cromwell and Henry imagine ancestors they are beholden to, a dead person to do right by. So do their fellow Englishmen: ‘Norfolk’s father’, Henry goes on to say, ‘took credit for Flodden, but in Durham they credit St Cuthbert with the victory. They march behind his banners now’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 364).

In spite of this realisation Henry does not learn to ‘bury the dead’, Cromwell thinks, and instead puts their corpses on display (Mantel [2020] 2021, 452). Henry cannot entertain any alternative to the dominant mode of knowing the past, present and future. He knows it only through his ancestors, through the history he has built for himself. It is him who refuses to change.

If someone does not have noble ancestors, like Cromwell, he must choose one, find a master such as the cardinal or the king and become servant to another to gain a history: someone to have to do right by. History in The Mirror and the Light, as well as a certain political mode of historical consciousness in contemporary Britain, is about being in the right.

As such, Mantel’s intervention expands upon and specifies Martin Davies’s thoughts on coercive and security-based historical epistemologies in twenty-first-century Britain. The Mirror and the Light suggests that history functions as a social anaesthetic not only because it insists that there is nothing new in the world, only familiarity, but because it insists that the person in the present is, and always has been, in the right – on the right side of history. Not only can no alternative future be conceived of, it must not be conceived of. Allowing change would be an admission of having been in the wrong. In an obsessive, coercive relationship with the past, any alternative relationship outside of obligations, such as doubt or rejection, would destabilise the self and take from them a vital sense of security and righteousness in the world.

This is what happens to Thomas Cromwell. As he realises he might have done wrong by Wolsey, he recalls other crimes he committed: ‘He saw a woman forced, and he said and did nothing. He saw a man’s eye put out of their sockets, because he had witnessed what he should not’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 350). Mantel suggests that violence against the vulnerable is accepted, even justified in a society where ancestry matters more than anything else.

3. History as insecurity: consequences of and alternatives to a security-based use of the past

Throughout Mantel’s novel, the reader may catch glimpses of an alternative way of being in the world: one in which history is the past rather than a coercive, narcotic epistemology. Cromwell begins to envision a future unrelated to his masters, imagined or biological ancestors: ‘I’ll have Launde for myself, when its surrender comes. I’ll build a house, and live there when I’m old, far from the court and council. It’s time I had something I want’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 439). At the same time, symbols begin to lose their meaning: ‘[The rebels] have no common bound but their banner, and what is it? Painted cloth’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 368).

Cromwell finds alternative historical epistemologies especially in his encounters with alienised and Othered people on the outside of the patriarchal national community. As his daughter Jenneke comes to visit from Antwerp, where she grew up, and spots the paintings of English kings in his house, she asks who they are and wonders at their number.

You recall so many?

He laughs. ‘They are long gone. We have invented them’.

Why?

As a reminder that men become dust, but the realm is continued.

You like to think about old days?

‘I suppose I do’. I prefer common history, he thinks: in my own life and times, certain themes must be elided. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 400)

His thoughts reveal the comfort offered by ancestry, princes, being part of a communal history, however coercive it might be. This history enables Cromwell not to have to reckon with his personal past and deeds.

Jenneke, having grown up outside of England, does not derive the same support from these invented ancestors. She seems less concerned with the dead and more interested in the living, especially at the moment of their greatest vulnerability. When Cromwell talks to her about the execution of the English printer Tyndale in Antwerp, who made a translation of the bible into English that Henry refuses to authorise, he says:

‘I have heard he was not dead when the fire reached him. That he spoke from the flames. He said, ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes’.

She says, ‘He spoke nothing. How could he speak? He was choked. He stirred and moved and cried with the pain’. She is angry. ‘Who is King Henry, to occupy his last thought? And what is England – except the realm that turned its back on him?” (Mantel [2020] 2021, 431)

Jenneke refuses the centring of England and English history at the final moments of a man’s death and argues instead that the man was burned because of the English king.

The Mirror and the Light casts the question of coercive historical epistemologies as a gendered issue, because it presents female characters as the ones who provide alternatives. They prioritise mortal bodies over dead ancestors, suggesting that those who have fewer powers and little authority do not require history and the dead as coercive instruments. Elizabeth Seymour says to Cromwell about the dead queen Jane that

[t]hey will always make ballads about her […]. And the king will give her a magnificent tomb, he says, in which he may lie with her in time to come. But I would rather be alive […] than have a great name: would not you, Lord Cromwell? (Mantel [2020] 2021, 520)

Security emerges here as a gendered concept. While male characters like Thomas Cromwell reach into the past for stability and stasis to create a sense of security in the present and uphold their privileges while remaining blinded to them, characters like Elizabeth Seymour seem to conceive of security as something that is constantly at risk in the present, not in the past.

She shares this conviction with Gertrude Courtenay, whom Cromwell asks to confess to any knowledge she might have about Thomas More or Bishop Fisher, to ‘ease her soul’, and who replies simply: ‘Why? They are dead’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 638). In spite of the execution of her husband and her imprisonment, Courtenay remains dedicated to her living self and understands that she is a physical body moving through time: ‘“A woman has her own soul to save”, Gertrude says. “Her husband will not do it for her”’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 636). This gendered dimension of Mantel’s criticism is particularly striking because Mantel is a female novelist, and female academics are driving sustained research into her writing; as Diana Wallace has noted, women have used historical fictions to write female and feminised experiences back into history (Wallace 2005: 3).

Unlike the women he is surrounded with, Cromwell continues to disintegrate and lose all sense of himself as a mortal, vulnerable body:

What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean … ? […] If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 617)

Although he has been disillusioned by Dorothea, Cromwell still seems unable to let go of his invented ancestor. Instead of retreating to Launde and retiring with a degree of happiness, he pursues his career and quest for revenge, even as he is losing the favour of the king. Henry suspects that his persistence is due to Wolsey’s death:

Henry says, ‘You know, I think you have never forgiven me. For parting with Wolsey’.

Parting with him? Christ in Heaven.

‘I think you blame me for his death’. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 715)

Cromwell does not deny it, and Henry confesses to missing the cardinal, even says he prefers him to Cromwell. Cromwell thinks, ‘The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 717).

Here The Mirror and the Light demonstrates most presciently why a coercive relationship with the dead is so attractive, enticing, even comfortable for the living. Since the dead cannot change their minds, they cannot abandon the living self. The self may hold onto the memory of any dead they choose, justify any action, and there is nothing the dead may do to prevent them. Far from the living having no other choice but to obey the dead and turn to them for legitimacy, as David Lowenthal and others have suggested, it is the dead who have no choice in how they are used by the living.

This mode of knowing the past provides, to each individual as well as a society as a whole, a strong sense of selfhood, legitimacy and a security that inoculates them against the needs of the vulnerable and the marginalised in the present. I suggest that in psycho-cultural terms this mode of knowing the past replaces the ethical obligation between living self and living Other, I and you, with a static relationship between living self and dead Other, I and They. A dynamic and fraught ethical process is replaced with a social, self-serving stasis that results in a secure yet coercive sense of selfhood and belonging as described by Martin Davies. It produces social standstill and justifies violent action.

The Mirror and the Light reveals and critiques the psycho-cultural effects of this self-serving security-based historical epistemology. Throughout the novel, Mantel suggests that the sense of security created by it is false, proving fatal both to the self and the Other. A long line of ancestors merely produces an illusion of immortality, eternity and invincibility, thus blinding the self to its own vulnerability, precarity and mortality and justifying violence against the self and the Other.

Cromwell’s end demonstrates the consequences of such an illusion. He persists in his crusade and is eventually sentenced to death. Once he becomes aware of his nearing death, he realises he is alone in his vulnerable body and finds himself unused to its precarity: ‘His throat is dry. His heart is shaking. His body knows, and his head is catching up’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 804). At this crucial moment, he thinks not of history but of his past: ‘He thinks, my father Walter would not have left his knife at home. If my father were here, I would not be afraid. But the enemy would’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 805). His past replaces his history as he conjures up a protector for his vulnerable and mortal body.

Up until the moment of his death, his past continues to replace history:

‘He is face to face with the executioner. […] He can smell drink on the man’s breath. Not a good start. He can imagine Walter beside him, ‘Christ alive, who sold you this axe? They saw you coming! Here, give it to my boy Tom. He’ll put an edge on it.’ (Mantel [2020] 2021, 874)

As Cromwell begins to think of himself as a child and continues to imagine his father, the past takes precedence over history, albeit not in an unambiguously comforting manner, since Cromwell is prompted to conjure the presence of his alcoholic father after smelling the drink on the executioner’s breath.

Notwithstanding this ambiguity, The Mirror and the Light suggests that at the moment of death, at the starkest apprehension of the self’s vulnerability and mortality, history ceases to matter. Ancestors are no longer the company of choice for Cromwell in his final moments. He imagines personal memories from the past instead, unique to him as an individual. History no longer matters. What matters is the past, what matters is lived experience:

He is an eel, he is a worm on a hook, his strength has ebbed and leaked away beneath him and it seems a long time ago now that he gave his permission to be dead; no one has told his heart, and he feels it writhe in his chest, trying to beat. (Mantel [2020] 2021, 875)

4. The politics of history: Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy as a radical political intervention

The Mirror and the Light is a crucial piece of reflection on historiography and history-making and the way in which history has been normalized both as a social anesthetic and a source of moral justification. This latter point is crucial, and it significantly expands the arguments made by Davies, Benjamin and others. Davies criticises a dominant historical epistemology because it leads to self-incarceration, trapping the individual in a reality where it is impossible to conceive of change. A careful reading of The Mirror and the Light reveals that the consequences of the security-based historical epistemology are even more serious than that. While the self ends up incarcerated, the Other ends up killed, and their death is considered righteous, even exigent.

The Mirror and the Light reveals that the ultimate consequence of a security-based historical epistemology is not standstill, it is violence, because violence is made to appear natural, even virtuous, certainly permissible if used to uphold the illusion of standstill, if used to keep our backs turned to the future and our faces towards the past. The dead are mobilised to justify harming, injuring, degrading and ultimately killing the living whose vulnerability is ignored or denied, a denial which is made to appear virtuous.

It is against this virtuous denial that The Mirror and the Light makes its radical intervention. I argue that the progressive potential of The Mirror and the Light comes to the fore at the moment when the historical body of Thomas Cromwell is put to death. It is through the killing of the historical body that a more radical mode of knowing the past is revealed: history is revived in its vulnerable and mortal form in the historical novel, only to be sent to its death, and the reader made to witness the moment of death that paradoxically comes to serve as a reminder of the mortality and vulnerability of the living self and Other in the present. By emphasising the mortality of the historical body, the novel presents a radical challenge to the dominance of the dead in the present and unmasks the purportedly virtuous denial of the vulnerability of the living. Instead of reviving soldiers from the First World War, of forcing them to inhabit the bodies of the living, Mantel kills Cromwell dead, taking readers to his inevitable end, reminding us that this is ‘where we all live, one inch on heartbeat, from extinction. It’s not a few seconds we spend there, it’s our whole lives’ (Mantel 2023, 282).

If the COVID pandemic is any indication, where millions of people in Britain and all over the world went into lockdowns to protect those most vulnerable, then people are aware that we live precarious lives and must protect others. I argue not that Mantel’s intervention is a plea made to individual readers, but that it challenges a stale forms of historical knowledge production and anaesthetising modes of thinking about history, society and the past. It drives home a radical point about history: ‘Dead strangers […] did not live and die so that we could draw lessons from them’ (Mantel 2017). History is not a matter of morality, The Mirror and the Light suggests. It is a skill, to paraphrase Hilary Mantel (Mantel 2017): the skill to recognise that the mortality of the living weighs heavier than the bones of the dead.

In her killing of the historical body, Hilary Mantel raises a crucial question: Why commemorate the dead in the public sphere, and how should we do so? What do we want history to do for us? Her work does not suggest that grief should not be an important part of the lives of individuals or that the wish to reconnect with deceased family members is to be viewed critically. What her work proposes is that the dead must no longer be used to provide legitimacy for violent and oppressive actions in the present.

All the same, there is a paradox in rejecting the dominance of the past even while representing it, a paradox that cannot be resolved. All realist fictions participate to some degree in both the subversion and corroboration of existing epistemologies, and neo-historical novels such as The Mirror and the Light ‘recognise and accept the challenges of representing the past accurately, but remain committed to trying to do so’ (Harvatt 2024, 79). Aware of this paradox, The Mirror and the Light chooses to participate in the attempts of representation, allowing the novel to serve as a strident political and social intervention. By drawing our attention to the shared vulnerability of the living, it may not be turning our gazes towards the future, but it is showing us that we have our faces turned towards the past, where all we get to see are ruins.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Lehnen

Christine Lehnen is a lecturer at the University of Exeter. Her upcoming monograph is entitled Historical Fictions in the Twenty-First Century: Grievable Bodies and Marginalised Histories (Routledge, 2026). She is a board member of the Historical Fictions Research Network.

Notes

1. All translations are the author’s.

2. I thank the peer reviewers for bringing this to my attention and allowing me to discuss this point in greater detail. I would like to thank both reviewers for their thoughtful and engaging comments.