The Mirror and the Light: the series takes Hilary Mantel’s manifesto for historical fiction to heart

“Talk to me before you believe anything!”, Thomas Cromwell (played by Mark Rylance) tells his monarch and master Henry VIII (played by Damien Lewis) in a pivotal scene in the penultimate episode of the BBC adaptation of The Mirror and the Light, the 900-page third act in Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Tudor drama. It is the last of their candid exchanges before the criticism from his enemies becomes deafening and Cromwell is seized, stripped of his offices of state and taken into custody.

For nearly a decade, Cromwell, has strived to speak the truth to his all-mighty monarch. It has set him apart from all those packed into the palace antechambers and pitching for a seat on the king’s council: aristocrats who were there by hereditary right, churchmen because of their office and favourites whose rise invariably was as fast as their fall.

Shrewd realpolitik was why Cromwell’s assent to the top seemed unstoppable and the reason Henry grew to like him. “By St Loy, this man has stomach, this man has gall!,” the now-ailing king recalls, in Peter Straughan’s script, of his first impression. Establishing the facts of the matter, however uncomfortable for whichever party, remained this self-taught lawyer’s stock-in-trade. But by 1540 Henry lacked the bodily strength and mental self-assurance to accept them anymore. “I have changed, Thomas. You, not so much.”

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“To retrieve history,” Mantel argued in her 2017 Reith lecture, “we need rigour, unsparing devotion and an impulse to scepticism.” Stomach and gall. Enough, Mantel urged, to unsettle the stereotypes, even to “de-centre” the “grand narrative”.

The determination Mantel found in Cromwell’s letters, to “decipher the bottom of their heart … if by any wisdom it may be drawn out” to politician Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1537 suggested that he could be a fresh guide to this period of Tudor history, long distorted by caricature and cliché. As sharp as the dagger secreted in his doublet and an outsider on the inside, through Cromwell’s eyes it might be refocused.

Mantel believed the novelist could best evoke an alternative point-of-view. “The records do … throw up some facts but they are not the whole truth.” Lived experience, she argued, lies in the “gaps, the erasures and silences” of the documented past, speeches unrecorded, thoughts unspoken. Fiction breathes them back into life, lifting the veil from the “vital”, “interior” view of lives long past.

Mantel’s conviction was so strong that she was inclined to criticise readers for clinging to “the first history they learn” and for their “unreasonable” refusal to commit to the novelist’s telling of it until they can be sure of its reliability. “I report the outer world faithfully,” she explained “but my chief concern is the interior drama of my characters’ lives.”

In their adaptation Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky have followed Mantel’s manifesto to the letter. They present the “outer world” with precision.

Unlike any of his predecessors, Kosminky has taken immense pains to locate the action in landscapes and environments which the historical figures would have recognised. His choices are clever, including Gloucester Cathedral, surely the most complete and unaltered Benedictine cloister in Britain, standing in for the lost abbey of Shaftesbury and Horton Court in Gloucestershire for Cromwell’s city of London chambers at the Austin Friary, which, in spite of its religious status, is known to have looked like a cluster of town houses.

Casting director Robert Sterne has peopled the scene with performers uncannily close in age and aspect to the figures they play. Thomas Brodie Sangster (Rafe Sadler) and Harry Melling (Thomas Wriothesley), both in their 30s, capture their subjects perfectly. Damien Lewis still seems to walk in Henry’s now halting footsteps, although the hiatus since the 2015 series means he is three years the king’s senior. Only Timothy Spall (Thomas Howard) is jarring. He is 67, as Howard was in 1540, but squat, jowly and with a one-note anger, which makes him less like a noble duke and more like Alice through the Looking Glass’s Queen.

But in spite, or perhaps because, of the studied skill of this practised team, this visualisation does expose the tensions – in fact, downright contradictions – in Mantel’s treatment of the past. In her Reith Lectures she declared: “Don’t lie, don’t go against known facts. Historical truth cuts against the storyteller’s instinct. Your characters are never how or where you’d like them to be.” Yet Straughan’s adept précis of the 900-page book shows how often she shrugged off her own counsel.

The visible, vocal presence of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), dead a full six years before the events of episode one unfolded, is conspicuously clumsy, muddling any viewer confronting the subject for the first time. Of course, it is a device, but if the “outer world” seems unstable how can they make sense of the “interior drama”? In Cromwell’s marriage proposal to the cardinal’s cast-off daughter, Dorothy Clancy (episode two) Mantel places her characters where she would like them to be and to say what she would like them to say.

Her “going against known facts” is less troubling than her narrow line-of-sight, which the clipped script and slick camerawork set in sharp relief. The historical dramas of Cromwell’s last years in power were armed rebellion (the Pilgrimage of Grace) and the greatest displacement of people and livelihoods since the Norman Conquest (the dissolution of the monasteries), a stop-start process which de-stabilised the Tudor regime as much as its subjects. In Mantel’s story, they are little more than noises out of frame.

The climate in court and country became so febrile in the face of these episodes because positions on them in every part of society were uncertain even, perhaps especially, in the mind of the king himself. Thomas Cromwell knew this better than any other contemporary witness. Mantel, whatever she claimed to the contrary, maintained the “grand narrative” of Catholic versus Protestant, traditional aristocrat versus modernising commoner. Like King Henry, she did not keep listening to her subject for long enough.

James Clark receives funding for historical research from the Arts & Humanities Research Council and consults on and collaborates in research and visitor engagement for the National Trust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries of London.