Hilary Mantel’s third Cromwell book is brilliant

Kings have always been bloody. They fight wars and shorten the careers and lives of their competing kin. But a king who bumps off his own wives for not bearing him children of the right – read male – gender? King Henry the VIII of England was one such man.

The publishing event of the year is Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light (HarperCollins), the third and final book in her celebrated Tudor England trilogy, full of palace intrigues, and the power struggle between Henry the VIII and his crafty prime minister, Thomas Cromwell.

The first two books, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), have both won Bookers and have, between them, sold over five million copies worldwide. The Mirror... is a book for history and politics buffs. Here you meet the person whose actions led to the change in character of the English government, from being run as the property of the king to a bureaucratic parliamentary structure.

Cromwell is the anti-hero of all the three Mantel books. The Mirror..., appropriately opens with Chancellor Cromwell’s macabre supervision of the execution of Anne Boleyn, the first queen Henry VIII got beheaded. “Once the Queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for…perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new, and there are no rules to guide us.” By the end of the novel some 800 pages later – the book is a doorstopper – the shoe is on the other foot; the man is writing “mercy” letters to the king hoping to be axed rather than having to burn at the stake.

Of the many life lessons to be gleaned from the book, here are three: the affections of those in power are fickle; if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword; and never attend the first meeting of the day without a proper breakfast.