Thomas Cromwell has long been reviled as a Machiavellian schemer who stopped at nothing in his quest for power. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell’s daughters have died, but he cannot allow himself the luxury of grief. ‘The Mirror and the Light,’ the final chapter of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Cromwell’s tenure as King Henry VIII’s advisor is a triumph. Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume of what will eventually become Mantel’s trilogy, opens with Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII out hawking. For the final Band to send you need over 1000 pages. Thomas Cromwell enters the Tudor Trilogy as a street rat, taking a beating from his alcoholic father. Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume of what will eventually become Mantel’s trilogy, opens with Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII out hawking. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell’s daughters have died, but he cannot allow himself the luxury of grief. Thomas Cromwell was a powerful minister who worked in King Henry VIII ‘s court. He lives to serve the king, and as a minister to the king he cannot indulge in such distracting luxuries as grief or rage or love or hate. As King Henry VIII’s right-hand man, Cromwell was the architect of the English Reformation; secured Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and plotted the downfall of his second wife, Anne Boleyn; and was fatally accused of trying to usurp the king himself. Bringing up the Bodies is the second part of the planned trilogy which talked of Thomas Cromwell’s rise and fall. In what is most people’s favourite historical period the Tudor era (or the rise of the Thomases, as there seem to have been so many) Henry VIII has always shone in people’s imagination. Hilary Mantel’s first book in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell is always worth reading. Our last image of him, as the trilogy closes, eerily evokes the first. With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her peerless, Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. You are worth the effort. English literature is A great villain Hilary mantel rehabilitated completed their trilogy about the English politician Thomas Cromwell. The second Brooker price Hilary Mantel won was after she had published Bringing up the Bodies in the year 2012. In December 2016, Mantel spoke with Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn on the KR Podcast about the way historical novels are published, what it is like to live in the world of one character for more than ten years, writing for the stage, and the final book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. The first two volumes were awarded the Booker prize.