The Mirror and the Light

The author portrays Thomas Cromwell as the mirror image of both the king and the country. This implies that he is both a reflection of England and an inverted representation of it. On the one hand, Cromwell symbolizes the essence of the English character—stoic and principled, logical and loyal. Early in the book, he is described as such: “Thomas Cromwell is now fifty years old. The same small quick eyes, the same thickset imperturbable body; the same schedules. He is at home wherever he wakes [...][wherever] Henry happens to be” (13). Cromwell is intelligent and sturdy, welcomed throughout the realm via his attachment to the king. On the other hand, Cromwell signifies the usurper, the commoner who does not quite belong in the illustrious circles in which he finds himself, and who might not actually belong solely to England at all. As Cromwell himself is aware, his rivals “[n]o doubt assume Thomas Cromwell can be cancelled too, reduced to the clerk he used to be: a useful man for getting money in, but dispensable, a slave that you trample as you stride up the stairway to glory” (18). Occurring so early in the book, this observation is prophetic.