The Mirror and the Light

History is an illusion, a mirage projected backward onto men who, in their own time, stumbled forward blindly. We tell ourselves they had a plan, that the great figures of the past saw what was coming, that they understood their fates with the clarity of a well-structured narrative. But Wolf Hall and The Mirror and the Light reveal the lie. Power is not certainty. Power is the void, and no one understands this better than Thomas Cromwell.

Cromwell is the perfect protagonist for our modern world because he is both believer and cynic, a self-made man who understands that power is not divine but constructed. He serves his prince, Henry VIII, not out of love, not out of belief in the inherent righteousness of kings, but because he understands how power is maintained. The Church teaches that kings rule by God’s will, but Cromwell knows the truth: Henry’s power exists because men like him enforce it. He is not an ideologue, not a nobleman by birth—he is a butcher’s boy, the son of a man who beat him in the streets, a man who grew up watching the monks live fat off the labor of the poor, taking what they please and pretending it is righteousness. Cromwell remembers.

Cromwell is the most Machiavellian figure in English history, but only because Machiavelli wrote it down. Had he never read The Prince, he still would have known. Because what is power but survival? And what is survival but the ability to control the perceptions of those around you? Cromwell rises because he understands men—how they think, what they fear, what they want. He watches as those who believe in ideals—More, Wolsey, Anne—are consumed, burned up in the fire of Henry’s favor.

But the prince’s favor is not a solid thing. It is light, shifting, fleeting, illuminating one man today, casting him into shadow tomorrow. The light of Henry’s attention is a kind of death sentence because to be noticed is to be vulnerable. Those who are overlooked—the monks in their cells, the peasants in the fields, the poor boys beaten by their fathers—live. But those who are seen must perform, and performance is fatal.

If Henry is the light, what is the mirror? It is Cromwell himself. He does not just serve the king—he reflects him. He is the only man at court who understands that Henry’s power is both absolute and entirely dependent on the belief of others. He is the only man who does not flinch when Henry contradicts himself, who does not point out when the king has spoken a lie, who allows the illusion to continue. He builds the state in Henry’s name, gives him what he wants, smooths over the inconsistencies. He holds up the glass in which the king sees himself not as a spoiled, impulsive man but as God’s chosen ruler.

And yet, the mirror is always at risk of being shattered. Henry does not want to see himself too clearly. He does not want to see his own weakness, his own paranoia, his own guilt. Cromwell, for all his loyalty, for all his cunning, is doomed the moment Henry begins to suspect that his minister knows him too well. The closer Cromwell comes to absolute power, the more he reflects back to Henry something that the king does not want to see: that his own greatness is a fiction.

Henry is not a man. He is an appetite. His wants shift daily, his favor is a force of nature, unpredictable and violent. To serve him is to live in a constant state of precarity, to understand that yesterday’s most trusted advisor is tomorrow’s traitor. He needs Cromwell—until he doesn’t.

And yet, Cromwell never sees himself as Henry’s equal. He does not delude himself into thinking he is truly safe, even when he reaches the height of his power. Because unlike Henry, Cromwell remembers Wolsey. He remembers how easily the king turned his back on the man who built his reign, the mentor Cromwell loved like a father. That is the wound that never heals. Cromwell has played the game better than anyone, but he cannot forget how it ends. He watched Wolsey die humiliated, abandoned, stripped of everything. He knows that will be his fate too.

But when Cromwell finally faces his fall, it is not Henry’s betrayal that truly destroys him—it is Johane’s rejection. Johane, Wolsey’s daughter, the last living connection to the man Cromwell served and loved, is given everything. He offers her wealth, security, even marriage—a final, desperate attempt to rewrite fate, to create something permanent in a world that has only ever taken from him.

And she rejects him.

This is the moment Cromwell truly breaks. Not when Henry signs the warrant. Not when the courtiers turn on him. But when the daughter of his greatest friend, the child of the man he fought for, looks at him and sees only another tyrant. He has amassed power, risen higher than anyone like him ever should, but he cannot buy the one thing he truly wants: loyalty. Love.

Because in the end, he is no different from Wolsey. Stripped of power, he is nothing. He has no noble blood, no divine right. He is a man who made kings, and now he is a man condemned by one. Johane’s rejection is proof that nothing he built was real. That he was not feared for himself but for the shadow of Henry at his back.

And when that shadow disappears, all that remains is a man kneeling before the axe.

Cromwell, like all great men, was never truly great. He was merely a man who understood how power worked better than those around him, who saw history not as a divine plan but as a game of survival. He won longer than most. But in the end, he was always doomed.

Because power is a trick of light. And mirrors always break.