He is enviably rich as well as powerful, possesses a fine and ever-expanding house in London, and has bought himself a striped African cat from a Damascene merchant “for a price you would not believe.” In the novel’s first chapter, the beast gets out and climbs up a tree, where she seems perfectly at home. He’s become less circumspect about reproving the manners of high-born courtiers around him-and despite their pride in their own chivalry, they are indeed a boorish lot. But he’s also gotten cocky, filling a volume he titles The Book Called Henry with advice on how to handle the king. Even at the peak of his power, Cromwell himself admits that he is the monarch’s utter dependent: “What have I, but what my king gives me? Who am I, but who he has made me?” he remarks when a friend passes along rumors of disloyalty. However, no reader needs the foreshadowing remarks of Cromwell’s enemies (and a few of his friends) to remind her where all this will end: Cromwell was executed for treason and heresy at the Tower of London in 1540. His rise has been unprecedented and, for the realm’s oldest families, confounding. Born the son of drunken, abusive, provincial blacksmith, by 1536, when The Mirror and the Light begins, Cromwell has become “the second man in England” after Henry VIII, the king’s closest adviser and feared fixer, as well as viceregent of the fledgling Church of England.

“I never know what I will do next.” The first two books in the trilogy, 2009’s Wolf Hall and 2012’s Bring Up the Bodies, both Booker Prize winners, were propelled by the force that inspired that awe: Cromwell’s seemingly unstoppable will. “I am in awe of myself,” admits Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, her third and final novel in a series that’s transformed the popular understanding of the Elizabethan statesman’s life.

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