The Mirror and the Light

Cromwell remembers the events of ten years earlier in the winter of 1526: “Robert Barnes is brought before [Cardinal] Wolsey on suspicion of heresy” (217). This is around the start of the English Reformation, the rise of Protestant churches against the abuses of the Catholic Church. Cardinal Wolsey was Cromwell’s master before he became a servant to the king, and Cromwell remembers how powerful Wolsey once was. He had “foreigners, who have been trapped by Thomas More with heretic books [...] led through the streets on donkeys, set backwards in the saddle with their faces to the tail” (219). The writings of Martin Luther, the German priest who initiated the movement, are “pinned to their coats” (219). Barnes fakes his own suicide, flees the country, and returns now that Henry has initiated the Reformation in England. He meets with Cromwell to discuss the commission of an English Bible; scholar William Tyndale’s translation is still suspect, and King Henry—for all his disruption of the political and religious realms—still clings to the old rituals.

Still, Henry is invested in shutting down the old monasteries and nunneries, amassing more wealth for the crown: “This summer, the Court of Augmentations is busy turning monks into money” (231).