But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, where can you speak it?
-- Cromwell (Part 1)

Importance: This striking line gestures to a number of major themes in The Mirror and the Light. In this moment, just after Anne Boleyn's execution, Cromwell has just been uncharacteristically blunt with Suffolk, who has refused to kneel for the beheading. The moment foreshadows one of the book's big conflicts—between the low-born Cromwell and the noblemen who surround him—and Cromwell's own end. But it also raises questions about what it means to "speak truth," especially at a beheading, when at least one party is no longer available to speak that truth. The project of The Mirror and the Light is to "speak truth at a beheading," but with an awareness that truth is complex, fugitive, and dangerous.

Now everything falls away, the pain, the doubt and the jaundiced fear that has shadowed Henry this last...
-- Cromwell (Part 1)