Method in her magic

Bring Up the Bodies, as everybody knows, is the sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s fictional re-imagining of the life and times of Henry VIII’s most effective servant, Thomas Cromwell. We have long been banging our spoons and forks for it. Speaking for myself, I finished the first with an almost unbearable curiosity to find out what was going to happen next — a strange result, when you think of it, because we all know perfectly well what is going to happen.

Mantel is comprehensive with her sources. Every scene is secured, like a piano key to its hammer, to the corresponding page of the great 21-volume Calendar of State Papers of Henry’s reign. The last book ended with the death of Sir Thomas More, therefore in this one Katherine of Aragon will die; the Boleyn queen will lose two babies, she will be arrested along with her five ‘lovers’ and the king will chop all their heads off. That much we know; of all the episodes in what Mantel has called our ‘national soap opera’ — Tudor history — this is the most often rehearsed.

However, the reason for the continuous re-fashioning of this one story is that nobody knows what actually happened. The fall of Anne Boleyn is one of our history’s curiosities and has always been told with liberal recourse to subjunctives. Her decline was erratic and unpredictable; she was up, down, up again in the months before she died and she fell suddenly, like a tumbling pigeon shot in the heart.

The coup was achieved quickly, efficiently and discreetly. If there were papers, they are destroyed. And sitting at the centre of the conundrum is the question: what role did Thomas Cromwell take in it?

Was he the originator or just the executor of the plot, acting on the King’s instructions?

This is where we look to Mantel.