8 Time March 30, 2020
win the award twice, and together they
were adapted into a TV series starring
Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis, as
well as an epic play in the West End and
on Broadway. As Cromwell has grown
in the public’s esteem, so has Mantel; in
2014, she was ennobled by the Queen
who now sits on Henry’s throne, and she
is entitled to call herself Dame Hilary.
Mantel’s fullest achievement in the
trilogy is the character of Cromwell
himself, a brilliant strategist whose
mean and sometimes brutish upbring-
ing informs his understanding and ma-
nipulation of power. He knows when
to speak softly, and he knows when to
wield a big stick.
But the rough-hewn Cromwell of the
novels is far removed from the writer
who resurrected him from obscurity.
Mantel carries herself with a delicate
bearing and admits she found it “quite
hard to bear” speculation in the tab-
loids that she might have had writer’s
block as readers awaited the final book.
She blames the “complexity of the ma-
terial” for the delay but says she “never
stopped.”
Mantel speaks in precise paragraphs
in a distinctive, lilting soprano register.
“He has this huge appetite for life,
and if you insult him, he laughs it
off,” she says of her subject. “That
kind of character fascinates me, that
imperviousness, as someone with
several fewer skins.”At such A contentious moment in
the U.K., it’s tempting to look to Man-
tel for lessons from the past. But the
author disdains parallels between her
novels and today’s politics. “People are
constantly asking me if the Reforma-
tion is like Brexit,” she says, dryly, “and
the answer is no.”
And don’t look to her studies
of Henry to yield any insights the
current royal family could put to use.
Mantel says the Windsors are less
like the Tudors and more like the
Victorians, driven to construct an
image of an ideal family, one that has
“severely crumbled” over the past two
decades. “The royals are all the time
being marketed to us, and the more
sensational their difficulties, the more
potential for marketing there will be,”
she says. “But I don’t think the nation isin London, The ghosTs of hisTory are never
far away. The past lies close to the surface of its
narrow streets and the walls of its churches. At
Gray’s Inn, the cluster of stately brick buildings
where lawyers have studied and practiced for
more than 600 years, it occasionally pierces
through into the present.
Hilary Mantel would know. The author has
spent the past 15 years imagining the people
who occupied the city’s historic haunts for her
epic Wolf Hall trilogy, a fictionalization of the life
of Thomas Cromwell, aide to King Henry VIII.
Mantel completes her series with the feverishly
awaited publication of The Mirror and the Light.
The third installment is even more epic in scale
than its predecessors: a sweeping narrative en-
compassing four years of royal births, marriages
and deaths; rebellions against the throne; and dip-
lomatic dealings between England and Europe.
After gently dismissing her husband to a
nearby coffee shop, Mantel settles at a polished
oak table in the Bencher’s Library at Gray’s Inn.
She suggested we meet here, where Cromwell, a
lowborn blacksmith’s son who became one of En-
gland’s most powerful men, studied to be a law-
yer before serving the king. She’s bored of setting
conversations against the backdrop of the more fa-
mous Tower of London, just a couple miles away.
The tower is cold and crowded, she says, but the
library is warm and quiet, its stone-arched win-
dows a reminder of its distant past.
Cromwell lived just around the corner, and
there’s a portrait of him hanging here that Mantel
describes as a “terrible” reproduction of the fa-
mous Holbein portrait made during his lifetime.
“They used to keep it in the cellars, but then when
he got famous, so to speak, they brought it up
again,” she says.
Cromwell’s 21st century fame is almost en-
tirely due to Mantel, 67, who made him the hero of
her 2009 novel Wolf Hall—a fictional retelling of
Henry’s decision to break the English church from
Rome, the British version of the Reformation, and
the unprecedented annulment of his first marriage.
The book became a critical and cultural sensa-
tion, along with its 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bod-
ies, which focused on Cromwell’s role in the fall of
Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. Each won the
Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman to
MANTEL
QUICK FACTS
Blockbuster
books
Mantel’s Wolf
Hall trilogy
has sold more
than 5 million
copies and been
translated into
36 languages.Living with pain
Mantel was
diagnosed with
endometriosis
at the age of 27
and until recently
suffered with
chronic pain.Royal ruckus
Mantel caused a
tabloid storm in a
2013 essay when
she described
Kate Middleton as
a “shop-window
mannequin.”
She’s a bigger
fan of Meghan
Markle, whom
she described
as a “lift to the
national spirits.”TheBrief TIME with ...
Her Cromwell trilogy
complete, Hilary Mantel
also has thoughts on
modern royals and pols
By Dan Stewart