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as obsessed as the media would like us to be.”
It may not be Mantel’s intention, but contem-
porary parallels are inescapable. Something about
the scenes of Cromwell and his rivals competing
to win the favors of a mercurial king, for example,
does call to mind the Trump White House. Man-
tel maintains that the U.S. President is nothing
like the Tudor king, in her conception. “Henry’s
enraptured by his role, but at the same time he
has serious doubts both about the nature of king-
ship and himself as a person. So I think he’s got a
rather different character,” she says.
However, she adds, Cromwell’s ability to rise
above the fray would equip him well for today’s
noisy politics. “He’s one of those men who doesn’t
regret, doesn’t retrospect. It’s always next thing,
next thing,” she says. “He wouldn’t be
knocked off course by Twitter storms.”
EvEntually, Cromwell’s ability to
stay ahead of his enemies and on the
right side of his king falters, and—
spoiler alert, if it’s possible to spoil
the centuries-old historical record—
he’s condemned to die in the Tower of
London.
The short chapter that concludes
the novel follows Cromwell right up to
the executioner’s block, a section Man-
tel says she first wrote soon after start-
ing work on Wolf Hall. That book begins
with Cromwell as a young man seeing
his blood on cobblestones, believing
he’s about to die at the hands of his abu-
sive father. “Obviously, that’s where
you’re going to end, except the years
have passed,” she says. She wrote and re-
wrote his death scene several times to get
the tone right, storing options in a filing
cabinet for 15 years until she pulled them
back out to configure the final version.
Having already sealed Cromwell’s
fate on the page helped mitigate any
qualms she might have had about kill-
ing off her beloved character, whose
ghost she has lived with for so long.
“There was a great calmness about
writing the end. There was no emo-
tional upheaval about it because I’d
done it years previously,” she says.
Besides, Mantel will resurrect him
once again for the stage in a theatrical
adaptation of The Mirror and the Light,
which she’s currently writing, and—she
hopes—another season of Wolf Hall for
television.
In the meantime, she has set to work
raising another of England’s ghosts—
that of the late Prime Minister Mar-
garet Thatcher, whose legacy of free-
market reforms and deindustrialization
still polarizes British society. Mantel is
adapting for the stage her controversial
short story, published in the Guardian
in 2014, which imagined the assassina-
tion of the Iron Lady in 1983. She is no
fan of Thatcher’s politics but says the
late Prime Minister shares her essential
confidence with Cromwell.
“They’re people who can focus and
narrow their attention and shrug off op-
position,” she says. “You don’t imagine
her going home and brooding over her
mistakes.” □
‘He’s one of those
men who doesn’t
regret, doesn’t
retrospect. It’s
always next thing,
next thing.’
HILARY MANTEL,
on Thomas Cromwell
ALICE MANN FOR TIME
