At times he cannot see precisely what is going on nor can he hear them. Cromwell regards them through 'the wobble in the glass' – the uneven Tudor glazing of the window.

Cromwell does not realise it, but the king is falling in love. To illuminate her technique she pointed to the scene, early in Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell, from a window, watches Jane Seymour walking with Henry in the garden of Wolf Hall.

It's to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case moving forward into a future that is not predetermined, but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.' The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. Her aim was to place the reader in 'that time and that place, putting you into Henry's entourage. So the reader knows how it's going to turn out, but the reader's expectation of how and why is constantly challenged.' 'I've marched a lot of people to the scaffold, and beheading seems to be my favourite sport,' she said.ĭespite the inevitability of Cromwell's death, however, she said that 'in every scene, even the quiet ones, I try to create turning points, multiple turning points.

Over her career Mantel has executed numerous characters, including Marie-Antoinette and many other figures in her 1992 novel about the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety as well as Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers in Bring Up the Bodies. Mantel, making a rare public appearance in a year when fragile health has limited her engagements, was speaking about Bring Up the Bodies, the second book in her projected trilogy about the 16th-century politician Thomas Cromwell, who started as 'a blacksmith's son, and rose to be Earl of Essex, Henry VIII's right-hand man, and minister of everything' – before ending up on the scaffold. In writing a historical novel you use all the tricks you have learned on diverse subject matter and use all the techniques you bring to novels of contemporary life.' She added: 'I don't see why you should compromise.

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