All language subtitles for Hilary.Mantel.Return.To.Wolf.Hall.2020.1080p.WEBRip.x264-CBFM.[eng]

When my first book came out,

a very famous writer...

..wrote to my publisher
and said, erm,

"Who is this young woman?"

That made me laugh.

When Wolf Hall came out,

people said,

"How wonderful to have so much
success so late in life."

Actually, Wolf Hall
was my 12th book,

and I started writing when I was 22.

I first published when I was 35.

I...

..breathed in stories

as soon as I breathed in air.

Sometimes I think...

..I wasn't born,

but I just came out of an ink blot.

I grew up in Derbyshire,

not far from those valleys

deliberately flooded
in order to create reservoirs.

BELL CHIMES

REPORTER: The clock once belonged
to Ruben Bradwell.

It stood in the Ashopton Inn, deep
in the Peakland valley of Derwent.

But in 1934, the shock came.

Derwent and Ashopton
were to be completely demolished.

Some of my grandfather's people

lived in the drowned village
of Derwent,

under the waters
of Ladybower Reservoir.

REPORTER: Ruben Bradwell, who owned
the clock at the Ashopton Inn,

is dead now, and the two
villages are dead too.

When I was a child in the 1950s,

people would tell you
that when the water was low,

they had seen the spire

rising above the water.

But then I found that...

..before I was born,
they'd blown up the church.

In the 1950s,
there was really no steeple.

The whole thing was very
thought-provoking for me.

I had believed implicitly

that they were seeing
what they said they were seeing.

Each individual
acting in perfect good faith,

and yet passing on
an accumulative untruth.

And it made me sceptical,

especially of those things
that we instinctively move towards

and want to believe.

It made me think,
"Check out the dates."

It caused me to reflect on
different layers of reality.

Fact, history...

..myth.

How they merge into one.

I first came to Budleigh
when I was...

..16, with my family.

We stayed in a caravan park,

and I came walking here by myself

over the clifftop path.

It was a hot, brilliant day,

and all the pebbles on the beach
were shining.

It was like a gigantic dish
of sugared almonds.

I saw that as perfect.

I want that.

I want to live here.

And then it took me
many, many years, but I did.

Hilary lives in a quiet town
in Devon.

She's absolutely dedicated to
and lives for her imagination.

That's where she wants to be.
That's what she wants to inhabit.

I go just up the hill.

It's less than five minutes
of a journey.

And as soon as I put my key

in the door of my writing flat...

PLUG GURGLES

..then I've entered a new reality.

But people say,
"Does the sea inspire you?"

And I'm... "What sea?"

Because I'm in 16th-century London,

locked between the walls,
in the little streets,

with the only water

the grey, sludgy River Thames.

That's where I've spent
most of the time living.

Nothing prepared me for...

..the joy and revelation
that was reading Wolf Hall

and subsequently
Bring Up The Bodies.

The reason that Hilary's work
stands out

in this broad field is because
she's a much better writer.

And she's won two Booker Prizes,
which is virtually unheard of.

In 2009, I was one of
the Man Booker judges.

Judges will often say this, but I
think it was a very strong year,

and Wolf Hall was one of
the shortlisted books.

There was the possibility for
quite a lot of disappointment.

The announcement was made.

I was up out of my chair
with indecent haste.

I shot straight up to that stage

and got my hands on the prize.

Peter Carey said, at some point,
that for an author to win

the Booker Prize was like
being in a train crash.

When she got the nod, it did feel
like a vindication of sorts.

Bring Up The Bodies,
by Hilary Mantel.

When I won the second time,

there was a moment of disbelief,
which I shared.

Well, I don't know...

I remain ambitious to do
very good work.

Ferociously ambitious.

I'd gone in to this having
contracted one book

about Thomas Cromwell with Hilary,
and now, suddenly, it was a trilogy

and the first two books
had won the Booker Prize.

Dream time.

I wrote her a fan letter.

I said, "Look, you know
this novel is a great novel.

"It's just won the Booker.

"But I want to tell you, this is
the Tudor England I recognise,

"and I gasped at
some of the detail you knew."

When I was approached
about the idea of Wolf Hall,

I have to admit,
my first thought was...

.."Henry VIII - again?"

Master Cromwell,

your reputation is bad.

You don't defend yourself?

Your Majesty can form
your own opinions.

I can.

I will.

It's quite rare that
you read a novel

and it sort of tilts your world
sideways.

The characters - Anne Boleyn,
Thomas Cromwell,

Henry VIII - didn't see themselves
as towering figures in history.

Anne Boleyn didn't know that she
was going to be one of six wives

or that she was going to
be beheaded.

They were living their lives
in the present,

and that came across so clearly.
It made them real

and quasi-contemporary characters
for me.

I began the writing of Wolf Hall,

and it was as if...

..I had walked into a space where
the novel was already happening.

As if it was waiting for me.

So I asked myself,

"When is this happening?"

And the answer is now.

So now get up!

It was so vivid in my mind

that it could only exist
in the present tense.

Walter is roaring down at him,

working out where to kick him next.

And then the next question is...

.."Who's seeing this?
Where am I looking from?"

And the answer was,

"I am behind
Thomas Cromwell's eyes."

"What are you, an eel?",
his parent asks.

He trots backwards, gathers pace,
and aims another kick.

So all the important decisions
about that novel,

and hence about the whole trilogy,

were taken within seconds.

"Look now."

"Look now!", Walter bellows.

He hops on one foot
as if he's dancing.

"Look what I've done."

"Burst my boot, kicking your head."

Wolf Hall begins

as if you don't know
where it's going.

It's narrated,
as Bring Up The Bodies is narrated,

in the present tense,

so it's history robbed
of its inevitability.

Dame Hilary.

While you're reading,
it's unfolding.

It hasn't unfolded.

I've called my little section
of today...

.."Don't you mean Oliver?",

because that is exactly
what people used to say to me

when I first said I was writing
about Thomas Cromwell.

And they don't say it any longer!
LAUGHTER

Today, I read from
The Mirror And The Light

for the first time
since I finished the book.

"He glances over his shoulder.

"He, Cromwell, is standing
as an impassable barrier

"between the family and the court."

Now, The Mirror And The Light
is about Cromwell's rise

and rise to unprecedented power,

and sudden fall.

He is ready for them,
on his feet, his jaw set.

His eyes narrowed, his breath short.

Norfolk says,
"I will tear out your heart

"and stuff it in your mouth."

It's not the pattern
you might expect

from the last book in a trilogy.

It's not a gentle decline at all.

It's a precipitous descent.

He is barged and buffeted.

His gold chain is off
and he puts his head down.

He puts his fists up, he lands
a blow, and he is roaring.

He is convulsed with rage.

He does not know what he says,
nor cares.

And then it is over.

When I wrote the first line
of the book,

I had a very good idea that
I'd also written the last line.

"So now get up!"

But then I thought, "How am I
going to do his execution?"

So I thought of it in Sainsbury's
as I was packing the groceries.

And I cried on the groceries
very hard.

But by the time I got them
into the trolley,

I thought, "Right, that'll do."

Hilary started sending me
100-page batches

from The Mirror And The Light.

The thing that struck me
was how unbearably sad it is.

As powerfully written as the end is,

it's personally devastating.

My upbringing...

..was in many ways in the hands
of my grandfather George Foster.

He was a patient man.

He would have made an ideal judge.

He was a sergeant instructor
in the Machine Gun Corps,

which was formed in 1917.

He was a tidy, precise man

who liked everything to be done
stage by stage

and in an orderly fashion.

And when I was a small child,

he could still recite and did recite
the training manual

for the Vickers machine gun.

GUN LOADS

The words that stuck
in my mind were,

"When you depress the trigger,
the gun will begin to fire..."

MACHINE GUN FIRE

"..and will continue to fire

"until one of two things happen."

Somehow, those words went
straight into my heart.

The two things that could happen
were the gun ran out of ammunition

or, simply, the pressure
on the trigger was released,

but they had a magic to me,
those words,

like an incantation.

So I often say to myself
as I go through life,

"One of two things can happen."

If you are orderly,
if you are precise,

it's a great assistance
when you're swimming

into the unknown territory
of a new book.

For a historian to think of
being a historical novelist

might seem outrageous or obscene.

They have the dead strangling
hand of the past

lying on them heavily.

I tend to write, being a historian,
in a straight line

with a big heap of evidence
in front of me,

and then I go on to the next bit
after that. She doesn't do that.

After a certain point,
where the record runs out,

he or she has to say,

"Beyond this point,
all is conjecture."

But that is the very point
where the novelist goes to work.

Where the record
fades from the page,

where something is erased
by the passage of time

or just simply dot, dot, dot...

A novelist can simply fill
the space in - embroider it,

in Hilary's case
in an utterly convincing way.

..what I like to do is

build on the knowledge we have,
build on the record.

He sits at his desk,
piled high with drawings and plans

from Ipswich and Cardinal College,

with craftsmen's estimates

and bills for Wolsey's
planting schemes.

I then say to myself,
"In the light of what we do know...

"..what is plausible?
What is possible?"

He thinks about Putney.

He thinks about Walter.

He thinks about the jittery sidestep
of a skittish horse,

the smell of the brewery.

Hilary takes the risk
of filling in the dots,

of going further, of stepping
into the emotional world.

He thinks about the kitchen
at Lambeth...

..and about the tow-headed boy
who used to bring in the eels.

He remembers taking the eel-boy
by the hair

and dipping his head in a tub
of water, and holding it under.

He thinks...

.."Did I really do that?

"I wonder why."

My field is just the past
and its people,

so there is no piece of knowledge
that is ever irrelevant,

no detail so small

that I can't do something with it.

She's not straying too far away
from the facts.

Those are like big posts
in the book

that we can relax around.

Hilary's research
is phenomenally detailed.

I don't read historical novels
all that much

because, generally, they annoy me.

I'm always going to
find something wrong,

but there's never anything WRONG
in Hilary.

I want to get back as close
to source as I can,

get to a destination myself
rather than having the way pointed

by historians all the time.

But of course, I'm not a historian,
I'm an amateur.

I find my own way to things.

Research is a much less dramatic
process than it used to be.

And while I've been
writing this trilogy,

the amount of material
available online

has multiplied very quickly.

At one point, you see,
I found it necessary

to keep a whole notebook
on jousting and tennis.

I've got phrases here.

"A baby is sometimes
called a little mop."

And a proverb,

"If you cut off his hands,
he would steal with his teeth."

"You devil's turd."

The whole thing is like
a vast spider's web.

But there are two aspects
to research.

There's the historical record,

but just as important
is the context.

So you need a knowledge
of everyday life.

The Tudors are in many ways
like us,

in many ways very alien.

Your job is to...

..work out which bits are which,

and then think how
you can mediate this

to the present-day reader.

You have to undergo a process
that's immersive

and can take quite a long time.

Develop Tudor senses
and Tudor sensibilities,

be able to experience as a Tudor.

You have to go and live in a world

where probably the loudest sound
people have heard

is thunder or church bells.

BELLS RING

A world before the fog
of industrial pollution,

where smells, for better or worse,
are natural smells.

You can smell the tannery,
but you can also smell the flowers.

You can't shed your
21st-century self entirely,

but you can make yourself
the creature of the book.

So there has been a tannery here
since Roman times?

It was quite an important area, and
there were four tanneries locally.

Some of the things they used
were not very nice.

A lot of dog dung was used.

The trouble is,
if the weather changed,

you'd get the smell
going everywhere,

so it was never very popular.

LAUGHTER

It's very much a case of
learning day-by-day what you need.

I can't do the research
like the professional historian

at the start of my project.

It's only by writing
that it's unfolded to you

what you need to understand,
and what's missing.

Seeing someone actually using
the tools,

that's very different from
looking at diagrams in a book.

There's nothing like
actually being on the spot

and inhaling these perfumed odours.

If I'd come here earlier,

it would have been
absolutely irresistible

to set a scene in a tannery.

It might have been a horror film.
LAUGHTER

You try to see the world...

..through your characters' eyes,
perceived through their senses.

If I were Thomas Cromwell,

I wouldn't be standing by the river
noticing Putney,

because Putney
is what I'm immersed in.

The world around you,
you take for granted,

so in none of my books,

when I'm trying to achieve
a sense of place,

do I actually go in for
topographical descriptions.

It's more a question
of looking on the micro level

and its sounds and scents,

as well as the way things look.

The wool is soft wool
from mountain sheep,

but none of them were black sheep.

Where the pattern is darkest, the
surface has already a brittle feel

from patchy dyeing

and with time and use
it may flake away.

He turns up the corner,
runs his fingertips over the knots,

counting them by the inch,
in an easy accustomed action.

In Thomas Cromwell,
she's taken somebody

who we traditionally think of
as a thug, the Tudor thug,

but she's...

..just gone in deeper.

There's a portrait,
which is extremely unrevealing,

of a bureaucratic robot.

And I had a strong feeling
that wasn't the story.

Cromwell made such an impact
on the history of England.

His part in the Reformation,

in giving the Bible in English
to the people,

and establishing Parliament
as a ruling force.

It ought to have been impossible

for a man from Cromwell's background

to rise to be Earl of Essex.

I'm attracted to people who...

..are born not at
the centre of power,

not with the good things in life,

so have to move from the margin
to the centre,

where power is concentrated.

And I suppose it comes from
my own life.

Insofar as I've found success,

it's not having made it
as a woman writer that strikes me,

it's having made it
as a working-class writer.

REPORTER: The industry
of the North Midlands

and all that goes with it.

Where there's muck, there's brass.

I grew up in Hadfield,
a working-class town in Derbyshire.

I was lucky in when I was born.

You know, I'm a child
of the 1944 Education Act

and the welfare state...

Hello.

..so I had chances that were not
available to my foremothers

and forefathers, many of whom
were intelligent people,

but went to work at 14
or even earlier.

This is your son's house? Yes.
Well, it was my grandma's house.

Was it?

When I was born,

my mother and father
lived here as well,

with my grandmother and grandfather.

My grandmother Kitty...

..lived here at number 56,

her sister Annie next door.

I noticed everything about them,
every quirk of expression.

They were typically Irish.

They never ran out of words.

They would sit either side
of the fireplace

and they would just talk,

and the conversation never flagged.

And that fluency was implanted in me

so that I carried off to school
with me an enormous vocabulary,

and also the habit
of sustaining a story.

It was a free gift given to me.

My grandmother was one of a family
of nine surviving children,

mostly boys.

All of them, I think,
fought in the Great War.

This is John O'Shea.

He was the eldest of the brothers
and something of a family hero.

His sister Annie married
a man called Jim Connor.

Jim came back from the Great War
without a leg,

and actually damaged,
really traumatised.

The family were very poor,

and Jim was involved in
the theft of some coal

from beside a railway line,

but the police were on to him
and they came to the house,

and the family got together
to discuss what to do,

and it was decided that, erm...

SHE SOBS

They, erm...

That John would take the blame,

because if Jim was sent to prison...

..it would kill him.

So John went to the police

and said that he had done this...

..and he served a sentence
of about 18 months or two years.

To me, that is virtue.

That's heroism.

WHISPERS: Sorry.

Too much.

I could do it again
and cry less.

When I was six,
I had a new little brother...

..and I guess that was just
one too many in this house.

My mother bought a house
up the road.

What began then was far darker.

I don't know what went wrong
with my parents' marriage,

but it seemed to go wrong
very early.

Jack came along,
an old flame of my mother's,

with an altogether more flamboyant
set of characteristics.

His pumped-up biceps
and his fuzz of chest hair,

and the androgenic whiff
that escaped

from the clotted pillow of hair
under his arms.

My father Henry then did
make himself part of the wallpaper.

When I first met Jack...

..I liked him,
because he was a novelty.

When he moved into the house,
it became more difficult.

I was afraid for my father, Henry,
with his humble body so white,

his Aertex vest drooping
from his shoulders

as he quickly and modestly
undressed,

turning away from me,
his daughter and roommate.

This is what my father, Henry,

used to carry every day
on the train.

He was a reader.

He did crosswords.

He listened to music.

He taught me chess, card games,

taught me any number
of quiet pursuits.

So the summer I was 11...

..the household in Hadfield
was packed up

and off we went to Romiley,
to Hayworth Avenue,

and I don't remember a moment
when I said goodbye to my father.

I knew, obviously,
that he wasn't coming with us.

He wasn't going to
live with us any more.

But I didn't know I wasn't
going to see Henry again.

But in point of fact, I never did.

It had not been unfolded to me
that our early life would be erased

and that there would be a pretence
that my father had never existed.

They would have found
no photographs of him.

Not only was my mother pretending
that she was married to Jack,

but she was also pretending
that Jack was my father.

I could quite see
why she vanished Henry,

but I thought that pretending
I was Jack's child

was carrying it a bit too far.

I found that injurious.

I don't associate
my father's type of quietness

with Thomas Cromwell's
type of quietness.

My father didn't speak
when he should have spoken.

There is a limit
to what silence can do.

He should have said,
"I won't have this."

For Cromwell, his silence
comes from a stronger position.

It's a weapon he possesses.
It's his tactic.

Cromwell's a man who's doing
his best with what he's given,

and I do admire that.

I admire his resilience,
his ingenuity.

I admire the quality of his mind.

Can one say she's been searching
all this time for her father

in her writing?

I think she'd be appalled
if she heard me say that.

But I wonder a little bit.

And Cromwell, the father, is an
incredibly interesting character

in the trilogy.

Cromwell, the father,
is very touching and very tender.

Before Advent,

he made the peacock wings for Grace.

Working with a penknife
and a fine brush,

sticking feather to fabric
with bluebell glue.

"Sad work to be doing by
candlelight", Liz had said.

But the days were short,
and there was no choice

if she was to have them
for the Christmas play.

It's up to Henry to have the son
to carry on the dynasty

and secure the country,

but he can't do that.

And being the father of daughters,

that's not the story for Henry.

The King is restless.

He looks as if prayers
are his best hope.

"Crom, what if some accident
befalls?

"I could die tomorrow.

"I cannot leave my kingdom
to my daughters.

"The one truculent and
half-Spanish, the other an infant.

"And neither of them
born in wedlock.

"My next heir would be
the Queen of Scotland's daughter."

A woman ruler is only
storing up trouble.

You may stave it off
for 10 years, 20,

but trouble will come.

He needs to be the father of a son.

Cromwell has nothing but a son.

His two daughters have died
very young,

so Gregory is the only living
member of his family,

the only way he's going to
carry on his legacy.

Thomas Cromwell sort of
happened along in my life

when I was at school
studying the early Tudors,

writing an essay on the
Dissolution of the Monasteries,

and thinking,
"A smart fellow behind this,"

which wasn't what you
were supposed to feel

when you were at a convent school.

I was brought up as a Catholic.

However, by the time I was 12,

my faith had gone.

But also, the Church
as an institution,

I began to see
as extremely defective

and blameworthy.

I had a very strong scent
of hypocrisy in my nostrils...

..and I did not think
that the priests and nuns

were good people.

This is a confessional box.

Now, if people had anything
really interesting to confess,

they'd go to Manchester
and find a priest there,

because it was considered
to be leaky,

and that it would get
all round the parish.

People talk about the seal
of the confessional,

and so much is made of it
in fiction and drama,

but not in Hadfield.

I still knew what faith was.

I knew what faith meant.

And I understood...

..that from the point of view
of the person

who has faith in God,
this world is not at all important.

The next world is important.

Now, that's an asset for me,

because I'm operating
as a historical novelist

in a universe where
almost everyone believes.

Hilary Mantel sort of sees Cromwell

as a character who is set on
changing and transforming a society,

a world which seems
utterly set in its ways.

In The Mirror And The Light,
it's 1539.

The religious situation has begun
to run against Cromwell.

The Cromwell trilogy is set
at a time of huge change

in this country.

The beginnings of Protestantism.

The Church of England
was set up at this time.

In Wolf Hall
and Bring Up The Bodies,

the nation is quite
a precarious entity.

It's religiously precarious.

That sense of sort of...
anxious nationalism,

I think is really brilliantly
rendered in it.

You can write on England,

but what was written before
keeps showing through,

inscribed on the rocks
and carried on floodwater,

surfacing from deep, cold wells.

It's not just the saints
and martyrs who claim the country.

It's those who came before them.

The dwarves dug into ditches,

the sprites who sing in the breeze,

the demons bricked into culverts
and buried under bridges,

the bones under your floor.

You came out of the church
after confession,

your soul all shining white,

and then, in a few yards,

you had reached my school.

Watch your step there.

Somewhere is a light switch.

Welcome back to school.

So what's the plan?

We've got a development going on
at the front,

and the funds from the development
will fund the restoration.

Are you going to get rid of
the atmosphere of childhood misery

that seeps out of the walls?

Yeah. My mum has a similar view
on it. Does she really? Yeah.

When was she a pupil here?
In the '50s.

My memories of it, frankly,
they are very miserable. Yeah.

My mum found being at this school
quite brutal.

Oppressed by the nuns, beaten...
Oh, yes, yes.

Like they enjoyed hurting kids.

This would be the infant classrooms.

Very few of our teachers
had any qualification

for what they were doing.

And in the case of the nuns,

I think I realised at the time
that they were quite ignorant.

It was childminding with violence,
that's what it was.

Coming into the top class,
and who should be waiting for you

but Mother Malachy,

who was a horror.

Occasionally, you would see
Mother Malachy

with a small boy in one hand
and a cane in the other,

dragging him into the office

to be punished in some way
that required privacy.

When you find out things
about Hilary's history,

you sort of go, "Ah, yes, I can
see some of the ingredients now

"that go into her novels."

It's very noticeable that
almost a half of her memoir

is given over to
the first ten years of her life,

the part where it might be
most difficult to remember stuff.

There are these experiences,
these intense recollections,

which often come through the body
before they get to the mind,

like the vision of what seems to be
a kind of diabolical being.

I am seven and I am in the yard
at Brosscroft.

I am playing near the house,
near the back door.

Something makes me look up,

some shift of the light.

I can sense a spiral,

a lazy, buzzing swirl like flies.

But it's not flies.

There is nothing to see.

There is nothing to smell.

There is nothing to hear.

But its motion,

its insolent shift
makes my stomach heave.

I can sense at the periphery,

the limit of all my senses,

the dimensions of the creature.

It is as high as a child of two.

Its depth is a foot, 15 inches.

The air stirs around it invisibly.

It was here.

I had to drag my feet from the floor
as if they were glued down.

And I went inside...

..and I was praying...

..that my mother would not
send me out again

and say, "Go and play in the sun"...

..because I could not have explained
to her what was out there,

and I did not want anybody
to know about it.

My feeling was that I had seen
something I should not have seen.

I think my world then...

..took a turn towards the darker,
my thinking.

If it weren't for that,

I think I would be
an entirely rational person.

I talk a lot about ghosts.

And I don't want to give people
the impression that I believe

we're being followed by dead people

wailing and wearing sheets.

A ghost to me
is unexplored possibility,

a turning not taken,

a prompt from the unconscious.

I learned not to talk to the ghosts,
but to listen.

He gets up.

Avery steps out of the way.

At the door, a spirit jumps up
and intercepts him.

George Boleyn,

arms gripping him,
head heavy on his shoulder,

tears seeping into his linen
and leaving a residual salt damp

that lasts till
he can change his shirt.

In many of her books,

the story is a hinge between
the living and the dead.

In the Wolf Hall trilogy,
the living still -

and particularly Cromwell -
have a relationship

with those that have gone,
which informs how they move forward.

In the original
television adaptation,

we did occasionally have to
deal with the fact

that the dead reappeared
in Cromwell's life.

The King wants a new wife.

Fix him one.

I didn't...

..and now I'm dead.

This will become
a much more significant issue

in The Mirror And The Light.

Cromwell's most important
relationship

is with Cardinal Wolsey.

Wolsey dies quite early on.

Wolsey is a presence
that never goes away,

and Cromwell says,

"Well, of course,
I'm used to talking to him.

"I run things by him."

And he's not there.

Risley says, striding beside him,

"Death has made the Cardinal
invincible, sir?"

"So it appears." But Wolsey
never speaks to him now.

Since he came back from Shaftesbury,
he is without company or advice.

The Cardinal bounces in the clouds,

where the faithful departed giggle
at our miscalculations.

The dead are magnified in our eyes,
while we to them appear as ants.

Historians divide time
up into chapters.

Anne Boleyn's head rolls...

..and then nobody talks
about Anne Boleyn

in the next chapter of the history.

That is not how life works.

If I had wanted to leave
the dead people

out of The Mirror And The Light...

..that would have been a terrific
challenge, and it would have been

deeply unnatural, to me,

to say, "They're dead,
therefore they're not present."

What the dead mean to me is they're
like a backing group, I suppose -

continually one's aware of
their presence,

continually aware of their voices,

but they might have been working
in quite a different studio.

I was really set on coming
to London for university.

From a little Cheshire town to the
rather grand setting of Bloomsbury.

It was only as I began to
go out into the world at 18

that I began to realise
how far the ground was tilted.

It had never in my life
occurred to me

that I should have
fewer opportunities than a man.

What bias was written
into the world

and the conditional nature
of women's lives,

that babies come along and seem to
knock a woman off course.

In Wolf Hall and
Bring Up The Bodies,

Hilary Mantel is really attentive
to, sort of, women's experiences

of being controlled and their
very bodies being controlled,

and how women's sexual influence
and their promised fertility,

how it mattered above all.

But it is from a male point of view.

Thomas Cromwell watches how they
are positioned and exploited.

What could be more central
to this masculine world...

..than the intricacies, the
fallibility, of a woman's body?

And all the men in the book
have to look and listen...

..in a woman's presence.

What is a woman's life?

Do not think because she is
not a man, she does not fight.

The bedchamber is her tilting
ground, where she shows her colours,

and her theatre of war is the
sealed room where she gives birth.

We do not make heroes of women

mangled in the struggle
to give birth.

If she seems so injured that she
can have no more children,

we commiserate with her husband.

Now, when I began to write about
the court of Henry VIII,

I became conscious of...

..what is called the Queen's side.

Cromwell learns early...

..to listen for what is happening
on the Queen's side.

"There have been rumours," he says.
"Yes, but she's not.

"I would be the first to know.

"If she thickened by an inch, it
would be me who let out her clothes.

"Besides, she can't,
because they don't.

"They haven't."

"She'd tell you?"

"Of course, out of spite."

Still Mary will not meet his eyes,

but she seems to feel
she owes him information.

"When they're alone,
she lets him unlace her bodice."

Hilary Mantel has an interest
in how women, how young women,

get on together and know each other,

but one which has no sense that sort
of sisterly-ness is a transcendent

or sort of upraising thing.

I mean, she has this in common with
some other really wonderful

novelists, you know,
from Jane Austen to Muriel Spark.

There were things that you'd
see happening to yourself

in your life...

..and the things that
you never foresee.

She's written about her health
problems when she was a young woman.

Her own body, which was
at war with itself...

..and that feeds some of the
writing, it seems to me.

I was almost famous
for being thin.

I had no idea of the medical
catastrophes that were

lying in wait for me,

how drugs would transform my body.

It was absolutely desolating.

My body weight increased 50%
within about six months,

and then it just kept on going.

The only thing you can do
is not be afraid of it.

You know, I'm damned if
I'm going to wear black

on the grounds that it's slimming.

Past a certain point,
nothing is slimming.

You may as well forget it.

It's a striking thing
about her fiction, that...

..some characters have awkward,
strange, even grotesque bodies.

The bulk of Thomas Cromwell's
body...

A body like a labourer...

..which he has to drape in
the clothes of the courtier.

..puts them sort of out of sync,
out of kilter with everybody else.

That's something she's fascinated
by and something that all these

characters have to kind of learn
to make into a virtue

rather than an affliction.

A man who is accustomed to hard
riding will fatten as he leaves off,

as he knows it from his own person.

He says, "I am 50, and even at 30,
I was never lean."

He does not take his belly,
as the King does,

as an insult to God's design.

In the Wolf Hall trilogy,
the body of Henry VIII is key,

the royal body
whose health is analogous

to the health of the nation.

The thing about Henry VIII
is he got very large.

As Henry's body deteriorates,

so he loses his self-confidence,
his masculinity is undermined...

His character deteriorates
with a consequent effect

on the politics
and the fate of England.

If the King is ugly,
so is the Commonwealth.

If the King is sick,
so is his realm.

Old men will tell you how
the King's grandfather, King Edward,

grew soft in middle age,

his eye always rolling in the
direction of any woman at court,

wife or maid...

..under the age of 30.

This is our favourite...
Oh, wonderful.

I am fascinated
by evidence of the past

pushing through the surface
of the present.

This is the road
going up towards Putney.

When Ben Miles was cast
in the role of Thomas Cromwell

in the Wolf Hall stage play,
he and George had the project

walk Thomas Cromwell's life
through London,

and they took a lot
of photographs.

George is a professional
photographer.

Ben also has a really good eye.

That's Austin Friars' basement.

The third book has been
very much fed by photographs,

and there are several instances
where the text has evolved

in response to a picture.

That's a hellhound.

It's half in this world
and half out of it... Yeah.

..and that picture actually
frightened me, so I went back...

..to one of the really frightening
episodes in Wolf Hall,

which is the burning of the
old woman, that Cromwell sees

when he's a boy of eight.

When I saw that dog,
I knew there was something missing,

so I re-wrote it,
adding the horrible detail... Yeah.

..about the dogs of London attracted
by the smell of human meat.

No-one came.

The light was waning.

He was not afraid of the old woman's
ghost, but he was aware of company.

In the smoke that still lingered,
he could see certain shapes,

low, slinking, looping.

I would never have thought of that.

But as soon as
I saw the photograph,

not only did I think of it,
but it seemed to me to be true.

So at the beginning of Bring Up
The Bodies, the second book...

..we find the King and his entourage
riding down to Wolf Hall.

She is silent
as she glides into his fist.

Already, you can feel the autumn.

You know there will not be
many more days like these,

so let us stand...

..the horse boys of Wolf Hall
swarming around us,

Wiltshire in the western counties,
stretching into a blaze of blue,

let us stand.

George and I met up with Hilary
at Wolf Hall,

the seat of the Seymour family.

As it stands now, it's a
Georgian version of Wolf Hall

on the same site.

These are our finds here.
We got thousands of them.

The Wolf Hall that was here
in the 1530s and '40s

was absolutely enormous.

It's got underground sewers,
and it seemed to have had

a complete makeover specifically
for Henry's visit of 1535.

We're going down.

HE GRUNTS

No.
Yes.

Now, take the picture.

Oh, no.

No, thanks very much.

It's huge.

Considering how old
these bricks are,

I think this is the most intact
place we've ever been to.

They've left a terrible mess here.
HE LAUGHS

It's almost surprising that
Wolf Hall is a real place.

The skeleton of the Tudor building
lies below the ground.

Lots of bones everywhere.
Yeah.

Henry's, tossed over his
shoulder. Yes.

Henry the King.

HE LAUGHS

Get out!

For me, Wolf Hall is sealed in
a kind of sunlit time capsule

on that day I imagine Henry
and Thomas Cromwell walking in.

The King's hand on his shoulder...

..Henry's face earnest as he talks
his way back through the landscape

of the day.

The green copses
and rushing streams,

the alders by the water's edge,

the early haze that lifted by nine,

the brief shower, the small wind
that died and settled...

..the stillness, the afternoon heat.

Wolf Hall is never not present
in the third book,

and particularly after
Jane Seymour's death,

Wolf Hall becomes a kind of spectre
for the King in his inner vision.

It's as if he's thinking back
to happier days.

"Do you know what I like best
this summer?" the King says.

He corrects himself.

"I mean, the summer before.

"I liked Wolf Hall.

"Once in a while, every prince
wishes he could lay aside his duties

"and live for a year
as a private gentleman."

The book is a study of kingship.

A king is such
a very strange thing to be.

In my trilogy,

Thomas Cromwell begins to
write a book about the King.

What he's doing is devising
a set of rules for himself.

Never say this to the King,

always do that in
the King's presence.

And a great deal of the conflict
in the book comes from

whether he can obey the rules
in the book called Henry.

In terms of the power games
that were going on,

this unlikely character, who barges
his way into Henry's councils,

Henry literally cannot manage
without him.

The Mirror And The Light is
primarily about the slipping away

of those powers.

He can taste his death.

Slow, metallic, not come yet.

In his terror,
he tries to obey his father,

but his hands cannot get a
purchase, nor can he crawl.

He is an eel.

He is a worm on a hook.

His strength has ebbed and leaked
away beneath him, and it seems

a long time ago now since he gave
his permission to be dead.

In a sense,
a book is never finished.

You could keep polishing
and polishing.

When you write something like
the Thomas Cromwell trilogy,

it's like trying to
polish up a thunderstorm.

You just have to accept
it's bigger than you are.

The night that I wrote the last
paragraphs, not just of a book

but a trilogy, and I was also
consciously ending a man's life,

I passed a very disturbed night,
and to my horror and astonishment...

..my picture of Henry VII
had fallen off the wall.

All that happens is
a plastic hook snaps...

..but "Why then?"
I ask myself.

For years and years and years,
The Mirror And The Light exists

in a private relationship between
a computer and Hilary Mantel,

and now the publishing process
kicks into gear.

There must be a sense of relief
to share a project that means

so much to you
and has overtaken you for 15 years.

MACHINE GUN FIRES

The fact that she only won really
popular recognition very late on

gave her a certain independence.

She's a fearless novelist.

My appetite for the subject,
for Cromwell's company,

it has never waned,
it has only sharpened.

I know, to the readers,
it seemed to take a long time,

but to me,
it's not been a day too long.

I could do more, but he's dead.

When his tale is done, he writes
the superscription, "To the King...

"..my Most Gracious Sovereign Lord,
His Royal Majesty..."

..but he cannot think how to end it.

It may be the last letter
they will allow...

..so he writes, "I cry for mercy."

He writes it again, in case
Henry should be distracted...

.."Mercy," and once again,
"Mercy."