Original subtitles

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."