Bring Up the Bodies

• 1. Introduction

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  Bring Up the Bodies opens at Wolf Hall, the Seymour family estate, where Thomas Cromwell rides alongside King Henry VIII. It is the moment everything tilts. Henry has grown tired of his queen, Anne Boleyn. She has given him neither peace nor a son. And Cromwell, the king's Master Secretary, is about to be asked to do something he knows may not be entirely just.

  Hilary Mantel's novel, the sequel to the award-winning Wolf Hall from 2009, traces what follows: a forced separation, a set of charges that may be built on rumour, and the deaths of Anne and several of those closest to her. The book won both the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. No other author had won the Booker twice for consecutive novels in the same trilogy.

  What draws readers and critics alike is not the outcome, which anyone with a passing knowledge of Tudor history already knows, but the method. How does Mantel make events that are centuries old feel terrifying and immediate? And what does she reveal about the man at the centre of it all, a man whose loyalty to the king coexists with his private doubts about the evidence he is assembling?

• 2. Cromwell's Calculation

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  Mark Smeaton, a musician in Anne's circle, passes on damaging rumours about the queen's faithfulness. Lady Rochford, Anne's own sister-in-law, does the same. Cromwell listens to all of it and begins to build a case, even as he acknowledges, in the novel's most morally charged moments, that he is not fully convinced the evidence is true.

  Anne's brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, refuses to help negotiate a separation. He warns Cromwell plainly that if Anne's marriage to the king survives, he will "make short work of you." That threat transforms the situation. Cromwell now has personal reasons, layered on top of the king's commands, to see the Boleyn circle brought low.

  The novel makes clear that Cromwell also carries a longer grievance. Many of those closest to Anne had helped destroy Cardinal Wolsey, the mentor whose fall Cromwell had watched at close range. The chance to bring those same people down sharpens his purpose. He pursues the case with an awareness of his own motives that does not slow him down.

• 3. The Trial and Its Cost

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  Anne Boleyn, her brother, and several members of her circle are tried for treason. The charges rest partly on testimony Cromwell knows to be uncertain. The trials end in conviction, and the executions follow.

  Henry rewards Cromwell with a barony for engineering the outcome. The new queen, Jane Seymour, brings her family into a firm alliance with him. His position as chief adviser to the king is secured at the precise moment when the method by which he secured it remains morally unresolved.

  Mantel does not present Cromwell as a villain or as a hero. She presents him as a man of immense practical intelligence who operates inside a system that demands results without asking too many questions about the path. Janet Maslin, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, wrote that Mantel makes these events "fresh and terrifying all over again," which is exactly the tension the novel sustains to its final page.

• 4. Publication and Recognition

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  HarperCollins published the novel in the United Kingdom in May 2012, with Henry Holt and Co. releasing it simultaneously in the United States. The critical reception was immediate and strong.

  By the end of that year the book had won the Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award, and the Costa Book of the Year. Mantel also took the Specsavers National Book Awards title of UK Author of the Year for 2012. The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction placed it on its shortlist in 2013.

  Years later, The New York Times listed the novel at number 95 in its catalogue of the 100 best books of the 21st century. That ranking places it among the fiction that critics and editors regard as having genuine staying power across decades, not just its initial season.

• 5. Stage and Screen

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  In January 2014, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a two-part theatrical adaptation covering both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. The script was written by Mantel herself alongside Mike Poulton. The production premiered at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon before transferring to the Aldwych Theatre in London later the same year.

  A six-part BBC television series, also titled Wolf Hall, followed in January 2015 in the United Kingdom and in April 2015 in the United States. Mark Rylance played Cromwell, with Damian Lewis as Henry VIII and Jonathan Pryce in the cast. The series drew from both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

  The trilogy concluded with The Mirror and the Light, published in 2020, which carries Cromwell's story through to its end.

• 6. What Mantel Made New

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  Maslin's observation in The New York Times captures something that reviewers returned to repeatedly: the book functions as a cliffhanger even for readers who know exactly how it ends. That is a technical achievement of a rare kind.

  Mantel's method is to inhabit Cromwell's perspective so completely that the reader experiences the events as he does, with all his rationalizations and private hesitations intact. The irony Maslin mentions is structural. The ending is no surprise in historical terms; what surprises is how much it costs, and how clearly the novel tracks that cost without ever letting Cromwell, or the reader, look away.

  The fact that Mantel returned to this world a third time with The Mirror and the Light in 2020, completing the arc she began in Wolf Hall, suggests that the material demanded more than two volumes to exhaust.