The Wolf Hall Picture Book

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Hilary Mantel with Ben Miles (centre), an actor, and his brother, George, a photographer, with whom she collaborated to create The Wolf Hall Picture Book. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian I am, as I think a lot of authors are, concerned about the speed at which we are consuming history now, the way that the past, the very recent past, is being made into a version and real-life people walking around have to live with their representatives and so on,” she says, not naming names, but nodding when I mention the TV series The Crown and Kenneth Branagh’s imminent appearance as Boris Johnson in This England. Many have tweeted tributes to Mantel following her death. Writer and broadcaster Damian Barr said her death is “such a loss”.

Reuniting the creative team from the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning first series, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will be directed by seven-time BAFTA award winner Peter Kosminsky (The Undeclared War, The State), adapted for television by Academy award nominee Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Frank) and produced by Colin Callender’s Playground (The Undeclared War, All Creatures Great and Small) and Company Pictures (Van Der Valk, Blood). In The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell recalls the same scene years later. The main action is identical but he remembers himself as more vulnerable. A threatening man, who wasn’t in the first memory, crushes the young Cromwell’s hand. People are crammed together, and the stench of burning flesh is so strong they vomit at their feet. Here’s an example. In Wolf Hall, after a threatening encounter with Thomas More in which More accuses him of “negotiating with heretics”, Cromwell remembers seeing a heretic burned alive. As a boy of about eight, Cromwell has run away from his violent father and got caught up in a crowd he thinks is heading towards a fair. But the roaring crowd is gathering around an old woman, “the Loller”, who is singed to death before their eyes. I think simply because I prize the long view so much. And that’s why I won’t make the parallels. I think that if you do, it turns real people into these kind of fantasy figures and unfortunately, they’re not. They’re real, present and dangerous.” In both recollections he stays after the onlookers have dispersed but in the second, stray dogs appear, and they are even more frightening than the humans. First the men, then the beasts. And he realises something new: that a version of himself has been left behind there, “at the wrong end of time”, and that the person who returned home was different.Bill Hamilton, who was Mantel’s agent throughout her career, said it had been “the greatest privilege” to work with the writer. “Her wit, stylistic daring, creative ambition and phenomenal historical insight mark her out as one of the greatest novelists of our time.” So original and disconcerting that it will surely come to be seen as a paradigm-shifter’ Sunday Telegraph Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel

When asked by the Financial Times earlier this month whether she believed in an afterlife, Mantel said she did, but that she could not imagine how it might work. “However, the universe is not limited by what I can imagine,” she said. Mantel is preparing to leave Devon to set up home with her husband, Gerald McEwen, in Ireland this month, having previously expressed her shame at the British government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and her desire to become an Irish citizen. She has become a byword for a particular kind of intensely-felt, brilliantly subtle exploration of the past. Today, Mantel says she is alive to the danger of drawing shallow links with present-day politics and society. With every book she redefined what words can do,” he tweeted, adding: “She’s the only person I ever interviewed that speaks in whole, flawless paragraphs. I can’t believe we won’t have another book from her.” In 1990 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 she was awarded a CBE and in 2014 a DBE.

Colin Callender, CEO of Playground, says “Following the success of the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning original television adaptation of the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy, we are thrilled and honoured that, nine years later, we have been able re-unite Peter Kosminsky and his brilliant team, in front of and behind the camera, to bring Thomas Cromwell ‘s final chapter to the screen. Intimate, thrilling, and deeply moving, The Mirror and the Light shines a fresh light on the politics of power and the personal price paid by those who wield it. Cromwell’s story is as contemporary as ever – a story of loyalty and betrayal that just happens to be about people 500 years ago.” Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. All of England lies at his feet, ripe for innovation and religious reform. But as fortune’s wheel turns, Cromwell’s enemies are gathering in the shadows. Mantel's Cromwell is an omnicompetent figure, "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Fluent in many languages, learned, witty and thoughtful, he's also an intimidating physical presence; Wolsey fondly compares him to "one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes". This makes him an ideal emissary for Wolsey's project of liquidating some smaller monasteries to fund a school and an Oxford college. But self-advancement isn't Cromwell's only motive. He's disgusted by the waste and superstition he encounters, and takes a materialist view of relics and indulgences. The feudal mindset of Wolsey's rival grandees seems equally outdated to him: jibes at his lowly origins bounce off his certainty that noble blood and feats of arms now count for less than lines of credit and nicely balanced books. Susanne Simpson, Executive Producer of Masterpiece says: “I am incredibly proud to bring Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to Masterpiece and the American audience. It is thrilling that such brilliant actors as Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis will reprise their roles for this final chapter of Thomas Cromwell’s story. The level of excellence on and off screen for this series is incomparable.”

The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s cruel and capricious gaze? She made headlines a year ago, when she suggested the monarchy could be facing “the endgame”, and may not “outlast William”; and a lecture she gave in 2013, entitled Royal Bodies, in which she described the then Duchess of Cambridge as a “plastic princess”, caused an outcry. Many people wilfully misread her criticism of what she explained as “the way we maltreat royal persons, making them one superhuman, and yet less than human”. The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context… Some immensely striking and suggestive images followed: a ghostly hound in Richmond Park, which brought to mind Cromwell’s memories of dogs circling, scenting burned flesh; Boleyn’s robes, laid out on a table like a shroud in Lambeth Palace; a curling tong lying plugged in on the floor during filming at Cromwell’s mansion in the City of London, Austin Friars, looking for all the world like an instrument of torture. There it is again – the interplay between the past and the present day. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’’ The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel

But the book is not an attempt on Mantel’s part to draw parallels with contemporary life. She was, she says, persistently bemused when people suggested to her, for example, that Boris Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings resembles Cromwell. “I would think: no, not in any way. b>It is the making of our English world, and who can fail to be stirred by it?’ Helen Dunmore, author of Birdcage Walk’ For Ben Miles, with whom Mantel co-adapted The Mirror and the Light for its run last year at the Gielgud theatre in London, the project was part of a continuing collaboration of nearly a decade’s standing. The three of them began to visit places together, one of them often acting as a decoy to the helpful guides intent on showing them the official version.