Royals, it seems, have their tenacious uses, often fictive. Contemporaries such as Alan Bennett and Edward St Aubyn have deployed them. One hundred years ago, Ford Madox Ford wrote his singular trilogy (1906–08) about Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen of Henry VIII. Now the esteemed novelist and memoirist Hilary Mantel returns to the Tudor world, again with revisionist intent.

Wolf Hall, published three years ago, was that rarity, a genuine bestseller that won high critical praise and the Booker Prize. The novel ends in July 1535, with Thomas More’s downfall: Anne Boleyn is secure as queen, and Thomas Cromwell dominates the political scene in the aftermath of his mentor Cardinal Wolsey’s disgrace. The sequel, Bring up the Bodies, rather shorter than Wolf Hall, covers some of the most extraordinary months in English history: the downfall of Anne Boleyn, the rise of the Seymours, and the unleashing of a new, sanguinary phase in Henry VIII’s reign.

The book is wonderfully anxious-making. We never relax, because our subject can never afford to relax – and this is a book, as Mantel reminds us in a firm afterword, about Thomas Cromwell (‘still in need of attention from biographers’), not Anne or Henry. ‘So now get up,’ the fifteen-year-old Thomas is told at the start of Wolf Hall, having been kicked to the ground by his brutal father, Walter. ‘Felled, dazed, silent’, he awaits the next, murderous kick. In a way, Cromwell has been getting up ever since, cannily, doggedly, notoriously. ‘His past lies about him like a burnt house. He has been building, but it has taken him years to sweep up the mess.’