Reaching the end of my Tudor trilogy

Novelist Hilary Mantel tells ROSIE KINCHEN about finally finishing her epic Thomas Cromwell trilogy

- ROSIE KINCHEN

Hilary Mantel is weighing up the first hardback copy of her new book. “It’s not too bulky,” she says, as her husband, Gerald, and I peer at the vast volume in front of us.

It seems extraordinary that someone who has already filled more than 1,000 pages with the life of Thomas Cromwell worries about such things.

“I am constrained by the realms of possibility – what can actually be held together,” she says thoughtfully. Whether she means the plot or the technical limits of publishing I’m not entirely sure. In both senses, The Mirror & the Light is her biggest book yet.

It’s the final installment in the life of Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief adviser. The first two in the series, Wolf Hall, published in 2009, and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), together sold more than five million copies worldwide and both won the Booker prize.

Sellout stage adaptations and a TV dramatisation followed (the latter starring Damian Lewis as Henry VIII and Mark Rylance as Cromwell). Mantel was instrumental in both. Then there came a very long silence. For eight years, rumours of writer’s block and missed deadlines have swirled while fans have clamoured for the next Tudor hit.

Now, at last, it is done. The final chapter in the life of Cromwell, the puppet master at the heart of the English Reformation, a blacksmith’s son who rose from the backstreets of Putney to sit at the king’s right hand, was published in March.