 Fourth Estate presents Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and the World of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell. Read by Dan Stevens, Julian Rindtut, and Anna Bentink. The World of Wolf Hall, a reading guide to Hilary Mantell's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, read by Anna Bentink. The Revolutionary Nature of the Books and Rehabilitation of Thomas Cromwell. There are few figures in British history as universally reviled as Thomas Cromwell. Held responsible for the suppression of the monasteries, the destruction of countless priceless books deemed too popish, and the attacking of statues, shrines and rude screens across the country, Cromwell has traditionally been viewed as a reforming bulldozer, manipulating the king's hand to achieve religious changes against the Catholic Church at any cost. Hilary Mantell, however, described in a 2013 Times interview her own discovery of Cromwell, many years before, in a contemporary account of Cromwell at Woolsey's Palace, weeping over a prayer book. It is one of those things lying around in the pages of history. The historian who describes that scene quotes from the original source, but none of them have realised that it is all soul-stay, the day of the dead. So, when he is crying, he may be crying for more than one thing, she says. An historian will say, we hear you, Cromwell, you are crying because Woolsey has come down and your career is under threat. But there is usually more than one reason for such a dramatic display of feeling. The novelist says, and what else? And you realise that within the last couple of years, he has lost most of his family, and this is the day that you remember them. Having written repeatedly about major figures in history, she reminded herself that the question always about history is, who is telling me this, and why would they want me to believe it? If someone has been consistently demonised, you want to ask why? And if there could be another story? In fact, so insistent was she that Cromwell was a far more interesting figure than history had traditionally depicted, that she worried another author would get there first. I kept thinking someone else would write the Cromwell book, because it seemed to me a very powerful story that changed everything we thought about the Tudor court. Cromwell has been such a peripheral character in fiction and in drama. If you put him centre stage, all this familiar stuff looks completely different. I was sure somebody else would beat me to it. Cromwell has, of course, been depicted many times before. In the 1960s, the films, Anne of the Thousand Days, and A Man for All Seasons, both portrayed Cromwell as ruthless, untrustworthy and vindictive. While in the 2007 television series The Tudors, Cromwell displays a fiery reformist zeal. He has appeared in countless books, series and films covering the rich historical era of Henry VIII, the man with saintly Thomas More's blood on his hands, but not until Mantell's books has he been regarded with such humanity and compassion. In a British Academy panel discussion in 2015 with Deir Mdmcculloch, Mantell described what she was doing with her Thomas Cromwell, explaining that previously he was not the sum of historical facts but the sum of prejudices, information, disinformation, rolling on from generation to generation among popular historians, amongst novelists and dramatists, unquestioned, unchallenged. Discussing whether her version is more or less accurate than a historian, she explained the difference between the two types of portrayal. Other historians, I think, are very much in the business of judging, issuing moral report cards on people, and academic historians, who have a different view of Cromwell, are in the business of evaluation, placing people, holding the backdrop steady and evaluating him. A novelist can't do either of them. The novel complete. Ready to continue?