In this book I try to show how a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer. Some familiar aspects of the story are not to be found in this novel. To limit the multiplication of characters, it omits mention of a deceased lady called Bridget Wingfield, who may (from beyond the grave) have had something to do with the rumours that began to circulate against Anne before her fall. The effect of omitting any source of rumour may be to throw more blame on Jane, Lady Rochford, than perhaps she deserves; we tend to read Lady Rochford backwards, as we know the destructive role she played in the affairs of Katherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife. Julia Fox has given a more positive reading of Jane’s character in her book Jane Boleyn (2007).

Connoisseurs of Anne’s last days will notice other omissions, including that of Richard Page, a courtier who was arrested at about the same time as Thomas Wyatt, and who was never charged or tried. As he plays no part in this story otherwise, and as no one has an idea why he was arrested, it seemed best not to burden the reader with one more name.

I am indebted to the work of Eric Ives, David Loades, Alison Weir, G.W. Bernard, Retha M. Warnicke and many other historians of the Boleyns and their downfall.

This book is of course not about Anne Boleyn or about Henry VIII, but about the career of Thomas Cromwell, who is still in need of attention from biographers. Meanwhile, Mr Secretary remains sleek, plump and densely inaccessible, like a choice plum in a Christmas pie; but I hope to continue my efforts to dig him out.

Acknowledgements

I am truly grateful to the open-minded historians who took the time to read Wolf Hall, to comment on it and encourage this project, and to the many readers who have contacted me with family trees and snippets of family legend, with piquant information about lost places and almost forgotten names. Thank you to Sir Bob Worcester for showing me Allington Castle, once owned by the Wyatt family, and to Rupert Thistlethwayte, descendant of William Paulet, for inviting me to Cadhay, his beautiful house in Devon. And thank you to all those people who have issued kind invitations I hope to take up in the course of writing my next novel.

I owe special gratitude to my husband Gerald McEwen, who has to share a house with so many invisible people, and who never fails in his support and practical kindness.

About the Author

HILARY MANTEL is the bestselling author of ten previous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Among her novels are A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. The winner of the 2006 Hawthornden Prize, her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. Mantel lives in England with her husband.