With exactly one month to go until Wolf Hall Weekend 2026 on June 6–7, in London, we now have only 5 seats remaining.

As readers continue to rediscover The Mirror and the Light, we are especially looking forward to our special staged reading of Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles’ play adaptation at All Hallows by the Tower, performed by the Tower Theatre Company under the direction of Dan Usztan. It promises to be a memorable experience in a remarkable setting beside the Tower of London.

Dr Tracy Borman, our opening keynote speaker for the weekend, has created this wonderful short video about her obsession with Thomas Cromwell and her love of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy and the adaptations:

Over the weekend we’ll be joined by leading historians, writers, actors, and scholars for conversations, presentations, signings, exhibitions and good food. If you have been thinking of joining us for this unique celebration of Hilary Mantel’s work, now would be the moment to secure your place!

https://wolfhallweekend.com

I stumbled upon this interesting interview on 4th Estate’s website recently, and it has changed my thinking about the often controversial version of Thomas Cromwell as portrayed in Wolf Hall Trilogy. Hilary is asked:

“How did you go about finding a voice for Cromwell and getting under his skin?

Because they were so often dictated, letters, personal or impersonal, can give you a sense of the rhythm and vocabulary of the character’s spoken voice, and hence their mode of thought. So you look at those, and you look at what other people have said about your character. The main person who tells us about Cromwell is the Spanish-Imperial Ambassador, Chapuys, who was his enemy, but he was also his neighbour in the city and someone whom Cromwell saw a great deal of.

Chapuys was a very astute observer. He tells us how, when you were talking to Cromwell, he would fasten his eyes on your face, to calculate minutely the effect his words were having on you. He also paints a portrait of Cromwell as a very open-handed, generous, affable host, a man with whom it was wonderful to have a conversation.”
Unlocking Cromwell: An interview with Dame Hilary Mantel, April 29, 2015, 4th Estate

This is a quietly revealing insight into one of the primary influences on Mantel in the creation of her Cromwell, and it seemed worth exploring further. I found myself looking into Eustace Chapuys himself, and how his activities at the Tudor court might have informed Mantel’s writing. In doing so, I expected to find a substantial biography. There is none. The only recent work centred on him is by one of our Wolf Hall Weekend 2024 speakers, Dr Lauren Mackay: Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives through the Eyes of the Spanish Ambassador. Mackay’s book approaches the period through Chapuys’ letters, and provides a fresh perspective on Henry, his court and the Tudor period in general.

It may be worth pausing to recall who Chapuys was before considering his role in shaping Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell. Born in Savoy and trained as a lawyer, Chapuys entered imperial service and was appointed ambassador to the court of Henry VIII in 1529, representing the interests of Charles V. He remained in England for over fifteen years, during which time he became both a skilled diplomat and a deeply invested partisan—particularly in his unwavering support for Catherine of Aragon. His proximity to the court, combined with his legal training and political acuity, made him an exceptionally perceptive observer. Yet everything he saw was filtered through allegiance and the demands of reporting back to an emperor. What survives of him—his dense, regular dispatches—is therefore not a neutral record, but a sustained act of interpretation under pressure.

The surviving record of his correspondence is substantial, but mostly encountered through calendared summaries and extracts rather than neat published volumes of complete letters. Chapuys’ dispatches to Charles V survive chiefly in the diplomatic papers of the Habsburg/Spanish imperial archive tradition, especially material preserved at Simancas and elsewhere. In English, they are most commonly accessed through the nineteenth-century series Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain, usually referred to as the Calendar of State Papers, Spain.

My thinking about the value of Chapuys to Mantel’s creation of her Cromwell is she is not saying: Chapuys tells us the truth about Cromwell. She is doing something subtler: Chapuys shows us how Cromwell looked to an intelligent enemy.

And that may be the real freshness. Mantel’s Cromwell is not created by wiping away hostile testimony. He is created by reading hostile testimony properly: noticing where it distorts, but also where it accidentally reveals.

Let’s look at the novel and see where Chapuys first enters in Part Three, Chapter One, “Three-Card Trick”, set in the winter of 1529–30. Mantel introduces him at a dinner at Antonio Bonvisi’s house, where Cromwell and Thomas More are already in conversation…

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We’re thrilled to welcome Rebecca Batley and Amy McElroy—the insightful minds behind the Substack newsletter The Tudor Notebook—for a thoughtful Q&A exploring how Hilary Mantel reanimates pivotal Tudor figures through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell in her Wolf Hall trilogy.

Rebecca and Amy bring an engaging blend of historical curiosity and literary flair to their commentary—be it on Mantel, historical fiction, or Tudor culture—making their perspectives both entertaining and enriching. Today, they share their takes on how Mantel frames characters such as Edward and Jane Seymour, Princess Mary, Charles Brandon, and Stephen Gardiner—and how Mantel’s Cromwell sees them in ways both sympathetic and sharply perceptive.

Rebecca is a historian and archaeologist who has focused on women’s stories in history. Her published books include:

• Ann Walker: The Life and Death of Gentleman Jack’s Wife (2023), uncovering the life behind the well-known figure Gentleman Jack’s partner;

• Anne Neville: Queen and Wife of Richard III (2024), a biographical exploration of the often-overlooked Queen Anne Neville.

• The Lord Protector and His Wives: Catherine Filliol, Anne Stanhope and Edward Seymour (2025), focusing on the complex relationships of Edward Seymour and his wives.

Amy writes passionately about the Tudor era and has authored several nonfiction works:

• Educating the Tudors (January 2023), exploring the diverse educational experiences of Tudor society.

• Women’s Lives in the Tudor Era (February 2024), illuminating the roles and experiences of women across social strata during Tudor times.

• Mary Tudor: Queen of France (2025), a biography of Henry VIII’s sister, delving into her life as Queen of France.

• And coming soon: Desiderius Erasmus: The Folly or Far Sightedness of Renaissance Europe’s Greatest Mind Hardcover – Mar. 2026

Welcome Rebecca and Amy, and thanks for taking the time out to speak with us about these fascinating characters.

WHW - Let’s talk about Edward Seymour. Through Mantel’s Cromwell’s eyes, he often seems like a cold, quietly ambitious operator. Do you think her Cromwell underestimates him—or is he onto something? And how do you read the power dynamic between those two in Mantel’s world?

Rebecca - That’s a really interesting question and not an easy one to answer. I do not think that Cromwell’s view of him as a “cold, quietly ambitious operator” is entirely inaccurate - Seymour did after all in many ways embody the image we have of an ambitious Tudor statesman - however I do also feel that his view is rather simplistic. Seymour was undoubtedly ambitious but he was also learned, educated to a very high level and had many other interests and involvements outside politics. I think in that sense Mantel’s Cromwell underestimates Seymour’s intellectual ability. Due to this I think the power dynamic between them is tipped in Cromwell’s favour in Mantel’s world. Cromwel clearly believes he is the more intelligent and educated of the two. Whether or not this is reflective of their relationship in reality is open to debate.

WHW - Jane Seymour is sometimes written off as dull, but Mantel— through her Cromwell—gives her a kind of quiet, steely presence. Do you think Cromwell sees something in her the rest of the court misses? Or is he simply playing a long game with a compliant queen-in-waiting?

Rebecca - Again a tricky question. I am not sure whether Cromwell sees something in her that everyone else misses or if he is seeing what he wants to see in her. I think it suits his purpose to believe that she has a certain strength in her. This is, in my opinion, extremely clever of Mantel, we know so little about Jane’s real character and she plays on this ambiguity, allowing Jane to become what Cromwell wishes her to be whilst never quite pinning down the truth of her character.

WHW - Princess Mary is one of the most emotionally fraught relationships Cromwell has. There’s conflict, but also moments of real empathy. How did you respond to their scenes together? Do you think Mantel’s Cromwell is genuinely conflicted—or just very good at pretending to care when it suits him?

Rebecca - I found the relationship between Princess Mary and Cromwell one the most fascinating in Mantel’s world. Their scenes together, are for me, some of the most emotional of the whole book. Their relationship is nuanced and complex. There are times when I genuinely believe that Mantel’s Cromwell is conflicted, for example once Mary has essentially decided that she no longer needs his protection Cromwell seems almost hurt that she is distancing herself. Having said that I also think he pretends to care more than he does when it suits his purpose to do so. He is so good at concealing his true feelings that I’m never quite sure about his motives, which I think is why the book is so good and why Mantel’s Cromwell continues to fascinate us all.

WHW - Charles Brandon—loyal drinking buddy of Henry VIII—doesn’t get much spotlight in Mantel’s trilogy, but when he does, it’s through Cromwell’s ever-skeptical gaze. What’s your take on how her Cromwell sizes him up? Respect? Contempt? Mild irritation?

Amy - I admittedly found Brandon’s portrayal to be amusing in that he comes across as loud, and a little bit of a buffoon, not quite fitting in with some of those of noble birth. Having said that, although Brandon does not feature heavily in the trilogy, Mantel does make it apparent that Brandon was a trusted friend of Henry. One cannot help but think that Cromwell viewed Brandon as largely irrelevant for his work and plans. I do feel that Mantel’s Cromwell thought more kindly of Brandon than he did of other nobles and those surrounding Henry. Within his short appearances in the trilogy Brandon gives Cromwell opportunities to speak, or persuades Henry to hear him out when others would shut him down. Overall, I think Mantel’s Cromwell did not view Brandon as any threat to him but was well aware of his influence over Henry.

WHW - Now, Stephen Gardiner. Cromwell’s old frenemy. Mantel gives us this fantastic simmering rivalry between the two—full of veiled threats and sharp-tongued letters. Do you think Cromwell secretly enjoys intellectual sparring? Or is Gardiner just the worst dinner party guest imaginable?

Amy - I loved the relationship Mantel portrayed between Gardiner and Cromwell; there was humour, rivalry, and on occasion, what appeared to be loathing. I certainly believe Cromwell enjoyed a good session of sparring, particularly with Mantel’s Gardiner who would become so irritated with Cromwell. Despite the war of words, I think Gardiner respected Cromwell, at least until he accrued so much power and became a rival to him and for Henry’s attention. Although Gardiner could be amusing on occasion he would not be at the top of my invite list to a dinner party (though Cromwell would be a fun guest).

WHW - One of the joys of Mantel’s writing is how we see the whole cast of Tudor characters filtered through Cromwell’s inner world. Do you think that narrows our view of figures like Brandon and Gardiner—or does it actually make them more vivid, seeing them through Cromwell’s unblinking, occasionally savage lens?

Amy - Mantel created an incredible world through Cromwell, one which I am sure has intrigued many and influenced them to learn more about their favourite characters or the Tudor period in general. As long as we remain aware that Mantel’s trilogy is fiction (though based on meticulous research) I do not think it narrows our views, it provides insight into history that to some may otherwise remain in the shadows. As a non-fiction author I fully respect the research and skills that go into creating historical fiction, weaving historical worlds for readers to enjoy and Mantel’s is one of my favourites.

A heartfelt thank you to Rebecca and Amy for joining us and bringing their sharp insight and enthusiasm. Their reflections remind us just how richly human Hilary Mantel’s characters are—crafted not just as historical figures, but as vivid individuals caught in the tangled web of power, ambition, and emotion.

If these discussions ignite your imagination, we’d love to meet you in person at Wolf Hall Weekend 2026, this June beside the Tower of London. Expect a weekend rich in insight, dialogue, and creative homage—featuring panels, performances, exhibitions, and immersive encounters, including an exclusive performance of The Mirror and the Light.

Secure your place now at wolfhallweekend.com/tickets

“IF YOU CANNOT SPEAK TRUTH AT A BEHEADING, WHEN CAN YOU SPEAK IT?”

On Saturday June 6th 2026, at All Hallows by the Tower, we will host a staged reading of The Mirror and the Light—performed by the Tower Theatre Company and directed by Dan Usztan as part of our celebration of the life and work of the late Dame Hilary Mantel. This is the dramatic final part of Mantel’s award winning trilogy that begins in England, 1536 when Anne Boleyn’s fate has been sealed by the executioner. Jane Seymour must deliver King Henry a healthy heir. And to the disgust of Henry’s nobles, Thomas Cromwell continues his ruthless ascent from the gutters of Putney to the highest rank beside his master. But Cromwell is vulnerable and his enemies are poised to strike. The further you climb, the harder you fall.

Before the reading begins, Ben Miles will be joined by Aurora Dawson-Hunte in a short opening conversation. Dawson-Hunte appeared in the original Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Mirror and the Light, playing Bess Seymour, and brings a first-hand perspective on how Mantel’s final novel was realised in performance. Together, she and Miles will reflect briefly on the process of shaping the text for the stage—before we encounter it in this more stripped-back form.

Ben is the actor most closely associated with Cromwell on stage; he is also, with Hilary Mantel, co-adapter of The Mirror and the Light. His account of that collaboration is instructive. Faced with a text longer than the two previous novels combined, the problem was not how to include everything, but how to decide what story to tell. As he says, adaptation became an act of “quite rigorous distillation”.

The Olivier and Tony Award-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies were hailed as landmark and must-see theatrical events. In 2021, Playful Productions and the RSC brought The Mirror and the Light, the highly anticipated final chapter of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, to the Gielgud Theatre in the West End, and our staged reading offers a first opportunity to return to Mantel and Miles’s adaptation in a live setting. Usztan’s previous directorial work includes Wolf Hall at the Bridewell Theatre, the Minack, and Lincoln’s Inn, alongside productions ranging from Blithe Spirit to One Man, Two Guvnors. He brings to this material not only familiarity with Mantel’s world, but a practical understanding of how it lives on stage.

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MAGNIFICENT

INDEPENDENT

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THRILLING STAGE FINALE TO HILARY MANTEL’S ‘WOLF HALL’ TRILOGY

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Miles reflects that there is a sense that the stage version is not a compression of the novel, but a re-interpretation of it. During the writing process, he had already developed an unusual working relationship with Mantel, sending her responses written in character as Cromwell—some of which found their way back into the final text. By the time they came to adapt the book together, the boundary between actor and author had become, if not blurred, then at least more permeable than usual and it is that collaborative perspective which sits behind the reading we will hear.

A staged reading, by its nature, strips away much of what we associate with theatre—set, movement, spectacle—and places the emphasis back on language and structure. In this context, the decisions made in adaptation become more visible revealing what has been retained and what has been omitted.

Miles also reflects on the importance of the shared experience. Reflecting on the return to rehearsal for the RSC production, he has described the act of gathering for performance not as an optional cultural extra, but as something closer to a necessity—an idea that resonates with Mantel’s own attention to the communal dimensions of history and storytelling.

All of which makes this particular event in June slightly different from a conventional performance. It is not the West End production. Nor is it intended to replicate it. It is, rather, an opportunity to encounter the adaptation at a more structural level, in the presence—through introduction and context—of those directly involved in shaping it.

Limited tickets still available:

What distinguishes Rosemary’s approach is not simply the depth of her research, but the way she inhabits it—combining archival rigour with re-enactment, costume, and performance to recover something of the lived texture of the Tudor world. It is an approach that aligns closely with the spirit of Wolf Hall itself in its awareness that history is as much about people as it is about events.

Her subject will be Kat Ashley, aka Katherine Champernowne, who is one of those figures who sits quietly at the edge of the main historic narrative and yet, on closer inspection, proves indispensable to it. In 1536, at a moment of profound instability in the Tudor court, Thomas Cromwell recommended her to Henry VIII as a suitable attendant for the king’s young daughter, Elizabeth. It is an intriguing decision. Cromwell, so often understood through his legislative brilliance and political ruthlessness, is making a judgement not of policy, but of character.

Her new book, Queen Elizabeth I’s Childhood Governess: Gentle Miss Astley (to be published August 2026), draws on original sources and a careful re-examination of long-held assumptions, and seeks to separate the historical Kat from the accumulated distortions of fiction and popular portrayal. Far from the familiar image of a “gossipy” attendant, Rosemary presents a woman who was highly educated, well connected, and positioned within networks of humanist and reformist thought close to the Tudor court . The book also revisits episodes such as the Thomas Seymour scandal, and questions whether judgements have been too readily accepted. What emerges is a more credible, and more consequential figure, one whose loyalty endured imprisonment, whose influence was recognised by Elizabeth in her elevation to Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, and whose death in 1565 reportedly left the queen genuinely bereft.

Alongside her, David Griggs introduces another texture of the period through song—those fragments of everyday culture that rarely survive in official records but which would have shaped the emotional and imaginative world of Tudor England. The effect is not reconstruction so much as evocation: a sense, however fleeting, of what it might have felt like to inhabit that world rather than simply to analyse it.

For a weekend concerned with Magnificence—focused on the precarious height of Cromwell’s achievement—this session offers a necessary counterpoint. It reminds us that while Cromwell built systems that would endure, he also made choices about people that sustained the Tudor court from within. Kat Ashley stands as one of those choices, and through Rosemary’s careful imaginative re-enactment we are invited to see what followed from it.

Wolf Hall Weekend, taking place Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th June 2026 at All Hallows by the Tower.

The programme is now fully in place, the speakers confirmed, for our focused celebration of the work of Hilary Mantel and the world of her Wolf Hall Trilogy.

Saturday will be a day packed with celebrity speakers and panels presenting on a wide range of intriguing Wolf Hall topics, followed by a wonderful staged reading of The Mirror and the Light in the evening. Then on Sunday we will venture out on expert guided tours of the Tudor city of Thomas Cromwell.

There are now only a small number of seats remaining.

If you have been intending to come, now is the moment to secure your place.

We look forward to seeing you there!

who is editor-at-large and former editor of londonist.com - the ultimate guide to what to see and what’s on in the nation’s capital - and the incredibly popular Londonist: Time Machine has meticulously searched out all the geographic places Mantel named in London, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and beyond, and has mapped them into three amazing visual aids. Matt’s decision to include only places Mantel explicitly names has resulted in an essential companion for anyone reading her Cromwell novels.

At our Wolf Hall Weekend June 6/7, 2026, Matt will join our city ramble, walking places named in the trilogy from the Tower area through the City and up towards Austin Friars, Cromwell’s long-time London base. Ahead of that, I wanted to ask Matt about his ‘obsession’ with mapping literary works - including those of Charles Dickens and Sherlock Holmes.

WHW - Welcome Matt and thanks for taking the time out to tell us more about your Wolf Hall maps. Once you applied your rule — “if Mantel doesn’t mention it, it’s not on the map” — were you surprised about what she included and what disappeared from the London of Thomas Cromwell altogether?

Matt - Thanks! I’d say “yes, and no”. Some major locations are entirely absent from the novels. The most glaring is Holborn (an important route out of the City, and home to two of the legal Inns of Court, which are mentioned). Likewise, Ludgate never gets a mention, despite being a key part of the route from the City to Whitehall and Westminster. On the whole, though, I was more surprised by just how much Mantel did cram in.

WHW - When you look at the finished London map, the Thames dominates everything. Did mapping it make you realise its greater significance in the past compared to today and how rarely people in the novels move without the river being involved?

Matt - You’re right, the Thames is the dominant feature of the map. Most of the King’s palaces (Hampton Court, Richmond, Westminster, Whitehall, Greenwich) are right beside it. Roads were unpaved and unreliable at the time, so those with money travelled by boat whenever they could. It was the great highway of the day. I think I was already aware of this from many years writing about London history, but the map brought this aspect to life visually. It also occurred to me that the Thames is a cypher for Cromwell’s life. His childhood is spent upriver in Putney. As a man, he flows downriver to York House to work for Wolsey, and then spends much of his time in Whitehall and Westminster with the King. His days flow inexorably onward and, still farther downriver, he meets his end overlooking the Thames at Tower Hill.

WHW - You’ve said the Tower of London is the most fully realised building in the trilogy. Were you tempted to map the buildings and rooms Mantel includes and are there any that stand out to you for their poignancy to the story.

Matt - I did, in fact, go some way to doing this, by adding the names of separate towers and other ares (like the menagerie) as they were mentioned in the text. 12 places within the Tower are namechecked in the books. I don’t think we quite get enough information to map the building at any greater resolution. Oddly, the bit I found most poignant was not the executions or tortures, but a detail from the very end of the last novel. As Cromwell is about to be escorted out to meet the axeman, his final thoughts are on another continent. He ponders William Hawkins’s expedition to Brazil: “I would have liked to know how that works out,” he muses. Mantel’s Cromwell was curious about the world to the final chop… and it’s details like that which make the character feel so real.

WHW - On the wider map of Britain, apart from the first novel’s namesake royal progress to Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymour’s in Wiltshire, am I right in thinking that most of the place names are associated with either the Dissolution of the Monasteries and The Pilgrimage of Grace, rather than journeys Cromwell made?

Matt - That’s right. Cromwell doesn’t do a great deal of travelling throughout the novels, and most of the place names are either related to the events you mention, or else mentioned in passing by various characters. Cromwell was at the centre of an intricate network of communications, and received missives from many locations, all captured on the map if they are mentioned. I did think about using different fonts or pins to indicate if a place is an actual setting, or if it’s just mentioned in passing, but from past experience this can get too messy.

WHW - You say that some places Mantel includes stubbornly refuse to be pinned down - unnamed taverns for example, and not forgetting the mysterious “Tilney Abbey” - how did you connect that to Jane Austen and will you find the time to map all the places in her novels - real and imagined?

Matt - Most historical novels weave in a few fictional locations among the historical ones (see my book Atlas of Imagined Places for discussion of this. Mantel is relatively light-touch in this respect, to the point where I’m never sure if she has made a place up, or if she’s riffing on something real from the archives that I’ve not been able to trace. Tilney Abbey is a particularly intriguing one. Mantel mentions dozens of threatened abbeys in the course of the novels, and all are real apart from this one. I’m not sure what she’s doing here. It could be a misprint for the real Tilty Abbey in Essex – perhaps deliberately misrepresented by Mantel to show how records were sometimes poorly transcribed. However, it occurred to me (having written a couple of books about fictional locations) that this could be a reference to the fictional estate of Tilney Abbey in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. If so, then perhaps Mantel is making a highly subtle pun here, with a reference to Austen’s friars in mirror to Cromwell’s Austin Friars. Probably not, but I do love a bit of wordplay!

And, yes, I have started a project to map every location from Jane Austen’s novels, which will see the light of day at some point.

You can read Matt’s original post about his mapping of Wolf Hall HERE and discover his maps of London from the works of Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Book Now, and join our celebration of Dame Hilary Mantel’s life and work while there are still seats available, where we will be led by an array of celebrity speakers and experts and a staged reading performance of Hilary and Ben Miles’ adaptation of The Mirror and The Light.

In Part I of this series we began with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s short and very revealing video on G. R. Elton, and in Part II we moved from Elton’s broad claim about a “revolution in government” to the actual statutes and administrative changes of the 1530s. MacCulloch’s own summation of Elton’s achievement was that he restored Cromwell to

“an unassailably central place in the story of early Tudor England and the Reformation”,

and that in so doing he altered the way this “archipelago” could be understood.

In this final post, I want to turn to the Cromwell Hilary Mantel inherits. Because by the time Mantel begins Wolf Hall, one part of the work has been done for her. She does not need to prove that Cromwell mattered to those who have studied the history of those times; Elton has already done that.

Mantel says so herself, in one of the most important sentences she ever wrote about the trilogy:

“The Tudor scholar G.R. Elton had established Cromwell as a statesman of the first rank, but Elton’s work had done nothing for his popular image.”

Mantel is not pretending that she discovered Cromwell in a vacuum. She knows perfectly well that modern historiography had already altered his standing. She identifies a gap — and it is precisely in that gap that Wolf Hall begins. Elton had changed Cromwell’s scholarly status; he had not changed the imaginative furniture of Tudor memory. Holbein’s portrait was still there. Robert Bolt was still there. The villain of the old story, the man with the hard eye and the cold hand, was still there. Mantel’s task was not to make Cromwell important. It was to make him imaginable and that is a much stranger and more ambitious project.

Elton had made Cromwell central to a transformation in government. Mantel makes him the medium through which an entire world is perceived. She does not begin with statute. She begins with a body in motion: the beaten child in Putney, the son of a blacksmith and brewer, the boy who survives. The shift is immediate and radical. Cromwell is no longer a name in a footnote to Henry or More; he is a sensorium, a memory-bank, an instrument for registering pressure, danger, and opportunity. The old question — what did Cromwell do? — is not abandoned. It is simply joined by a more difficult one: what did it feel like to be the man who did it?

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That is a very large claim and it deserves to be tested not in generalities, but against the actual statutes and institutional changes of the 1530s, and to that end we will look at the key changes, in concrete terms, Cromwell helped put into law.

This is what Elton meant by a revolution in government. And in the 1990 afterword to England Under the Tudors, he still held to the essence of it, writing that there had been “so much deliberate change crowded into the 1530s that a genuinely new state emerged, however closely it was linked to the old.” MacCulloch, though fully aware of the criticism Elton’s thesis has received, still writes that what remains from that argument is

“the restoration of Thomas Cromwell to an unassailably central place in the story of early Tudor England and the Reformation, changing the character of this archipelago up to the present day.”

That last phrase matters. Not just England. This archipelago.

Because once government is reworked through statute, record, revenue, and administrative reach, the consequences do not stop in London.

In the rest of this post I want to stay with the statutes themselves and ask what, in practice, they changed: how they worked, why Elton thought they mattered so much, and how far their consequences ran into Wales, Ireland, and the later political formation of Britain.

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Designed to honor the double Booker Prize winner’s legacy of mentoring debut novelists, the prize focuses on “work in progress” from unpublished writers. It provides not just financial relief, but the structural support—mentoring and professional guidance—needed to turn a promising draft into a finished masterpiece.

The Winner: Anna Dempsey

Taking home the top honor is Anna Dempsey, a writer whose career already hums with the kind of “vigorous prose” Mantel herself championed. Originally from Florida and now based in London, Dempsey recently completed a PhD at Bath Spa and Bristol University, exploring the profound intersection of fiction and the grieving process.

Dempsey is no stranger to the podium, having won the 2019 Costa Short Story Award and gained recognition from the Bridport Novel Prize. Beyond her own desk, she fosters the next generation through The Grove, her community-focused writing company, and her local library’s Junior Book Club (home to the accidentally-named mascot, “Annagator”).

Upon receiving the award, Dempsey noted the daunting bridge between the craft and the industry:

“Creating art is one thing, but navigating the business of the book world is another, so this support is invaluable to emerging writers like myself. Your generosity [Hilary] continues beyond your lifetime.”

The Runner-Up: Uduak-Abasi Ekong

The judging panel—chaired by Maggie O’Farrell and featuring Mantel’s longtime editor Nicholas Pearson and actor Ben Miles—also recognized the exceptional talent of Uduak-Abasi Ekong.

A Manchester-based Nigerian writer, Ekong has built a prolific presence in literary journals such as Brittle Paper and Wensum Literary. Her work is a fearless exploration of the “interior weather” Mantel so admired—tracing the darker threads of envy, desperation, and regret to understand how we survive one another. A 2026 Smokelong Emerging Writer Fellow, Ekong represents the sharp, empathetic future of the British novel.

As these two writers move forward with the support of the Mantel Prize, they carry with them the mandate of the woman who redefined historical fiction: to say what they want to say in the most direct way possible.

(You can read a full transcript of the video here. 1 )

MacCulloch’s point is not merely that Elton wrote a successful textbook. He claims that Elton altered the way the Tudor age was perceived, and the question we will be asking in this three part series is whether without G.R.Elton’s work, would Hilary Mantel have been inspired to write her equally Cromwell-centred trilogy?

Like many who studied Tudor History in English schools in the 1960s and ‘70s, using Elton’s textbook, when I read Wolf Hall for the first time, I instantly recognised the Cromwell in her work and this got me thinking what had influenced the approach Mantel took in her Cromwell trilogy.

Hilary Mantel once wrote that the Tudor historian G. R. Elton had established Cromwell “as a statesman of the first rank”, but that his work had done nothing for Cromwell’s “popular image”. (thebookerprizes.com) - and there’s no question that in our generation, Mantel has firmly put Thomas Cromwell on the map - but was this only made possible because of Elton?

Let’s see if there are any clues we can gather from Elton, MacCulloch and Mantel to help us consider how history is interpreted and portrayed when historians and novelists reach for original archival evidence, rather than repeating the interpretations that have gone before.

Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton FBA (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg; 17 August 1921 – 4 December 1994) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988. Elton was MacCulloch’s doctoral supervisor, an old-style Doktorvater in the Germanic tradition, who is honoured as the dedicatee in MacCulloch’s recent biography: Thomas Cromwell - A life.

Elton arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany and brought with him what MacCulloch calls a “Germanic rigour” in archival research. At Cambridge in the 1950s, this methodological discipline collided with a field that was still dominated by older narrative traditions. The result was a different texture of history: more documentary, more institutional, and more interested in administrative structures than in courtly anecdotes.

MacCulloch puts the matter plainly: Elton’s England Under the Tudors gave the Tudor age a new centre of gravity. And that centre, unexpectedly for many readers at the time, was Thomas Cromwell.

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The dazzling 24ct gold heart-shaped pendant is the only piece of jewellery of its kind from the time of Henry VIII’s marriage to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. It is a poignant token of the love between the royal couple.

Henry VIII was a man of many talents. The king was an accomplished poet and musician who authored many lyrics, poems, and musical compositions. He was deeply enamoured with the ideals of courtly love and was quite the romantic. It is believed that some of his early surviving lyrics are odes to his first wife Katherine of Aragon.

‘Though that Men do Call it Dotage’ is one of these poems. Read by Damian Lewis, it serves as a reminder of the strength of their 24-year-long marriage before it was ultimately annulled in 1533.

We’re delighted to welcome back as a major new exhibition Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn opens at Hever Castle (11 Feb 2026 – 1 Jan 2027) — the first time so many portraits connected to Anne have been gathered together. We caught up with Owen to delve behind the scenes and explore the choices made, and how the visual record connects to the contemporary stories told about Anne.

WHW. Welcome Owen, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us about Capturing a Queen, which assembles more portraits of Anne Boleyn than have ever been shown together. What were the key criteria for selecting the works on display, and were there cases where attributions were too uncertain to include?

Dr Owen:

The guiding principle for the exhibition was curiosity and a desire to understand not just what Anne looked like, but to understand how and why subsequent generations saw her. Anne Boleyn is one of the most recognisable figures in English history, yet paradoxically one of the least securely identified in visual terms. Rather than attempting to present a single, definitive “true” face, though we have excitingly identified two new contemporary images of her - we wanted to show visitors how Anne’s image was constructed, repeated, adapted, and sometimes misunderstood over time.

The works selected fall broadly into three categories. First, portraits that can be shown, through dating, provenance, or material analysis, to be plausibly connected to the 16th century, and close to Anne’s lifetime. Secondly, images produced in the decades after her death, particularly during her daughter Elizabeth I’s reign, which tell us a great deal about how Anne’s image was rehabilitated and politically useful. And finally, later interpretations that reveal how Anne’s appearance became increasingly romanticised and mythologised, to suit the expectations of later generations.

There were certainly works we couldn’t include. In some cases, traditional attributions simply could not stand up to scrutiny once examined closely. However, we consciously included some of these works to demonstrate how her image has been understood across time, and how and why it morphed. This is not about diminishing Anne’s visual legacy, but about strengthening it. The exhibition is as much about questioning long-held assumptions as it is about celebrating remarkable survivals.

WHW. Can you tell us what inspired you to conduct new scientific analysis of the famous “Hever Rose” portrait, and how has this reshaped the narrative of Anne’s visual legacy?

Dr Owen:

The Hever Rose portrait has always been visually compelling, but for many years it sat in an uncomfortable grey area: admired, reproduced, and discussed, yet never properly interrogated using modern scientific methods. In truth, it has been a desire of mine to have it scientifically examined for many years. What prompted the new analysis was a growing sense that we were asking the wrong questions of it. Instead of asking “Is this Anne Boleyn, yes or no?”, we began asking “When was this painted, how was it made, and what does that tell us?”

The results were genuinely transformative. By combining dendrochronology, pigment analysis, and multi-modal imaging, we were able to demonstrate that the portrait was produced at a pivotal time in her daughter’s reign. The materials and techniques align perfectly with later Elizabethan copying tradition, and we now know that the panel it was painted on dates to c.1583, making it likely the oldest known panel portrait of Anne known to survive. This of course may well change in the future as precious few of the surviving panels of Anne have been scientifically dated, including the majority of those that we are exhibiting. One of them may well date to closer to Anne’s lifetime.

What excited me most about the analysis was that the artist clearly made a decision to change the composition, firstly drawing the body and arms disappearing from the bottom of the composition, and then sketching in Anne’s hands. This is therefore likely the first time that Anne’s hands appeared in this pattern of portraits. Why this is significant is answered by a theory posited by the historian Helene Harrison, who asked whether Anne’s hands in this portrait might have been added to refute the calumny being propagated by the recusant Catholic, Nicholas Sander, who claimed that Anne Boleyn had six digits on one of her hands. The mechanical nature of the added hands in the Hever Rose portrait, rather awkwardly showing each of Anne’s ten digits, now adds weight to Harrison’s astute theory. This was a visual refutation of the slander spread by Sander in an attempt to undermine Elizabeth’s legitimacy.

What is also exciting is that the underdrawing shows a confident, unbroken like, strongly indicating that it derived from a pre-existing pattern, taking us closer to Anne. The Hever Rose is no longer just an attractive outlier; it becomes a serious piece of evidence in understanding how Anne’s likeness may have been recorded during her lifetime or shortly after.

WHW. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has profoundly influenced contemporary perceptions of Anne Boleyn, portraying her as politically astute and intensely aware of image and reputation. How do you think this literary persona compares with the Anne that emerges from the exhibition’s portraits?

Dr Owen:

Mantel’s Anne is a woman who understands the power of appearance, gesture, and performance, and that is something the portraits quietly reinforce rather than contradict. What struck me most while working on the exhibition is how consistent Anne’s visual language appears to have been. The repetition of certain motifs, particularly the B pendant, the French hood, and the controlled presentation of her face, suggests a woman who understood that image was not decoration but communication.

That said, the portraits also complicate the literary Anne. They resist the idea of her as simply dazzling or dangerously beautiful. Contemporary descriptions describe her as striking rather than conventionally pretty, and the portraits reflect that restraint. There is a confidence there, but also a certain reserve.

Where they align most closely is in Anne’s awareness that she was being watched. Whether through paint, jewellery, or emblem, Anne curated how she appeared to others. The portraits do not shout this, but they do show it, and that quiet consistency may be closer to the reality of court life than even the most brilliant historical fiction.

WHW. Can you choose a couple of your favourite portraits that you’ve brought in for this exhibition and explain why you think they are particularly significant?

Dr Owen:

The Hever Rose portrait is an obvious choice, not simply because of the new scientific findings, but because it forces us to rethink our confidence in long-established narratives. It is a reminder that familiarity is not the same as understanding. The portrait’s scale, delicacy, and material sophistication suggest intimacy rather than pure propaganda, and that alone makes it extraordinary in the context of Anne’s story.

The other would be the portrait traditionally known as the Nidd Hall type. What makes it so important is that it perhaps the closest expression in paint of the contemporary image of Anne found on the 1534 medal, now known as the ‘Moost Happi’ medal. Tragically, so much wood has been shaved from the back of the panel to accommodate a supporting cradle that dendrochronology (the dating of the panel) has been deemed impossible. This isn’t an idealised portrait of Anne, and it is rarely cited as being a favourite of many people, but since it so closely aligns with the contemporary medal, and as it is entirely consistent with the Winsor sketch of Anne Boleyn by Hans Holbein the Younger, I have a confidence that it might well be one of the closest likenesses of Anne in paint.

WHW. Finally, how do you think Capturing a Queen will encourage visitors to rethink their assumptions about her appearance and how it was recorded over time?

Dr Owen:

I hope visitors leave with a greater sense of nuance. The question “What did Anne Boleyn really look like?” is not an unreasonable one to ask, but it is an incomplete one. What matters just as much is why so many different answers to that question exist.

By placing portraits side by side, rather than isolating them, the exhibition shows how Anne’s image was shaped by politics, religion, memory, and later nostalgia. Visitors can see how a face becomes a symbol, and how that symbol shifts depending on who is doing the remembering. In that sense, the exhibition is not just about pinning Anne down, but about understanding her afterlife changed her appearance.

Anne’s appearance mattered in her own lifetime, and it has mattered ever since. What Capturing a Queen offers is the chance to see that process unfolding across five centuries, and to recognise that uncertainty is not a failure of history, but part of what makes her such a compelling figure to study. What we are most excited about is hearing our visitors thoughts on the question. Having considered the contemporary descriptions of Anne’s appearance, and seen so many iterations of her image, we are actively asking our visitors to join the conversation and let us know which portrait pattern they feel closest fits the Anne of history. This exhibition is certainly not the final word on Anne’s image. It is part of a conversation that we hope will continue for many years to come, and leads to further scientific and archival research which helps us get closer to discovering what Anne truly looked like.

We are honored Dr Owen Emmerson will be speaking at our Wolf hall Weekend 2026 in June.

Fans of the corpus of Hilary Mantel’s work will be thrilled to hear about Dr Lucy Arnold’s new book - Hilary Mantel - Liverpool University Press (Published on 28 February 2026), in which she offers one of the most conceptually rigorous accounts yet of Hilary Mantel’s writing life and literary method.

Lucy’s new study is organised around the themes of transformation, embodiment, historical method, and Mantel’s self-conscious resistance to being “explained” by her life. Drawing on the late author’s fiction, memoirs, criticism, and archival traces, the book asks how a writer comes into being through language — and what it costs to do so.

Dr Lucy Arnold is Course Leader for English Literature at Worcester University, UK, where she is School Research & Knowledge Exchange Coordinator, in the Institute of Arts and Humanities and English Media and Culture. Lucy specialises in Contemporary Literature, with particular research interests in contemporary gothic, narratives of haunting, contemporary women’s writing and psychoanalytic criticism. Her teaching experience spans a wide range of periods and genres but focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her published work to date has concerned the writing of Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel, with her monograph, Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades, published with Bloomsbury in 2019.

We are thrilled that Lucy will be speaking at our Wolf Hall Weekend in June about her study of Hilary’s work and the uneasy traffic between life and art that defines it.

WHW - Welcome Lucy, and thanks for this opportunity to get a sneak preview into your latest book, which continues on from your doctorate dissertation and first book on Hilary’s writing.

From the outset, you’re very careful not to treat Mantel’s life as a neat explanatory key to her fiction — and yet you also take seriously her sense that writing was a way of claiming ownership of herself. Do you ever get the sense that she was pulled between those two positions?

Lucy Arnold - Absolutely, there is a consistent tension between these two positions in Mantel’s writing I think, both explicitly in the way she articulates her relationship between her life as it was lived and the act of producing a literary representation of that life, and implicitly in the way that much of her fiction, short and long form, rehearses events and characters which resonate with her biography. One of the keys to this puzzle, I think, can be found in how Mantel understood the human experience and human perception, at the level of the individual and of the collective, as never singular and fixable, but kaleidoscopic. What Mantel’s writing asserts, I would argue, is that each element of this ‘shifting, shadow mesh of [ . . .] possibilities’ as Cardinal Wolsey puts it in Wolf Hall, has validity, has authenticity, can tell us something urgent and important, whether about one’s life or a country’s history.

WHW - You describe Mantel’s writing as working through something like an alchemical process. Does that idea of transformation feel to you like something Mantel consciously cultivated — or more a pattern that reveals itself only when you step back and look across the whole body of her work?

Lucy Arnold - Having been fortunate enough to spend some time with Mantel’s literary papers during the course of developing this book, my sense is that the idea of transformation, particularly a model of transformation with its roots in the Catholic concept of transubstantiation, permeated her imaginary from a very young age - she speaks beautifully about this in some of the supplementary materials that were published in later editions of her most explicitly ‘alchemical’ novel, Fludd. As far as her published work goes, this emphasis on transformation runs through the entirety of her corpus but rather than being ‘consciously cultivated’, it feels present as a corrective to the idea that individuals, events, places, whatever they may be, are straightforwardly and reliably fixed and stable. I would posit that this preoccupation with the alchemical or the metamorphic might helpfully be understood as an articulation of a wider world view which has identified a capacity for (perhaps even a tendency towards) transformation as being foundational. I think it is both the source of profound hope and profound unease in her work, that people and things, the status quo, can change.

WHW - One of the most compelling threads in your study is your attention to how Mantel weaves damaged, altered, or precarious bodies into her work - marked by power, law, religion, and medicine. Do you think we can benefit from viewing her Tudor novels in that light?

Lucy Arnold - Absolutely so. My colleagues specialising in the early modern period will be able to speak to this much more eloquently than me, but the period in which the Tudor Trilogy is set is one in which the way that the body - its capacities and its outward appearance - was understood, was interwoven with a complex set of religious, philosophical and moral narratives. So already, we need to approach these characters’ experiences of their own embodiment with these contexts in mind, the way that the body is understood as ‘legible’ in a range of crucial ways in this moment. One of the things I think that sets these texts apart from other literary representations of the Tudor period which I have come across, is Mantel’s capacity for capturing the sense of the vulnerability of the body in this historical moment, its fragility, not merely in the face of the exercise state power but in experiences of illness, pregnancy and childbirth. The treatment of the deaths of Liz, Anne and Grace Cromwell are such striking examples of this, the way they flicker between being and nothingness in the space of a few pages, in an illness that lasts only a matter of hours. There’s an image, in the passage describing the Cromwell daughter’s illness and death, in which Anne pushes rose petals beneath the surface of a bowl of water ‘so that each of them becomes a vessel shipping water’ - it is precisely that fragility and vulnerability within embodied experience that the Tudor novels capture for me.

WHW - You move away from the familiar question of whether Mantel “gets history right”, and instead focus on her idea of pursuit — what she once called “the living turn and chase the dead”. Do you think Mantel was more interested in asking what kind of relationship we have to the past rather than focusing on historical fact or was she committed to both?

Lucy Arnold - Your first question concerned the tension between the living of a life and the writing about it, and in many ways this kind of tension characterises the two positions you outline here. The first thing to observe is that Mantel articulated - in her published work, in her discussions of it in the press, and in her own correspondence - a profound respect for historical ‘fact’ as far as we can discern it. She once memorably reported, with reference to the writing of A Place of Greater Safety, that she could make up the thoughts in a man’s head, but ‘make up the colour of his wallpaper? My hand would rot in my sleeve’. But then there is this question of how far can historical ‘fact’ get us that she grappled with almost from the outset of her writing career. She spoke often about the gaps in the historical record, and the risk that, if we refuse to interrogate and inhabit these gaps, what might be left risks being, what one she once described in an interview for the Independent on Sunday as the kind of trivia ‘an old-fashioned Marxist might like to find in his Christmas cracker.’ Certainly, she was continually interrogating the possible relationships we might forge with the past, indeed there is a sense in some of her writing that the past is continually coming into being by virtue of our forging and maintaining a relationship with it, but my reading of the work to date is that these relationships for Mantel emerge precisely from the slippery relationship between the facts and the gaps between them.

WHW - You write about Mantel as a “vocational reader” — someone for whom reading, criticism, fiction, and life-writing was all part of the same practice. Did working on this book change the way you see Mantel’s essays and lectures?

Lucy Arnold - One of the many reasons it has been such a pleasure to work on this particular book was that it afforded me the time to really sustainedly sit with Mantel’s critical and cultural commentary. In that sense I had really followed a trend in Mantel criticism whereby this enormous body of work had been somewhat overshadowed by the complex and extensive achievements of her fiction. So, in one very basic way, the process of writing the book forced me to rebalance her corpus in my mind, and fully recognise that her work as a critic ran parallel to her creative work for a significant proportion of her career.

The other key realisation that this element of the project prompted in me was the way that the cultural commentary Mantel gives us in work, such as her essays for the London Review of Books for example, serves to really foreground the deeply ethical and exacting philosophy which underpins the body of her work. In review after review, you can trace a thread which is concerned with questions of who has been allowed to speak and who has been silenced? How might we speak on the behalf of others without doing violence? What have we forgotten or denied, culturally and socially? And there is a real power in the way these questions are posed in the pieces, not didactically or in any kind of hectoring way, but in such a form as to not let the reader off the hook or permit them to be lazy in their thinking (a quality which, now I come to think of it, is shared with her fiction).

Thanks to Lucy for these truly insightful answers and for writing what is a ‘must-read’ addition to our appreciation of Hilary Mantel’s opus.

Book Now, and join our celebration of Dame Hilary Mantel’s life and work while there are still seats available, where we will be led by an array of celebrity speakers and experts and a staged reading performance of Hilary and Ben Miles’ adaptation of The Mirror and The Light.

In Part I of our series of posts, we looked at the reputations that preceded them and at how Mantel quietly unsettles those inherited verdicts. In Part II, we followed the widening space between them as Henry’s “Great Matter” hardened into statute and the requirement of an oath and Anne Boleyn became an ally to unseat More.

In this post we look at the end of their association through their interaction leading up to More’s trial and execution. All of this occurs within the last few pages of her masterful novel and is the result of her reading of More’s original writings and contemporary documents, rather than borrowing the narratives of More’s biographers past and present.

This was meant to be the final post in this series but thanks to one of our subscribers* I have decided to write a BONUS POST that looks at Hilary Mantel’s, Letter to Thomas More, Knight - from HOLBEIN’S SIR THOMAS MORE Hilary Mantel Xavier and F. Salomon. published by The Frick Collection, New York, in association with D Giles Ltd. 2018 as a reflection on ways we can determine Mantel’s use of her fiction to deal with what she sees as the conflicting traits within the Thomas More of history.

*Thanks to our subscriber, Chris, for suggesting this content for reflection.

By 1533, England had redefined itself. The Act in Restraint of Appeals declared that “this realm of England is an Empire.” The jurisdiction of Henry’s power solidified as Rome was severed from the chain of authority. What once belonged to an external spiritual order now belongs to the Crown. The following year, the Act of Succession required subjects to swear to the legitimacy of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and to “bear faith, truth, and obedience” to the heirs of that union.

Thomas More refuses to swear and Mantel reflects that More’s refusal is not loud. He does not incite rebellion, nor issue pamphlets; he simply declines.

Then came the Treason Act of 1534, and here the ground shifted decisively. Treason was extended to those who “maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing” harm to the King or denial of his titles. This statute moved the arena of treason from actions to words and the burden of protecting him from his own ‘folly’ that now threatens his life, falls primarily to Cromwell.

Silence itself has become interpretable as treason.

Continue reading… (some language in this post may offend some readers.)

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“My dear More… How do I address you?”

In 2018, Hilary Mantel’s Letter to Thomas More, Knight — published in Holbein’s Sir Thomas More by The Frick Collection, New York, in association with D Giles Ltd — quietly entered the world. The volume pairs Mantel’s imaginative essay with Xavier F. Salomon’s art-historical study of Holbein’s 1527 portrait. The publisher describes it as a work dedicated to “Hans Holbein’s famous portrayal of Sir Thomas More,” presenting Mantel’s opening piece as a vivid imaginative reconstruction that gives the portrait “historical perspective and immediacy.”

I confess I was unaware of this letter until it was recently brought to my attention by Chris, one of our subscribers, and I am grateful that he did — for one key reason. In this letter I feel I am discovering as much about Hilary as I am about More. She is writing in the form of a personal letter, as one might write privately to someone who is not a complete stranger — except that the recipient has been dead for nearly five centuries, and the only physical proximity available to her is Holbein’s portrait - that is before she turns to the archive.

Hilary quickly sets the personal tone with the disarming line, “My dear More… but here’s the first problem. How do I address you?” In doing so she identifies the fault-line on which the entire exercise rests. She confesses her difficulty in naming a man who is at once Lord Chancellor, canonised saint, Renaissance humanist, persecutor of heretics, domestic patriarch, and posthumous liberal icon. How does one write to someone who arrives already wrapped in reverence — or resentment — long before one consults the documentary record?

She has partly resolved this by using his official title of “Knight” — a Knight of the realm — a title never stripped from him, despite conviction for treason and execution on 6 July 1535. “Knight” is curiously stripped of devotional accretions. It predates canonisation. It avoids both hagiography and modern secular appropriation. It situates him politically rather than theologically.

Already, Mantel is stepping outside inherited interpretive frames.

So I find myself wondering: what does this letter reveal about her core thinking toward him? What makes her task uniquely difficult? What does Holbein’s portrait offer her — not merely aesthetically, but methodologically? What inner conflicts does she identify in More himself, and what ironies does she foreground in his life and reputation? And perhaps most provocatively, how much does this letter tell me less about Thomas More — whom, as a contemporary of Hilary, I feel I already “know” through biography and drama — and more about Hilary herself? What does it reveal about her own formation, her respect and scepticism, and the imaginative impulse that would eventually produce Wolf Hall?

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We’ve long admired the immersive experiences that Philippa curates for her guests. Her Substack newsletter British History with Philippa B blends deep research with real personality, and offers insights into everything from Tudor politics to quirky local legends.

Bookings for her 2027 tours opened on Wednesday, 11th February 2026, and are selling out fast.

It was a real pleasure to speak with Philippa recently to learn more about how her business began, what makes her tours special, and why physical places still matter so much when it comes to understanding the past.

WHW: Welcome Philippa - thanks for taking the time to speak to us today. Tell us about British History Tours — what inspired you to start this venture, and what makes your tours different from the usual tourist trail?

Philippa: Thank you for inviting me. The inspiration for British History Tours goes right back to when I was at University reading Psychology and Business. I was looking for a female leadership figure to inspire me and I began to read about Elizabeth I. I was fascinated by her and the times in which she lived in, and thrilled to find out that so many of the places in which her story unfolded were still in existence and available to visit. The idea of standing in the places where history happened really excited me, thus began a 25+ year obsession with travelling through the UK’s history.

However much I read about a place, I found that there was always more to discover by visiting it, especially independently run or smaller locations. There is informational gold to be found in a locally-produced booklet about a church and its parish, or by talking to the staff and volunteers at a location, and simply by using one’s own observational skills to notice features of a building or landscape.

In the early days of my history adventures, I would do lots of research before I visited a place, wanting to know as much as I could about what happened there but, as I stood in these spaces, I noticed people just walking through, sometimes at quite a pace, and I thought “Oh no! They don’t know what happened here!” I felt like they were really missing out, and that bothered me. A few years later and that seed of a thought had grown into a full business plan to take people on historical tours to tell the stories of the past in the places they happened. I think that is fundamentally what makes them different from simply visiting the same places on a day out. Our tours bring together eminent historians, expert guides and carefully thought out itineraries to tell a story across several days and places, all packaged into a luxury experience with great food and gorgeous hotels.

WHW: What’s one moment you’ve had on a tour that really stopped you in your tracks — something that reminded you why you love what you do?

Philippa: Any moment where a guest walks into a place which takes their breath away. It honestly makes me emotional. The Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace is one place that never fails to bring out a “Wow” - which is exactly what it was designed to do 500 years ago. When it’s a place that’s a complete surprise (I like to add hidden gems into itineraries when I can) then that’s even better. Harvington Hall, for example, brought a lot of smiles to people’s faces and to me. That is what it is all about - experiences and memories.

WHW: In an age when so much history is online or in books, why do you think being physically present at historic sites still resonates so strongly with people?

Philippa: There is literally no substitute; not video, not virtual reality, not reading, nothing, to being in the places where history happened. It’s been said before, but bears repeating, when you are standing at a historical site it is simply time and not space that separates you and the past.

Historical sites have an energy; you simply have to be there to experience that. Fountains Abbey, for example, is such a remote, beautiful and surprisingly large site that photographs cannot convey the same level of appreciation for the site and, by extension, the people who once occupied it, as being there does. That is just one example but I cold think of many, many more.

Add to all that what I mentioned earlier about discovering things that simply can’t be gleaned from reading or viewing another person’s account and I think that is why being physically present in a historical site is so compelling.

WHW: Your tours often draw on Tudor history — why do you think this period continues to capture people’s imaginations so vividly?

Philippa: The Tudors have it all; glamour, sex, intrigue, conspiracies, heroes and villains. They ruled over fundamental shifts in the way of life in the country, the repercussions of which continue to this day.. The landscape bears the scars of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. The art and architecture of the time have given us many wonderful survivors from the period meaning we can “see” better than any period beforehand what places and people looked like. Food history, practiced at places like Hampton Court Palace, even tell us what their food smelled like (for the Royal court at least). The amount of information available is vast, and more is being discovered all the time from new discoveries and reexamination of old.

The period has huge personalities too, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I as the obvious examples but then there is Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated and judiciously murdered second wife of Henry VIII, Margaret Beaufort the matriarch of the Tudor dynasty, and so many others.

They are most certainly not the only interesting period in British History though. I would encourage anyone who thinks they are only interested in the Tudors to expand their reading into the period beforehand, the ‘Wars of the Roses,’ (which we happen to have a new tour on in 2027) to understand the context into which the Tudors emerge, and the Stuarts, to see the immediate repercussions of a dynasty which brought about religious flip-flopping and died out within three generations.

WHW: What do you think surprises people the most when they join one of your tours and keeps them coming back for more?

Philippa: There are two comments that come up most in the feedback we get from guests. The first is that we absolutely deliver on our promise that all the arrangements are taken care of and they can simply enjoy the experience and not have to worry about a thing. The other, and this was a very pleasant surprise to me as well in the beginning, is the friendships made on our tours. Very often people meet on a tour and come back on future tours together. Our rebooking rate is around 70% with some people already booked for their 7th or 8th tour with us.

You can explore Philippa’s latest itineraries and find out more about upcoming tours at:
www.britishhistorytours.com

The Wars of the Roses Tour

20th - 29th April 2027

See Tour Details

The Anne Boleyn Tour

17th - 21st May 2027

See Tour Details

The Rise of the Tudors Tour

20th - 27th June 2027

See Tour Details

We’re proud to have British History Tours as a supporting partner of the upcoming Wolf Hall Weekend by the Tower of London 2026.

For all the latest updates on Wolf Hall Weekend 2026, including speaker announcements, venue details, and ticketing info, visit:
www.wolfhallweekend.com

This is the phase of the story in which Mantel’s Cromwell comes fully into view as a political actor, and in which More’s authority — rooted in academia, religion, law, conscience, tradition, and the structures of the old Church — begins to lose its purchase at court.

Part II — More Falls as Cromwell Rises

Mantel is particularly attentive here to an alliance she considers exists between Cromwell and Anne Boleyn.- one that is solely strategic and against More who embodies the old order’s refusal to bend. This tenuous coalition is by no means sentimental, and it is not presented as inevitable. It is shaped by opportunity, with some resentment and an appetite for power, and the shared understanding that the future now belongs to those willing to enact the King’s wishes to their own advantage - which may differ between the two players, but follows a similar route.

We’re not yet at a trial, and not yet at what to some is seen as martyrdom. We are watching the widening of positions, in which Cromwell rises by mastering the new workings of power and More falls by holding fast to an older one.

This is Mantel’s story of how that gap widens.

Continue reading…

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We recently asked Bea to tell us more about her exciting ‘stitcher-in-residence’ event.

Stitching Cromwell: Dr Lucie Bea Dutton — An exploration in Cloth and Text

‘Textiles are central to Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy, woven through the narrative as thread through fabric. Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell prices his associates by the yard, dresses queens, and understands the centrality of the wool trade to the English economy. The practice of stitchery is ever-present in the text: from the child Jo’s awkward little backstitch used to sew up Cardinal Wolsey’s letters in Wolf Hall to the treasonous embroidery of Margaret Pole in The Mirror and the Light. Queens’ initials, and badges are stitched and unpicked as fortunes rise and fall.

‘Mantel’s writing of the act of stitching is irresistible for a textile practitioner, and, when combined with archival research practice, provides endless creative inspiration. An inventory of long-lost objects may be reinvigorated when its contents are stitched onto cloth. A surviving letter to Cromwell can be simply represented as an entry on a spreadsheet, or be logged, remade, and sewn into a reconstituted “letters-in” collection. An account book can be mined not just for sums in or out but for objects as various as artichokes, silver bells, and embroidered coats.

‘Taking Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy as a starting point for a stitched piece of work presents choices for the textile practitioner. Are the difficulties of sewing with gold thread worth overcoming to conjure up magnificence? Should the usual striving for neatness and uniformity be abandoned in favour of an awkward little backstitch? Does one attempt to recreate blackwork designs? Should only Sixteenth Century materials and techniques be used, or do newer threads, waddings, and fabrics reflect the trilogy’s publication in the 21st Century?

‘Using my large-scale sewing project inspired by Mantel’s work, and carried out over the last decade, this lecture, on Wednesday 4 March, and the accompanying exhibition (2–7 March) will explore how descriptions of needlework in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy have led to a growing body of stitched artworks including Letters to Cromwell, the Cromwell Cloak, the Cromwell Narrative Cloth, The Book of Queens, and the Wolf Hall Quilt; how the objects depicted in these pieces are underpinned by archival research; and how creative choices (such as hand stitching; use of dip pens and Doomsday Ink) force an ‘analogue’ pace to the work.

The exhibition will have a “stitcher-in-residence” as I will be present, stitching throughout.’

Bea Dutton - The Thread of Her Tale | Bea Stitches | Substack

Tickets for the lecture (Wednesday 4 March, 2026) are available here:
https://www.worcestershire.gov.uk/events/engine-room-lectures-stitching-world-within-and-without-hilary-mantels-cromwell-trilogy

We are delighted that Bea will also bring her magnificent project to our Wolf Hall Weekend in June this year, where she will exhibit her work and co-host the weekend with me, extending these conversations from page and fabric into a shared space at All Hallows by the Tower.

David Holland - Founder, Wolf Hall Weekend

Tickets on sale now: Wolf Hall Weekend by The Tower 2026

The Spring Online History Festival, Defining Moments in British History is operated by and Catherine Ibbotson. Philippa is the Founder and Managing Director of the award-winning historical tour operator of British History Tours and this is the sixth online festival, bringing together six leading experts to explore the defining moments that shaped Britain.

Across six live talks, eminent historians examine the turning points that transformed the nation — from the Battle of Hastings and Magna Carta to plague, reformation, civil war, and the birth of modern Britain.

Insightful, authoritative, and engaging, this online festival offers a compelling journey through the moments when Britain’s history changed course.

How to enter our ticket prize draw:

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2. Answer the question below.

3. Submit your answer by midnight February 28th 2026 GMT. The winner will be notified on 1st March 2026.

The question

Who was the last Papal Legate in England before Henry VIII’s Act of Succession in 1534? (Clue- the character appears briefly in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall.)

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The Prize

The winner will receive a free ticket valued at £21.29 to access the Online History Festival which will commence online live from Mar 20 at 8pm to Mar 22 at 9pm GMT.

See HERE to view the full program of talks. The talks will be recorded and can be viewed by ticket holders until 31st May 2026.

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The winner will be selected based on a completely random prize draw and the first entry drawn with the correct answer will win the prize.

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• One entry per subscriber.

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• Entries close at midnight February 28th GMT.

• The winner will be announced using their initials in a post about the Online History Event in early March.

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In Part I we look at the reputations both men bring with them into the novel, and the quiet way Mantel begins to unpick those reputations. Part II turns to the King’s marriage and the oath, and Part III turns to enforcement and the cost of certainty.

Introduction to Part I

‘I remembered you, Thomas More.’

By the time most of us first meet them—through school lessons, stage plays, films, and the long afterlife of Reformation polemic—More and Cromwell tend to arrive with their moral verdicts already attached.

More enters as the embodiment of conscience. The Catholic Church has formalised that reverence: More has been “a saint no less since 1935,” as Paul Lay - editor of History magazine and Senior Research Fellow in Early Modern British History at Buckingham University - notes, with a “special place in the hearts of English Catholics.” That sanctification matters. It stabilises the story around him. It encourages a More whose finest hour is refusal, whose moral life is cleanly legible, and whose death resolves the argument.

Cromwell arrives under a different weight. The dissolution of the monasteries, the violence of enforcement, and the administrative machinery of the King’s will—these are his headline associations. Even his competence can be framed as a kind of menace: the efficient villain, the gifted operator, and the man who gets things done.

Mantel steps into that inheritance with her eyes open.

Continue reading…

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