Wolf Hall: Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell Trilogy and the BBC Adaptations

Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy is the most acclaimed work of historical fiction of the past fifty years. It won the Booker Prize twice — the only author to achieve this — and it changed what historical fiction could do. The BBC adaptations (2015 and 2020) brought the novels to a wider audience, but the books are on another level.

The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy

1. Wolf Hall (2009) — Booker Prize winner
2. Bring Up the Bodies (2012) — Booker Prize winner
3. The Mirror and the Light (2020) — Booker shortlisted; Mantel died in 2022

The complete Thomas Cromwell reading order is on the series page.

All three novels are told in close third person following Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII’s secretary, fixer, and eventually scapegoat. The point of view is intensely intimate: Cromwell sees everything, including himself, with a clarity that is simultaneously analytical and human.

The Novels’ Achievement

Mantel’s great innovation was the present tense and the intimate third person. Where most historical fiction creates comfortable distance, Mantel puts you inside the Tudor court as if it’s happening now. The “he” pronoun — always Cromwell — requires attention but rewards it with an immediacy that conventional historical narration can’t achieve.

Wolf Hall establishes Cromwell’s rise under Cardinal Wolsey and his survival of Wolsey’s fall. Bring Up the Bodies covers the destruction of Anne Boleyn in dense, brilliant plotting. The Mirror and the Light follows Cromwell’s own fall from 1536 to his execution in 1540.

The trilogy spans roughly fifteen years of Tudor history, but Mantel’s interest is in power — how it’s acquired, maintained, and lost — as much as in history.

The BBC Adaptations

Wolf Hall (BBC, 2015) — six episodes adapted both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Mark Rylance as Cromwell is one of the great performances of modern television: still, watchful, precise. Damian Lewis’s Henry VIII is warm and dangerous simultaneously. Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn is excellent.

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC, 2024) — six more episodes adapted the third novel. Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis return. The adaptation is faithful and well-made, though the third novel’s political complexity is necessarily compressed.

What the adaptations achieve: Visual realisation of the Tudor court that Mantel’s prose only suggests. The casting is uniformly superb. The pacing is deliberate in ways that prestige television rarely allows.

What’s lost in adaptation: The interior voice. The trilogy’s central experience is inside Cromwell’s head — his memories, his calculations, his grief. The BBC series has to externalise all of this, and something essential is inevitably lost.

Where to Start

Read Wolf Hall first, even if you’ve seen the series. The novel takes time to enter — the pronoun confusion (“he” always meaning Cromwell even when other men are present) resolves itself after fifty pages. Once you’re in, there’s nothing like it in contemporary fiction.

Bring Up the Bodies is shorter and faster than Wolf Hall — some readers prefer it. The Mirror and the Light is the longest and was written as Mantel was ill; it carries that weight.