For France, and then for the rest of Europe, the world changed utterly in the years that followed 1789: new regimes, new laws, a new organization of the way property was held, a new system of education -- all these transformed the way people lived their In a speech in 2013, Mantel referred to Kate Middleton, by then the Duchess of Cambridge, as “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”; a woman whose primary purpose was to provide the heir apparent with heirs of his own. Both Ed Miliband and David Cameron voiced their disapproval but, “if anything,” she says now, “I think my plea was to consider, these are human beings. I’m on her side, not one of her persecutors.” With the royal family yet again in crisis, she connects the current obsession with royal bodies to the themes she’s probing in The Mirror & the Light: “What is a king? Is he a sort of super-being? Or is he a kind of beast? Does he even rise to the status of human? And all this is explored through Henry’s body. So it’s very much a theme I’ve been conscious of continually. And, of course, it was completely misunderstood by numbskulls.”

When I began writing I had a perfect belief that, although I might not know how to do many things, I did know how to write a novel. Other ­people might have disputed that, looking at my efforts, and no one was in a hurry to endorse my confidence, but I did know within myself that I could write a novel. The reason was I’d read so many that the pattern was internalized. I’ve always been an intensely ambitious individual and whatever I was going to do, I was not going to let go until I got where I thought I ought to be. It’s a question of, What will you sacrifice? What other things will you let go, to clear the space for your book? What develops later is something rather different, as you proceed from book to book, every book throwing up different demands, needing different techniques.Some years ago, probably fifteen years ago, I was invited to the Huntington Library, to a conference along with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens—the lads, you know. I casually mentioned to a woman there that I was thinking of writing something down the line about Thomas Cromwell. And she said, When you do, we have a woman here you need to meet. I thought no more of it until the time came, then I said, You have a woman, I believe. And therein we fell into correspondence—very tentatively at first. Mary had long ago written a Ph.D. thesis on Thomas Cromwell’s ministerial household. She’d also written a couple of papers on his property holdings. But she had not really asked herself what this man was like, because that was not her job. I’m sixty-two next month. About four months ago, I noticed that I’m no longer in pain every day. I find myself feeling better than I have since I was twenty, and therefore, I think I can do things. There are a lot of novels I want to write, but there are also plays I want to write. It’s a bit unusual to start at this age, but why not?

There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist. Did the book reviewing make you see your own work within a context? Did you feel your novels were related to other schools of fiction?I try not to. For me the question is, Can I live with you, or can I not? I’m fascinated by really clever people, and I think Cromwell had a brilliant mind—I know he did—and a rare kind of mind in that he saw the big picture and all the details as well. It was through his grasp of detail that he managed to achieve the things he did. When he said, We’re going to survey the Church property, we’re going to find out where the money is, he did it in six months, and that’s with sixteenth-century communications. It should have taken ten years. But he knew how to mobilize others to work for him, how to give precise instructions, how to plan. He had a big-scale vision of a different sort of country from the one he started off in, and he had the practical sense to start bringing it about. I’d read all the history books and novels I could lay my hands on, and I wasn’t satisfied with what I found. All the novels were about the aristocracy and their sufferings. And I thought those writers were missing a far more interesting group—the idealistic revolutionaries, whose stories are amazing. There was no novel about them. I set about writing it—at least, a story about some of them—so I could read it. And of course, for a long time it seemed as if I were the only person who ever would. My idea was to write a sort of documentary fiction, guided entirely by the facts. Then, not many months in, I came to a point where the facts about a certain episode ran out, and I spent a whole day making things up. At the end of it, I thought, I quite liked that. It sounds naive, not knowing that I would have to make things up, but I had a great belief that all the material was out there, somewhere, and if I couldn’t find it, that would be my fault. That wasn’t what I needed. It sounds horrible, but I needed a listening ear. I needed someone to write for, someone who wanted to know what would happen next. I was on evening duty, and somebody jumped on me. It wasn’t a sexual thing. There were a group of pupils, with one person hitting me. Compared to what could have happened, it was trivial. It was dark, they were not my ­pupils, I couldn’t identify them, the school wasn’t interested in finding out. It was a shambles. I felt unsupported by the headmaster, and so I left, but I didn’t want to go, because I liked my pupils. We have the household books. We have names. We have inventories, so we know the things they had. We have the names of the people who live there, we’ve got what they spend their money on, the possessions that lie about them. That’s as good as it’s going to get.