While making an inventory of relics from a dissolved monastery, Cromwell's agent says, "Reason cannot win against these people. You try to open their eyes. But ranged against you are statues of the virgin that weep tears of blood." This echoes John Searle's comment on "the contemporary scientific world view" that "when we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them the comfort and security they claim to derive from these beliefs, but at bottom we remain convinced that either they have not heard the news or they are in the grip of faith."

Looking into Cromwell's mirror, it's easy to see contemporary secular Britain reflected back. Cromwell's efforts to put  state in places formerly occupied by church, his wholesale rendering unto Caesar, paved the way for modern secular society in which the welfare state has replaced the Christian virtues as an unassailable tenet of our secular creed. The obvious parallels between Cromwell's world view and contemporary Western values are fully drawn out by the American historian Brad Gregory in his new book The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard University Press, £25). Gregory notes how the rejection of the central truth claims of medieval Christianity engendered a pluralism leading to moral and cultural relativism, taken up by the state and its institutions: "A centrally important, paradoxical characteristic of modern liberalism is that it does not prescribe what citizens should believe, how they should live, or what they should care about." But "it nonetheless depends for the social cohesion and political vitality of the regimes it informs on the voluntary acceptance of widely shared beliefs, values" and norms. "Otherwise liberal states have to become more legalistic and coercive in order to ensure stability and security."

Legalistic and coercive are words aptly fitted to Thomas Cromwell. "The fist of Cromwell is more proximate than the hand of God," says Cromwell's fool. While Mantel absolves him of outright thuggery, he nonetheless makes his physical presence felt in order to achieve certain ends in Bring Up The Bodies. 

A consummate lawyer, he makes the law serve him, manipulating language to make it soft, persuasive, powerful. His mind is "infinitely flexible" and he confers the same quality on any legal phrase so that he can always be said to be acting within the letter of the law. He uses law to coerce; he flexes it like a whip and people fall in line.

 Language is powerful and power, in the abstract, can be exerted for good or ill. Having studied law, Mantel is surely alive to this fact, and to the ways in which legal language can serve both justice and injustice.