"Whose side is this fellow on?" Charles Brandon asks of Cromwell in Bring Up The Bodies. The same may be asked of Mantel. Ostensibly, she is on Cromwell's side. She has placed that mirror in his hand. She sees what it reflects. But there is also a sense in which she has placed it at such an angle that it dazzles her reader, causing temporary blindness. Her infinitely flexible literary imagination is able to project into any mind, any body. Because he has to second-guess Katherine of Aragon's legal arguments Cromwell "enters into her concerns". The narrator (Cromwell? Mantel?) remarks, "How close we hug our enemies! They are our familiars, our other selves."

Any sequel to Bring Up The Bodies may yet reveal that Cromwell has been Mantel's enemy, hugged close and entered into, so that she may make her argument across him. His persuasive rhetoric is dangerous, and Bring Up The Bodies is a wonderfully skilful, dangerous work. It shows how dangerous it can be when a country forgets its own history; how, when readers unreflectingly allow themselves to be swayed by powerful rhetoric, they can end up identifying with a point of view without knowing how they got there, backed into a corner.

Mantel has said in interviews that she wants the reader to ask, "Wouldn't I have done the same in Cromwell's situation? What other choice did he have?" Brad Gregory makes the point that by definition the past has made the present what it is, but things did not have to turn out this way. Institutionally and ideologically, materially and morally, we need not have ended up where we are. Human decisions were made that did not have to be made, some of which turned out to be deeply consequential. Patterns were established and new behaviours normalised that need not have taken hold.

Suddenly, there is Cromwell normalising incest, conspiracy and treason, making them routine. Yet this is also Mantel's liberal, enlightened, tolerant Thomas Cromwell: a man for our season. In Bring Up The Bodies he stands in a hall of mirrors, an endlessly posed question, like the author herself. Whom does she serve? Cromwell's vision of modern liberalism? Or Thomas More's reminder that there is always the choice to speak truth to power?