The jealousies and flirtations of Anne Boleyn and her ladies-in-waiting become evidence that will secure her execution when Henry VIII needs Cromwell to find a reason to be rid of her. Revolutionary times allow Cromwell and Robespierre to turn their grudges and insecurities into reasons to murder.

The view of Wolf Hall as simple-minded anti-Catholicism or a mere examination of everyday political chicanery fails to see her in the round because, above all else, Mantel understands the elation and despair of revolution.

In A Place of Greater Safety, the young Camille Desmoulins is caught eavesdropping on a conversation between his father and the Prince of Condé on the possibility of revolution coming to France. The prince isn't angry. He kindly asks the boy how he stayed still and silent for so long. His friendliness isn't reciprocated.

"Perhaps you froze my blood," Camille said. He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. "Of course there will be a revolution," he said. "You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model."

Desmoulins does not build a pure republic. His revolution ends in tyranny, and Desmoulins ends on the steps to the guillotine with his comrades urging him to pull himself together and not give the mob the satisfaction of seeing him cry.

In Wolf Hall, Cromwell delights in his master Henry VIII. Anything seems possible as long as he has the king's ear.
 

You could watch Henry every day for a decade and not see the same thing. He admires Henry more and more. Sometimes he seems hapless, sometimes feckless, sometimes a child, sometimes master of his trade. Sometimes he seems an artist, in the way his eye ranges over his work; sometimes his hand moves and he doesn't seem to see it move.

As Cromwell gathers more power, he dreams he can turn England into an industrious Protestant nation where the poor are put to work, good folk read the Bible in English and merchants prosper. Yet all his power and hopes depend on the nearest England has had to a Stalin. The violence he needs to fulfil his ambitions will destroy him as surely as it will destroy the French revolutionaries. Henry VIII's ministers, wives and nobles find, as the Bolsheviks were to find, that the most dangerous place in the world is the seat next to a tyrant.

Damian Lewis's Henry is charming, charismatic and boyish. He looks as if he barely cares for power, until the moment his eyes narrow and he pulls Cromwell close. He must have what he wants, and if he does not get it someone must pay. Eventually that someone will be Cromwell.