Even now, aged fifty when Bring up the Bodies opens in September 1535, two years into Anne’s flamboyant reign, Cromwell is by no means invincible. To many he is a noisome figure – low-born, rapacious, lacking finesse. According to the duke of Suffolk, he is ‘not fit to talk to princes’. Anne, ruthless as her husband, jokes about bringing him down. In her presence Cromwell feels his head wobble on his shoulders. That Cromwell is demonstrably capable of anything and never to be trusted sharpens people’s loathing.

Mantel’s study of Anne Boleyn, always seen from Cromwell’s point of view, is consistently hostile. She may not bear the sixth finger of legend or produce a deformed foetus (sure marks of her devilry), but she is capricious and malignant throughout. Some connoisseurs of Anne, as Mantel has dubbed them, will reprehend the portrait of her as wilful, venal, injudicious – far from the inspired patroness of Protestant reformers and architect of the break with Rome. This is the ‘goggyll-eyd hore’ of legend, the seductress and wrecker who soon tires of Henry and who may – may – have turned to other men for consolation or to provide the king with a son (as G.W. Bernard, her most recent biographer [2010], deems credible).Not that Jane Seymour – lady-in-waiting to Henry’s first two queens, and Anne’s successor – fares much better (most of the female characters are dubious, and Cromwell reflects on ‘the peculiar cruelty of women’). Jane, Henry’s ‘little bun-face’, is a farcical figure, even a dunce (‘Jane sits on a stool. You expect someone to hand her a slate and begin her on A.B.C.’). To her ruthless brother Edward, keen to promote the marriage, ‘Jane is as much use as a blancmange’, but a biddable blancmange. Limited though she is, and probably illiterate (unlike the brilliant Anne), Jane is not without ambition or resolve.Cromwell, plump fingers in every fatty pie, knows the court intimately – knows its dangers, its nepotistic excesses. He has never forgiven the others for destroying Wolsey. Cromwell – brighter, better-connected, harder-working than anyone else – runs rings around his peers. But the Tudor king is another matter altogether. When Bishop Gardiner advises Cromwell to write a book, he muses: ‘If he did, it would be called The Book Called Henry: how to read him, how to serve him, how best to preserve him.’ This new-minted monarch is needful, self-pitying, and wholly unpredictable – every inch the ‘grey, failing but vindictive and obstinate mass known as Henry’ of Ford’s trilogy. Already he displays signs of physical and mental decline, the latter possibly accelerated by the deep concussion he suffered during a joust in January 1536, which caused Anne to miscarry again and unleashed the astonishing events of May 1536, when, in the space of a fortnight, Anne was suddenly accused of adultery with several men (including her brother), summarily tried, and beheaded by a French swordsman.

As in Wolf Hall, Mantel humanises tyrants and psychopaths. Unlike most writers, who have so little experience of it, she understands power. ‘Like a crab the king goes sideways to his destination, but then he sinks his pincers in.’ Cromwell, who knows what his role is (‘ease out the Boleyns, ease in the Seymours’), clings on, but only just. When the putative lovers are taken to the Tower for interrogation or worse, Cromwell has no idea how it will all end. Of course, we know how it will end, four years hence, but this must wait until the third novel foreshadowed in the afterword.

Mantel’s command of the Henrician literature is impressive. Now and then, for obvious reasons, she tweaks the chronology (Anne did not, crucially, miscarry on the same day as Catherine of Aragon’s funeral, but a few days later). Some of the dialogue is familiar from the myriad histories and biographies, but most of it is new and plausible. Mantel is so attuned to the nuances, the deadly dramas, of the great hall. As in Wolf Hall, people glance at one another out of ‘the tails of their eyes’. Like Jane Austen, Mantel can make a polite tête-à-tête seem as diabolical as anything in the Kremlin. Set-pieces such as Cromwell’s last interview with the dying Catherine (devout, resistant, indissolubly married to the last), his interrogation of Mark Smeaton and Henry Norris, and Anne’s trial in the Tower are charged – often very funny, too. Mantel’s Cromwell is a master of the paradox, and his sotto voce observations about human folly are choice.

The language throughout is fluent and zesty. Adverbs are at a premium, and most of the sentences are brief. This tautness, the seeming simplicity of the prose, generate real drama and spring (‘He gets up, he walks away, he turns, he shakes his head: he sighs’). The lyricism is so integral, the prose so subtle, that we almost overlook its panache:

The days are perfect. The clear untroubled light picks out each berry shimmering in a hedge. Each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, hangs like a golden pear.

Many of the minor players (Rafe Sadler, Jane Rochford, Anne’s odious father, Thomas Boleyn, the Spanish ambassador, Eustache Chapuys) reappear, often with the same brio and definition as Shakespeare’s ostensibly lesser characters.

At the centre, though, is Thomas Cromwell – brutal, human, pre-eminent. He knows what life in The Book Called Henry has done to him: ‘You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.’ Hilary Mantel’s second novel about this doomed statesman and most improbable of heroes proves even more relishable than the first.