Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel was born Hilary Thompson in Derbyshire, a rural county in central England. When Mantel was seven, her mother’s lover Jack Mantel moved into the family’s home; it would be another four years before her father moved out, a fact that made Mantel’s family a target for town gossips. After her parents officially separated, Mantel never saw her father again. Though Mantel initially intended to study law, she soon shifted to writing fiction, beginning a novel about the French Revolution (published as A Place of Greater Safety in 1992). However, Mantel struggled to find a publisher, only succeeding when she shifted from historical novels to work more directly grounded in her personal experience. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Mantel steadily built acclaim, before bursting through with the 2009 publication of Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell’s role during the reign of British King Henry VIII. She followed Wolf Hall up with Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), both of which received similar critical acclaim and were adapted into a wide variety of media (including a stage play and a miniseries). For decades, Mantel lived with her husband Gerald McEwen, whom she briefly divorced in 1981 (before remarrying him in 1982). Mantel passed away in 2022 due to complications from a stroke. 

Since Bring Up the Bodies is a work of historical fiction, a great number of real-life events inflect the plot and thematic content of the novel. Perhaps the most important background, however, centers on events that precede King Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. As a young man, Henry was married off to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon in a bid to create peace between England and the territories governed by the Hapsburg ruler Emperor Charles (including Spain and the Holy Roman Empire). In choosing to marry Anne and end his marriage with Katherine, Henry broke this alliance, introducing instability into an already-tense European continent. Even more consequential, however, was Henry’s willingness to defy the Pope in securing his annulment, despite the fact that this meant risking excommunication from the Catholic church. Henry’s decision to break with the papacy would then spark the English Reformation and the rise of Anglican Christianity (a movement Cromwell is seen to actively further throughout the novel). Alongside the Protestant Reformation, Henry’s split with the papacy catalyzed the political decline of the Catholic church, ending the church’s long reign as the most powerful force in Europe. 

Mantel cites as influences several other authors of historical fiction, including Gore Vidal (known for novels including Lincoln and Burr), Barry Unsworth (who wrote largely about the Atlantic slave trade, most notably in Sacred Hunger), and J.G. Farrell (best known for writing about anti-colonial struggles in the British empire). The most closely related literary works, however, are the other two novels in the Wolf Hall trilogy. Wolf Hall, the first entry, follows Thomas Cromwell as he tries to defend his mentor Cardinal Wolsey against an ascendant Anne Boleyn. The Mirror and the Light, the final novel in the trilogy, picks up soon after the end of Bring Up the Bodies, tracing Cromwell as he falls out of favor with King Henry and ends up facing public execution.