Mantel stays close to Cromwell’s acute class-consciousness, to his sense of being different from most of those around him. “All these people,” Cromwell thinks at one moment, of the courtly set, “are related to each other. Luckily, the cardinal left him a chart, which he updates whenever there is a wedding.” One effect of this authorial proximity, and of Cromwell’s impressive self-motivation, is that he emerges from these novels if not quite a hero, then at least someone whose torments have been chosen for comprehension, like the sinful protagonist of a Graham Greene novel. This is brave of Mantel, even bravely peculiar, given the reputation of the actual Thomas Cromwell, who acted as a brutal fixer for both Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII. Stephen Greenblatt, reviewing “Wolf Hall” in The New York Review of Books, likened Cromwell to Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police, and marvelled that Mantel had taken him on. Under Wolsey, Cromwell plundered the English monasteries. He survived his master’s demise, in 1530, and as Henry VIII’s helper-in-chief managed the annulment of the King’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and his remarriage, in early 1533, to his mistress, Anne Boleyn. In 1535, Cromwell presided over Thomas More’s execution for treason. That is where “Wolf Hall” closes, with Cromwell’s savagely controlled assessment of the ascetic More, now imprisoned in the Tower. As far as Cromwell is concerned, More is the author of his own death: “Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don’t give a fourpenny fuck.”

“Bring Up the Bodies” continues the tale, post-More. If anything, Mantel is even less sentimental in this novel than in the last in her appraisal of Henry and Cromwell. It is 1535-36; the King is weary of Anne Boleyn, and of her inability to provide him with a male heir. He is eying Jane Seymour, and Cromwell, now chief minister and principal secretary to the King, is used again to make the chief players offers they can’t refuse. There is a necessary comedy to Mantel’s new-old story, as Henry and his royal servants engage, for a second time in only three years, in servicing the King’s marital dissatisfactions. “What if . . . there is some flaw in my marriage to Anne, some impediment, something displeasing to Almighty God?” Henry wonders. Cromwell reflects that he has heard those words before, about a different woman. History repeats as farce, and the reader comes face to face with the Henry VIII of Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon’s funny poem, once quite familiar in British classrooms:

Bluff King Hal was full of beans; He married half a dozen queens. . . . The first he asked to share his reign Was Kate of Aragon, straight from Spain— But when his love for her was spent, He got a divorce, and out she went. Anne Boleyn was his second wife; He swore to cherish her all his life— But seeing a third he wished instead, He chopped off poor Anne Boleyn’s head.

“Bring Up the Bodies” ends with Anne Boleyn’s execution—and the prospect of four more Mantel novels of this period, each a variation on the same tragicomic theme, each devoted to a royal wife. (Though what is more likely, to judge from an authorial note, is that Mantel will write a third and final volume, in which we follow Cromwell’s own fall from royal favor, and his execution, in 1540.)

Once Cromwell is sure of Henry’s marital intentions, he moves against a group of privileged courtiers and aristocrats. He sees an opportunity to avenge the shameful treatment of his beloved master, Cardinal Wolsey. Anne Boleyn has been noisily indiscreet; there are scores of stories about her lovers. If Cromwell can authenticate these tales, he can find Anne and her lovers treasonable. Four young aristocrats stir his most concentrated vengeance: Henry Norris, George Boleyn, William Brereton, and Francis Weston. These men took part in a play at Hampton Court, not long after the disgrace and death of Wolsey. The play, in Mantel’s telling, was a raucous allegory entitled “The Cardinal’s Descent Into Hell.” A man dressed in scarlet, representing the ousted Cardinal, was tossed and bounced by four devils, played by the four aristocrats, each of whom held a limb of the supposed Cardinal. It was their misfortune that Thomas Cromwell, grieving for Wolsey, was watching in the wings.

“Bring Up the Bodies” lolls a bit in its midsection (and perhaps suffers merely on account of coming after the extraordinary freshness of “Wolf Hall”), but becomes menacingly narrow in its last third, as Thomas Cromwell dresses his victims in careful accusation. The scenes of their interrogation are as frightening as anything in “Darkness at Noon” or “1984” (and better written). First comes Henry Norris, known as Gentle Norris: “Gentle Norris: chief bottom-wiper to the king, spinner of silk threads, spider of spiders, black centre of the vast dripping web of court patronage.” Full of bravado at first, Norris says that Cromwell will get no confession out of him: “You will not put gentlemen to the torture, the king would not permit it.” Cromwell rises and slams his hand on the table. “There don’t have to be formal arrangements. . . . I could put my thumbs in your eyes, and then you would sing ‘Green Grows the Holly’ if I asked you to.”

Even after this outburst, Norris remains confident, until Cromwell calmly asks his prisoner to recall a certain play, “in which the late cardinal was set upon by demons and carried down to Hell.” Four men, Cromwell thinks, “who for a joke turned the cardinal into a beast; who took away his wit, his kindness and his grace, and made him a howling animal, grovelling on the boards and scrabbling with his paws.” Norris’s indignation gives way to “blank terror,” as he comprehends the fragility of his fortune and the persistence of his prosecutor. Watching Norris’s fear, Cromwell thinks that at least “the fellow has the wit to see what this is about: not one year’s grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down.” He goes on: