"What," he now wonders, "if there is some flaw in my marriage to Anne, some impediment, something displeasing to Almighty God?" Cromwell, who has heard these words before, is ordered to conclude the story of Boleyn, and to do it swiftly. It is at Wolf Hall in 1536 that the king, in Mantel's sequel Bring Up the Bodies, will encounter Jane Seymour, who to her family "has as much use as a blancmange" but to Henry represents a source of future sons. The first mention of the book's title comes as its last words, but we have been in a hall of wolves throughout. Having secured the end of the king's 20-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon, enabled his remarriage to Anne Boleyn, and seen his enemy Sir Thomas More ascend the scaffold, Cromwell plans five days for himself at Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymour family. Secretary to the king, his job was to edit Henry's plots: to erase his queen, cancel his inconvenient daughters and terminate those chapters in the narrative which were getting tedious. W hen we last saw Thomas Cromwell, in the Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's unlikely hero was at the height of his powers.
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