With her award-winning Wolf Hall series of books, Hilary Mantel made Tudor bad guy Thomas Cromwell sympathetic. But as TV adaptation Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light premieres in the US, the question is: did she also 'sidestep crucial matters'?

Nearly 500 years after his death, Thomas Cromwell lives again, reborn in the popular imagination thanks to novelist Hilary Mantel, and her Wolf Hall trilogy. For decades, historians piled layer after layer of interpretation upon Henry VIII's astute chief minister, a key figure in the Reformation, when King Henry broke from the Catholic Church to establish his own Church of England. But now, with the emergence of Mantel's fictional Cromwell – so attractive, so splendidly presented – the real man is in danger of being buried forever.

Going forward, Cromwell's name will likely call to mind the lean, canny look of actor Mark Rylance – star of the television adaptations of the Wolf Hall series – rather than the grumpy, heavy-jowled visage captured by artist Hans Holbein in a portrait done from life circa 1534. And a figure once counted among history's villains will retain the glow of Mantel's revisionist high regard for many years to come.

Starting on 23 March, US audiences can watch Rylance play Cromwell, alongside Damian Lewis as King Henry, one more time. Six hours of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, based on the third and final book, make up the last tranche of episodes of the BBC's lavish costume drama. The script takes the complicated story of Cromwell's fall, culminating in his execution for treason in 1540 after six years as the King's right-hand man, and renders it (relatively) easy to follow. Especially impressive is the dialogue, often lifted directly from Mantel's text. The author, who died of a stroke in 2022, had a gift for rendering 16th-Century speech in a non-risible way. (The Wolf Hall novels have also been adapted into two plays.)

Although critics consider The Mirror and the Light to be the least successful of the novels – it's the only one of the three not to win the Booker Prize – the TV version received rapturous reviews when broadcast in the UK last autumn. The Guardian's five-star review proclaimed: "The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's masterpiece is the most intricate television you are ever likely to see. It is so beautifully made it's breathtaking."

But where do sumptuous production values end, and the facts begin? Such questions have accompanied Mantel's project from the start. Tracy Borman, Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces and author of 2015's Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant, tells the BBC about the impact Mantel's first Tudor novel, Wolf Hall, had on her upon its publication in 2008. "All through my education, from early school days until university, I was taught that Henry VIII's chief minister was a grasping, ruthless, cynical henchman, driven by greed and power. Then I read Wolf Hall and it gave such a different perspective… I was inspired to write a non-fiction biography so that I could find out where the truth lay."

Researching her book, Borman discovered a sharp-witted and enterprising Cromwell, as Mantel did, and realised just how thorough the novelist had been in mining primary sources for innumerable details, including Tudor swear words, Cromwell's favourite wines, and the names of his servants. "Granted, she took artistic license when she needed to," Borman says.........

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