Booker Prize 2012: Mantel's tale drips with the often putrid scents of the Tudor age In Bring Up the Bodies, she notes in passing that torture in continental Europe was "usual, as necessary as salt to meat," but not countenanced by English law without the nod of the king: rather than being a country characterised by state-sanctioned violence, as our normal picture of the Tudors might suggest, England was, at the time, marked by its absence of judicial cruelty, not its excess. The mood, the tone, of her prose suggests that the novels display only the tip of the iceberg of Mantel's research and knowledge. This is at its most masterly in her depiction of the great tyrant himself. In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell gives a page-long "extract" from what he calls "The Book Called Henry" and in it deftly nails our much-married king pinned and wriggling to the wall. The bald counsel, "He is never in error," alone summarises much of Henry VIII's mindset and why so many of the great predicaments of the age - his "divorce" from Katherine of Aragon, his break from the Church of Rome, the downfall of Thomas Wolsey - resolved themselves as they did. I have seen Mantel's devotion first-hand. In 2009, I organised a three-day conference on Henry VIII and his court at Hampton Court Palace, which the author attended, sitting through the academic papers being presented, discussing with scholars working on Thomas Wyatt and Tudor portraiture, and bringing herself entirely up to date with research in the field. She will know that her decision to characterise Cromwell as a composed, ruthless master manipulator draws on a very specific historiographical vein - and yet also subverts it. For historians have debated whether Cromwell, or Henry VIII, was at the centre of the changes and policy decisions of 1530s. The grandfather of Tudor history, Sir Geoffrey Elton - who taught David Starkey and John Guy, among others - characterised Cromwell as the ultimate mover and master puppeteer, with Henry open to persuasion, influenced by faction and confined by law. The king's suspicious, fickle and callous personality made him controllable. Recently, however, G W Bernard has thrown the cat among the pigeons by arguing that Henry VIII's Reformation was precisely that - authored by Henry himself, a strong and deliberate sovereign whose conscience defined the religion of a kingdom. Mantel's Cromwell is Eltonian in his faultless control of his mercurial monarch, and yet this Cromwell cares little for the religious change that Elton thought he engendered. If one had to find a flaw with her reading of the past, it might be that Mantel doesn't make Cromwell's handling of power compatible with his urgent Protestantism. Rochefoucauld wrote: "There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of the people that one has ceased to love." If modern Britain has fallen out of love with God, we shouldn't underestimate His intoxicating power in centuries past. Mantel will also know the well-trodden, mine-laden ground around Anne Boleyn's downfall, which she characterises so memorably in her second Booker-winning novel. For historians, her titles were as trailers for what was to come: "Wolf Hall," the home of the Seymours, suggested the line she might take to explain Anne's execution; "Bring up the Bodies" are the words that presage the end point of the book, when Anne and her alleged lovers will have met their fate. The line she chose was that Henry VIII tired of what David Starkey has called Anne's "abrasive character," especially after Anne had failed the king yet again in her miscarriage of January 1536. Henry is attracted to the bovine Jane Seymour, whom he finds "restful," in contrast to his vivacious and demanding wife, and Cromwell stages a plot to rid Henry of this thorn in his flesh. We disagree on precisely why Anne fell, but I admire Mantel's use of the arguments - even the very words - of the primary sources that relate to Anne's fall, and above all, the way her argument pivots on the power of rumour and gossip to ruin reputations. Mantel has a jilted Mary Shelton, Anne's cousin, tell Cromwell about the conversations that Anne has had with the men of the court (conversations in reality recalled by Anne herself as she waited in the Tower and racked her brains as to why she was there) - conversations that arguably crossed the line from the flirtation of courtly love into the deadly territory of loving another and "imagining the king's death," when to do so was treason. Perhaps best of all is Mantel's recreation of the decisive moment when one of the accused, the young court musician Mark Smeaton, confesses to adultery with the queen. Where an historian can speculate, a novelist can expound. For "his moment in the sun," Mark boasts that Anne loves him: "Mark has lived in a story of his own devising, where the beautiful princess... looks out and sees by moonlight the humble musician with his lute." In his instant of glory, he confesses too much. Mantel captures this "simpleton," this "puppet," this "marionette" perfectly. It is this tenderness and emotion that allows Mantel ultimately to draw conclusions that can even give historians pause to think. When Henry is downcast on the day of Katherine of Aragon's funeral, Mantel's Cromwell ponders, "How close we hug our enemies! They are our familiars, our other selves. Bring Up the Bodies is a rare creature: something that delights historians, Tudor fiction fans, the general reader, and now, deservedly, the Booker prize committee. Suzannah Lipscomb is senior lecturer and convenor for history at New College of the Humanities, and author of '1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII