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All the reviews I’d read assured me that Hilary Mantel’s historical novel is compelling, witty, and accessible, but I was still worried that the characters would talk like this: “How now, good my liege? Aroint thee, wench!” Fine, they talk like that in Shakespeare, but he wrote it back when they talked like that.

Sometimes you feel like reading a Middle Earth epic written partly in Sindarin, sometimes you’re in the mood for very purple prose (Tina swears by The Lymond Chronicles of Dorothy Dunnett), but I’m in a hurry. I have to clear my backlog in January because in February we’re doing the big fat Russian novels. Because we feel like it.

Thomas Cromwell, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Fortunately Wolf Hall is accessible, the prose lyrical but tight, the direst moments laced with humor. When Cardinal Wolsey is exiled to a filthy, unkept house, Thomas Cromwell takes charge. “I will send some people,” he says, “to sort out the kitchens. They will be Italian. It will be violent at first, but then after three weeks it will work.” The complexities of European history are laid out in a thorough yet appealing manner, so the reader need not have a detailed knowledge of England under Henry Tudor. (What little I know of English history I learned from Ladybird books, movies, and the Shakespeare class of Professor Wilhelmina Ramas, a brilliant and exacting teacher.)

Thomas Cromwell is the hero of the novel—interesting choice, given all the much more glamorous characters running around the court at the time. Henry VIII is king and smitten with Anne Boleyn, who won’t put out until he marries her, so he has to divorce his queen Katherine who, inconveniently, is the aunt of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V. Circumstances familiar to viewers of The Tudors, the Dynasty version of English history.

Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger. Doesn’t exactly make you cry, “Good God, it’s Jonathan Rhys-Meyers!” Henry VIII’s thigh was bigger than Jonathan’s waistline. (Every time I see that Hugo Boss ad with the pout and the swiveling hips I want to send Jonathan to a convent.)

On one hand if you’ve seen the Tudors, you know the plot outlines, the major characters, and the alliances. On the other hand if you’ve seen the Tudors, you may not recall who Thomas Cromwell is. He’s that shadowy, weaselly secretary to the king, the one who gets into trouble for promoting Henry’s marriage to the unattractive Anne of Cleves. (When he was looking for wife number four, Henry sent his court painter Hans Holbein to paint Anne of Cleves and her sisters. Henry himself picked Anne to marry; apparently Holbein’s portrait was too flattering. See what they had to put up with before photography was invented.)

All the men in the Tudor court are named Henry or Thomas, all the women Anne or Jane, and it gets confusing at times.

M Zouch, lady-in-waiting to Jane Seymour, by Hans Holbein the Younger

The Thomas Cromwell who emerges from these pages is a fully fleshed-out human being: ambitious but kind, loyal but pragmatic, a man who knows all the angles but tries to hang on to his soul. Badly-treated by his own father, he is good to his wife and children and keeps a large and happy household. In contrast the sainted Thomas More is portrayed as a snob, mean to his wife and children, a ruthless torturer eager to burn heretics at the stake. His goodness has made him inhuman.

I’m more than halfway through Wolf Hall. Wolsey is dead, the king still hasn’t gotten his divorce and Anne Boleyn still hasn’t given in. But Cromwell has been put in charge and he is “the cleverest man in England”; he will find a way to give Henry what he wants.

Three Princesses of Saxony: Sibylla, Emilia and Sidonia by Lucas Cranach the Elder. I call it Fashionable Ladies of 1535.