England has long adopted the version of events informed by the Victorians’ biases and neuroses. But what is behind the flood of 21st-century retellings, including the new TV series The Mirror and the Light?

The TV adaptation of the third of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels – The Mirror and the Light – arrived on Sunday on BBC One to rave reviews. “Six hours of magic” was the Guardian’s verdict. The series had been eagerly awaited, but nothing like as eagerly as the book itself. Mantel’s legions of fans waited eight years from the publication of Bring Up the Bodies for the finale to arrive in 2020.

There was a rumour at the time that Mantel had had writer’s block – specifically, that she had been unable to bring herself to tackle (500-year-old spoiler alert!) Thomas Cromwell’s death scene. She denied this, but an atmosphere of truth clung to it. By the time she had finished with this unlikely hero – “a modern, rational, state-planning bureaucrat in the midst of all these over-ambitious nobles” is how the Oxford history professor Steven Gunn puts it, which is cool, but hardly Indiana Jones – Mantel had brought Cromwell so vividly to life that it made sense that she couldn’t bear to kill him.