– One of History’s Greatest Schemers –
by John Anderson | The Wall Street Journal | March 20, 2025
“Henry would not kill his own daughter,” chirps the ambassador Chapuys (Karim Kadjar) during the opening episode of “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.” It’s a judgment that causes Thomas Cromwell a moment of atypical candor. “Who knows what Henry will do,” he says ruefully. It is the great tragedy of Cromwell—portrayed with a magnificent fatalism by Mark Rylance—that for all his anticipation, calculation and manipulation he can never quite tell what capricious notion will seize the king of England. He does know that his own neck is never far from the block.
This second “Wolf Hall” series—the first, in 2015, adapted the title novel by Hilary Mantel and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies”—is an event. And for all the exhilaration that a great story brings, there is a corresponding melancholy. You can’t change 500-year-old English history. The author is gone (she died in 2022) and can’t deliver more Cromwell, even if there were more Cromwell to give. And Mr. Rylance, too, has now exhausted what may be the best role of a brilliant career. Yes, there could be prequels or some other nonsense, but it would be beneath everyone’s dignity, the quality that most distinguishes the Rylance performance.
Cromwell was, after all, one of history’s great schemers—a near contemporary of Machiavelli, coincidentally—and the architect of Anne Boleyn’s beheading. He has been, as this “Masterpiece” series unfolds, the chief engineer of the English Reformation, Henry’s matchmaker and a man who, per Mantel, keeps a knife at his breast, just in case. He is not always grim, or ever an ideologue; he is noble in no traditional dramatic sense—nor, as his enemies keep carping, in his bloodline. He is a pragmatist of the first rank. “When negotiation and compromise fail,” he tells his faithful protégé Rafe Sadler (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), “and your only course is to destroy your enemy—before they wake in the morning, Rafe, have the ax in your hand.” He is ruthless. Mr. Rylance makes it a virtue.
So did Mantel, who turned the historically execrated Cromwell into one of literature’s great characters—an American character, in a sense, for all his influence on English history. In the “Wolf Hall” retelling, Cromwell is the son of a blacksmith and a smith himself who became a globe-trotting lawyer and earned his way into the court of Henry VIII (Damian Lewis, brilliant in the most thankless supporting role of the year) through guile, intelligence and a gift for realpolitik. Hampton Court is not, normally, a meritocracy, and Cromwell’s low birth and high rank generate fear and loathing among his foes, notably the repellent Duke of Norfolk (a potent Timothy Spall, looking like a poisoned apple) and his co-conspirator and Catholic bishop, Stephen Gardiner (the superb Alex Jennings).
Haunted—and advised—by the ghost of his mentor, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), Cromwell is oppressed by guilt over the death of Anne. (Her beheading, in oblique flashback, has one grieving anew for Claire Foy’s pretty neck.) Also, the fear that he betrayed Wolsey. “There is no truth or faith in Cromwell,” parrots the cardinal’s daughter (Hannah Khalique-Brown), a cloistered nun. All the while, the king’s high minister is burdened with keeping the kingdom together despite Henry and his whims; Anne’s head has barely rolled when the king marries his third wife, Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), in the hopes of fathering a male heir.
He does, though the resulting Edward VI and his half-sister, the future Elizabeth I, play no part in this six-part story. The child on whom everyone’s fate depends is the very delicate, very Catholic Mary (Lilit Lesser), whose birth has been rendered illegitimate by annulment of her parents’ marriage (Henry to first wife Catherine of Aragon) and is the great hope of Catholic Europe for a return of England to the church of Rome. (“Bloody Mary,” a Lucy Worsley special airing at 8 p.m. Sunday, is the PBS lead-in to “Wolf Hall.”)
Cromwell believes in the Reformation. He also believes in staying alive, whether that means forcing Mary to swear an oath to her father as head of the breakaway Church of England, or letting her risk her own neck. Rylance’s Cromwell is an astonishing mix of empathy, doom and hope, a man who knows his fate depends on a king who has been indulged so long he thinks he deserves what he has. What makes “Wolf Hall” fascinating, too, is the intimate glimpse it gives into the way real political power works, not at some remote level of a massive government, but in a small court where most people have no dentistry and the life expectancy is about 40.
The dialogue is fluid and of its time, so much so that you forget someone wrote it (Peter Straughan did), or that it was directed (by Peter Kosminsky). During one particularly marvelous scene, the king’s niece Margaret (Agnes O’Casey), having married without the sovereign’s permission and thus put her life in danger, is being grilled by Cromwell and provided—though she’s not catching on—with a smoothly paved avenue out of her predicament. “Sit down,” advises her friend Mary Fitzroy (Viola Prettejohn), “and try to comprehend what the Lord Privy Seal is telling you.” The king who made Cromwell the “Lord Privy Seal” has always listened. Until he doesn’t.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light begins Sunday, 9 p.m., PBS Masterpiece.
Read the rest of the original article at The Wall Street Journal