– Downfall of the Captive Lion –
by Inkoo Kong | The New Yorker | March 30, 2025
In the culmination of the Hilary Mantel adaptation, Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell becomes a more poignant figure, weighed down by regrets.
In the first season of the Tudor-era drama “Wolf Hall,” Anne Boleyn’s brief queendom was undone by rumors. Just three years after she became the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, in 1533, Anne (played by Claire Foy) landed in the Tower of London following accusations of adulterous dalliances, including with her own brother. Her beheading was a ghastly sight, shocking even to the man who had done much to bring it about—the King’s adviser Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), who used threats of ruin and torture to drum up witnesses against Anne. Now, in the show’s second season, Cromwell becomes the subject of outlandish gossip himself. There’s practically nothing that his Catholic foes, still smarting at the Church of England’s rejection of papal authority, won’t believe about the man who helped engineer the schism so that Henry (Damian Lewis) could divorce his first wife as part of his ongoing quest to beget a male heir. Some say Cromwell has ensorcelled the sovereign. Maybe the King is dead, and has been for some time: one commoner claims that the adviser has secretly taken the throne and intends to “melt all the crucifixes for cannons to fire on the poor folk.” In the North, where a rebel army prepares to march on London, the statesman has become a monster with which to scare children. Mind yourself, the little ones learn, or “he’ll jump down your throat and bite your liver.”
Season 1 ended with Anne’s decapitation; Season 2, which débuted on March 23rd, ends with Cromwell’s. The six hours of television between those two deaths are riveting—partly because the more fearsome Cromwell’s reputation becomes, the more assiduously he strives in private for moral redemption. Immediately after Anne’s execution, Henry had warmly embraced Cromwell; while the monarch beamed, thinking perhaps of his impending nuptials to Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), the adviser could barely conceal his dismay at what they’d accomplished. Early in the première of the new season, the series’ director, Peter Kosminsky, deploys one of his most effective flourishes, cutting between Anne’s final moments and Henry’s wedding to Jane. As the newly emboldened King tests the limits of his power, Cromwell struggles to remain a loyal servant amid his growing unease about Henry’s ideas and tactics. He believes that the King, in his role as reformer of the Church, doesn’t go far enough, and that, as the father of an obstinately Catholic daughter—Mary (Lilit Lesser), his firstborn—the monarch is startlingly reckless.
“Wolf Hall” is a PBS/BBC adaptation of the novelist Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of the same name. The second season arrives a decade after its predecessor, but the two halves display remarkable consistency, having been not only directed entirely by Kosminsky but also written entirely by Peter Straughan, who won a screenplay Oscar earlier this month, for the film “Conclave.” The original season covered the first two novels in Mantel’s trilogy; this one dramatizes the events of the third novel, from which it takes its subtitle, “The Mirror and the Light.” Season 2 is arguably greater than its acclaimed predecessor. Cromwell’s middle-aged regrets build poignantly, while brisker pacing and some levity—Cromwell is widowed, and various courtiers take it upon themselves to play matchmaker—lend the proceedings a teeming liveliness.
In the first season, Cromwell, then in his forties, still saw himself as a vengeful son. Having escaped his humble origins through a legal education, he was ferociously loyal to the surrogate father he found in Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), a once beloved confidant of the King who, in the end, scarcely fared better than Henry’s discarded wives. After Anne’s death, a more paternal side of Cromwell appears—augmented, perhaps, by the loss of his own young daughters to sudden illness, a few years earlier. He pleads for mercy for those he believes to have been carried away by youthful folly, such as Mary, whom Henry “bastardized” when he annulled his marriage to his first wife. Demoted from princess to plain Lady Mary, she flirts with fatal defiance when she refuses to publicly recognize her father’s negation of his twenty-four-year union with her mother. In so doing, she becomes a dangerously attractive marriage prospect for Vatican allies with eyes on the English throne.
Unlike many period dramas, “Wolf Hall” doesn’t bother to twist history to suit modern preoccupations. Straughan trusts that the machinations of this notorious royal adviser and his king’s marital fecklessness, the consequences of which are still with us five centuries later, are fascinating enough on their own. This makes for an unapologetically cerebral series, demanding close attention to keep track of its sprawling cast, not to mention a host of characters we never see. (Many of them are foreigners who regard Henry’s dominion as a pregnable backwater: “some poor little island full of heretics and sheep.”) But the focus required is amply repaid by a richly detailed snapshot of an England that is not yet a colonial superpower. While Henry worries about the risks of invasion by Spain or of a religious civil war, Cromwell, whom nobles nickname Crumb for his low birth, envisions a world that’s less beholden to ancient hierarchies. Cromwell’s sense of superiority stems from his intelligence, his cosmopolitanism (he has spent time in Europe), and the knowledge that he has made his own fortune. When an ally cautions that, by going after the “oldest, richest families in the land,” Cromwell is making too many enemies, the statesman flashes a grin—a rare break from Rylance’s bewitching understatedness—and compares their imminent destruction to “jugs in an earthquake.” But the self-made upstart underestimates the extent to which his alienation of the aristocracy leaves him perilously dependent on a fickle ruler.
When Henry isn’t admiring his own portrait, like a ginger Narcissus, he spends much of “Wolf Hall” fretting that he’ll be remembered for his inability to beget a son to succeed him. (Eventually, he gets his wish: Jane Seymour gives birth to the future Edward VI, but dies days afterward.) In fact, he is now chiefly remembered for going through queens as if they were disposable broodmares. (The pop-feminist takeaway of the Broadway musical “Six,” about Henry’s wives, is that he, and we, treated his brides interchangeably.) The series, like Mantel’s novels, humanizes the oft-villainized Cromwell, but its most refreshing creation is perhaps its version of Henry. Seldom seen in closeup, the King is framed as Cromwell regards him—a distant figure to be simultaneously feared and managed, like a captive lion. In contrast to the ever-prune-faced Cromwell, Henry undergoes significant bodily deterioration during the decade in which the two seasons take place, and Lewis delivers a magnificently physical performance of a man who feels his virility slipping away. Henry’s self-awareness—and his self-pity—allows him to recognize his emasculation; he grumbles to Cromwell that he has to “breed for the nation.” No wonder, then, that this aging jock in velvet and furs is at his giddiest when making plans to dress up as a Turk or a shepherd, resorting to boyish pranks in such garb when manhood becomes a duty.
Cromwell loses the King’s favor after his suggestion for wife No. 4 goes awry: Henry, betrothed to Anne of Cleves (Dana Herfurth) sight unseen, is crushed to discover that she doesn’t live up to her portrait and recoils at the sight of him. It’s a credit to the series that, though history determines the plot’s immovable destination, exactly where we are headed moment to moment rarely feels predictable. Not all the detours are worthwhile; there are too many flashbacks and conversations with Wolsey’s ghost, as well as an unconvincing story line in which Cromwell is tempted to withdraw from court—a tired iteration of the trope of the grizzled veteran who dies just before a long-awaited retirement. But for the most part the scripts stay commendably true to Cromwell’s grounded point of view, refusing to manufacture the kind of climactic confrontations on which TV dramas thrive. When Henry decides that Cromwell will follow Anne Boleyn to the Tower, the two men don’t face off or exchange their grievances or relive their past together. The result is all the more unsettling for it. Cromwell is instead forced to plead his case to his jumped-up, cocky juniors—the final indignity for a man who knows that he could bring forth “brave new days,” if only he had more time.
Read the rest of the original article at The New Yorker