The hotly anticipated second series of the late Hilary Mantell’s Wolf Hall trilogy has finally hit our screens, nearly ten years after the first. The six episodes adapt the trilogy’s last book, The Mirror and the Light, and cover the years from the execution of Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, in 1536, to the climax of Thomas Cromwell’s execution in 1540.
In the first episode, we see the sensational drama of Boleyn’s execution. It also features tensions mounting as the king threatens his daughter, Princess Mary, with the same fate.
Mary is devoted to her recently deceased mother, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife. Her father had divorced Catherine, claiming the marriage was incestuous and illegal because she had previously been married to his dead brother, Arthur.
