It seems pleasingly apropos that it is almost impossible to believe that the adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall appeared on our screens almost a decade ago. Whether you were reading her masterpiece or watching its fruits, carefully peeled and arranged for our delectation by screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky, the years between us and the Tudors shrank to nothingness. Time no longer.
The 2015 series covered the first two books in the trilogy – Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – taking the story of Thomas Cromwell, Putney blacksmith’s boy and adviser to Henry VIII, through the negotiation of the end of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his break with Rome, the crowning of Anne Boleyn and finally – though you ludicrously kept hoping otherwise – her execution, contrived to clear the way for Jane Seymour and the greater possibility of a male heir. Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light covers the last volume and final four years of Cromwell’s life. And it does so as beautifully, movingly and immaculately as before. It is breathtaking.
Straughan and Kosminsky lay their opening scene just days after Anne’s death, intermingling the preparations of the king (Damian Lewis) for his new bride with Cromwell’s memories of the late queen’s final moments. In the unlikely event that you don’t recall Claire Foy as the condemned woman barely mastering her terror on the scaffold, here are a handful of scenes to bring it rushing back. Time collapses once more – between us and 2015, us and the Tudor court, and between Cromwell and this (particular) fell deed he brought about.
Cromwell is played again, of course, by Mark Rylance and it remains an incomparable performance. It suggests everything, answers nothing. Every time you see him, you know both more and less about the man who must turn the tides of events brought about by Henry’s increasing caprice and anger. We also see more of the man, less of the monolith than before. There is an extraordinary scene with the illegitimate daughter of his beloved Cardinal Wolsey that blows your mind as it breaks your heart. Along with him, you must gather the scattered pieces of both before you can continue.
Cromwell rises in the first episode to become Lord Privy Seal – displacing Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn – to the commensurate fury of enemies old and new. He has Henry’s daughter Mary’s fidelity to her mother and her mother’s faith to break and, once her allegiance is barely pledged to Henry, her restoration to legitimacy and a marriage to broker if possible. The ramifications of every choice and potential decision must be weighed, hedged against, left as ambiguous as it can be in the hope of insuring against disaster. It is a politico-religio-psychological thriller by candlelight. And that’s before the Pole family start pulling their stunts. This time round, Janet Henfrey is replaced by Harriet Walter as Lady Margaret; moving seamlessly from modern malevolent matriarch in Succession to her 16th-century equivalent, she is quietly terrifying.
Jonathan Pryce returns as Wolsey, appearing to Cromwell as a welcome vision and/or manifestation of his doubts, perhaps his conscience, a way of sorting through the layers of deceit and truth that make up his life and deciding which will serve him best and when. And the king, of course, the king.
The script is a miracle of compression and architecture, bearing loads that ought to be impossible. The first did justice to 1,200 pages of Mantel’s perfect prose in six hour-long episodes; this distils the essence of her trilogy’s last 900. But here the story is less well known and every moment must be even more densely packed in order to coach the audience through. And we are, without ever realising it because the story never flags, the intrigue never lessens but somehow the information is always there, our ignorance dispelled just in time to appreciate the next twist in Cromwell’s increasingly knotted life. It is the most intricate yet accessible piece of work you’re ever likely to see – the result of an entire cast and crew working in perfect harmony and surely at the peak of their powers.
To misquote Arthur C Clarke – any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from magic. And it is here for us all. Six hours of magic.
• Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
