Television loves a good medieval romp. In recent years, we’ve had the bodice-ripping The Tudors, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a sleek Henry VIII ruling over a sybaritic court. And of course there is the phenomenon of Game of Thrones based on George RR Martin’s fantasy novels. Although friends of mine are obsessed by this series, I’ve never thought much of it. What rankles is its cynicism—not just the excessive violence and sex, but the political cynicism of the author. For Martin, it seems, rulers are only interested in exercising naked power; ideals are a sham.
Enter Wolf Hall, the first episode of which was broadcast last night on BBC2. Based on Hilary Mantel’s two Man Booker-winning novels (the third book in the trilogy is still to come), it follows the rise of blacksmith’s son Thomas Cromwell to become Henry’s closest advisor and architect of the English reformation. I saw some complaints on Twitter last night that Wolf Hall was too slow, too dark and too confusing. Certainly it respected its audience enough to make us do some work. I found it subtle, slow-moving and absorbing.
Cromwell (Mark Rylance) is an advisor to Cardinal Wolsley (Jonathan Pryce) as he is struggling with the king’s “great matter”—his divorce from Katharine of Aragon. When we first see Cromwell, he’s walking down a spiral staircase holding a lamp; as soon as he enters Wolsley’s chamber, his face is briefly illuminated before he blows out the light. Now we see him, now we don’t—true to the spirit of Mantel’s novels, Cromwell is an enigma. Rylance is a charismatic stage actor famous for his tics and shuffles—he was an outrageously funny and terrifying Richard III at the Old Vic last year. Here all that energy was compacted within a rarely expressive face. Even when his wife and daughters die from sweating sickness he loses control only momentarily. Grief hollows out his face from the inside.
But Wolf Hall shows that Cromwell was not only motivated by private anguish: he was also a man of ideas and ideals. In one scene we see him opening a secret package from Europe: a copy of Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible. “You should read it for yourself,” he tells his wife Liz. “No mention of nuns, monks, relics.” She says she’s happy with her beautifully decorated prayerbook. Cromwell smiles and watches his daughter run her fingers over its illuminated words. After both their deaths, he is caught reading this prayerbook by one of his rivals, who mocks him for pretending to be pious—while we know he is really mourning his family. This event is found in an early biography of Cromwell, but it was Mantel’s genius to give it a personal resonance. Through this one sequence the audience is shown both the liberating—and potentially destructive—power of the spreading reformation. It’s as though English Catholicism died with Cromwell’s family.
Eamon Duffy’s book The Stripping of the Altars describes in painful detail the destruction of that world. Other 20th-century historians such as Geoffrey Elton have been more sympathetic to Cromwell. (We await what will surely be the definitive biography by Diarmaid MacCulloch.) What Mantel the novelist—and Peter Straughan, the adaptor for TV, and director Peter Kominsky—do is not so much take sides in history, but dramatically present the conflicts that existed within the Tudor court and within the protagonists. When Cromwell sees the disgraced Wolsley’s house being taken apart—the jewell-encrusted crosses put away, the rich fabrics taken down—he is worried about his own fate. But with historical hindsight we perhaps see the thought-germ of Cromwell’s later dissolution of the monasteries. Similarly, when he enters the house of Anne Boleyn and challenges the lute-player Mark Smeaton for abandoning Wolsley, we know he will later use the poor boy to set up Boleyn—and lead them both to their deaths.
Mantel’s novels stick tightly behind Cromwell’s perspective. The freedom of television drama allows us to see him as others might have done. As he moves into Henry’s orbit, and becomes more ruthless in the service of his ideals and his ambition, it will make fascinating viewing.
