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selenakGerman-French channel ARTE also put up the complete Wolf Hall, so I was able to watch the six parter they did based on Hilary Mantel's third Cromwell novel at last. What I thought of the novel itself, its plusses and minuses and how it deals with the history, you can read here, so this review is mostly about how it fares as a book adaptation and tv miniseries.
It's the same creative team as with the first adaptation, and mostly the same actors, though they had to swap up out some due to death (hence Timothy Spall as Norfolk) or moving on to superstardom (Tom "Spider-Man" Holland who played Cromwell's son Gregory in the first Wolf Hall now evidently commands a salary beyond tv budgets?). Also, as I recall from when this was broadcast in the UK, there was some bitching about this second adaptation going for colourblind casting in the case of one important character (Elizabeth "Bess" Seymour, Jane's sister who married Gregory Cromwell) and some minor ones, like one of the Tower guards, with all the usual suspects crying foul and that this breaks their suspension of disbelief. Like casting Mark Rylance, who doesn't look anything like the Hohlbein portrait of Thomas Cromwell, and as opposed to Damian Lewis' Henry isn't allowed to put on at least some pounds for the role does not. Pfff.
(Honestly, though: I don't think Rylance, superb as he is in the part, works as Mantel's Cromwell for me for this reason in at least two important scenes, where after some severe provocation he physically attacks and intimidates the Duke of Norfolk (whose venom and anti Cromwell vengefiulness increases accordingly). In one of them, one of the other guys in the room cries "He's an old man!" - which works is the actor playing Thomas Cromwell would look like a killer, as the books point out he does, or at least like a former mercenary, but what you get on screen is Rylance with his sad gothic scholar face angrily shacking Spall, and that's not really cutting it.)
Considering the first miniseries had to adapt two lengthy novels, and this miniseries just one, it could get in more of the plot, but still had to cut out a lot. Some of which I applaud (gone is the ridiculous subplot where Cromwell belatedly discovers that back when Thomas More was for a year under lock and key in the Tower and going through his own trial and execution, and was under Cromwell organized surveillance the whole time, he somehow found the time and means to organize the capture and execution - a year and a half after his own death - of William Tyndale), some of which I regret (the book scene where Jane Seymour makes both her brother and Cromwell squirm in that manner Mantel's Jane has where you can never be quite sure whether she's artfully trolling or being genuine when they basically want to know whether the wedding night went well). Let me add here that the black humor Mantel employs in the entire trilogy was reduced in the first miniseries already, and here even more, presumably because the audience knows that the entire season is building up to our hero's tragic date with an axe. The actors are great in their parts, minus my reservation about Rylance just lacking to come off as menacing in the few early and mid season scenes where the show still requires him to do so. Mind you, Mantel went already out of her way to let Cromwell only ever threaten violence and/or mindmess with people he interrogates, never mind the historical record, so give me at least the aura of danger, show! The other actor I found lacking was the one playing Eustace Chapuys, though this might also have been the fault of the direction. In the novel "The Mirror and the Light", Chapuys and Cromwell have a very enjoyable "Worthy Opponents" type of relationship, where they truly like each other which doesn't stop either of them of doing their utmost for their respective realms against each other, and where Chapuys is basically the only novel character on Cromwell's level of verbal sparring, mindmessing and masterminding. In the show, he's incredibly transparent and easy to see through, and his occasional assurances of friendship are never believable.
All this being said, of course both novel and miniseries have Henry VIII brought to the fore in a way he's not in the first two books/ the former miniseries, and Damian Lewis excels at making him ever more dangerous without ever coming across as caricature. (Also, unlike Jonathan Rhys-Meyeri in the Tudors, costuming does let him gain bulk more and more as Henry did.) The scenes where Cromwell are with him are inevitably highlights on an acting and writing level as Cromwell must navigate managing the man whom he now knows to be capable of destroying his nearest and dearest, and both Rylance and Lewis bring on their A-Game. Since Norfolk, Cromwell's main opponent, is just odious and Gardner (Cromwell's secondary main opponent) comes in rather late, this is useful because the true antagonist, not that Cromwell himself understands it, is of course Henry. The miniseries keeps Mantel's suggestions that beneath all the Ruler and Faithful Servant relationship there was also boiling resentment and blame projection, for Wolsey's downfall on Cromwell's part, and for enabling him to kill Anne & Co. on Henry's. The one scene for which the miniseries leaves Cromwell's pov (which the book never does) is the one between Henry and Rafe Sadler where Sadler petitions for Cromwell (reading out at Henry's behest the historical "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!" letter) and there Henry says he doesn't think Cromwell ever forgave him for the Cardinal, hinting that among the variety of reasons why he's willing to sacrifice Cromwell now isn't just the schemes of Norfolk & Co. or needing a scapegoat for the Cleves marriage.
Cromwell being haunted by Wolsey in more than one sense is a red thread through both novel and miniseries, and in the miniseries comes in handy for letting us know Cromwell's thoughts in the first two episodes where he's telling them to Wolsey's ghost. (Not a literal ghost; this is neither this type of show or book, but Cromwell seeing or not seeing Wolsey of coruse does tell us something about his emotional state at any given point.) Then as in the novel he gets the shock of hearing from Wolsey's illegitimate daughter that she blames him for betraying her father - something readers/viewers know he didn't do - after which point Head!Wolsey disappears and he angsts about whether or not he did betray his beloved mentor by not going with him to Yorkshire until the final episode, where a) Head!Wolsey shows up in the Tower again to reassure him, which is from the book, and b) Head!Wolsey also shows up in the crowd of spectators waiting for Cromwell's execution, so that when Cromwell in his death speech blames himself for not having done enough for his Master and asking his Master's forgiveness, the crowd thinks he's referring to the King but Cromwell is actually speaking to Head!Wolsey, whose loving acceptance and nod of forgiveness makes it moving for the audience instead of making them squirm on Cromwell's behalf for the period typical praise of the King who is about to have him executed. (This as far as I recall isn't from the book but the show's idea, though given it's been years since I read The Mirror and the Light, I may be misremembering.)
So far, so clever. But then we get Cromwell living out his retirement fantasy of the beautiful (former) abbey with the honey bees he wanted to spend his old age at in the last few pictures, indicating that this is what he thinks of while dying, before we cut to black and the credits. 'Which is a SERIOUS departure from the novel. Also history, but leaving that aside for the moment. Now I realise what Mantel actually accomplishes in her novel(s) with Cromwell's death is incredibly difficult to do on screen wiithout getting your rating up to X. Because Thomas Cromwell died in an incredibly gruesome way, with the executioner completely botching his task and needing seven strokes to finally sever his head from his body. What Mantel as a writer dared to do and actually pulled off in the novel was to describe this FROM CROMWELL'S POV, intercut with his memories of the scene that opened the very first novel, Wolf Hall, of his abusive father beating kid!Thomas up and yelling at him to rise again. Now like I said, I am aware this is difficult to do on screen. But not impossible. Not least because the trashy soap The Tudors actually did manage a version of Cromwell's execution with those seven strokes without needing to be broadcast after midnight as far as I know. It's a gruesomely effective scene, and while I mention The Tudors, let me add that as soapy and trashy as it was, it did two pioneer things in terms of popular Tudor fiction which only after became more common - a sympathetic Princess Mary whose abusive adolescence was detailed there for the first time, and a morally ambigouus and mostly sympathetic Cromwell, played by James Frain, whom I do think to come closer to the historical original than Mantel's faultless Renaissance Superman. Frain doesn't look a bit like historical Cromwell, either, but his Cromwell is both sincere about reform AND burningly ambitious and interested in his own pockets. The Tudors includes him and Anne Boleyn falling out, among other things, about where all the money from the monestaries should go, with Cromwell not championing social services there. Both Mantel and the tv adaptation don't give that as one of the reasons for the Cromwell/Boleyn split, and only in The Mirror and the Light we get someone (not the dead Anne) pointing out that if you dissolve all the monasteries, you need SOMEONE to step in with the charity for the poor and sick. But our hero Thomas Cromwell assures viewers and characters alike that a No-Popery England will take care of that and people in a more advanced age won't be able to believe the superstitious once prayed to plaster and wooden statues. And that is basically the one scene in the miniseries indicating the terrible social problems caused by the dissolution leading directly to the big Northern Uprising that was the "Pilgrimage of Grace", which in both Mantel and the tv series is instead presented as happening because of a few evil snobbish aristos misleading their superstitious peasants. (Not leaving Cromwell's pov comes in really handy here.)
The Mirror and the Light miniseries accomplishes the solution to the narrative problem that a big part of the appeal of Mantel's Cromwell is that he's the Underdog rising, and in the era it is describing, he's not an Underdog, he's the second most powerful man of the Kingdom until his downfall by identical means to the book: there are still lots of aristocrats (not limited to but mainly the Duke of Norfolk) around to sneer at Cromwell's low birth and Cromwell in general, even Henry's fool 'Will Somers sneers at him, and of course, there are flashbacks to when Cromwell was actually not yet powerful, there are no scenes with people brought down by Cromwell being hurt or executed that the audience could sympathize with (well, except his repeated flashbacks to Anne's execution in the previous series, I guess), and there is always the awareness on both the audience's and Cromwell's part that Henry can withdraw his favour and thus reduce Cromwell from powerful to powerless at any moment. It works, but again, I salute other narratives who also charted a progress from characters starting as underdogs and rising to the top or near top which are brave enough to narratively admit that they're not underdogs anymore, they are who some currrent underdogs are afraid of, and not unfairly so.
Mantel in her novel made one attempt to go there at least a little bit by letting a shocked Cromwell realize that his son Gregory is afraid of him and believes him capable of almost anything. But because her readers only know Cromwell as a devoted father who has never been anything but gentle to Gregory and otherwise as a Renaissance superman who doesn't need to torture people, he just needs to hint he could and they all start talking already, this is just more material for Cromwell's woobienss. TV show Gregory does not come across as afraid of Cromwell, more as feeling replaced by Cromwell's young male proteges in the son capacity early on, and otherwise having the general "in his father's shadow" problem. Thus the scene where Gregory asks Cromwell after showing he is aware Elizabeth Seymour originally thought she was marrying T'homas C., not Gregory, to stay away from her and him has a different emotion texture in the show than it does in the novel. In the show, what comes across is Gregory feeling so overwhelmed by his living legend of a father that he wants to have this one part of his life TC-free. In the book, at least to me the emotional heft of the scene was Cromwell realising that not only does his much loved son believe him CAPABLE of doing something gross like having an affair with his daughter-in-law, but that Gregory believes him capable of pretty much anything, and not in the good sense.
Of course, two of Cromwell's male protegés abandon him in the finale - Richard Rich and Henry "Call me Risley" Wriothesley - , and because we talked about Rich in Tudor fiction recently in the comments to A Man for all Seasons, let me add that show! Rich comes across as simply a pragmatist in terms of his motivation (i.e. no personal feelings about Cromwell one way or the other, as soon as he could see which way the wind was blowing, he switches sides), while show!Call-me-Risley actually does love Cromwell to the end and acted out of a mixture of hurt feelings, jealousy (because Cromwell prefered others of his proteges before) and fear. The protegé who remains loyal and true and fights for Cromwell to the end is Rafe Sadler, and here I must admit that Rafe Sadler in the novels was never a very memorable character to me whereas in the show he benefits from being played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster who makes all his scenes with Cromwell throughout the series very moving indeed and is basically the True Son Of His Heart. (I have zero idea what became of him later, must look that up, wereas I never cared in the books.)
Lastly: while both Jane Seymour early on and Anne of Cleves late in the show have memorable scenes, as does Elizabeth Seymour in the midst, the most prominent female character in The Mirror and the Light is probably Mary Tudor, captured here at a key point of her life, the horrible realisation that Anne Boleyn's death doesn't mean her father will stopp harrassing her and demanding she recognize him as head of the Church and herself as illegitimate. Until Anne's death, she had the emotional out of blaming her, but now it's obvious that no, it's not Anne or "evil advisors", it's Henry himself, and the show makes it very clear he would be willing to go as far as killing her if she doesn't give in. That she then did, and later never forgave herself (not just in terms of religion, in terms of as she saw it betraying her late mother through this), very much informed who Mary Tudor would eventually become as Queen. In both show and novel, Cromwell is credited for being the sole English noble who a) sees clearly what Henry is willing to do, and b) is determined to save Mary, which he accomplishes by talking her into signing the "yes, I'm a bastard and you're God" letter to her father he has prepared. His enemies use Mary calling him her one true friend after that in a thank you letter to try and discredit him by claiming he has designs on marrying her and thus becoming King. This doesn't work, though it's brought up repeatedly (when Henry eventually decides to ditch Cromwell, this isn't why, though), but the tv show at least indicates some ambigious feelings between them. I.e. it could be Mary is simply subconsciously on the lookout for a replacement father who gives a damn about her, or it could be she's a bit crushing on him (and since he's Mantel's Cromwell, always kind to women and children and a Renaissance superman, why not?); it could be that Cromwell, who lost both his daughters as children, is subconsciously on the lookout for a replacement daughter (this is before he discovers he actually has an illegitimate one), or that he feels some attraction (but knows he could never act on it). Either way, Mary also comes across as smart (hence her realising that Cromwell is telling her the truth when he says her father would be ready to kill her, instead of clinging to hte delusion that Dear Old Dad would never), desperate, and capable of passionate attachment (not just to her dead mother) and kindness, with the bitterness of having to go against her conscience to survive slowly starting to make her colder. I found it a very plausible and well rendered portrait of Mary at that age, and welcome, too, given a resurgence of her as a Catholic supervillain elsewhere .
It's the same creative team as with the first adaptation, and mostly the same actors, though they had to swap up out some due to death (hence Timothy Spall as Norfolk) or moving on to superstardom (Tom "Spider-Man" Holland who played Cromwell's son Gregory in the first Wolf Hall now evidently commands a salary beyond tv budgets?). Also, as I recall from when this was broadcast in the UK, there was some bitching about this second adaptation going for colourblind casting in the case of one important character (Elizabeth "Bess" Seymour, Jane's sister who married Gregory Cromwell) and some minor ones, like one of the Tower guards, with all the usual suspects crying foul and that this breaks their suspension of disbelief. Like casting Mark Rylance, who doesn't look anything like the Hohlbein portrait of Thomas Cromwell, and as opposed to Damian Lewis' Henry isn't allowed to put on at least some pounds for the role does not. Pfff.
(Honestly, though: I don't think Rylance, superb as he is in the part, works as Mantel's Cromwell for me for this reason in at least two important scenes, where after some severe provocation he physically attacks and intimidates the Duke of Norfolk (whose venom and anti Cromwell vengefiulness increases accordingly). In one of them, one of the other guys in the room cries "He's an old man!" - which works is the actor playing Thomas Cromwell would look like a killer, as the books point out he does, or at least like a former mercenary, but what you get on screen is Rylance with his sad gothic scholar face angrily shacking Spall, and that's not really cutting it.)
Considering the first miniseries had to adapt two lengthy novels, and this miniseries just one, it could get in more of the plot, but still had to cut out a lot. Some of which I applaud (gone is the ridiculous subplot where Cromwell belatedly discovers that back when Thomas More was for a year under lock and key in the Tower and going through his own trial and execution, and was under Cromwell organized surveillance the whole time, he somehow found the time and means to organize the capture and execution - a year and a half after his own death - of William Tyndale), some of which I regret (the book scene where Jane Seymour makes both her brother and Cromwell squirm in that manner Mantel's Jane has where you can never be quite sure whether she's artfully trolling or being genuine when they basically want to know whether the wedding night went well). Let me add here that the black humor Mantel employs in the entire trilogy was reduced in the first miniseries already, and here even more, presumably because the audience knows that the entire season is building up to our hero's tragic date with an axe. The actors are great in their parts, minus my reservation about Rylance just lacking to come off as menacing in the few early and mid season scenes where the show still requires him to do so. Mind you, Mantel went already out of her way to let Cromwell only ever threaten violence and/or mindmess with people he interrogates, never mind the historical record, so give me at least the aura of danger, show! The other actor I found lacking was the one playing Eustace Chapuys, though this might also have been the fault of the direction. In the novel "The Mirror and the Light", Chapuys and Cromwell have a very enjoyable "Worthy Opponents" type of relationship, where they truly like each other which doesn't stop either of them of doing their utmost for their respective realms against each other, and where Chapuys is basically the only novel character on Cromwell's level of verbal sparring, mindmessing and masterminding. In the show, he's incredibly transparent and easy to see through, and his occasional assurances of friendship are never believable.
All this being said, of course both novel and miniseries have Henry VIII brought to the fore in a way he's not in the first two books/ the former miniseries, and Damian Lewis excels at making him ever more dangerous without ever coming across as caricature. (Also, unlike Jonathan Rhys-Meyeri in the Tudors, costuming does let him gain bulk more and more as Henry did.) The scenes where Cromwell are with him are inevitably highlights on an acting and writing level as Cromwell must navigate managing the man whom he now knows to be capable of destroying his nearest and dearest, and both Rylance and Lewis bring on their A-Game. Since Norfolk, Cromwell's main opponent, is just odious and Gardner (Cromwell's secondary main opponent) comes in rather late, this is useful because the true antagonist, not that Cromwell himself understands it, is of course Henry. The miniseries keeps Mantel's suggestions that beneath all the Ruler and Faithful Servant relationship there was also boiling resentment and blame projection, for Wolsey's downfall on Cromwell's part, and for enabling him to kill Anne & Co. on Henry's. The one scene for which the miniseries leaves Cromwell's pov (which the book never does) is the one between Henry and Rafe Sadler where Sadler petitions for Cromwell (reading out at Henry's behest the historical "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!" letter) and there Henry says he doesn't think Cromwell ever forgave him for the Cardinal, hinting that among the variety of reasons why he's willing to sacrifice Cromwell now isn't just the schemes of Norfolk & Co. or needing a scapegoat for the Cleves marriage.
Cromwell being haunted by Wolsey in more than one sense is a red thread through both novel and miniseries, and in the miniseries comes in handy for letting us know Cromwell's thoughts in the first two episodes where he's telling them to Wolsey's ghost. (Not a literal ghost; this is neither this type of show or book, but Cromwell seeing or not seeing Wolsey of coruse does tell us something about his emotional state at any given point.) Then as in the novel he gets the shock of hearing from Wolsey's illegitimate daughter that she blames him for betraying her father - something readers/viewers know he didn't do - after which point Head!Wolsey disappears and he angsts about whether or not he did betray his beloved mentor by not going with him to Yorkshire until the final episode, where a) Head!Wolsey shows up in the Tower again to reassure him, which is from the book, and b) Head!Wolsey also shows up in the crowd of spectators waiting for Cromwell's execution, so that when Cromwell in his death speech blames himself for not having done enough for his Master and asking his Master's forgiveness, the crowd thinks he's referring to the King but Cromwell is actually speaking to Head!Wolsey, whose loving acceptance and nod of forgiveness makes it moving for the audience instead of making them squirm on Cromwell's behalf for the period typical praise of the King who is about to have him executed. (This as far as I recall isn't from the book but the show's idea, though given it's been years since I read The Mirror and the Light, I may be misremembering.)
So far, so clever. But then we get Cromwell living out his retirement fantasy of the beautiful (former) abbey with the honey bees he wanted to spend his old age at in the last few pictures, indicating that this is what he thinks of while dying, before we cut to black and the credits. 'Which is a SERIOUS departure from the novel. Also history, but leaving that aside for the moment. Now I realise what Mantel actually accomplishes in her novel(s) with Cromwell's death is incredibly difficult to do on screen wiithout getting your rating up to X. Because Thomas Cromwell died in an incredibly gruesome way, with the executioner completely botching his task and needing seven strokes to finally sever his head from his body. What Mantel as a writer dared to do and actually pulled off in the novel was to describe this FROM CROMWELL'S POV, intercut with his memories of the scene that opened the very first novel, Wolf Hall, of his abusive father beating kid!Thomas up and yelling at him to rise again. Now like I said, I am aware this is difficult to do on screen. But not impossible. Not least because the trashy soap The Tudors actually did manage a version of Cromwell's execution with those seven strokes without needing to be broadcast after midnight as far as I know. It's a gruesomely effective scene, and while I mention The Tudors, let me add that as soapy and trashy as it was, it did two pioneer things in terms of popular Tudor fiction which only after became more common - a sympathetic Princess Mary whose abusive adolescence was detailed there for the first time, and a morally ambigouus and mostly sympathetic Cromwell, played by James Frain, whom I do think to come closer to the historical original than Mantel's faultless Renaissance Superman. Frain doesn't look a bit like historical Cromwell, either, but his Cromwell is both sincere about reform AND burningly ambitious and interested in his own pockets. The Tudors includes him and Anne Boleyn falling out, among other things, about where all the money from the monestaries should go, with Cromwell not championing social services there. Both Mantel and the tv adaptation don't give that as one of the reasons for the Cromwell/Boleyn split, and only in The Mirror and the Light we get someone (not the dead Anne) pointing out that if you dissolve all the monasteries, you need SOMEONE to step in with the charity for the poor and sick. But our hero Thomas Cromwell assures viewers and characters alike that a No-Popery England will take care of that and people in a more advanced age won't be able to believe the superstitious once prayed to plaster and wooden statues. And that is basically the one scene in the miniseries indicating the terrible social problems caused by the dissolution leading directly to the big Northern Uprising that was the "Pilgrimage of Grace", which in both Mantel and the tv series is instead presented as happening because of a few evil snobbish aristos misleading their superstitious peasants. (Not leaving Cromwell's pov comes in really handy here.)
The Mirror and the Light miniseries accomplishes the solution to the narrative problem that a big part of the appeal of Mantel's Cromwell is that he's the Underdog rising, and in the era it is describing, he's not an Underdog, he's the second most powerful man of the Kingdom until his downfall by identical means to the book: there are still lots of aristocrats (not limited to but mainly the Duke of Norfolk) around to sneer at Cromwell's low birth and Cromwell in general, even Henry's fool 'Will Somers sneers at him, and of course, there are flashbacks to when Cromwell was actually not yet powerful, there are no scenes with people brought down by Cromwell being hurt or executed that the audience could sympathize with (well, except his repeated flashbacks to Anne's execution in the previous series, I guess), and there is always the awareness on both the audience's and Cromwell's part that Henry can withdraw his favour and thus reduce Cromwell from powerful to powerless at any moment. It works, but again, I salute other narratives who also charted a progress from characters starting as underdogs and rising to the top or near top which are brave enough to narratively admit that they're not underdogs anymore, they are who some currrent underdogs are afraid of, and not unfairly so.
Mantel in her novel made one attempt to go there at least a little bit by letting a shocked Cromwell realize that his son Gregory is afraid of him and believes him capable of almost anything. But because her readers only know Cromwell as a devoted father who has never been anything but gentle to Gregory and otherwise as a Renaissance superman who doesn't need to torture people, he just needs to hint he could and they all start talking already, this is just more material for Cromwell's woobienss. TV show Gregory does not come across as afraid of Cromwell, more as feeling replaced by Cromwell's young male proteges in the son capacity early on, and otherwise having the general "in his father's shadow" problem. Thus the scene where Gregory asks Cromwell after showing he is aware Elizabeth Seymour originally thought she was marrying T'homas C., not Gregory, to stay away from her and him has a different emotion texture in the show than it does in the novel. In the show, what comes across is Gregory feeling so overwhelmed by his living legend of a father that he wants to have this one part of his life TC-free. In the book, at least to me the emotional heft of the scene was Cromwell realising that not only does his much loved son believe him CAPABLE of doing something gross like having an affair with his daughter-in-law, but that Gregory believes him capable of pretty much anything, and not in the good sense.
Of course, two of Cromwell's male protegés abandon him in the finale - Richard Rich and Henry "Call me Risley" Wriothesley - , and because we talked about Rich in Tudor fiction recently in the comments to A Man for all Seasons, let me add that show! Rich comes across as simply a pragmatist in terms of his motivation (i.e. no personal feelings about Cromwell one way or the other, as soon as he could see which way the wind was blowing, he switches sides), while show!Call-me-Risley actually does love Cromwell to the end and acted out of a mixture of hurt feelings, jealousy (because Cromwell prefered others of his proteges before) and fear. The protegé who remains loyal and true and fights for Cromwell to the end is Rafe Sadler, and here I must admit that Rafe Sadler in the novels was never a very memorable character to me whereas in the show he benefits from being played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster who makes all his scenes with Cromwell throughout the series very moving indeed and is basically the True Son Of His Heart. (I have zero idea what became of him later, must look that up, wereas I never cared in the books.)
Lastly: while both Jane Seymour early on and Anne of Cleves late in the show have memorable scenes, as does Elizabeth Seymour in the midst, the most prominent female character in The Mirror and the Light is probably Mary Tudor, captured here at a key point of her life, the horrible realisation that Anne Boleyn's death doesn't mean her father will stopp harrassing her and demanding she recognize him as head of the Church and herself as illegitimate. Until Anne's death, she had the emotional out of blaming her, but now it's obvious that no, it's not Anne or "evil advisors", it's Henry himself, and the show makes it very clear he would be willing to go as far as killing her if she doesn't give in. That she then did, and later never forgave herself (not just in terms of religion, in terms of as she saw it betraying her late mother through this), very much informed who Mary Tudor would eventually become as Queen. In both show and novel, Cromwell is credited for being the sole English noble who a) sees clearly what Henry is willing to do, and b) is determined to save Mary, which he accomplishes by talking her into signing the "yes, I'm a bastard and you're God" letter to her father he has prepared. His enemies use Mary calling him her one true friend after that in a thank you letter to try and discredit him by claiming he has designs on marrying her and thus becoming King. This doesn't work, though it's brought up repeatedly (when Henry eventually decides to ditch Cromwell, this isn't why, though), but the tv show at least indicates some ambigious feelings between them. I.e. it could be Mary is simply subconsciously on the lookout for a replacement father who gives a damn about her, or it could be she's a bit crushing on him (and since he's Mantel's Cromwell, always kind to women and children and a Renaissance superman, why not?); it could be that Cromwell, who lost both his daughters as children, is subconsciously on the lookout for a replacement daughter (this is before he discovers he actually has an illegitimate one), or that he feels some attraction (but knows he could never act on it). Either way, Mary also comes across as smart (hence her realising that Cromwell is telling her the truth when he says her father would be ready to kill her, instead of clinging to hte delusion that Dear Old Dad would never), desperate, and capable of passionate attachment (not just to her dead mother) and kindness, with the bitterness of having to go against her conscience to survive slowly starting to make her colder. I found it a very plausible and well rendered portrait of Mary at that age, and welcome, too, given a resurgence of her as a Catholic supervillain elsewhere .
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Date: 2025-09-24 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-24 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-24 06:30 pm (UTC)I had to laugh out loud at this bit, "Rylance with his sad gothic scholar face" - he does look a lot like that, doesn't he? In "The Outfit" he looked similarly grief-stricken (but that one had a twist, and the character's past came as a grim surprise).
And I'd agree that James Frain carried off Cromwell's ambiguity a bit better, his rough past, the possibility of resorting to violence if push came to shove.
Oh gods, Damian Lewis: genuinely terrifying in this adaption. Great, and terrifying.
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Date: 2025-09-24 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-24 09:08 pm (UTC)The Tudors was undoubtedly trashy but had some unexpected gems of casting and characterization.
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Date: 2025-09-25 12:31 am (UTC)