Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, BBC One, review: This is the drama of the year

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII return in six more hours of opulent television

5/5
A lot has changed since early 2015, when Wolf Hall was last on our screens. The UK has been through six prime ministers. President Trump came and went (and may come again before this second series even airs). And Hilary Mantel – who died in 2022, two weeks after Queen Elizabeth II – wrote and published a third novel in her acclaimed historical fiction series about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. At long last, we have Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC One), six more rich hours of whispered conversations in candlelit, tapestry-draped rooms.
Here, hallelujah, nothing has changed. Literally, in the sense of the plot, which picks up a few days after the execution of Anne Boleyn (Beheaded No 1), with King Henry marrying Anne’s lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour (Died); but also, miraculously, in terms of Peter Kosminsky’s production, which looks and feels as if it was filmed back-to-back with the original six Bafta-winning episodes. The only telltale signs that the real world has intruded on this living, breathing Holbein tableau is the sparse inclusion of some previously trailed diverse casting (of little note, unless you’re determined to be irked by it) and the recasting of several roles, some more successfully and seamlessly than others.
Do you mind spoilers? Mantel’s final novel concerns itself with Cromwell’s final four years, beginning in 1536 with Cromwell (Mark Rylance, totemic) riding high as the king’s right-hand man, Mr Fix-It, matchmaker, confidant and, now, Lord Privy Seal. How, then, does it all go wrong? One answer lies, of course, in Henry – hot-headed, paranoid, inadequate, capricious, and now dealing with a rebellion that seeks to use his daughter Mary to bring England back to Rome. Cromwell must make it all go away. But the answer lies too with Cromwell, as finds he has too many fires to put out and begins to understand the limits of Machiavellianism.
There is no small thrill in watching Rylance, at last, go through the gears. In the first series, his Cromwell was a monolith: unchanging, unmoving, impassive behind those doleful eyes. Here, we see Cromwell begin to blossom – or fray. There’s flirting, bragging, tears, even tentative acts of violence. The blacksmith’s son, he reminds us, can still wield a hammer. Wolsey’s dog is still a dog.
Damian Lewis is excellent as Henry, his body and country and wives failing him. He seems to congeal slowly in front of our eyes, each gout-ridden movement slightly more difficult than the last, a man trying to prove his vigour while swimming through porridge. Lilit Lesser (daughter of Anton, who played Thomas More in the first series) is otherworldly and sickly as Lady Mary (future Bloody), while Kate Phillips as Jane does well with the least interesting of Mantel’s women (the ghost of Anne, in the shape of the magnificent Claire Foy, looms over this series in more ways than one). Harriet Walter (taking over from Janet Henfrey as the scheming Lady Margaret Pole) is glimpsed only briefly in this first half, while Timothy Spall is gratifyingly pugnacious as the Duke of Norfolk (you still miss Bernard Hill’s brutishness, however).
Less successful is Karim Kadjar, who replaces Mathieu Amalric as the French-born diplomat Eustache Chapuys. Kadjar’s performance verges on the hammy, but the actor is not helped by the fact that Chapuys is often required to speak his thoughts out loud to deliver gobbets of exposition (“What eez this letter? Ah, it eez Mary’s hand!”). These few moments of inelegance stand out in Peter Straughan’s otherwise superb scripts, which are marvels of concision.
The standout scene from these three episodes sees Cromwell at his most vulnerable, as he attempts to reach out to Cardinal Wolsey’s illegitimate daughter, Dorothea (Hannah Khalique-Brown), whose opulent nunnery, he knows, will soon be dissolved. Rylance’s preternaturally unruffled Cromwell flounders and stutters as his words fall on deaf ears. “There is no faith or truth in Cromwell,” she tells him. The beauty of this series is in watching Cromwell work out if that is true.
‘Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light’ begins on BBC One on Sunday November 10