Wolf Hall - Season 1

The Secretary’s Art: Wolf Hall and the Prince Who Never Wears the Crown

Somewhere in the long history of political thought there is a sentence that every ambitious minister should have tattooed somewhere private: everyone sees what you appear to be; few touch what you are. Machiavelli wrote it for princes. The BBC’s Wolf Hall (2015) understands that it applies with even greater force to the people who work for them. Peter Kosminsky’s six-hour adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s first two Cromwell novels, written by Peter Straughan, is one of the most intelligent dramas about power ever made for television. Its intelligence lies in moving the Machiavellian question off the throne and into the room next door, where a blacksmith’s son from Putney keeps the accounts, reads the letters, and slowly comes to know where every body in England is buried, metaphorically and then literally.

The series begins with a fall. Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce, all faded scarlet and wounded vanity) is being thrown out of power because he cannot deliver the king’s annulment, and his servant Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) is the one person in the household who does not run. It is a canny place to start, because it is also where Machiavelli’s own story starts. The Prince was written by an unemployed functionary, purged from the Florentine government and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy, who wanted his job back and offered the Medici the only thing he had left: what he knew. Cromwell, in the show’s first hours, is in the same position. His patron is ruined, and his only asset is competence. Where Machiavelli failed to win back his masters, Cromwell succeeds. Wolf Hall is, in a sense, a fantasy of Machiavelli’s career if it had gone right: the counselor who actually gets hired, and who then discovers what that costs.

Virtù in a Black Doublet

The Florentine’s key term, virtù, translates poorly as “virtue.” It means something closer to adaptive capacity: the energy and intelligence to shape circumstances rather than be crushed by them. Its opposite is fortuna, the river that floods without warning and sweeps away anyone who hasn’t built embankments. Rylance plays virtù as stillness. His Cromwell barely moves his face. He listens, half-smiles, lets other men talk themselves into corners. Damian Lewis’s Henry is all weather, sunny and boyish one moment and lethal the next, while Bernard Hill’s Norfolk blusters and Mark Gatiss’s Gardiner sneers. Cromwell builds embankments.

What makes the performance more than a study in poker-faced cool is that the show never lets us forget how cruelly fortuna has already worked on him. The sweating sickness takes his wife and daughters in the first episode, in a sequence of almost unbearable restraint. Flashbacks return us to the father who beat him. Cromwell’s competence reads as a response to a world that has shown him, repeatedly, that it will kill what he loves for no reason at all. Machiavelli’s famous counsel that it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both, is usually quoted as cynicism. In Wolf Hall it plays as grief, the reasoning of a man who has learned that love is the most exposed position on the board.

The show is also scrupulous about the other half of that counsel, which people tend to forget: a prince should be feared without being hated. Cromwell’s household is the warmest place in the series, full of wards and clerks and strays, Rafe Sadler (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and young Gregory (Tom Holland) among them, fed and educated and loyal. This is not hypocrisy. It is the Machiavellian understanding that power needs a base, and that people who owe you their lives are a better foundation than people who merely fear you.

The Effectual Truth

Machiavelli’s most radical move was methodological. He said he would write about the verità effettuale della cosa, the “effectual truth of the matter,” rather than about imagined republics that never existed. Politics is to be judged by what happens, not by what ought to happen. Wolf Hall builds this inversion into its casting of Thomas More. In A Man for All Seasons, More was the conscience of England, martyred by a thuggish Cromwell. Here Anton Lesser plays him as a chilly zealot who supervises the burning of heretics and condescends to Cromwell at his own dinner table. Some critics found the reversal unfair to the historical More, and they have a point. The series tilts the scales, and that tilt is one of its limits. But dramatically the inversion is the whole argument. More is Machiavelli’s “unarmed prophet,” the man who stakes everything on a vision of how things ought to be, and the series treats his death as the predictable outcome of mistaking conviction for strategy. Cromwell spends a long time trying to give him an exit, a form of words he can swear to. More refuses because the form of words is, for him, the point. For Cromwell, words are tools, and that is the gulf between them.

Here the Machiavellian lens begins to need help, because the show is up to something the sixteenth century couldn’t fully name. Watch what Cromwell actually does all day. He writes letters. He keeps ledgers. He knows who owes money to whom, who visited whom, which servant can be bought. His power is not the lion’s or even quite the fox’s. It is the clerk’s. When the series turns, in its final two episodes, to the destruction of Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy, brittle and brilliant and terrifyingly alone), what it shows us is not a coup but a case file.

From the Scaffold to the Archive

This is where Foucault becomes indispensable, and where he quietly argues with the primary lens. In his lectures on governmentality, Foucault read The Prince as the last great text of a dying model, in which power means a sovereign holding on to a territory, and contrasted it with the emerging “art of government,” which manages populations through knowledge, records, and administration. Wolf Hall stages that transition inside a single man. Henry is the sovereign in Foucault’s old sense: his power is personal, bodily, spectacular. When he is knocked unconscious in a jousting accident in the fifth episode, the whole court panics, because the state is his body. Cromwell’s power is the new kind. It lives in paper, and paper does not fall off horses.

Anne’s fall is a demonstration of what Foucault called power/knowledge: the production of truth by institutions that have the authority to declare it. Cromwell does not discover that Anne committed adultery with Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston, Mark Smeaton, and her own brother. He assembles that fact. In the novels and the show, the men he chooses are the ones who once performed in a masque mocking the fallen Wolsey and dragging him down to hell, so the “evidence” is a ledger of old debts, settled in the vocabulary of the law. The interrogation of Smeaton, conducted in a quiet domestic room by a man who never raises his voice, is the most frightening scene in the series precisely because it is so administrative. There is no rack on screen, only the shared understanding that one exists. Confession, as Foucault argued, is not the revelation of a hidden truth but its manufacture. The anachronism is productive: the show lets us watch the modern state being born in a Tudor parlor.

Yet the series also refuses to let the archive fully replace the scaffold. Anne still dies in public, killed by a French swordsman Henry has sent for as a mark of his “mercy.” That is exactly the old theater of sovereign power that Foucault described in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish. Both regimes coexist. The ledger decides who dies, and the sword still does the dying. Machiavelli would not have been surprised. He always insisted that the fox needs the lion.

The Morbid Symptoms of an Interregnum

If Foucault explains the mechanism, Gramsci explains the moment. In his prison notebooks he wrote that a crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, and that in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. It is hard to think of a better description of the English Reformation as Wolf Hall imagines it: a feudal-Catholic order losing its grip, a new mercantile and Protestant order not yet secure, and the court in between turning on itself with paranoid ferocity. The Boleyns, the Seymours, Norfolk’s old aristocracy, More’s old church: everyone is improvising on ground that has gone soft.

Gramsci also gives us the best language for who Cromwell is. He would call him an organic intellectual of a rising class: someone whose skills (international trade, law, accountancy, a working knowledge of Italian banking) come from the merchant world, and who uses them to build the institutions that will make that world dominant. The old nobility despise Cromwell as a jumped-up tradesman, and Norfolk’s sneers about his blacksmith father are among the show’s running motifs. They are right to fear him. He is not just climbing their ladder. He is quietly replacing it. Gramsci’s distinction between domination (rule by force) and hegemony (rule by consent, by making your interests seem like common sense) maps neatly onto the difference between Henry and his secretary. Henry dominates. Cromwell is building the conditions under which the break with Rome, the Acts of Parliament, and the English Bible will come to feel natural.

Gramsci, though, also points to the show’s most significant blind spot. He reread Machiavelli as a democratic writer, someone whose real audience was not the prince but the people the prince would have to win. In “The Modern Prince” he argued that in modern politics the prince must become a collective actor, a mass movement. Wolf Hall is almost entirely a drama of rooms: council chambers, bedchambers, Cromwell’s study, all lit by candle in Gavin Finney’s justly celebrated cinematography. The common people of England, whose religion is being torn up by these decisions, barely appear. Cromwell came from them, and the show cherishes his Putney past, but the commons exist mostly as a memory and a mood. The Pilgrimage of Grace, the great popular rising against the Reformation, lies just beyond the series’ endpoint, and its absence feels structural rather than accidental. For a show this attentive to how power works, the narrowness of its view of whom power works on is a real limitation.

The Minister’s Fate

There is a story in the seventh chapter of The Prince that every viewer of Wolf Hall should know. Cesare Borgia, wanting to pacify the Romagna, appointed a hard man named Remirro de Orco to restore order by whatever means necessary. Remirro did the job brutally and well. Then, when the cruelty had served its purpose and the people had begun to hate it, Borgia had him cut in two and left in the piazza at Cesena, so that the people would be, in Machiavelli’s words, at once satisfied and stunned. The minister performed the violence, and the prince took the credit for ending it.

Wolf Hall ends with Anne dead and Henry embracing Cromwell, and Rylance’s face, over the king’s shoulder, is the last great image of the series. It is the face of a man who has just won everything, and who knows exactly what kind of prince he serves. Every viewer who knows history knows that in 1540 Cromwell will go to the block on Henry’s orders, his usefulness exhausted. The show doesn’t need to depict that (though it will a decade later). The Machiavellian logic it has spent six hours teaching us does the work. Cromwell has been Henry’s Remirro all along. The embrace is the moment before the piazza.

This is why the series is so much better than the many Tudor dramas surrounding it. It isn’t interested in costume romance or moral pageantry, though it is gorgeous to look at, and Debbie Wiseman’s spare score and Kosminsky’s patient direction give it a rare gravity. It wants to show us the effectual truth of power: who holds the pen, who does the dirty work, who pays. Its limits are real. The interiority of Mantel’s prose, that famously intimate “he,” cannot fully survive the move to the screen, and Rylance’s minimalism, extraordinary as it is, occasionally leaves the character more opaque than mysterious. More gets a raw deal. The people stay offstage. But few dramas trust their audience this much: to read a glance, to sit with silence, to understand that the quietest man in the room is the most dangerous. Machiavelli wrote his book for a prince who never read it. Wolf Hall finally gives him the reader he wanted, the servant who learned the lesson perfectly, right up until the moment it was applied to him.