Wolf Hall - Season 2

The Lieutenant's Mistake: Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light and the Afterlife of The Prince

In the seventh chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli tells a story he plainly admires. Cesare Borgia conquered the Romagna and found it full of brigands and petty lords. He installed a hard, efficient man named Remirro de Orco and gave him full authority to restore order. Remirro did so quickly and cruelly. When the work was finished and the resentment had built up, Borgia had him cut in two and displayed in the square at Cesena, with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside the body. The people, Machiavelli writes, were left satisfied and stunned at once. The hatred had a target, and the target was dead. The prince kept his hands clean.

The second season of Wolf Hall, adapted from Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, is a six-hour retelling of that paragraph, slowed down so we can watch the knife being sharpened. It is also one of the most intelligent dramas about power television has produced in years. Its achievement is to put us inside the head of a man who has read the handbook and still can’t see which chapter he is in.

The effectual truth, by candlelight

Machiavelli’s great move was to stop describing how rulers should behave and describe how they actually do, which he called the verità effettuale, the effectual truth of things. Peter Straughan’s scripts and Peter Kosminsky’s direction are built on the same refusal to moralize. Nobody in this Tudor court is a villain in the theatrical sense. They are positioned. A conversation in a gallery is a negotiation, and a dinner is a census of alliances. A gift of quinces is an argument.

Mark Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell as a man who has made the effectual truth into a way of being. His stillness is the stillness of someone who is always calculating, and he barely moves his face because the face is an asset. Machiavelli warns that everyone sees what you appear to be and few touch what you are, and Rylance builds a whole performance in the gap between the two. When he smiles at Norfolk, we can’t tell whether it is contempt, patience, or simple accounting. That uncertainty is the point. The season’s best scenes are the ones where he lets the mask slip for half a second, and even then we wonder whether the slip is staged.

The cruelest of these is Cromwell’s handling of the Lady Mary. She has to be made to acknowledge herself a bastard and her father supreme head of the church. In this version Cromwell does it with the gentleness of a doctor setting a bone: soft voice, the paper already drafted, an implied threat never spoken because it doesn’t need to be. It is a perfect demonstration of the fox, the persuader who doesn’t have to show the lion’s teeth. It is also the moment the season starts planting the seeds of his end. Mary’s gratitude, a ring, and rumors that Cromwell means to marry her all become, in his enemies’ hands, the material of the case against him. In this world a kindness is never only a kindness. It is also evidence.

Never a prince

The tragedy the season builds is that Cromwell understands princes far better than he understands ministers. He knows Henry needs to be managed, flattered, frightened and soothed. He knows promises bind a ruler only while they serve him, and the season shows this with brutal clarity during the Pilgrimage of Grace. Henry offers the northern rebels pardons and a parliament, then breaks his word as soon as the rebellion scatters. Cromwell watches this with professional calm, as if checking a theorem.

What he never applies to himself is the advice Machiavelli gives about advisers. The prince, Machiavelli says, must keep his minister loyal by honoring him, enriching him, and making him feel he cannot stand without the prince. The minister’s elevation is a leash, not a reward. Cromwell’s rise in this season — Lord Privy Seal, Knight of the Garter, finally Earl of Essex — is shot with a muted dread that is one of the series’ finest choices. Each new title lands like a stone added to a scale. Damian Lewis’s Henry, now heavy and short-tempered, his ulcerated leg a constant offstage pain, hands out these honors with a generosity that reads as threat. Lewis plays him as a man who knows exactly what Cromwell is for, even when Cromwell has forgotten.

Then fortuna arrives in its most humiliating form: a marriage that fails at first sight. The Anne of Cleves match was Cromwell’s diplomatic design, Protestant and anti-imperial, sensible on paper. The king’s personal distaste turns it into a liability overnight. Machiavelli compares fortune to a river that floods without warning, and says virtù can only build dikes in calm weather. Cromwell built superb dikes. He did not build them against the one current that mattered, the king’s body and the king’s mood. The prince who made him can unmake him, because Cromwell has no other ground to stand on. In chapter nine of The Prince, the man who rises through the favor of the nobles is less secure than the man who rises through the people. Cromwell rises through neither. He rises through one man, and that is the most precarious footing there is.

So the season’s real Machiavellian figure is Henry. Henry is Cesare Borgia, letting his lieutenant break the monasteries, the Boleyns, the Poles and the northern rebels. He gathers in the land and the obedience, then lets the realm’s accumulated hatred fall on the lieutenant. The final irony is historical and the series lands it hard: Cromwell is beheaded on Tower Hill on the same day the king marries Catherine Howard. The square at Cesena has been moved to London. The block and the bloody knife are where they always were.

What the paperwork was doing

Machiavelli can explain why Cromwell falls. He is less helpful on what Cromwell was actually doing while he stood, and here a Marxist reading gives the season a depth it only partly claims for itself.

The dissolution of the monasteries runs through these episodes as a backdrop of surveys, valuations and transfers, administrative work that Cromwell does with a craftsman’s satisfaction. In Capital, Marx names this event as a lever of what he calls primitive accumulation: the Reformation’s seizure of church property, the dispersal of its lands to speculators and courtiers, and the ejection of its tenants and dependents into a new class with nothing to sell but their labor. Seen this way, Cromwell’s genius is the personal face of a vast transfer of wealth. The new gentry who bought monastic acres would survive him by centuries.

This reframes the class hatred the season dramatizes so well. Timothy Spall, inheriting the Duke of Norfolk from the late Bernard Hill, plays the role with vicious, wounded pride. His contempt for the blacksmith’s son from Putney is more than snobbery. It is an old landed order recognizing, without the words for it, that the ground is moving. Machiavelli would call Cromwell’s enemies the grandi, protecting their privilege. Marx would add that they are defending a whole way of holding property, one that the clerk with his ledgers is dismantling for reasons larger than himself.

This is also where the two thinkers pull against each other, productively. The Machiavellian story is about one man’s skill meeting fortune and losing. The Marxist story says the skill hardly matters, because history was working through Cromwell and would have found another clerk. Marx’s famous line holds that people make their own history, but not under conditions they choose. The series honors both views without settling between them. Cromwell is unmistakably the author of his own moves, and he is also, in a way he only glimpses, an instrument twice over: used by Henry, and used by history.

The Marxist lens also names the season’s most real limitation. The people Cromwell’s paperwork uproots are almost entirely offscreen. The Pilgrimage of Grace, a mass rising of commons who were furious about their abbeys, their taxes and their faith, reaches us mostly as reports, a few emissaries and decisions taken in candlelit rooms. That is faithful to Cromwell’s point of view and to Mantel’s tight interior focus. It also means that a drama acutely aware of how power works rarely shows us where power lands. We spend six hours in the corridors of Whitehall. The fields are rumors.

The archive turns

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish opens with a scaffold, the public dismemberment of a would-be regicide in 1757. For Foucault this is sovereign power at its most theatrical: the king’s authority written on the body of the offender in front of a crowd. Tudor England is still fully in that regime, and the series doesn’t flinch from it. The executions are staged with restraint, which only makes the logic more chilling.

But Foucault also describes another kind of power growing beside the spectacle: quieter, file-based, built on informers, correspondence, interrogation and the extraction of confession. This is Cromwell’s real domain. His network of agents, his archive of letters, his patient questioning (the earlier season’s breaking of Mark Smeaton still hangs over this one) are the early machinery of an administrative state. In his lectures on governmentality, Foucault reads The Prince as a text about a ruler’s external, fragile hold on his territory. He sets it against an emerging art of government that operates with a rationality of its own, apart from any one ruler’s person.

Cromwell stands at that hinge, and the season’s finale turns the hinge against him. When Wriothesley, his own protégé, and the council move in, they use Cromwell’s tools: his habits of documentation, his methods of questioning, the record his own system produced. The arrest at the council table, where the Garter insignia is torn from his neck, is the old sovereign spectacle. The case beneath it is pure bureaucracy. The apparatus has learned the master’s techniques and no longer needs the master. Machiavelli could tell Cromwell that princes are ungrateful. Foucault tells him something colder: the machinery he built has no gratitude to give, because it was never loyal to a person.

The ghost of Wolsey, played again by Jonathan Pryce, haunts Cromwell’s fall and gives this idea an emotional form. The dead cardinal returns not as a moral warning but as a colleague, the man who showed Cromwell the job and was destroyed by it. Theirs is a succession of servants, each consumed by the office. It is fitting that Machiavelli himself was hung from the strappado in 1513 when the Medici returned, and then wrote the most famous handbook for princes in his exile. He knew from the inside what the instrument is worth once the work is done.

Mirror and light

There are limits to what this season can do with its source. Mantel’s final novel is a vast interior monologue, full of memory and self-interrogation. Television can only gesture at that through flashback, voice and Rylance’s extraordinary face. The pacing is deliberately funereal, and some viewers will find the long, quiet middle stretch a test of patience. The series asks us to feel the slow tightening of a noose, and it does not always manage to make the tightening dramatic.

Those are the costs of an uncompromising work, and the work earns them. Ten years after the first season, the actors carry the decade in their faces. Rylance’s Cromwell is visibly older and more tired, still watching everything. The production design stays luminous and grave. Straughan’s dialogue compresses Mantel’s ironies into exchanges sharp enough to cut.

Above all, the season makes political philosophy dramatic without ever turning it into a lecture. The title points to the old genre of the “mirror for princes,” the advice books of which The Prince is the most notorious. This series is a mirror for ministers: for every capable, unglamorous operator who believes their competence makes them necessary. Its answer is Machiavelli’s, told from the other end of the knife. The prince needs the work done. He does not need the person who did it. Once you have made yourself the face of the hard thing, you have made yourself the one he can afford to destroy.

Cromwell knew all of this. He just believed, as clever people tend to, that the rule had an exception for him. Wolf Hall lets us share that belief for six patient, beautiful, merciless hours, and then shows us the piazza.