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Warning: contains spoilers for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light episode 4.
When Cromwell said that Dorothea’s accusation of faithlessness had undone him, he wasn’t wrong. Without her words ringing in his ears and haunting his nightmares, he might have made more pragmatic choices this episode, and prioritised his safety over his conscience. Instead, the need to prove to himself that there is both faith and truth in Cromwell, led Cromwell to take some unusually dangerous stances that set him on the path to becoming Henry’s enemy.
The two men’s new conflict was on display in the costume design of their chess scene. Sitting across the board from one another, Henry was dressed in white and Cromwell in black. They may as well have repeated the outfits at John Lambert’s hearing, so opposite were their attitudes. Henry wanted Cromwell to be his attack dog and to shred Lambert’s heretic Protestantism between his lawyer teeth. Cromwell, sharing Lambert’s beliefs on transubstantiation, on women clerics, on priests marrying…, risked Henry’s ire and refused the fight. Like Lambert and Thomas More and any other martyr for a cause, Cromwell chose his principles over his survival, recognising his mistake even as he made it.
Was it a mistake? To non-believers in an afterlife, absolutely. But to a 16th century theist threatened from so many directions that his first act on waking is to unsheathe a knife, perhaps acting with his conscience is Cromwell’s only move now. He’s already talking as if his days are numbered – “Let me live a year or two,” he told Risley, and he’d see it all complete – his only goal now to ensure that the reformation work of the last seven years can’t be undone. To that end, he’s gunning for the Poles and the Courtneys, promising to make the great Catholic families fall as part of his great papist unstitching. So much work to do in increasingly little time, and with a potential French and Spanish Catholic invasion breathing down his neck.
Was religious conscience the reason Cromwell left Jane Seymour’s deathbed when she was being read the Last Rites with all those shiny Roman trinkets, or was it anger or grief? His dangerous outburst about Jane being better served were he her husband felt based in all three. It must have been informed by his having recently learned of the death of Jenneke’s mother Anselma – a woman he loved and, like Jane, would have loved to have saved. When powerful men feel impotent, they become dangerous and rash.
And so to Henry. This drama’s depiction of Henry is slyly brilliant. Damian Lewis plays him as no fool but as a man heavy with vanity. We saw that in the opening scene of the Holbein portrait unveiling and in his rage about England (and therefore his princely self) being so little regarded in the France/Spain alliance. Henry’s protest that he would “walk to Jerusalem” if it would save his pearl Jane was also rather undermined by the speed at which he added Mary of Guise to his next wife wish-list. Without approaching caricature, Lewis and this team have created a Henry who swings between terrifying and pathetic and who convinces at every point on that pendulum’s arc. What a figure he cuts too! Those outfits are monumental.
Cutting a much smaller silhouette was Jenneke, who’d come to England to save her father, we learned. Hearing of the threat posed by the Northern rebels, she offered to take him back to Antwerp and away from this statuesque life he’d built. Like her though, he wouldn’t budge. When you’re the king’s man and on borrowed time, sabbaticals and sick days aren’t an option.
Fantasies though, are. That’s exactly what Cromwell’s Launde Abbey dream is. Watching Jenneke leave England, he imagined walking through the former abbey’s Edenic gardens, past its busy beekeepers, and seeing his daughter waiting for him in its doorway. It’s an attractive idyll, a grander version of Sherlock Holmes’ beekeeping retirement plans on the South Downs, and an understandable one for a man so haunted and so much hunted. When Cromwell’s death eventually comes in this excellent drama, it could do far worse than to repeat that scene of him coming home to Jenneke, the sound of summer bees buzzing in his ears.
A different kind of buzz afflicted Cromwell in the closing scenes, one brought on by illness and by the return of that persistent mosquito Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester. (For anybody feeling as disorientated as Cromwell, Alex Jennings’ role was played by Mark Gatiss in the first series.) Wolsey’s old secretary has long been Cromwell’s enemy, and now the shit-stirrer supreme is back at court and whispering scandal.
Not just whispering, in fact, but saying it just about plain at a fancy dinner hosted by the archbishop of Canterbury. Gardiner and his dyspeptic pal Norfolk accused Cromwell of having committed murder by poisoning for Wolsey – all the better to discredit the Lord Chancellor and paint him as a threat to the king. “He was no lord in those days,” sniffed Norfolk, pinpointing Cromwell’s lack of pedigree as his greatest failing in the eyes of the English nobility.
Well, he is a lord now, and a formidable one at that, to judge by his treatment of Geoffrey Pole. Did Geoffrey pay for his life with enough family secrets before that candle guttered out? Let’s see.
The Poles. Gardiner. Norfolk. The northern rebels. The Emperor. A dissatisfied Henry (one who’s presumably about to become even less satisfied when Anna of Cleves shows up in the flesh)… Cromwell’s enemies are everywhere. “So you’re safe” said Jenneke this episode, clearly believing the opposite. Safe? No. Standing up for himself and his beliefs? Recklessly, yes.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light continues on BBC One on Sunday December 8.
The post Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light Episode 4 Review: Jenneke appeared first on Den of Geek.
