In the long-awaited sequel to "Wolf Hall," mortality stalks Cromwell's conscience

Here's Thomas Cromwell at New York's Frick Collection, trapped in canvas by the Tudor court painter Hans Holbein: thick fingers gripping a secret missive, thin lips curled into a truculent frown, shrewd little eyes seeming to bore into the portrait of Saint Thomas More, who is sitting just across the other side of a mantelpiece.

More, the humanist scholar and short-lived Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, famously martyred himself on the scaffold at Tower Hill for refusing to sign the Oath of Supremacy, which would have been an intolerable concession by him that king, not Pope, was God's vicegerent on Earth. Less well-known is that as early as 1563, long before the late Hilary Mantel embarked on her own rehabilitation of the tough-minded Tudor statesman, Cromwell too was named a martyr by the influential Protestant theologian John Foxe, who in his "Actes and Monuments" described him as one whose "worthy acts and other manifold virtues" engineered the restoration of the "true church of Christ" in England.

In Mantel's Tudor trilogy, adapted first in "Wolf Hall" (2015) and then in its long-awaited sequel, "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” (now airing on PBS), Cromwell (Mark Rylance), long regarded as the oily creature of an aging tyrant and a ruthless persecutor of men with conscience, is instead a forward-thinking intellectual who uses his power to transform a backwater of feudal particularism into a prototype for a unified, modern nation-state. (How transformational was he actually? Historians still argue, as they always do.) While some critics have accused Mantel of promoting anti-Catholic propaganda and treating Cromwell a little too kindly, she, unlike Foxe, does not shy away from the blood that trails Cromwell's ascent. And it's not just Catholics like More (Anton Lesser) who must die for Cromwell to rise, but also a fellow Protestant martyr from "Actes and Monuments": the "most virtuous and noble lady" Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), Henry's (Damian Lewis) second queen. Her death, largely contrived by Cromwell at the behest of his prince, bookends the 2015 adaptation and opens the 2025 sequel, creating a kind of illusion that the ten years separating them never existed.

Rylance, Mantel's on-screen Cromwell, has aged somewhat in those ten years, adding yet more gravity to his solemn, tactful portrayal of a man who, in other adaptations and even in Mantel's books, cuts a more domineering figure unafraid to play up his "ruffian" background. But while the trajectory of Master Secretary Cromwell in "Wolf Hall" resembles a triumphant swagger from dirty old Putney to the heart of royal power, the arc of the Lord Privy Seal in "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light" bends towards the chopping block, and is haunted throughout by the ghosts of those he has deposed.

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Cromwell, indeed, spends several scenes in "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light" staring off into his past and future: of Anne's death; of the nun Dorothea (Hannah Khalique-Brown) accusing him of betraying his former patron, the late Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce); of the Princess Mary (Lilit Lesser) pondering the joy of daughters, a joy he once had before their lives were blotted out by the sweating sickness; of retirement in the abbey of Launde, where he can observe the friars collecting honey — perhaps a merciful (or brief and unconscious) exemption from Cromwell's plans to throw all of England's monks and nuns out onto the road. And yet Cromwell seems to understand, on some level, that he cannot truly retire safely, for he has offended too many people in his pursuit of power, political reform, and the work of the gospel.

“Every day Master Secretary deals with grandees who, if they could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe, as if he were a fly," Cromwell thinks in "Bring Up the Bodies," the second book of Mantel's trilogy. That the king has elevated him to the peerage, made him Lord Privy Seal, and later, bestowed on him The Most Noble Order of the Garter, does not scrub out his base origins nor temper the perplexed rage that England's old aristocracy bears towards this upstart. At times, he appears to let his newfound status get the better of his good sense, like when he boasts to a group of mostly unreliable "allies" that in persuading Princess Mary to sign the Oath, he had fulfilled a pledge not to Henry, but to his first queen, Catherine of Aragon (portrayed by Joanne Whalley in the first series). 

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light" (Playground Television/PBS)More often, Rylance's Cromwell seems as fey as a martyr. In one moment he falters, just slightly, under the glare of a king whose goodwill and patience dissipate further with each passing episode. In another, he tells his slippery lieutenant, Thomas Wriothesley (Harry Melling), of his religious reformation: "[The Catholics] know Henry's afraid of excommunication. They think a show of force will bring him back to Rome, but they're wrong. Henry won't turn. Let me live another year or two, and I will make sure that what we've done can never be undone, and even if Henry does turn, I will not turn... I'm not too old to take a sword in my hand."

After Cromwell is forced to publicly condemn John Lambert (Tim Scragg), a Protestant whom Henry wants burned for heresy, Thomas Cranmer (Will Keen), the Archbishop of Canterbury, urges the Lord Privy Seal to "maintain your rule, for the gospel's sake, as long as you can... I shall do the same."

“What good is my rule if I can’t save John?" Cromwell replies. "If he can burn John Lambert, he can burn any of us. Any of us."

Weighed down by accumulating stress, Cromwell falls ill, and in his delirium sees in the shadows Anne's ladies-in-waiting, hands covered in their mistress' blood. Perhaps the visions remind Cromwell that he too can suffer, fatally, from Henry's displeasure; or that in his moment of political peril — which in the Tudor court also means mortal peril — he is now by his own actions bereft of an influential Protestant ally; or that he had blotted his conscience by arranging the death of an innocent woman and the four men accused of laying with her. Neither the traumatic effects of Cromwell's campaign to dissolve England's monastic houses — which he accused of harboring corruption and sinful excess — nor the human cost of his role in suppressing a furious popular reaction, however, are thoroughly explored in "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light." In both books and show, one gets the sense that Mantel pulls too many punches because she does not trust that Cromwell will retain her audience's sympathy. Nevertheless, some of his more proximate misdeeds are effectively used to make clear that Mantel's antihero is, in the denouement of his life, fully alert to his sinful state.

The purpose of earthly life for a good 16th-century Christian was to prepare for life with God in heaven, their soul cleansed of mortal sin. Few people believed that anyone but the saints could walk through their waking years fully immaculate, and so holy amnesty was granted to those who showed remorse for their wrongdoing and a genuine desire to return to the Lord's grace. For some, procrastination until the precipice of death inevitably led to a rather stressful process of deathbed absolution. For others, like Mantel's Cromwell, the more distant smell of mortality is apparently enough to trigger feelings of guilt, self-reflection, and a renewed desire to make right what is wrong. 

Religion, it should seem obvious, is not a prerequisite for moral conscience in life and near death — one might argue that rather than religion acting as the sole source of conscience, it is conscience inherent in man that acts as a source of religiosity. Among modern-day atheists, agnostics and deists alike, stories often emerge of late-arriving regrets, both over a dying person's treatment of others and their treatment of themselves. In some cases, they even confess to crimes like murder. Whether something or nothing lies beyond, there comes a time when the motion of life is suspended forever, the consciousness trapped in its final internal state even as it wanders in realms detached from Earth. The human impulse to leave behind a clean account, expressed in such pedestrian routines like sweeping a house before a long journey away, galls them one more time, their last chance to adjust their mark on the world before the ink settles.

Cromwell in Mantel's retelling is a man of genuine conviction who not only puts his faith in God, but also in the people of England to take charge of their own souls and salvation by reading bibles in their vernacular tongue. In "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light," that conviction is tested by a king who remains steadfastly conservative in his theological beliefs and continues to burn radical Protestants alongside Catholics suspected of papist sympathies. Cromwell, usually so pragmatic and hard-headed, but now distracted by an unsettlingly potent conscience and perhaps some acceptance of his fate, imitates Thomas More in his less directly obstinate way, stonewalling the king's demands for an annulment of his marriage to the Protestant Anne of Cleves (Dana Herfurth). If he fails, Henry will fall into the 17-year-old honeypot (Summer Richards) set up by the grasping Duke of Norfolk (Timothy Spall), Cromwell's hated enemy, and potentially undo the evangelical cause in England forever.

Henry will brook no defiance, no matter how allusive, and so Cromwell must die under the shadow of an axe. Mantel has faulted the lopsided portrayal of the heroic More and villainous Cromwell in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons," and then received criticism in turn for a radical reversal of roles that portrayed More as a religious zealot and hypocrite. But in the end, Mantel has both men die in much the same manner: a faithful servant discarded by a king whose capricious whims, finally, abrased too roughly on the immortal soul.