Ivan Radford | On 11, May 2025

This contains spoilers for Wolf Hall’s first season. Not caught up? Read our review here.

Ten years. That’s roughly how long it’s been since Wolf Hall aired on the BBC, bringing to the screen the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise in power – from being a lowly son of a blacksmith to the right-hand man of King Henry VIII. Directed by Peter Kosminsky to make the most of natural lighting, and adapted with calm patience by Peter Straughan, it was a slow, riveting political drama that made history feel like it happened yesterday. Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light has almost the effect, intentionally so.

While the 2015 series was based on Hilary Mantel’s first two books, this second and concluding chapter is based on the last book in Mantel’s trilogy. That air of finality, fused with the sense of time passing, creates a reflective mood that turns Wolf Hall’s political thriller into a brooding, absorbing meditation on mortality and legacy.

The events are no less knotty, and Straughan’s screenplay is again a feat of distillation without losing details – the exposition is as character-driven as the characters are plot-movers, navigating and nudging us through a complicated web of events with a clarity that ensures a curriculum’s worth of history becomes cumbersome. We pick things up immediately after Anne Boleyn’s execution – and the brief repeated footage of Claire Foy’s ill-fated second wife of Henry not only puts us back into the period zone but also highlights just how seamlessly the production team manage to stitch together the years-apart scenery, costumes, locations and cast. You could have sworn the first season was made last week, or that this new footage had been unearthed after being lost for a decade.

With Anne out of the way, Henry (Damian Lewis) moves on to Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips) and his hopes for a male heir, and we swiftly head on to their marriage – almost as swiftly as Henry ends up moving on to Anne of Cleves (Dana Herfurth). Waiting in the wings, meanwhile, is Summer Richards as the naive Catherine Howard, carefully placed in Henry’s path by an ambitious family. But the plotting and plans aren’t restricted to Henry’s current and future partners – Cromwell is also navigating the fallout of Henry’s past romances, attempting to reconcile Henry with Mary (Lilit Lesser), his daughter with the discarded Catherine of Aragon. And, all the while, the Pole family are raising their own claims to power, and Cromwell is caught somewhere between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Where do his allegiances really lie? Is he just out for himself and the future of his own family? That’s all part of the fun of tuning in, as we find Cromwell as ambiguous and enigmatic as ever – he’s so chameleonic that it’s impossible to tell precisely where he stands. But Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light nonetheless pulls back the curtain on him as man more than ever, with one devastating scene involving the illegitimate daughter of the late Cardinal Wolsey hitting Cromwell right in the heart. The returning Jonathan Pryce as Wolsey’s ghostly presence is at once chilling, moving and revealing, as Cromwell’s doubts and conscience chip away at his ruthless, slippery determination.

The cast, as ever, deserve every award going. Harriet Walter superbly replaces Janet Henfrey as the fearsome Lady Margaret, the ever-youthful Thomas Brodie-Sangster steps into Tom Holland’s shoes as Cromwell’s unfailingly loyal son, and Timothy Spall replaces the departed Bernard Hill as the shrewd Duke of Norfolk. The always-excellent Harry Melling also replaces Joel MacCormback as the cunning Thomas Wriothesley.

At the heart of it all, Damian Lewis shines as King Henry, turning a dangerous and egotistical ruler into an increasingly capricious and unpredictable figure. As paranoid as he is cruel, he’s more intimidating than ever – and the best scenes in the series are when he and Cromwell are simply talking, each man sizing the other up, but Henry starting to see Cromwell more clearly than he once did. Mark Rylance, it almost goes without saying, is flawless as the impenetrable politician, able to ask umpteen questions just with his eyes – and, more often than not, avoid answering all the other ones he’s already left us with. But as he becomes more preoccupied with the future of the nation and the security of his own position, he becomes more and more vulnerable – a joker whose deck is slowly running out of cards.

It’s no coincidence that The Mirror and the Light introduces a new device for the show’s accomplished storytelling: the flashback. Intruding upon the narrative that once was a steamroller of calculating chess moves, it forces us to join Cromwell in his increasingly disjointed and melancholic headspace – and encourages us, like him, to reflect on time past and people gone, and exposes the frailty of what’s left. It’s a thought-provoking departure from period drama conventions, and elevates Wolf Hall from a classy, masterful reliving of history into a profound musing on the relationship between the past and the present. It’s almost a shame there can’t be a third season – but then why try to improve on TV perfection?

 

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