Wolf Hall Recap: Entirely Beloved
Share
The times they are a-changing in this week’s installment of Wolf Hall.
There’s turbulence aplenty in Henry VIII’s England, and at the center of it is our dear Thomas Cromwell, equal parts snake charmer and royal whisperer. Still Cardinal Wolsey’s loyal “butcher’s dog,” Cromwell is at great pains in London to regain the king’s favor for his exiled master—or, at the very least, keep Wolsey out of the executioner’s grasp. To do so, he’s on a charm campaign with both Henry and the ever-testy Anne Boleyn. Because as we all know, if Anne ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Wolsey’s certainly learned his lesson from underestimating the paramour du jour in the past. As he tells Cromwell in a quick strategy meeting: you must gain Anne’s favor, because she is the key to reaching Henry.
It would certainly seem that way. In Cromwell’s several attempts at a brief conversation with the king, Henry acts less like the center of all power than a prisoner of his own court. In his first scuttled attempt at a private audience all Cromwell gets from Henry is, “I can’t talk about the cardinal. Don’t you understand? I can’t talk about him.” No matter where his own sympathies may lie—and he says he does truly miss the cardinal—everyone in Henry’s orbit is out for priestly blood. That makes Henry’s overture in a follow-up conversation all the more symbolically significant: Cromwell manages to squeeze 1,000 pounds out of the king for the cardinal’s well-being on the DL.
That’s pocket change when it comes to trying to improve the cardinal’s situation, but it’s a minor victory. Of course, the nasty sword of Damocles in all this is the ever-present threat of treason charges against Wolsey, which is why, when the cardinal’s household moves north to York, Cromwell stays behind at court to continue wooing, lobbying, and stalling. Stalling, despite the urgings of even his loyal young aides to dump the cardinal. Even Henry remarks on Cromwell’s loyalty, which is just too legit to quit.
Of course, Cromwell’s also busy at home, mainly attempting to figure out his son, Gregory, who’s sublimely unsure of himself. “Is he scared of me?” Cromwell asks his sister-in-law, Johane. Johane shoots down that particular worry and instead tells Cromwell to quit spoiling the boy, thus proving that in every age adults have lectured on the folly of coddled young brats. Cromwell’s home life is an interesting parallel to Henry’s. Where the king cannot produce an heir, Cromwell is busy trying to groom his into someone ready to face the world.
Someone who’s definitely not scared of Cromwell: Johane. It may be a sin in the eyes of the church, but tender romance has begun to sprout between Cromwell and the sister of his late wife. It’s nice to see something go right for London’s most persistent and most persistently overworked righthand man. He’s so happy that he’s singing bawdy Italian tunes from his youthful heyday around the house!
That jovial attitude is all the more impressive considering how little sleep the man’s getting. As is their way, messengers arrive in the middle of the night to summon Cromwell to the king’s bedside. Henry’s had a disturbing dream, you see, in which he saw the visage of his dead brother, Arthur. Henry takes it as an ill omen, his brother accusing him from beyond the grave of usurping his rule. But Cromwell, that silver-tongued master of spin, manages to persuade the king the dream was actually urging Arthur urging Henry to become the king he should be.
And what exactly does that mean? Cromwell tells Henry he should claim his complete and rightful sovereignty, and, by implication, throw off the shackles of Rome and that busybody papacy telling him who he can and cannot marry and unmarry. The words soothe Henry and also lay some additional groundwork for Anne’s rise to the throne, a fact Cromwell makes sure to mention to Thomas Cranmer, Anne’s quietly sassy chaplain. No good deed should go unpublicized, after all.
In this important act, Cromwell has attempted to do what Wolsey asked of him: gain Anne’s confidence. Alas, whatever ramifications come of it, they will be too late for the good cardinal. The impatience of the queen-to-be wins out, and a posse—led by Harry Percy, whose fling with Anne was halted by Wolsey—comes to take the cardinal on charges of treason. On the road back to the Tower of London, Wolsey’s failing health failed even harder, until his sudden passing. Afterward, in a show of disrespect, the cardinal was buried in a plain wooden box, to taunts about his low birth.
As his faithful servant, George Cavendish, relays this tale of woe to Cromwell, he adds that he asked God for vengeance. To which Cromwell responds simply, “There’s no need to trouble God, George. I’ll take it in hand.”
And now, after earning his way onto Henry’s privy council via sexy talk of increased taxation income, Cromwell may very well have his vengeance…next time on Wolf Hall.
Stray Observations:
–We get our first glimpse of Jane Seymour, future queen and currently one of Anne’s ladies in waiting. In fact, she may already have begun her quest to take Anne down a peg…
–Welcome to Thomas More’s Wonderland. Maybe the lush gardens and adorable bunny rabbits and dinner table monkeys make the eccentric More clan more tolerable, but if I were Cromwell, I wouldn’t attend many more of those awkward dinner parties. “Thomas Cromwell, why don’t you marry again?” Oh, man, a shudder went through every person who has been on the receiving end of relationship questions at family dinners.
–It will be interesting to see who Call-Me-Wriothesely does more spying for: Cromwell or Stephen Gardiner.