wolf Hall recap: episode five – Cromwell saves Henry's life 

‘Why not geld me, Madame?’ Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd

Last modified on Thursday 19 February 2015 02.53 EST

Hilary Mantel has probably done enough research on Thomas Cromwell to earn a PhD to go along with her DBE and two Bookers. But, as Colin Burrow suggests, she may have been most attracted to this period for its “dark places” within which she can let her literary imagination run free. Does she let it run too far?

The eminent historian Eamon Duffy, who has evidently had it up to the eyeballs with Wolf Hall, fired off a furious letter to the Times last Friday. “Rumours that More tortured suspects are dramatised in Wolf Hall. But More, who died rather than swear a false oath, indignantly insisted that no one in his custody had suffered ‘so much as a flip on the forehead’. By contrast, Cromwell’s role in the starvation and disembowelling of blameless Carthusian monks for refusing to recognise Henry as head of the Cchurch is undeniable.”

Cromwell inflicted these atrocities well after the period of this serial. But, Duffy reminds us, he was a man who did such things. History testifies to this..

The fifth – and penultimate – episode, Crows, opens, as the usual placard informs us, in 1535. If we take anything away from this serial, it’s that five years is a long time in Tudor history. Fade, almost instantly, to black. One of the more contentious features of the adaptation is Kosminsky’s use of sombre pictorial tones. The candled gloom, so obtrusive in the first episode, is closing in again.

Cromwell has made a mistake. He deviated the king’s royal progress via Wolf Hall to prosecute his own suit to Jane Seymour. There’s a wordless scene (was ever a series more sparing with its words?) in which, unshaven, night-cap on, he looks from his dim bedroom into the bright morning; outside, the king is wooing the very woman he had his eye on.

Other men Thomas could out-scheme. Not Henry. Now that their monarch has fixed his eye on Jane, the Seymours see their chance. Grudgingly, Cromwell gives them advice, to pass to her, on what to do if the king makes an “attempt on her person”.

Large dynastic shapes are emerging: Thomas, still to be ennobled, has ambitions for his “house” that are invested in his son, Gregory. Do not “flatten” the boy in the forthcoming tournament, he implores the king, thinking Gregory (it is his first joust) has been set up as easy meat. Barely looking at him, Henry ignores the request.

The Boleyns, with Anne’s Bullingdon-ish clique around her, her catty sister-in-law, Jane, and her dwarf jester, have overextended themselves. Not even Norfolk will go all the way with her. Anne knows where her danger lies: Jane Seymour, the woman with the “wet cunt”, as one of her Bullingdonians crudely jests. But if Anne finally contrives to provide an heir, the Boleyns will be supreme, and Thomas Cromwell’s head, as he well knows, will end, rotting, on a spike. What remains of the bond between Anne and Cromwell is broken when he refuses to “compromise” the Princess Mary, clearing the future way for Princess Elizabeth. Not his “method”, Cromwell says.

Catherine is dying in enforced solitary confinement at Kimbolton castle. Not even Mary is allowed to be by her deathbed. She duly dies, wretchedly. “Not before time,” exults Anne, who goes into brilliant mourning yellow. Catherine’s body is buried at Peterborough: “It will cost less,” says Henry.

Cromwell’s raising of revenues from the extortion of Catholic institutions (“stripping the altars”, as Eamon Duffy calls it) has made him the most powerful commoner in England. But his future, and that of his house, hangs by a thread. What a web has he woven for himself, he wonders, that the only friend he has in England is the king of England.

He has a French friend, Eustace Chapuys. There’s a scene in which, after some sparring about national interests, he relaxes into first-name conversation, over the inevitable chess board, in dim candlelight, with the French ambassador (played by the sardonic Mathieu Amalric). What a game men like them have to play, they commiserate, in the service of monarchs and emperors.

Friend as he is, Cromwell tricks Eustace into bowing, publicly, to Anne – the “concubine”. The Frenchman then overplays his hand, attempting to negotiate a politically expedient marriage for young Mary. Henry explodes and berates Cromwell in front of the court: “You think you are the king, and I am the blacksmith’s boy!” Mysteriously, Cromwell crosses his wrists to deflect the king’s wrath. A flashback takes us back to him burning himself in his father’s smithy. Block your wrists, his father tersely instructs – “it confuses the pain”. Lovely line.

The most powerful commoner in England ... Thomas Cromwell. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd

The highpoint of the episode is the joust in which Henry “dies”. Should Cromwell and his family flee, before they close the ports? He becomes, instead, the man of action, inserting his dagger into his sleeve. Bustling through the crowd milling around the king’s corpse, he performs violent CPR. Henry gasps back into life. “Long live the king!” Thomas bellows (thinking “God save Thomas Cromwell”).

Henry’s impotence, and his fury at it, is becoming the most important factor in the great game England is playing. He was not honourably wounded at the joust; he fell off his horse. When a miscalculatingly wifely Anne, on behalf of the nation, requests that he not joust again, he summons her, with a crook of his finger, and whispers; “Why not geld me while you’re at it? That would suit you, Madame, wouldn’t it?” She recoils, in shock, at the public affront.

Damian Lewis plays Henry as outwardly gorgeous. The camera lingers on his sumptuous dress. He struts like a peacock, elbows akimbo, as in the Holbein portrait. But Lewis conveys the moral rottenness within. The Boleyn woman must have “practised” on him, he muses. She is a witch. It’s a dirty ruse, but it will serve. Only one man is cunning enough to do the necessary dirty deed. Cromwell will be loosed, like a fox, into the Boleyn coop.

Stephen Gardiner reappears, briefly. A bishop on the losing side, he has been digging, maliciously, into Cromwell’s early years in Putney. He knifed a man. Thomas does not dispute the fact. What Thomas has never known is that his father paid to get him off. For the first time, his face, that stony mask, betrays not fear, but insecurity.

The king realises that he needs his “right-hand man” after all. No need to explain what for. But he must do the necessary about the Boleyn woman, “secretly”. Thomas is revisited by the ghost of Wolsey and the dead cardinal’s gloomy words: “The King wanted a new wife. I didn’t get him one, and now I’m dead.”

• What is Jane Seymour’s game? When, with her “tiny” hand, she gently wakes the king, slumbering over his dinner (all the men at the table are too frightened), and when she returns the purse he has sent, having “kissed the seal” (“genius”, exclaims a bystander), is it maidenly reticence or guile that even Cromwell might envy? She can’t have more than a hundred words in an episode dominated by her silence.

• Who threw the dog we saw Jane fondling in episode four to its death from an upper window?

• In the bedroom-curtain scene, was the blaze started by Anne herself, cunningly forestalling the prophecy that she, like a witch, will burn? Was it some careless midnight visitor, as her sister-in-law spitefully suggests to Cromwell? Was it an attempt by Anne to rekindle Henry’s interest in her (he seems more interested in the destruction of a fine piece of fabric)? Was it arson, with homicidal intent?

• In the last recap, fellow commenters, sharper-eyed and better historically informed than I, pointed out errors. Thank you to them and apologies to all. I mistook the tamed tiger for a tamed lion, confused Rafe and Gregory in the secretarial scene and miscalled Jane, Lady Rochford, a sister, not a sister-in-law.

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