And Lewis is not even the lead. That would be Mark Rylance as Henry’s Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell, an endlessly fascinating and ambiguous figure—brilliant, scheming, moral—whom Rylance animates with gravity and kaleidoscopic skill. His story begins, of course, with the first season of Wolf Hall (which is more or less a prerequisite to watching these new episodes; you can stream its six episodes on PBS). Cromwell is the son of a blacksmith who has become, by the start of The Mirror and the Light, to the most powerful man in England, in many respects more important to the future of the realm than Henry himself.
That is because Cromwell was instrumental in the events that led to Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn (played in the first season by Claire Foy), the king’s concomitant break with Rome, and, when Boleyn would not produce a male heir, her subsequent beheading. The Mirror and the Light opens with that profoundly disturbing execution, Foy a pale rictus of fear and vulnerability as she is led to the block, where she is blindfolded and positioned before the executioner’s sword. Rylance as Cromwell winces at the spectacle, a premonition of his own future.
The series speeds us through the next four years. Henry is besotted with Jane Seymour, who will become his third wife, and at long last bear him that male heir. Seymour (Kate Phillips) is a delicate thing, wary of Cromwell—as she should be—but as the season goes on, and as she eventually becomes pregnant, she sees Cromwell as an ally in the face of Henry’s caprices. Her death is a tragedy, and there are more tragedies to come.
