'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' Recap: Episode 2

Wolf Hall airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Cromwell may have reconciled King Henry VIII with his daughter Mary, but the king is not yet ready for her to return to court. He wants to find a husband for both Mary and his niece Meg Douglas, and asks Cromwell for a list of potential advantageous matches. Any husband for either would be set up to potentially become king after Henry, making their anointing significant and dangerous.

The king can – sometimes – forgive, however, as when Cromwell returns the chain of office of Treasurer to William Fitzwilliam, after ripping it from him when he deigned to criticize Henry.

Meg Douglas must hope for such absolution. Cromwell’s protege Thomas Wriothesley has found Meg’s behavior suspicious and thus questioned her servants, who easily revealed that she has been carrying on a romance. The offender is Thomas Howard the Lesser, the younger half-brother of the powerful Duke of Norfolk, also named Thomas Howard. The Lesser has written poems to Meg that he signs “Tom Truth.”

Meg is defiant when confronted by Cromwell and Wriothesley. But Cromwell is eager to save her, and immediately begins rewriting the affair into something harmless, a mistake. Meg’s friend – and Norfolk’s daughter – Mary Fitzroy urges Meg to grasp Cromwell’s lifeline, but Meg insists that she and her lover have been married.

Wriothesley encourages Cromwell to use the moment to bring down Norfolk, especially since he is also the uncle of the recently beheaded Anne Boleyn. But Cromwell refuses. When the king learns of Meg’s endeavours, he is furious and wonders whether Norfolk is behind them, scheming to place his half-brother close to the throne. Cromwell stays silent.

He tells Henry’s new wife, Jane Seymour, that he needs to call back some of the women from Anne Boleyn’s retinue, despite Jane and her family’s distaste for them. But Cromwell needs to question women like Anne’s sister-in-law Jane Rochford about Meg’s dealings with Tom Truth.

Cromwell and Wriothesley confront the man himself while he is imprisoned in the Tower of London. They read his poetry to him and speculate that he was aiming for a marriage to a powerful and wealthy woman, since the younger Howards like himself are not rich.

Naive Jane Seymour summons Cromwell and asks him for advice on conceiving an heir with the king – her main duty. The king later worries to Cromwell that he has married a simple-minded woman whom the Europeans find plain and laugh at him over.

But Cromwell has other worries, like saving Meg from the king’s wrath. He defends the young woman, as does Henry’s sister in a letter from Scotland. He also asks permission to give another intransigent young woman, the king’s daughter Mary, a ring praising obedience. He has had the artist Hans Holbein craft the ring, along with paintings of English kings in his ever-expanding, increasingly opulent home of Austin Friars.

The king decides to give the ring to Mary himself. He also tells Cromwell that he wants his cousin Reginald Pole dead. Not only has Reginald written a book against Henry, he has now been tasked by the pope with seeking an alliance with France to oust Henry and return England to the Catholic Church.

Mary herself has no wish to marry but will obey her father, as she tells Cromwell. She does want a child, but worries that she will have miscarriages, like her mother. Cromwell tells her she might be able to return to court after Jane is officially crowned queen.

A rumor goes around that Cromwell himself has been promised to Mary by the king. Warm letters between them have been mentioned. Treason lurks around the corner.

Cromwell showed Chapuys, the Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador and a friend of Mary’s, those letters to help him convince Mary to yield to Henry. Cromwell confronts Chapuys, who laughs – and then shrinks from Cromwell’s veiled threats.

An even more trying encounter awaits Cromwell at Shaftesbury Abbey. He and the Lord Chancellor Richard Riche are breaking up monastic communities and taking their wealth and land for the state. Shaftesbury’s abbess warns Cromwell that she won’t surrender her abbey, and he reassures her that they are only targeting small, corrupt establishments.

But that’s not the real reason for his visit. He is there to see Dorothea, the illegitimate daughter of his late master the cardinal. She was sent to the abbey as a young girl to hide her from the world. Now Cromwell tells her she is free to leave; he will support her, and even let her live with him if she would like. But she is antagonistic to both him and the idea of leaving the abbey. Cromwell offers to find her a husband, and is surprised to find himself offering himself as a possibility. We’re both alone in the world, he tells her.

But she dismisses him, accusing him of betraying the cardinal and serving Norfolk by making the cardinal seem treasonous to Henry after he was sent north following his downfall. Cromwell is shocked and hurt. He tells her to come to him when she is abandoned; he loved her father and thus will do anything for her. Dorothea returns the gifts he has brought as he leaves.

Riche and Cromwell’s devoted manservant Christophe find Cromwell sitting against a wall, sobbing. He seeks reassurance that Riche doesn’t believe Cromwell betrayed the cardinal. I should have gone north with him and been with him when he died, Cromwell says.

Back home at Austin Friars, he can no longer summon the specter of the cardinal, with whom he has often conversed and traded wisdom in his mind. He worries to Rafe Sadler, his most devoted protege, that the cardinal himself believed Cromwell betrayed him. From whom else could Dorothea have heard such a thing?

And, while you can repair your reputation with the living, you cannot with the dead.