'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' Recap: Episode 4

Wolf Hall airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode.
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The sudden appearance of a daughter he didn’t know existed has Cromwell rethinking his life. Jenneke came to London from her home in Antwerp because she heard about a rebellion in England that threatened Cromwell, and she wanted to meet him before he died. Cromwell wishes her mother, Anselma, had told him about Jenneke, but Anselma – who died last year – didn’t want him to consider Jenneke a mistake for which he had to pay. Word of Jenneke’s existence has already spread throughout court and even Europe.

Now, Cromwell asks Jenneke to stay in England: he can provide handsomely for her in a marriage that she can choose herself, and he, she, and his family could retire to a beautiful abbey that he is eying for himself. He has been undone by the accusation of his late patron Cardinal Wolsey’s daughter Dorothea that he betrayed the cardinal, and now feels that he has lost his way. Jenneke wonders how Cromwell’s life has ended up here: why didn’t he marry again? He should leave everything behind.

But both she and he know that neither will upend their lives, even as Cromwell plaintively asks that Jenneke not abandon him. Jenneke returns to Antwerp and asks Cromwell to come with. He doesn’t.

King Henry VIII also loses a loved one, even as he gains an heir. Jane Seymour gives birth to a son but is absent from the joyful presentation of the new prince to the court. Ailing in bed, she asks Cromwell to attend the boy’s christening in her stead.

Jane fails to recover, so Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer gives her last rites in her bedroom as Henry kneels and Cromwell cries. Cromwell leaves the room and rages about the “negligence” that led to her death. If she’d married me, she’d still be alive, he says in front of shocked courtiers.

But there is no time to mourn. The king’s council asks Cromwell to turn the king’s attention towards selecting another bride. He may now have a male heir, but children die all the time. Henry says he could be happy to remain a bachelor, but it is his duty to marry. He tosses off an interest in a French noblewoman, but his rival the King of Scots is already angling for her. The king asks Cromwell for a week to mourn before turning his attention towards a new marriage.

Then the king of France and the Holy Roman Emperor sign a ten-year truce, putting England in a precarious position against allied great powers. Some councillors argue that the truce won’t last, but others worry that the emperor will now invade England and set up as king Henry’s renegade cousin Reginald Pole, who is preaching rebellion against Henry for separating from the Catholic Church in Rome. Henry is furious.

So Cromwell finally moves against the Poles and Courtenays, rival families who have claims to the throne. He arrests Reginald’s brother Geoffrey and questions him alongside his protege Wriothesley in order to find evidence against the king. Cromwell wants to solidify the religious reforms he and Cranmer have instituted under the king so that they cannot be reversed – even if Henry himself changes his mind. Wriothesley is shocked at Cromwell’s seeming defiance of his king, in a time when Cromwell himself has turned even a hint of antagonism into treason.

Cromwell is trying to ally Henry with the German princes who have also broken from Rome after Martin Luther. The alliance between France and the Holy Roman Empire could actually force Henry towards the Germans, as the king’s ambassador Thomas Wyatt points out to Cromwell – who nevertheless tasks Wyatt with breaking up the alliance. Cromwell pitches a marriage to the German Anne of Cleves to Henry – even as the king is recovering from a near-fatal collapse due to the worsening of an injury to his leg that has plagued him for years.

But the king is backing away from some of the more radical Protestant reforms, such as allowing clergy to marry and declaring that the bread and wine at mass are not actually the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Henry proves this when he demands a public debate with a priest, John Lambert, who was charged with heresy but never tried because of changes in church leadership. Cranmer and Cromwell urge Lambert to moderate his beliefs but he refuses – and damages their cause and Cromwell in the process.

At the debate, the king asks Cromwell to speak – and Cromwell hedges, saying the king has already said everything. Cromwell’s rival Stephen Gardiner, returned from France after years as ambassador there, delights in the belittling of Lambert and goads Cromwell, saying that he agrees with Lambert.

That night with Cranmer and his closest confidante Rafe, Cromwell admits that Gardiner is right. He regrets that he did not speak in defense of Lambert, who will now be burned as a heretic. Today we failed, he says.

He suffers nightmares and wakes up soaked in sweat. The Italian fever that occasionally strikes him down has returned. After days of hallucinations and chills, he finally returns to court, despite still being weak and cloudy-minded. He is shocked to find the king with Gardiner – and that the king insists on keeping a smirking Gardiner there even as Cromwell tries to dismiss him. Gardiner casts doubt on Anne of Cleves, and Cromwell promises to provide all the paperwork proving that she is free to marry despite an aborted agreement drawn up when she and another nobleman were mere children.

When Gardiner and Cromwell snipe at each other, the king demands that they be reconciled at a dinner being hosted by Cranmer that evening, then dismisses Cromwell. Gardiner stays.

At that dinner, Cromwell’s mind is still in a fog, so he fails to immediately defend himself when Gardiner accuses him of murder years ago. A rival of Cardinal Wolsey’s was poisoned in Italy while Cromwell lived there. It was before Cromwell knew Wolsey, and Cranmer defends Cromwell. But the duke of Norfolk – an ally of Gardiner and increasingly an enemy of Cromwell – begins lambasting the cardinal. Ever loyal and defensive of his former patron, Cromwell hauls Norfolk from the table by his neck. Cranmer intervenes. Gardiner revels in the discord.