Remember that dumb line from “Love Story”—“Love means never having to say you’re sorry”? Turns out that’s pretty much the modus vivendi for King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), and it comes with a corollary for everyone else: “Love me, and you’ll be sorry.”
Exhibit 1: Katherine of Aragon (Joanne Whalley) who goes to her death with Henry’s name still on her lips and earns this epitaph for her troubles: “We’ll lay her to rest in Peterborough. It will cost less.”
Exhibit 2: Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), who comes close to being immolated in her bed, only to see her husband grieve over the surrounding arras. (“Oh, this was a good piece.”)
Exhibit 3: The king’s trusted adviser Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), who begs Henry not to unhorse Cromwell’s son in a jousting tournament and gets this blasé reply: “When you’re thundering down at a man, you can’t check.”
Kings have always been kings, but Henry’s new quasi-papal status seems to have made him more changeable and less anchored than ever before. When Cromwell tricks Imperial Ambassador Chapuys (Mathieu Amalric) into acknowledging Henry’s new queen, that should qualify as a diplomatic coup. But when Chapuys presumes to make direct overtures to Henry, our man-boy king sniffs a different kind of coup and goes mental on Cromwell. “What would a man like you know about the honor of princes? You think you are the king and I am the blacksmith’s boy! Don’t you? Don’t you?”
It’s an attack of such heat and ferocity that, in defense, Cromwell can only cross his wrists — as his blacksmith father once advised him to do after grabbing a hot iron. “Defuse the pain,” said Walter, but in this case, the gesture, with its evocations of the cross, seems more designed to quell a demon.
Cromwell’s enemies are crowing over his humiliation, but the next day, the King taps him on the shoulder, and off they go for one of Henry’s patented non-apology apologies. First some distraction: idle talk of going “down to the weald” to talk to ironmasters. Followed by affirmation: “You are my right hand, sir.” Followed by a declaration of need: “I cannot live as I have lived, Cromwell. You must free me from it. From Anne.”
And what choice does Cromwell have? As Wolsey’s cheerful ghost reminds him: “The King wants a new wife. Fix him one. I didn’t, and now I’m dead.”
It’s a peculiar conundrum for Cromwell, who prides himself, as we’ve discussed, on knowing what lurks in every mind and heart. (Surely that’s why Hilary Mantel refers to him constantly as a godlike “he,” with no antecedent.) But what good is all that omniscience without omnipotence?
“You think I have everything,” Cromwell complains, “but take Henry away, I don’t have a crumb.” Crumb, as it turns out, is also our hero’s nickname — a constant reminder that he can be brushed off whenever his master chooses.
And such a master! Morphing from alpha male to keening child and no more infantile than when he is screaming “I am not an infant!” Stung by any threat of emasculation and yet willing to emasculate himself to get out of his second marriage. (“I was seduced, practiced upon. Perhaps with charms, with spells. Women do such things.”) His volcanic temperament is perhaps best exemplified in the scene where Anne begs him not to joust again. Smiling, he beckons her forward, and then, when she is in sonic range, hisses, “Why not geld me while you’re at it?” (In effect, she already has. Hence the fury.)
With his towering size and his gift for duress, Mr. Lewis is fully up to the character’s barometric swings — and a good thing, too, because Henry, initially a marginal figure, has become the axis on which this whole mad enterprise spins. He’s power without knowledge. And maybe the only one who can survive in this world — for now — is the blankly enigmatic virgin Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), who has neither knowledge nor power and has somehow turned that into a singular asset. She prospers because no one can be sure what’s inside.
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