Wolf Hall Recap: Anna Regina

“People should say whatever it takes to keep them alive.”
Despite her faults, Anne Boleyn can sure hit it on the nose, and her utterance to Cromwell governs the whole of this week’s Wolf Hall.
The year is now 1531. Things have changed—Wolsey is dead, as you’ll recall—but Henry VIII’s marital drama continues to rage. Having failed to secure a papal release from his marriage to Catherine, Henry, acting on Cromwell’s counsel, is asking Parliament to make him the supreme head of the Church of England.
This is not a unanimously popular proposition. And so it falls to Cromwell to make the sluggish wheels turn. Poor Cromwell. With Wolsey gone, he’s traded one master for two, as he contorts himself pleasing both Henry and Anne. It’s a high-stakes political game he’s playing, particularly with such fickle and fiery personalities, but Cromwell could teach the master class on managing upward.
And he’s got plenty of time on his hands to handle the extra workload, because the fires at home have grown cold. His romance with Johane, his live-in sister-in-law, may be at an end. She tells him her mother knows about the two of them, which is a problem for two reasons: 1) their relationship is technically incest in the eyes of the church, and 2) Johane is still married. So Johane is putting an end to the hanky-panky, but not without a little parting gift.
Earlier, during some cuddling, Cromwell asked Johane what she might like as a present. Jewels would be an appropriate answer. Or one of those fancy royal dresses that requires three people to get you inside of it. But no, all Johane mentions is a name: James Bainham, a lawyer allied with Cromwell and the reformists who has been arrested for heresy.
In the opening scene of the episode, we see Bainham being tortured by Lord Chancellor Thomas More twice over: having the life squeezed out of him while listening to More, the Tudors’ sartorial answer to Radagast the Brown, drone on in Latin. Cromwell sets about to free him, and he starts with Anne. After Cromwell dutifully listens to one of her vent sessions, Anne agrees to talk to Henry about getting Bainham released, so long as he recants.
“And if he doesn’t? Cromwell asks.
“Then he’s a fool,” Anne retorts. “People should say whatever it takes to keep them alive. You would, wouldn’t you?”
Cromwell doesn’t answer, but that’s a question he’s going to have to deal with the higher up the ladder he climbs. He’s already dancing with the devils responsible for Wolsey’s downfall: the Boleyns. Not to mention the delicate waltz he’s doing as far as his religious beliefs. But for now, it’s working to his advantage: Bainham does recant and is released—at least until he pipes up once again and is executed. It would seem not everyone will say what it takes to stay alive.
But that’s something Cromwell has no trouble with, according to Thomas More.
“I think your faith is for purchase,” More lectures, before telling Cromwell he knows of the letters he’s sent Tyndale, whose English-translated Bible is at the center of this whole heretic mess.
“Are you threatening me?” Cromwell asks.
“Yes, that’s precisely what I’m doing,” More replies, not realizing the giant mistake he has just made. Cromwell’s not in the immediate vengeance game. He’s more a fan of the slow-burn destruction of your life variety.
And that’s exactly what young Harry Percy finds out as well. You remember Harry Percy, no? He’s the young stud whom Anne nearly married, before Wolsey intervened. Well, maybe she did pseudo-marry him, or at least that’s what Percy is claiming now.
So Cromwell drops in on Percy’s den of iniquity to help him do a little math: Percy is a man with many debts, and Cromwell is a man who knows his many creditors. It’s not armies and castles that decide the fate of the world, Cromwell explains, it’s bankers—and, left unsaid, it’s Cromwell. Scared witless at the prospect of eating rabbit stew out of his hovel with lawfully wedded Anne, Percy seems inclined to shut up and run after the conversation ends.
Check one item off Cromwell’s to-do list. Also on the list of accomplishments: a successful vote on Henry’s sovereignty bill in the House of Commons, which can be chalked up to a deft bit of engineering by Cromwell. The vote is supremely public, with the yeas and nays physically lining up on opposite sides of the room as Henry looks on.
More good news! The bill has alienated More to the point that he’s resigning as Lord Chancellor. Cromwell is so tickled by the news that he interrupts a naughty daydream about Anne to discuss possible successors with her. It would seem the obstacles to Henry and Anne’s union are falling like domino pieces. That notion gets reinforced when drunk Henry lets slip that the French king has agreed to speak favorably of the marriage to the pope, since they’re still on speaking terms.
Onward to Calais, where Henry, et al., are making merry with Louis XII in celebration. Well, Anne may be getting a little too merry, with Henry getting increasingly agitated by her flirtations with another monarch. The quarrel between the two is loud afterward, but it has a heckuva resolution: Henry marries Anne on the fly, then promises to make it Facebook official when they’re back in England.
And just like that, the driving dilemma of the first three episodes is resolved—sort of. The resistance to Queen Anne isn’t going away anytime soon, even though it’s revealed she’s pregnant with Henry’s child.
Though they’ve been shipped off to another castle, Catherine and her talking shrimp—Mary, who makes her first sickly appearance in this episode—are still in the picture. Second, the opposition is loud, as exemplified by the Holy Maid, an ultra-religious soothsayer who claims Anne will doom Henry’s reign.
These are two tendrils of the hydra that lays before Cromwell. Anne may be queen, but her problems are just beginning, as Cromwell’s fascination with Jane Seymour forewarns. We’ll see how all of that plays out next week—and maybe Cromwell can even snatch another kiss from Mary Boleyn. Oh, the possibilities!