Wolf Hall's Entirely Beloved: Episode 2

[tealin]

Greetings, Internet, and welcome to another episode of Metapiece Theatre. Our offering today is, a little bit late, Episode Two of Wolf Hall, entitled "Entirely Beloved."

As with "Three Card Trick," whose writeup you should definitely read before this one, the title of this episode is not a coincidence. The entire hour is a game of beloveds, as we set up the relationships whose ramifications will play out in the rest of the series.

Cromwell is beloved of Wolsey
Wolsey . . . Cromwell
Cromwell . . . Johane
(and then vice versa)
Gregory . . . Cromwell
Cromwell . . . Mary Boleyn
Jane . . . Cromwell
Primarily, though, the overarching Beloved of this episode is Cromwell, of the audience. We come to love him for how much he loves others, as well as some cheaper tricks thrown in for good measure.


Of course, to show the Beloveds in greater contrast, we must have the Unbeloveds:

Cromwell vs Henry
Henry vs Wolsey
Cromwell vs Anne
Cromwell vs More
Cromwell vs The Gentry
Cromwell vs Gardiner

Most of these relationships are set up for an evolution, either of sentiment or of power, over the course of this episode or several. And, as mentioned last week, to some extent the value judgment of a character is directly proportional to how beloved they are of Cromwell – those who aren't on his side (e.g. Norfolk) are made out to be baddies, and those who are, are painted in varying shades of gold.

Such energy is put into garnering our sympathy that an alternate title for the episode might be "Laying it On With a Trowel." It's done subtly and organically, but when you start noticing the agenda, each of these moments begins to stand out. Continuing the legal analogy from last week, you can almost year Cromwell telling his take on things with a 'Yeronner...' Doth he protest too much, mayhap?



The episode starts with an Unbeloved: Henry gives Cromwell the cold shoulder as he's on Wolsey's business, and Henry's beloved Anne has made him officially anti-Wolsey. We cut immediately to the Beloved, with the title card helping to point this out:


So within the space of the opening credits we have neatly set up the arc of the episode. Cromwell here goes from Henry to Wolsey, but over the next hour he will be moving from Wolsey to Henry, and we will end with the tables turned. (I did say 'spoilers.')

Back to the present, though: Wolsey, from his sickbed, announces that a hitherto unmentioned cat has given birth under his bed. This gives us the opportunity for AWW KITTEN, a background noise which may be loud enough to drown out what else is being presented to us in this scene.

First we have Wolsey calling the wee beastie he is so lovingly fondling 'black as the Devil.' This is playing on the superstition of cats – and black cats especially – being associated with evil. We're being counted on to dismiss this as nonsense, or at best ironic, in order to ignore the implications of the line. The modern image of Satan is red (like, hmmm, a Cardinal) but black devils are far from uncommon in older religious art. Who else can we think of who's all in black?
Well! Golly, that's convenient. And he is not a million miles removed from having been born, figuratively, under Wolsey's bed, being brought into the exalted world in which he now operates through the Cardinal's sponsorship. As if to drive this point home, Wolsey hands the kitten to Cromwell, and the equation of the two is so complete that the little sooty fluffball practically disappears into Cromwell's customary robe of inky black.

While we are still rendered insensible goo by the cuteness of the scene, Cromwell suggests the solution to their problems is to bribe people with Church property. He admits the questionability of giving away what isn't theirs, but touts the uncertainty it'll sow. No matter what your opinion on institutional religion, neither bribes nor wanton mischief are honourable. Good thing we were distracted by infant felines, or we might suspect Mr Cromwell is not entirely above-board! Notice how Wolsey didn't immediately respond with an objection to this plan? He's probably not above-board either. But he cuddles Itty Bitty Kitty Cromwell so lovingly that we don't listen to our cognitive dissonance.

This is part of why I wonder if Discworld readers are perhaps better-equipped than the rest of the audience to unpick Wolf Hall, because lampshading precisely this sort of cognitive dissonance is a recurring motif in the series, best exemplified in humans' interactions with Death: He's an eight-foot-tall animate skeleton, but they cannot possibly be talking to an eight-foot-tall animate skeleton, so their conscious brain supplies another image and tries to shush the unconscious, leaving them with a perplexed feeling that something wasn't quite right about that man. The reviewer mentioned in last week's Wolf Hall post, and a few people I've talked to socially, have mentioned that perplexed feeling. They said that it wasn't quite satisfying and they couldn't put their finger on why, in a way that sounds just like a human who's given Death directions to the library. I think it's the cumulative effect of scenes like this, and the growing macro double-narrative as the series progresses.

By the way, while we're paused here, a moment of filmic appreciation:


The eye is naturally drawn to saturation, movement, and the area of highest contrast (and kittens), and can be 'led' around a composition by embedded graphic elements. When you want your audience to look in a certain place, you use these tools to your advantage (though, sadly, kittens are underutilised). We have here a confluence of all these factors. What is right in our intended line of sight but a high-contrast and colourful ring, which, despite its marginal position in the frame, leaps off the screen – could this be Important? (Hint: Yes.)

The Kitten Scene wraps up with a reminder that Cromwell is a very adept lawyer and Spinmeister Supreme, which is something to keep in mind while we digest his ongoing Argument for the Defence (a.k.a. this show; see Post 1)

CROMWELL
New life, born under your very bed – well, I read that as a good omen!

WOLSEY
You lawyer!

CROMWELL grins and nods
Another melanistic animal-based hint as to our protagonist's nature is next found in the scene where his son comes home from school:

GREGORY
People in Cambridge are laughing at my greyhounds.

CROMWELL
Why?

GREGORY
Because they're black. They should be white. They
say only felons have dogs you can't see at night.
It was Cromwell who bought these dogs for his son – only felons, eh? Perhaps not quite getting the point about dark animals, he tries to mollify his son with the offer of the little black kitten, the kitten equated with himself, playacting it as if it were a character much larger and fiercer than its nature would suggest. A reflection on Cromwell's growing stature, perhaps? The shot of Cromwell and the kitten here is a mirror-image of the shot which first equated the two, so it's not outside possibility. If that is the intent, then Gregory's line dismissing the offer is some pretty succinct foreshadowing: "The dogs" – purebred aristocratic status symbols on the surface, but wolves deep down – "will kill it."

The follow-up to this scene puts us back on the theme of 'Beloved' – we learn Cromwell is concerned his son doesn't return his love, and that he is a big softie who spoiled Gregory as a baby. You see, yeronner, my problem is, I just love people too much ...

The bonds of love are, of course, at the centre of a family business. You know, like those other family businesses where the patriarch has spent time in Italy and has a big oak desk in a big oak-panelled office and is flanked by smirking henchmen and everyone dresses in black ...


Yeah, that isn't remotely threatening at all.

This is the scene that introduces Wriothesley, believed by Cromwell & Co to be a spy sent by Gardiner, and a prospective double-agent. Along with the scenes surrounding Anne, in which Mary Boleyn gives Cromwell some intelligence, Anne sets Cromwell to spy for her, and Jane bemoans her failings as a domestic spy, this scene helps to establish the idea that everyone has spies everywhere and the upper echelons of the Tudor world are slippery indeed. Along with the Beloved, spies (perhaps the opposite, the embodiment of mistrust) are a major feature of this episode.

We're back to the court, then, for another milestone in the Wolsey-to-Henry arc mentioned earlier, after Henry's introduction to the craft of the Spinmeister. There's a foreign merchant claiming compensation; Cromwell suspects him of pulling their collective leg, and offers to 'look into it.' Henry tries to brush him off, but Suffolk (Norfolk's partner in posh boorishness, not a notorious lover of common Cromwell) takes his side:


Henry calls him over and they have this little conversation:

HENRY
I'll say this for you: you stick by your man.

CROMWELL
I've never had anything but kindness from the Cardinal.
This episode – more so, later – does a quiet but complete job of setting up Cromwell's motivation for some of the more wicked things he gets up to by the end of the series: he's doing it for Wolsey. Or, in other words, Loyalty, yeronner, it's all loyalty, he was kind to me, y'see, when no one else was. Is loyalty really the case, though, in action? He does a good job projecting an image of loyalty to Wolsey, but I have reason to suspect this may not run as deep as he claims. Here is an observation I would like you to put to the test: After Wolsey leaves for the North, does Cromwell ever mention him, or even apparently think about him, except when George comes down with news? In a show as deftly written as this, shot and acted in a way which shows thoughts better than most films, if they wanted Cromwell's loyalty to Wolsey to be his primary motivation in actual fact rather than simply in his saying so, they could have presented it that way. 'Show, don't tell' is a core principle of storytelling, and the dichotomy between the showing and the telling here is, well, telling.

While we're basking in the warm fuzzies of the Wolsey/Cromwell loyalty fest, we may miss this:


... which, in true Cromwell fashion, is left conspicuously unanswered. It's a question that harks to a famous quote from scripture (not out of place, given the constant presence of religion in the story), and makes us think about the implications of Cromwell's silence: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.” (Matthew 6:24) Less cosmically, it opens the question of who Cromwell's other master may be. Is he angling, with that look, for Henry to be his master? Or is this question answered later when George visits from Wolsey's exile?

This scene also sees the conflict of Beloveds: Wolsey was beloved of Henry, but now Anne is, and that Beloved is impeding the first. They might coexist in a tense parallel, except that the third Beloved, Cromwell of Wolsey, keeps bumping into them and raising sparks. At this point Henry unbends a little from the first encounter and makes a sotto voce concession to the Cardinal, via Cromwell. Things are shifting. The arc progresses.

The next question Cromwell fails to answer is that of Ambassador Chapuys, as to how much of his own money he's putting towards Wolsey's move from the Southeast up to York, which promises to be quite the affair. Cromwell's long pause, with the Beloved 's loyalty freshly established, makes his reply ('Some debts are not to be reckoned') heavily imply the answer is 'quite a lot,' but there's a certain amount of plausible deniability in that statement: he wants us to think he loves the Cardinal so much he'll put a fortune towards him, but does not say so in as many words. And he immediately deflects any further reflection on that topic to something juicier – 'I heard a rumour recently about someone you know...'

The conversation with Chapuys opens another window on who, in truth, Cromwell might actually be working for. His steady climb up the ladder of influence is presented as representing Wolsey, but let's not pretend it doesn't have really rather significant side benefits for Cromwell, and the family business. So significant they may, just perceptibly, start inching from the side towards the centre ... but as related to us in this scene, it was all Chapuys' idea, yeronner, honestly.

At last it is time to see off the Cardinal – another milestone in the episodic arc, quite literally putting Cromwell closer to Henry by moving Wolsey much, much further away. “Will you come north?” Wolsey asks his ensign, as he bustles. “Mhm, I'll come fetch you! Soon as he summons you back, and he will.” A statement that appears to be in friendly honesty, but I ask you this: in its delivery, and especially its narrative context, does it seem to you more like a)the confident statement of a foregone conclusion, or b)chirpy groundless optimism delivered to the terminally ill?

“God bless you, mine own entirely beloved Cromwell,” says Wolsey, nailing the episode title, as we see a figure in black kneeling to a figure in red, in a shadowy room ... So Cromwell is, ostensibly, the Beloved of the title, but beloved of a man who has taken a vow of poverty but lives and travels in expensive luxury, and concedes to the dishonest use of property that isn't his. What sort of person is beloved of such a man? It does a good job of exemplifying the corruption of an institution in need of a Reformation, but how can Cromwell be a happy servant of the avatar of the Roman Catholic Church and be on the leading edge of the English Reformation? The question of two masters, again ... which is his Beloved?

But in the meantime it's all hustle as Cromwell is micromanaging Wolsey's exit. Because I just love him too much, yeronner ... Loving too much, it's my curse.

Before he leaves, Wolsey gives Cromwell a present, not to be opened until he's gone, which Cromwell places in a Box of Beloveds, sharing space with mementos of his wife and daughters.


We cut immediately from Beloveds Absent to Beloved Present, seeing Gregory loving his new white greyhounds. Aww, he loves his son, and spoils him so. But might this not also signify the interchangeability of love, that pets can be so easily replaced and the owner's love transferred? And might this also be a filmmakers' blink, a demonstration of Cromwell engineering his image, wanting not to be perceived as a felon?

Our next port of call is to check in with a multi-episode arc, that of the relationship between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More. More is being set up as Cromwell's foil in the exploration of Idealism vs Pragmatism, and this episode takes it to stylistic extremes, highlighting the mirroring of the characters with Carroll-esque imagery.


In this Looking-Glass world, things are not necessarily as they appear, and the game is slippery indeed. Is More's white rabbit (innocent herbivore) an answer to Cromwell's black cat, or is it a false front? Is Henry Pattinson really a brain-damaged fool, or is this a shell behind which, Hamlet-like, he can observe and act unsuspected? Is More's scatological Latin insult an insight into his mind, or is it simply to test Cromwell?

In Episode 1, and at the beginning of the More sequence in this episode, More is at the top and knows it. He is brazenly dismissive of Cromwell, if not insulting. After he tests him at dinner and finds a mind that can parry his thrusts, the relationship starts to change. Without More's knowing it, the levelling of his own estimation of Cromwell parallels the change in objective distance between them in status and influence. Over the first four episodes their trajectories cross: as Cromwell rises, More falls; their paths make a perfect X. I believe it is possible to pinpoint the exact scene where they pass each other, but we'll get there later.

There are more scenes of spies and Beloveds when Cromwell goes to visit Anne Boleyn – it is all fairly obvious so I won't bother pointing them all out, but I would like to draw some attention to something just below the surface, something which ought to colour, at least slightly, everything which follows.

Mary Boleyn, after all but proposing to Cromwell, gives him some important intelligence:

“If she sent for you, she means to flatter you. She's going to ask you to do some little thing for her, and then she'll make you hers. Take my advice: before she does, turn around, and walk the other way.”

Notice, in the following scene with Anne, that Cromwell very definitely does not do this. There is even a little pause, a hiatus between his implicit refusal to take Anne's commission and his eventual relenting, where he could have done it, but he does not. In voluntarily stepping into her service, in defiance of the best advice, Cromwell is signing up to play this game. Everything that comes after can be seen as a consequence of getting involved at this point. To be fair, he shows about as much sign of carrying out Anne's commission as he does Wolsey's, but the important thing here is that he is seen to be getting involved; he lets Anne think he is 'hers' as Mary said, and thereby becomes a player instead of leaving the game.

Cromwell arrives home from the Boleyns' to the development of another Beloved, in this case his relationship with his deceased wife's unhappily married sister Johane. The spark was lit earlier, but now the scene is shot in such a way that suggests both desire and damnation, supporting and underlying the dialogue:


We snap out of the deepening pool of Tudor intrigue with – oh yeah, Wolsey. That guy. Is he still a thing? Apparently yes, and we get some small talk about quails and public relations before we get to the emotional heart of the conversation:

CROMWELL
I know ... I know what people are saying. That I'm
working for myself now. That I've been bought out.

GEORGE
But if you came and spoke to him, any doubts that he had –

CROMWELL
I'm needed here. To protect him. To persuade the king.
He likes me, George. I feel it.

Here we may have identified who Cromwell's other master is – himself. Certainly this is consistent with what we have seen so far; 'what people are saying' is clearly founded on observation. He spins it so that apparent self-interest is in the service of Wolsey, but is it? The Cardinal hasn't seemed to be much on his mind, lately, and given how things are going this smells an awful lot like he's deferring the matter. I may be reading too much into a few lines of dialogue, but there is a clue in the way the scene is shot:


In the long shot, George is fully lit, presumably so that he stands out from the dark wall, but in his medium shots – where he takes importance, and we can see his acting and into his mind – his head, his brain, is in shadow. One might almost think he was ... in the dark.

It's been a while since we had any cheap ploys for sympathy, but this deficit is redressed as we hang out with Henry's entourage in the next scene. The posh boors reiterate their poshness and boorishness, giving Cromwell a chance to stick up for the little guy; they mock the idea of Princess Mary taking the throne, giving Cromwell occasion to school them on the military charisma of Isabella de Castille. He's an egalitarian and a feminist! What an upstanding and forward-thinking progressive! Surely any of our enlightened modern viewers who haven't yet taken his side must do so now, and feel smugly superior to those dinosaurs clinging to inherited power.

After besting Henry at archery, Cromwell gets a private audience, during which Henry hands him a lever with which he can be moved: “Wolsey told me once that you had a loathing of those in religious life. That's why he found you so diligent in your inspection of the monasteries.” So instead of taking the opening to make the case for Cardinal Wolsey, he proceeds to undermine the reputation of those in religious vocations – pretty much the opposite of what he promised to do, but arguably in his own self-interest as it moves him closer to Henry and distances him from association with the now-unfavoured Wolsey. The arc passes another milestone. Then Henry drops another key:


... and those with even the dimmest recollection of British history will by this point have cottoned on:
Oh hang on, now I remember why his name sounds familiar ... this is Thomas 'Dissolution of the Monasteries' Cromwell! Well, this is going to get interesting!

And yet ... it doesn't, or at least not in the way you'd expect. Through the course of the series I kept waiting for the Dissolution to come up, but this famously destructive facet of Cromwell's career, and the spiritual, economic, and physical landscape of Britain, is almost entirely passed over. Not falsified, not denied, not even downplayed, just very casually not mentioned. One might almost think the Defence didn't want to draw attention to the indefensible ...

Having ingratiated himself with the king, it is Cromwell for whom Henry sends when he awakes from a bad dream. Cromwell puts his spin into overdrive, turning Henry's nightmare into inspiration, apparently supplanting Cranmer as most adept counselor, and becoming Spinmeister Royal.


... Yeah, and you've done a good job for yourself, too, mate.

Cromwell arrives home and celebrates his promotion by consummating the escalating relationship with Johane (entirely off screen, much to the consternation of fans of a certain HBO series). He starts his day singing and, uncharacteristically, tells a story from his time in Italy, of hilarious hijinks with his pals the Portinari boys. The sun is shining, everyone's smiling, things are looking up – we might be so buoyed by the high spirits that we don't quite notice the actual content of the story ...


(Incidentally, I looked up 'Portinari' and didn't get anything about the 'boys,' but if the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, they may be the sons of Tommaso Portinari...)

Of course you know, in a serious drama, when things are looking sunny is when you're most likely to run into a stormcloud. Wolf Hall is true to form, and the stormcloud comes in the shape of George, bringing news of the arrest and death of Wolsey. I wept, yeronner, wept ... and was sworn onto the Privy Council, and opened Wolsey's farewell present (he's certainly gone now!) which is the ring we saw at the beginning. We will see Cromwell wear that ring for the rest of the series, as a visual reminder that everything he does, he does for Wolsey ... though it is interesting to note he did not bother to do so before Wolsey died. Cromwell lurks in the shadows of a grotesque mockery of the Cardinal's low birth and ignominious death, much enjoyed by its audience, which gives him all the sympathy of the underdog as well as a hit list for the future. George weeps "I prayed to God to send vengeance upon them all," and then, cementing his apparent motivation, the man who so adroitly quoted scripture at Thomas More forgets Romans 12:18-20 and Deuteronomy 32:35-36 by responding "There's no need to trouble God, George. I'll take it in hand.”

Oh, Thomas Cromwell, don't you know what hubris does to a tragic hero?

Episode 3: Anna Regina