‘Gossip is a currency’: The precarious lives of Tudor women in Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light opens with a tale of two queens. We return to the Tower of London, where the first season of the BBC’s dazzling Hilary Mantel adaptation concluded almost a decade ago. Anne Boleyn, played by Claire Foy, is about to be executed, ostensibly for treason and adultery (though her real crime is her inability to give Henry VIII a male heir). Then, we cut to the palace, where a radiant but timid Jane Seymour, played by Kate Phillips, vows to marry a king who has just condemned his ex-wife to death. It is not the most auspicious start for a union. “Once you set a precedent for cutting off your wife’s head, I don’t think it makes for a very comfortable life for the wife that comes next,” Phillips says. Understatement of the (16th) century.

These juxtaposed scenes form a stark reminder for viewers that in the world of Wolf Hall, women (especially ones that catch the king’s eye) are often expendable. Fall out of favour – or fail to give birth to a son – and their lives are at risk; there are younger, more fertile and docile replacements, manoeuvred by grasping male relatives, who are ready to take their position. In The Mirror and the Light, which is based on the final instalment of Mantel’s virtuosic trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, played by Mark Rylance, that sense of peril only becomes more distinct, for Henry’s wives, daughters and the women who surround them.

Henry, played by Damian Lewis, is older, more desperate for an heir than ever, and high on a sense of his own supremacy after breaking with the Catholic Church (to get himself out of his first unsuccessful marriage, to Catherine of Aragon). “While I think Jane knew that she was a very different person to Anne, I don’t think she went into that marriage with a sense of safety,” says Phillips, who also played Seymour in the original 2015 series, when she was “very green” and fresh out of drama school, her nerves echoing Jane’s. “I think she probably went into that marriage thinking, ‘Oh my f***ing god, how am I gonna get through this?”

But that’s not to say that Mantel rendered these Tudor women as feeble pawns – she was far too deft and subtle a chronicler of power relations to fall into that trap. Just as she probed beyond the accepted version of history in her portrayal of Cromwell (a man who’d been seen as the “big bad” of Henry’s reign), she wrought layered portraits of female figures, too. Jane has often been characterised by historians as demure, even slightly dull, but Mantel’s book – and screenwriter Peter Straughan’s script – makes us question whether that was a clever performance, designed to secure a spot in Henry’s good graces as a kind of anti-Anne. “Coming back to the scripts and the book, and trying to get myself into [Jane’s] mindset, I was reminded of what an enigma she is,” Phillips says. “She’s written through Cromwell’s eyes, certainly, as someone that does have agency, does have spark, does have an inner power. And yet loads of other people are referring to her as meek and mild and plain. But then she managed to get herself into a position where she is liked by the king, which I think is a very canny thing to do.”

Henry’s court was all for the survival of the fittest, and the women of Wolf Hall must become savvy operators themselves, constantly reacting to shifting allegiances and the king’s fluctuating favours. Whispers and rumours could be co-opted as their political tools, used to make and break reputations. “For the women, gossip is a currency,” says Lydia Leonard, who takes on the role of Jane Rochford, wife of George Boleyn, and who was instrumental in the bloody downfall of her husband and her sister-in-law. “Cromwell has such a close, interesting relationship with all the women of the court and recognises that power. And it was gossip that brought down Anne Boleyn.”

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Leonard has taken over the role from Jessica Raine, who played Rochford in the TV show’s first season, but she is not new to Mantel’s Tudor milieu – far from it. She starred as Anne Boleyn in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, eventually earning a Tony nomination when the shows moved across the Atlantic to Broadway. “Wolf Hall and Hilary specifically have been a really large part of my life,” she says. Mantel was heavily involved in the process of bringing the books to the stage – just as she was with the initial TV production of Wolf Hall, before her death in 2022 at the age of 70 – and so Leonard had the chance to learn about her characters first hand, through “lengthy conversations” with the author. “I felt like I already knew Jane Rochford when I got this part because of having spent so much time in [Mantel’s] company already,” she says. Her questions to Mantel would be met with “not an err, not a pause… You received this wonderful, long, specific, enriched answer. It was really special”.

Rochford has been vilified by history thanks to her role in Anne’s demise. But in Mantel’s work, and the TV show, she is a fascinating character study: she is sharp and scathing in her assessment of others (“Anne said it was like being slobbered over by a mastiff pup,” she remarks of Henry’s attentions at one point) and thrills at her proximity to political power, but she is also reeling from the end of a cold, unhappy marriage. “I have a lot of sympathy for [her],” Leonard says. “Because even though she’s very scheming and dangerous and Machiavellian, and she enjoys nothing more than the downfall of another woman, she was so abused. All the women [in Wolf Hall] are just struggling to survive, and Jane Rochford was treated abominably by George Boleyn.” Rochford is “a cruel woman”, she says, “but by circumstance and by the necessity to survive”.

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Another character with a well-honed survival instinct – and a less than glowing historical reputation – is Mary, Henry’s eldest daughter and the only child from his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Lilit Lesser, who uses they/them pronouns, was first cast as Mary as a “really shy” teenager – like Phillips, Wolf Hall was their debut role, and an “extraordinary initiation” into acting – so returning to the role a decade on “feels like the closing of a circle”. The devoutly Catholic “Bloody” Mary has a reputation for religious fanaticism, and is best remembered for her ruthless persecution of Protestants. But in the show, we see her as a young woman weighing up whether to stick to her religious principles and remain an outcast from the court, or tentatively accept her father’s Church of England and return to the fold.

The received view of Mary, Lesser says, has been coloured by the work of the martyrologist John Foxe, whose 1563 Book of Martyrs featured “really lurid accounts of the burning of [Protestant] martyrs” during Mary’s reign and “became incredibly popular”; her historical perception hasn’t changed all that much since then. Lesser says their job wasn’t to judge Mary, but to “radically empathise [with] and just embody” the royal – although they note that the notoriously intolerant Mary “would not have taken kindly to me as a queer Jewish person, which I find quite funny”.

Mary would’ve learnt of the contingency of her position at an earlier age than most. As “the only one of her siblings to survive” – Catherine of Aragon experienced multiple miscarriages and stillbirths during her marriage to Henry VIII – she was initially adored by both parents and received “an education that would have been much more common for only men to have”. But when Catherine became persona non grata, Mary was cast out too. After Henry married Anne Boleyn, he declared his daughter to be illegitimate, and she was separated from her mother. “You have this golden child who falls so suddenly in grace,” Lesser says. “To me, it was [about] playing this person with a shrieking void at the core of them, that I feel she’s perhaps not afraid to wield in quite a cruel and violent way. She finds out so harshly how quickly the tables can turn.”

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Other fascinating biographical details jumped out, too, when Lesser was researching the character. Mary was often in “intense physical pain”, and many historians believe that, were she alive today, her symptoms would have been diagnosed as endometriosis – which Mantel suffered from and wrote about extensively in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost. Lesser lives with the condition, too: “I admire [it] so much, her being very vocal about endometriosis.” And Mary was a keen gambler, they note, which may have been “one of the bonds between her and Cromwell”.

Their shifting dynamic is one of the show’s most fascinating relationships, in a crowded field. “They really see one another… There’s no hiding somehow,” Lesser says, and their affinity is particularly striking “because politically, these two people are diametrically opposed”. Director Peter Kosminsky sent them a biography by the historian Tracy Borman, which included letters between the two, so Lesser could “see firsthand the language that Mary uses, which is so intimate and tender: she signs off to him as ‘your assured bounded loving friend’. There’s this interesting intimacy between these people who should be completely at odds”.

Phillips, meanwhile, was struck by how little biographical material exists about Jane. Her marriage to Henry, and indeed her existence, was short-lived: they were together for just over a year, before Jane died, aged 28 or 29, days after the birth of their son, Edward. Phillips wonders, though, whether this dearth of detail might be linked to the fact that Jane was never actually crowned: her coronation was delayed by the outbreak of plague, and by a spate of uprisings in the north. “She wasn’t given the official title, and I think one of those reasons was because Henry wanted to make sure that she was able to produce the heir before he kind of set her [role] in stone, which again, I think, makes her position incredibly fragile. You wonder whether people just didn’t really want to make notes of her existence until they knew that she was going to stick around.”

Even what’s seen as Henry’s most loving relationship, then, was a power struggle. “It’s why the Tudors are endlessly fascinating – that mix of politics, love, sex and power,” Leonard says. “It’s potent.” Watching the ways that Mantel’s female characters navigate that tinder box remains truly thrilling.

‘Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light’ will air on BBC iPlayer and BBC One at 9pm on Sunday 10 November, with new episodes premiering weekly