Woke Comes for the Tudors

On six successive Sunday evenings in November and December, British television viewers were served a tasty treat: the second and final tranche of episodes in the BBC’s magisterial adaption of novelist Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy. Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light received rapturous notices, and justifiably so. As was the case with its first season, which aired here on PBS a decade ago and is now available on Amazon Prime, the cast is led by the baleful-eyed Mark Rylance as royal counselor Thomas Cromwell, and a volatile Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII. The costumes, the locations, the soundtrack, even the dialogue—16th-century speech is notoriously hard to approximate in a non-risible way—are all divine. With astonishing skill and meticulous attention to period detail, director Peter Kosminsky and writer Peter Straughan deftly and movingly recount the complicated events leading to Cromwell’s fall from power.

In this instance, the pupils have surpassed the master. Mantel became a worldwide literary celebrity with the publication of the original Wolf Hall in 2009 and its 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, both of which served as the source material for the original series. But her third Cromwell novel, The Mirror and the Light (2020), is bloated, repetitive, and ultimately unsatisfying. The BBC version saves it. Kosminsky and Straughan give the story urgency and shape, at the same time avoiding the sentimentality, farcicality, and rampant ribaldry of other recent small-screen royal dramas (see, or rather, don’t: The Empress, The Great, and Becoming Elizabeth). Unlike the Cromwell of Mantel’s final novel—she died in 2022 at the age of 70—this one resonates over the centuries, a haunted and haunting man. A skilled, loyal retainer catering to a maniacal king’s caprices, he ultimately loses his head, but never his humanity, despite his many morally reprehensible deeds. We believe in him as a man of his time, who is also somehow timeless, the ideal hero for historical fiction.

And yet. The BBC and its team accomplished all this, only to sacrifice verisimilitude—the entire project’s calling card—on the altar of the modern racial spoils system. The flaw in this diamond—which begins airing in America in March on PBS—is intrusive “colorblind” casting. While the first season of Wolf Hall featured no black actors, here they are numerous, in crowd scenes and populating Henry’s palaces as servants, attendants, and guards. On several occasions when the king meets with his ministers, their number includes a black man or two, sitting gravely at the privy council table. Jarring, too, are women of color among the ladies-in-waiting of Henry’s queens, who, in Tudor times, were the daughters of noble families. The sight of a beautiful black actress in the train of Anne of Cleves, arriving from Düsseldorf to marry King Henry, brought to mind the absurdity of the black Nazi soldiers created by Google’s AI image-generator.

No machine made these choices. The director did, because, as Kosminsky has stated, the world has changed since 2015, when the first series debuted, and Wolf Hall needed to change along with it. The absurdity of this view is transparent, since the Tudor world is immutable: Non-whites were vanishingly rare in early modern England. In her authoritative book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, historian Miranda Kaufmann documents a total of 360 individuals of African descent living in the country between 1500 and 1640. (John Blanke, a trumpeter who performed at the coronation of Henry VIII, was one of them, and he appears in a tapestry commemorating the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Blanke, however, is not a character in Wolf Hall.)

Several BAME—the British acronym for black, Asian, and minority ethnic—actors also play real historical figures in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. The politician and poet Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), originally portrayed by Scottish actor and Slow Horses star Jack Lowden, is now played by Egyptian-born actor Amir El-Masry. A descendant of the Tudor politician and lyric poet, Petronella Wyatt, argued in a piece for the Telegraph that this casting has no “logical grounding,” pointing out that her kinsman, a Yorkshireman, never ventured east of Calais. She added: “To portray English aristocrats as black or mixed-race is, conversely, an act of racism, as it suggests that ethnic minorities in Tudor Britain had the doors of society flung open to them when, in fact, they led drear and oppressed lives.”

Political objections aside, Kosminsky, by eschewing fact to foreground virtue-signaling, bewilders his audience. In the Wolf Hall saga, noble ladies are central to the plot, and the casting has generally reflected what is known of their appearance. The actress Kate Phillips is true to the historical record in her physical rendering of King Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour—known to have been pale and fair. In several scenes, Phillips wears jewelry and a gown painstakingly replicated from a Hans Holbein 1536 portrait of Queen Jane. But confusion sets in with other Seymours. In the 2015 season, they are introduced to Henry upon his arrival at their home, the eponymous Wolf Hall, and they are all white. But on this go-round, the family includes several members of apparent African descent. Bess Seymour, Jane’s sister, is played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers, whose mother is the black Guyanese actress Joy Richardson. Viewers could be excused some perplexity in the second episode, when Phillips (as Jane) says to Richardson-Sellers (as Bess): “Sister, it is Thomas Cromwell who does everything in the kingdom now.” Pity the poor viewer not familiar with the lengthy list of interrelated dramatis personae (laid out over seven pages at the start of Mantel’s novel) or the Tudor world’s mores. Are these Seymours actually sisters, or is it a figure of speech? If they are sisters, do they have different mothers? Will that be significant in the story? The series has taught the viewer that authentic details matter, and then throws in incongruous, inauthentic ones.

Kosminsky contends that he found it liberating to “choose actors based on their talent not their ethnicity.” And yet he digitally altered the flashbacks in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light because he was concerned that viewers would fixate on how much younger Rylance and Lewis looked 10 years ago when those scenes were originally filmed. Kosminsky may challenge viewers not to “see” race, but is frightened of them seeing…aging?

Still, if one believes the job of actors is to act, how much does it really matter how true to life they appear? Splendid Mark Rylance doesn’t have Cromwell’s beefy build. Damian Lewis is a redhead like King Henry but infinitely better-looking than that Tudor tyrant. And besides, everyone has a boss, and Kosminsky works for the BBC, known for leaning (sharply) left. It’s fair to ask: What did one expect him to do in the post–Black Lives Matter era? Even in the Telegraph, nicknamed The Tory-graph for its conservative bent, the television critic was unperturbed. The diverse casting, wrote Chris Bennion, is “sparse” and “of little note, unless you are determined to be irked by it.”

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Put me in the irked column. I’d like to believe it’s because I take Wolf Hall seriously, as Mantel intended. This is not Bridgerton, a Gossip Girl remake set in Jane Austen’s Britain, where diverse casting reinforces the romp-like spirit of its premise. When Mantel—a well-regarded author of mostly contemporary novels, culminating in the darkly brilliant Beyond Black—set out on her Cromwell project, she married her modernist’s sensibility to an assiduous interest in the facts. The third-person perspective of the novels comes from inside Cromwell’s mind, and the reader eavesdrops on his thoughts. She accurately reports the events that defined his life—the death of his patron, Cardinal Wolsey, his efforts to rid the king of his first two wives, Catherine of Aragon and then Anne Boleyn, and finally his plans for a strategic alliance with the German Protestants via Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. (It’s this last that leads to his downfall.) Rather than the bullying bad guy depicted in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, Mantel’s Cromwell is conniving, yes, but also brilliant, pragmatic, and above all rational. He’s exasperated by extremists on either side of the 16th-century religious divide—both Thomas More, the unbending Catholic, and William Tyndale, the radical cleric.

Many historians are uneasy with Mantel’s take on her protagonist but few quibble with the diligence of her research. In 2017, Mantel said of historical fiction: “Engagement with the [historical] evidence is what raises your game. If you regard it as something that gets in the way….your novel will be unhistorical and unconvincing.” Her efforts twice won her the Booker Prize. Sunday Times literary critic Johanna Thomas-Corr credits Mantel with saving the entire genre from “bodice-ripping naffness.”

Still, even Mantel folded when it came to diversity casting. “It’s difficult for me, because to me they’re not characters, they’re people, and I have a very strong sense of them physically,” she said when the question was first mooted in 2021. “But as soon as you move to stage or the screen, that must yield because you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” ’ Tis a pity the show makers couldn’t have, as a final tribute to Mantel, respected her resistance to “presentism.” Instead, we see a version of the past—the one showbiz luvvies and BBC mandarins prefer to the truth.

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