This script has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

Ten years ago, audiences were enraptured by a stunning achievement as both history and literature were brought to life on screen. Wolf Hall transported viewers back to the dangerous and politically fraught world of Tudor England, and into the belly of the beast: the candlelit halls of power, Hampton Court Palace during King Henry VIII’s reign. 

Wolf Hall, director Peter Kosminsky’s adaptation of the late author Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning historical novels, tells the infamous story of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s tumultuous marriage, and Henry’s break from the Catholic Church as he names himself the Supreme Head of the Church in England. 

CLIP

Henry: Why does he come back now? I have been king for 20 years.

Cromwell: Because now is the vital time! Now is the time for you to become the king you should be, the sole and Supreme Head of your kingdom. Ask Anne, she’ll say the same.

Henry: She does. She says we should not bow to Rome.

Cromwell: And if your father should come to you in a dream, you take it the same way as you take this one. They come to strengthen your hand.

Mirroring Henry’s story, Wolf Hall also tells of the rise of Henry’s notorious fixer, Thomas Cromwell. 

CLIP

King Henry: Do I keep you for what’s easy? Do you think I’ve promoted you for the charm of your presence? I keep you because you are a serpent. Do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.

Cromwell’s story continues in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light on MASTERPIECE on PBS, which adapts Mantel’s final novel in her Tudor trilogy. Cromwell rose from the lowly position of a blacksmith’s son to one of the most powerful men in England, a position that is safe, so long as he stays within the king’s favor. 

CLIP

King Henry: Do you sleep at nights, Crumb?

Cromwell: Eh?

King Henry: You bear a burden of work no other man has carried. I sometimes wonder where you come from.

Cromwell: Putney, majesty.

Because Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light depicts the true story of Henry and Cromwell, we thought we’d speak with an expert on the real-life King Henry VIII and Tudor England. In this episode, we’ll talk with historian, author, curator, podcaster, and television presenter Lucy Worsley about Cromwell’s portrayal, King Henry’s reign, and how his eldest child, Mary Tudor, earned the nickname Bloody Mary.

Jace Lacob: And this week we are joined by historian Lucy Worsley. Welcome.

Lucy Worsley: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

Jace Lacob: Thanks so much for joining us. You are a historian, author, television presenter, and podcaster. You served as the chief curator of the Royal Historical Palaces, which includes the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace for 21 years, and you are now the ambassador for the Royal Historical Palaces charity. What does that role mean to you, particularly as someone who owned a beloved copy of Jean Plaidy’s The Young Elizabeth, with Hampton Court on the cover as a child?

Lucy Worsley: Oh, I’m liking this research. We’ve gone straight into my childhood and my deepest motivations. Yes, you’re quite right. When I was young, I cherished a little book I had about Hampton Court Palace, and I couldn’t believe when I grew up that I got to spend 21 years of my life living and working there.

Do you know what’s special about the place? It’s walking in the footsteps of the people of the past. When you’re at Hampton Court, you are literally where Henry VIII was making his decisions or Anne Boleyn was running into trouble. And it has been said that at Hampton Court and other places like that, only time and not space, separates you from these people of the past. You can really feel this kind of echo of their presence. It’s amazing. Have you been to Hampton Court Palace ever?

Jace Lacob: I have, several times. I actually was just looking this morning at photos. I had taken my son a few years ago.

Lucy Worsley: Oh, great.

Jace Lacob: He was almost five at the time, and he absolutely loved it.

Lucy Worsley: Oh, lovely.

Jace Lacob: You mentioned walking through history. I just want to drill down a little more. What was it like living at the palace and how did it put you in the mindset of someone living in Henry’s court?

Lucy Worsley: Well, at first it was very sort of weird and disorientating, because I had just moved from Scotland, where I’d been working for Glasgow Museums. And the reason that I was given this tiny little apartment in the Tudor kitchens part of the palace, which is vast, I mean, some people think that the English historic house is like Downton Abbey with an upstairs and a downstairs. But at Hampton Court, there’s a sort of a this side, which is the State Apartments, and then a that side, which is several acres of downstairs, except it’s not downstairs, it’s like a little city in its own right.

So, I was given the key to this little couple of rooms where Henry VIII’s sweet makers used to live and work. And I was told you can, you can live in there until the boiler is fixed in the place where you’re actually going to be living, which was in the Barrack Block, and I was in the inner security cordon. When I moved in, it was at this time of year, it was February, it was dark, it was foggy. I looked out of the window and all I could see was a Tudor courtyard full of mist.

It was quite an overwhelming and intimidating experience in a way. But it did mean that I had the advantage of learning my way around the building, which is vast. It’s a labyrinth. There are 15 courtyards. There are 1,300 rooms. I got a feel for the place, spending all my time there.

Jace Lacob: You have a masterful skill at bringing history to life, unpacking the social and the political and often moral conflicts at play within historical moments or figures, and investigating them through the lens of the 21st century. Is it true that your father, when you told him you would be reading history rather than science, said “You’ll be cleaning toilets for a living, my girl, with a history degree”?

Lucy Worsley: It is true. Much as he is not pleased to be reminded of this now. He’s retired now, but he was a scientist, and he wanted me to be a scientist, too. And I don’t want to set up some stupid division between art and science, because we need both artists and scientists in the world, right? But he was a bit disappointed that I didn’t follow in his footsteps.

But when he said that, when he said that I would make a living cleaning toilets with a history degree, he was wrong to say that, because there’s nothing wrong with cleaning toilets for a living. We need people who are going to clean toilets for a living, don’t we? But he was also curiously right, because I have ended up spending quite a lot of my time as a social historian and particularly working at Hampton Court Palace, talking to people about how toilets worked in history. People are endlessly fascinated by it. It’s a topic that even people who think that they don’t like history are going to want to know about that sort of thing.

Jace Lacob: You once said of Henry VIII, “If you made up the tale of Henry VIII’s six wives, no one would believe you. Divorce, followed by beheading, and then a tragic early death, another divorce, another beheading, and then the final lucky one, Catherine Parr, who got away and survived the old monster’s death.” Apart from the melodrama, why does Henry’s narrative still feel so relevant and powerful today?

Lucy Worsley: Oh, well, I’m all too sorry to say this, but the violence against women is obviously something that is still talked about in our society too. And I’ve really noticed a change during the 20 years that I spent with Henry VIII. When I started 20 years ago, it’s kind of like he was a bit of a superhero. People thought, wow, there was something special about that guy. He caused the English Reformation. He set up the English Navy. He did all of these important political things. But now when young people are coming in, say, to the Tower of London, you see them turning to their parent and saying, so he killed two of his wives here? What’s going on with that then?

And now he’s definitely an anti-hero. And people are fascinated by the darkness in him, as well as the way that he just straddles English history. It’s like he’s got one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot in the Renaissance. He’s colossal. You kind of can’t get away from him really, but you can definitely look at him from all angles.

Jace Lacob: On that note, while imprisoned in the tower for his alleged dalliance with Anne Boleyn and possibly even witnessing her execution, Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote, “These bloody days have broken my heart, my lust, my youth did them depart, and blind desire of estate who hastes to climb seeks to revert, of truth circa Regna tonat.” Is this ultimately then a story that also thunders through the realm hundreds of years later?

Lucy Worsley: Thunder rumbles round the throne. Yes, I think you’ve really summed up the atmosphere for the top people at the Tudor court. And of course, we’re still fascinated by the melodrama of that, the ups and the downs and the beheadings and the way that you get a sense that life was perilous.

Often people ask me, would you like to live in the past? And my answer is always, well, at what level of society? If I was going to live in Tudor England, I don’t think I would have liked to have worked on the land as most people did. That sounds muddy and laborious and painful. And I don’t think I would have liked to have been at the court either. The stakes were too high. There was power, but there was peril too.

And if I had to live anywhere in Tudor England, I would have chosen maybe a life in the city where actually women could have some autonomy and independence, maybe working as silk women, running businesses like, like Thomas Cromwell’s wife does. That’s the sort of safer level of society, I think.

Jace Lacob: On the note of court, Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn is executed. He quickly takes a new bride in Jane Seymour. How was each queen’s presence felt at court? Did the vibes, we’ll say, change depending on his wife at the time?

Lucy Worsley: Yes, yes very much so. Although, I think, because I’m a historian, it’s endlessly interesting just how scanty some of the evidence is from which we have built up these very clear imaginings of the Tudor world. It is fair to say, though, that Anne Boleyn’s court had an air of French chic about it. She had trained to be a courtier in France. She herself was highly intellectual. She liked engaging conversation. And when Jane Seymour came along, the tone changed because she basically didn’t. She didn’t enjoy lively dispute and conversation in the same way.

Anne Boleyn’s motto as Queen was, “The most happy”. And there is something a bit in your face about that. I’m the happy one. I’m the lucky one. And you get the sense that there was something almost arrogant about asserting her happiness in the face of her having won it so much at the expense of Catherine of Aragon. And a lot of people were not happy that Anne Boleyn was queen.

She also had a French motto that her servants wore on their uniforms, which basically translates as “Haters gonna hate”. That was Anne Boleyn. But on the other hand, Jane Seymour’s motto was “Bound to serve and obey”. It’s meek, isn’t it? It is mild. And people at the time said, look, the attraction is here, that she’s quiet. She wasn’t Catherine of Aragon, she wasn’t Anne Boleyn, who were both outspoken, challenging women. She wasn’t going to give Henry a hard time. And sadly, I think part of that might be linked to do with her education. She wasn’t as educated as the first two wives. We don’t have evidence of her reading books. So, I don’t think that she had the self-confidence of the educated woman.

But there’s also a gap in the evidence where Jane’s personality should be. And I think because of what happened to her two predecessors, one died in disgrace, the other beheaded, I think that maybe she deliberately kept a low profile. That’s a possible reading of her actions. One of the things that we hear quite early on in her matrimonial career is that before, well Anne Boleyn is still alive at this point, Henry VIII sent Jane Seymour a present of some golden coins, and she sent them back again and said, you can give me presents when I’m a married woman.

And it is actually hard to interpret this. Was she sending them back because she was virtuous or was she sending them back as a kind of sexual tease? “I’m holding out for marriage.” But certainly, the ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, thought that her brother had told her to send the coins back again, that she lacked agency in this decision. And Edward Seymour fancied being the brother of a queen, which is what ended up happening. So maybe he was calling the shots.

I myself err on the side of thinking that women in the past were kind of like me. I like to think of them having agency. So, I guess I like to think of her acting deliberately meek and mild in order to try to survive rather than just being a genuinely passive, empty headed kind of a person. There literally isn’t all that much evidence for her life because she was only queen for 18 months really. And compared with more than 20 years of Catherine of Aragon, we just don’t have the time for the evidence to build up.

Jace Lacob: I love the notion that she was more canny, that if you saw your predecessor be violently beheaded, you might want to tiptoe around your spouse. You might not want to push. You might want to walk on eggshells a bit. So, maybe there is some truth to that. But I love thinking that she does have more agency in this than just being empty headed and just acquiescing just out of a lack of agency or training or knowledge.

Lucy Worsley: When the pilgrimage of grace happens, which is this big religiously motivated rebellion in the north of England, in the sort of Catholic heartlands, Jane pleads for the lives of the rebels, which is, on the one hand, this is meek and mild behavior, like we think Jane Seymour carried out. On the other hand, she’s actually just acting within the recognized model of queenship. It is the job of a queen to beg for mercy on behalf of people who are in trouble.

This has always been the case throughout the Middle Ages, and it’s actually something that we also see Catherine of Aragon doing after a riot, the riot that’s known as the Black May Day. So, yeah, I’m not sure that we can see Jane herself being present in the action of pleading for the rebels. Maybe she was just doing what people thought that she ought to be doing.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: Cromwell was Henry’s fixer and was clearly a divisive figure at court. He had a lot of enemies, even among Henry’s supporters. How much of an outsized influence did Cromwell have over the court, over Henry?

Lucy Worsley: Well, that depends which historians you believe, really. There are different thoughts about this. The Cromwell that Hilary Mantel gives us is really based on the life’s work of the post war historian Geoffrey Elton, who’s one of the granddaddies of Tudor history. And Elton was a man of the 20th century. He liked the idea that one individual could shape politics, and he fixed upon Cromwell as this kind of superhero fixer character. Somebody not of high birth, as is constantly thrown down Cromwell’s throat by people in the drama, certainly. “You’re not a nobleman, you’re jumped up, you’re no good!” But we root for people like that, don’t we? It makes for dramatic tension.

But you can argue that the changes that Cromwell made would have happened anyway. I suppose in very broad terms, England has become a much more peaceful place because the Wars of the Roses have ended and the traditional role and power of the mean old dukes like the Duke of Norfolk, it used to have been the job of a duke to raise an army from their bit of the country and therefore to support the king. But once we get into the 16th century, they don’t need to do that anymore. There’s less fighting. The army is organized more on a national basis. In fact, the Navy is coming to be more important. So, bureaucrats are taking over the jobs that these old dukes used to do. And so, if it wasn’t Cromwell, it would have been somebody else with those skills annoying the dukes and governing in a much more sort of modern and recognizable way.

And here’s a sort of counterintuitive thing that was good about Henry’s very well publicized failure to have a male heir. Because there was all of this dispute about the, well, questions were constantly hovering over the succession, people were really worried that there might be civil war again. It’s not obvious who’s going to be the next king, and people are really worried about what’s going to happen if he dies. Therefore, people step up and strengthen structures like parliament to avoid it. Can you see what I mean? If it’s not obvious what the future holds, then society is more invested in the structures that will minimize the possibility of civil war.

Jace Lacob: Nature abhors a vacuum, so something has to rush to fill it, so you might as well build something that can withstand that.

Lucy Worsley: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: Lucy Worsley Investigates: Bloody Mary looks at the tarnished legacy of England’s first queen who happened to be on the losing side of history. You’ve written about Mary before in your historical fiction novel Lady Mary, which follows her from age 9 to 21. Have historians given her a beating because she was Catholic, because she was a woman, because of her religious persecutions of Protestants, or was it an orchestrated smear campaign?

Lucy Worsley: All of the above, I would say. Poor Mary has traditionally been seen as this kind of villainous, and she’s known as Bloody Mary in an excellent piece of Protestant branding for the undeniable fact that she burnt a lot of people for religious reasons. She burnt a lot of people for what she defined as Protestant heresy. Listen, I don’t condone burning anybody. Nobody should be burned. That’s obvious, right? But it’s also obvious to me that Henry VIII and the great Elizabeth I were burning Catholics.

This was the behavior of rulers in the 16th century. She wasn’t uniquely cruel. And that had always bothered me, that she seemed to get a harsher kicking from history than the Protestants did. Because, certainly in this country, the Protestants eventually win the propaganda battle and tell the story their way.

Also, I feel that she’s been underestimated because of the challenges that she had to overcome to rule. She was the first regnant queen in England, which meant, doing things for the first time is always really difficult. She was the only Tudor in the 16th century who had to rouse an army in order to seize the throne by force. She had to go through the male ceremony of coronation in an entirely new way. She had to write the rule book and create a blueprint for how it was to be done. And then she had to negotiate the whole issue of marriage and sharing her power and having an heir, having children.

And this is where it went wrong for her. You could say, she shouldn’t have married Philip of Spain. Deeply unpopular. Shouldn’t have raised the possibility that she was going to have children, and then, in her case, tragically, because she really wanted them, and then failed to do so. And I think that not least amongst her achievements was showing her half-sister Elizabeth what mistakes not to make.

Jace Lacob: I love that entire notion that her experience has taught Elizabeth which mistakes to avoid. Which begs the question then I guess, do you ultimately see Mary I as a tragic figure?

Lucy Worsley: I think she saw herself as a tragic figure. So, there is something in that, definitely. And once she had embarked upon a road that she wanted to lead towards motherhood, you can really see this physically manifesting itself in her body. She went through this really unusual medical experience that you might call a phantom pregnancy, which is where somebody wishes to be pregnant so much that their body physically responds, hormones kick in, they appear to be pregnant, their belly swells up. So, she was absolutely committed to this, to the extent of her well-being because there was no pregnancy, she was shamed by this, and left in a condition of extreme personal pain.

Throughout her life, you can certainly argue that she experienced what today we would describe as depression, periods of loneliness, fearfulness, inability to function normally or to move. And in Mary’s case, my goodness, well, you can see so many things that were going on in her childhood that might well have exacerbated that, the way that her father and mother treated her when she was little.

Jace Lacob: I want to talk about that. You were able to hold a miniature portrait of Mary painted when she was a girl. You’re looking at that miniature and you say that Mary was a much loved six-year-old. She was the only child of Henry and Catherine’s to survive. What did she mean to her parents outside of just sort of being a dynastic link in the chain?

Lucy Worsley: First and foremost, she was a dynastic link in the chain. That’s her key value, certainly in the eyes of her father, because he thinks that he can use her as a sort of counter in the chess game of European politics. But her mother clearly has a very, I don’t want to say uniquely warm relationship with her, but one that’s almost surprising given the way that children in the 16th century were taken away from their parents and brought up by different sets of staff all together. So very early on, Mary and her mother were not spending huge amounts of time together. And yet, the relationship between them, lifelong, was extremely strong and supportive.

And her father’s effect on her life was just horrible because she did experience all the things that daughters were supposed to feel, feelings of dutifulness and obedience, and yet her religious beliefs and her mother’s support meant that she just could not do what her father wanted her to do, which was to recognize that his marriage to Anne Boleyn had taken precedence over his marriage to Mary’s mother, that Mary herself was now illegitimate, and that Henry had broken with Rome and become the head of the Church of England.

And this resulted in her being estranged from both of her parents, for long, long periods of her teenage years and threats of physical violence against her. And that sort of thing, it cannot have been anything but hugely traumatizing to a teenager.

Jace Lacob: She’s sent to Ludlow Castle in Shropshire. She’s occasionally permitted to return to court. By the time she reaches 17, however, she’s stripped of her royal title when her father splits from the Catholic Church. She becomes Lady Mary rather than Princess Mary. They’re at a distance, but what was their relationship like at that point?

Lucy Worsley: Well, she doesn’t see her father for five years during this long period of estrangement, and neither is she allowed to see her mother by his decision, but they do send each other secret letters. They have Catholic supporters, servants, people like Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador, are able to smuggle messages between them. So, she’s in a position of huge isolation and you can really see in a way that something steely is being forged in her soul during this period of incredible resistance that will come out later when she’s queen.

And as queen, she’s going to need it. It’s a very difficult job to be the queen. But perhaps she also takes it to excess, pursuing with single minded devotion this idea that she’s going to become a mother, to the extent of almost thinking herself into being one, which ultimately fails.

Jace Lacob: Did she believe that with the execution of Anne Boleyn that she might be permitted to return to court and maybe even her father’s good graces, that she might be able to exert a stronger claim over the throne than her sister Elizabeth?

Lucy Worsley: Well, all those possibilities opened up with the death of Anne Boleyn. Ironically, one of the things that had kept Anne Boleyn in place as queen was the continued life of Catherine of Aragon. And it’s actually when Catherine of Aragon died that things began to start to shift because Henry, by this point, was fed up with Anne Boleyn and was thinking, she’s not produced an heir, I need to think about starting to get rid of her.

So, the tectonic plates begin to shift even before Anne loses her life on the 19th of May, 1536. And one role that Jane Seymour plays in her meek and mild iteration of Tudor queenship is interceding for Mary with Henry, trying to bring the family back together again. Mary at this point had a terrible relationship with her half-sister Elizabeth, who had obviously completely pushed her down the pecking order by being the legitimate as opposed to the illegitimate member of the family. And this would play out in various painful ways between the two of them for the rest of both of their lives.

At one point Mary has Elizabeth put into the Tower of London thinking that she’s involved in a treasonous plot against her. These are half-sisters. It’s really tough the way being a Tudor royal person messes with your family relationships. Having said that though, I’m being slightly ahistorical in saying that because Tudor royal family life is not family life as we know it today.

Jace Lacob: Unlike in Hilary Mantel’s novel, there is no historical evidence that Cromwell made a promise to Catherine of Aragon to protect Mary. How would you describe the relationship between Cromwell and Mary? Did he have any romantic designs on her?

Lucy Worsley: I don’t think so. I think this is a novelist’s legitimate use of the imagination. There’s the vaguest, most gossipy rumor that he had some kind of an intended relationship with Princess Mary. And it comes down to a translation issue. I mentioned Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, whose letters are written in French. And he mentions that Cromwell had given Mary a gift.

And for many years, many historians have described this gift as a ring, which sounds kind of wedding-y, it sounds like a courtship gift. But you can argue that that’s a mistranslation of the word, and that actually he was talking about a medal, which is less wedding-y, it’s less of a courtship gift. And the gift was inscribed with a little motto about being obedient. That doesn’t sound very wedding-y, does it? So, I can see why that story has arisen with regard to Cromwell, but I don’t actually think that there’s anything in it.

Jace Lacob: Historical dramas, or indeed historical fiction, always take liberties with the narrative in the name of drama. You’ve been both historian and historical fiction author. How do you reconcile the emotional truth of a drama with the truth of history? Can you watch historical drama without having a critical eye?

Lucy Worsley: I can. I can. And I know this is an unpopular opinion of mine, but when I’m watching drama, I’m there for the story. I’m there for the character. I’m there for the emotional truth. I’m there for what you might call wisdom rather than knowledge. But I am aware that a lot of people watch drama thinking that they’re going to get a history lesson, thinking that they’re going to learn what really happened, and whenever a new historical drama comes out, people are always asking me, is it accurate?

And I’m like, why are you even asking that? If you want to know what really happened in the past, don’t watch a feature film. Don’t watch a drama. Watch a really well researched and well presented history documentary. That’s what you need to do. People make this category error, thinking that dramas somehow have a duty to show us what really happened in the past. And I am aware that that is how people consume them. So, the makers of dramas perhaps have a duty not to completely mislead, but the idea that you can present an accurate picture of the past through a drama is impossible. That’s not what drama is for.

Jace Lacob: In your time living and working at Hampton Court, did you ever see a ghost in the haunted gallery or elsewhere? And did Tom Hiddleston ask you this exact question while you gave him a tour?

Lucy Worsley: He did, he did. It’s the question that I have been asked the most often over the years. And I will tell you this, if you and I were to be standing in the most haunted room of Hampton Court Palace, which is called The Haunted Gallery, I promise you that it’s highly likely you’d experience something that I’ve experienced, and that many other people have experienced too, which is a drop in the temperature. There’s definitely a cold spot in the corner of the gallery.

And it’s haunted by the ghost of Catherine Howard. This is the story, wife number 5 out of 6, who makes her appearance just at the end of The Mirror and The Light. And in 1541, Henry was in the chapel at Hampton Court when he was handed a letter telling him that Catherine Howard had a sexual history that he didn’t know about when she married him. And this was terrible news for Catherine Howard. This was the end of her marriage.

And the ghost story is that the news of the revelation got back to her in the queen’s apartments and that she came running along the gallery in order to beg her husband for her life. But she was intercepted by the guards. And this cold spot, this ghostly presence is this horrible, dragging, screaming moment as she gets taken back to her rooms in Hampton Court Palace from whence she is taken to the Tower of London and she is executed and she never sees her husband again.

However, and I’m sorry to tell you this, I think that the cold spot in the haunted gallery is the draft coming up the stairs. And part of the reason I think that is because we don’t hear about these ghosts at Hampton Court Palace until we get to the 19th century. They’re just not there in the 18th century record.

In the 19th century, then it’s ghost story, ghost story, ghost story every week. And that’s because by then the palace had been split up into what are called grace and favour apartments. And they were given to retired courtiers by the grace and the favor of the monarch. And what all the retired courtiers wanted was a better apartment. The palace wasn’t being used by royalty anymore. It had just become a kind of retirement home. So, their correspondence to the Lord Chamberlain is hilarious because it says, I need a better apartment, mine is too damp. Or I need a better apartment, mine is too haunted. So, the ghosts kind of got invented as part of a real estate property market in Victorian times.

Jace Lacob: I love that. Thank you very much Lucy Worsley.

Lucy Worsley: Thank you.

Next time, Thomas Cromwell tries to stay one step ahead of the king.

CLIP

Cardinal Wolsey: We understand princes are not like other men. They have to hide from themselves, so they’re not dazzled by their own light. Henry will take the credit for all of your good ideas and you the blame for his bad ones. When fortune turns against you, you will feel the lash. I know this.

Next Sunday, we dive deeper into the real-life history behind Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light and dissect fact from fiction with Wolf Hall production researcher Kirsten Claiden-Yardley.