This script has been lightly edited for clarity.

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

An ill wind blows through Britain. King Henry VIII prepares for his wedding, his third, this time to Jane Seymour. But meanwhile, his current wife, Anne Boleyn, prepares for death as she makes her way down from the tower and onto the executioner’s scaffolding. The blade swiftly strikes, it is the work of but a moment.

CLIP

Rafe: Done?

Cromwell: Done.

Rafe: Did it have to be this way, so bloody?

King Henry soon promotes Cromwell, his right-hand man, to the position of Lord Privy Seal. As monarch, Henry is known to keep those in his favor close to him. But for several years now, Henry has been unwilling to keep his own daughter, Mary Tudor, close. He confides in Cromwell that she refuses to sign the oath acknowledging Henry as the head of the Church. 

CLIP

Henry: I shall not tolerate this defiance. Not from a child to whom I gave life.

Cromwell: She loves you, majesty, she loves you. I will convince her to take the oath.

Meanwhile, Cromwell takes it upon himself to tend to unfinished business with another family, that of his late master, Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell visits Wolsey’s daughter Dorothea, but is far less successful in tying up those loose ends.

CLIP

Dorothea: Your person is not defective, at least not so defective as your nature and your deeds.

Cromwell: I see. I see. I think it is my religion you do not like. I love the gospel. I follow it, I will always follow it. Your father understood that.

Dorothea: My father understood everything. He understood you betrayed him.

Today, production researcher and historian Kirsten Claiden-Yardley joins the podcast to tease fact from fiction in the first two episodes of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.

Jace Lacob: This week we are joined by Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light production researcher, Kirsten Claiden-Yardley. Welcome.

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Jace Lacob: Thanks for coming back. So episode one of The Mirror and the Light begins with the execution of Anne Boleyn, as we see Anne traveling to the tower and her execution, intercut with Henry preparing for his wedding. Did the two events occur at roughly the same time in reality or close to it?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: Yes. Yes, they did. It’s not quite interleaved in the same way. In the show they’re showing it almost as if it’s happening exactly at the time. There is a little bit of a delay. What happens is that Anne Boleyn is executed and the following day, Jane Seymour gets engaged to Henry VIII. So those happen really closely, and then it is actually ten days until they get married. There is a bit of a gap, but I think still for a lot of people, in terms of what you would consider proper time to wait after the death of one’s spouse, you know, 10 days doesn’t feel like very much time. Or, 11 days from the death of Anne Boleyn to the marriage to Jane Seymour does feel rather rushed. But yes, that is sort of Henry’s style.

Jace Lacob: He’s nothing if not impatient, I guess.

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: Indeed.

Jace Lacob: Before she ascends the scaffold, Anne hands out coins to the spectators, what was behind such a gesture?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: So, there’s probably a few different things going on there. Some of it is probably just an element of tradition. It’s what you do if you can afford to at an execution. Behind it though, are beliefs rooted around charity and death and the afterlife. Obviously, with Anne Boleyn, we tend to think of her sort of in terms of Protestantism and religious reform. But obviously, she’s grown up in a world where in her youth and her childhood, she’d have been surrounded by ideas that you want people to pray after your death. So you give money to people in the hope that they’ll pray for you.

And whilst Anne herself doesn’t necessarily adhere to those, there’s perhaps an element of, in your last moments, you might sort of return to kind of those beliefs. You don’t quite know what’s going to happen. And even if she doesn’t truly believe in prayers for the dead and prayers for her soul, there’s still ideas around charity and what’s expected of you as a high status person setting a good example.

So right up to the end of her life, she’s wanting to model admirable behavior, and that includes giving charity, even to the end, in the hope that this is how she’s going to be remembered. She’s going to be a model of, in that moment, of facing your death. She still has that kind of poise and charity.

Jace Lacob: Noblesse oblige until the very, very end.

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: Yes.

Jace Lacob: Amazing. Cromwell offers the ambassador, Eustace Chapuys some strawberries. And Chapuys is horrified that the English eat strawberries raw, as those on the continent at the time would only eat them baked into tarts. What is behind this exchange in Chapuys’ disgust? Was the humble strawberry suspect at the time?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: So, there were concerns to do with fruit. And it’s to do with understandings of science, and how your body works, and your humours, and your balance, and do you have too much wet, do you have too much cold, do you have too much hot, do you have too much dry? And so fruit, fresh fruit, was viewed as not necessarily entirely healthy. It’s okay. And to eat some fresh fruit is fine, but you don’t want to overdo it. So there’s some beliefs like that that are quite strange to us now, but that’s the science of the time.

Jace Lacob: Always back to those humors. Cromwell gives Mary a gift of a horse and she renames the horse Pomegranate.

CLIP

Mary: My lord Cromwell?

Cromwell: My lady?

Mary: I forgot to thank you for the dapple grey. She is a gentle creature, as you promised.

Lady Shelton: Madam, the king is waiting.

Mary: Lord Cromwell sent me a pretty mount from his own stable. Her name was Douceur. It is a good name, but I have renamed her. I have called her Pomegranate. It was my mother’s emblem.

Jace Lacob: Did Mary actually rename the horse as an act of defiance, despite swearing the oath of supremacy and renouncing her mother? Or is this invented for the series?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: I think that is invented. It is true that Cromwell gave her horses at around that time. It’s that scene where she has this meeting where she gets welcomed back to her father and Jane, and it’s very much this kind of aside to Cromwell, but it’s the sort of conversation that doesn’t really get recorded.

It wouldn’t be written down particularly. She stops deliberately, and kind of calls him to the side to make this very pointed comment to him. And I certainly haven’t come across a source which references the horse being called Pomegranate. I know there’s a series of letters where she talks about the horse that she’s been given, and she talks about her pleasure on riding him, and that she’s hoping that it’s going to improve her health, because she hasn’t been able to do much riding. But in those particular letters, she just refers to “the horse” and “him”, she doesn’t give it a name.

Jace Lacob: So Mary is presented to Jane Seymour, who’s now Henry’s wife. Jane gives her a diamond ring, which Henry then pockets. Jane Seymour was said to have urged Henry to make peace with Mary. What do we know historically about the dynamic between Mary and Jane?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: I would say we don’t know a huge amount, and I think that’s partly because of people’s perspectives of Jane as much as anything. She tends to get portrayed as this very meek and mild queen. Some people probably in the past have dismissed her as slightly dull, kind of lacking some of that spark that Anne Boleyn has said to have had. And I think that’s the sort of view of her that is beginning to be changed. I know there are historians working on Jane Seymour specifically at the moment, trying to give a bit more nuance to our understanding of her.

But at the moment, it’s sort of a lack of in depth studies of her, and as a result some of her relations with people around her perhaps haven’t been examined in the same depth as, for instance, Anne Boleyn, we have a lot of biographies about her. People return to her again and again and again from different perspectives. And, I would say people haven’t quite looked at the dynamics of Jane Seymour’s relationships with people in the same detail. So we don’t know quite as much. And in the case of Mary as well, even in their biographies, this period can get quite sort of shrunk down, if you see what I mean. It becomes a few pages in a longer book to cover it.

As you say, she gets invited for this meeting. She doesn’t come back to court immediately. They’re kind of anticipating all the time that Mary’s going to be invited back to court. And it takes a while, but there’s various instances where she does meet on occasion with Jane Seymour and with her father together. So, she’s not as isolated as she was. But there hasn’t been a huge amount written about the quality of the relationship between Mary and Jane.

Jace Lacob: Norfolk was said to have been violent toward Mary in an effort to bully her into signing the oath, calling her a traitor. What sort of threats did he make against Mary and did that contribute to the rivalry between Norfolk and Cromwell?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: The incident between Norfolk and Mary is in some ways, a little bit toned down for the show. We have a report afterwards where he said that she’s so disobedient that if she was his daughter, he would have beaten her. And he actually goes so far as to say he would have knocked her head, I think it’s “against the wall until it’s as soft as a baked apple.”

Jace Lacob: Wow.

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: So, it’s not necessarily that he is physically violent to her, but he’s saying that he wished he could be. I don’t know that it particularly soured Norfolk and Cromwell’s relationship in real life above other political differences that they have. There is a degree of fictionalizing, of kind of expanding on that relationship between Cromwell and Mary for the show. In actual fact, during this period where they’re working on Mary’s submission, Cromwell doesn’t actually go to see her in person. In real life, it was all conducted by letters and other people visited. Because that relationship has been slightly tweaked, it then perhaps makes it look like there would have been more of a kind of conflict between Norfolk and Cromwell coming out of it than there was in real life.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: So, Episode Two. In the Tudor court, there are rumors swirling that Cromwell has romantic designs on Lady Mary, and is actively courting her, with the goal to marry Lady Mary and move even closer into Henry’s orbit. Was there court gossip at the time about this relationship, about Cromwell being Mary’s valentine?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: So, I don’t know if there’s gossip specifically about the valentine. The reason that we know about the valentine thing is actually from an account book, a list of payments being made out of Cromwell’s household, where there’s an entry saying that a certain amount of money has been sent to Mary because “my lord was her valentine.” So it’s not the sort of source that tells you about gossip. It’s a very factual source. There certainly is gossip around, and it’s not made up completely by Hilary Mantel that this is something that people gossiped about.

Jace Lacob: Was there a notion as well that Cromwell wanted to marry Jane Seymour?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: I don’t think there is. This is something that I’ve noticed a bit with the Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light portrayal of Cromwell is this very much this idea that either he wants to marry quite a few of the female characters or quite a few of the female characters are interested in him. And there isn’t a huge amount of evidence for any of that. He helped Tudor women. We have quite a few examples of letters from women being written to him, asking for his assistance in various different situations. But it’s not clear that it really goes beyond that kind of request for patronage. So, I personally think that a lot of that is sort of invention for the purposes of the storytelling.

Jace Lacob: Cromwell tracks down Wolsey’s daughter, Dorothea, who’s now living as a cloistered nun at Shaftesbury. He proposes to Dorothea out of what he says is a loyalty to her late father.

CLIP

Cromwell: I will marry you, mistress, if you’ll have me. I am, I’m not sure you know this, but I am, long time I’m a widow. And I like the graces of person, but I am rich, likely to grow richer. I have good houses, you’d find me generous. I would like to have more children, or, yes, or not. As you wish. If you want a marriage in name only so that you have a place in the world, for your father’s sake.

Dorothea: In name only? Are you offering to marry me or not?

Cromwell: All I mean is that you are alone in the world, and so am I. For your father’s sake, I would cherish you.

Jace Lacob: Dorothea says that Wolsey had told her that Cromwell had betrayed him. Is there any evidence that this exchange or the proposal happened in reality, or does this fall into that same category?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: This falls into the same category of fictionalization. There is very little evidence for Dorothea. Essentially, there is a letter that comes in to Cromwell when they’re carrying out surveys of the monasteries, and it’s around the time that they’re trying to put an age limit on when you can join a monastery or a nunnery.

So under a certain age, you’re not allowed to take holy orders. And the person who’s visiting Shaftesbury Avenue has come across a young woman who’s under that age but doesn’t want to leave the monastery and she’s Wolsey’s daughter. So he writes a letter to Cromwell telling him that he’s found this situation and that’s pretty much it.

The only time that Dorothea is mentioned again is there’s a list from when the nunnery is shut down listing the people who are receiving pensions, sort of the payment that they received when the monastery was closed down. So pretty much everything else about her is an invention by Hilary Mantel. We don’t know that Cromwell ever met her, ever corresponded in person. It’s not even entirely clear that he even knew that she existed before this letter came in.

Jace Lacob: Cromwell commissions a ring for Mary inscribed with the words, “In praise of obedience”. It’s a gift that Henry co-ops, presenting it to his daughter himself. Did Cromwell commission a ring for Mary, or was it another item?

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: There’s a little bit of debate about this and whether there’s been a mistranslation. So Diarmaid Macculloch, who wrote a very thorough biography of Thomas Cromwell, which came out between the two TV series, he thinks that it was actually a pendant and that people have misinterpreted the source over the years. And I think his logic is that the length of the text would make for a very bulky ring. And we’ve got other examples of pendants being made around the same time, including commissioned by Cromwell. So he thinks it’s more likely that it was a pendant. I think just for creative reasons, it was decided that for the purposes of the show, the ring suited how they wanted to do that scene better.

Jace Lacob: Kirsten Claiden-Yardley, thank you so very much.

Kirsten Claiden-Yardley: You’re welcome, and I hope everyone’s been enjoying the show.

Production researcher Kirsten Claiden-Yardley will join us at the end of each episode this season of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light on MASTERPIECE Studio for more historical commentary. Keep listening for more insights into what’s historical fact, and what’s dramatic fiction.

Next time, Cromwell orchestrates Lady Mary’s return to the palace.

CLIP

Gregory: What does she want?

Cromwell: To thank me, for caring for her like a father.

Gregory: A father?

Tune in next week as we sit down with Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light star Lilit Lesser, to examine how their character balances safety with conviction.