We’ve reached the end of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, and that meant the end of Thomas Cromwell’s story. If you knew your history, you knew how this story was going to end.
Caution: There are some SPOILERS for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light series finale in this post.
At the end of the Wolf Hall sequel, Cromwell realized that karma had caught up to him. Everything he did to bring Anne Boleyn and her faction down was coming back to haunt him. People were doing the exact same thing to him, and it meant the exact same outcome.
Even those who had been risen up through Cromwell’s actions were turning against him. Of course, nobody could blame them considering how they would have been pulled down as well if they sided with him.
What really happened to Thomas Cromwell? (Was Wolf Hall accurate?)
Cromwell did, in fact, meet his end classed as a traitor to the Crown. As the show depicts, many of the crimes he was accused of were likely fabricated. There is no evidence that Cromwell was a Lutheran, and there is no evidence that he was plotting on marrying Lady Mary or Margaret Douglas. He was a man who wanted power, but he was also a smart man.
It was the power that got him. As you rise up in Henry VIII’s Court, there are always people looking to pull you down. Cromwell had seen this in the past, and he’d even been involved in it. Now he was seeing people turn against him. Gaining no respect from the men around him, it was only a matter of time before he would lose his head.
Like in the series, Cromwell never faced a trial to prove that he was a traitor. His death came via an Act of Attainder, because none of Cromwell’s enemies would have wanted to go up against him in a court of law since Cromwell had been a lawyer. He knew his way around the system, so a bill was the only way to ensure his guilty verdict and have him executed.
Henry VIII regretted his decision in life
Henry could have prevented the execution, but he often acted on his current feelings. He hated his marriage to Anne of Cleves, and he blamed Cromwell for it. Once Cromwell was able to find a way to get him out of the marriage, he refused to listen to Cromwell’s cries of mercy.
While Henry VIII didn’t necessarily regret a lot of his actions, there are historical texts that suggest he did regret this one. He would eventually raise Cromwell’s son, Gregory, up despite his father being deemed a traitor. This type of ending would have usually led to all later Cromwells being stripped of the title.
Cromwell was executed, and it took three blows of the ax because the executioner wasn’t that great — this may have been planned by Cromwell’s enemies to make the death more painful. He is buried at St. Peter ad Vincula, which is where Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard (the fifth wife of Henry VIII) have also been buried.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is available to stream on PBS.org.
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