I watched the first episode, and have to agree with pretty much everything that Weigel (among others) has said, here. My own observation was that the show (and presumably Mantel, though I can’t imagine why I’d read her books) “jumped the shark” early in the first episode, when Cromwell’s domestic life was portrayed in a scene clearly plagiarized from common depictions (not least Bolt’s) of More’s domestic life. Say what you will, but not even the most pro-Henry Tudor or Reformation apologist views the mercenary, break-eggs-to-make-omelets Cromwell as remotely humane or gentlemanly. He was a hatchet man, and like most of them he overplayed his hand in the end. As Weigel says:
[Wolf Hall] proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere.
The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was to take down the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons—the Thomas More the Catholic Church canonized—and her instrument for doing so is More’s rival in the court of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell.
Hillary Mantel does not lack for chutzpah, for Cromwell has long been considered a loathsome character and More a man of singular nobility. In the novel Wolf Hall, however, the More of Robert Bolt’s play is transformed into a heresy-hunting, scrupulous prig, while Cromwell is the sensible, pragmatic man of affairs who gets things done, even if a few heads get cracked (or detached) in the process. All of which is rubbish, as historians with no Catholic interests at stake have made clear.