(bright music) - There are a number of very strong women in this piece, it's not the central character of Anne Boleyn in this one, but there are a number of women.

Jane Seymour, who you get the impression in the first series, that he himself is falling in love with, and then has to step back when he witnesses Henry VIII falling in love with her.

- My Lord, Privy Seal.

I think Jane and Cromwell are in love with each other.

He's one of the very few people in her life that she can rely on, that she trusts, that she confides in.

It's just a really important relationship in her life, and I think there's a huge amount of pain that you see underlying that exists in lots of the scenes where I think they would if they could have been together, and then the king gets in the way.

(laughs) (hands clap) (feet stomp) - Henry was an interesting character in spite of his genocidal tendencies.

He believed in love, he believed in romantic love, he wanted love, he wanted to feel love and be loved, and I think he felt he could have this with Jane Seymour.

- Another fascinating character, Princess Mary, Lady Mary, the daughter of Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

- I am bound to you now, Lord Cromwell.

- She was just a young girl in the first series, and now is showing all the intelligence and kind of inbred blood of a ruling person, someone of a family of enormous authority.

- You would not wish me to marry a Spaniard, I think.

They might seek to use me as the figurehead for an invasion.

I think Cromwell is very adept at remaining quiet and playing these incredible long games, and gambling and winning, and Mary is a gambler also.

They've met their match in one another in a lot of ways, which is thrilling.

- Perhaps now that the king has spared her and brought her back to court, she feels she no longer needs you.

- The woman who upsets him most of all, or disturbs him most of all, I should say, is Cardinal Wolsey's illegitimate daughter, who has become a nun.

Cromwell goes up to visit her, to offer her her freedom, and in offering her her freedom, he invites her to come stay at his house.

- Live with you?

- And then finds himself inviting her to marry someone.

Why not marry me if you could like marriage?

- Marriage?

- So his heart's kind of wide open to her at that moment.

He hardly, he knows her, but it's to do with his love for Woolsey and for what Wolsey did for him.

And she, much to his horror, says, you betrayed my father.

And this becomes one of the many arrows into the heart or the body of Cromwell that gradually builds up over The Mirror and the Light.