In the final seconds of Wolf Hall — the six-part BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s best-selling novels of high-stakes intrigue at the court of Henry VIII — the camera lingers on the terrified face of a man who has just achieved total political triumph. The man is Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, a blacksmith’s son whose improbable rise to power has just been capped by the latest of his machinations on behalf of his monarch: the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second queen, on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason. (Her real crime, as everyone knew, was her failure to provide…