Odds bodkins, gadzooks, zounds and other declarations of intense antiquated dismay, sirrah! Anyone hoping Martine Brant's penultimate instalment of C4's premier civil war drama would provide a chink of hope for the thus far massively beleaguered Angelica Fanshawe (Andrea Riseborough) would have found themselves gasping for air during an episode that positively reeked of despair. There were beheadings and betrayals. There were toppled hats, stabbed shins, sobbing monarchs, mutinous soldiers, ransacked churches and oppressed Catholics cowering in the small, virulent gap that separated churned land and apocalyptic sky. First up, though, was some blood. And screaming. And, forsooth, the messiest labour in television history.
Following the deaths of two husbands (the first blasted by the King's guards, the second expunged at the behest of putative best mate Cromwell), a stint as an accidentally murderous highwayma'am had landed our troubled heroine in prison. Here, awaiting execution, Angelica passed the time by giving birth. She needn't have bothered. "A boy," whispered proto-feminist midwife/Leveller Elizabeth Lilburne (Maxine Peake), gently bundling the small, gore-spattered corpse into a sack as Angelica shrieked in anguish. "He came too early into this world."
From this point on, everything went downhill on a three-legged carthorse. Perched on the gallows, a blank-eyed Angelica awaited death. "Men have sought to silence me all my days," she announced to cackling nemesis Joliffe (a splendidly puffy Tim McInnerny). "But you, sir, are the whore, for you sold your soul for a bag of gold." It was a noble, shiver-making adieu – not to mention an apt reminder that beneath that powdery, subjugated bosom pounded the heart of a Proper Rebel - and yet Angelica didn't die. Rescued, once again, by Sexby (John Simm, who has never been better), she returned the favour by joining the brooding mercenary in loveless matrimony.
Historically, events were crapper still. Red-eyed, twitchy Charles I (Peter Capaldi) got his tyrannical head chopped off. Royalist brigands reduced rural communities to screaming mulch. While Sexby blasted his way across Ireland with the New Model Army, Angelica joined a community of Diggers, whereupon, among fields of lowing serfs and dead corn, she befriended a man who looked like Ralf Little. Christian – for this, eyebrow-raisingly, was his name – spoke solely in wearisome pro-God aphorisms ("we are living in the last, and best days!" etc) but seemed a gentle, understanding sort. Her heart's compass began to spin. In this selfless, unattractive man, Angelica had found a reason to abandon a life of godless pessimism and embrace the notion of "universal love". Or had she?
Alas, in a wholly depressing twist, Christian was revealed - AVERT THY EYES NOW ALL YE WHO'D RATHER AVOID A MASSIVE SPOILER – as a bastard. A bastard in the pay of Joliffe, no less. In the back of a carriage, they guffawed over Angelica's gullibility and hatched a plan that would no doubt end in the Ultimate Destruction of Her Very Soul, By God. Then Sexby went crackers and almost raped her. The end.
It was an enormously depressing do. Mercifully, sanctuary was to be found in the ongoing magnificence of director Marc Munden. In his bold mitts The Devil's Whore is a hushed, icy gallery of brooding, Rembrandt-hued postcards, the cumulative effect of which is to present the mid 17th century as an era poised on the very brink of armageddon. If the man doesn't glean at least a nomination at next year's Baftas, I will eat Charles I's dead hat.
Verily, what thoughtest thee?
