“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” picks up where “Wolf Hall” left off, amid the gruesome beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536, which we get to see this time in even more gruesome detail.

In real life, however, there has been an unusually long gap between series and sequel. It has been 10 years since the release of “Wolf Hall,” based on the first two novels in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series. This means that in “The Mirror and the Light,” based on the final novel, the actor Mark Rylance is a decade older than the 50-something character he is playing.

And it works, because the Cromwell in the new six-episode series (beginning Sunday on PBS’s “Masterpiece”) is haunted and beaten down by his work as Henry VIII’s political and matrimonial fixer, a job that included fabricating the evidence that led to Boleyn’s murder. In that first scene both we and Cromwell are reliving the beheading (necessary, from Henry’s point of view, because Anne, his second wife, had not borne a son).

“The Mirror and the Light” is very much of a piece with the earlier “Wolf Hall,” written and directed by the same men — Peter Straughan and Peter Kosminsky — and with many actors returning to their roles, including Rylance and, as Henry, Damian Lewis. Among relatively recent historical costume dramas, the shows set a standard for polish and seriousness.

But as the story of the commoner Cromwell’s decline and abrupt fall, “The Mirror and the Light” has an entirely different feel than the up-by-the-boot-straps, grimly celebratory “Wolf Hall.” The mood is nervous and ominous, as Cromwell begins to make errors and give in to his emotions. And it habitually casts its eye back in time, as Cromwell reassesses the often dirty work he has done. Picking up on a device from the novel, “The Mirror and the Light” continually drops in snippets of Cromwell’s guilty memories in the form of bits of film we have already seen across the two series.

His guilt even has a supporting role in the form of the dead Cardinal Wolsey, the beloved master and mentor whose downfall Cromwell was unable to prevent. Cromwell now has late-night conversations with Wolsey’s slightly diaphanous ghost, scenes that are a little cringey but that do us the favor of keeping Jonathan Pryce and his archly disapproving eyebrows in the show.

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