You are a cultured man with a humorous turn of phrase. You are astute and subtle, but also passionately engaged in Katherine’s cause, and you give wholehearted commitment to her, and then to her daughter Mary. For you, this is not just a matter of duty, it’s personal. You labour under certain disadvantages; you don’t speak English. But who does, in the Europe of the 1530s? (How much English you understand is a matter of debate.) Visiting Henry’s Court, you never know what to expect. You have to swallow insults and threats, being snubbed and ignored. You are bobbing about in a sea of barbarians. Really, the only thing that makes life bearable is your regular suppers with Thomas Cromwell.
With Cromwell you can rattle along in colloquial French, your native tongue. You can pick up all the gossip. It may not be accurate, and you are aware that he may be teasing and misleading you, and yes, you know he’s the Antichrist. But you can’t help but like him, you tell the Emperor. He’s so generous and so entertaining and neighbourly. You do believe he’s on the Emperor’s side, if only he could be brought to say so.
It takes all your courage to face Henry. Luckily you have a lot. You will not only face him but needle him, probing the areas of vulnerability. Perhaps, you say, he will never have a son: God has his reasons. Henry bellows at you: ‘Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?’
Your problem is this: your confidants are the old aristocratic families who support Katherine and Mary, and because you listen to them you misperceive the situation; you report to the Emperor several times that the English are ready to revolt and replace Henry, and you urge him to invade; in fact, the families you are involved with have little popular support. It is difficult for you to understand that the power structure is changing from below. There’s something you’re persistently not grasping. Perhaps it’s Cromwell. One day when you are deep in conversation, he starts to smile and can’t stop. You tell the Emperor that he has the grace to cover his mouth with his hand.
You are an arch-conspirator doomed to ineffectuality, a brave man on a failing mission. When the Emperor finally allows you to retire, on grounds of ill-health, you limp to the low countries and found a college for young men from your own country of Savoy. And you die peacefully, 1556: having made more of a mark on the history of England than you could ever have believed possible when you were sent among the savages.
SIR HENRY NORRIS
You are known as ‘gentle Norris’ the perfect courtier: emollient, but also, it seems, a man of genuine tact and kindness. You are chief of the King’s Privy Chamber, and Henry’s close friend; almost a brother: the man he wakes up to talk to, when he can’t sleep. Your closeness to him makes your friendship invaluable to other courtiers. You are at the centre of a network of patronage and favours. You are very powerful because you can control who is admitted to the King’s presence, and what he signs, and when. You grow discreetly rich. Like William Brereton, you are one of the ‘marcher lords’, with lands on the Welsh borders.
You are roughly Henry’s contemporary, and like him a star jouster, but you are also clever enough to take on a role in the management of his finances which is deliberately impenetrable: you are in charge of the ‘secret funds’.
This may be your undoing. When Thomas Cromwell comes marauding along, he doesn’t want secrets; he wants complete charge of the revenue and what happens to it. You may take a certain amount of pleasure in thwarting him. As long as you and your friends control how the King lives day to day, you can limit Cromwell’s access. It’s a setback when he is given rooms at Greenwich that communicate directly with Henry’s. But the Privy Chamber’s mandarin workings are very hard to challenge.
You are also aware that Cromwell is involved in a clean-up of border jurisdiction, and is intent on reforming the ineffectual government of Wales. You’re not stopping him. But you’re not exactly helping him either. The present situation suits you nicely.
You have an area of weakness; though you’re not a child, like Francis Weston, and you should know better, you’ve become too close to Anne Boleyn.
You are a widower, and you are considered engaged to Mary Shelton, Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting. You’d better hurry up, because Mary is being hotly pursued as a lover, not least by Weston. But you don’t hurry: why is that? Anne puts the question in public, on 30th April 1536. Tormented, you quarrel with her, and are overheard. It sounds as if you and Anne plan to marry, in the event of the King’s premature death. This is dangerous; it’s a short step from saying ‘the King might die’ to saying ‘the King will die.’ Preparing for a tournament at Greenwich, you are ignorant of the construction being placed on the quarrel.
On the day of the joust, Henry is in the spectator’s stands. You’re having a bad day; your horse acts up and won’t enter the lists, and Henry offers you one of his own standby string of mounts. But before the sport gets underway, Cromwell’s nephew, the irritatingly confident Richard, strides up to Henry and whispers something to him: a nasty piece of news. Henry rises from his place. He will ride back to London. You are commanded to ride with him.
On the journey he tells you that you are an adulterer. You have slept with his wife. You are shocked; and probably, you are also innocent. Confess, he says, and I’ll be good to you. There can be mercy.
You don’t believe it. It’s an escalating horror. Back in Whitehall you are interrogated by Master Treasurer, William Fitzwilliam, one of Cromwell’s wingmen. You admit something. Perhaps that, yes, you are in love with Anne. You immediately retract what you have said. You don’t admit adultery. But you seem resigned to what follows. You make no inelegant protest. Perhaps you have too much experience to think you can fight off Cromwell. You must wonder why the King has so abruptly turned against you. Possibly you know the one secret Henry tries to keep from the world; he’s sometimes impotent. Perhaps Anne told you. But perhaps it was Henry himself, in an outbreak of late-night confidence: later regretted, and with fatal consequences. Perhaps he thought you were laughing at him, together with his wife: that’s the one thing he can’t forgive.
SIR WILLIAM BRERETON
You come from a powerful Cheshire family and, like your friend Norris, you are a marcher lord, with lands on the disturbed and contentious Welsh border. You are a member of Henry’s Privy Chamber, one of his inner circle, but when you are arrested and named as one of the Queen’s lovers, there is a certain amount of incredulity. No one thinks you are particularly close to Anne. Thomas Wyatt, after your death, has trouble writing a farewell verse about you. He says he hardly knows you and, frankly, not too many people are complaining about your demise.
Thomas Cromwell believes in economy of means. He’s looking for ‘lovers’, and you’re standing about. Alas for romance, it’s all about Welsh government. In 1534, you execute, illegally, a Welshman called Eyton, who had killed one of your servants in a fight, but who has been acquitted by a London jury. This is what Cromwell has set his face against: the arbitrary ‘justice’ meted out by little lords. He marks your card. But you’re too arrogant to notice.
On the scaffold you seem free from illusion: ‘I have deserved the death.’ You can hardly complain and, to your credit, you don’t. You have to learn the new, Cromwellian system of weights and measures: one English courtier, in high favour with the King and from a powerful family, is worth no more than one obscure and friendless Welshman.
MARK SMEATON
You are about twenty-three at your death, but your origins are not known; they are humble. You are a talented musician brought up from teenage years in Wolsey’s household, and transferring to the Court at Wolsey’s fall. You are part of George Boleyn’s coterie and by 1535 you are suspiciously well-dressed and living beyond your official means. Where are you getting the money?
You appear to have become obsessed with the Queen. You lurk outside her rooms, looking lovelorn, in the hope of a word from her. She explains to you, ‘You cannot look to have me speak to you as if you were a gentleman, because you be an inferior person.’ You sigh, ‘A lo
ok suffices.’ You turn your back and melt away. And so you glide towards disaster.
At the end of April 1536, the Court is alive with rumour but you do not suspect anything when you are invited to Thomas Cromwell’s house in Stepney. You think you’re going to provide entertainment, but don’t guess as to its nature. By the time you leave the following day, en route to the Tower, you have confessed to being the Queen’s lover and have implicated several other men. There are rumours that you were tortured at Cromwell’s house and racked at the Tower. Torture is illegal in England without a royal warrant and it would not be like Cromwell to step outside the law. It’s most likely that you are terrorised or tricked or both. If you had been racked at the Tower you would probably have been unable to walk to your impending execution. As a sign of favour, because you’ve been so helpful, you are allowed a gentleman’s death by the axe instead of the common man’s demise at the end of a rope.
GEORGE BOLEYN, LORD ROCHFORD
The younger brother of Anne and Mary, you are recognised in your lifetime as an accomplished and attractive young man, but there is a curious blank in history where you should be. You were a busy Court poet but your verses are lost. You were said to be handsome but no picture remains. You were committed to religious reform but your only religious writings are translations. You are oddly insubstantial and so, in these plays, you are your clothes: flamboyant, expensive and a bit silly.
You were brought to Court by your father when you were ten, for the Christmas celebrations, and stayed on to become one of the King’s pages. You receive an excellent humanist education, speak some Italian as well as Latin and French, and are considered gifted. As you grow up you hardly know your sisters. This is quite usual for the time. But when you meet as adults, you and Anne become very close.
By the age of twenty, you are part of the King’s Privy Chamber. Wolsey threw you out in 1525 when he reorganised the King’s personal staff. But with both sisters, at one time or another, in the King’s bed, your success is assured. You really know nothing except Court life. As Anne and the King move towards marriage, you are sent on several embassies to France. Your inexperience is not appreciated but you don’t create any disasters. You’re a good talker, which Henry likes. Ambassador Chapuys finds you personable and a civilised young man to deal with, but says you are always starting arguments about religion.
You do not like your wife and are said to be a great womaniser. When Anne becomes Queen you become Lord Rochford and acquire several offices of State. Your path inevitably crosses and re-crosses the path of Thomas Cromwell. You have nuisance value to him and when you are made Warden of the Cinque Ports, an important security post, he steps in and countermands your orders. You protest, but it’s like spitting at a mountain in the hope you’ll flatten it. At thirty-two, you have not acquired the gravitas your status suggests. The centre of your own little world, surrounded by flatterers, trivial people like the musician Mark Smeaton, you may not know that the King suspects your circle of gossiping about him and laughing at him. You are probably astonished to find yourself on trial for treason, and in addition accused of incest. You speak intelligently at your trial, Cromwell says, but it’s too late; you are said to have spread rumours of the King’s impotence, and in doing so you have put in jeopardy the status of the Princess Elizabeth. Because if the King is impotent, whose child is she? Possibly yours. You are dead before you can blink.
FRANCIS WESTON
You are a golden boy, son of a rich Surrey family. You are a page at Court, then a member of the Privy Chamber. You are a good athlete and musician, you show off and run up big debts, you gamble, you fall in love and have affairs with the ladies-in-waiting. You are just the kind of young man Henry loved to be with when he was twenty, and now he’s forty you remind him of the good old days.
You are close to George Boleyn, and one of the young men who is always in and out of the Queen’s rooms. You are married, with a young son. In April 1536, Anne Boleyn teases you, saying you do not love your wife but love Anne’s cousin, Mary Shelton. You reply ‘There is one I love better than these.’ The Queen asks, ‘Who?’ You reply, ‘It is yourself.’
So, if the fall of Anne is a Cromwellian plot, you are an obvious person to scoop up. You are not a player on the political scene, but you are part of the sweep-out of the Privy Chamber Cromwell wants to engineer. Your family offer the King a colossal sum of money if he will pardon you. There is no response and Cromwell refuses to meet your family.
In the Tower, Anne says she ‘most fears Weston’.
Presumably because you know things she doesn’t want known and she does not think you would stand up to pressure, or perhaps because she knows that you don’t like Norris and might implicate him.
On the scaffold you say that you’d intended to commit sins for twenty or thirty years, to ‘live in abomination’, and repent when you were a bit older. The transparent sincerity of this sentiment suggests you were not very bright.
Your wife remarries immediately.
SIR THOMAS BOLEYN
You are fifty when the action of the plays begin, a prominent courtier. On your mother’s side you have ancient royal blood, but your wealthy paternal grandfather was Lord Mayor of London; hence the jibe that your people are ‘in trade’. You are clever, well-connected, cultured, smooth and able; exactly the sort of man who gets on in the reign of Henry VIII.
You marry into the powerful Howard family, and so enhance your status, but you have a large number of children, so that you struggle financially for a number of years. Three children survive: Mary, Anne and George. You speak notably elegant French, and serve Henry on several high-profile diplomatic missions. You place your son at the English Court and your two daughters at Court in Burgundy and then France. Through your mother you have a claim on estates in Ireland, and when you bring Anne home, when she’s twenty or twenty-one, it’s with the intention of marrying her to one of your Irish connections. Anne has her own ideas, and you are probably dismayed that she has involved herself with the Earl of Northumberland’s heir. If her initiative can be made to work, you will back it, but it probably can’t. You know Harry Percy is already spoken for and you are afraid to cross Wolsey. You are ambitious but you are not a man of conspicuous moral courage.
However, when the King makes known his feelings for Anne, you see the opportunities unfolding before you. At the French Court, being the King’s official mistress is a lucrative and prestigious option; Mary did not take proper advantage of her situation, but Anne might. You begin to collect offices, titles and perquisites. After Wolsey’s fall, you are appointed Lord Privy Seal. Once Anne is Queen, and you are Earl of Wiltshire, you position yourself as her éminence grise, and adopt the special title ‘Monseigneur’. Soon, like Uncle Norfolk, you find your actual power with Anne is less than you expect.
You regard your daughter Mary as undeserving of your attention or money. After she is widowed, you make no effort to find her a second husband. When she runs off with William Stafford, you cut her off, and are, Mary says, ‘cruel’.
When the King turns against Anne, and she and your son George are arrested, you appear to do nothing whatever to help them. You probably count yourself lucky not to be implicated. You take care to be helpful to Cromwell (who takes over your post as Lord Privy Seal) and you creep back to Court two years after Anne’s fall, dying quietly in 1539.
THOMAS WYATT
You are a turbulent spirit.
We think of you as the greatest poet of your era, but your contemporaries don’t see you that way; every gentleman pens verse. To your peers, you are one of the King’s gang of young gentlemen, his regular tennis partner, more volatile and risk taking than most, with apparently no sense of self-preservation. You get into debt. You are involved in an affray where a man is killed. You fall out with the powerful Duke of Suffolk, who will be trying to ruin you for the rest of your life. No one would be surprised if you were killed in a street fight or broke your neck in the tiltyard. You are in your
late twenties when this story starts and it’s time you grew up.
Your poetry is not published in your lifetime. It’s circulated privately among the courtiers, coded and ambiguous; your friends think they understand it but probably don’t. Because it’s never been taken to the printer, it’s flexible. It can be smudged out, rewritten: like the story of your life so far. Is Anne Boleyn your dark lady? No one can be sure. In the Tower in 1536, Anne will speculate on whether the men imprisoned with her are writing ballads, but will add, ‘Only Wyatt can do it.’
Perhaps you spend your life searching for a purpose because your father, Henry Wyatt, is a hard man to live up to. As a known supporter of the future Henry VII, he was imprisoned and tortured under Richard III, and left in a dungeon to starve. He still carries the marks of his torture, a reminder of the old era of civil war. Prominent in the new order, he is a diligent and much-admired public servant. He is a friend of Wolsey and has a high opinion of Cromwell, appointing him one of his executors. When ill-health forces him into retirement, he hands you over to Cromwell, telling you to do exactly as he says. I’ve told my son, he writes to Cromwell, ‘in every point to take and repute you as me.’
One miscalculation your father made; he married you off at seventeen to the daughter of a well-connected neighbour in Kent. Your wife was quickly and notoriously unfaithful. Is that why you are so touchy about your honour, about proving your manhood? Why you are so quickly angered, and why your expectations of human conduct are low? You are cynical about love. It makes a fool of you and it doesn’t last. You expect to be betrayed.
Anne Boleyn is your damnation and Thomas Cromwell is your salvation. No one knows whether you and Anne were lovers. Only you know. No one is surprised that you are arrested with Anne’s ‘lovers’. You have been talked about for years and, to most people, you are the obvious suspect. What’s more remarkable is that you escape execution. Soon after your arrest, Cromwell assures your father that you will be coming home safely. He is confident of his ability to save you. But he must be confident you will give him something in return: evidence against Anne, which he will use if he has to. No such evidence emerges in court, as it is not needed. But you emerge into your future, not only free but with financial compensation.