your trusted maids cook for you over the fire. Henry sends Norfolk and Suffolk to bully you, without result. Finally you are divorced in your absence. You die in January 1536, after an illness of several months’ duration, probably a cancer. The rumours are, of course, that Anne Boleyn has poisoned you.
Cromwell’s admiration for you is on the record: even though his life would have been made simpler if you had just vanished, he admired your sense of battle tactics and your stamina in fighting a war you could not win. His approach is pragmatic and rational; he’s not a hater. You understand this. You may think, as much of Catholic Europe does, that he is the Antichrist. But you write to him in Spanish, addressing him as your friend.
PRINCESS MARY
Born seven years into your parents’ marriage, you are the only surviving child. You are in your mid-teens when you appear in this story. You are small, plain, pious and fragile: very clever, very brave, very stubborn. You hate Anne Boleyn, and revere your father, following your mother’s line in believing that he is misled. When you are separated from Katherine, and kept under house arrest, you are physically ill and suffer emotional desolation. You believe when Anne is executed that all your troubles are over. You are stunned to find that your father still requires you to acknowledge your illegitimacy and to recognise him as Head of the Church. You resist to the point of danger. Thomas Cromwell talks you back from the brink. Your dazed, ambivalent relation with him begins in these plays.
STEPHEN GARDINER
Cambridge academic, Master of Trinity Hall, you are in your late thirties as this story begins, and secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, who admires your first-class mind, finds you extremely useful, and has little idea of the grievances you are accumulating. Tactless and bruisingly confrontational, you are physically and intellectually intimidating, and your subordinates and your peers are equally afraid of you. But you suspect Thomas Cromwell laughs at you, and you are possibly right. You can only stare with uncomprehending hostility as he talks his way into the highest favour with Wolsey first and then the King. Cromwell is at his ease in any situation. You are the opposite, constantly bristling and tense.
Your origins are a mystery. You are brought up by respectable but humble parents, who are possibly your foster-parents. The rumour is that you are of Tudor descent through an illegitimate line, and so you are the King’s cousin. This may be why you get on in life; or it may be you are valued for your intellect; your personality is always in your way, and you seem helpless to do anything about it.
As you are politically astute and unhampered by gratitude, you begin to distance yourself from the Cardinal some months before his fall, and become secretary to the King. You are promoted to the bishopric of Winchester, the richest diocese in England. You are conservative in your own religious beliefs, but you are an authoritarian and a loyalist who will always back Henry, so you work hard for the divorce from Katherine, and you are all in favour of the King’s supremacy in Church and State. But Henry finds your company wearing; you always want to have an argument. And he likes people who can read his mood and respond to it.
So once again the pattern repeats; you are pushed out of the King’s favour by Cromwell, and have to watch him grow the secretary’s post into the most important job in the country (after king). Cromwell is generally so plausible that even Norfolk sometimes forgets to hate him. But you never forget.
During the years of his supremacy, Cromwell will keep you abroad as much as possible, as an ambassador. When you finally make common cause with the Duke of Norfolk, his other great enemy, you will be able to destroy him.
Cromwell suspects, and he’s right, that underneath all, you are a papist, and that, given a chance, a swing of political fortune, you would take England straight back to Rome. This proves true; in the reign of Mary Tudor, you grab your chance, become Lord Chancellor and start burning heretics.
WILLIAM WARHAM, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
You are over eighty years old and are a man of immense dignity, when awake. You have been Archbishop for almost thirty years. A former Lord Chancellor, you were pushed out of that role by Wolsey. Your favourite saying is, ‘The wrath of the King is death.’ So you do not oppose Henry’s divorce or the early stages of the Reformation, but at the very end of your life, as in your scene here, you find the unexpected courage to disagree with the King. So your rebuke carries weight.
THOMAS CRANMER, INCOMING ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
You are the introvert to Cromwell’s extrovert. You act so much in concert that some less well-informed European politicians think you are one person: Dr Chramuel. When you and your other self are with Henry, you go smoothly into action, able to communicate everything to each other with a glance or a breath.
You are a reserved Cambridge don, leading a quiet life, when you chip in an idea about Henry’s divorce: why doesn’t he poll the European universities, to give his case some extra gravitas? The King likes this idea and soon you are at the heart of the struggle, a family chaplain to the Boleyns, guiding them, cautiously, towards reformed religion, and hoping to take Henry the same way. You must be wary of Cromwell, with his reputation as Wolsey’s bully boy. But once you begin to work together, you instinctively understand each other and become friends.
Intellectually rigorous, you are not the cold fish you may appear. As a young man, not yet a priest, you made an impulsive marriage. This meant you had to give up your fellowship at Jesus College, and try to find work as a clerk or tutor; your father is a gentleman, but you have no money from him, and Joan was just a servant when you met her. Within a year you lose your wife in childbirth. The child dies too. Jesus College takes you back. You are ordained. Perhaps nothing else will ever happen to you?
Your promotion to Archbishop is something you could never have imagined, even a year or two before it happened. Though you can appear cerebral and withdrawn, you are in tune with the emotions of others; you are a gentle person, who tends to calm situations. You are psychological balm to Henry and to Anne, both of them restless and irritable people. Henry loves you, and (as Cromwell said) you can get away with anything, including your increasingly Protestant convictions, and the second mad marriage you make. You fall in love when you are on mission in Germany, and smuggle your wife back. Henry is fiercely opposed to married clergy; he must know about Grete, but he closes his eyes.
You are possibly the only person in England without a bad word to say about Anne Boleyn. You are swept up in the terrifying process of her ruin, with hardly a chance to protest. You turn this way and that: how can these allegations be true? But if they were not true, would a man so good as Henry make them? You do believe in his goodness, which is what he needs. You go on trying to believe it, against all the accumulating evidence. In many ways as the years go on, your role as Archbishop becomes a torture to you. Though Henry makes many concessions to reform, he remains stuck in the Catholic mindset of his youth. You and Cromwell have to stand by while he persecutes ‘heretics’ who share your own beliefs. Henry thinks you are a hopeless politician, and likes you all the better for it. But you are wiser than he thinks. You never pointlessly antagonise him, but prudently and patiently salvage what you can from each little wreckage he makes.
When Cromwell falls, you will go as far to save him as your natural timidity allows. You will beg the King to think again, and ask him pointedly, ‘Who will Your Grace trust hereafter, if you cannot trust him?’ You are not naturally brave but you are wise, humane and sincere, and eventually in Mary’s reign you will die horribly for your beliefs.
THOMAS MORE
You would keep a tribe of Freudian analysts in business for life. They would hold conferences devoted just to you. An absent-minded professor with a sideline in torture, you turn on a sixpence, from threatening to cajoling to whimsicality. Ill-at-ease in your skin, self-hating, you show your inner confusion
