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 look 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
