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.
There is no emotional compensation. You write ‘These bloody days have broke my heart.’ In the years after Anne’s death, England is an uncomfortable place for you. Cromwell sees you as a very clever man, but a man who feels too much. He sends you abroad on diplomatic missions, all of them uncomfortable and some of them dangerous. When you are away he looks after your business affairs. You come back to find yourself solvent and your papers in order. Soon you are in debt and disorder again.
When Cromwell walks to execution, you stand by the scaffold. He takes your hand and begs you to stop crying. You are the last person he speaks to. You go home and write a poem about it.
You are broken, disillusioned and worn out. You are dead before you’re forty.
GREGORY CROMWELL
You are in your late teens as this story unfolds. You are Thomas Cromwell’s only surviving child, and you are brought up as if you were a prince. You will be known to your contemporaries as ‘the gentle and virtuous Gregory’. Implacably sweet-natured, you seem to be bowed under the weight of all that is invested in you.
You spent your first years away from home under the indulgent care of a Benedictine nun, who lobbied for you to stay with her until you were twelve. But at some stage your father decided you had to grow up and learn proper Latin, and everything else his son was going to need to know. A distracting series of tutors follow. You are being prepared for a career in public life. You are really only interested in hunting and going out with your dogs.
Your father ascends the career ladder and you have to turn into a courtier. You are surprisingly good at this, a perfect young gentleman and a star in the tiltyard. (Your elder cousin Richard is also a formidable jouster, which must be a source of grief to the young noblemen who have prepared for the dangerous sport all their lives, and feel born to win.) The important thing is, the King likes you.
You will marry the sister of Jane Seymour. (So the blacksmith’s grandson is related to the King.) This family connection saves you when your father is executed. Richard Cromwell is a tougher character than you are, much more of a player, and his career is over, but though you do not inherit your father’s title of Earl, you are granted a baron’s title, and as Lord Cromwell you live and die a country gentleman, fathering many children and making a negligible impact on national life.
How could you possibly have lived up to expectations? In the third Cromwell novel, you will say to your father, ‘You know everything. You do everything. You are everything. What’s left for me?’
JANE BOLEYN, LADY ROCHFORD
We have to read you backwards, from your death on the scaffold eight years after the action of these plays. Possibly we are being unfair to you. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that you were a strange and dangerous woman.
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