in the dark. This disarrayed outside makes you seem vulnerable, even harmless; but inside, your barriers are rigid and your core is frozen.
You have a father to live up to: good old Sir John More, stalwart of the London law courts, a man with a fund of anecdotes that you will be telling for the rest of your life. You follow him into the law. You think you should become a monk, but you fail. You decide you can’t live without sex; and you don’t want to be a bad monk. Perhaps, also, you want the warmth of family life. You can’t do without people. You can’t detach, as a religious man should. The realisation causes you anguish. The inner conflict, the consciousness of sin, is so painful you have to flagellate yourself as a distraction. You wear a hair shirt. Not figuratively, literally.
Yet you are one of the showpieces of Henry’s Court: an intellectual, to vie with those good-quality ones they have abroad. You seem so modern, if we ignore the hair shirt. You are a scholar and a wit, a great communicator, a man attentive to your own legend; if you lived now, you would write a column for one of the weekend papers, all about the hilarious ups and downs of family life in Chelsea. You are a member of several Parliaments and serve as Speaker. You keep amicable relations with Wolsey while he is in power, but are ferocious at his fall. For all your urbanity, you are an excellent hater. When you write about Luther or other evangelicals, your detestation comes spilling out in an uncontrollable flood of scatological language. It’s as if you have a poisoned spring inside you. Unluckily, the times allow you to release your violence, instead of forcing you to suppress it. You have a busy legal practice but your real vocation is persecuting heretics.
Posterity will excuse you, saying, ‘It’s what they did; those were not tolerant times.’ But Cardinal Wolsey was loyal to Rome, and he managed his long tenure as Lord Chancellor without burning anybody. You preside over a handful of executions, but you damage the lives of many, imprisoning suspects until they are mortally ill or their businesses fail. You are not apologetic. You are proud of your record, and you want it mentioned in your epitaph, which, of course, you have written in advance.
You have been in Henry’s life since he was a boy, and he looks up to you, and you are confident that you can influence him for the better. So when he asks you to take over as Lord Chancellor, you agree, as long as you don’t have to work on his divorce. Within a short time your position becomes untenable, and it’s obvious that the King is listening to Cromwell, not you. Your path has crossed Cromwell’s many times. Your raid on his house, in these plays, is a convenient fiction, shorthand for the hostility between you, and modelled on your raids on Cromwell’s friends. Probably you wouldn’t care to confront him so directly, even after Wolsey’s protection is withdrawn. Besides, you don’t know where to place Cromwell; you’re never sure whose side he’s on. You suspect he might be solely motivated by money. You never imagine he’s a man of conviction. Perhaps your failing, as a political animal, is that you don’t give your opponents credit; you don’t believe they are as clever or determined as you are. You think the King is still a boy who can be led. Quite possibly, you think Cromwell is overconfident and will come unstuck. He doesn’t explain himself. Neither do you. You are a master of ambiguity and soon you need all your skills to keep you alive.
Henry permits you to retire into private life. You go home to Chelsea and live quietly. The country is seething with plots, but you keep your hands clean and you do not talk about your views. You refuse the invitation to Anne Boleyn’s coronation, which is a mistake. It suggests to Henry and Anne that you remain hostile to their marriage, though you’ve never made any public objection. When you are required to take an oath to recognise Henry as Head of the Church, and Anne’s daughter Elizabeth as heir, you refuse. But you won’t say why. So you sit in the Tower of London for a year, while your family and friends try to talk you into a compromise, and Cromwell negotiates. Sometimes he pushes you and sometimes he gives you, you say, the good advice you’d get from a friend. Perhaps Henry will forget you? But he won’t, because he’s furious that a man he admired has turned against him.
You are not ill-treated. There is no question of physical force, but there is intense mental pressure, and there is fear and loneliness. Finally, you entrap yourself, in conversation with Richard Riche, a young lawyer you despise; you knew he was Cromwell’s man, but you couldn’t resist chatting away, ‘putting cases’ as if you were still a student. Riche reports your ‘treason’ and Cromwell hauls you into court. It’s a failure on his part; victory would have been to break your spirit, and not to have the embarrassment of executing a famous opponent of the regime. You are not a martyr for freedom of conscience, as recent legend suggests. You are the old-fashioned kind of martyr, dying for your faith, or, as Cromwell sees it, for your belief that England should be ruled from Rome.
RAFE SADLER
You are twenty-one when this story begins, and as seasoned and steady as a man twice your age. You are brought up by Thomas Cromwell, but by the time you are in your late twenties you have become his father, and tell him off when you think he’s being frivolous. You are a quietly admirable character, and you manage to do something very difficult: you last the distance in politics, and keep your integrity.
Your own father is a gentleman and minor official, caught up in the great dragnet of Wolsey patronage. He somehow spots Cromwell as the man to watch, though at the time he is only a young London lawyer. You grow up in his increasingly lively household, as close as a son, and by the time of the Cardinal’s fall you are his chief clerk. Henry likes you, and in 1536 promotes you to a position in his own household, so you act as daily liaison for Cromwell. You are utterly loyal to him, hard-working, sober and shrewd. You’re cautious by nature, practical, steady, very able, and seldom put a foot wrong. Thankfully, you do one silly thing in your life: instead of marrying for career advantage or money, you marry a poor girl with whom you’ve fallen in love. Whoever else might see this as a problem, Cromwell doesn’t. He has your future in hand anyway.
You build yourself a shiny new country house at Hackney, the garden adjoining one of Cromwell’s properties. Later you acquire a country estate. You and Helen have a whole tribe of children, the eldest called Thomas. Though you can’t bear to be apart, you can never take Helen to Court, and you are mostly at Court as you are increasingly necessary to Henry. When, in 1539, Cromwell, staggering under the burden of work, finally parts with the post of Mr Secretary, the job is split between you and Thomas Wriothesley. At Cromwell’s fall, you cannot save him but you behave with dignity and courage. You carry his last letter to Henry. Read it, Henry says. You do so. Read it again. And a third time: read it. You can see the King has tears in his eyes. But he doesn’t speak; there’s no reprieve. It is you who carries Cromwell’s portrait from the wreck of Austin Friars, as his opponents loot it.
After Cromwell, you are beaten out of the top jobs by the unscrupulous Wriothesley, but make your name as an envoy to Scotland, a hardship posting which sometimes involves dodging musket balls. You are a little man, with no pretentions to military prowess, and no interest in sports other than hawking. But, at the age of forty, caught up in the Scots wars, you will ride into battle under Edward Seymour, and behave with such valour that you are knighted on the battlefield. Pent-up aggression, probably, from all those years of being discreet.
You serve three sovereigns (retiring from public life under Mary). You are a Privy Councillor for fifty years, and are still working for Elizabeth I at the age of eighty. You’re too precious to be let go; you know where the bodies are buried. The Cromwellian ability to make money has rubbed off, and you die the richest commoner in England.
HARRY PERCY, EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND
You are in your early twenties when you first become involved with Anne Boleyn and in your mid-thirties when these plays end. You were brought up in Wolsey’s household and he had a poor opinion of your abilities. As the Earl of Northumberland’s heir, you contracted a mountain of debt, and when your father came to Court to tell you off about your involvement with Anne Boleyn, he called you ‘a very unthrift waster’. You seem to be a muddle-headed, emotional, unreliable young
