man, but a confused one, frequently out of his depth.
Under protest, you give up Anne and contract the marriage arranged for you, with Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Your only child with her does not survive and the marriage is miserable. When you inherit the earldom, you begin alienating land to pay your debts, prejudicing the holdings of your younger brothers. A complex of family quarrels and financial disasters adds to your unhappiness, though you are not frozen out by the King at this stage; your family name decrees that you should be made a Knight of the Garter, and the geography of your land holdings makes you important in defence against the Scots.
When you are sent to arrest Wolsey in Yorkshire, you are reported to be shaking with fear. He laughs at you and refuses to credit your authority, though he agrees to be taken into custody by the officials with you.
From about 1529 you are ill and convinced you will die early. Perhaps this makes you reckless. You refuse to live with your wife and, in the hope of obtaining her freedom, she tells her father that you have always claimed to be married to Anne Boleyn. Anne is on the point of marrying the King and insists on an investigation. Under pressure, you swear on the blessed sacrament that you never contracted a marriage with her. All the same, rumours persist.
In 1536 you are asked by Cromwell to retract your oath and say that you were, after all, married to Anne. This would give the King an easy and bloodless exit from his marriage. You refuse to do so. You are perhaps afraid of the consequences for your soul, and by now you resent and detest the Boleyns. (Chapuys has seen you as a candidate to join an aristocratic conspiracy against the King, but has been told you are ‘light’ and untrustworthy.)
You are one of the peers who sit in judgment at Anne’s trial. You concur in the guilty verdict and then collapse.
You die in 1537, your lands taken over by the Crown. There is no new Earl until 1557.
CHRISTOPHE
On one of Cardinal Wolsey’s State visits to France, he was systematically robbed of his gold plate by a small boy who went up and down the stairs unnoticed, passing the loot to a gang outside. In the world of Wolf Hall, you are the small boy. So you are a fiction, with a shadow-self in the historical record.
Thomas Cromwell is ignorant of your earlier life and previous names when he runs into you in Calais in 1532. You are the waiter in a backstreet inn, where he is entertaining a cabal of elderly and impoverished alchemists from whom he hopes to obtain a working model of the human soul. He has time to notice that you are a cheeky, dirty, violent little youth, who reminds him irresistibly of his younger self. Deciding he is a great milord, you follow him to his lodgings and announce you mean to ‘take service’ with him and see the world.
At Austin Friars you are an all-purpose dogsbody. With difficulty, you make yourself fit to be seen with a gentleman. You find good behaviour a great strain. The legacy of your former life is that you are always hungry.
THOMAS HOWARD, DUKE OF NORFOLK
‘I have never read the Scripture, nor will read it. It was merry in England before the new learning came up: yea, I would that all things were as hath been in times past.’
You are almost sixty when this story begins, with the vigour of a man half your age; you run on rage. Your grandfather was on the wrong side at the Battle of Bosworth, and your family lost the dukedom. Your father regained the favour of Henry VII, annihilated the Scots at the Battle of Flodden, and got the title back. And you expect a battle every day, and are always armed for one, visibly or not. You never forget what damage a king’s displeasure can do. To his face, you are creepingly servile to Henry Tudor. In private, you probably regard him as a parvenu, and a bit of a girly as well.
With the exception of Henry’s illegitimate son, you are England’s premier nobleman, an old-style magnate who holds a magnificent court in East Anglia. Your courtier’s veneer is paper-thin. You prefer warfare. But you are not without diplomatic weapons, as you will lie to anyone.
You hate Wolsey: in your view, he is common, greedy and pretentious. You are also frightened of him, as you think he has the power to put a curse on you. You are one of the main agents of his fall, and you threaten that if he does not make speed to the north, away from Court, ‘I will come where he is and tear him with my teeth.’ You are supremely valiant at kicking a man when he’s down.
You beat your wife, or at least she tells Cromwell that you do; she also complains that your in-house mistress knocked her down and sat on her. She tells Cromwell everything, and she sends him presents. Cromwell is everywhere you look, in your face, and once you accept it you approach him with a gruesomely false bonhomie, teeth gritted.
You back the efforts of your niece, Anne Boleyn, to become Queen, because you think it will be good for the family, but you turn against her when you realise that she has no intention of obeying her uncle. Presiding over her trial, you have no hesitation in sentencing her to death, and a few years later will do the same for another niece, Katherine Howard. Though you are innately conservative and papist, you say yes to anything Henry wants, and when Cromwell begins to dissolve the monasteries, you are first in line for the spoils. Your fortunes rise and fall through Henry’s reign. You come into your own in the autumn of 1536, when rebellion breaks out in the north; you suppress it with ferocity and relish. You are triumphant when you finally see off Cromwell, but that triumph doesn’t last; you are disgraced by the Katherine Howard affair, and later by the dynastic ambitions of your son, the Earl of Surrey. Though you are sentenced to death in 1546, you have a long wait in the Tower, and Henry dies the night before your scheduled execution. Unlike so many of your friends and enemies, you die in your bed in the reign of Queen Mary, in an England you don’t really recognise any more.
CHARLES BRANDON, DUKE OF SUFFOLK
A blundering hearty, a big man with a big beard. Six or seven years older than Henry, you are one of the tiltyard stars he looks up to when he is a young lad just taking up dangerous sports. Your relationship with him is warm and brotherly.
Your father, who was well-connected but ‘only’ a gentleman, died at Bosworth fighting for the Tudors, and you are brought to Court young, so grow up in an arena where you can shine. You fight with Henry in his small French war of 1531. You are considered the King’s principal favourite, are given offices and lands, and, five years into his reign, receive an enormous promotion to Duke of Suffolk. You are a good soldier, but considered over-promoted, a product of Henry’s enthusiasm, and more use in war than peace.
Then you mess everything up in the most spectacular way. You are sent to France for the marriage celebrations of Henry’s youngest sister, Mary, to the King of France. Louis XII is elderly and unattractive, Mary is a beauty of eighteen, and she has a crush on you; she marries under protest. Three months later, while you are still in France, Louis dies. Mary claims that Henry promised that if she would oblige him with the French alliance, she could choose her next husband herself. She chooses you. You think this is all a bit risky, but marry her because ‘I never saw woman weepe so.’ You then have to go back to England together and face Henry, who is so furious that there is a real possibility you will lose your head.
Wolsey intervenes and talks Henry around. An enormous fine is substituted for any other penalty. Most years Wolsey ‘forgets’ to collect it. You are wealthy because of the large pension Mary is given by the French, but the downside is that, for years, they treat you as their hired man at Henry’s Court.
You are an irrepressible man. You are soon back in Henry’s favour, though he sulks at you from time to time and falls out with you. As a politician, you are much less nimble than Norfolk, your East Anglian rival. Henry gives you nasty jobs, like trying to talk Katherine into compliance. You don’t
