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 you are not a man of conspicuous moral courage.
However, when the King makes known his feelings for Anne, you see the opportunities unfolding before you. At the French Court, being the King’s official mistress is a lucrative and prestigious option; Mary did not take proper advantage of her situation, 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