So once again the pattern repeats; you are pushed out of the King’s favour by Cromwell, and have to watch him grow the secretary’s post into the most important job in the country (after king). Cromwell is generally so plausible that even Norfolk sometimes forgets to hate him. But you never forget.
During the years of his supremacy, Cromwell will keep you abroad as much as possible, as an ambassador. When you finally make common cause with the Duke of Norfolk, his other great enemy, you will be able to destroy him.
Cromwell suspects, and he’s right, that underneath all, you are a papist, and that, given a chance, a swing of political fortune, you would take England straight back to Rome. This proves true; in the reign of Mary Tudor, you grab your chance, become Lord Chancellor and start burning heretics.
WILLIAM WARHAM, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
You are over eighty years old and are a man of immense dignity, when awake. You have been Archbishop for almost thirty years. A former Lord Chancellor, you were pushed out of that role by Wolsey. Your favourite saying is, ‘The wrath of the King is death.’ So you do not oppose Henry’s divorce or the early stages of the Reformation, but at the very end of your life, as in your scene here, you find the unexpected courage to disagree with the King. So your rebuke carries weight.
THOMAS CRANMER, INCOMING ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
You are the introvert to Cromwell’s extrovert. You act so much in concert that some less well-informed European politicians think you are one person: Dr Chramuel. When you and your other self are with Henry, you go smoothly into action, able to communicate everything to each other with a glance or a breath.
You are a reserved Cambridge don, leading a quiet life, when you chip in an idea about Henry’s divorce: why doesn’t he poll the European universities, to give his case some extra gravitas? The King likes this idea and soon you are at the heart of the struggle, a family chaplain to the Boleyns, guiding them, cautiously, towards reformed religion, and hoping to take Henry the same way. You must be wary of Cromwell, with his reputation as Wolsey’s bully boy. But once you begin to work together, you instinctively understand each other and become friends.
Intellectually rigorous, you are not the cold fish you may appear. As a young man, not yet a priest, you made an impulsive marriage. This meant you had to give up your fellowship at Jesus College, and try to find work as a clerk or tutor; your father is a gentleman, but you have no money from him, and Joan was just a servant when you met her. Within a year you lose your wife in childbirth. The child dies too. Jesus College takes you back. You are ordained. Perhaps nothing else will ever happen to you?
Your promotion to Archbishop is something you could never have imagined, even a year or two before it happened. Though you can appear cerebral and withdrawn, you are in tune with the emotions of others; you are a gentle person, who tends to calm situations. You are psychological balm to Henry and to Anne, both of them restless and irritable people. Henry loves you, and (as Cromwell said) you can get away with anything, including your increasingly Protestant convictions, and the second mad marriage you make. You fall in love when you are on mission in Germany, and smuggle your wife back. Henry is fiercely opposed to married clergy; he must know about Grete, but he closes his eyes.
You are possibly the only person in England without a bad word to say about Anne Boleyn. You are swept up in the terrifying process of her ruin, with hardly a chance to protest. You turn this way and that: how can these allegations be true? But if they were not true, would a man so good as Henry make them? You do believe in his goodness, which is what he needs. You go on trying to believe it, against all the accumulating evidence. In many ways as the years go on, your role as Archbishop becomes a torture to you. Though Henry makes many concessions to reform, he remains stuck in the Catholic mindset of his youth. You and Cromwell have to stand by while he persecutes ‘heretics’ who share your own beliefs. Henry thinks you are a hopeless politician, and likes you all the better for it. But you are wiser than he thinks. You never pointlessly antagonise him, but prudently and patiently salvage what you can from each little wreckage he makes.
When Cromwell falls, you will go as far to save him as your natural timidity allows. You will beg the King to think again, and ask him pointedly, ‘Who will Your Grace trust hereafter, if you cannot trust him?’ You are not naturally brave but you are wise, humane and sincere, and eventually in Mary’s reign you will die horribly for your beliefs.
THOMAS MORE
You would keep a tribe of Freudian analysts in business for life. They would hold conferences devoted just to you. An absent-minded professor with a sideline in torture, you turn on a sixpence, from threatening to cajoling to whimsicality. Ill-at-ease in your skin, self-hating, you show your inner confusion by your relationship with your clothes; you look as if you are wearing someone else’s, and got dressed 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