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 man, with poor judgement; not a man to dislike, not a cowardly 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