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 get on with the Boleyns, and are offended by the family’s rise in the world. The rumour is that at some point before Henry’s marriage to Anne, you go to him and tell him that Anne has had an affair with Thomas Wyatt; you’re trying to save him from himself. At this point it’s the last thing Henry wishes to hear, and he kicks you out. You’re soon back at Court and happily blundering along. You love Henry, in spite of all.
You are baffled by Cromwell. But you find it best generally to do as he says.
After Mary Tudor’s death in 1533, you marry a fourteen-year-old heiress who was intended for your son. She grows up to be a witty and strong-willed religious reformer who keeps a small dog called Gardiner, which she shouts at in public: it’s the most successful joke of the English Reformation.
You remain rich. You remain honoured. You are a thread that connects Henry to his young self and to the England he inherited. You die in your bed, 1545. Henry pays for a magnificent funeral.
EUSTACHE CHAPUYS
You are born in Savoy, to a respectable but not wealthy family. You are a lawyer with university training, a meritocrat, able to make your way in the vast field of opportunity offered by service to the Holy Roman Emperor. You are in your late thirties (but, a fragile man, you seem older) when you come to London in 1529 to represent your master and to act as councillor and comforter to the embattled Queen Katherine. You will stay until 1545, with a brief intermission when diplomatic relations are broken off. That fact in itself is a testament to your endurance, and the faith placed in you by your distant boss.
You are a cultured man with a humorous turn of phrase. You are astute and subtle, but also passionately engaged in Katherine’s cause, and you give wholehearted commitment to her, and then to her daughter Mary. For you, this is not just a matter of duty, it’s personal. You labour under certain disadvantages; you don’t speak English. But who does, in the Europe of the 1530s? (How much English you understand is a matter of debate.) Visiting Henry’s Court, you never know what to expect. You have to swallow insults and threats, being snubbed and ignored. You are bobbing about in a sea of barbarians. Really, the only thing that makes life bearable is your regular suppers with Thomas Cromwell.
With Cromwell you can rattle along in colloquial French, your native tongue. You can pick up all the gossip. It may not be accurate, and you are aware that he may be teasing and misleading you, and yes, you know he’s the Antichrist. But you can’t help but like him, you tell the Emperor. He’s so generous and so entertaining and neighbourly. You do believe he’s on the Emperor’s side, if only he could be brought to say so.
It takes all your courage to face Henry. Luckily you have a lot. You will not only face him but needle him, probing the areas of vulnerability. Perhaps, you say, he will never have a son: God has his reasons. Henry bellows at you: ‘Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?’
Your problem is this: your confidants are the old aristocratic families who support Katherine and Mary, and because you listen to them you misperceive the situation; you report to the Emperor several times that the English are ready to revolt and replace Henry, and you urge him to invade; in fact, the families you are involved with have little popular support. It is difficult for you to understand that the power structure is changing from below. There’s something you’re persistently not grasping. Perhaps it’s Cromwell. One day when you are deep in conversation, he starts to smile and can’t stop. You tell the Emperor that he has the grace to cover his mouth with his hand.
You are an arch-conspirator doomed to ineffectuality, a brave man on a failing mission. When the Emperor finally allows you to retire, on grounds of ill-health, you limp to the low countries and found a college for young men from your own country of Savoy. And you die peacefully, 1556: having made more of a mark on the history of England than you could ever have believed possible when you were sent among the savages.
SIR