by Mike Poulton
When your wife (and two little daughters) die, you do not marry again. This, for the time, is unusual. We don’t know your reasons. You have women friends; this is not understood, for example, by the Duke of Norfolk, who tells you that he never had a conversation with his own daughter until she was about twenty years of age, and was perplexed to find that she had ‘a good wit.’
Your household at Austin Friars, as you progress in the King’s service, is transformed, extended, rebuilt, into a great ministerial household, a power centre, cosmopolitan and full of young men who are there to gain promotion. You take on the people written off elsewhere, the wild boys who are on everybody’s wrong side, and make them into useful workers.
You are an administrative genius, able to plan and accomplish in weeks what would take other people years. You are good at delegating and your instructions are so precise that it’s difficult to make a mistake. You extend the secretary’s role so that it covers most of the business of State; you know what happens in every department of Government. Your ideas are startlingly radical, but mostly they are beaten off by a conservative Parliament. At the centre of a vast network of patronage, you have a steady tendency to grow rich. You are generous with your money, a patron of artists, writers and scholars, and of your own troupe of actors, ‘Lord Cromwell’s Men’. The kitchen at Austin Friars feeds two hundred poor Londoners daily. All the same, you are a focus of resentment. The aristocracy don’t like you on principle, and the ordinary people don’t like you either. In the opinion of the era, there’s something unnatural about what you’ve achieved. In the north they think you’re a sorcerer.
Much of your myth is ill-founded. You do not control a vast spy network. You do not throw elderly monks into the road; in fact, you give them pensions. You are not the dour man of Holbein’s portrait but (witnesses say) lively, witty and eloquent. You have a remarkable memory, and are credited with knowing the entire New Testament by heart. Your particular distinction is this: you are a big-picture man who also sees and takes care of every detail.
Apart from your intellectual ability, your greatest asset is that you manage to get on with the most unlikely people. You are affable, gregarious, and amazingly plausible. You easily convince people you are on their side, when common sense should suggest different. You tie people to you by favours rather than by fear, and so they don’t easily see what a grip you’ve taken. People open their hearts to you. They tell you all sorts of things. But you tell them nothing.
What do you really think of Henry? No one knows. You don’t seem to feel the warmth towards him that Wolsey did, but you respect his abilities and you serve him because he is the focus of good order and keeps the country together. Dealing with him on a day-to-day basis needs tact and patience. You are optimistic and resilient, and believe there’s hope even for the bigoted and the terminally stubborn. Those who are on the inside track with you have their interests protected, and you take trouble to help out those in difficulties. But those who cross you are likely to find that you have been out by night and silently dug a deep pit beneath their career plans.
Your weakness is that you do not head up a faction or an interest group and have no power base of your own; you depend completely on the King’s favour. You are resented by the old nobility, and you are destroyed when your two implacable enemies, Norfolk and Gardiner, manage to make common cause. But by then, you have reshaped England, and even the reign of the furiously papist Mary can’t undo your work; you have given too many people a stake in your remodelled society.
ELIZABETH CROMWELL
You were the daughter of Henry Wykys, a prosperous wool trader, and were first married to Thomas Williams, a yeoman of the guard, and then to Cromwell. Your family were connected to Putney and may have been Welsh in origin. You have three children, Gregory, Anne and Grace. You die in one of the epidemics of ‘sweating sickness’ that sweep the country in the late 1520s, and your daughters follow you. You are a member of a close family and your sister, mother and brother-in-law continue to live at Austin Friars for many years.
We know nothing about you, so we can only say, ‘women like you’. City wives were usually literate, numerate and businesslike, used to managing a household and a family business in cooperation with their husbands. In Wolf Hall I make you a ‘silk woman’, with your own business, like the wife of Cromwell’s friend Stephen Vaughan, who supplied Anne Boleyn’s household with small but valuable articles made of silk braid: cauls for the hair, ties for garments. Cromwell watches you weave one of these braids, fingers moving so fast that he can’t follow the action. He asks you to slow down and show him how it’s done. You say that if you slowed down and stopped to think you wouldn’t be able to do it. He remembers this when he is deep into the coup against Anne Boleyn.
CARDINAL ARCHBISHOP THOMAS WOLSEY
You are, arguably, Europe’s greatest statesman and greatest fraud. You are also a kind man, tolerant and patient in an age when these qualities are not necessarily thought virtues.
You are not quite the enormous scarlet cardinal of the (posthumous) portrait. You are more splendid than stout, a man of iron constitution who has survived the ‘sweating sickness’ six times. You are a cultured Renaissance prince, as grand and worldly as any Italian cardinal. Renowned for the speed at which you travel, you are capable of an unbroken twelve-hour stint at your desk, ‘all which season my lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat, but continually wrote his letters with his own hands…’ Your household observes you with awe, as does the known world. You hope you might be Pope one day, but think it would be more convenient if you could bring the papacy to Whitehall; you wouldn’t want to give up your palaces or your place next to your own monarch, and anyway you could probably run Christendom in your spare time.
You are the son of a prosperous butcher and grazier, and your family seem to have known how extraordinary you were, because they sent you to Oxford, where you took your first degree at fifteen and where you were known as ‘the boy bachelor’. The Church is the route to advancement for the poor boy. And your route is paved with gold. You acquire influential patrons and enter the service of Henry VII.
When Henry VIII came to the throne you were ready to take much of the burden off the young back, and the prince was glad to let you carry it. You have real esteem and affection for the young Henry, and he loves you for your personal warmth as well as your unique abilities. You are not only Lord Chancellor but the Pope’s permanent legate in England. So your concentration of power, foreign and domestic, lay and clerical, is probably greater than that wielded by any individual in English history, kings and queens excepted. You are more than the King’s minister, you are the ‘alternative king’, ostentatious and very rich; suave, authoritative, calm; an ironist, worldly-wise, unencumbered by too much ideology. You never simply walk, you process: your life is a spectacle, a huge performance mounted for the benefit of courtiers and kings. You are acting, particularly, when you’re angry: after the performance, you shrug and laugh.
Until the point where this story starts, you have been able to solve almost every problem that’s faced you. You are so sure of yourself, that your unravelling is total and unexpected and tragic.
When Henry first asks for an annulment of his marriage, you are confident that you will be able to secure it. But the politics of Europe turn against you, and you find yourself trapped, faced with an impatient, angry monarch, and between two women who hate you: Katherine of Aragon, who has always been jealous of your influence with the King, and Anne Boleyn, who resents you because, before the King set his heart on her, you frustrated the good marriage she intended to make. You are astonished by the extent of the enmity you have aroused (or at least, you say you are) and, like everyone else, you are baffled by the King’s conduct; he wants you banished, then he offers to make peace, then he wants you banished.
For a year your enemies at Court are nervous that the King will reinstate you. No one is capable of assuming your role in Government, and H
enry quickly learns this. When you are packed off to the north of England, you do not behave like a man in disgrace. You draw both the gentry and the ordinary people into your orbit, and soon you are living like a great prince again, and writing to the powers of Europe to ask them to help you regain your status. When these letters are intercepted, you are arrested and set out to London to face treason charges.
Soon after your arrest you have what sounds like a heart attack, followed by an intestinal crisis which leads to catastrophic bleeding. There are rumours that you have poisoned yourself. You are forced to continue the journey, and die at Leicester Abbey. Your body is shown to the town worthies so that no one can claim that you have survived and escaped, to set up opposition to Henry in Europe. It is the kind of precaution usually taken for a prince. Even dead, you spook your opponents. Your tomb – which you have been designing for twenty years, with the help of Florentine artists – is taken apart bit by bit and elements find their way all over Europe. At St Paul’s, Lord Nelson occupies your marble sarcophagus, rattling around like a dried pea.
KING HENRY VIII
Let’s think of you astrologically, because your contemporaries did. You are a native of Cancer the Crab and so never walk a straight line. You go sideways to your target, but when you have reached it your claws take a grip. You are both callous and vulnerable, hard-shelled and inwardly soft.
You are a charmer and you have been charming people since you were a baby, long before anyone knew you were going to be King. You were less than four years old when your father showed you off to the Londoners, perched alone on the saddle of a warhorse as you paraded through the streets.
Even as a child you behaved more like a king than your elder brother did. Arthur was dutiful and reserved, always with your father, whereas you were left with the women, a bonny, boisterous child, able to command attention. You were only ten when your brother married the Spanish Princess Katherine, but when you danced at the wedding, all eyes were on you.
At Arthur’s sudden death, your mother and father are plunged into deep grief and dynastic panic. It’s by no means sure that, were your father also to die now, you would come to the throne as the second Tudor; no one wants rule by a child. But your father battles on for a few more years, and you step into Arthur’s role gladly, an understudy who will play the part much better than the original cast member. Later, do you feel some guilt about this?
You are eighteen when you become King, a ‘virtuous prince’, seemingly a model for kingship; you are intellectually gifted, pious, a linguist, a brilliant sportsman, able to write a love song or compose a mass. Almost at once, you marry your brother’s widow and you execute your father’s closest advisers. The latter action is a naked bid for popularity, and it ought to give warning of the seriousness of your intent. Still, early in your reign you put more effort into hunting and jousting than to governing, with a bit of light warfare thrown in. You prefer to look like a king than be a king, which is why you let Thomas Wolsey run the country for you.
You are sexually inexperienced and will always be sexually shy; you don’t like dirty jokes. You have a few liaisons, but they are low-key and discreet. You never embarrass Katherine, who is too grand to display any jealousy, though she is too much in love with you not to care. However, you cosset and promote your illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy (a son you can acknowledge, as his mother was unmarried). Fitzroy has his own household, so is not part of the daily life of the Court, but is loaded with honours.
You are approaching forty when this story starts, five years younger than Thomas Cromwell. You are not ageing particularly well; still trim, still good-looking, you remain a superb athlete and jouster, but in an effort to hang on to your youth you have taken to collecting friends who are a generation younger than you, lively young courtiers like Francis Weston.
Your manner is relaxed, rather than domineering. You are highly intelligent, quick to grasp the possibilities of any situation. You expect to get your own way, not just because you are a king but because you are that sort of man. When you are thwarted, your charm vanishes. You are capable of a carpet-chewing rage, which throws people because it is so unexpected, and because you will turn on the people closest to you. But most of the time you like to be liked; you have no fear of confronting men, though you don’t seek confrontation, but you will not confront a woman, so you are run ragged between Katherine and Anne, trying to placate one and please the other. Unlike most men of your era, you truly believe in romantic love (though, of course, not in monogamy). It is an ideal for you.
You were in love with Katherine when you married her and when you fall in love with Anne Boleyn you feel you must shape your life around her. Likewise, when Jane Seymour comes along…
When you ask Katherine for an annulment, you are not (in the view of your advisers) asking for anything outrageous. The Pope is usually keen to please royalty, and there are recent precedents in both your families. The timing is what’s wrong; the troops of Katherine’s nephew the Emperor march into Rome and the Pope is no longer free to decide. You are outraged when Katherine resists you and Wolsey fails you. You believe in your own case; you are a keen amateur theologian, and you think you know what God wants.
You are highly emotional. You are religious, superstitious, vulnerable to panic. Because you are so afraid of dying without an heir you’ve become a hypochondriac, and gradually a sort of self-pity has corrupted your character. You are so different from Cromwell that there’s probably little natural sympathy between you; you get your brotherly love from Archbishop Cranmer. But you need Cromwell as a stabilising force. You can carry on being loved by your people, as long as he will carry your sins for you. He begins by amusing and impressing you, proceeds by making you rich, and ends by frightening you. When, in 1540, you are told by Cromwell’s enemies that he intends to turn you out and become King himself, you completely believe it. For a few weeks, anyway. Then, as soon as his head is off, you want him back. It’s the Wolsey story over again. Who is to blame? Definitely not you.
ANNE BOLEYN
You do not have six fingers. The extra digit is added long after your death by Jesuit propaganda. But in your lifetime you are the focus of every lurid story that the imagination of Europe can dream up. From the moment you enter public consciousness, you carry the projections of everyone who is afraid of sex or ashamed of it. You will never be loved by the English people, who want a proper, royal Queen like Katherine, and who don’t like change of any sort. Does that matter? Not really. What Henry’s inner circle thinks of you matters far more. But do you realise this? Reputation management is not your strong point. Charm only thinly disguises your will to win.
You are the most sophisticated woman at Henry’s Court, with polished manners and just the suggestion of a French accent. Unlike your sister Mary, you have kept your name clean. You are elegant, reserved, self-controlled, cerebral, calculating and astute. But you are (especially as the story progresses) inclined to frayed nerves and shaking hands. You are quick-tempered and, like anyone under pressure, you can be highly irrational. You look at people to see what use can be got out of them, and you immediately see the use of Thomas Cromwell.
You come to the English Court in your early twenties, but you are in your late twenties before you catch Henry’s attention, and ours in the plays. Your contemporaries did not think you were pretty because they admired pink-and-white blonde beauty, and you (judging by their descriptions) were dark and slender. This difference becomes part of your distinction. It’s your vitality that draws the eye. You sing beautifully and dance whenever you can. You are the leader of fashion at the Court, before you become Queen.
When you are first at Court you become involved with Harry Percy, the heir to the Earldom of Northumberland. In the strictly regulated hierarchy of Court marriages, he is ‘above’ you, and is already promised to the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Cardinal Wolsey steps in and makes Harry Percy go ahead with the Shrewsbury marriage. It’s at this point, your detractor
s will say, that you start to hate Wolsey and look for revenge. As far as the Cardinal is concerned, it’s nothing personal. But it wouldn’t be surprising if you took it personally. Harry Percy will later claim you had made a promise of marriage before witnesses, which would count as binding. At the time you are silent about the business. Whether you had feelings for Harry Percy, or were acting out of ambition, is not clear.
When the King makes his first approaches you are wary because you don’t intend to be a discarded mistress, like your sister Mary. You make him keep his distance and work hard for a smile. To think that you, a knight’s daughter, could replace the Queen of England is an idea so audacious that it takes a while for the rest of Europe to catch up with it. It’s assumed that, once Henry’s divorce comes through, he will marry a French princess. You are Wolsey’s downfall; for a long time, though he remembers you exist, he doesn’t know you’re important to the King. As far as he is concerned, he has finished his dealings with you when he makes Harry Percy reject you. There was a time when the King told Wolsey everything. But since you came along, that age has passed.
Your campaign to be Queen is fought with patience and cunning. Saying ‘no’ to Henry is a profitable business and you are made Marquise of Pembroke. There is a point when, after you feel Henry has committed himself to you, you’d probably be willing to go to bed with him; but by that time, he’s intent on remaining apart until you are married. He says you have promised him a son, and he wants to be right with his conscience and with God. Any child you have must be born within your marriage. You marry secretly in Calais, at the end of 1532, and a few weeks later, with no fuss, on English soil. Elizabeth is born the September following. Though Henry is disappointed not to have a boy, he doesn’t (as myth suggests) turn against you. He is glad to have a healthy child after losing so many, and confident of a boy next time.