by Mike Poulton
Are you really a religious woman, a convinced reformer? No one will ever know. It’s probable that you picked up your ideas at the French Court, where the intellectual as well as the moral climate is freer. There’s nothing to gain for you in being a faithful daughter of Rome. The texts you put Henry’s way are self-serving, in that they suggest the subject should be obedient to the secular ruler, not to the Pope. But you go to some trouble to protect and promote evangelicals. ‘My bishops’, as you call them, are your war leaders against the old order.
Your family – your father, Thomas Boleyn, and your uncle the Duke of Norfolk – expect that, if they back you as Henry’s second wife, it will be to the family’s advantage, and they will be your advisers and indeed controllers. They are shocked to find that, once Queen, you consider yourself the head of the family. They begin to distance themselves from you as you ‘fail’ Henry by not providing a son, but your brother George is close to you and always loyal. Your sister Mary has a shrewd idea of what is going on; after the first blaze of triumph, you are unhappy.
You expected to be Henry’s confidante and adviser, as Katherine was in the early days of the first marriage. But Henry is less open now, and his problems (many of them caused by your marriage) are new and seem intractable. Gradually you realise that Cromwell, whom you regarded as your servant, is accreting more and more power and that he has his own agenda and his own interests.
Meanwhile, you are locked into an unwinnable contest with Henry’s teenage daughter Mary. She will never acknowledge you as Queen, even after her mother is dead. From time to time your temper makes you threaten her. No one knows whether you mean your threats, but it’s widely believed you would harm her if you could.
After Elizabeth’s birth you miscarry at least one, maybe two children. Henry feels he has staked everything on a marriage that, despite his best efforts, no one in Europe recognises. You start to quarrel. Ambassador Chapuys gleefully retails each public row in dispatches. Cromwell warns the Ambassador not to make too much of it; you have always quarrelled and made up. But, unlike Katherine, you don’t take it quietly when Henry looks at other women. That he would become interested in someone as mousy as Jane Seymour seems like an insult.
Besides, you are bored. You were always cooler than the King and perhaps irritated by his adoration. He is not a good lover. You collect around you a group of admiring men who are good for your ego. You don’t see the danger in what becomes an explosive situation. Or perhaps you do see it, but still you crave the excitement.
Meanwhile, nothing good is happening to your looks. Ambassador Chapuys describes you as ‘a thin old woman’ at thirty-five. There is only one attested contemporary portrait, a medallion, not a picture. In it you can clearly see a swelling in your throat, which was noticed by your contemporaries, who also called you ‘a goggle-eyed whore’. To our mind, this suggests a hyperthyroid condition. You are nervous and jittery, outside and inside. There’s something feverish and desperate about your energy. You can’t control it and you are wearing yourself out.
At some point on the summer progress of 1535 you become pregnant again. At the end of January, on the day of Katherine’s funeral, you lose the child, a boy. (Contrary to the myth that’s taken hold, there is no evidence that the child was abnormal.) In the opinion of Ambassador Chapuys: ‘She has miscarried of her saviour.’ You celebrated when you heard of Katherine’s death, but it is not really good news for you. In the eyes of Catholic Europe, the King is now a widower, and free.
You are now in trouble. You are right in thinking you are surrounded by enemies. Nothing you could do would ever reconcile the old nobility to your status, and the tactless and noisy rise of your family has cut across many established interests. Katherine’s old friends and supporters are beginning to conspire in corners, and make overtures to Cromwell. Will he support the restoration of the Princess Mary to the succession, if they back him in a coup against you?
When Henry decides he wants to be free, the idea is to nullify the marriage, not to kill you. The canon lawyers go into a huddle with Cromwell. Then the whole business is accelerated and becomes public, because in late April 1536 you quarrel with Henry Norris; and afterwards you visibly panic, giving the impression of a woman who has something to hide. Everything you say is keenly noted and carried to the King, who immediately concludes you have been unfaithful to him. Cromwell is talking to your ladies-in-waiting. It’s possible that, even at this stage, he is not sure how he will bring the matter to a crisis. But when you are arrested you break down and talk wildly, supplying yourself the material for the charges against you.
By the time of your trial and your death you have collected yourself and are, according to Cromwell, ‘brave as a lion’.
KATHERINE OF ARAGON
Thomas Cromwell: ‘If she had been a man, she would have been a greater hero than all the generals of antiquity.’
You are the daughter of two reigning monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Your father was known for his political cunning and your mother for her unfeminine fighting spirit. When you are told that you have failed, because you have only given Henry a daughter, and a woman can’t reign, there must be a part of you that asks, ‘Why not?’ Another part of you understands; though you are highly educated, you are conventional and accept what your religion tells you: that women, after God, must obey men. This is a conflict that will run through your life.
You have known since you were a small child that you were destined for an English alliance, and even in your nursery you were addressed as ‘the Princess of Wales’. You are an object of prestige for the Tudors, who are a new and struggling dynasty with a weak claim to England. At fifteen you come to England to marry Prince Arthur. You are beautiful and much admired, tiny, fair-skinned, auburn-haired. You are sent to Ludlow to hold court as Prince and Princess of Wales. Within a few weeks, Arthur is dead. You will always say that your marriage was never consummated. Some of your contemporaries, and some historians, don’t believe you. Perhaps you are not above a strategic lie. Your parents would have told one and not blinked.
Now you enter a bleak period of widowhood. King Henry VII doesn’t want you to go back to Spain. You’re his prize, and he wants to keep your dowry. After he is widowed, he thinks of marrying you himself, a project your family firmly veto. You remain in London, without enough money, uncertain of your status, on the very fringe of the Court. Your salvation comes when Arthur’s seventeen-year-old brother succeeds to the throne. It’s like all the fairytales rolled into one. After a period of seven years, the handsome prince rescues you. He loves you madly. You adore him.
And you always will. Whatever happens, it’s not really Henry’s fault. It’s always someone else, someone misleading him, someone betraying him. It’s Wolsey, it’s Cromwell, it’s Anne Boleyn.
You look like an Englishwoman and, as Queen, an Englishwoman is what you set out to become. When Henry goes to France for a little war, he has such faith in you that he leaves you as Regent. All the same, the King’s advisers suspect your intentions. You act as an unofficial ambassador for your country, and are ruthless in pushing the interests of Spain, a great power which at this time also rules the Netherlands. Your nephew, Charles V of Spain, becomes Holy Roman Emperor, making him overlord to the German princes, in territories where new religious ideas are taking a hold. You are not responsive to these ideas. You come from a land where the Inquisition is flourishing, and though your parents have reformed Spain’s administration, they have done it in a way that consolidates royal power. Probably you never understand why Henry has to listen to Parliament, or why he might want popular support.
At first you are Henry’s great friend as well as his lover. Then politics sours the relationship; Henry and Wolsey have to move adroitly between the two great power blocs of France and Spain, making sure they never ally and crush English interests. And your babies die. There are six pregnancies at least, possibly several more; the Tudors didn’t announce royal pregnancie
s, still less miscarriages, if they could be hidden. They only announced the happy results: a live, healthy child. You have only one of these, your daughter Mary.
You are older than Henry by seven years. And the pregnancies take their toll on your body. You become a stout little person, but you are always magnificently dressed and bejewelled; a queen must act like a queen. You are watched for signs that your fertile years are over. When Henry decides he must marry again, the intrigues develop behind your back. You are not at first aware, and nor is anyone else, that Henry has a woman in mind and that woman is Anne Boleyn. You believe he wants to replace you with a French princess, for diplomatic advantage, and you blame Wolsey, who you have always seen as your enemy; for years he has been your rival for influence with the King. You think you understand Henry. But for years he’s been drifting away from you, the boy with his sunny nature becoming a more complex and unhappy man.
Once the divorce plan is out in the open, no notion of feminine obedience or meekness constrains you. You fight untiringly and with every weapon you can find, legal and moral. The King says that Scripture forbids marriage with a brother’s wife. You insist that you were never Prince Arthur’s wife, that you lay in bed together as two good children, saying your prayers. You also believe that even if you and Arthur had consummated your marriage, you are still legally married to Henry; the Pope’s dispensation covered both cases.
No settlement is in sight. You are offered the option of retiring to a convent; if you were to become a nun, your marriage would be annulled in canon law, and, given that you are deeply religious, Henry hopes that might suit you. But as far as you are concerned, your vocation is to be Queen of England, and that is the estate to which God has called you, and you and God will make no concessions. You are always dignified, but you will not negotiate and you will concede nothing.
You are sent to a series of country houses: not shabby or unhealthy, as the legend insists, but remote, well away from any seaports. You are separated from your daughter, which agonises you, because she is in frail health and also you fear that she will be pressured into accepting that she is illegitimate. Though you are provided with a household to fit your status, you live in virtual isolation because you will not answer to your new style of ‘Dowager Princess of Wales’ and insist on being addressed as Queen. Soon you have confined yourself to one room, and your trusted maids cook for you over the fire. Henry sends Norfolk and Suffolk to bully you, without result. Finally you are divorced in your absence. You die in January 1536, after an illness of several months’ duration, probably a cancer. The rumours are, of course, that Anne Boleyn has poisoned you.
Cromwell’s admiration for you is on the record: even though his life would have been made simpler if you had just vanished, he admired your sense of battle tactics and your stamina in fighting a war you could not win. His approach is pragmatic and rational; he’s not a hater. You understand this. You may think, as much of Catholic Europe does, that he is the Antichrist. But you write to him in Spanish, addressing him as your friend.
PRINCESS MARY
Born seven years into your parents’ marriage, you are the only surviving child. You are in your mid-teens when you appear in this story. You are small, plain, pious and fragile: very clever, very brave, very stubborn. You hate Anne Boleyn, and revere your father, following your mother’s line in believing that he is misled. When you are separated from Katherine, and kept under house arrest, you are physically ill and suffer emotional desolation. You believe when Anne is executed that all your troubles are over. You are stunned to find that your father still requires you to acknowledge your illegitimacy and to recognise him as Head of the Church. You resist to the point of danger. Thomas Cromwell talks you back from the brink. Your dazed, ambivalent relation with him begins in these plays.
STEPHEN GARDINER
Cambridge academic, Master of Trinity Hall, you are in your late thirties as this story begins, and secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, who admires your first-class mind, finds you extremely useful, and has little idea of the grievances you are accumulating. Tactless and bruisingly confrontational, you are physically and intellectually intimidating, and your subordinates and your peers are equally afraid of you. But you suspect Thomas Cromwell laughs at you, and you are possibly right. You can only stare with uncomprehending hostility as he talks his way into the highest favour with Wolsey first and then the King. Cromwell is at his ease in any situation. You are the opposite, constantly bristling and tense.
Your origins are a mystery. You are brought up by respectable but humble parents, who are possibly your fosterparents. The rumour is that you are of Tudor descent through an illegitimate line, and so you are the King’s cousin. This may be why you get on in life; or it may be you are valued for your intellect; your personality is always in your way, and you seem helpless to do anything about it.
As you are politically astute and unhampered by gratitude, you begin to distance yourself from the Cardinal some months before his fall, and become secretary to the King. You are promoted to the bishopric of Winchester, the richest diocese in England. You are conservative in your own religious beliefs, but you are an authoritarian and a loyalist who will always back Henry, so you work hard for the divorce from Katherine, and you are all in favour of the King’s supremacy in Church and State. But Henry finds your company wearing; you always want to have an argument. And he likes people who can read his mood and respond to it.
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.