Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies - the RSC Stage Adaptation

by Mike Poulton

  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 apolitical 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 master of ambiguity and soon you need all your skills to keep you alive.

  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, hardworking, 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 tops 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 o
ff, 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 wrong side at the Battle of Bosworth, and your family lost the dukedom. Your father regained the favour of Henry VII, annihilated the Scots at the Battle of Flodden, and got the title back. And you expect a battle every day, and are always armed for one, visibly or not. You never forget what damage a king’s displeasure can do. To his face, you are creepingly servile to Henry Tudor. In private, you probably regard him as a parvenu, and a bit of a girly as well.

  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.