Tom and Harry, a play
Act One is about a defining Tudor tragedy that happened in May 1536. Act Two avenges it 17 years later.
Act One.
A TV documentary at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, May 19 2016. Little Jack Horner plays- a deliciously 'period' Tudor arrangement. Low light. Life-size portraits of the Boleyns hang on the walls, Queen Anne and her father Tom prominent. If available, actors should (and Anne must) play these Boleyn portraits as a tableau, watching and reacting to the lecture. Henry VIII's throne is CS with a Great Bible beside it. Enter fanfared by the music to spotlit in front of the throne, Professor Harriet Toms, reigning rock queen of celebrity TV historians. The music is joined by Tudor voices.
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner
Eating a Christmas pie
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plumb
And said what a good boy am I.
Harriet Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Viewers of The Matter of Breck’s Isle my box set chronicling the history of these islands have asked many times over the years about that theme tune. It is indeed dark with meaning. Like Ring a Ring o Roses- actually about the Black Death - or Who Killed Cock Robin- about the Fall of Britain's first and longest-serving Prime Minister the Lynn MP Robert Walpole - not to mention all the other gnomic nursery nasties of profound national trauma we cheerfully pass on to our children. The last Abbot of Glastonbury at the time of the Dissolution, hoping to appease Henry VIII, sent his steward Jack Horner to London with a Christmas gift, a pie. Hidden in the pie were the deeds of twelve manors. On the journey, Jack opened the pie and removed the deeds of one - Mells Manor, in the village of Mells near Glastonbury in Somerset. The manor remains in the hands of his family until this day. Jack Horner thus stole the best part of a village and set his family up for life. (pause) King Henry VIII did the same on a national scale, effectively pocketing all the manors, holy buildings, objects, libraries and lands of the English Church and putting the enormous loot raised into his own coffers. This 'Dissolution of the Monasteries' made him the richest King in Europe at the time. It was either the greatest act of vandalism in English history or an act of political genius, depending on which side of the Reformation you’re on. Henry had created his own new Tudor tribe: those new Protestant families now owning monastic lands simply couldn’t afford to return to the Catholic Church. It secured him his own enduring political nation. Of course as soon as you know that, it's a very different nursery rhyme. (mischievously)
Let's hear it again.
Music, with period voices as before
Old King Harry
Was happy as Larry
Gorging the wealth of the Church
Till the size of his belly
And his breath foul and smelly
Put his wives' breeding gears in reverse.
Stupendous applause
Harriet Thank you. So. What is Tudor history? A Spy Thriller? A Detective Story? A Super Scary Bank Holiday Serial Psycho-Chiller? The Continuing Soap of a Peyton Place that changes like A Man For All Seasons, pitching a dreamy Sir Thomas More against a real-politicking Thomas Cromwell in Robert Bolt's 1960s Tudor tragedy and reversing those masks in Hilary Mantel's human comedy 40 years later? Whichever it is – and it has been all of these at different times in the past and, in our post-historic present, all of these at once and more – it remains the National Ghost Story that still haunts us all. The seismic unearthing of Richard III's hastily hidden corpse from under Shakespeare's mesmerising Tudor propaganda and a Leicester carpark last year (2015), spookily close to where the original life and soul of the Tudor party Cardinal Wolsey was hounded to death, changed our view of the Tudors yet again. And the skeletons continue to emerge from the closet. And nowhere more than here at the perennially voted National Trust Survey 's MOST HAUNTED HOUSE IN BRITAIN - Blickling Hall, the Norfolk seat of the Boleyns and probable birthplace of Anne Boleyn. And never more so than tonight, May 19 2016, the 480th anniversary of her execution.
A deathly sigh from the portraits. Harriet reacts slightly but continues.
Harriet These 5000 acres of parkland, with their hedges, tree-lined lanes, manor and woodlands, mesmerise us like the riddle of England itself, a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma, inside the added intrigue of top secret work carried out by the RAF during the Second World War, the one Tommy lost the World to Win. (pause) By way of Anne, the mother of the Great Elizabeth, these time-struck Norfolk lanes led us from the first Elizabethan Age all the way to the Second. A great place to re-root yourself.
The ghosts gather around her.
Harriet (shivering slightly) Its native ghosts are restless tonight and Anne's has good cause. Her failure to provide a male heir for the Tudor dynasty convinced Henry VIII his marriage was cursed by God. We may ask what on earth gave that ulcerated colossus bestriding the gulf between mediaeval and modern the conviction that his wife was a she-devil?
A vampire in a high-necked cloak ghosts on behind and unseen by Harriet. It is the 3rd Duke of Norfolk arrayed as Anne’s judge. He is an irascible presence, always the antagonist never the protagonist. Harriet remains unaware of him throughout, mouthing his speeches as if she and not he is saying them.
Norfolk Apart from her multiple miscarriages, defective births, a sixth finger, a glaring neck mole the size of witch's teat and the notorious erotic magnetism of her unfashionable dark looks and shrewish frame.
Harriet …And her avid book-reading, particularly of advanced Protestant texts, including Henry's English Bible, didn’t help either. And nor did her patient learned defence that
Anne she could not be placed at any of the scenes of the ‘crime’ with any of the six ‘adulterers’ accused
Harriet when countered by the pre-Enlightenment prosecution that
Norfolk A witch can materialise anywhere, anytime!
Anne moves behind Harriet, who shivers slightly.
Harriet At her trial for treason, presided over by her uncle Duke of Norfolk, she was accused of…
Norfolk Acting the libertine before her marriage to Henry, and of being a disciple of Satan who had bewitched Henry, seducing him with sorcery.
Harriet She was imprisoned in the Tower in May 1536 - in the very state rooms she had spent her happy coronation - this so-called 'unfeeling witch'
Anne enquired anxiously about her father and her 'sweet broder' and lamented that her mother would die of 'sorrow' for her.
Harriet Which - a year after Anne, of a broken heart, she did, and her father soon followed.
The portrait of Tom Boleyn moves
Harriet Local legend has it that, as penance for the untimely deaths of two of his children, his ghost crosses 12 bridges before cockcrow every 19th May. With a coach of headless horses, he starts at Blickling and crosses bridges at Aylsham, Belaugh, Burg, Buxton, Coltishall, Hautbois, Meyton, Oxnead and Wroxham.
Psychotic laughter off
Harriet And it had been going so well. With a head start as a diplomat and linguist at Henry VII's court, Sir Thomas Boleyn 's calculated marriage to the royally-connected, royal-blooded dukes of Norfolk
Norfolk bares his vampire teeth
Harriet had secured him a friend in the highest of high places. For Norfolk, the Essex of Tudor England, the only way was up. Tom's three extremely well-educated children, George, Mary and Anne, were all part of his grand plan to conquer. The girls spent their teenage years in France as ladies-in-waiting to Henry's sister the French Queen, then joined Queen Katherine of Aragon’s household, as consecutive Henry-bewitching maids of honour. Anne played harder to get than Mary.
Anne The harder we play, the higher we rise…
Norfolk And the harder you fall.
Harriet The high-riding Toms of her new family - father Tom Boleyn and uncle Tom Howard, Duke of Norfolk – applied the traditional bridles by which many lesser women had been broken. But they had to give Anne her family head.
Anne And I was right.
Harriet In the dark heat of that thrilling royal chase, her father Tom was created Earl of Wiltshire and brother Lord George Rochford appointed to the Royal Privy Chamber. And it didn’t do Uncle Tom any harm either.
Harriet sits back on the throne
Harriet Her secret wedding to the rampant King of a rampant new England, on 25th of January, 1533, exceeded even these two Tom cats’ ambitions - and they all rose with her.
Norfolk and Tom Boleyn stand
Harriet (shuddering unconsciously) Though reductively presented by male history as the cunning conquest of a king by a sex cat, it was actually the most brilliant 4 year political campaign of the Tudor era. She kept her head through years of brinkmanship, achieving more in her brief hour upon the main stage than her new age father’s positive or his negative, her reactionary uncle.
Anne A female career more like those great Toms Wolsey and Cromwell than my kittenish sister's.
Pause. Harriet stands.
Harriet But no head was secure in Henry Tudor's wake. Not even a head as prettily screwed on as Anne's. (moves to the portrait of Norfolk) Not while this undead fist in the gauntlet of the dead past was for hire whenever Henry needed it! (unconsciously touches her neck as she senses his slight movement towards her and moving away). The fairy tale castle that Tom built - his life's master work - was swept away in 1536 in one appalling May tide. Within eight years, not one member of the Boleyn household survived. They all died or disappeared to Ireland, which, as far as ambition went, amounted to the same thing. Even Norfolk, rapidly sentencing Anne to death to avoid association with her fall, felt the curse. His 17 year old niece Catherine Howard replayed her cousin Anne as the new pretty head on the block in a ghastly 1542 return of Anne’s 19 May 1536 Horror Show. Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, Catherine’s maid, beheaded on the same stage with her, reprised George’s role as the supporting Boleyn. After Thomas Boleyn’s death in 1539, Blickling passed through his brother’s hand to his relatives, the Tudor-rich Cleres. Yet - by the Curse of the Boleyns - even Sir Edward Clere died a bankrupt in 1605 and eleven years later his widow sold the whole Estate. However brilliantly Anne gave her head to the task, she was all undone by a womb that failed its basic job description…
Norfolk The concocting, in that steaming witch’s cauldron of female parts, of a male heir.
Harriet Her triumph was as absolute and as brief as a May Queen's, Her avenging crocodile uncle Tom proclaimed the death sentence upon it with
Norfolk (enjoying the lie) ‘Tears in my eyes’. (mouth an open coffin, laughs.)
Harriet And what of her heart? Was there, as poor little rich boy Henry bewailed, only head in Anne’s requited troth? She denied it to the end, on the scaffold itself. But Henry was certainly not her first love. Cardinal Wolsey - on the King’s orders - terminated her betrothal to Lord Henry Percy. And she had inspired court poet Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rhyme-royals
Norfolk (delivering this allegation as judgement) 'Adultery before the fact'
Harriet long before Henry’s.
The tableau/ portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt comes to life
Wyatt (to audience) Good even. Sir Thomas Wyatt. Soldier, poet, envoy, ambassador. Renaissance man. Born Allington Castle, Kent, 1503. Died 1542, Dorset, of a violent fever but fret ye not (smiles reassuringly) ‘tis no longer contagious . Educated Cambridge. Formally accompanied Harry 8 and my old flame Anne to France before their marriage – awks. In between missions accomplished on Harry 8’s behalf abroad: knighted; imprisoned in the Tower– along with Anne - released, unlike Anne; promoted to French ambassador; imprisoned in the Tower again, royally pardoned, died, in the king's pay, at 39. Serving Harry was a tricky business.
Harriet Poor Tom (revealing a pre-show incident) Like that moment a celebrity TV director claps all his attention on you
Wyatt They f-
Harriet until a whisper (the analogy becoming bitterly personal) refocuses his stunning gaze over your shoulder at someone else…
Wyatt
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
(It is now)It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Harriet This? 8.00am, Friday 19 May 1536. 29 year old Queen Anne ascends the stage, costumed in a robe of black damask covered by an ermine mantle of white. Her brother and the other five alleged ‘adulterers’ have been executed horribly the day before. Instead of denying her guilt as an adulteress and disciple of witchcraft, she delivers a love speech to her former lord.
Music. Anne mimes this.
Harriet And on every May 19 since, a carriage pulled by six headless horses with a headless coachman carries Anne to the door of Blickling Hall. She gets out brandishing her crowned severed head, then roams the hall’s corridors until daybreak
Enter The Common – the Common Man and the Common Woman or multiples thereof - dressed as burglars.
The portraits come to life.
Common (sings) We stole to the door of Blickling Hall
On the nineteenth night of a moonlit May
And met the ghost of Anne Boleyn
Shining bright as day.
Six headless horses drew her coach
A haunted headless coachman drove,
‘Give them their head!’ she laughed, then turned
On me her look of love.
‘I lost my hart in the darkest chase,
On the dying fall of a hunting horn.
I lost my head for the rose of the world
And the rose withered on the thorn.
‘A death-white moon with a raven head
And a smile like a blossom of lovely May
I sold my heart for a worldly crown
And I’ll take your breath away.’
‘We’re not your True Thomas!’ we cried in dread
And her witch head turned in its rotting shroud
‘Ah! You’ve named the angel who guards my grave,’
And she hid her moon face in a cloud.
‘I lost your heart in the darkest chase
On the dying fall of a hunting horn.
I lost my head for the rose of the world
And the rose withered on the thorn.'
Harriet Call security!
C. Woman We thought you were on our side, Harriet.
Harriet Yes but this is my show. Not yours!
C. Man (irreverently singing)
She gave head to King Harry,
Heart to Sir Tom
C. Woman And a hell to each Dick
Who happened along…
C. Man Oh no, it’s the heritage police!
Enter Security in Blickling Hall/Elizabethan Tower Guard livery
Security Ha! You’ve picked the wrong night to burgle history, Mr and Mrs Common Man. May the 19th be with you now!
C. Man Phallocentricity!
C. Woman The long right arm of his story.
Security arrests and removes the Common and exits. Enter Henry VIII. Phallocentric order is restored.
Scene 2. 1536. Anne Boleyn and Thomas Wyatt sit separated by the throne in separate cells in the Tower USL and USR. Henry VIII occupies the throne at the centre, lounging at the audience with open legs.
Henry VIII (with the bluster of a lifelong inferiority complex) You’re looking at the biggest in England, whatever She said to her ladies of the bedchamber. The first thing I learned was never trust a courtier. They didn’t even announce my father’s death for two days. Hyper-cautious Henry VII is Dead, Long Live the Courtiers Consolidating their Positions! I couldn’t even sign my name to royal gifts or letters patent without the counter-signature of my father’s minders, back-watching ministers like Sir Henry Wyatt feathering his own nest. Until Wolsey set me free of all such constraints (repressing a regret)in the days when he served his king before his God. My skinflint father united the bloodlines of York and Lancaster in marriage after centuries of blood and fire and married the new house of Tudor to the might of Old Spain – twice: the pope ruled that my brother the real-King-Arthur-who-never-was died before he mounted Catherine’s bed. Dad guarded my inheritance and filled the royal coffers with his mean hands, at a price. I grew up over-protected, watchful, wary. But they’re all wary of me now.
Wyatt looks wary
Henry VIII What Dad grabbed at Bosworth wasn’t the glorious England of Henry V. It was a farmyard stuck in the Middle Ages: deserted, backward, inward, a dunghill on France’s doorstep still recovering from the Black Death about 100 years slower than the rest of Europe. Edward III ruled five million people. Richard II, twenty five years of Black Death later, half that. Now, after twenty five years of me, everything’s soaring: population, rents, prices, land speculation, commerce, enclosures, evictions. Consumables at 231%. Uprooted peasants flooding the towns and wages falling. But my people: the landowners, commercial farmers, property investors, the nobility, the gentry, the merchants, the land-grabbers making it yield: all rich and getting richer. We’ll be conquering Europe again soon like the knights of old. Meanwhile, my Renaissance men – handsome soldier- scholars strutting Italy and France - sing Italian sonnets to my Tudor rose
Both men look at the rose on Anne’s table
Henry VIII and their hearts out to ladies they can’t have! Hands off, Master Wyatt, she’s mine! (laughs)
Wyatt (in prison)
Whoso list to hunt: I know where is an hind.
But as for me, alas I may no more:
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain,
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
Henry VIII (Brendan Behan voice) ‘The foundation stone of the Protestant Church are the balls of King Henry VIII’ ? If that’s true I’m a Dutchman. Erasmus was writing his Greek and Latin New Testaments at Cambridge when I was a young king dancing Spanish steps on the graves of my father’s councillors. John Colet was attacking priests, monks, superstition, even the papacy, from the lecterns and pulpits of Cambridge years before I needed to ditch Catherine. More was sweet-reasoning his Utopia (a pang of regret) long before he put his conscience before my friendship. The Renaissance had come to Little England, closely followed by Luther’s Reformation, not mine. My papal legate, Wolsey, was burning books and imprisoning men, albeit too late. But he didn’t imprison the ideas and he balked at burning the heretics who spread them. Luther gave men’s loathing of papal monarchy and church power a doctrine. I did it without the doctrine. Ann’s circle brought Lutherism to my court but it wasn’t her Bible I married her for. Luther said priests should give up their concubines and marry: their balls, not mine.
Pause
Henry VIII Catherine bore me five children. Eighteen years serving the royal codpiece and past it. Only Mary survived. (lewd)A king must protect his dynasty. Enter the lovely Boleyn with her Bible.
Both men’s eyes are riveted on the Bible on the table. They are seeing Ann Boleyn, the flower of the court, playing demure and chaste to perfection. Wyatt notices the competition, drops his.
Wyatt For to love her for her looks lovely
My heart was set in thought right firmly,
Trusting by truth to have had redress.
But she hath given me leave full honestly.
Yet I do not rejoice it greatly,
For on my faith I loved too surely.
But reason will that I do cease
For to love her.
Since that in love the pains been deadly,
Me think it best that readily
I do return to my first address
For at this time too great is the press,
And perils appear too abundantly
For to love her.
Henry sings Parla Più Piano (‘Speak softly love’ – the theme from the Godfather) in Italian.
Henry VIII Was it love? Was it ever love, that witchcraft in her eyes? That song in my heart? Yes, surely. A young woman’s open-eyed admiration behind the queen’s ageing back. It is a magic mightier than kings. It turns the world around. ... (disillusioned) But truelove is kind, does not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own. Becomes not a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. (pause, a king again) The pope would have to challenge his own authority to un-permit my marriage to Catherine. That put me with the radicals who said popes could be fallible. Lucius, the legendary first Christian King of England, was also its vicar - ‘Give the king thy judgements, oh God.’ Why should I kneel to the bishop of Rome to free me from the daughter of Spain? I too was my own man in my own empire at the head of my own church. I needed a papal legate like a knife in the neck. And then More also let me down. So I convened the most powerful law-making parliament in English history, as long as it did my will. The Act of Annates; the Act of Appeals; the First Act of Succession; the Act of Supremacy, the Treasons Act - farewell, Thomas More -the Act Against the Pope’s Authority. After centuries of nothing much, a completed Revolution in Six Acts, in four years. My precedents were King David, King Solomon; Emperor Constantine, Emperor Justinian: Heads of Church and State. God ordained it. Parliament, belatedly, recognised it. The bishops nodded it through, cowed by taxes and threats and fear of the alternative: permanent subordination to Parliament. What was it? A temporary squabble of king and pope, not worth being burned for. Wasn’t I more Catholic than most of northern Europe, a Defender of the Faith?(pause)But what if my heirs to an independent English church were Protestant? A church given a royal head as Lutheran as Boleyn? Think about it. Most of them didn’t at the time.
Wyatt picks up letter and begins to read.
Anne (in her pomp as queen of the hive) The queen bee must provide an heir to the colony in earnest and lead the dance of the hive in the game of courtly love. Like the king, I flirt with everyone but in earnest I am faithful. (darker, privately).Unlike the king.
Henry VIII As a boy, I trained for the priesthood; as a married man, a defender of the faith, I agonised over whether my serial lack of male heirs was God's judgement on the unholiness of each of the unions. Though I sacrificed four wives on the altar of Tudor permanence, I lived, married and died, a Catholic.
He indicates a Great Bible.
Henry VIII My Church of England was a Catholic one shorn of priest-cults - saints, intercessions, images, pilgrimages. And with an English Bible. My gift, the people eating the Word from my hand. Anne read from it every day, like it was hers. Master Cromwell used it as a rod for the church’s back, stripped the church of idols, sacraments, ceremonies, emphasised faith and sermons and got close to altar-smashing if not the Lutheran extremes of justification by faith alone and denying Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. That cunning Puritan served Protestantism not me. That’s why I let the old Catholic guard have him in the end, did him for heresy as well as treason. He’d dissolved the monasteries by then anyway. I plundered 560 monastic institutions of stone, gold, lead, plate and benefices and bought myself a new political nation: no family enfranchised by church loot is going back to Rome. The north rose in rebellion – The Pilgrimage of Grace - I crushed them with martial law, public hangings and broken promises. In three years I broke centuries of church power forever, two fifths of the country passing to the Crown. The England you know was born. Which is more than you can say for the son Boleyn miscarried in our third, and last, year of marriage. And the pre-nuptial nothing she conceived in our first. (dismissive)Elizabeth. (pause)God was damning my second marriage so (repressing regret) I let the Seymour faction destroy her. Love had nothing to do with it.
Wyatt opens the letter. Yearning Tudor court music. Over it:
Henry VIII Blame them for cutting off the pretty head of the Boleyns before it turned on them. I’d already divorced her ‘for marrying within prohibited degrees’ not for adultery. I didn’t need to kill her.
Wyatt reads the letter. Anne speaks it
Anne ‘How quickly it changes. God blessed Jane Seymour with a son and killed her with Tudor surgery 12 days later. Four short months ago, Henry and I wore yellow to celebrate Catherine’s death and he stroked my pregnant belly. And waking beside him the next day, the terrible truth dawned: with Catherine gone, he no longer needed me. (holds empty womb)Then my last best hope miscarried. When he came to me at Easter, he was already gone. At the May jousts, as I Queened it for the third and last time, six gentlemen and pages were arrested for plots against the king and carnal knowledge of me. Including you, Tom, Esquire of the Body and master of mine long before Henry knew it. They will let you go, after watching me die: you have Cromwell as your pillar. They wracked confessions from the others. Yesterday, on the scaffold, my brother Rochford, also accused of being my lover, said “From my mishap learn not to set your thoughts upon the vanities of the world, and least of all upon the flatteries of the court. (Wyatt says this last sentence with her) The higher we rise, the harder we fall.” (pause) Keep your head down, Tom, lest you lose it.
Henry VIII Let that ring out around my realm.
Wyatt goes to the grated window of his cell.
Wyatt Who list his wealth and ease retain
Himself let him unknown contain;
Press not too fast in at that gate
Where the return stands by disdain:
For sure, circa Regna tonat.
The high mountains are blasted oft
When the low valley is mild and soft;
Fortune with health stands at debate,
The fall is grievous from aloft:
And sure, circa Regna tonat.
These bloody days have broken my heart:
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert:
Of truth, circa Regna tonat.
The bell-tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night:
There did I learn out of a grate
For all favour, glory or might,
That yet,circa Regna tonat.
By proof, I say, there did I learn
Wit helpeth not defence to earn.
Of innocency to please or prate:
Bear low, therefore, give God the stern.
For sure, circa Regna tonat.
Anne All six of my ‘lovers’ died confessing their sins, though not the ‘sin’ they were executed for. Here today, dead tomorrow, I swore on the sacrament, that I am pure. Shall I die without justice? I asked and the lieutenant said the poorest suggest the king hath, hath justice. And I laughed. A dying old Lady of the bedchamber whom I never meant to offend, Lady Wingfield, called me a whore on her deathbed. She told our young love story, Tom, as if it were happening now. Blame the Duke of Suffolk, my sworn enemy, for your arrest: the Wingfield family are his clients. I am 29, too young to die, guilty of nothing but youth. I indulged ‘pastime in the queen’s chamber’ giggled at tales of the king’s impotence. Henry said I was unfaithful with a hundred men and this last six no worse than the rest. Truer than he meant.
Wyatt What vaileth truth? Or by it to take pain?
To strive by steadfastness for to attain
To be just, true and free from doubleness?
Sithens all alike where ruleth craftiness:
Rewarded is both false and plain,
Soonest he speedeth that most can feign.
True meaning heart is had in disdain.
Against deceit and doubleness
What vaileth truth?
Why would Henry arrest six adulterers to destroy Anne when one would do? That was the Seymours, annihilating the competition. Jane Seymour – by refusing him hers - had his lips; her faction his ears. The court flew from Anne’s weakness. She felt his jousting fall deep in her heart: it cost her the baby. A boy. She refused to smile on Henry’s little affairs. Jane Seymour showed ‘gentleness’ in this, Anne ‘cursedness’ – like Catherine. Bad move. They say Henry never spared a man his fury or a woman his lust. (bitter)That is the hand that pulled the strings of the English Reformation.
Anne But I know his hand. It lures, ignores, manipulates, leads, abandons.
Henry egresses singing his own composition Greensleeves.
Alas, my love, you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously
For I have lovéd you so long
Delighting in your company
Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight
Greensleeves was my heart of gold
And who but the lady greensleeves
Your vows you've broken, like my heart
Oh, why did you so enrapture me?
Now I remain in a world apart
But my heart remains in captivity
Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight
Greensleeves was my heart of gold
And who but the lady greensleeves. (exit)
Anne It’s his other hand you’ve got to watch, the one stroking a pregnant belly. The world he imagined he made real: plots everywhere, the strong to his side, or his bed, the weak to the scaffold. The only defence is to counter-attack first, like Thomas Cromwell. We Boleyns were too slow. I watched my brother hanged, drawn and quartered, spilling the guts he’d shown before. This morning, I will ‘be beheaded or burned at the king’s pleasure.’ All the pleasure I once gave Henry’s body has won me this mercy: a blade instead of the flames. The king never had my heart, he says, and he will have my clever head on its stiff Protestant neck for it, while Norfolk my accuser blooms like a rose in June, all the offices, grants and honours in the world vouchsafed by that one failsafe: royal favour. Tom, you had my fickle heart once and kissed my neck like you meant it, praising its yielding softness. Pray for that softness now.
Wyatt puts hand on to his neck, in shared terror. The door opens and he expects to be led to the block. The Common Man sings.
Common
Man A moon of May and a shining hour
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
And passing fair is the fading flower
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
You stalked me softly who later flew
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
And kissed me bold, wild and free and new.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
With lips of young, sweet and dangerous rose
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
That like the blood-red of summer blows.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
So wild to hold though I seem so tame;
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
I lost my heart when I won the game.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
A Tudor rose and a May queen’s throne.
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
I plucked them both and now both are gone.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
I lost my soul for a golden band
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
That bows the neck as it forced the hand.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
I lost my head for a peerless hour
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
And my True Thomas in the tower.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
Six headless horses to lead her home;
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
A headless coachman; a hollow crown.
Fa la la la la la la la la la. (exit)
Act 2. May 19 2033. As Act 1, though the throne is gone. Thomas Howard the 3rd duke of Norfolk seated in the Tower in the high-necked cloak worn by the vampire in Act 1. He adopts a superior pose. Enter Harriet CS, 17 years older and looking it, no longer famous or fashionable. She looks at him as if at a portrait. The Common perform The Grand Old Duke of York.
Oh the Grand Old Duke of York
He had 10,00 men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up they were up
And when they were down they were down
And when they were only half way up
They were neither up nor down.
Harriet Good evening lady and gentleman. Thank you for supporting this fundraiser. And thank you to our resident folk history enthusiasts The Common for that …version of the famous old rhyme. (through gritted teeth) I can’t wait hear their adaptation of it to the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, the subject of tonight’s lecture, later. Though no longer the head of Tudor History or the face of Tudor TV, I can still string the odd death sentence together. (aside) - Even if we now have to make a song and morris dance of it with some …folk. In my History of Breck’s Isle, I argued that the nursery rhyme you've just heard is about the Plantagenet Richard Duke of York, Protector of England and Pretender to the throne, during the Wars of the Roses. In 1460, he marched his white rose army against a red rose Lancastrian army all the way up a massive Norman earthworks to Sandal, his impregnable castle stronghold, then, in a moment of madness, he marched them all down again in a direct attack and was killed. I conclude that the conservative lesson of remaining in one's stronghold was not lost on his Yorkist colleague. (indicates the tableau of the Duke) So what’s his story? How do I put this? He doesn’t have one. He hasn’t a tagon to be pro about. He’s the Not of the Tudor is. And it gives us the interesting problem of how to tell an anti-story. Because, tonight, lady and gentleman, the eternal antagonist finally gets his own show. The Strange Death of Catholic England. I should of course be delivering it at Kenninghall Palace, the imposing family seat of the Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, not here at Blickling Village Hall, near the seat of their relatively poor cousins the Boleyns. But history has reduced mighty fallen Kenninghall to three broken stones in the corner of a Norfolk field.
Norfolk furiously tries to move. Can’t
Harriet The actor who plays Thomas Howard the 3rd Duke of Norfolk in the 1970 BBC series 'The Six Wives of King Henry VIII" also plays the 2nd Dr Who.
Dr Who music. Over it:
Harriet Appropriately, he (Patrick Troughton) plays Howard like a creature from another planet or age; a Spectre at the Tudor feast. Craggy-faced, mad-eyed, madcapped, cadaverous, capering mournfully in the shadowy margins to David Munrow's dance-of-death theme tune piped on 'authentic' period instruments, he looked like a ghost. The ghost of an England that died at Bosworth in 1485.
Norfolk bares vampire teeth in a grimace
Harriet History is in fact written not by the victor but by the present, retelling the story in its own image and for its own purposes. Without the present, history is dead. It is that commentator’s curse in a football coverage whose ‘expert summariser’ is ridiculed by that unforeseen change in the narrative. “At 2-0 in the 90th against ten men, this game is over, Ron. What!! …Where did those three injury time away goals come from! ” History progresses like steadfast Thomas Cromwell, the brilliant founder of a modern nation. And, like Cromwell, comes up against-
The historian indicates Norfolk in his cell, half lit and statuesque. The tableau can't move but his face is a picture of repressed biting fury as he listens.
Harriet This. This Owner of the Previous Establishment. This All Our Yesterdays Man. This Old Noble Money. This undead antagonist. This eternally side-lined, bluecheese, toffee-nosed, dried-up, stiff-jointed, tweed-capped, absolute reactionary, gothic mediaeval villain of every piece. This upstaged splenetic crosspatch. This clock-stopped Time Lord. This no-can do. This petrified might of Old England.
Norfolk almost breaks out of his tableau in fury. But can't.
Harriet Thomas Howard of Norfolk: 1473-1554, and all of it emotionally lived in the previous century. His father and grandfather - the first and second dukes - fought on the wrong side at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, white rose Yorkists sharing Richard III's defeat. After his father's four wilderness years under the new Tudor regime - imprisonment, attainted titles and slow return from the dead - he achieved military glory under both Tudor Henrys. He helped his Dad the restored 2nd Duke heroically save the kingdom from Scottish invasion at Flodden, striking the fear of an English God into the Irish and the French. He helped save the kingdom from real peril at home while Henry VIII played out fantasy 'invasions' of France on his 'Arthurian' horse. He loyally supported that crowing Tudor upstart against even his Old Catholic Family's religious principles, remaining true to an older, holier principle: relentless self-advancement.
Norfolk makes a spleen-bursting face at this presumption, all the more furious because he's got to keep still.
Harriet And his reward was - to lose his second son to the scaffold. And his own seventh decade to the Tower. Five decades of unswerving loyalty to every swerve of Harry’s progress never won him Old Harry’s love.
(The portrait of) Henry VIII sings a snatch of Greensleeves, mockingly
Harriet After Wolsey's fall – which, as temporarily restored head of the council, Norfolk devised as assiduously as Thomas Cromwell's and for the same reason - he tried just as hard as the cardinal to juggle Harry free from Katherine of Aragon and the Pope while playing off France against Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. He was just much less good at it than Wolsey - who against the laws of possibility very nearly pulled it off - and Cromwell, who actually did. He was better at killing people than negotiating with them. He was Old Winter caught in an English renaissance spring, out-skilled, out-thought and alienated from the power and royal favour he saw as his birth-right by two starry Toms of common birth - Cardinal 'Almost Pope' Wolsey and Sir Thomas Cromwell - opposing revolutions they led, not so much on religious grounds as on a settled hatred of common humanity setting the national agenda. Common as in he’s a bit common; Common Land and House of Commons. Too short on ideas - and too mediaeval in instincts - to help establish a modern England or to find constructive solutions to Henry's tangled progressions and predicaments, this fossil, this black hole in the air, nevertheless hurried England's brilliant last cardinal to an early grave at Leicester and viciously despatched Cromwell the genius of its Reformation. (pause) Consumed them both like a vacuum. Like the great self-glorifying 'seat' of Kenninghall the Dukes of 'Norfolk' now occupy in our Norfolk landscape. A vacuum that, for all its loyalty, took him inexorably to this cold, dark, damp, black hole of London for 7 years, mourning the death of his son and of all his hopes. (She fatally enters his space) One can only imagine his thoughts.
Norfolk stretches himself in his chair after his long wait. The inflexibility of his movements is not just the result of age and 7 years confined but the rigor mortis of his outlook. After a life of the highest military and courtly rank it does not sit comfortably to be imprisoned and he still addresses the audience as if from a judge's chair. But he also looks cell-worn and all of his 79 years. He moves stiffly to the self satisfied, taunting portrait (Harry from Act One) on the wall.
Norfolk (addressing the portrait) Fortune thy name is Tudor. They even place thy smirking portrait here to mock me! But for thou, this cell in the Tower would have been Hampton Court Palace; this stool the throne of England.
Gets up, stiffly. Checks for spying ears. Confides in audience.
Norfolk Both my wives were royal; both my nieces were queens of England. When Fortune attainted us for the second time, sentenced us to death, my son's Howard blood stained the scaffold as blue as heaven. In Henry's hoary twilight, in 1547, I was deprived, on the crowing upstart's orders, of all comforts, books, bedsheets, even the hangings for these moat-damp walls. Only spared Death by the upstart Fortune himself being taken to Judgement.
Enter Anne with a portrait gallery tableau of Boleyn ghosts He turns, seeing them. He judged and sentenced Anne in Act One. In this Act, she will judge and sentence him.
Norfolk (shock)Mouth of hell!
Anne Blickling Hell!
Norfolk Why there?
Anne To endure the annihilation you imposed on us.
Norfolk So many accusing faces!
Anne The Norfolk Boleyns, clamouring for your ruin every May 19.
Norfolk Tudor Parvenus, hitching your Norfolk wagon to my star.
Anne Gentlemen and ladies in our own right, generations before we allied with our great Uncle Howard. But easier to accuse a Boleyn of witching a king's bed with sterility when you make-believe her blood had no place there anyway, eh uncle! (a judge of him in death as he of her in life) Your soul must be smelted of its mediaeval pride. That fossil you call a heart made to feel the flesh and blood it froze out.
Norfolk (terror) So this is my purgatory?
Anne There's been a Reformation. There is no purgatory. Only Hell.
Norfolk (triumphantly)Heresy!
Anne You are no longer the judge. I am.
Norfolk I cannot be judged by an apostate. (Catholic magic) Aroynt thee, witch! (Legal magic/ science) Proved so in court!
Anne (mocking the judgement)"The sulphurous looks; the extra finger; the devil's teat; the sable skin; the shrewish frame; the miscarriages; the defective births (worse)the reading (worst of all) the Bible reading!" (laughs) Even Thomas Cromwell couldn't find 'witchcraft' there, uncle. Nor place me at any of the crime scenes.
Norfolk (trotting this out professionally)"A witch may materialise anywhere."
Anne Oh please! This is the sixteenth century.
Norfolk (not for him it isn't)You threatened all Government! You were the only woman who ever answered Henry back.
They look at (the portrait of) Henry VIII
Anne It was a marriage- a Protestant partnership. It's the future you and your land alliances fostered by fathers will never know. A marriage of true minds.
Norfolk It was a country matter - like any other. Only in your case a country traded for the whole of England! And don't pretend you gave your maiden heart to the king for love! You lost your maidenhead to Sir Thomas Wyatt long before you pretended to give it to Henry.
Anne I lost my maiden heart to Tom. And you, ‘Uncle’, took my head for it.
This moves him at last.
Norfolk I sentenced you with tears in my eyes.
Anne (reliving the terror of the scaffold)The mob went quiet. I was blindfolded. I didn't know where the executioner was. I prayed. Something sang in the air. An angel?
Norfolk The king's then. He could afford to show a traitor witch the edge of his mercy, employing a professional executioner's sharp French sword. Up to a point.
(The portrait of) Henry VIII exits.
Norfolk I had to defend my family against your Curse.
Anne So that your blood niece Catherine really could commit the adulteries and treason I was only accused of. (a judgement) And by your unrepentance, your lack of common humanity, you have sealed the fate of the Howards. Your grandson will follow your son to the traitor's block.
Norfolk Little Tom in the steps of poor dead Harry.
Anne Yes! You Norfolks are history, uncle! Like the dead knight in the ballad of the ravens.
Norfolk Despair your charm! That dead knight is graciously mourned by his faithful lady, his pining hound, hawk and horse, and the ravens are unable to molest him. (like a spell)"God send every gentleman,
Such hawks, such hounds, and such a leman."
Anne (a counter-spell, the ‘Scottish’ version of the ballad)"His hound is to the hunting gone
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl home,
His lady taken another mate,
Of his flesh, they make their dinner sweet."
Norfolk hisses.
Anne Your second son will repeat the same old testament of stupid mistakes, scheme to marry Mary Tudor and plot to make Mary Queen of Scots Catholic Queen of England. For which your family will be exiled forever from Kenninghall and Norfolk. While my daughter will rule a new Protestant England. (quoting her Protestant Bible)"The stone which the builders refused becomes the head stone of the corner."
Midnight chimes. Anne exits, leaving Norfolk to his agony. The ghost of the dashing soldier poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Harry) appears as an angel.
Surrey (sings cheerfully) There were three ra'ens sat on a tree,
Down a down, hey down, hey down,
They were as black as black might be,
With a down.
The one of them said to his mate,
Where shall we our breakfast take?
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down
Norfolk (alarmed)Who's there?
Surrey (sings)Down in yonder green field,
Down, a down, hey down, hey down,
There lies a knight slain 'neath his shield,
With a down.
His hounds they lie down at his feet,
So well they do their master keep,
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down.
His hawks they fly so eagerly,
Down a down, hey down, hey down,
No other fowl dare come him night,
With a down.
Down there comes a fallow doe
As great with young as might she go
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down
She lifted up his bloody head,
Down a down, hey down, hey down,
And kissed his wounds that were so red,
With a down.
She got him up upon her back,
And carried him to earthen lake,
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down
She buried him before the prime
Down a down, hey down, hey down,
She was dead herself ere e'en-song time,
With a down.
God send every gentleman,
Such hawks, such hounds, and such a leman.
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down
Norfolk I know that voice. Harry? Son?
Surrey Aye! Henry Howard Earl of Surrey. Or the ghost of him.
Norfolk I have seen a worse phantom. Anne Boleyn's. Prophesying Howards’ end!
Surrey I have better news.
Norfolk Better news! Sweet boy!(pause, delaying fatally, the old suspicion and calculation) Or some devil tricking me in my son's guise?
Surrey One cannot lie in heaven. Test me.
Norfolk What you thought of your rival. Truly.
Surrey Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest;
Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain,
And virtue sank the deeper in his breast;
Such profit he of envy could obtain.
A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame,
Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain
As on a stith, where some work of fame
Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain’s gain.
A visage, stern and mild; where both did grow,
Vice to condemn, in virtues to rejoice;
Amid great storms whom grace assured so,
To live upright and smile at fortune’s choice.
A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme;
That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit;
A mark the which unperfited, for time
Some may approach, but never none shall hit.
A tongue that served in foreign realms his king;
Whose courteous talk to virtue did enflame
Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring
Our English youth, by travail unto fame.
An eye whose judgment no affect could blind,
Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile;
Whose piercing look did represent a mind
With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile.
A heart where dread yet never so impressed
To hide the thought that might the truth avaunce;
In neither fortune lift, nor so repressed,
To swell in wealth, nor yield unto mischance.
A valiant corps, where force and beauty met,
Happy, alas! too happy, but for foes,
Lived, and ran the race that nature set;
Of manhood’s shape, where she the mold did lose.
But to the heavens that simple soul is fled,
Which left with such, as covet Christ to know
Witness of faith that never shall be dead:
Sent for our health, but not received so.
Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost;
The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost.
Norfolk But can I trust these words? Your funeral oration, for Wyatt, was true?
Surrey As true as art, which art in heaven.
Norfolk And what does art in heaven say of me?
Surrey That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang-
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Norfolk You never wrote so tragically. Of the Dissolution, of Death. Of-
Surrey I still don't. That art is not mine father, save that, in heaven, it belongs to All. It waits for a mind on earth to think it, a hand to write it, a Will to find a Way.
Norfolk After they beheaded you, I had your poems sent to me here in the Tower. Then they took my books away. There was one about Windsor…
Surrey (recalls)'When Windsor walls sustain my weary arm-'… Was that really me?
Norfolk Convinced you were right, whatever you did.
Surrey (remembering) "London hast thow accused me
Whose breast did boil to see
Thy dissolute life
Within thy wicked walls so rife!"…
But listen, father-
Norfolk Remember when Edward Seymour accused us of sympathising with the very Pilgrimage of Grace we put down. And you struck him - the king's new brother in law -in the precincts of the court! Always saying the right thing at the wrong time. (darkly, thinking of the scaffold)Or losing your head at the crisis.(exasperated and with real grief)You ruined us, Harry! Just as the tide was turning in our favour. You were the king's 'Lt-General on Land and Sea of all the Continental Possessions of England'. Why then assault a Seymour servant, lay us open to a charge of treason? announce that I your father should be Protector when Henry died, place the royal insignia in our coat of arms on your shield?
Surrey The frozen past is what it is and no amount of anguish can make it other than it has been. I have news of what's to come. But I must be quick-
Norfolk You showed our royal hand too soon! Somerset held two kings - the old and the new - in his and got every last scrap of us: your sweet life, my liberty, my position as Earl Marshall, lord high treasurer, all our chairs, seats, titles, lands, manors, everything - even our family jewelry and linen.
Surrey The Wheel of Fortune has taken Somerset down at the neck as it did me. But listen, you must
A cock crows
Surry (looks up) Ah! Dawn comes. I must go.
Norfolk Wait. You said you had 'better news' for me?
Surrey Quickly then! Edward the boy king is dying and names Mary Tudor his heir. The white-maned lion of Norfolk may kneel for communion at a Catholic altar again without checking over its shoulder.
Norfolk (falls to his kneels in joyous thankful prayer) Hail Bloody Mary!
Surrey Tomorrow, Somerset's nemesis, Northumberland, the former Earl of Warwick, will marry his son to Henry's niece Lady Jane Grey, showing his royal hand too early. In due course, he'll be executed as a traitor against Henry Tudor's declared heir, just as I was. Only more horribly, on your orders! The wheel of Fortune turns yet again. (hauls his father to his feet) And this summer, it will lift you the country's warlord on his old warhorse… once more on a returning tide of Catholic Faith!
Norfolk (calculating already, as of old) Mary Tudor - a woman and wedded to England's enemy, Spain - will need me, the old legitimate Plantaganet. Ha! The old white lion of Norfolk IS what he used to be. He will escape its cage, his neck be maned again with a fleece of honours, warm again with un-common Norfolk wool! (shivers)
Enter The Common dressed as Puritans but singing like Punks
Common (sings) God Save The Queen. Her Catholic regime. Has made you a…
Surrey What are you killjoys doing here? You hate the theatre.
Common We hate courtly theatre, which you have made a nest of gossip and luxury and vice. We are the people’s players. We have our own story. We sing the music of the Common.
The cock crows again
Surrey (distracted but persisting, to Norfolk) You will seize the reins of England… once more and lead a royal army against the traitor son of Sir Thomas Wyatt! You will be king, in all but name. But, father-
The cock crows again. Surrey exits.
Norfolk (his residual ambition)Perhaps in name too.
Common (sings)
Up to Rochester Bridge on his high horse
With his gunners to the fore,
His London White Coats left behind
Turned like the tide of war.
"A Wyatt! A Wyatt! our war cry,
For church and liberty;
Against this queen and her Spanish crew,
All Englishmen are we!"
When Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger
And his seven thousand men
Rose up against their Catholic queen,
Old Norfolk rode again.
(watches)
Norfolk (moves his cell chair to where Henry's throne was in Act I, mounts it like a horse, addressing his people in deluded grandeur, where but for the grace of history, England might have gone…) Privy councillors, lords and commons of England, fellow East Anglians, Norfolk neighbours, city fathers of Norwich, Englishmen, fellow citizens of Christendom. Instead of an Eden owned by landed nobles, leased to yeoman farmers and worked by faithful villagerswith the right to graze animals on common land, Henry VIII unleashed his thin-blooded Tudorocracy on you. They seized common land for their own sheep; made wool-rush fortunes; built merchant empires and plague-infested towns; watched peasant and yeoman farmers go to the devil. And took away your faith. When the Tudor upstart split from our father in Rome, fleecing our monasteries of their riches, you all cheered, Little Jack Horners with hands in the church pie. But you didn't cheer when Cranmer's new Book of Common Prayer came out under the boy king Edward did you? Now it was crown against personal faith. Now it was your common land not the Catholic Church's they were fleecing. You tore down the new fences. You complained about the new clergy. There was trouble in Protestant Paradise - there always is. In the East of England, instead of the generous rule of your Howard lord, gifting you government posts, grants of land, licenses, patronage, hospitality, charity and employment, Somerset and Northumberland gave you the power vacuum of my absence in the Tower. The tight East Anglian ship I ran, ran aground. You looked for a new lion to lead the pride. You looked for a future. You poor deluded fools, you thought you’d found one in Robert Kett. (freezes into a tableau)
Common (as one of Kett's followers, to Norfolk) The third of our 29 grievances is this. We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall common upon the common. The fourth of our 29 grievances-
Re-enter Harriet
Harriet He can't hear you. He's not here. He's in the Tower.
Common You’re not here either.
Harriet I'm an historian. I'm here to explain what happened.
Common We know what happened. We’re here, with Robert Kett. We’re his Commons in arms.
Harriet Ah, but to really know, you need hindsight.
Common Well, what did happen?
Harriet Norfolk Yeoman Farmer Robert Kett sought to limit the power of a gentry coked to the nostrils by Henry VIII's social revolution; keep them out of village life; put a brake on a runaway economy; protect common land and rights from enclosure and remind the clergy of their spiritual vocation. Unfortunately it all went wrong.
Common Doesn't it always?
Harriet Tell me about it.
Common We will.
The Common Man and Woman live the events of their tragedy as they sing it. Harriet watches, detached.
Common (sings)
As I lay down on Mousehold Heath,
I heard two corbies beak to beak,
‘It’s cold as death, fifteen below.
To Norwich Castle let us go.
‘Upon its wall, a traitor hangs
Who led last summer’s rebel gangs:
Twelve thousand men, a city strong,
Unfencing nine and twenty wrongs.’
The Commons’ land, he gave it back
Then led their time-honoured attack
And his bare bones shall be his plaque
Till crows are white and snows are black.
At Dussindale they broke his army;
His brother hanged on Wymondham Abbey;
His name is blood in church and state,
We’ll pick his bones to celebrate.
His brave old England: shabby crops
Outselling woollens in the shops;
The oak its heart until its bark
Is cut to build a new car park.’
The Commons’ land, he gave it back
Then led their time-honoured attack
And his bare bones shall be his plaque
Till crows are white and snows are black.
‘His brave new England on the hill
In narrow streets and arms fulfilled;
Its oak near Hethersett will stand
While people matter more than plans.’
The Commons’ land, he gave it back
Then led their time-honoured attack
And his bare bones shall be his plaque
Till crows are white and snows are black.
The cry of a racked prisoner off. Norfolk comes back to life, approves.
Norfolk (with relish) 3000 rebels were butchered. 300 were hanged. Robert Kett was run to earth a few miles from the battle site, dragged to the Tower, found guilty of treason and starved in chains from the walls of Norwich Castle, his crow-stripped bones a warning to all Norwich of the fate that awaits traitors. His brother William was hanged from the west tower of Wymondham church. Somerset was accused of sympathies with the anti-enclosers. Warwick became the new Protector, and, as Duke of Northumberland, the new thief of my positions, titles, lands, manors, jewels, plate, ducal coronet, collar and badge of the garter and clothes! MPs gave landlords the right to enclose common land and fixed the death penalty for fence-breakers. Northumberland's solution to all your discontent was to impose an even more fanatical Protestantism.
He makes the sign of the cross.
Norfolk Our Holy Mother Church, where each knew his place and the all-forgiving love of Mary, was not just sold off as in the days of Harry Eight and Tom the blacksmith's boy, but stripped bare and every Tom, Dick or Harry allowed to play God with her sacraments. This is what happens when you cage the Howard lion. (pause, shows vampire teeth in a politician's smile) Well the Howard lion is out of his cage again and he bequeaths you the opposite. Anne's ghost told me I was dead, I was history. Well, the eternal antagonist finally gets to tell his story. He who laughs last, laughs longest. (howl of grave-mouth Vincent Price laughter. He resumes his king's speech to the people) All this dissolution of trust between governing classes and people in Norwich wasn't caused by the solidified might of old certainties and the love of Our Holy Mother Mary but by Norfolk's long infestation with Lollards and dissent.
Common Lollards and dissent? Us?
Norfolk And under the royal Howards, all your unhappiness and discontent will be… (chilling glare) crushed.
The cell door opens and Norfolk looks up, startled out of his reverie. Morning light and the people singing. It is his release.
Common (sings) Oh the grand old Duke of Norfolk
Seven years in the Tower.
Blue in the joints and black in the heart
They brought him back to power.
When Northumberland pleaded quarter,
Queen Lady Jane Grey's case;
'My quarter's this - you'll be quartered, hanged
And your heart flung in your face!'
When Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger
And his seven thousand men
Rose up against their Catholic queen,
Old Norfolk rode again.
As the song continues, Norfolk struggles to his feet and hobbles out of the Tower cell towards his fool's 'restoration.'
Harriet (coming to the end of her lecture) … So, having spent most of his seventh decade and the whole of the third Tudor King Edward's reign under a 7 year sentence of death in the Tower - as a 'traitor,' Old Norfolk was restored under a fourth Tudor, Mary, at the head of a royal army, the 80 year old has-been he was born to be, the old implacable Power of stopping things happening, the immoveable object of every sentence, hired to put down a revolt led by Thomas Wyatt's son. And replaced when he failed. Finally put out to grass at a restored Kenninghall. It is incredible that one man could embrace so much triumph and disaster, all the proverbial 'ebbs and flows' of Tudor fortune and -
Common unlike most of his enemies-
Harriet die in his restored bed at Kenninghall. A spent force at last. But he did. Then he and Kenninghall disappeared into the void of history.
Common (sings)
He thundered, 'turn those guns around!'
But his Londoners fled the field
Their coats all torn, their bows unstrung,
His Catherine wheels un-wheeled.
The Roman Candle's final blaze,
It won the day without him,
Till Bloody Mary, too, went down
In flames and rack and ruin.
When Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger
And his seven thousand men
Rose up against their Catholic queen,
Old Norfolk rode again.
Harriet (watching Norfolk go) He who laughs last …
Common didn’t see the joke.
Vincent Prince laughter off. Projected image of an empty field with a few pieces of broken masonry.
Harriet Built by the 3rd duke on the site of 'Cynning-Halla' seat of East Anglia's ancient kings; Kenninghall was seized by Henry VIII; restored to the 3rd and 4th dukes by Queen Mary; re-seized at Bloody Mary's death by Elizabeth I and then dissolved like a monastery, and its broken materials sold off, as Elizabeth died and the Tudors' roller-coaster 118 years came to an end. Though not before they had serially crushed, serially resurrected and finally wiped the Howards from the face of Norfolk. (pause) Thank you. There's no charge for tonight's lecture but a bottomless donations bucket awaits. A reminder that The Blickling Hall Heritage Centre is now closing for 3 years of refurbishment in preparation for the 500th anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution, as sponsored by Putin Britain First and the Moscow-London Cultural Project. The gift shop will remain open-
C. Man I thought it was us Puritans who closed the theatres, not the heritage business.
C. Woman Commemoration extinction rebellion now!
C. Man The Plague on all your houses!
C. Woman Covid 25 if we’re still alive.
C. Man Keep the viral wheels of capitalism and coronavirus turning!
C. Woman Blickling Hall In Association With Putin Britain First Presents
C. Man Ye 500th Ann-Boleyn-iversary Masque!
Harriet You can purchase your tickets and Plague masks
in the bar. (puts on a mask for the Masque)
Common Follow us there (sing)
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
A selfish King had a fiscal sting
To shrink the Jack and Gill measures
But tax them the same for his luxury and gain.
He fell down but his Crown fell further….
Hot cross buns!
Hot cross buns!
One ha’ penny, two ha’ penny,
Hot cross buns!
If you have no daughters,
Give them to your sons
One ha’ penny,
Two ha’ penny,
Hot Cross Buns!
But if you haven't any
Of these pretty little elves,
You cannot do better
Than EAT THEM YOURSELVES!
C.Man Self interest innit, the basis of the market.
C. Woman Get em while they’re ’ot, as ’ell….
Both (demonic) Ha ha ha ha.
Exeunt, singing
Interval
Part Two
Dom and Harry
Blickling Hall 3 years later (May 19, 2036, the 500th anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution). A death bed and a drip. Harriet on it. Harlem Shuffle by a Strolling Bones skeletal self-tribute act (ie the Rolling Stones, approaching their early hundreds) are performing it. All the Blickling portraits dance in a ghoulish manner forming into a tableau around the bed. Harriet sees Anne’s Ghost.
Harriet I wouldn’t bother, dearie. There’s nothing left to haunt. And no-one here to watch you do it. The lane is so pot-holed, the planning company scheduled it for a rebuild - right in the middle of heritage fortnight- so the traffic control company set up its light show. Red green amber red. Which was all that happened around this famous Norfolk lane for a week. Apart from the signs warning that it was going to happen, two weeks after it hadn’t. By the time Privatised Highway Construction had coordinated enough migrant workers to start rolling tarmac, the privatised traffic lights company had removed the lights. PHC then had to wait for traffic control to put up the lights again by which time PHC had gone. That’s the trouble when only a small fraction of your employees actually do the work, rather than variously solicit ‘how did we do?’ feedback on it. This second week was networking a high-speed fibre optic conference about whose fault it all was. And that, ladies and gentlemen of Little England, is Blickling Hall Heritage Fortnight 2036, the 500th Anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s Execution-
Anne Are you talking to me?
Harriet I’m talking about you (indicates the audience) to the complaints desk. They’re the only ones here.
Anne You can see me?
Harriet Yes.
Anne How is’t possible? I’m a ghost.
Harriet You were born here so you haunt here. I was born on the NHS so I haunt it. I guess Blickling Hall and the NHS are in the same place because both are now part of the heritage industry. I knew it was all up when they gave me a free choice in the emergency ambulance about which A&E IOU I wanted to have my heart attack in. And when I ticked ‘the one without a full set of vowels’ it disappeared. I mean what if our post-NHS dentists thought of our mouths as a place to drill for gold rather than for the good of society’s health like that? Or our post-NHS opticians framed the public’s health for their own private gain, like that dodgy dealer up at Barnard Castle?
Dom (off) I heard that!
Harriet Of course you did, Dom. You went private. … I died on the post-NHS, making full use of the building, every single part of me tended by a different medic – none of whom talked to each other. Like a brilliant football team that doesn’t pass. Or as the guy from Laurence Fox News put it on Twatter
LFN Why would you trust your health to a service that needs applause just to do its job?
Shock- horror at this abuse of the NHS.
Harriet What, like an actor you mean?
LFN (bows) I thank you
Applause. LFN laps it up.
Anne We’ve come back for a Third Act? The climax?
Harriet There are no third acts in modern British lives, Anne.
Anne So what’s this?
Harriet The anti-climax. Strictly For The Birds: The First Election of a New Head of State by TV Show Phone In.
LFN And, in a major coup for those on the right side of the cultural wars, it’s all happening here at Blickling Hall in Old Norfolk, in the heart of real England.
Harriet It’s all we have left. The Empire’s gone. The Commonwealth’s gone. Europe’s gone. Scotland’s going. Northern Ireland’s going. Wales isn’t. It’s still voting Neoliberal Breck’s Isle Alliance, the More for Me Party, the one Dom finally seized it from Bullingdon Boris with leaked photographs of that greased piglet telling the truth at a privatised gathering in celebration of Freedom Day.
Anne Freedom Day?
Harriet July 17. The day we stopped protecting ourselves from the Plague in 2021. The two finalists are Dom of the Breck’s Isle More For Me Party who succeeded Boris as Breck’s Isle Tsar last year, seeing off the latest computer generated coup by the Russian-financed Putin Britain First Party. And Harry, the Progressive post-Royal.
Dom at a presidential desk.
Dom There is no break with tradition in my replacing Boris. You have my word…. Boris’s statesmanlike ability to repeat the same hypnotic winning phrase at the drop of a clanger - Get Brexit Done; I’m Sorry But I’ve Got Work To Do; Time to Draw Another Line; Never Mind The Flood, Here’s A Surf Board My Eton Pal Made …– was a mark of the man and his legacy. Every year on January 31 at 11 pm you are still neoliberally ordered to celebrate Boris Day with Boris Dancing and with every drink and scrap of food in the cabinet.
Harriet even though we can’t make, import or steal them like we used to and, even if we could, the Plague keeps neoliberally closing all the theatres and street parties in every street except Downing Street?
Dom Yes. We should see these as Opportunities -
Anne (horrified) Is’t the King?
Harriet The Head of State. There’s as much chance of a King now as of post-Royal Harry’s progressive alliance Taking Back Control of the Red Wall of Darlington.
Anne Our Head of State is not the King?
Harriet Not since Charles III in 2032, after New Elizabeth’s 80 years finally closed in a decade-long platinum jubilee thumbing its nose at him. (waves to a ‘portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth II d. 2032 who cheerfully waves back.) The shortest reign in history after the longest. Beating Lady Jane Grey’s previous record by nine days.
Anne Even I had three years.
Harriet Charles and William and all their immediate heirs were all poisoned at Charles’ coronation with an dose of Russian polonium in their Eton Messes. Allegedly chaliced in during the ceremony by a diversity Archbishop.
Dom According to the conspiracy theories. It was actually a long overdue herd immunity of the viral capitalist ‘I’ to the royal we.
Harriet 75% of the country didn’t even celebrate Elizabeth’s 10 year jubilee 2022-2032 so he’s got a point. Despite its 100% takeover of the BBC and the blue-rinsed grey-white liars still reading the print newspapers. And she was popular. The Head of State and the Prime Minister are now combined in one ‘person’.
Dom waves presidentially. Green traffic light on his face
Harriet (to the audience) And don’t think it won’t happen just because you’re watching a farce.
Light on Dom’s face changes to Simpson amber….
Harriet The Simpsons had Donald Trump as a cartoon President 5 years before he became a … cartoon President. But in a remarkable change to British tradition, a cartoon premier now faces a miracle alliance of progressives, from one nation Tories through (light changes to red) new world reds and old world liberals (yellow) and to end-of one-world greens (green…) united under post-royal Harry.
Dom That won’t last.
Harriet So in the first Election of a Head of State by TV Phone In, with me Harriet Toms, deceased, we ask you, our Strictly For The Birds audience, to vote for who You think should be… ABSOLUTE PREMIER-SIDENT OF BRECK’S ISLE. Remember, you must cast your vote for who best captures THE SOUL of BRITAIN.
Strictly For The Birds theme tune. Accompanied by traditional Boris Dancing.
Common Don’t go to work
Don’t go to school
Stay in your homes
Keep the 2 metre rule.
From the council estates
To the posh ones with parks
From high fashion and high finance
To its slave kids in the dark
From the poles to the equator
Supermoon into eclipse
From the fjords to the deserts
Temperate zones to the tropics…
Can’t breathe…
Come and heal us with your caring
Then go back where you came
You’re not from round here
We don’t know your name.
From the centre of the cosmos
To Little England in the Styx
From the heart of Little England
To each human breath’s limits.
The world has come
To Little England in the Styx
Little England is the world
We’re all together in this
Blitzing Brits for Blighty
As the Beast in the East
Spits his cold War into Salisbury
Then we go off piste.
Covid’s knee in the throat
Of your healer and your bro;
In this world war for survival
Every ally is your is foe.
The world has come
To Little England in the Styx
Little England is the world
We’re all together in this
Except we have no test kits
We shut down too late
We didn’t quarantine
We didn’t track and trace.
We didn’t take the test
Now we’re top of Death’s class,
Lord Hee Haw dressed as Churchill
We are such a silly ass.
Can’t breathe…
Anne Has it come to this?
Scene 2.
Harriet We’ll start with King Harry in Exile who we can speak to now by satellite link, tempests permitting. Harry can you hear me?
A sword in a stone. Harry bestrides it.
Harry Yes Harriet I can hear you. Far away and long ago - on a druid island at the very end of the world - the land was divided and leaderless, groaning under its divisive winter King Breck.
Anne (aside) Breck?
Harriet (aside) Middle English for breached or broken.
Dom He means me. (to Anne) I was going to call us Breckland until Rees-Mogg said it made us sound like something out of Middle Earth.
Harriet Or a remote area of Norfolk.
Anne Break-land. Tis three hour’s ride south. Infertile land farmed by rotation, ploughed 1 year in 10 and lying fallow in the ‘breaks’.
Harriet Breckland is now mostly shooting preserves and rabbit warrens. And hobbit holes.
Dom (to Anne) So I called us Breck’s Isle instead.
Harriet The Broken land. And its slogan is-
Dom Imperial measures - of nothing much - for all Britons! The Last Ditch of History.
Applause
Harry Barbarians invaded from north, east and south. King Breck paid the fiercest of these to defend him but they kept the gold and took the land themselves. Against the advice of his Earl Marshall Uther Pendragon.
Anne (aside) My Harry loved an Arthurian romance too. It brought out the Welsh in him.
Harry and with his war council divided, Breck met the challenges by retreating ever deeper into his fastness of Little Britain, ordering his neoliberal wave-slaves to build an impregnable mountain fortress there, but it kept falling down. He forced the Druid Mer-
Dom Murdoch?
Harry Merlin …to read the roots of Britain …and its waters beneath ….and its stars above …to tell him
Dom Why does my castle keep falling down?
Anne He looks a bit like my Harry actually.
Harriet Breck?
Anne No, no. (indicates Harry) Your Harry.
Harriet It’s the ginger hair and Celtic fringe. And the red beard.
Anne Like my Elizabeth.
Harriet Unfortunately the original Breck, King Vortigern, the proverbial divider, had a red beard as well. You’re going to need to put some blue Celtic sky between you and him, Harry.
Harry A May King, a Dragon head, was needed to unite the people and drive out the invaders. Such a king would prove himself by drawing out from a weathered rock a wondrous sword. Many years passed and many strong men failed. At last- a boy succeeded!
He addresses the sword
Harry His name…
and pulls it out.
Harry was Arthur!
Anne Like my Harry’s older brother, the King who never was.
Harriet Not William V. Henry VIII’s older brother who died of consumption in 1502
Anne before he could consummate his marriage to Katherine of Aragon.
Harriet Probably. It was a name avoided by royals ever after despite its heroic original.
Harry Arth-ursus. War Bear in two languages. Crowned king of All Britain in a landslide of relief, renewal and cool Britannia like the Great Pretender Blair a millennium or two after. Eleven times Arthur the May King faced the barbarian invaders in battle, starting here on these old Iceni burial grounds. His cavalry drove all before him. But as Gildas Rees-Mogg
Dom Telegraphing the Ruin of Britain in a nearby monastery font
Harry warned the barbarians kept coming from the Wash/East Saxon rivers to the gulf of Londinos. To the Last Ditch of History, at the very end of civilisation as we knew it. Where Arthur, War Bear, drew up his
Dom British and natively brilliant
Harriet British and Roman-drilled
Harry cavalry at Badon Hill. And faced down the big bad Saxon sea-wolf for the twelfth and final time. His kingstone sword shattered in that Battle for Britain-
Dom EU-regulated French steel. Pa!
Harry Welsh actually. But Merlin the Druid took Arthur west to Glastonbury pursuing a light beyond the forest to a Lake shore and into the mists of herstory. Three damsels, not the distressed kind, walk there on the surface of the Lake. Subtle ultra-feminine beings of exceptional beauty and charm:
Anne I know the feeling. I played all three-
Harry Viviane, lady of the Lake, sword-bearer; Morrigan Macha Bodbh Celtic triple goddess of birth, marriage and death; Arthur’s dark sister, and Raven, the Queen of the Wastelands -
Anne As the May Queen.
Harry And looking at the three damsels is like looking at the Sun. The Lady bears a mighty sword, Excalibur, ‘lightning blade’
Dom the brand of Britain!
Harry which can never fail in battle, and whose magical scabbard wills its wearer-king never to bleed, no matter how maimed. His birthright.
Dom Until some fay damsel from Glamorgan Welshes it.
Harry Arthur builds a great fastness named Camelot and trains a band of mounted warriors called The Knights of the Round Table. Together they drive out the invaders. For 50 years the land grows in peace and plenty. And the people love him.
Dom It’s what they did before they could vote.
Harry Arthur marries the beautiful (Welsh accent) Gwenhwyfar,’ (translates) white phantom.’
Dom ‘White phantom’
Harry ‘first lady’ of these islands.
Dom Of these islands.
Harry The most beautiful woman in the world.
Dom And that’s where the trouble starts.
Harry Arthur’s dark sister, the Celtic triple goddess of birth, marriage and death, the Black Lady, blights the wedding to which she was not invited with this impediment: that she and the god Arthur are already married in Annwyn, the Celtic otherworld. She makes a maiden speech to die for.
Dom Which splits her own party.
Harry She is dark, unconscious, divine. Or, as the Welsh puns it, ‘Du’
Morgan I love males, yet live makeless:
The long night and false dawn still lingers lonely
As day breaks my dike-brook’s bed
Diluting with grey light my Du-distilled soul.
I give birth, yet grave brothers.
My mothering bosom of womb-mouthing earth
Is death-witch and dearth’s country;
Both vessel you’re born on and vestige’s barque.
I bride men and breed Mordreds:
The world’s consummation weds its confounding;
The lightning of love’s moon-lore
Will strike dead the armed man sick-nursed in these arms.
I brave blood, a bereaved bride,
God’s mother and man’s Eve, a death-moth and Mary:
O, Arthur, ardent brother,
The love-sword you bury here seeds the whole world…
Applause
Dom In short, she put the C word among the cocks.
Harriet Cynghanedd?
Harry Cymru.
Anne Country matters. It always did to me.
Dom God sends a bolt from the heavens, fire and brimstone from under the earth. In 536, there is a summer without sunshine all over the world. In 539, Arthur and his dark son Mordred, the evil one, murder each other at the icy battle of Camlaan. The Black Lady
Harriet Morrigan Macha Bodbh, Mordred’s mother, Arthur’s sister
Dom ships him officer class beyond the sunset to the mystical isle of Avalon. She will sing at his funeral.
Morgan makes to sing.
Harriet Not now Morgan.
Harry Gwenhwyfar, ‘wife of Britain’ – and who can blame her - finds consolation with Arthur’s faithful captain, her champion the lightning god Llugh, for whom London is named. Arrested at the infant stage in a hollow hill by his doting mother The Lady of the Lake, until she sends him to court with a magical shield conferring the strength of three men
Dom And useless against one woman
Harry He resists that one woman, the irresistible Gwenhwyfar, for a thousand years, while time stands still and Britain is serially conquered by Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, Roman Catholics, Danes, Vikings and the class-consumed Normans who convert him to Christianity and rename him (in perfect French) Lancelot du Lac.
Harriet Lance remains the monkish hero of his own boy’s story or, as it’s sometimes called, history, play-fighting all the other squires until he is king of the castle, then does the same against King Arthur’s real enemies.
Dom And everything in the rose-scented garden is lovely until one midnight, returning from the quest of the red hart by moonlight to find Gwenhwyfar alone there, with a troubadour singing ‘something for the ladies’ from an open window above, he and the story grow up to heaven,
Harriet or down to Earth, depending what side of Ofa’s dyke you’re on.
Lance The squire grows to knighthood, the heart learns to dance:
An Eye for the Ladies, an arm for the lance;
A foot for the stirrup’s blind date with chance,
Leaps the last ditch of history, for the lawns of romance
Dom Cue the Celtic harps and violins.
Harry Following in Arthur’s godly footsteps, Sir Lancelot du Lac, Britain’s greatest knight – former Celtic god, now Christian, French and half-mortal – seeks redemption for his sinful love in a quest for a horn of plenty
Dom rebranded as the Holy Grail.
Harry But just as he finally lays a Jacob’s Rees Mogg ladder against the wall and enters (perfect Welsh accent) Corbenic, the bewitched Castle of the Blessed Horn of Plenty, now trading as (French accent) Corbenoit, Castle of the Blessed Body of Christ,
Dom all visitors please report to Deception,
Harry and gets one grasping gauntlet on the Grail… his heart pulls him all the way back down the snake to Gwenhwyfar. Or actually the Grail Maiden
Dom in a racy Gwenhwyfar costume provided by that witchy wardrobe mistress Morgan le Fay. He should have gone to Specsavers.
Harry Like you, Dom. The day you stormed Barnard Castle. (the final pitch for the vote) But from this delusory union will spring her father the Maimed King’s real cure, the real consummation of her divine crush on Lancelot; the return of real fertility to our British Waste Land and – all these in one – a Christ, Gwalchaved the Grail Finder, who out of all this longing imperfection and imperfect longing
Dom Or, as we called it before The Woke, sin.
Harry unites purity with prowess and conquers the world, within and without. Everybody gets what they want.
Harriet Sort of.
Dom But infidelity consumes the heart of Britain.
Harry Well, you’d know all about that, Dom. Lancelot and Guinevere do to each other what Boris did to the country, fiddling around while post-Rome burns. And into that vacuum explodes the Celtic god of darkness. Arthur’s anti-son. Which you’d also know. The shadow conceived as summer dies by Arthur with his female counterpart.
Dom Or, as we call it on this side of the culture wars, his sister.
The Green Knight Goddess mother and goddess aunt. It got very complicated at Christmas. Especially when Gawain or as we used to call him (Welsh accent) Gwlachmei the Hawk of May- also turns up as Morgan’s nephew …
Harriet Not now, Sir Green. Your party will get a chance at the end.
The Green Knight
At the end of the world you mean? After the Flood?
Harriet Please don’t interrupt. (to Harry) You were telling us about the Celtic god of darkness. The King’s anti-son.
Anne My Harry was always seeing him in the shadows of his court.
Harry Born at Beltane, May 1st, Arthur’s coronation day, this un-May/ Winter King, this Nemesis – his name is legion but his enemies call him
Anne Mordred. My Harry loved this bit.
Harry - tears the land apart again.
Dom What do his friends call him?
Pause
Dom Murdoch?
Harry ‘Dom.’ Or as we called you before The Woke, ‘Satan’.
Dom Sssssssssssssssssssss.
Harry Mordred’s is no ordinary armed rebellion. There is a Beltane magic at its heart. He claims the throne of Logres. Which was rightfully Arthur’s.
Dom Never take a red dragon wall for granted.
Harry and the cry goes round the divided realm.
Dom “Which is the shadow and which is the Son? Which is the King and which the Usurper?”
Harriet Like ‘voting Brexit will add 350 million pounds to the NHS’ and other post-truths. Or Lies, as we called them before the culture wars.
Harry Alas. But, Arthur the Sun King, aided as always by the wizard
Dom Murdoch?
Harry Merlin. …overcomes even this. Arthur slays Mordred,
Dom his own flesh and blood
Harry his anti-self/shadow.
Dom And is mortally wounded by that self-murder.
Harry and escorted from the field in injury time – and on into a red dragon sunset - by that mysterious triptych of keening maidens. The Lady of the Lake, the Queen of the Wastelands and The Black Lady
Harriet Morrigan Macha Bodbh.
Harry Arthur’s last request is that Excalibur – lightning blade
Dom The brand of Britain
Harry be cast back into the fairy lake from whence it came.
Lights reddening and slowly fading towards blackout.
Harry He will live on in Avalon for centuries as a Maimed King (brandishing the sword) and return in our darkest hour to save us.
Dom (unimpressed) Meanwhile, Gwenhwyfar, and the rest of the story, drift off into a Celtic twilight as Europe comes pouring back in from the East.
Harry Curtains for Gwenhyfar and Camelot. And for our little foreshadowing. (bows)
Dom shadows his bow. Fade to blackout, which Dom embraces CS with Christ-mocking arms spread wide.
Morgan (as the light fades) It’s not over until the Black lady sings.
Scene 3. Harriet receives a post-NHS letter onstage.
Harriet It appears my death has been exaggerated. It wasn’t vagina after all, always fatal for a his-torian. It was angina.
Anne Can you still see me?
Pause. Wheezes for breath, sprays under her tongue.
Harriet Where’s Anne? Anne? We seem to have lost Anne.
Anne No, no. I’m still here. Here!
Harriet Anne? (another spray) Ah well, if we could come to you then Dom. You completely object to the idea of Britain Harry sketched out in the previous scene. Why?
Dom The whole thing’s a myth. There never was a sword in the stone for a start. That’s just a fake news story dreamed up by Merlin to keep him and his westering Celtic fringe in power. The real power in the country was the Saxon axe.
Harriet But the Celts were here first? And their 400 year deal with Rome had brought a European, world civilisation to these shores.
Dom But why has diversity got to drive everything? Roman civilisation was too bureaucratic, too big, too corrupt and too regulated. And when it failed the Saxons took control because they had a simple programme that worked. They were winners.
Harriet But without Rome didn’t Britain then take a large step back into the Dark Ages?
Dom Oh Harriet, you old Rome-moaner, there was a bit more to our Anglo-Saxon kingdoms than a Dark Age bonfire.
Dom addresses the sword in the stone, pulls it out , brandishes it.
Dom 'Logres forever!' cries the Sword that failed
Gwen the bad nun; Lance the penitent monk
At the big bad sea-wolf, the Saxon axeman,
The Seaxe-wielding Thor-blond incredible hunk.
(reverses sword to axe)
'And tomorrow belongs to me!' the brute hacks,
(punctuating each with a murderous blow of the axe)
Week without end, "Tiw's Day; Woden's day,
Thor's day, Freya's day-" but the Celt snatches back
Rome's long weekend, "Saturn-Sun-Moon-day!"
And follows the Grail off upstage right;
The Saxon keeps chopping, not knowing they’ve gone.
(sword) Britain goes West, into Celtic twilight,
Sunset and Moonset and World's End begun.
'I don’t like Moon-days.' The Saxon worker flails,
Chopping down the Moon for a Dark Age bonfire,
The Moon cries," the Grail! the Grail! Look Guinevere, the Grail!
Who dies wins, by this brute's axe shall live, forever!"
'And tomorrow belongs to me!' the Saxon stokes
(punctuating each with a murderous blow of the axe)
The red dragon blaze: "Tiw's Day; Woden's day,
Thor's day, Freya's day..." into not so much a twilight
As a Germanic-British Library Display:
Illuminations, Bibles, jewellery, Alfred's lore,
A Celt might trade her second best harp for,
The axe head reversing King Arthur's holy sword
(presenting the sword handle as an axe-head/Cross)
Beaten - lifted - as a Cross: and taking it forward.
Harriet Christ’s Cross?
Dom The Union Jack.
Harriet Hardly the same thing, Dom! This is Herstory. Not that dirty flag of modern Britain, the Daily Mail.
Dom I think we can see which side of the culture wars you’re on, Harriet.
Harriet I’m on the side of truth, Dom.
Anne (to Dom) Is Daily Mail the armoured Knight of truth? Holding the sword of justice and carrying the shield of British fair play?
Dom can’t hear Anne
Harriet (to Anne) More a Hitler-gothic Argus with its eyes in its tail feathers, Anne. Hang on. He still can’t see or hear you. But I can!
Anne You must have died after all. It was vagina.
Harriet (to Anne but Dom thinks to him) Never mind. (as in ‘the show must show go on’) Herstory must go on! If history is written by the victor and then continually rewritten to suit the needs of the present, the Mail– the only daily mainly read by women - is the story of England that never changes even when its alibi is broken.
Dom That’s the Express.
Harriet But we were talking about grownups who can read.
Dom Grownups?
Harriet Women.
Dom Well, there you are. The Mail is herstory.
Harriet More like herstory under house arrest. (to Harry) Well, Harry. Does Dom’s Saxon axe define Britain?
Dom reverses Arthur’s sword to an axe again.
Harry Christ’s Cross? Embracing everyone?
Dom The Union Jack. Taking back control. If I may continue-
Harry My Union Jack is Christ’s Cross at the heart of four patron saints, four home nations. More of a broadsheet, Dom. An elaborate unity narrative spread across twenty centuries.
Dom An elaborate lie spread across twenty pages of the Guardian! I thought this was supposed to be a balanced coverage. Do I get to make my case or not?
Harriet Go ahead.
Dom spreads the Union flag aloft on his cruciform arms. Kneejerk applause. Chorus of God save Our Team etc.
Dom The Union Jack.
A model of diversity and inclusiveness
representing a clear majority
Harry 52%
Dom of our four home nations and their patron saints.
(makes an X ) The red saltire of Saint Patrick for Ireland-
Harry Ireland minus not just its 26-European-Counties but also the remaining 6 who voted for the EU.
Dom (makes an X) the white saltire on a blue background of St Andrew for Scotland
Harry EU and SNP
Dom (points at the Union flag) the yellow cross on a black field
of St David and Wales ...
Harry Not there, Dom.
Dom (points at the Union flag) beautiful red dragon of on a green field of King Arthur
Harry Not there, Dom.
Dom represented in absentia by St George
Harry who slew that Welsh dragon in 1284
Dom Wales
Harry EU-Funded
Dom but Brexit voting
Harry an absence voting for an absence
Dom and, last and most, stamping a seal on all the others
Harry like a Brexit vote (makes an x)
Dom (make a +) the majority red cross of St George
Harry a Turkish-born Greek 3rd century Roman
Dom who soldiered for his faith in Israel
Anne nailed to the red cross of loving His enemies, like Christ?
Dom Taking back control of the Holy Land from militant Muslims
Harry By murdering them back. Which is of course Christ’s basic message just as Buddha’s was Every Man For Himself; Rama’s that Greed is God; Zoroaster’s insistence on ‘Bad Thoughts, Bad Words and Bad Deeds’ and Krishna’s that anything except self-interest is an Illusion.
Dom Exactly.
Dom’s Union Jack is flanked by several English flags
Dom Cry Dom, England and St George!
Harry as our – French - national hero King Couer de Leon did
loving his enemies to death under the Victor’s cross
Dom (with audience support) England, my England!
Harry and Edward "love your enemies" the First
- whom Scots love so much, for love begets love,
they SHOUT OUT HIS NAME in their national song –
Dom (waving his Saxon axe/George cross, with football crowd support, all carrying England flags) ENGLAND! ENGLAND!
Harry who, along with Edward Mark III, his killer grandson
made George - that Turkish Christian saint of Georgia and Catalonia -
the red standard of English military prowess,
football hooligans and the Far Right
Harriet in 1348
Uproar. Cries of Take back control. Take back control.
Dom (bringing his Union flag back through the crowd of England flags and indicating it) Britain for the British. Lions led by unicorns. What more do you want?
Harry A truly Great Britain. The one we really are or could become. Diverse, inclusive, devolved, global.
Dom Political inclusiveness gone maaaaaad!
Harriet Some would say you’re political exclusiveness gone mad, Dom. Or the Bullingdon club, as it was called before the culture wars.
Harry White English males drunk on power and privilege.
Dom The trouble with your diversity and inclusiveness, Harry, is that white English males are excluded. That’s why they voted Brexit.
Harriet White English males drunk on power and privilege. Leading all the other white English males who are just drunk?
Dom White English males expensively trained to lead the country, leading all the majority white English males, also excluded from the diversity project, who vote for them.
Harriet Leaving aside that the actual white English majority is female for a moment, what do you say to Dom’s point Harry? Does your diverse Britain and your ‘woke’ history have no place for his mainstream white Englishman?
Dom Excluded from ‘woke’ history and their own white cliffs. The Englishman of Crecy, Agincourt, Shakespeare, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Lords Test match on TMS with the last man in -
Harry and a match to win against the colonials -
Dom England at Wembley …
Harriet being booed and racially abused for taking the knee and missing a penalty they missed because they were being booed and racially abused and have been all their lives
Dom the Lancaster bomber, English beer, Scotch eggs, Welsh rarebit, Irish stew, red Leicester, white cheddar, blue nun, the George Cross in the Union Jack-
Harry I could give itemise all the diversity whitewashed from that ‘English’ history
Dom yawns Ere we go… minorities to the front as usual
Harry - the Africans in Elizabethan England, the colonial regiments in the trenches, the Poles in the spitfires who helped win the battle of Britain – but all that would just confirm your prejudice.
Dom You said it.
Harry So let me flag up an earlier, gentler England instead.
Harry hoists Edmund’s flag.
Harry Some in the East say the English need a flag and a patron saint from a home nearer than George. Someone properly English. Actually Christian, rather than a Crusader.
Dom God help us. We’d be a Muslim colony in the shake of a scimitar-
Harry Someone like the Angle St Edmund the Martyr, King of East Anglia, born on Christmas Day-
Dom In Germany -
Harry As was England… this Christian King who Dunkirked to Bury, under his white dragon on a red field flag, the moral standard of the beautiful loser, was captured and tortured to death by Danes for refusing to renounce his faith.
Dom Exactly. Winners are us.
Harry Danes are us, Dom. That's where 'every Englishman's home is his castle' comes from. Sea-borne freeborn Danes refusing that pan-European know-your-village-place-and-never-leave-it feudal deference. Viking winners. But Edmund’s heroic un-defeat - unlike vic-Tory-us King Richard - really did convert his enemies.
The Common seize Edmund’s flag and sing
Red as Christ's blood,
White as chivalry
But shouldn't our Saint
Be an Angle like me?
You can shoot me with arrows
And chop off my head
But the Christ within me
Will never be dead.
In a thick wood my people
Lose one another
"Where are you? And where's
The head of our Martyr?"
You can shoot me with arrows
And chop off my head
But the Christ within me
Will never be dead.
"Hic hic, over here!"
My head wolf-cries,
Holy spirit of England
That never dies.
Between a wolf's paws
They find, in wonder
My head that to body
Returns un-sundered.
You can shoot me with arrows
And chop off my head
But the Christ within me
Will never be dead.
Dom A loser’s flag for a loser’s cause. Is that the best you can do?
Harry The absolute divine best, yes.
Dom Meanwhile, back in the real world, we’re back at Hastings. Fighting to take back control from a successful European invasion. And you give us a loser’s flag.
Harry It's the flag the English carried at Hastings. The flag carried into battle by Aelfred the Great.
Dom Now you’re talking. The man who saved England.
Harry By losing most of it. Not to mention those other ‘English’ greats. King Canute, a Great Dane. Harold, a Great Half-Dane…
Dom There you go again, bringing diversity into everything.
Harriet I think it’s already there Dom.
Dom Your King Arthur wasn’t keen on it though was he?
Harry Merlin’s vision of Logres was a white dragon fighting a red one. Edmund’s red and white flag combined them.
Dom More diversity. Why don’t we ever hear about some proper full-blooded English kings.
Harry Because we haven’t had one of those since Aethelred the Unready a thousand years ago in the primary school of our history. And he fares rather badly in its OFSTED report.
Harriet (pause) Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the Abingdon Monks (puts her hands together in prayer)
The Abingdon Monks (the Common in monk wigs etc) – their hands together in prayer - perform in a plainsong
Aethelred II served as King of the English from 978 to 1013. And usually turned up on time. He is inadequate with some Arma-geddon out of here features. And recommended for takeover as a Norse Academy.
"A feeble and treacherous ruler who failed to prevent the Danes from over-running England. Implicated in the assassination of his half brother King Edward the Martyr, thus sabotaging English resistance and causing nearly the whole country to be ravaged.
During his reign, the Church was deprived of all reverence and just dues; the rights of free men were destroyed; innocent men and young children were sold into slavery; treachery was so rife and the social order so loosened that noblemen and slaves took each other’s places.
His policy to buy peace made the invasions worse. His other policy to massacre the Danes already here brought the wrathful Swine Forkbeard of Denmark who replaced him as temporary Superhead of the English and after Aethelred’s return for two final inglorious years, the end of English rule forever: ultimately precipitating a Norman conquest which would last until Domesday.
Aethelred’s self-evaluation – that his reign included the legendary resistance of the Battle of Maldon; the finest scholarship and illuminated manuscripts of the entire Anglo-Saxon period; and the word ‘Unready’ in Old English meant ill-advised not unprepared cannot be located in the annals because everyone thinks his name begins with an E whereas in fact it begins with an A .
Eeeeeee-men."
Harriet The Abingdon Monks, appearing in a monastery font somewhere near you. (applauds)
Harry retrieves Edmund’s flag.
Harry The truth is, Dom, it’s not England you Brexit winners believe in. It’s conquering. Your warrior Normans seized the white dragon of Edmund and adopted it. But that George’s bloody British Legion Cross came to suit you better. When you talk about the Battle of Hastings and taking back control, you’re of the Conqueror’s party without knowing it. You’re about as English as William the Bastard.
Dom Are you calling me a Frenchman?
Harry Not even a Frenchman. A third generation Viking. The clue is in the name. ‘Nor-man’. A Guy of Gisbourne robber baron who crashed, burned and made such monumental efforts to ethnically cleanse English culture of Englishness through the feudal Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet centuries. And never even half succeeded. Because the real England – Common England - is unconquerable.
The Common Public! Common Land! Keep Off. An Englishman’s home is his Common!
Harry Hereward seized history; Robin Hood the greenwood and the Saxon underdog his day. And I’m telling you so in Angle-ish, not Norman. It's one of the wonders of these islands. English survived. And then it triumphed. Despite 300 years of suppression from the Conqueror to Chaucer. That's the soul of England, not you. You’re like that joker-minstrel at Bourne who sang for Hereward’s father but changed his market stall snake-skin as soon as the Normans took over because it was the only soul he knew, Dom.
Dom I’m the patriot here. I love and believe in Britain. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori was my Old School motto.
Harry Like your party under its Hitler-backing Mail-flag whose much vaunted ‘love’ of and belief in Britain was exposed in that 2012 report
Dom (donning a Norman helmet and brandishing a sword) Britannia Unchained!
Harry damning our people ‘as the worst idlers in the world.’ A nation with the fewest national holidays in the world.
Harriet (like a sports score reader) England and Wales 8. Scotland 11. Europe 13. Japan 17.
Harry You love a Britain that slaves for your private profit, Norman.
Dom The English are a motley bag -
We pocket them like money -
Of Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes
But 'ereward's really funny;
The dozy brute, the son of a nun
Godiva and a Dane,
Ereward the Wake was 'alf asleep
Till William the Conqueror came.
We'll turn your stagnant fens around,
Your farms and mills advance,
Make lazy Saxon manors French
And work-shy peasants dance.
If 'alf a Dane with 'alf a brain
Can stop us, where was 'e
At 'astings when ze arrow fell?
Pah! skulking o'er the sea.
Viking round the world just like
The half-blood Dane he is
Now let me civilise you, wench
With French embrace and kiss!
We'll turn your stagnant fens around,
Your farms and mills advance,
Make lazy Saxon manors French
And work-shy peasants dance.
Our brutal Norms are cultured now
By three French generations,
Our hot Norse blood cooked into wine,
Our priests don’t have relations.
The English are a mongrel race,
Their priests the marrying kind,
Their Rome with Celt and Viking Crossed,
Their kings are Cnuts and Sweyn-
We'll turn your stagnant fens around,
Your farms and mills advance,
Make lazy Saxon manors French
And work-shy peasants dance.
Dom bows. Wild applause. Chants of “Take back control!” “England. Oi!” threatening to overwhelm the debate.
Harriet Ladies, please!
Dom Those are the economic realities, Harry. The real world. For all your historical ‘myths’.
Harry is up against jeers and cynicism with this plea for national unity but perseveres.
Harry British place names – the social-economic nouns we make over the centuries- dispute that, Dom.
As any kid who’s pulled a sword from a stone
Will tell you,
The real Myth of Britain lives on in a harp-dreaming present
Stretched away beyond the limits of the past and future.
A Sword pulled from a Stone from Wales to the heart
Of Stonehenge; to Pen y ghent; Pont-y-fract; Dundee; Lynn,
London, Dover, Thames; Cumbria; Glastonbury, Cornwall
Through Brittany to Normandy and on to Provence
Where the Matter of Britain is The Matter of Europe
And Arthur Rome's heir and Europe's High King.
The real Myth of Britain - more real than its history-
Is what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
We bury the axe, put the sword back in the stone
And make a nation, an agreement to differ.
Silence
Dom We’ve given you back control. What more do you want?
Anne (points at Harriet) The rest of herstory.
Scene 3
Harriet Well, in 1485, something terrible happened. The Welsh came back, in the shape of Henry Tudor. Yes, he did what Owain Glyndwr could only dream of. Logres was no longer the lost Land. King Arthur rode again, even if in Henry VIII’s case the tilt at Arthurian glory was more cloth than gold and ended like hybris before a fall in a rotting ulcerated leg. And whether a Welsh dynasty ruling England did Wales any more good as an independent nation than James Stuart did Scotland later by uniting the thrones and nations beneath him is
Harry Whatever a moot point is in Welsh.
Morgan ‘Cardiff.’
Dom Shakespeare gives the Tudors the finest English press a Welsh dynasty could have and demonises the last Plantagenet Richard III
Morgan But his actual Welsh characters are dreamers like Glendower or idiots like Fluellen (sneezing this) llewing all over the shop.
Morgan (sing) There’s a kind of Welsh all over the shop tonight-
Harriet Not now Morgan. Meanwhile, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, the old money left over from the Battle of Bosworth, after a lifetime flirting with the premiership title, heads for a retirement in that Henry VIII Care Home, the Tower. Cue the Strange Death of Catholic England under Good Queen Bess.
Anne My baby!
Harriet Whose ‘Elizabethan Settlement’ confirmed the Break With Rome. Church Walls, windows and interiors made Cromwell-clear of decoration.
Anne Thomas. Not Oliver.
Harriet Puritan Middle England had voted with its Protestant Work Ethic to
Dom Leave Europe
Harriet Leave Catholic Feudal Agrarian Festival Southern Europe and Remain with Dynamic Trading Proto-Industrial Northern Powerhouse Europe. Or, as they called it before it grew up, The Hanseatic League. England stopped looking South to Holy Rome and Imperial Spain and started looking North to New Merchant Holland. After Edward and Mary’s see saw Margery daw
Common Mary Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
Goosey goose gander
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
A priesthole for the old Guy
Who crossed the new State God,
The left-footed southpaw
Gutted for His Love.
Mary Tudor, Bishop Gardner
Killing and Torturing Prots,
Silver thumbscrews, Manhood carvers,
Maidening their anti-Mary plots,
Anti-Mary maidening their plots.
Goosey goose gander
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man
Who would not say his prayers.
I took him by the left leg
And threw him down the stairs.
Mary Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
Harriet under Elizabeth, Catholic England went West. Protestant England went everywhere else.
Anne Attagirl. She had my blood in her all right.
Harriet Except that she died a virgin. And her Scottish heirs and cousins the Stuarts had a nasty habit of either marrying Catholics or making a marriage-deathbed with them. So the English clock rewound towards ritual and away from spirit.
Harry For some this put us on the wrong side of the Thirty Years War – that holocaust of Protestant Merchant North against Catholic Feudal South –
Harriet but, if so, we were on the right side as well, because Absolute Charlie Mark I declared war on - and lost to – and had to pay crippling compensation to - both sides at once….. And then chose the Catholic side anyway. English Churches and Crosses were re-dressed a la French mode. Cue a Very English, Very Un-Civil War. Families, friends, classes, the Church, ideals of fidelity and honour and truth, minds and the ‘home nations’ all divided from each other and against each other and themselves. A Lost Land, implacably divided.
Harry No change there then.
Harriet Oliver ‘Williams’ Cromwell the one who gets blamed for straining out the stain in the glass of Ely’s Lady Chapel, even though it was Thomas – called them Roman Temples. And led a new model new Elizabethan blood and thunder cavalry charge through them into the future.
The Common chants
'Cut off his head with the crown upon it,
God damn this king!' we cried
Only tyrants will tremble recalling this day.
Good men recall it with pride.
Cavalier tales of Cross-dressing Kings
Royal-escaping up oaks! – Ha! -
Give us that heaven on earth achieved
And run by New Model blokes!
The greatest England for 400 years
From Agincourt to Waterloo
Won with God on our side at Naseby Field
For ever! For England! For you.
Harriet Those the Civil War reduced in wealth and power begged to differ of course. And that conflict has given English one of its slipperiest words: that as a noun means ‘gallant dashing knight’ and as an adjective ‘irresponsible anti-social oaf’.
Dom Bullingdon?
Harriet Cavalier. (pause) Cromwell’s Greater England flew its 4 nation flag - equal quadrants for each of the ‘home’ nations, unlike your ‘Union’ flag, Dom - and rode the revolutionary tide to international prestige through the 1650s, mapping out a future ahead of its time. But never really healed its rift. At the Restoration, his embalmed body was ripped from its tomb, dragged through the streets to Tyburn, decapitated, hanged drawn and quartered; and the head spiked on a pole atop Westminster Abbey.
Dom It was a head of its time.
Harriet After 25 years soaking up the sun, the heavens opened in an electric storm and it was struck down to Earth, hidden up a chimney and for three centuries appeared in museums, freak shows and episodes of ‘the good old days’ before finally being laid to rest at Cambridge University in 1960, in the sanctuary of his old college. No-one digs it up from there, for the very good reason that they don’t know where it is and that all our premiers have come from Oxford not Cambridge for 100 years.
Dom The last time Cambridge won that Thames-igniting Boat Race was ‘Safety First’ Stanley Baldwin in the Nazi First 1930s.
Harriet Who famously said, in his Old School Cambridge Conservative way, (Cambridge sneer, down the nose) “I cannot tell the truth. It would cost me the next election.”
Dom (bored Oxford drawl, in the throat) At Oxford we were trained to sound like we’re telling the truth even though we don’t know what it is.
Harriet Now Dom what would Old Noll, England’s only previous Republican Head of State say, about his stab at ruling this Eton Mess Arthurians call Logres; Shakespeare called this jewel set in a silver sea; Milton called a Paradise Lost; Churchillians call The Empire and you call Breck’s Isle
Cromwell’s Head terrifyingly appears before Dom can answer, clearing the stage.
Cromwell “a Kingdom of the Saints!” (speaking from bitter experience) Potentially.
Cromwell’s Head leads The Common in an Essex chant
In Sixteen Hundred and Forty Eight
When England suffered the pangs of State,
The Roundheads laid siege to Colchester town
Where the King's Men still fought for the Crown.
There One-Eyed Thompson stood on a wall
He was the deadliest gunner of all,
From St Mary's Tower, his cannon aflame.
Humpty Dumpty was its name.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
Applause
Harriet You should tour that, Cromwell. Only maybe not in Ireland…. And so our long island story ends in a Strictly For The Birds Dom and Harry TV Play Off final. It won its last battle with the Nazi end of civilisation, bomb-dusted itself off and then emerged from that finest hour to totter down its always-England country lanes to the end of a Second Elizabethan age
Anne My blood in its veins.
Harriet Your sister Mary’s actually.
Anne That Harry-serving little Tom!
Dom (sings) You’re the headstrong Boleyn. She’s the royal one!
The Beatles plays
Harriet Don’t look so disappointed. Spirit is truer than blood and your spirit was definitely there when the sons of the British Empire conquered Everest, not to mention at the Boleyn ground in Swinging London itself when West Ham won the World Cup; the Beatles conquered America; and Harry ‘the pipe’ Wilson rewrote the nation into the Twentieth Century with his post-Buggery Act, post death penalty, post racial and gender discrimination Sixties just as Thomas Cromwell wrote it out of the Middle Ages in Act One; and Thomas Howard failed to write it back in Act Two. World-saving Tommy’s Yellow Submarine may have gone down since – repainted as a Blue Meanie U boat snatching children’s Free Milk on its way to abolishing Society altogether but it went down singing. The All Made in Great Britain that gave us Shakespeare, The Steam Engine, The TV, The NHS and The BBC adding The Beatles, Edward Jenner and The World Wide Web. It was a brilliant New Elizabethan farewell. After which, there was …
Dom Freedom Day!
Harry Freedom from European civilisation. January 31 2020. Freedom from Plague-protection. July 17 2021. A laughing stocks on the world stage, Logres a prey once again to a host of enemies without and a fatal paralysis of tribal self-absorptions within. Lord Hee Haw dressed as Churchill. Drawing a line under a line under a line under a line…
The immediate past. Enter Boris dancing, boozing, snatching, drawing a line, then another, then another, knocking everything over.
Boris (drunk and slurring) I think one of those eighteen litres I had must have been Belgian. I’ve got a terrible hangover. Still, yet another No Confidence motion won thanks to Rees-Mogg’s casting Vote and the rule changes I, Boris, ‘British-bulldozed’ through. (a toast) To the Conservatives. Sorry, I forgot we'd thrown those Rome-moaning Law-Abiding Commons Wets to the British Bulldog. To The Breck’s Isle Union of Fascists. Whatever else you say about me, I know how to throw a Party. Cheers everyone.
Exit, tripped by Dom. Applause
Harry And now this Joker auditioning to be King Breck.
Dom His small eye revolving his treasure -
Little Britain and all it contains -
The King steals from Merlin a vision
His tiny mind hardly sustains:
Harry "Your castle, King Breck, keeps collapsing
Because built on the underground lair
Of two warring dragons, the red split
In the white's jaws of victory there.
"The red dragon stands for Britannia,
The white for the English-to-be
And your red worm is turning - and driving
The white dragon into the sea."
Both Let a nation divided/ in battle be joined,
Raven and Eagle conceiving the dove
As the Little is lost in the Greater Britain
Let Arth/Ursus cleave; hate is conquered by love.
Dom "But the red dragon's head is young Uther!"
Says King Breck, "And it ought to be mine!"
"My Breck's Isle exists on division,
I’m the crack in Great Britain's behind."
Harry Merlin magically helmets young Uther,
Who cleaves to his dead captain's wife.
She believes he's her lost war-dead husband
In the hottest night of her life
And bears him a son, an Arth/Ursus,
A high noon in our deepest night sky,
The May-Winter King of a Lost Land
That Was Never, but Is, and Can't Die.
Let a nation divided/ in battle be joined,
Raven and Eagle conceiving the dove
As the Little is lost in the Greater Britain
Let Arth/Ursus cleave; hate is conquered by love.
Harriet But there’s life in the old bulldog yet. We can still come second in the Eurovision Dom contest. Congratulations, white Cliff! Now Dom and Harry it’s time to sum up your entire side of the cultural war in one sexy, spectacular, vote-catchy Song For Breck’s Isle. Are you ready?
Harry Yes.
Dom Yesssssss.
Boris (off) Yesh.
Harriet (as on Gladiators) On my first whistle, Dom you will put your case. On my second whistle, Harry you will answer.
Grn Knight And what about the Green case?
Harriet Sorry, we seem to have run out of time.
Apocalyptic thunderclap.
Grn Knight We certainly have.
Dom If we don’t keep selling each other stuff, and flogging the planet to make it, capitalism will die.
Grn Knight If we don’t stop viral capitalism-
Harry I’ve got this, Sir Green. If we don’t stop selling each other stuff, and flogging the planet to make it, humanity will die.
Eurovision razzamatazz disguising the Apocalypse. Dom with Churchill-Farage cigar-ette and beer glass of champagne. The italic verses are spoken in a would-be Churchill voice; the rest rapped.
Dom As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a No Deal with Nil Points
The UK will win Eurovision again;
Cilla, with Ringo's hair.
The Tories will be Winston Churchill again.
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
Rap beat. Over it
Dom You can keep your French shtick, your double Deutch,
Your Dolce-clad discothèques
Your tiqui-taca, your Peps and your Klopps
Your Lattes and Pilsners and Becks.
You can keep your fromage, your Nordic noir,
Your Breughel and Brendan and Brecht,
Your Christendom, culture and 'civitas,'
Let me live on the Isle of Breck
Where coiffure d'Albert is Albert's of Heacham
And le bistrot a gastritis-pub;
Where mange tout de chef is Chav's All You Can Eat
And pure white folk rules at the club
And pure white folk rules at the club.
As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a no-deal with 'nil points',
England will win the World Cup again,
Harry Kane will be the hot Spur
The Who will be Number One again
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
You can keep your Rioja, your Pinot, your Brut,
Give us Spitfire and Bombadier
And Broadside and Bomber and Brexile Bitter
And rationing, hatred and fear.
It's the new party line, the new Civil War,
Breaching kin, class, friend and Union
Eyes right, all salute the all-white flag
Of our half-mast donkey-led kingdom.
Full steam ahead to Breck's Isle, Ahoy!
A hundred percent right and sure
Or 52 on a confident day
Which it might not be anymore.
As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a no-deal with 'nil points',
Wales will win the World Cup/ beat the All Blacks/ again;
Real Madrid/ Warren Gatland/ the Spur;
The valleys be home-grown and funded again
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
100 percent for a four point turn
Going back where we weren't before
Back from the Front and that Normandy beach
Home to Brexile's doughty white shore.
We will fight in the plazas where families dine out,
Kick over their wine and cuisine;
We will never surrender our country and cod
And chip on the shoulder and Queen.
We are the champions of Europe we were
And will be, by running away
Backwards up Winston Churchill Drive
Though his soft 'Will' has shrunk to hard 'May.'
Though his soft 'Will' has shrunk to hard 'May.'
As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a no-deal with 'nil points',
Northern Ireland will win the World Cup again,
A backstop midfield be the Spur,
Our Lost Lands will be Arthur's England again
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
Uproarious applause. Shouts of “Red Leicester. White Cheddar. Blue Nun!” Dom dons a British army beret, hoists a British Legion flag, deploys around the Arthur Sword now dressed with poppies as a War Memorial Cross
Anne Has it come to this?
Harry Yes.
We were never truly in
We'll never be truly out,
This hard or soft Breck's Isle we seek
Is a Round Table roundabout.
A Round Table has no leader,
A lone nation has no place,
"We demand to be Kings of Europe - or else…
We'll disappear without trace!"
Once Breck, King of All Little Britain,
Paid sea-wolves to help him defend
Breck's Island against its invaders
Now those sea-wolves rule without end.
We're the one at the Table insisting
'We stand alone, merci, m'sieu!'
Safe behind national borders
Hard as nails, though the nails aren't secure.
Singing "not from our part of the world, bye "
- To the world inside our Breck's isle,
- To its goods on our continental shelf,
- To its services with a smile.
A Round Table has no leader,
A lone nation has no place,
"We demand to be Kings of Europe - or else…
We'll disappear without trace!"....
As fossilised as a Daily Mail font,
We gather for remembrance, Brexit-badged
With poppies pinned tweet-loud, Union-flagged
Against the Europe we won then didn’t want;
The dying leaves in wild gusts blowing blunt
Our inside-out umbrellas like the rags
Of Empire, this beret-ing bulldog wag's
Self-crowned Napoleon pushing to the front.
And yet up lines dividing Indian,
Arab, Jew - as MIXED-RACE BRITAIN WINS F1
IN GERMAN CAR - for King, Country, the names peal
Cleaving off a tongue that joins us all
The way from Private Ames to Lancelot Percival
Williamson, knights of faith: these countrymen.
Harriet (to the audience) So – who you gonna vote for? Vote now by tapping Dom or Harry on your Strictly For The Birds app and tune in next week for the result, Apocalypse permitting. That’s all for now. Good night!
Fade into a long red dragon sunset as....
Morgan It’s not over till the Black Lady sings. (sings)
“Throw back, throw back, Excalibur!”
He begged Bedwyr, and twice more,
“Throw back, grown-black Excalibur”
That he might live forever,
That Light might strike forever!
In wicked shifting thickets, the thorn
Of his heart’s bursting must be:
Rose-clad, at home and sleeping,
Or gone is the dazzling dream.
That Artos, once man Arthur,
Mis-mothered where life faltered
On long fought malice, Mordred,
Is god, is lord immortal:
A dream too real to live, thrown
Out of your world and hurled, look:
A Christ-sword to Word your sky!
Brilliant light. Fade.
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