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. 


Characters
Professor Harriet Tom, celebrity historian
Henry VIII 
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Henry Howard Earl of Surrey
Anne Boleyn, Queen of England
Kett's Hill and The Common  - folk minstrels
Tableau of Boleyn Ghosts
Acts One and Two of this play (the Tudor tragedy repeated as a revenge tragedy) has 8 speaking parts.  Each Act is a self-contained story, though linked by common themes. If casts are limited, the Toms and Harrys may be doubled or Tom can play  Harry and vice versa in the second Act.  If lots of actors are available, as eg a school play, the Toms and Harrys can be separate,  the (singing part) folk band can be a big band and the Boleyn ghosts tableau parts can be fully extended.

(A separate play Dom and Harry repeats this Tudor double tragedy as a postmodern condition of England  farce. https://calwaygareth.blogspot.com/p/dom-and-harry-satire-for-our-times.html




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.  


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 Kett’s Hillbillies and The Common dressed as burglars.  

Their music brings the portraits come to life. 


KHATC  (sings) I 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.’


‘I’m not your True Thomas!’ I 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!  


Enter Security in Blickling Hall/Elizabethan Tower Guard livery


Security This is Heritage. We want none of your threepenny operas here. 


Security arrests and removes KHATC and exits. Enter Henry VIII through the kerfuffle. 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.   Kett’s Hillbillies and the Common sing. 


KHATC 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. Kett’s Hillbillies and the Common enter uproariously and perform The Grand Old Duke of York.


KHATC 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- 


KHATC won’t give up the limelight, bowing and whooping


Harriet (grimacing) And thank you to Kett’s Hillbillies and the Common our resident folk ‘history’ enthusiasts 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.  


She finally manages to usher them off, composes herself and faces the audience 


Harriet 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 history 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.  


Henry VIII portrait 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 Henry’s portrait.


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.


Exit (the portrait of) Henry.


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         Then your funeral oration for Wyatt was true? 


Surrey           From the heart  and 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         (wonderstruck) You never wrote so tragically. Of the Dissolution, of Death. Of-


Surrey          Truly I never did. I learned that sweet sonnet of an upstart crow in heaven. All it needs now is a hand to write it, a Will to find a Way.


Norfolk          (not really following but then he never really listens) 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 a better world to come. But I must be quick-


Norfolk         (following his own thought instead) 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. He looks up


Surrey 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 unspeakable relief with a blasphemous oath) 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 his ‘new’ future already, as of old) The Age is Chivalry is Undead! (Dracula grin) The Duke Returns To His Castle. 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)


Bonfire Night lighting, smoke and loud fireworks. Re-enter into this Kett’s Hillbillies and The Common dressed as Puritans but singing like Punks


KHATC (sings) God Save The Queen. Her Papist regime. Has made you a moron. Potential Hate Bon … fire


Surrey            What are you killjoys doing here? You hate the theatre.


KHATC 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 are the songbirds 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. 



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) 


KHATC (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 in the Tower.


KHATC He can’t hear you. You’re 500 years away.


Harriet          Exactly. So I can see what’s happening. 


KHATC What!? We’re here and now, with Robert Kett, living his story. We know what’s happening. We’re-


Harriet          his Commons in arms, I know. But to really know, you need hindsight.


Pause


KHATC Well, what does happen? 


Harriet          Norfolk Yeoman Farmer Robert Kett seeks 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 goes wrong. 


KHATC (deflated) Doesn't it always?


Harriet          Tell me about it. 


KHATC We will. 


Kett’s Hillbillies and the Common live the tragedy as they sing it. Harriet watches, detached.


KHATC (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) 3,000 rebels butchered. 300 hanged. Robert Kett 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 hanged from the west tower of Wymondham church. Somerset accused of sympathies with the anti-enclosers. (less pleased) Warwick 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. (accusing the audience) 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 my solidified might of old certainties and the love of Our Holy Mother Mary. It was caused by Norfolk's long infestation with Lollards and dissent. 


KHATC Don’t look at us.  As far as we thought about the holy bread at all, half of us preferred the old familiar loaf. And we were mainly concerned about getting our hands on an earthly one.


Harriet No change there then.


Norfolk And under the royal Howards, all your unhappiness and discontent will be… (chilling glare) crushed. He who laughs last…


The cell door opens and Norfolk looks up, startled out of his reverie. Morning light and the people singing off. It is his release. The octagenrian struggles to his feet and hobbles out of the Tower cell towards his fool's 'restoration.'  The singing comes onstage.


KHATC 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!


Hillbilly 1 Self interest innit, the basis of the market.


Hillbilly 2 Get em while they’re ’ot, 


Hillbilly 1 as ’ell….


KHATC (demonic) Ha ha ha ha.


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 - 


KHATC unlike most of his victims- 


Harriet die, a spent force spent at last, in his restored bed at Kenninghall. But he did. Then he and Kenninghall disappeared into the void of history. A few pieces of broken masonry in an empty field.


Projected image of an empty field with a few pieces of broken masonry. Pitiful applause for her lecture.


Harriet (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 our 500th “ANN-IVERSARY” of Anne Boleyn’s execution. 


Hillbilly 3 And you thought it was us Puritans who closed the theatres.


Harriet The heritage gift shop will remain open. 


Norfolk, furious, is re-installed centre stage as a heritage manikin. Harriet presses his nose and he emits a terrifying yawning Dracula-fanged grave mouth of Vincent Price laughter.


Harriet He who laughs last … 


KHATC didn’t see the joke.  (sings to the tune of the Grand Old Duke of York) 


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.


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! (= ‘to 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.


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.


Blackout. The hollow Vincent Price laughter continues.





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