Privy Seal

Margot Poins

Margot Poins waits on Lady Katharine Howard, yet when Magister Udal calls her his lady's maid she corrects him sharply: she is tirewoman to her own self alone. Warm, mocking, and entirely unsentimental, she lets the magister dote on her hand and her 'oh's' of pleasure while quietly dictating the terms of their marriage. It is she who orders him out of their Paris kitchen and onto the road to London, to make himself a great man or come crawling back to her fire. Her ambition quietly steers a scholar's fate.

Sir Throckmorton

Sir Throckmorton has lied to Privy Seal on Katharine's behalf, worked for her for months without thanks, and now finds his safety knotted to hers. He warns her that a cavalcade to Windsor is folly, that the Queen is no friend, and that if she is not Queen soon, Cromwell's teeth will close on them all. He claims he cannot sleep for thinking of her fairness, yet his fear is as much for his own neck as for her honor. Every counsel he gives is half devotion, half self-preservation.

Thomas Cromwell

Cromwell rules England through terror and paperwork, knowing the opinion of every man with a vote from shire to burgh, burning his lamp while the kingdom sleeps. He believes Katharine Howard virtuous, and therefore plans to prove her unchaste: bring her cousin Culpepper raging from France, plant witnesses from Lincolnshire, catch the King and her together. He reasons justly, Throckmorton thinks bitterly, and that is the horror of him. His cold logic is the engine that drives the whole plot toward its crisis.

Thomas Culpepper

Thomas Culpepper sits his horse at Smithfield among the heads and gallows, watching a friar burn while Privy Seal's agents count the hours until he reaches Greenwich. He is the weapon Cromwell has chosen: a man whose mere renown for violence drove Cardinal Pole from Paris, and who can be filled with tales that his cousin plays the King's leman. His jealousy is being manufactured for him, and he does not yet know it. Where he rides, catastrophe follows.

Magister Udal

Magister Udal was sent to Paris to Latinise letters between Wyatt and the French, a reward for a play he wrote for Cromwell, and he groans at leaving behind his many loves. Now he sits in the Widow Annot's kitchen, belly full of carp and ale, reading Lucretius, while his wife orders him to London to make himself Sir Chancellor. He protests, threatens a ladle, and surrenders, because she is the better man. Comic, cowardly, and useful to everyone, he is the novel's rueful witness to its intrigues.

Katharine Howard

Katharine Howard is the woman around whom every faction in the book coils: the King loves her, Cromwell plans to destroy her, Throckmorton has lied for her, and her cousin Culpepper is being fetched to ruin her. She refuses to be Queen if the Queen is truly the King's wife, and she takes shame that men have lied for her sake, pointing an accusing finger at Throckmorton rather than accept the debt. Her stubborn honesty is both her glory and her danger. In a court built on falsehood, she insists on truth, and the whole plot turns on whether that can survive.