The story so far…
Week 5: Make or Mar / Three-Card Trick
A Flemish musician who was a chorister at York Place. Wolsey thinks of sending him to Anne as a gift. Clearly, Smeaton doesn’t know that Cromwell speaks Flemish, or maybe he would be more careful when whispering about Anne’s lovers. But no hard facts. Nothing Cromwell can use.
Week 6: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 1)
The musician is at York Place with Anne Boleyn. He is happy and doesn’t miss the cardinal. Cromwell thinks: I think of you, Mark. You called me a felon and a murderer.
Week 9: Arrange Your Face (Part 2)
When visiting Anne, Cromwell flicks a finger against Mark’s head. “Cheer it up, can’t you?” Mark is playing something doleful on his lute. Anne doesn’t seem to know his name.
Later, Harry Norris says Francis Weston “is jealous of a boy she brings in to sing for us some nights.” Is that Mark?
Week 10: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)
The goggle-eyed lute-player is still with Anne Boleyn. “He’s a sweet boy,” says Mary Boleyn.
Week 14: Devil’s Spit / A Painter’s Eye
Cromwell and Lady Rochford share a “pointless dislike of Mark.”
‘He sticks like a burr to his betters. He does not know his place. He is a jumped-up nobody, taking his chances because the times are disordered.’
So says Lady Rochford. She sees him act as go-between for George and Anne, as the queen seeks novelty away from the king’s “stale” bed. Smeaton is paid in “pearl buttons and comfit boxes and feathers for his hat.”
Looking at the painting of himself, Cromwell says: “I fear Mark was right… I once heard him say I looked like a murderer.”
Gregory Cromwell says: “Did you not know?”
Week 18: Falcons
What man could find out what women talk about? Mark, dressed as a woman?
‘Oh,’ Jane says, ‘Mark’s with us anyway. He’s always loitering. We barely count him a man. If you want to know our secrets, ask Mark.
Week 20: Crows (Part 2)
Mark outside the queen’s chambers.
What brings Mark here? He is without musical instruments as an excuse, and he is got up as gorgeously as any of the young lords who wait on Anne. Is there justice? he wonders. Mark does naught and gets more bonny each time I see him, and I do evverything and get more grey and paunchy by the day.
Smeaton seems less proud and asks Cromwell for work, calling himself and Cromwell, ‘we lesser men.’