Characters & Actors
Lord Chancellor Gardiner
It's the cut and thrust of the political world that Gardiner really excels at. A high flyer under Henry VIII, he fell foul of Henry's successor Edward but returned to a position of power when Mary Tudor inherited the throne. And recognising his ruthless streak, Mary entrusts to him the task of exposing a Protestant plot to unseat her for Elizabeth.
"Mary gives my character, Gardiner, the job of getting a confession out of Elizabeth and Thomas Wyatt," explains Robert Pugh, "He interrogates Elizabeth rather rigorously; I think he enjoys it!" In the end he's lucky not to lose his own head when Elizabeth becomes Queen upon Mary's death.
"He gets his comeuppance when he says to Elizabeth, 'I was only ever acting out of duty' - and she just looks at him and says, 'Your duty's done', and off she goes," reveals Robert. "It says it all really because he's put her through a very bad time and she knows that he wanted her to lose her head, so he has to go; out with the old, in with the new.
"No one knows exactly what happened to him after that, he just disappeared from history," he continues, speculating that Gardiner thought it was better to vanish before Elizabeth changed her mind and decided on a more severe punishment than merely being banished from Court. Despite Gardiner bouncing back from imprisonment under Edward, there was little chance of any rehabilitation with Elizabeth.
"He goes with Mary, puts all his eggs in one basket and that's it really; that's his big mistake," says Robert. "I can't understand why he did it, because he's been around a lot, he's a wily politician. He was used to the life around Westminster, very cut-throat and backstabbing and all that, and very much keeping an eye out for where the power was coming from and aligning to it. He just picked the wrong horse at the last - I don't know why, I think perhaps it was the Protestant/Catholic argument."
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