Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (10 page)

Undaunted by the obvious dislike shown by the common people of London, Anne went into Westminster Abbey for her coronation, accompanied by thirteen mitred abbots. Sir Thomas More did not attend and his absence was noticed.

Eustace Chapuys reported triumphantly that the ‘sad and dismal’ Londoners turned the five days of celebration into an event more like a funeral.
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What of Catherine, now an unwilling and resentful ‘Princess Dowager’? She had been packed off to Ampthill in Bedfordshire with a dramatically reduced household and on 3 July was visited by a deputation from Henry’s Council, tasked to win acknowledgement of her new status. Cogent and compelling arguments had been prepared in advance to persuade her to forgo the title of queen.
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The visitors found her lying on a bed in her privy chamber ‘because she had pricked her foot with a pin, so that she might not well stand … and [was] also sore annoyed with a cough’. As soon as they began reading out a document describing her new life without Henry, she angrily interrupted, maintaining stoutly that she remained the queen and ‘the king’s true wife’. Her defiance continued unabated.

It was declared to her that it neither stood with the law of God, nor man, nor with the king’s honour, to have two queens named within this realm and that indeed he had but one lawful wife, to the which he was now married and caused to be crowned …

The king did not a little marvel that she would disobey his commandment, not only by herself but also cause … his subjects to do the same.

She said in that she would rather disobey him than God and her own conscience, [or] damn her own soul.
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When Cromwell was told of this difficult, rather staccato conversation, he must have smiled wanly. He dryly commented that nature had done Catherine a disservice by not making her a man – as in her bravery she could have surpassed all the heroes of history.
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Such a display of emotion was rare in him.

Henry was not nearly so sympathetic: spitefully, he ordered that Catherine should be moved again, to less salubrious accommodation at Buckden Towers in Cambridgeshire, with a further thinned-down household.

Meanwhile, in Rome, a hesitant and uncertain Pope was at last galvanised into some semblance of action. On Friday, 11 July, Clement VII finally condemned both Henry’s separation from Catherine and his bigamous marriage to Anne. In a secret consistory court hearing, he gave the English king until September to restore his legal wife to the royal bed under threat of excommunication.
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When Norfolk, on some wearisome diplomatic business in Lyons in France, heard the news, he almost fainted at the shock.

Henry, made of sterner stuff, contemptuously rejected the papal commandments. He was buoyed up by a certainty that very soon all his irksome fears about a lack of a lawful male successor would be put behind him and the Tudor dynasty would at last be secure.

But all the confident predictions by physicians and astrologers of a male heir to the throne of England came to naught.

Queen Anne was delivered safely of a girl child at about three o’clock in the afternoon of 7 September 1533 in her room at the palace at Greenwich, hung about with tapestries portraying the legend of St Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. The sex of the child was a disagreeable surprise for everyone, particularly for the royal couple, but Henry managed to put on a brave face. Embarrassingly, a pre-written circular letter addressed from
the Queen to Lord Cobham, her chamberlain, had originally announced the birth of a prince. The letter ‘s’ had to be added to the word to correctly report the sex of the child.
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The three-day-old princess was named Elizabeth when she was christened in the Church of the Friars Observant at Greenwich.

The new Queen’s unpopularity was unlikely to be improved by the birth of a girl and many saw this as God’s heavy judgement upon Henry. Catherine posed little threat as long as she remained sequestered from the outside world, but the clergy’s opposition to the King’s policies was beginning to pose real problems.

Chief amongst these was Elizabeth Barton, the so-called ‘Holy Maid of Kent’. She was born in 1506 and had been a serving girl to the family of Thomas Cobb at Aldington in that county.
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About 1525 she became ill, perhaps suffering from epilepsy. Certainly, she fell into trances and astonished the villagers when, as she writhed helplessly in the filth and animal droppings on the ground, a loud voice cried out ‘with marvellous holiness in rebuke of sin and vice’. People said these pious words had been uttered by an angel. With such claims, the Church naturally became involved, and Edward Bocking, a learned monk of Christchurch Priory, Canterbury, investigated her case. He was convinced she had experienced genuine religious ecstasy and arranged her entry into the Benedictine nunnery of St Sepulchre in Canterbury, where she lived very modestly.
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By the end of 1526 she had been proudly paraded before Archbishop Warham, Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More. Cardinal Wolsey had interviewed her in 1528, when she warned him of his impending downfall.

Such incidents were not unknown in superstitious sixteenth-century England: Ipswich had its own Holy Maid around the same time and there was another at Leominster in Herefordshire who was unfortunately exposed as an impostor.

Later, Elizabeth Barton became an unwitting pawn of those opposed to Henry’s divorce, his supremacy over the Church and the growth in influence of the evangelical reformers. Egged on by her cleric supporters, she claimed that an angel had appeared and commanded her to tell Henry – ‘that infidel prince of England’ – that he ought now to mend
his ways. He should ‘take none of the Pope’s right or patrimony from him … [and] destroy all these new folks of opinion and their new learning’. Furthermore, ‘if he married and took Anne to wife, the vengeance of God should plague him’ and he would die a ‘villain’s death’.
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She even claimed that a letter, written in Heaven by Mary Magdalene in letters of gold, was unimpeachable evidence of the veracity of her predictions.

All this was reported to Cromwell, who had her and her accomplices
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first watched, then arrested and thrown into the Tower of London for interrogation. Sir Christopher Hole, who had detained four men in Canterbury on Cromwell’s instructions, was shocked and horrified at this grievous affront to monks. He begged him ‘to send home the religious men as soon as you can’ if no hard evidence could be found against them.
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A vexed Cromwell took a much wider view, for to him Elizabeth’s prophecies had a dangerous political dimension. ‘If credence should be given to every such lewd person as would affirm himself to have revelations from God, what readier way were there to subvert all commonwealths and good order in the world?’ he asked.
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His investigation also demonstrated that Elizabeth had maintained seditious contacts with followers of the discarded Catherine. He seized 700 copies of
The Nun’s Book
, which had just been printed, and had them burnt, along with all the writings about her he could find. This was a very overt example of Tudor political censorship and symptomatic of Cromwell’s fears about the power of the printing press over popular susceptibilities.
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On his orders, she and five priests and monks were charged with high treason in November 1533. Fisher and More were also accused of ‘misprison’ of treason – improperly failing to disclose to the authorities the Holy Maid’s own treachery. To Henry, she was now no mere gibbering religious fanatic: Elizabeth had conversations with the feisty Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, the second wife of Henry Courtenay, who was a grandson of Edward IV and thus a dormant but nonetheless possibly dangerous claimant to the throne. The matter was taking on ever more sinister overtones.

On 23 November, the mystic and some of her fellow prisoners were pushed onto a scaffold at Paul’s Cross, outside St Paul’s Cathedral, to be
harangued by John Salcot, alias Capon, the abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Hyde, just outside the northern gates of Winchester in Hampshire.
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He denounced her as a vain whore who had been stupidly misled by her confessor Bocking, and whipped the watching crowd up into an eager cacophony of ridicule and derision.
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The propaganda content of her planned public humiliation smacked of Thomas Cromwell’s eloquent prose. Salcot also disseminated salacious rumours of sexual improprieties between Elizabeth and her priests.

Cromwell meanwhile gathered evidence from Thomas Goldwell, prior of Christchurch Priory, and his monks, who were keen to distance themselves from both the ‘Holy Maid’ and Bocking. The confessor was, the monks wrote in a letter to the King,

so heinous, so grievous and so displeasant to your majesty that we dare not open our lips to make any prayers or supplications to your highness for him, yet if it might please your highness of your most gracious benignity and natural goodness to extend your super-abundant grace upon him, he should have a thousand times more cause to laud, magnify, observe, love, and pray for your grace.

Whose temerity, furious zeal and malicious blind affection, went about to … let, stop, impede and slander your grace’s marriage and lawful matrimony which you now enjoy to God’s pleasure.
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A special commission appointed by Cromwell examined her and she broke down under their relentless questioning, confessing that ‘all that she said was feigned of her own imagination, only to satisfy the minds of them which resorted to her and to obtain worldly praise’. Cranmer called them ‘mischievous … visions’ containing ‘much perilous sedition and also treason’.
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Briefly, Cromwell was in something of a quandary about how to deal with her. His ‘remembrances’ or notes to himself record: ‘To know what the king will have done with the nun and her accomplices.’ There were frustrating problems caused by the fact that she had merely spoken treacherous words, rather than committed treasonable acts. This made the chances of a successful prosecution under the law less than certain. Cromwell instead turned to Parliament to secure the deaths of his hapless
prisoners. Elizabeth Barton and five others
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were attainted for high treason when a bill was introduced into the House of Lords on 21 February 1534. It received the royal assent a month later
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and they were hanged at Tyburn on 20 April. On the scaffold, the ‘Holy Maid’ dutifully declared:

I am the cause not only of my own death, which most justly I have richly deserved, but of the death of all those persons who are going to suffer with me. Alas! I was a poor wench without learning, but the praises of the priests about me turned my brain, and I thought I might say anything that came into my head. I, being puffed up with their praises, fell into a certain pride and foolish fantasy with myself … Now I cry to God and implore the king’s pardon.
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Her last words had probably been written for her. She was allowed to hang until she was dead, but the others had their heads struck off. These were set on London Bridge and the four main gates of the city. They had become the first true victims of the Reformation in England.

On 27 February, Cromwell had tried to persuade Fisher to seek the King’s pardon for his crime of misprison, having previously employed ‘heavy words and terrible threats’
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about which the Bishop had complained. Cromwell told him:

If you had … tried out the truth of her and of her revelations, you would have taken another way … You would not have been contented with the vain voices of the people making bruits [rumours] of her trances and disfigurations, but like a wise, discreet and circumspect prelate, you would have examined such sad and credible persons as were present at her trances …

Surely my lord, if the matter comes to trial, your own confession … besides the witnesses which are against you, will be sufficient to condemn you.

[If] you beseech the king’s grace … to be your gracious lord and to remit unto you your negligence, oversight and offence committed against his highness … I dare undertake that his highness shall benignly accept you into his gracious favour, all matters of displeasures past before this time forgotten and forgiven.
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Fisher, old and sick, remained unbowed, but escaped with a fine of £300. The charge against Sir Thomas More was dropped after he disowned the nun as a ‘lewd … and wicked woman’ and ‘that silly nun’. He wrote to Cromwell: ‘My poor heart is pierced at the idea that his majesty should think me guilty. I confess I did believe that nun to be inspired but I put away far from me every thought of treason.’
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Inconvenient and politically incorrect prophecies appeared to occupy much of Cromwell’s time that season. A Warwickshire priest, Ralph Wendon, predicted that ‘a queen should be burned at Smithfield’ and vehemently hoped it might be that ‘whore and harlot Queen Anne’.
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Mrs Amadas, widow of Cromwell’s predecessor as Master of Henry’s Jewel House, prophesied that the King, ‘cursed with God’s own mouth’, would be banished from his realm, which, before midsummer 1534, would be conquered by a Scots army.
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She claimed that there was a mysterious monk, living on an island, who would summon the Commons and Lords to the Tower of London to sit as ‘the Parliament of Peace’. The distraught widow also alleged that the King had plied her with gifts to ‘make her a whore’ and that there had been attempts to lure her to Sir William Compton’s house, where Henry planned to seduce her.
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Poor Mrs Amadas – she was clearly completely mad.

Cromwell was still introducing a steady stream of new legislation, some directly related to the supremacy, the rest to slightly less pressing matters. Amongst this latter group was the Buggery Act of 1533,
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the first penal law against homosexuals in England and Wales. Existing measures against heterosexual sex offences punished only rape and adultery. The new Act decreed death by hanging for anyone guilty of ‘the detestable and abominable vice of buggery [anal sex] committed with mankind or beast’.
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