Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (12 page)

more foul and more stinking than a sow, wallowing and defiling herself in any filthy place. For however great he is, he is fully given to his foul pleasure of the flesh … And look how many matrons be in the court or given to marriage, these almost all he has violated, so often neglecting his duty to his wife and offending the sacrament of matrimony.

And now he has taken to his wife of fornication this matron Anne, not only to the highest shame and undoing of himself but also of all this realm.
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It was an open-and-shut case against them. All were found guilty of treason and sentenced to the traitor’s death of hanging, drawing and quartering. But Feron was later pardoned, officially ‘on account of his youth’ but more probably because he had turned king’s evidence.

The sentences were carried out on 4 May at Tyburn, the site of today’s Marble Arch. None of the victims had been degraded from their order and were pointedly executed while still wearing their monks’ habits and priestly vestments. They were dragged on hurdles from the Tower to the killing place and there were hanged until half-dead, then cut down, castrated and their vital organs ripped from their bodies and burnt. Finally, the corpses were beheaded and quartered. The scaffold was like a gigantic gory butcher’s block. Pio, the papal nuncio in France, was horrified: ‘Their heads and feet were displayed on the public gates [of the city]. One piece [was displayed] at the gate of the Charterhouse monastery to terrify the monks … The whole city is displeased as they were of exemplary and holy life.’
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There was more judicial slaughter to come. Another three monks from the London Charterhouse – Humphrey Middlemore, William Exemere and Sebastian Newdigate – were accused of denying the supremacy at Stepney on 25 May 1535.

Cromwell was amongst the judges at a special commission of oyer and terminer
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for Middlesex, sitting at Westminster, to try the three Carthusian monks and Fisher on 11 and 17 June.
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The monks were swiftly found guilty and sentenced to death. For thirteen days they were shackled by chains around their necks and arms in Newgate Jail, cruelly forcing them to remain standing.
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They were executed at Tyburn on 19 June. Fisher, humiliatingly described as a ‘clerk, otherwise late Bishop of Rochester’, was alleged to have openly declared on 7 May that ‘our sovereign lord is not Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England’.
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He too was sentenced to die as a traitor, but the sentence was reduced to beheading.

Three days later, on 22 June, Fisher was carried out of the chamber in the Tower in a chair, as he was too weak to walk after his months of imprisonment. The four sheriff’s officers who had lugged him up the slope to Tower Hill were going to assist him up the steps to the scaffold but he shrugged them off: ‘Nay, masters, now let me alone. You shall see me going to my death well enough myself without help.’

After his gown was removed, many in the crowd ‘marvelled to see [any man] bearing life to be so far consumed, for he seemed a lean carcass; the flesh clean wasted away … As one might say, death in a man’s shape and using a man’s voice.’
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Fisher lay prone on the straw of the scaffold, his neck ‘on a little block … Then came quickly the executioner and with a sharp and heavy axe cut asunder his neck and so severed his head.’ The crowd were astonished ‘to see so much blood come out of so old, lean, slender, weak and sickly a body’.
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Fisher’s corpse was left under guard for nine hours, and that evening the executioner and some soldiers dug a grave ‘hard against the wall’ on the north side of the churchyard of nearby All Hallows, Barking, in Upper Thames Street. ‘Without any reverence, they vilely threw his … dead body, all naked, flat upon his belly, without any winding sheet or accustomed funeral ceremonies and … following herein the command of the king, buried it very contemptuously.’ His head was parboiled and set up high over London Bridge, alongside those of the Carthusian monks who had been executed before him. But even after two weeks, it ‘looked very fresh and lively as though it had been alive, looking upon the people coming into London, which many of the people took for a miracle … and notifying the world of the blessed bishop’s innocence and holiness.’
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The chronicler Edward Hall said Fisher’s face ‘was observed to become fresher and more comely day by day and that such was the concourse of people who assembled to look at it, that almost neither cart nor horse could pass’.
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The day after Fisher’s execution, Henry attended a pageant that celebrated the royal supremacy and his triumph over the clergy. The court was then at Windsor, and the King reportedly walked ten miles at two o’clock in the morning, carrying a two-handed sword, to the village
where the spectacle, probably organised by Cromwell’s agents, was to be staged on the eve of St John the Baptist’s Nativity. ‘He [Henry] got into a house where he could see everything. He was so pleased at seeing himself cutting off the heads of the clergy that in order to laugh at his ease and encourage the people, he discovered [revealed] himself. He sent to tell his lady [Anne] that she ought to see the representation of it repeated on the eve of St Peter.’
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It was now Sir Thomas More’s turn to face Henry’s justice. Cromwell had visited him at the Tower at the end of April to inform him that the King now desired his opinion about the succession and his supremacy over the Church. More replied that he had ‘discharged his mind of all such matters and would neither dispute the King’s titles nor the Pope’s but is and will be the King’s true, faithful subject’. Cromwell said this answer would not satisfy Henry – ‘a prince not of rigour but of mercy and pity’. Although the former Lord Chancellor was now condemned to perpetual imprisonment, ‘he was not discharged of his obedience and allegiance to the king’. More insisted he was the King’s faithful subject:

He did no one any harm, said no harm and thought no harm – but wished every one good. If this was not enough to keep a man alive, he longed not to live. He was dying already and since he came here, he had been [several] times in such a case [state] that he thought he would die within the hour; but was never sorry for it, but rather sorry when the pang passed. Therefore, his poor body was at the king’s pleasure and he wished that his death could do him good.
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On 3 June, Cromwell, together with Archbishop Cranmer, saw More again at the Tower. Again he refused to take the oath. Exasperated, Cromwell told him he liked him ‘worse than the last time, for then he pitied him. But now he thought he meant not well.’
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More came up for trial at Westminster Hall on 1 July. The main witness was Solicitor General Sir Richard Riche, who had gone to the Tower on 12 June with two of Cromwell’s men, Sir Richard Southwell and Thomas Palmer, to collect More’s books. Riche described his conversation with More:

You know that our lord and king is constituted supreme head on earth of the Church of England and why ought not you, Master More, affirm and accept him so …

To which More, persevering in his treasons, answered that … a king can be made by Parliament and deprived by Parliament; to which Act every subject being at the Parliament may give his assent but as to the primacy, a subject cannot be bound because he cannot give his consent to that in Parliament.
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More maintained the witness had lied: ‘In good faith Master Riche, I am more sorry for your perjury than for my peril.’
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After being condemned for treason, he abandoned his sophisticated legal arguments and relied instead on his eloquence: ‘Since I am condemned (and God knows how), I will speak freely for the discharge of my conscience what I think of this law.

‘For the seven years I have studied the matter, I have not read any approved order of the Church that a temporal lord could or ought to be head of the spirituality.’

Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Audley, genuinely surprised at More’s words, asked: ‘What! You wish to be considered wiser or of better conscience than all the bishops and nobles of this realm?’

More replied: ‘My lord, for one bishop of your opinion, I have 100 saints of mine and for one Parliament of yours, and God knows what kind, I have all the General Councils for 1,000 years and for one kingdom, I have France and all the kingdoms of Christendom.’

Norfolk, another of his judges, interrupted and declared that More’s malice was now patently clear. The condemned man snapped back:

Noble sir, not any malice or obstinacy causes me to say this but the just necessity of the cause constrains me for the discharge of my conscience and satisfaction of my soul.

I say further that your Statute is ill-made because you have sworn never to do anything against the church, which through all Christendom is one and undivided and you have no authority, without the common consent of all Christians, to make a law or Act of Parliament, or council against the honour of Christendom.

I know well that the reason why you have condemned me is because I have never been willing to consent to the king’s second marriage but I hope in the divine goodness and mercy, that as St Paul and St Stephen (which he persecuted), are now friends in Paradise, so we, though differing in this world, shall be united in perfect harmony in the other.

I pray God to protect the king and give him good counsel.
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More was brought out of the Tower at around nine o’clock on the morning of 6 July 1535. The scaffold on Tower Hill was ‘ill-constructed, weak and ready to fall’ and the prisoner joked with Edward Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower, ‘I pray you Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.’ He told the executioner: ‘I am sorry my neck is very short. Strike not awry for saving of your honesty.’ He added: ‘I pray you let me lay my beard over the block, least you should cut it.’
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Thus, with another quip, his life was ended with one blow of the axe.

His head was also set up on a pike on London Bridge, replacing Fisher’s, which was then thrown into the river. The Bishop’s body was exhumed from All Hallows’ churchyard and buried with More’s in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower, near the vestry door.

In Rome, Paul III wrote to Francis I that Henry ‘had exceeded his ancestors in wickedness’. He was compelled by the ‘unanimous solicitation of the cardinals to declare Henry deprived of his kingdom and his royal dignity’. The Pope sought help from the French King, ‘his most dear son, having always been accustomed to have recourse to his predecessors in the [Church’s] oppression, [and] earnestly implore him … to be ready to execute justice on Henry … remembering the great armies [with] which your forefathers revenged her injuries’.
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Cromwell expressed surprise at the Pope’s indignation at the deaths of Fisher and More. He told Casalis, the English agent at the Vatican: ‘They were openly tried and convicted of high treason. Their punishment was much milder than the laws prescribe and many have, from their example, returned to their loyalty. Anyone of sound judgement may see how precipitately the Pope and the Roman court have taken offence at this.’ He dextrously wielded the airbrush of propaganda: ‘These men
alone [opposed the law of the land] pretending that they were entirely given up to the contemplation of divine things and endeavoured to refute and evade these laws by fallacious arguments. Let not the Pope be offended if the king acts in accordance with his own right and that of his kingdom.’
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The Spanish ambassador in London, Eustace Chapuys, reported on 11 July that John Stokesley, Bishop of London, ‘who never preached a sermon in his life, on account of his stammering and bad speaking, preached this morning in [St Paul’s] Cathedral by the King’s order.’ Cromwell was present to ensure the correct words were stuttered out: ‘The whole of the sermon was to invalidate the king’s first marriage and to deny the authority of the Pope and those who favoured it – even those who have suffered death in its defence. The other bishops must do the same or it will cost them their benefices and their lives.’
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But despite the propaganda, despite the preaching, the imperious and demanding Queen Anne remained as unpopular as ever throughout the realm.

Many of the clergy continued to be obdurate and unbending about the marriage and the supremacy. The vicar of Rye in East Sussex had a little book, Ekius’s
Enchiridion
, which argued against the King being the head of the Church, and a friar at Blackfriars in London earnestly desired to see the head of every supporter of the new learning upon a stake and Henry to die a ‘violent and shameful death’ and also ‘that mischievous whore the queen to be burnt’.
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Others got into trouble for less violent language. Poor old Dr Carsley, a canon residentiary of Wells Cathedral in Somerset, mentioned ‘Lady Catherine the Queen’ when leading the prayers one Sunday in February 1535. This crime was merely ‘a slip of the tongue’ and when the Bishop reproved him, he expressed his sorrow, saying he thought not ‘much of the lady Catherine and meant only Queen Anne for I know no more queens but her’. Cromwell was told: ‘He is a good man, not much under eighty and it was evidently said unawares.’
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Margaret Chancellor, alias Ellis, a spinster of Bradfield in Suffolk, was interrogated by local justices after she called the Queen ‘a goggle-eyed
whore’ and blessed Catherine ‘as the righteous queen – and she trusted to see her queen again’. Now wholly penitent, she explained she had been drunk and that ‘an evil spirit’ had caused her to utter those treasonable words.
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George Taylor, of Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, claimed in February 1535 that ‘the king is but a knave and lives in adultery and is a heretic and lives not after the laws of God’. Furthermore, he was not bound ‘by the king’s crown and if I had it here, I would play football with it’. Again, his outburst was put down to drunkenness, but nevertheless Sir Francis Bryan advocated indicting him as a traitor. He told Cromwell that ‘due execution of justice in this case will be a very great example and the safeguard of many’.
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