Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (13 page)

Continuing disapproval of Anne Boleyn was not confined to bucolic alehouse rantings and the resentful clergy. In the sumptuous surroundings of the court, Henry Percy, Sixth Earl of Northumberland, spoke bitterly of Anne’s ‘arrogance and malice’, reporting that she had used ‘such shameful words to the Duke of Norfolk as one would not address to a dog, so that he was compelled to quit the royal chamber. In his indignation … he uttered reproaches against [her] of which the least was to call her
le grande putain
[the great whore].’
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Chapuys told Charles V in May 1535 that the Queen – he scornfully called her Henry’s concubine – was ‘more haughty than ever and ventures to tell the king that he is more bound to her than man can be to woman, for she extricated him from a sin’. Reports also circulated in government circles in Spain that Henry was growing ‘weary and tired’ of her.
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Early the following month she clashed angrily with her ally Cromwell and threatened to cut his head off his shoulders. But he seemed curiously untroubled by her tantrum and explained to Chapuys, ‘I trust so much in my master that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.’ The ambassador had his doubts, however, as he needed Cromwell as his own window into the court’s intrigues and machinations. He reported: ‘I could not but wish him a more gracious mistress and one more grateful for the inestimable services he has done the king.’ He ‘begged and entreated’ Cromwell ‘to guard against her attacks more effectively than the cardinal [Wolsey] had
done, which I hoped his dexterity and prudence will be able to accomplish’. He pondered privately whether Cromwell had invented the Queen’s tirade

in order to enhance his merchandise [standing with him]. All I can say is that everyone considers him Anne’s right hand. Indeed, I hear from a reliable source that night and day, the lady [is] working to bring about the Duke of Norfolk’s disgrace with the king. Whether it be owing to his having spoken too freely about her or [that] Cromwell wishes to bring down the aristocracy of this kingdom, I cannot say.
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But the root cause of the Queen’s frequent bouts of fury was undoubtedly Catherine of Aragon, who threw a dark shadow of menace across her life at court. Cromwell’s crony Thomas Bedyll told him in October 1534 that the household servants of the ‘Princess Dowager’ still persisted in calling her queen.
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Thus Catherine and her daughter Mary, now aged eighteen, were a constant irritant to Anne, and the Spanish ambassador feared that her nagging would coerce Henry into treating them cruelly. ‘To which the concubine will urge him with all her power … saying it was a shame to him and all the realm that they were not punished as traitors, according to the statues.’
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Dr Pedro Ortiz, the imperial envoy based in Rome, recounted Anne’s bitter feelings towards her stepdaughter Mary: ‘She is my death and I am hers, so I will take care that she will not laugh at me after my death.’
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Chapuys also reported that the Queen ‘constantly speaks of them as rebels, deserving death and Cromwell would willingly say what Caiaphas did’, referring to the Jewish High Priest who urged that Christ should be put to death.
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Moreover, Anne ‘had suborned a person to say that he had [received] a revelation from God that she could not conceive while the two ladies were alive’.
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Here lay the crux of the tensions afflicting England’s King and Queen.

Anne no longer lived up to her personal motto: ‘The Most Happy’. After probably suffering a miscarriage in July 1534, she was so desperate to become pregnant again – it was her principal role as queen, after all – that in her despair and frustration she spoke slightingly of Henry’s lacklustre performance in bed where, she said, he had neither skill nor
virility.
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Attacking Henry’s over-inflated ego was tantamount to suicide within his whispering, rumour-ridden court and these unwise indiscretions were to count against her in the future. But eventually, in October 1535, she conceived another child.

Catherine meanwhile lived in continual dread that she and her daughter would be called upon, under Cromwell’s new statutes, formally to abjure their titles of queen and princess and recognise, by oath, the legal validity of Henry’s marriage with Anne. Possibly because of her stress and fear, Mary fell seriously ill in February 1535 and Catherine pleaded with Chapuys to ask the King to send his daughter to her, so she could ‘treat her with my own hands … There is no need of any other persons but myself to nurse her … I will put her into my own bed where I sleep and will watch her when needful.’
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But Henry feared that bringing the two women together would make them a rallying point for opposition to his marriage and his supremacy over the Church. In March 1535, with unusual frankness, he told Chapuys that he ‘would take good care not to send [Mary] thither, for the queen, being so haughty in spirit, she might by favour of the princess, raise a number of men and make war as boldly as did Queen Isabella, her mother’. The King bluntly sent Mary word via her governess that ‘he had no worse enemy in the world than her and that she was the cause of mischief … The king declared publicly that her conduct was calculated to encourage conspiracy against him.’
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The Spanish envoy was convinced there was a conspiracy to kill Mary, or at least so badly neglect her that she succumbed to her illness. In April he told his imperial master Charles V of a sinister conversation he had with Cromwell about the princess. The Minister ‘several times told me that it was the princess who created the difficulty and troubled matters and that if it pleased God … He did not dare to say more, but it was quite clear what he wished.’
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On another occasion, he ‘was not ashamed to throw out hints that it would be a comfort if the two ladies could be got rid of’. There was other circumstantial evidence to support these suggestions of his malice, which was also keenly felt by the King. Henry bragged that he would now fulfil some old prophecies about himself: at the beginning of his reign he was
as gentle as a lamb ‘and at the end, worse than a lion and that he would despatch those who were in the Tower and some that were not there as well’.
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The threat was unspoken but nonetheless the King’s meaning was crystal clear: if all else failed, he was willing to execute his first wife and their daughter to neutralise the danger they posed to his crown.

In October 1535, Catherine wrote to Pope Paul III urging him to have special consideration for England and warning the pontiff that ‘if a remedy be not applied with all speed, there will be no end to the loss of souls or to the making of martyrs’. She was writing plainly to fully discharge her conscience ‘as one who expects death, along with my daughter’.
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The Pope, rather limply, could only call for prayers from the faithful in Spain for Catherine and Mary, on St John’s Day – 24 June 1536. He generously offered seven years and seven Lents of pardon to all those who said three paternosters ‘in memory of Christ’s death, when the bell rings at 3 p.m.’ on that day. Ortiz in Rome believed Paul’s intention was that ‘all these prayers shall be offered for the queen and princess and the saints who are fighting for the faith in England’.
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No doubt Catherine found comfort in the promise of all those devout prayers by so many of the Catholic faithful.

But by the end of the year, she was dying and Cromwell was told of her impending end that Christmas.

After New Year 1536, Chapuys hastened to Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire,
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where Catherine was now confined: ‘On my arrival she called me at once, that it might not be supposed her sickness was feigned and also because there was a friend of Cromwell’s who the king had sent to accompany me, or rather to spy.’ The envoy spent four days at her bedside and departed, comforted that she seemed a little better.

It was her last brave rally before her death. On 9 January, Cromwell sent Chapuys a message announcing that Catherine had died two days before at two o’clock in the afternoon, having heard the news himself that morning from Sir Edward Chamberlain and Sir Edmund Bedingfield of her household.
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She was just over fifty years old. Chapuys told her nephew Charles V:

The queen’s illness began about five weeks ago … and the attack was renewed on the morrow of Christmas Day. It was a pain in the stomach, so violent that she could retain no food.

I asked her physician several times if there was any suspicion of poison. He said he was afraid it was so, for after she had drunk some Welsh beer she had been worse and that it must have been a slow and subtle poison for he could not discover evidences of simple and pure poison.

On opening her, indications will be seen.
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Cromwell played a dangerous game of disinformation to distract Chapuys and defuse any talk of Catherine’s supposed murder. He told him of rumours received from France, which had ‘originated from Spaniards … that the late queen was poisoned. This Cromwell could not tell me without some visible change of colour and countenance.’
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News of Catherine’s death delighted the Queen and her faction at court. Anne, showing ‘great joy’, gave the messenger a ‘handsome present’. Her father, the Earl of Wiltshire, commented that it was a pity Mary ‘did not keep company with her [mother]’. Henry, when told, exclaimed: ‘God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war.’ But Chapuys maintained that Anne, in the privacy of her chamber afterwards, ‘cried and lamented, fearing she herself might be brought to the same end’.
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The ambassador wrote that the next day, a Sunday, Henry was clad in celebratory yellow ‘from top to toe, except for the white feather he had in his bonnet’ and the

Little Bastard [two-year-old Princess Elizabeth] was conducted to Mass with trumpets and other great triumphs.

After dinner, the king entered the room in which the ladies danced and there did several things like one transported with joy.

At last he sent for his Little Bastard, and carrying her in his arms, he showed her first to one and then another.
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Cromwell was charged with the delicate matter of arranging a funeral for a discarded queen. Sadler reported to him that the King had decided there would be no elaborate funeral hearse
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with candles and tapers in St
Paul’s Cathedral to mark her passing and had told the French ambassador that he was not paying for any mourning clothes.
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The obsequies should befit someone of royal status but not be too expensive. Cromwell’s detailed plan for her burial in Peterborough Cathedral survives.
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It styles her: ‘The right excellent and noble Princess and Lady Catherine, daughter to the right high and mighty Prince Ferdinand, late King of Castille and late wife to the noble and excellent Prince Arthur, brother to our sovereign lord King Henry VIII.’ Even in death, her status had to be politically correct. On her tomb, the arms of Wales
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were quartered with those of Spain. Her marriage to Henry had been thoroughly expunged from history.

Catherine’s belongings, stored in Baynard’s Castle in London, were carefully catalogued by Sir Edward Baynton in February. Of them, two ivory chessboards and pieces, a set of red and white ivory chessmen and a desk covered with black velvet were appropriated by Henry himself. A case of wooden trenchers (plates), a coffer covered with crimson velvet and two working stools of ivory were selected by Queen Anne for her personal use.
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On 24 January 1536, the eve of the Conversion of St Paul, Henry took a starring role in a joust at the royal tilting yard at the palace at Greenwich. It may have been a sport full of chivalry, romance and dash, but it was also recklessly dangerous for a king without a lawful male heir to his throne. He met with a terrible accident: ‘The king, mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed, but he sustained no injury.’
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That was the official version of events. His injuries were, in reality, far more serious and were caused by his armoured charger falling on him, crushing him beneath. Later he was reported to have been laid low ‘for two hours without speech’, possibly through severe concussion or, worse still, bruising of the cerebral cortex.
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Cromwell, however, reported ‘that the king is merry and in perfect health’, but in his words one can smell the sixteenth-century spin of a devious minister.

Five days later Anne miscarried of a heavy male fetus aged about three and a half months, after Norfolk, her uncle, told her of the King’s accident. She put the loss of the child down to shock at the news.
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Henry
was less than sympathetic. He told her bluntly that ‘he would have no more boys by her’.
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He departed her bedside with ‘ill grace’, snapping: ‘When you are up, I will come to speak to you.’

He was tiring of his sharp-tongued, jealous queen, always conscious of her status, always ready to feel affronted. During the previous three months he had barely exchanged words with her on ten occasions. The King was now forty-four and beginning to feel his age. His chances of siring an heir with his current wife looked increasingly remote. Chapuys, although armed only with second-hand court tittle-tattle, reported gleefully that Henry had told a courtier

in great secrecy and as a confession, that he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges [sorcery or witchcraft] and charms and that owing to that, he would hold it as nullified. God, he said, had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children.

He therefore considered he could take a third wife which he said he wished much to do.
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This was becoming a familiar royal refrain. Coldly, calculatingly, Henry now reasoned that it was time to move on. He had already identified Anne’s successor: one of her own ladies, twenty-six-year-old Jane Seymour, whose eldest brother Edward was one of Henry’s esquires of the body. He had rid himself of one unwanted wife. Now that he was supreme head of the Church in England, why not again?