Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (14 page)

Henry naturally turned to Cromwell to remove this unwanted tartar.

Only too conscious of Wolsey’s fate when he had failed the King in a similar situation, the Minister decided guile and cunning needed to be applied to the problem, as he knew she would not go quietly. Anne was already aware of the whispering campaign being mounted against her at court and was now openly on bad terms with Cromwell. Attack was the best form of defence. On 2 April, her almoner John Skip audaciously delivered a sermon on the text ‘Which among you accuses me of sin?’, taken from St John, chapter eight. He attacked Cromwell, comparing him with the Old Testament character of Haman, the scheming councillor of the Persian King Ahasuerus (also known as Xerxes), who ended up being hanged on the very gallows he had built for Mordecai, the protector
of Queen Esther.
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Skip was roundly rebuked for interfering in matters of state.

At Easter, Cromwell willingly gave up his rooms at Greenwich Palace for Jane Seymour’s use. Dour Cromwell was playing the unfamiliar role of procurer, or, more generously, Cupid. His apartment was conveniently located, as Henry could visit her at all times ‘by certain galleries without being perceived’.

Ironically, the text for Skip’s sermon came from the New Testament parable of the woman taken in adultery and this may have inspired the Minister with the idea to investigate or, more accurately, invent accusations of faithlessness against the embattled Queen. On 24 April, a special commission headed by Cromwell and Norfolk (by now definitely no friend of his niece) was set up to find damning faults in the Queen’s character and behaviour.

It was all too easy. Mark Smeaton, a groom of the privy chamber and a musician and dancer who was probably a covert homosexual, was lured from Greenwich and tortured, probably by Cromwell, into a stammering confession that he had become Anne’s lover. There were always a number of youthful courtiers around the Queen, fluttering like moths about a bright flame. Now their wings were burnt for dancing too close to the King’s private life. Five were accused of enjoying carnal knowledge of the Queen at Hampton Court, Westminster and at the palace at Eltham,
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as well as with plotting Henry’s death. With a spiteful, perverted twist, one of them was her own brother, George, Viscount Rochford, accused of incest in an unsubtle attempt by Cromwell to further blacken Anne’s name. They all denied the accusations, except the naive Smeaton, who doubtless had been promised his life in exchange for his damning testimony.
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Another, Thomas Wyatt, was questioned and then released.

Anne was arrested at Greenwich on 2 May and taken to the Tower of London. She was received by its constable, Sir William Kingston, who had previously escorted Wolsey to London. He described her arrival to Cromwell:

She said to me: ‘Mr Kingston, shall I go into a dungeon?’

‘No madam, you shall go into your lodging that you lay in at your coronation.’

‘It is good to me,’ she said [and added], ‘Jesu, have mercy upon me,’ and knelt down, weeping a [great] pace and in the same sorrow fell into a great laughing, and she has done [so] many times since.

And then she desired me to move the king’s highness that she [ought] to have the sacrament in the closet by her chamber, that she might [pray] for mercy. ‘For I am as clear from the company of man as I am clear from you and am the king’s true wedded wife.’
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Archbishop Cranmer, seemingly innocent of the murky world of Cromwell’s conspiracy against the Queen, felt it necessary to write to Henry to comfort him in his distress:

I am in such a perplexity that my mind is clearly amazed – for I never had better opinion in [a] woman than I had in her, which makes me think she should not be culpable.

And again, I think your highness would not have gone so far except that she had surely been culpable …

If she proved culpable, there is not one that loves God and his Gospel that will ever favour her but must hate her above all other; and the more they favour the Gospel, the more they will hate her.
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Cromwell, always keen to explore every avenue of enquiry and to tie up loose ends, contacted Henry Percy, Sixth Earl of Northumberland, about his liaison with the youthful Anne Boleyn before the King had ardently lumbered onto the scene and stopped the affair. Northumberland wrote to him on 13 May, solemnly declaring that there had been no pre-contract of marriage with Anne, thus inconveniently removing a handy legal trick that could have been used to invalidate the royal marriage.
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Cromwell then set in motion alternative arrangements for a speedy divorce before she met her death.

Four of the men accused of adultery with her – William Brereton, Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston and the hapless Smeaton – appeared on trial at Westminster Hall on 12 May. Cromwell’s promises to Smeaton that his life would be spared had, of course, proved completely worthless, like most of his pledges given in such circumstances. Inevitably, they were all found guilty.

Anne and her brother were tried in the Tower of London on 15 May, watched by two thousand curious people crowded into the King’s Hall, on the second floor of the White Tower. Cromwell’s evidence against George Boleyn was thin, but dramatic. The Minister relied on the testimony of George’s wife Jane, Lady Rochford, to secure his charge of incest between brother and sister. But she could only produce vague innuendoes – which did not even amount to circumstantial evidence. There was ‘undue familiarity’ between the siblings, she said; George was ‘always in his sister’s room’. Would Cromwell’s case against his prime victims stumble and fall at the first fence?

Then he produced his trump card. Lady Rochford discreetly wrote down the Queen’s incautious words about Henry’s lack of manly prowess in bed and handed the paper over to the twenty-six peers who sat as judges. She had written: ‘
Que le Roy n’estait habile en cas de soi copuler avec femme, et qu’il n’avait ni vertu ni puissance
’ – ‘The King was not skilful when copulating with a woman and he had not virtue or power.’ Cromwell’s veiled implication was not difficult to discern: if Anne could not have a son by the King, she would look elsewhere to beget a child and pass it off as an heir. The Queen was finished. So was her brother.

Henry Percy, Anne’s youthful lover so many years before, was now one of her judges. He suddenly quit the court, pleading sickness.

Norfolk, with crocodile tears in his eyes, sentenced his niece: ‘Because you have offended our sovereign the king’s grace, in committing treason against his person and here attainted of the same, the law of the realm is this: that you shall be burnt here within the Tower of London on the Green, else to have your head smitten off as the king’s pleasure shall be further known.’
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Rochford was beheaded on Tower Hill on 17 May with the four other scapegoats of Cromwell’s conspiracy. The same day at Lambeth, Archbishop Cranmer issued a decree nullifying the Queen’s marriage to Henry.

Cromwell boasted openly of his part in Anne’s downfall. He told Chapuys that he had been

authorised and commissioned by the king to prosecute and bring to an end the mistress’s trial, to do which he had taken considerable trouble. He …
had taken, planned and brought about the whole affair. One of the things which had mostly raised his suspicions and induced him to inquire into her case was certain prognostications made in Flanders of a conspiracy against the king’s life by people, it was said, nearest to his royal person.
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He was a little shamefaced about his earlier role in facilitating the Boleyn marriage. ‘Cromwell began to excuse himself for having promoted the king’s marriage. True it was, he said, that seeing the king so much bent upon it and so determined, he [Cromwell] had paved the way towards it.’
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Kingston meanwhile carefully reported on Anne’s behaviour to the Minister in a series of letters. Henry had decided she should be beheaded in the French manner, and a French executioner from St Omer, in the Pale of Calais, was specially brought over and paid £24 to do the grisly job with a two-handed Flemish sword. Early on the morning of Friday 19 May, the day of her execution, she discussed how she would die. She told Kingston:

‘I hear say I shall not die before noon and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.’ I told her it should be no pain as it was so subtle. And then she said: ‘I heard say the executioner was very good and I have a little neck’ … [She] put her hand about it, laughing heartily.

I have sent many men and also women executed and they have been in great sorrow and to my knowledge this lady has much joy and pleasure in death.
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A scaffold with five steps had been built on the greensward within the Tower. Kingston had removed all strangers from the precincts of the fortress on Cromwell’s orders and had locked the gates the previous night. A small group of the King’s councillors was gathered that morning, with Cromwell standing prominently in the front row to savour his triumph at her downfall.

Her head was cut off with one blow. The headsman had earned his fee.

The Queen’s body was unceremoniously dumped into a long elm
chest, normally used to hold arrows, and carried off to be buried in the Tower’s Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in an unmarked grave.
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A Frenchman reported to Cromwell that the wax tapers about Catherine’s tomb at Peterborough ‘had been lighted of their own accord’ the day before Anne was beheaded.
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On 20 May, Jane Seymour was brought to the Palace of Westminster by barge from Greenwich. Ten days later she married Henry in a secret ceremony in the Queen’s Closet at Westminster.

CHAPTER FIVE

Shaking the Throne

To remember all the jewels of all the monasteries in England and specially the cross of emeralds at St Paul’s
.

CROMWELL’S ‘REMEMBRANCES’, EARLY APRIL 1535
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Cromwell’s influence and power now pervaded almost every dark corner of Henry’s administration. Only the Church and religious doctrine still remained officially free of his autocratic meddling – but these soon fell prey to his domination. On 1 January 1535, the King granted him the extravagant titles of Vicar-General and Visitor-General of the Monasteries, thereby giving Cromwell authority and precedence even over the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, let alone the entire bench of bishops.

In October that year, Cromwell set up his own ecclesiastical court to issue licences to approve preachers and probates for wills and to hear petitions for divorce. More significantly, it had the power to install bishops or dismiss a monastic prior.
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The Word of God had now taken on a political dimension, as it required governmental approval in many of its manifestations.

Cromwell was also particularly interested in the wealth of the Church, having seen how convenient it was to appropriate monastic property for other purposes when he had worked for Wolsey a decade before. There seems little reason to doubt the widespread belief of the
time that it was Cromwell who suggested the suppression of the monasteries to the King, as a means of both finally severing any links with Rome and augmenting the contents of his exchequer. Henry had a ready ear: two years before, he had warned Chapuys of his determination ‘to reunite to the crown the goods which churchmen held of it … and that he was required to do this by the oath he had taken at his coronation’. One can almost hear the canny lawyer’s own words repeated.
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First, with typical bureaucratic thoroughness, Cromwell needed to assess exactly how much this amounted to. He accordingly dispatched agents both to monasteries and secular churches to survey all their property holdings and income. It was an ambitious project. The result of this huge clerical exercise, conducted throughout 1535, was the twenty-two volumes of the
Valor Ecclesiasticus
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– the largest survey of property since the Norman government’s Domesday Book in the eleventh century – which listed and assessed the value of the Church in England, sometimes down to the last cow and pig. Although much was left out of the final reckoning, Cromwell now knew that the property of the religious houses was worth at least £200,000, or more than £72 million at 2006 prices. On top of that was the value of the buildings themselves and their precious possessions such as gold and silver chalices, crosiers and candlesticks.

On 21 January, Henry, as supreme head of the Church, issued him a commission for a general visitation of the churches, monasteries and clergy in England and Wales, with power, as Vicar-General, to appoint deputies for the work.
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Cromwell’s commissioners were tasked to investigate their ‘condition, both spiritual and temporal … and the lives and morals of the abbots, removing and punishing those [with whom] they find fault’. Amongst the issues they were especially instructed to explore were those that concerned any new increase in the value of lands each monastery possessed and, very specifically, ‘the behaviour of the nuns and how often they confess’. The commissioners also had injunctions to find ‘relics and feigned miracles for increase of lucre’ from naive pilgrims and were told they should encourage monks to leave each house.
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Their hidden agenda was to seek out and uncover excesses and loose and wanton behaviour, which could be used as ammunition by Cromwell
in his planned attack on the realm’s monastic wealth. To ensure there would be no unwanted hindrance from the church authorities, he decreed that no bishop should visit any monastery while the King’s commission was in progress.

For this mission he recruited a ragtag band of lawyers and priests who had been in government service: Thomas Legh,
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John ap Rice and, latterly, Dr Richard Layton.
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In modern Whitehall parlance, they were all ‘sound’ men as far as the Minister was concerned. Legh had taken part in the Dunstable divorce proceedings against Catherine of Aragon and had interrogated one of Bishop Fisher’s servants in an attempt to gather evidence against the prelate. The Welshman ap Rice, a notary public, had been in Cromwell’s service since 1532: his loyalty was certain-sure. Layton had questioned both Fisher and Sir Thomas More in the Tower and had suggested a visitation of the diocese of York to root out ‘frantic fantasies and ceremonies’ there. He boastfully told Cromwell: ‘You will never know what I can do until you try me.’ The offer was irresistible.