Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (18 page)

Cromwell was no general. Given his reputation in the country, he probably knew that if he were to lead the King’s army, he probably faced assassination by his own hastily recruited soldiers. To his chagrin, the King summoned Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk, to command the royal forces of retribution as ‘high marshal’. Chapuys reported: ‘The Bishop of Carlisle … [said] he never saw the duke so happy as he was today … thinking it will be the ruin of his rival Cromwell, to whom the blame of everything is attached and whose head the rebels demand.’
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The Minister shrewdly perceived that Norfolk would seize any military glory on the field of battle against these yokels as a means to boost his influence in court and to hasten the downfall of the upstart Cromwell.
Nil desperandum!
The threat of Norfolk could wait. His first priority was to ensure that the rebellion was crushed.

The King put on a brave face, but in reality feared for his crown, as ‘Cromwell’s nephew said today in secret to an honest man’. Richard Cromwell had been busy: he had gone to the Tower of London’s arsenals and obtained a ‘great quantity of arrows and other implements of war’ and dispatched men to the North, including the eighty carpenters and masons commandeered as they worked on his uncle’s house at Austin Friars.

On 8 October, Richard reported from Ware in Hertfordshire, north of London, where he had a hundred horsemen, with forty handguns, at nearby Waltham:

I intend soon after midnight to repair … to Huntingdon and gather such company as I can. Today on my journey I met with one Hall, who was taken prisoner by the traitors in Lincolnshire and sworn as their captain but … escaped. He reckons them at 40,000 or 50,000 and that they increase by 500 or 600 a day. Five or six hundred handguns are required and some of the small [artillery] pieces in this Tower, for many of them are good archers. I bought harness for a hundred men at London, because it is so scant here.
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His uncle meanwhile was sending out frantic letters to the nobility and gentry of the Home Counties and southern England, mobilising troops and ordering contingents to concentrate at Ampthill, Bedfordshire. This was a convenient base for an advance to the north, but close enough to defend Windsor if the rebels marched south. Cromwell himself was paying for a hundred men. Other forces were instructed to maintain security in their own counties while more were hastily formed into units to guard the King and Queen.

Suddenly, the Lincolnshire rebels melted away.

As Henry’s hastily assembled forces pressed nearer, the rebels, at last fearful of his terrible vengeance against them, deserted Lincoln and went home, their tails between their legs. Richard Cromwell, relishing his new life as a soldier, was sorry that his chances of battlefield glory had vanished: ‘I lament nothing so much as that they fly thus, as we hoped to have used them as they deserved,’ he robustly told his uncle.
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Letters
scrapping the Ampthill muster were sent out on 15 October, although twenty thousand troops had already encamped there,
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and the ordnance was returned to London.

This was another damning miscalculation by Cromwell.

Three days before the ‘stand down’ order was issued, there were reports that the insurrection had spread to Yorkshire and rumours that ‘certain horse-loads of bow staves and bows have been sent for to York to be carried into Lancashire’.
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Confirmation of the new rebellion came late on 15 October. Thomas Wriothesley told Cromwell: ‘A post has arrived from Lord Darcy declaring the greater part of Yorkshire to be up and the whole country to favour their opinions – the same that were reported in Lincolnshire. This matter hangs yet like a fever, one day good, another bad.’
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The Yorkshire men had risen, too late, in support of their brothers in Lincolnshire. The issues were the same and rumour and unrest had been rampant for some weeks. At the town of Dent, a royal official called William Breyar had been attacked and the local blacksmith told him: ‘Thy master is a thief for he pulls down all our churches in the country.’ Others said: ‘It is not the king’s deed, but the deed of Cromwell, and if we had him here, we would crum him and crum him as he was never so crummed.’
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Breyar fled for his life.

But the Yorkshire insurrection posed a far more serious threat to Henry’s crown because it was more widespread and certainly better led. Cromwell also knew well that if it was not put down successfully, he would pay with his head. He was now busy finding cash to pay the hastily re-assembled troops and was having ‘great trouble … in getting £10,000 together’. He resorted to the simple expedient of melting down plate from Henry’s jewel house to turn into coin.
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Norfolk whined continually about his lack of money to pay his men: ‘All complain they cannot live on eight pence a day.’

Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, took shelter in Pontefract Castle together with a group of local nobles headed by Thomas, Lord Darcy. On 15 October, they appealed for help to George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, commander of a six-thousand-strong contingent of the King’s army at Nottingham: ‘Today we hear there meet before York above 20,000 men … They increase in every parish, the cross goes before them.

‘I, Darcy, have twice written to the king of the weakness of the castle but have got no answer and without speedy succour, we are in extreme danger.’
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Two days later, the Sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Brian Hastings, informed Shrewsbury that the rebels now numbered forty thousand and had been ‘received into York with procession’ the previous Monday.

Worse still, the rebellion was spreading west into Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland. On 19 October, Henry diverted the troops of Edward Stanley, Third Earl of Derby, to put down

an insurrection attempted about the abbey of Sawley in Lancashire, where the abbot and monks have been restored by the traitors.

We now desire you immediately to repress it, to apprehend the captains and either have them immediately executed as traitors or sent up to us. We leave it, however, to your discretion to go elsewhere in case of greater emergency. You are to take the said abbot and monks forth [with] with violence and have them hanged without delay in their monks’ apparel.
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Events were looking bleak for the King. His northern capital of York had been taken and the major seaport of Hull capitulated on 19 October after five days of siege by six thousand rebels. The next morning, Darcy surrendered Pontefract Castle and was persuaded to join the King’s enemies. They saw themselves as a ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and marched devoutly behind banners embroidered with the Five Wounds of Christ on the Holy Cross, below the sacred monogram ‘IHS’
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and the image of a chalice.

The leader, or captain, of the Yorkshire rebels was Robert Aske, a one-eyed lawyer in his early thirties who had previously been a servant to Henry Percy, Sixth Earl of Northumberland.
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He now presided over the castle and town of Pontefract. Two days later, a messenger from Shrewsbury, Thomas Mylner,
Lancaster Herald
, arrived with a proclamation from Henry. He was taken to the hall of the fortress and, while reading out the King’s words, was taken to Aske in a nearby chamber. The rebel leader looked ‘as [if] he had been a great prince, with great rigour and like a tyrant’. Aske told him:

This proclamation shall not be read at the market cross nor amongst my people who are all in accordance with our articles, determined to see a reformation or die.

I asked him what his articles were, and he said one was to go with his company to London on pilgrimage to the king to have all vile blood put from his council and noble blood set up again; to have the faith of Christ and God’s laws kept and restitution done for wrongs done to the Church.

The herald fell on his knees and asked to read out the King’s words. This request was again refused and he was given two crowns for his pains and safe conduct out of the town.

Norfolk was meanwhile hastening north, complaining to Henry from Newark that he had ‘not slept two hours these two nights and must take some rest’. At Tuxford, the old campaigner moaned about ‘the scantiest supper I had for many years’.

He soon had more to complain about. Norfolk had been forced to parley with the Yorkshire rebels rather than destroy them in battle ‘to avoid an effusion of blood’. Heavy rain had made the roads almost impassable for royalist artillery and the King’s armies, scattered across the Midlands, were too weak to guarantee victory on the battlefield. Norfolk was incensed at the hand dealt him by fate: ‘Now, forced to appoint with the rebels, my heart is near broken.’

He was also fearful of Henry’s reaction and told the King’s Council in London: ‘It is not fear which made us appoint with the enemy but the cold weather and the want of room to house more than a third of the army and no wood to make fires; hunger both for men and horses of such sort I think never Englishman saw. Pestilence in the town is fervent and where I and my son lay, at a friar’s, ten or twelve houses were infected within a butt’s length.’
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The King’s forces in Lincolnshire were now rounding up the dejected rebels there and interrogating them. John Williams told Cromwell that nowhere had he seen ‘such a sight of asses, so unlike gentlemen as the most part of them be’. They were ‘men void of fashion’ and when it came to questioning, ‘if they know more of this rebellion than they pretend, the dull wits will not hide it’.
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A general pardon was now offered to the Yorkshire insurgents, as well as a conference at Doncaster in December to air their grievances. The rebels, lulled by Norfolk’s weasel promises, again dispersed.

In early January 1537, the embers of rebellion burst into flame again in Yorkshire, sparked by rumours that the King was reinforcing Hull and Scarborough both as refuges for the local gentry and bases from which to subdue the county.
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The leaders were John Hallam, who had taken a prominent role in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and renegade spendthrift Sir Francis Bigod, a long-term debtor labouring under Cromwell’s high interest rates.
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This forlorn hope was launched in the unfounded belief that parts of Yorkshire and Durham were about to rise again in revolt. Hallam failed to seize Hull, while Bigod’s men were attacked at Beverley and sixty-two taken prisoner.

Henry threw away the promises of mercy and benignity made to the Yorkshire rebels. This was one insurrection too many; now he wanted blood.

The ringleaders and many of those caught up in the troubles were quickly arrested. On 22 February, Norfolk was urged on by the King to be merciless in his justice: ‘You must cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of the inhabitants, hanging them on trees, quartering them and setting their heads and quarters in every town as shall be a fearful warning.’
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He joyfully imposed martial law in some areas of north-west England, executing as he progressed from county to county. At Carlisle he admitted that if he had proceeded by normal process of law, ‘not a fifth of them would have suffered … because [of the] affection and pity of neighbours’ who would have sat as juries.
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Cromwell drove Norfolk on to even greater cruelty, taunting him that he was soft in the suppression of the abbeys and lenient in his punishment of traitors. ‘Neither here, nor elsewhere, will I be reputed Papist or a favourer of naughty religious persons,’ Norfolk retorted, adding that he had been warned ‘to take heed of what he ate or drank in religious houses’ for fear of poison.

A total of 216 were executed for their part in the rebellions that shook Henry’s throne. Of them, forty-four came from monasteries: the abbots of Jervaulx, Fountains, Barlings, Sawley and Rievaulx, the prior of
Bridlington and thirty-eight other monks. Even Thomas Mylner, the luckless
Lancaster Herald
, was tried and executed for bending his knee to Robert Aske at Pontefract.
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Lord Darcy, under questioning in London, told Cromwell bitterly: ‘It is you that are the very original and chief cause of all this rebellion and mischief. I trust that … though you would procure all the noblemen’s heads within the realm to be struck off, yet shall there be one head remain[ing] that shall strike off your head.’
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So Cromwell lived on to fight another day. He bragged to Sir Thomas Wyatt in July 1537: ‘The realm … [goes] from good quiet and peace, daily to better and better. The traitors have been executed: the Lord Darcy at Tower Hill; the Lord Hussey at Lincoln. Aske [was] hanged upon [above] the dungeon of the castle at York. The rest were executed at Tyburn. So, that, as far as we can perceive, all the cankered hearts are weeded away.’
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CHAPTER SIX

In a Glass Darkly

No lord or gentleman in England bears love or favour to my Lord Privy Seal because he is a great taker of money. He will speak, solicit or do for no man, but all for money
.

GEORGE PAULET, 1538
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Paintings of Cromwell, preserved in London’s National Portrait Gallery and mainly by the court painter Hans Holbein the Younger,
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show a man growing progressively more corpulent as the years pass. The impact of good food, wine and the sedentary hours spent poring over voluminous paperwork were beginning to tell.
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But even when you look closely at these images, there are remarkably few clues to the true character of this man of mystery. His hooded grey eyes mask any suggestion of emotion below that low, beetling forehead, as they stare, sphinx-like. Clearly absorbed in deep thought, he seems oblivious of the searching gaze of the artist.

The most famous portrait,
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probably painted sometime in 1533–4, shows him dressed soberly in heavy black, fur-edged robes, sitting on a wooden-panelled settle, with rich dark-blue damask covering the wall behind him. He resembles very much a successful merchant, trading in staple commodities, and the aura of prosperity is emphasised by the large ring on one of his chubby fingers. On the narrow table in front of
him, covered with a Turkish carpet, lies a closed clasped book, probably concerned with some devotional subject. There is also a soft leather bag, plainly containing his personal seal, a feathered quill pen and a pair of scissors with which to trim it. The sitter’s identity and status are disclosed by the tiny pinched writing on the piece of paper lying on top of a small pile of parchments on the table: ‘To Master Cromwell, trusty and well-beloved master of our jewel house.’ As we have seen, he was appointed to this post on 14 April 1532, for the first year jointly with Sir John Williams, and held it amongst a host of other offices, both major and minor, until his death. This portrait, therefore, is likely to have been a gift from a grateful sovereign, well contented with a servant entrusted with guarding what was always closest to Henry’s heart: his wealth.