Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (22 page)

Then the king’s waites
²
and the waites of London played with the shawms
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and after that a great peal of guns were shot at the Tower of London, all which … was done to give laud and praise to God for joy of our prince.

The same night, at five of the clock, there were [bon]fires made in every street and lane, people sitting at them banqueting with fruits and wine; the shawms and waites playing in Cheapside and hogsheads of wine set in [many] places in the City for poor people to drink as long as they [wished] …

Also there was shot at the Tower that night above two thousand guns and all the bells ringing in every parish church until ten …
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Amid all this noisy rejoicing, correct protocol had to be rigorously followed. With typical Tudor bureaucratic efficiency, a circular letter, written in advance and now sealed in the margin by the Queen’s signet,
⁵
was quickly dispatched to the great and good of the realm, announcing pointedly that ‘Jane the queen had been brought in childbed of a Prince
conceived in Lawful Matrimony between my lord, the King’s Majesty, and us’.
⁶
That night, Cromwell, still toiling at his paperwork at St James’s Palace ‘beside Westminster’, penned a letter to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the English ambassador to Charles V, instructing him to inform the Imperial Emperor of ‘the good news … of the queen’s grace’s deliverance of a goodly prince’.
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Margaret, the Dowager Marchioness of Dorset, who was virtually quarantined in Croydon, Surrey, 11 miles (18.3 km) south of London, because of an outbreak of the plague there,
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hastened to send her congratulations to Henry, having heard ‘the most joyful news and glad tidings that came to England this many years’. For this, ‘We, all your grace’s poor subjects, are most bound to give thanks to almighty God that it has pleased Him, of His great mercy, so as to remember your grace with a prince,’ she added piously.
⁹
Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, was carried away to ludicrous heights by his enthusiasm. He told Cromwell: ‘Here is no less joy and rejoicing in these parts for the birth of our prince, whom we hungered for so long, than there was … at the birth of St John the Baptist. God give us all grace to yield due thanks to our Lord God, God of England.’ The good Bishop suddenly seemed to realise that his politically correct euphoria teetered on the fulsome, as he swiftly added: ‘What a great fool am I! Devotion shows many times but little discretion.’
¹⁰
But shrewdly, he had made his loyal point.

Court officials immediately began preparations for the prince’s extravagant christening. On the day of his birth, a mandate was issued at Westminster instructing the Mayor and Sheriffs of London to publish a proclamation sternly forbidding access to Hampton Court on Monday, 15 October (the day appointed for the ceremony) without the personal permission of the King, ‘on account of the plague’. Retinues of the invited nobles and prelates were also strictly limited, for fear of infection from them.
¹¹

Before Cromwell hurried off to the christening, he had one particularly important piece of business to transact: the arrest of an old adversary, Sir George Throgmorton
¹²
(or Throckmorton) of Coughton, Warwickshire, an MP and a staunch opponent of Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Four years earlier, he had fomented resistance to the King’s ambitions and marital plans during seditious meetings at the
aptly named Queen’s Head Tavern in Cripplegate, in the City of London. At the time, Cromwell had warned him to ‘live at home, serve God and meddle little’.
¹³
But he had not heeded the ominous advice and was constantly in trouble.

Throgmorton was now sent to the Tower and closely questioned. He wrote to the King, frankly recounting his past sins: how in 1533 he had discussed with Sir Thomas Dingley why the Restraint of Appeals (to Rome) Act had been passed ‘so lightly’ – and he had thought this unsurprising as ‘few would displease my Lord Privy Seal’.

Henry had sent for him, he recalled, after he had spoken against the Act and he had seen that the King’s conscience was troubled about marrying his brother’s wife: ‘I told your grace I feared if you did marry Queen Anne you [would] have meddled both with the mother and sister. And his grace said: “Never with the mother.” And [Cromwell] standing by, said: “Nor with the sister either – and therefore put that out of your mind.”’

The Minister demanded he write down other communications he might have had about the King and Queen during those meetings at the Queen’s Head, but hopelessly, haplessly, he confessed he found that ‘very hard to do’.
¹⁴
Henry, triumphant at the birth of a son, must have wondered at the ironic timing of the re-emergence of these old causes célèbres. He probably saw Throgmorton as merely the unwelcome residue of an unhappy past.

After this thoroughly satisfying arrest,
¹⁵
Cromwell rode on to Hampton Court for the christening in the Chapel Royal. The ceremony began at midnight and, despite Henry’s injunctions on invitees, was attended by nearly 130 lords, gentlemen and clergy, as well as 270 other guests, all crowding into the recently refurbished blue and gold-leafed fan-vaulted chapel of the palace. The King had chosen the Christian name of Edward after his maternal great-grandfather Edward IV and to mark the baby’s propitious day of birth, the eve of the Feast of St Edward. At the moment of naming, torches of expensive virgin wax were lit simultaneously by the congregation and then the chief herald,
Garter King of Arms
, loudly proclaimed the prince’s name and new titles – Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester.
¹⁶

The child was then returned, amid a strident clarion call of trumpets, to his mother’s privy chamber, where Henry and his queen awaited him. Jane, cosily wrapped in a mantle of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine fur, was propped up in bed, weakly reclining on four plump cushions of scarlet-and-gold damask. The King triumphantly took the baby up in his arms, blessed him loudly in the name of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St George, and burst into tears of joy, watched approvingly by the noble sycophants around him, politely sipping hippocras
¹⁷
and nibbling biscuits. With the child then safely tucked up in his ‘rocking chamber’ in the north range of the palace’s Chapel Court, the royal christening party continued until almost dawn.

Three days later, the Queen fell ill.

Her condition rapidly worsened and at eight o’clock in the morning on 24 October, her chamberlain Thomas Manners, Earl of Rutland, together with Robert Aldridge, Bishop of Carlisle, and the King’s doctors, John Chambre, William Butts and George Owen,
¹⁸
wrote to Cromwell, reporting that the previous afternoon, Jane had ‘a natural lax [a loosening of the bowels] by reason she began somewhat to lighten and [appeared] to mend’. Her recovery continued until the evening but then she suffered a sudden relapse. ‘All this night, she has been very sick … Her confessor has been with her grace this morning … and even now is preparing to minister … the Sacrament of Extreme Unction’ – the Last Rites of the Catholic Church.
¹⁹

The bulletins from Hampton Court to Cromwell in London began to flow thick and fast, with news of every development as the Queen fought for her young life. Sir John Russell, now Comptroller of the Royal Household, told the Minister that Henry had planned to leave for nearby Esher that morning for a day’s hunting, but

because the queen was very sick this night and this day, he tarried. But tomorrow, God willing, he intends to be there. If she mends, he will go, and if she [does not] he told me … he could not find in his heart to tarry.

I assure you she has been in great danger [last] night and this day, but thanks be to God, she is somewhat amended. If she scape [survives] this night, the physicians be in good hope that she is past all danger.
²⁰

But both Russell and Henry’s doctors were overly optimistic, as the Queen was now sinking fast. Twelve hours on, Norfolk dashed off a brief, urgent note to the Lord Privy Seal, still at Westminster:

My good lord. I pray you to be here tomorrow early to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress, there is no likelihood of her life – the more pity – and I fear she shall not be alive at the time you shall read this.

At eight at night, with the hand of [your] sorrowful friend.

T. NORFOLK
.
²¹

She died just before midnight that night, aged twenty-eight.

Cromwell later blamed her illness on the ‘faults of them that were about her’ who had allowed her to eat the wrong kinds of food, ‘as her fantasy in sickness called for’, or suffered her to catch cold.
²²
In truth, she probably died from a puerperal fever and septicaemia, caused by an infection contracted during her exhausting confinement.

Her death must have been an unpleasant shock for Cromwell, who knew only too well that Henry, after a decent period of mourning, would require a new consort, and finding her would be his unenviable task. At least with the birth of the prince, the Seymours would remain in royal favour, so his efforts to ally the Cromwells to them through marriage would not have been wasted.

The King immediately departed Hampton Court for Westminster, seeking ‘a solitary place to see to his sorrows’.
²³
Henry was genuinely mortified at the loss of his ‘entirely beloved’ wife, although at the beginning of November he was reported to be ‘in good health and as merry as a widower may be’.
²⁴
The King wrote to Francis I of France: ‘I have so cordially received the congratulations which … you have [sent] me for the son which it has pleased God to give me … Notwithstanding, Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of the death of her who brought me this happiness.’
²⁵

While Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, arranged Jane’s state funeral, Cromwell was compiling the official audit of the Queen’s possessions and assets. An eighteen-page book listed her jewels, pomanders and girdles, some now gifts to her friends, family and household.
²⁶
A two-page
document, signed by Cromwell, detailed those owing money to her estate. A
valor
²⁷
of lands in Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Surrey and Hampshire, ‘lately [a] parcel of Queen Jane’s jointure and dowry and now reserved into the king’s highness’ own hands’, was also drawn up, estimating them to be worth £938 6s. 3d,
²⁸
or £350,000 at 2006 prices.

Cromwell had other things on his mind. Although the young prince was in good health and thriving – he ‘sucketh like a child of his puissance’,
²⁹
he reported enthusiastically – that young life was a slender, uncertain thread from which to suspend the future of the Tudors in those days of virulent epidemics. There was also the ever-present threat of assassination. The Minister was only too aware that what was required, for the absolute security of the realm, was a ‘spare heir’ – another healthy baby prince – and to achieve that lawfully, Henry would have to take another wife.

The daughter of one of the turbulent noble houses of England was not a comfortable option, as Cromwell feared such a wife would swiftly become the focal point for a new bout of jealousies and inevitable conspiracies within the court – which might well threaten his own position. A French match seemed diplomatically advantageous, which would help neutralise a threatening alliance between the two European superpowers, France and Spain.

At the end of October, with Jane scarcely cold in her coffin and still unburied, Cromwell informed Lord William Howard, then in France, and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, now ambassador to the court of Francis I, that his sovereign was ‘little disposed to marry again’ but some of his Council had urged him to undertake once more ‘the extreme adventure’ of matrimony, purely for the sake of his realm. ‘So his tender zeal for his subjects has already overcome his grace’s disposition and has framed his mind, both to be indifferent to the thing and to the election of any person from any part that, with deliberation, shall be thought meet.’ He added ponderously: ‘We live in hope that his grace will couple himself to our comforts.’
³⁰

There were two girls in France who might be suitable candidates as brides, wrote the Lord Privy Seal. Firstly, ‘the French king’s daughter [Marguerite],
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said to be not the meetest, and Madame de Longueville
[Marie de Guise],
³²
of whose qualities you are to inquire and whom they say the King of Scots doth desire …’ Lord William should not return without discreetly ascertaining how the Scottish king ‘stands in his suit and what the conditions and qualities of both persons be’. His enquiries, Cromwell emphasised, must be kept absolutely secret.
³³

Norfolk, taking time off from the complex organisation of a queen’s funeral,
³⁴
scheduled for 12 November at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, had another critical matter to settle with Henry: his personal share of the wealth and lands of the priory of St Pancras at Lewes, in Sussex, about to be surrendered to the crown.
³⁵
One may well consider Norfolk to have been brutish, grasping and bovinely insensitive to dare to raise such an issue when Henry (at the best of times possessing an uncertain temper) had just been bereaved. Sadly, he was all that and more. On 4 November, he wrote to Cromwell, who also had his sights fixed firmly on the rich pickings of the Cluniac monastery, to report his conversation with the King at Hampton Court the previous day.

Thanks for your venison. By your letter, you [wanted to] know how I sped [fared] with the king yesterday.

First (peradventure [perhaps] not wisely, yet plainly), I exhorted him to accept God’s pleasure in taking the queen, and comfort himself with the treasure sent to him and this realm (namely the prince) and advised him to provide for a new wife.