Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (23 page)

After that, I thanked him for being content to give us Lewes, if we might conclude the bargain, rehearsing of your service to him, as I told you in your garden, and saying I was content you should have two parts.

Henry distractedly replied: ‘As you showed unto me’ – a vital indication, Norfolk believed, that the sorrowful King thought the priory’s property was ‘well bestowed’.
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Here, the Duke and Cromwell were both avariciously pursuing the ripest plum in all the dissolutions of the religious houses, even though, only the previous month, Henry had granted the Lord Privy Seal the suppressed Augustinian priory of Michelham, also in Sussex, with a handsome annual income of £171 4s. 4½d, or £64,000 in today’s money.

Although Norfolk was his opportunist ally and intended fellow
beneficiary for the wealth of Lewes,
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Cromwell was privately maintaining a regular and friendly correspondence with the Duke’s wronged forty-year-old wife Elizabeth, whom Norfolk had brutally discarded in favour of his blowsy mistress, Bess Holland. On 24 October, Elizabeth wrote to the Lord Privy Seal, complaining that although she had been married to Norfolk for twenty-five years and had provided him with five children, ‘because I would not suffer the bawd[s] and harlots that bound me to be still in the house, they pinnacled [manacled] me and sat on my breast till I spat blood, all for speaking against the woman in the court, Bessie Holland’. Bitterly, she recounted how four years before, Norfolk ‘came riding all night and locked me up in a chamber, took away all my jewels and apparel and left me but £50 a quarter to keep twenty persons in a hard country’.
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Just over two weeks later, the feisty Duchess wrote again to Cromwell, sending a seasonal gift of partridges, appealing for his aid in persuading Henry and Norfolk to improve her bleak living conditions at Redbourne in Hertfordshire:

Without your aid I shall never get it. I have so many enemies – Bessie Holland in the court, for chief, and the bawd and the harlots at Kenninghall [Norfolk’s seat near Norwich] and the men, Southwell one, and Rouse, another … They rule my lord as they wish …

I have been from my lord four years come Easter … and will never return to him. I have written to him that I will do more for gentleness than for all their extreme handling, seeing I was his choosing, and not he mine.

So much for loveless arranged marriages. Her humiliation still rankled, as fresh as if her hurts had occurred the previous day. It was the stuff of real scandal, but any notion of conscience or honour seemed to wash off arrogant Norfolk’s back. After he had thrown her out, the Duke had sent two of his chaplains to cajole Elizabeth into agreeing to divorce him, in return for her jewels, clothes and ‘much of his plate and household stuff. I rebuked his priests and next day, he wrote it with his own hand. But though my children be unnat[ural] to me, I still love them. I will never trust my husband – he can speak fair to his enemy as to his friend.’
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This was not, by any means, the only tricky family dispute that Cromwell was routinely involved in, although no doubt he was storing
up the salacious details for use against Norfolk on a rainy day in the future. On 12 November, before rushing off to Windsor to personally escort Louis de Perreau, Sieur de Castillon, the newly arrived French ambassador to London, at the Queen’s funeral, he dashed off a sharply worded letter to John Babington, the feckless executor of his mother’s will, about his careless administration of her estate:

Your brother, Thomas, son and heir of her late father Sir Anthony Babington, agreed to an award … that Dame Katherine, your late mother, should have the manor place of Kingston, Nottinghamshire, with certain lands there during her life and for a year after her decease, paying nothing for it, although your brother might have £10 a year rent for it. I hear you … have during the said year after her decease, committed so great a waste in the same manor that £100 would not restore it.

You and your brother shall each take two honest and indifferent [impartial] gentlemen to view the waste and take such order thereupon that your brother may have no cause to complain to me or the king’s Council.
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Elizabeth, the distraught wife of Sir Marmaduke Constable Junior, a member of the Yorkshire family, also appealed for Cromwell’s assistance as her husband refused to maintain her. She offered him income from various leases as an inducement for his help:

I have not had a penny from my husband for two years and a half and none of my own kin will help me with a penny, nor [a] penny’s worth this twelve month. Oh good my lord! How should I live? Beg, I cannot, loth and ashamed I am to be a harlot.

If your lordship will get me my whole jointure of 100 marks [£67],
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I will freely give you the first farm [lease payment] that is at Candlemas, 50 marks; if I have but half my jointure, I freely give you both Candlemas and Lammas; the farm of them both is but 50 marks.
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Then there was the bizarre case of Elizabeth, wife of Sir Thomas Borough, who prematurely gave birth to a son and ‘was in great danger of losing it after her great travail’, she told Cromwell in early November. Lady Borough spent her confinement with a relative of her husband, who
wrote to him after the child was born ‘that he might have no cause of jealousy against her, seeing that the child, by the proportions of his body, was born long before the time’. The distressed lady’s husband was now claiming it was not his child and ‘[made] himself absent from her’. She therefore humbly begged Cromwell’s mediation.

Worse was to come. Hard on the heels of that pleading letter came another on 13 November, piteously complaining that her husband ‘always [lay] in wait to put her to shame’. She remained a ‘comfortless prisoner’ and now her father-in-law, Lord Borough, had complained about her to the King’s Council, declaring that her child was not his son’s. She added: ‘Nothing but the power of God has preserved his life and I beg [that Cromwell] will prevent him being disinherited.’
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It was not to be. Eventually, in 1542, her father-in-law procured a private Act of Parliament declaring her children bastards.
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Aside from his arbitration in family disputes and taking an unlikely hand in Tudor marriage guidance, Cromwell routinely had to handle a mountain of paperwork and the annoying administrative problems that daily afflicted any busy minister of the crown. Take the case of John Thompson, the Surveyor of the King’s Works at Dover, who was supervising, rather inefficiently, the construction of an expensive new harbour there to ‘control the narrow seas’ of the English Channel, as well as repairing the defences of Dover Castle. In July 1537, he had admitted that the ‘king’s money was not so well spent as might be’ and in October that his labourers were owed two months’ wages. This had clearly led to some harsh words from Cromwell during a fraught meeting at his house, at Mortlake in Surrey, when Thompson gave a written undertaking to ‘do better service this winter than had been done all summer’. On 18 November, however, the project manager was in trouble again. He was in renewed fear of his master’s wrath over unexpected bills found ‘in a dark place’ in the great hall of the former religious house, the Maison Dieu, at Dover, ‘by William Worm of Sandwich, who is blind of one eye and cannot see well with the other. [These bills] conspire to put me out of the king’s favour.’

Thompson, panic-stricken at this new evidence of his financial mismanagement, had rushed off to London but had met one of Cromwell’s
servants at Canterbury, who prudently advised him to ‘send a letter for my excuse’ rather than turning up in person to face the hard consequences. Piteously, he complained that since he began work on the harbour, he had ‘once been poisoned, which has been in his body this quarter of a year past, and is now descended into his legs. As Cromwell’s servants, Anthony Auchar and John Anthony, can show, there are certain persons who conspire to put him out of the king’s favour.’
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Despite this pressing issue of cost overruns and embarrassing delays in an important strategic project, Cromwell’s most urgent concern remained that of quickly finding a new wife for Henry, who continued to wear mourning even though he detested the sight of black, which reminded him of death.
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With the King’s bulk growing daily and his health declining, time and his medical condition were against any chances of further royal procreation.

John Hutton, the Governor of the Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp and the English agent based in Flanders, was one of those ordered to send the Lord Privy Seal any information about likely brides, despite his rather pathetic protestations that he had ‘little experience amongst ladies’. In early December 1537, Hutton reported that there was a fourteen-year-old daughter of the Lord of Brederode (in the modern Netherlands) ‘waiting upon the queen [Mary, dowager of Hungary] … [and] of goodly stature, virtuous, sad and womanly; her beauty is competent. Her mother has departed this life.’ Her uncle, Erarde de la Marck, the Cardinal of Liège, would provide her with a good ‘dote’ – an ample dowry – ‘to have her bestowed [married off] well’.

Then, mused Hutton, there was the widow of John, Count of Egmont, who was often at court. ‘She is over forty – but does not look it.’ There was also Christina, the sixteen-year-old second daughter of the deposed Christian II of Denmark and widow of Francisco Sforza, Duke of Milan, ‘who is reported a good personage and of excellent beauty’. She was then also living at the court of Mary of Hungary in the Netherlands.

The indecorous business was taking on all the hallmarks of a cattle market, and Hutton was clearly finding it an issue too hot to handle – a far cry from his comfortable, clear-cut world of commerce. He pleaded
uneasily that he had written ‘the truth as nigh as I can learn but I leave further judgement to others’. Almost as an afterthought, the agent added: ‘The Duke of Cleves has a daughter, but there is no great praise either of her person or beauty.’
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Hutton, now in Brussels, sent across another report about the Duchess of Milan on 9 December.

She is … very high of stature. She is higher than the regent, a goodly personage of body and of competent beauty, of favour excellent, soft of speech and gentle in countenance. She wears mourning apparel after the manner of Italy. The common saying … here is that she is both widow and maid. One of the council here suggests that the king should marry her and the Duke of Ravestein the lady [Princess] Mary.
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She resembles one Mrs [Madge] Shelton that used to wait on Queen Anne.
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He also told Thomas Wriothesley, one of the Clerks of the Signet, that there was none who could be compared to Christina for ‘beauty of person and birth … She is not so pure white as the late Queen [Jane] whose soul God pardon, but she has a singular good countenance, and when she chances to smile, there appears two [dimples] in her cheeks and one in her chin which becomes her right excellently well.’
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Hutton was clearly captivated by the teenager’s charms, for all his self-deprecating talk of inexperience with women.

More powerful figures on the European stage were now taking an interest in Cromwell’s discreet soundings on a future bride for his royal master. His Most Christian Majesty Francis I of France wrote to his London ambassador Castillon on 11 December, acknowledging that he had ‘taken in good part the overtures of marriage made by the Lord Privy Seal’. Indeed, he would think it a great honour if Henry would take a French girl as his new wife but: ‘There is no lady who is not at his command except Madame de Longueville whose marriage with the King of Scots has been arranged.’

But not far beneath the diplomatic pleasantries lay the familiar French fist of steel. Francis instructed his envoy to try to ‘ascertain what terms are desired for a treaty in connection with this marriage, both for offence and defence on either side. Since England desires the amity of
France, it should be established firmly with a clear knowledge of what one is to do for the other.’
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Just over two months after Jane’s death, Henry, no doubt encouraged by Cromwell, could just descry the distant sound of wedding bells. He became incongruously ardent, like a star-struck boy. Castillon reported to Francis on 30 December that the English King was ‘so amorous of Madame de Longueville [Marie de Guise] that he cannot refrain’ from considering her as a wife. ‘I assured him that the marriage between the King of Scots and her had already been sworn … but that no lady in France would be denied him.’ Would you, the French ambassador enquired, ‘marry another man’s wife?’ Given Henry’s experience of marriage, it was a cheekily indiscreet question, but it did not dampen the King’s mounting enthusiasm. Henry would not be diverted or dissuaded and audaciously sought that the betrothal to the King of Scots be broken off, promising ‘he would do twice as much for [Francis]’ as his nephew, this ‘beggarly and idiotic’ Scottish king:

I [Castillon] asked who caused him to be more inclined to her than to others and he said [Sir John] Wallop [former ambassador to France] was so loud in her praises.

Moreover, he was big in person and had need of a big wife, that your [Francis’s] daughter was too young for him and as to [Marie] de Vendôme, he would not take the King of Scots’ leavings.
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The next day, Castillon wrote again to the French King with some startling news. Cromwell had sent Sir Peter Mewtas as an agent into France, who had learned that Marie de Guise had never consented to the marriage to James V of Scotland.
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She was ready to obey Francis in everything, but she had never specially promised to marry the King of Scotland and Francis could grant her to Henry.

Castillon strongly advised that Bishop Gardiner, the resident English ambassador in France, be clearly notified ‘that the marriage was concluded and sworn … so that no more be said upon the subject, for the King of England would have given half his kingdom to have married her’.
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So the voluptuous charms of Marie de Guise were to be denied the English King. This
belle femme de France
needed little discouragement:
Henry’s marital reputation was notorious within the courts of Europe. Marie dryly commented that she might be a big woman, but she only had a little neck.
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