Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (27 page)

Henry apparently calmed down enough to disingenuously invite Pole to England to discuss the letter. Cromwell, anxious to avoid reconciliation between them, wrote to Pole ‘to stir him the more vehemently’
⁵⁴
and he prudently declined to come, fearing a charge of treason against him.

Then came the rebellious Pilgrimage of Grace. Pole was created a cardinal on 22 December 1536 and the following March papal legate to England. Paul III made no bones about the reasons behind the appointment. Pole was instructed to exhort, persuade, cajole Henry to return to the true faith. ‘It may be that the enemy of mankind [Satan] has such a hold upon the king that he will not … be brought to reason except by force of arms. It is better that he and his adherents should perish than be the cause of perdition to so many.’
⁵⁵
The new Cardinal was sent to France to rouse support for the rebels in England. Henry immediately demanded his extradition as a traitor but his French brother sovereign, Francis I, trapped between antagonising the English King or the Pope, only ordered Pole out of his dominions. The Cardinal sought refuge in the Low Countries but was stopped at the frontier and forced to return to Rome after abjectly failing in his mission.

He was lucky to escape with his life. A remorselessly vengeful Henry planned to kidnap Pole and bring him back to England to pay for his treachery with his head. ‘For as much as we would be very glad to have the said Pole by some means trussed up and conveyed to Calais, we desire and pray you to consult and devise between you thereupon,’ he told his ambassadors in France, Gardiner and Sir Francis Bryan. The latter, Henry added pointedly, should ‘secretly appoint some fellows for the purpose’.
⁵⁶

But Cromwell had already launched an operation to snatch or assassinate Pole. Sir Thomas Palmer, Knight-Porter of Calais, wrote to him on 6 May 1537 reporting that he would leave the next day for Flanders, on pretence of buying a horse there, and arrange for half a dozen accomplices to meet him along the coast at Gravelines.
⁵⁷
He was clearly watching Pole’s movements, ready to strike, for he told Lord Lisle ten days later
from Tournai that ‘the man you want … does not come out of his lodging, nor intends not, as [far as] I can learn, for I take the French king too much to be his friend, which I trust he will repent at length’.
⁵⁸
Pole himself told a Welshman at Liège that not only Palmer but four others had been sent into the Low Countries to destroy him.
⁵⁹
Pole informed Pope Paul III that if he remained in that city, ‘the King of England will make still greater efforts to take [me]’ and the English had offered the astronomical reward of 100,000 crowns in gold – worth more than £8 million in 2006 values – for him ‘alive or dead’.
⁶⁰

He escaped Henry’s clutches and Cromwell sought, but failed, to subvert Pole’s servant Michael Throgmorton into spying on the cardinal. In September 1537, Cromwell wrote a bitter, vituperative five-page letter to Throgmorton. He did not mince his words:

I thought the singular goodness of the king’s highness showed to you and the great and singular clemency showed to that detestable traitor, your master, in promising him not only forgiveness … of his most shameful … conspiracy against his honour, might have brought him from his so sturdy malice, blindness and perversity, or else encouraged you to be … a true and faithful subject.

I might have better judged that so dishonest a master could have even such a servant as you are.

No, no, loyalty and treason dwell seldom together; you could not have been a spy for the king so long without showing it.

Cromwell continued:

You and your master have both well declared how little fear of God rests in you, which, led by vain promises of promotion, work treason against your natural prince and country, to serve an enemy of God, an enemy of all honesty, an enemy of right religion, a defender of iniquity, of pride, a merchant and occupier of all deceit and of twenty things that no honest man’s pen can well touch, much less utter and put forth.

So much for Pope Paul III. The Minister then swept back to attacking Throgmorton’s character: ‘You have bleared my eyes once – your credit shall nevermore serve you so far to deceive me a second time … [You]
now stick to a rebel, follow a traitor who mortally hates your sovereign lord, love him whom God cannot but hate; what folly it is to excuse such mad lewdness!’

Cromwell then turned his steely attention to Pole and his words took on an ominously threatening tone:

Now if those who made him thus mad can also persuade him to print his detestable book, where one lie leaps in every line in another’s neck, he shall be as bounden to them for their wise counsel as his family shall be to him for his wise dealings. God, I doubt not, will send him little joy thereof as his friends and his kinsfolk are like to take profit of it.

Pity is that the folly of one brain-sick Pole, or to say better, of one witless fool, should be the ruin of so great a family.

As for the cardinal himself, he might marvel that ‘no way is found to take away the author of such treachery. Surely, when an answer shall be made to this heady malice, I think there shall be very few, but they will think as I do, that he has, as he deserves, if he be brought to a most shameful death.’

Cromwell added:

There may be ways found enough in Italy to rid [ourselves of] a traitorous subject. Let him not think, but where justice can take place by process of law at home, sometimes she may be forced to seek new means abroad.

I must, I think, do what I can to see you condignly punished. God send you both to fare as you deserve, that is either shortly to come to your allegiance, or else to a shameful death.
⁶¹

The Lord Privy Seal’s vicious eloquence could only be seen as menacing for Pole’s family and the other White Rose descendants, who now came under close surveillance by his agents. They were old enemies of Cromwell: Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, some time before had reportedly tried to kill him with a dagger – but his murder attempt had failed because Cromwell was prudently wearing breastplate armour beneath his doublet.
⁶²

On 29 August 1538, Cromwell swooped upon Sir Geoffrey Pole, the younger brother of the cardinal, and left him to sweat in the rank
summer heat of the Tower of London. He was accused of writing to his traitorous sibling and having interfered with the King’s orders to arrest him.
⁶³
Cromwell looked to him to provide incriminating information about his family. He was not disappointed.

Geoffrey Pole cravenly turned king’s evidence to save his own head, even though his testimony would inevitably bring down his kinsfolk. His poisonous tittle-tattle flowed thick and fast, incriminating first his eldest brother Henry, Lord Montague, who had unwisely said on 24 March 1537: ‘I like well the proceedings of my brother, the Cardinal … but I like not the doings … in this realm and I trust to see a change of this world. I would [wish] that we [were] both over the sea. The world in England waxes all crooked; God’s law is turned upside down, abbeys and churches overthrown. I think they will cast down parish churches.’ Then, a little later, he had dreamt the King was dead, and two days afterwards traitorously said: ‘The king is not dead but he will die one day suddenly, his leg will kill him and we shall have jolly stirring.’
⁶⁴
Appropriately on 1 April – All Fools’ Day – Montague had commented: ‘Cardinal Wolsey [would have] been an honest man if he had an honest master.’
⁶⁵

In November, Cromwell believed he had enough evidence and arrested the White Rose faction in a clean sweep.
⁶⁶
Pole’s mother Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, Montague, Courtenay and his wife Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, Lord Delawarr and Sir Edward Nevill were all imprisoned. Even the young sons of Montague and Exeter were thrown into jail. A tunic or vestment bearing the Five Wounds of Christ – the emblem of the Pilgrimage of Grace rebels – was later found triumphantly amongst the Countess’s household effects. Some members of the faction were undoubtedly carrying on a reckless correspondence with Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador. Others were no friends of Cromwell, such as Nevill, who fumed with frustration over the activities of the King’s Council: ‘God’s Blood! I am made a fool amongst them, but I laugh and make merry to drive forth the time. The king keeps … knaves here that we dare neither look nor speak and if I were able, I would rather live any life in the world than tarry in the privy chamber.’ Evidently the sentiments of a man who had sat through too many committee meetings. One of his outbursts was clearly targeted at the upstart Cromwell: ‘I trust
knaves shall be put down and lords reign [again] and that the world will amend one day. The king is a beast and worse than a beast.’ Exeter shared his viewpoint: ‘Knaves rule about the king. I trust to give them a buffet [a punch] one day.’
⁶⁷
The old nobility’s abhorrence and jealous envy of the Lord Privy Seal’s power and position oozes from their very words and they did not have to wait long before paying a heavy price for such indiscretions.

Three days of treason trials were staged at the beginning of December. Montague was tried by his peers in Westminster Hall on 2 December 1538, on charges that he ‘devised to maintain, promote and advance one [Cardinal] Reginald Pole, esquire of London, late Dean of Exeter, enemy to the king beyond the seas and to deprive the king of his throne’. Judgment: guilty. The following day, Exeter was attainted for treason at the same venue and on 4 December, Nevill, the spineless Sir Geoffrey Pole and a number of small fry caught up in Cromwell’s net were all condemned to death for treason.
⁶⁸
The commoners faced the full rigour of the law and were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 9 December. Exeter, Montague and Nevill were beheaded at Tower Hill. The Countess of Salisbury was eventually attainted by Act of Parliament in June 1539 and was confined in the Tower until she was executed – more accurately, hacked to death – on Tower Green on 27 May 1541, aged sixty-seven.
⁶⁹
Montague’s heir Henry disappeared within the walls of that grim fortress and died some time after September 1542, while Exeter’s twelve-year-old son Edward was held there until Princess Mary ascended the throne in 1553 and he was, at last, freed. The obsequious, oily Delawarr, too naive and stupid to be involved in any conspiracy, managed to win a royal pardon by granting his estates at Halnaker, near Chichester, West Sussex, to a rapacious Henry. Geoffrey Pole, who unsuccessfully attempted suicide in the Tower in a fit of remorse, was granted a full pardon on 2 January 1539 by a grateful sovereign.
⁷⁰
Half-crazed by guilt, he subsequently roamed throughout Europe, finally dying in 1558.

Catholic priests and members of the nobility were not the only groups to suffer for their beliefs and actions in 1538. That November, Cromwell and Cranmer opened up a campaign against members of
the burgeoning Anabaptist sect in England, who argued against ‘the Real Presence’ of God in the sacrament of communion. That was rank heresy in Henry’s mind. Some had to die for possessing such profane beliefs.

There was enough burning motivation.

Accusations of heresy against the King continually stung his pride and overdeveloped ego. He was taking quite literally his title of ‘Defender of the Faith’, even though it was now a somewhat different faith in England from the one ruled over by Pope Leo X when he had granted the honour to Henry in October 1521. Henry needed a very public demonstration of his piety and religious knowledge.

It was probably the conservative Bishop Gardiner who chose John Lambert, alias John Nicholson, as the victim.

Cromwell, for his part, laid on the propaganda trial within the banqueting hall of the Palace of Westminster. He was as thorough as ever over the details and knew full well how to put on a good spectacle. Seats on tiered wooden scaffolding had been erected along the walls to allow the invited nobility and clergy to witness the King’s own personal prosecution of a known heretic.

The outcome of the trial was, of course, a foregone conclusion.

Lambert, a radical evangelical, once a chaplain to the English merchant community in Antwerp and now a London schoolmaster, had already been found guilty of heresy by Cranmer in a hearing at Lambeth Palace.

On the stroke of noon on 16 November, the King, attired head to foot in white silk – symbolizing purity – strode into the crowded hall, escorted by his Yeomen of the Guard, also clad in specially made white uniforms. Henry took his seat beneath a canopy of estate, flanked on his left by his temporal peers, led by Cromwell, and on the right by Cranmer and his bishops.

Lambert was brought in and stood on a small wooden platform to face his royal accuser.

The King leant forward and asked the prisoner: ‘Ho good fellow! What is your name?’
⁷¹
Lambert, possibly lulled by this apparently jovial royal greeting, started badly. He had employed an alias to escape
persecution, but his stumbling explanation was quickly silenced by Henry, his ‘look, cruel countenance and his brows bent into severity’. He snapped at Lambert: ‘I would not trust you, having two names, although you were my brother.’

The noted preacher George Day, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, then explained helpfully that the ‘assembly was not at all convened to dispute about any point of faith, but the King – being supreme head – intends openly to condemn and confute that man’s heresy in all their presence’.

Henry knew the script and its inevitable finale. Piously removing his cap every time he mentioned the Name of Christ, he demanded to know whether Lambert believed that the consecrated wafer and wine truly represented the Body of God the Son. Lambert said he agreed with St Augustine ‘that it is the body of Christ,’ and then fatally added, ‘after a certain manner’.

The King leapt upon his prevarication: ‘Answer me neither out of St Augustine, nor by the authority of any other. Tell me plainly whether
you
say it is the Body of Christ. Yes – or no.’