Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (34 page)

One of Henry’s favourite court physicians, Dr John Chambre, advised him not to ‘enforce himself’ for fear of causing an ‘inconvenient debility’ of his sexual virility.
³⁵
The King willingly obeyed this sage medical advice, indeed stopped sleeping with his Queen altogether after four months. Enough was more than enough, as far as Henry was concerned.

It seemed an intractable problem. Was the obstacle to the King’s passion perhaps the rank odour of poor Anne’s body – her ‘displeasant airs’ – possibly caused by the effects of her hearty diet? Was it merely the King’s continuing repugnance towards her appearance? Or was Henry playing a devious, cunning game: already secretly planning a quick annulment of his fourth marriage on the grounds of non-consummation? Despite that overarching gamecock ego, he must have been painfully conscious of both his advancing years and rapidly declining health – which would soon diminish his physical ability to sire further sons. Perhaps with a cynical eye on encouraging future candidates for a new bride, the King was very anxious to quash prurient rumours that he was already impotent. He told another of his physicians, Dr William Butts, that he had experienced ‘
duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno
’ (two nocturnal ejaculations) and firmly believed ‘himself able to
do the act with others – but not with her’.
³⁶
These breathtakingly personal statements were deliberately disseminated around the royal household, not only to silence the sniggering, smutty gossip amongst some of the courtiers, but also in the hope that they would be heard by foreign ambassadors and so protect Henry’s chances of another marriage with a foreign princess.

Meanwhile, Anne occupied her time by playing cards and dice with her ladies and embroidering cushion covers – one thing she did excel at was needlework. She also developed a love for music and created her own troupe of musicians, including members of the Jewish family of Bassano, found for her by Cromwell in Venice and housed in part of the dissolved London Charterhouse. They introduced with them, that spring, a new instrument to England called the violin. A number of her countrymen – Master Schulenberg, her cook, and Englebert, her footman – remained members of her household, so at least she could retain some vestiges of her own culture. Anne also had a pet parrot to help while away the hours of servile boredom. But soon the English noblemen and gentlemen who had been attracted to her court in hopes of generous patronage began to drift away, as word spread of the King’s displeasure with his latest queen.

He showed it in petty or vindictive ways. Plans for her coronation at Westminster Abbey on 2 February were abruptly abandoned. On 4 February 1540, Henry brought his new wife to Westminster, not by the traditional glittering procession winding through the decorated streets of the City of London, but by barge, along the Thames. The convoy from Greenwich, escorted by the boats of twelve livery companies of London, was led by a gilded barge, decorated with banners, conveying the King and his closest nobles, followed by his yeomen guard in another boat. Anne, with her household, followed in their own vessels. As the procession rowed up the river, ships fired salutes and as they passed the Tower of London – ‘there was shot above a thousand chambers of ordnance which made a noise like thunder’.
³⁷
The royal party finally landed at Westminster and entered the palace.

Henry had given up all pretence of married life with his queen. He began looking around for some other feminine comforts to ease his distress and satisfy his yearning for love.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

No Armour Against Fate

Master Cromwell: If you follow my poor advice, you shall, in your counsel giving [to] his grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do. So shall you show yourself a true faithful servant and a right worthy councillor. For if a lion knew his own strength, [it would be] hard for any man to rule him
.

ADVICE TO CROMWELL FROM SIR THOMAS MORE, MAY 1532
¹

On 17 April 1540, a grateful sovereign granted Cromwell the earldom of Essex and added yet another prestigious position to his already glittering CV – that of Lord Great Chamberlain of England.
²
The Lord Privy Seal had now collected the second of the six traditional great offices of state.
³

On the following day, a Sunday, in a ceremony at the Palace of Westminster, Cromwell was formally created an earl and presented with a patent for the title, bearing a heavy yellow wax seal, by the Chamberlain of the Royal Household, William, Lord Sandes. The King then limped grumpily off to dinner in the Queen’s chamber and the dukes and earls retired separately to their own meal in the council room. There, the herald Christopher Barker,
Garter King of Arms
, proclaimed, in ringing tones, Cromwell’s latest impressive style of address: ‘Earl of Essex, Viceregent and High Chamberlain of England, Keeper of the Privy Seal,
Chancellor of the Exchequer and Justice of the Forest beyond the Trent.’ The new Earl promptly dipped into his purse, tipped Barker £10 and liberally paid the price of his gown, especially bought for the occasion.
⁴

To those many courtiers who were hostile to Cromwell, Henry’s unexpected generosity seemed to be a warning signal that he still enjoyed royal protection and patronage. Although a few days earlier he had handed over the duties of secretary jointly to his long-standing protégés Thomas Wriothesley and Ralph Sadler,
⁵
there was no visible or actual diminution of his authority in the land,
⁶
merely a downgrading of the administrative role of secretary because of the Lord Privy Seal’s impending new prominence.
⁷

But the King’s Minister was aware that the religiously conservative faction at court and the old established nobility, with their simmering, vengeful spite, were both resolved to bring him down. Cromwell had suspected for some time that his own disgrace would come suddenly, just as surely as it had for his former master Thomas Wolsey, more than a decade before. Two years previously, Cromwell had quietly gathered together his domestic servants and described to them ‘what a slippery state he stood [in] and required them to look diligently and circumspectly into their order and actions, lest, through their default, any occasion [trouble] might arise against them’. To each of his boy choristers, he gave £20 apiece and sent them home to their parents, safely out of harm’s way.
⁸
No doubt he also prudently transferred some of his wealth to his immediate family to prevent their complete penury after his fall and the inevitable forfeiture, to the crown, of all his property.

For Cromwell, the taste of this latest success must have savoured even sweeter after surviving the previous months of conspiracy and uncertainty. It was the longed-for apogee of his power and status and seemed finally to confound his enemies’ attempts to bring him down. John Uvedale, Secretary of the Council of the North, unctuously wrote to him ‘rejoicing at the great honour to which the king’ had called Cromwell.
⁹
Doubtless there were more flattering letters from others who had discovered that the fickle wind of royal favour was still blowing strongly in his direction. However, there were some, yet more cynical, at court, who pointed to Henry’s lavish gifts to Anne Boleyn just before she was
arrested and claimed that this latest preferment was a harbinger of Cromwell’s own imminent ruin.
¹⁰

Cromwell’s new noble title had been conveniently left vacant by the death of sixty-eight-year-old Henry Bourchier, the ebullient Second Earl of Essex, who had snapped his neck when he was thrown to the ground while recklessly riding a young, inexperienced horse at Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, on Friday, 12 March. The office of Lord Great Chamberlain had been held since December 1526 by John de Vere, Fifteenth Earl of Oxford, who had also died, aged around fifty, a week after Bourchier, at his manor in Essex.
¹¹

In reality, the King’s munificence did hammer another kind of nail into his Minister’s coffin, but this was not through some Byzantine stratagem on the part of a cunning Henry. By choosing a title to bestow on Cromwell that had been created around 1139 and enjoyed, down the centuries, by some of England’s greatest noble families such as the de Mandevilles and the de Bohuns, the King had (possibly unconsciously) caused the nobility’s poisoned cup of hatred and intolerance of Cromwell to finally overflow. Almost to a man, they heartily detested him both for his lowly birth and his firm, apparently unshakeable grip on power and patronage in the realm. These new preferments had rubbed salt into their raw, gaping wounds of hurt pride and injured status and it was now only a matter of time before they would move to destroy him.

But the final instrument of his demise was to be in the forlorn shape of Henry’s fourth wife, the pockmarked and sadly malodorous Anne of Cleves.

Norfolk and Gardiner, the leaders of the religious conservatives at court, had already set a subtle honey-trap for Henry and, by association, Cromwell. In March 1540, the Bishop staged a magnificent dinner at his sprawling fourteenth-century Gothic palace in Southwark, on the banks of the River Thames, directly south of the City of London. Henry had graciously accepted an invitation to attend. As he watched the dancers pirouette in the multicoloured light thrown down by the stained glass in the thirteen-foot-diameter (3.96 m) rose window of Gardiner’s banqueting hall,
¹²
he suddenly noticed a pretty eighteen-year-old auburn-haired girl, stylishly dressed in the French fashion, giggling and laughing
amongst the strutting young courtiers. He was immediately attracted by her youth, vivacity and beauty. Something surprising stirred deep within his vastly increased bulk: the first flowering of an unexpected love, coming late in life.

The encounter was probably no mere accident. That flighty, wanton girl was Catherine Howard, daughter of the recently deceased Lord Edmund Howard,
¹³
and yet another niece of the Duke of Norfolk.
¹⁴
She had first come to court in December 1539 as a maid of honour to the now unwanted foreign queen, Anne of Cleves. Today, she would be regarded as rather unfashionably plump and certainly something of a bimbo, as she was vain and rather scatterbrained. Her task, set by the conniving, Svengali-like Norfolk and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, was to act as sensual bait for the unhappy, resentful and frustrated Henry. Whether knowingly or not, she performed her role perfectly.

Like all successful plans, theirs was brilliant in its simplicity: if Cromwell failed to rid Henry of his unloved and spurned wife, he would, no doubt, quickly fall victim to the thwarted King’s rage. But if he succeeded in sending Anne of Cleves packing, Henry would be free to marry the giddy Catherine. With her as a malleable and naively compliant queen, their power and influence would increase mightily at court and probably enable them to topple Cromwell from his pinnacle of authority. In such a favourable climate and with such a doting monarch, they might also be able to halt the inexorable contagion of religious reform infecting the realm and even, they whispered in the dark corridors of the palaces of Westminster and Greenwich, establish a rapprochement with Rome. It may have been pimping, plain and simple, but the plan could hardly fail: Gardiner and Norfolk knew their sovereign and his proclivity for a pretty face all too well. As soon as he clapped eyes on Catherine Howard amongst that swirling, glittering throng at Winchester House, ‘he did cast a fancy to her’, and to the ageing, adoring monarch, she swiftly became a ‘blushing rose without a thorn’.
¹⁵

Truly, there is no fool like an old fool, especially when he is an absolute monarch, with nothing to comfort him during the dark evenings save only his vivid memories of a glorious, chivalrous past and gambling over a hand or two of cards with his male cronies.

For Henry, it was always a case of what the King wanted, the King quickly got. By Easter, during the following month, Henry was shamelessly showering expensive jewellery upon Catherine and other valuable gifts on her sycophantic family whilst poor Anne of Cleves watched helplessly from the marriage sidelines. Ralph Morice, Cranmer’s secretary, remarked that the ‘king’s affection was so marvellously set upon that gentlewoman as it was never known that he had the like to any woman’.
¹⁶

His mounting obsession with Catherine only served to pour fuel onto the already fiercely burning flames of discontent over his marriage to the ‘Flanders Mare’. Cromwell once again felt the dark, dank shadow of the Tower fall upon him. Thomas Wriothesley, one of the new secretaries to the Council, said he was ‘right sorry that his majesty should be so troubled’ by the problem of how to rid himself of his queen. He urged Cromwell – ‘for God’s sake’ – to quickly devise some plan to achieve this and grimly predicted that if Henry ‘remained in this grief and trouble they should all one day smart for it’. Cromwell could only shrug his shoulders hopelessly and answer: ‘Yes! … How?’
¹⁷
On top of this intractable and dangerous problem, Gardiner, his tenacious and eloquent arch-opponent, already had the ear of the King. The Minister now sensed his enemies closing in on him as they circled for the kill.

At the end of March, Wriothesley, perhaps innocently hoping to defuse the mounting animosity between Cromwell and Gardiner, arranged a private dinner for them to discuss their differences. It must have been an interesting encounter between two mighty intellects: on the one hand, the devious, scheming and odious prelate; on the other, the Machiavellian panjandrum. After four hours of talking, they ‘concluded that … there be truth and honesty in them [and] not only all displeasure be forgotten but also in their hearts be now perfect friends and likewise … Wriothesley and the said bishop’.
¹⁸

Cromwell knew that for all his fulsome protestations of friendship, Gardiner would remain at the very vortex of all the underhand attempts to bring him down. He had to strengthen his defences and, if possible, launch a pre-emptive strike at the conspirators ranged against him.