Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (38 page)

The King had been the

most bountiful prince to me that ever was king to his subject and more like a dear father … than a master. Such have been your most grave and godly counsels towards me at sundry times. In that I have offended, I ask you [for] mercy. Should I now for such exceeding goodness … liberality and bounty, be your traitor, no, then the greatest pains would be too little for me.

He committed his soul to God, his body and goods to Henry’s pleasure, to do with as he wished. As for the people of England:

I have after my wit, power, knowledge, travailed [laboured] therein, having had no respect to persons, your majesty only except, and my duty to the same but that I have done any injustice or wrong wilfully I trust God shall be my witness and the world shall not be able to justly to accuse me and yet I have not done my duty in all things as I was bounded, wherefore I ask mercy … Sir, I have meddled in so many matters … that I am not able to answer them all.

Cromwell pressed on to the specifics of the King’s complaints against him – that ‘within these last fourteen days I have revealed a matter of great secrecy. I remember the matter but never revealed it.’

This secret was Henry’s unfeigned dislike of his new wife, the dull Anne of Cleves, and his plans to rid himself of her that Cromwell stood
accused of disclosing to Sir Richard Riche and Sir George Throgmorton, brother of Michael, personal secretary to Cardinal Pole.
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After your grace had spoken to me in your chamber of the things you disliked in the queen, I told you she often desired to speak with me, but I dared not [speak with her], and you thought I might do much good by going to her and telling her my mind.

Lacking opportunity, I spoke with her lord chamberlain, for which I ask your mercy, to find some means to induce her to such pleasant and honourable fashions as might have been to your grace’s comfort, thinking thereby to have some faults amended to your majesty’s comfort. I repeated the suggestion when the lord chamberlain and others of her council came to me at Westminster for licence [permission] for the departure of the [German] maidens [back to Cleves].

This was before your grace committed the secret matter to me, which I never disclosed to any but my Lord Admiral [William Fitzwilliam, First Earl of Southampton]
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by your commandment on Sunday last in the morning, whom I found equally willing to seek a remedy for your comfort and consolation and saw by him that he did as much lament your highness’ fate as ever did man and was wonderfully grieved to see your highness so troubled. Wishing greatly your comfort … he would spend the best blood in his belly [for that object] and if I would not do the like, yes, and willingly die for your comfort, I would I were in hell.

During his questioning by the councillors, Cromwell was also accused of hiring large numbers of retainers – deemed an offence since the Wars of the Roses, to prevent the creation of private armies in England.
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Here he was on safer ground to make denials. He firmly rejected claims that he ‘ever retained any except his household servants’ – and this had been against his will. Disingenuously, perhaps, he claimed he had been so ‘besought by persons who said they were his friends that he received their children and friends’. But if he had offended, he now desired pardon.

Humbly, Cromwell acknowledged himself a miserable sinner towards God and the King and loyally desired prosperity and long life for Henry and the infant Prince Edward. He ended his letter: ‘Written with
the most quaking hand and most sorrowful heart of your most sorrowful subject and most humble servant and prisoner, this Saturday at your [Tower] of London.’
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Strangely, he omitted the word ‘Tower’ – as if he could not bring himself to write the name of his prison and the symbol of his destruction.

Henry’s reaction to this passionate plea is unrecorded. He had probably seen straight through Norfolk and Gardiner’s trumped-up charges of treason, but his all-consuming vanity and pride were probably more than pricked by the well-chosen accusation that Cromwell had gossiped about the intimate secrets of the royal marriage bed. His Minister had innocently (and fatally) been seeking discreet ways of fending off the alluring rival attractions of Catherine Howard by encouraging Anne of Cleves to behave more sensually towards her bored and distracted husband. He recognised she needed to learn the artful lessons of seduction. But now Henry just wanted to speedily divorce his unwanted German queen with her unpleasant nasal, guttural speech and her ‘displeasant airs’. Cromwell’s crime had struck too close to home and could never be forgiven or forgotten by the rampant royal ego.

There were other unconfirmed reports of Cromwell’s recent behaviour that enraged the King. Sir John Wallop (an enemy of the former Lord Privy Seal) had told Henry that he had heard from various foreign sources that Cromwell intended to make himself king and that he intended to marry Princess Mary.
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Five days after Cromwell wrote his letter, Norfolk and Gardiner introduced a bill of attainder against him in the House of Lords.
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It did not mince words. Cromwell, Earl of Essex, whom the King had raised from a ‘very base and low degree’ and had ‘enriched him with manifold gifts’ had now become the ‘most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor’ of all Henry’s reign – as had been proved by many ‘personages of great honour, worship and discretion’. The Minister ‘of his own authority and office, set at liberty diverse persons convicted of misprision of high treason and others apprehended upon suspicion of treason’.

Moreover, he had ‘for sums of money, granted licences for the export
of money, corn, grain, beans, beer, leather, tallow, bells, metals, horses and other commodities … contrary to the king’s proclamations’ and had also appointed ‘commissioners in important affairs without the king’s knowledge’.

All this was merely the precursor to a veritable litany of heinous crimes. The bill, addressed to Henry, went on to claim that Cromwell, ‘being a person of as poor and low degree as few be within this your realm’, had publicly boasted ‘that he was sure of you which is detestable and to be abhorred that any subject should speak so of his sovereign’. So much for the nobility’s hatred of him. Now for Gardiner’s personal vengeance:

Being a detestable heretic, [he] has utterly disposed to set and sow common sedition among your true and loving subjects, has secretly set forth and dispersed into all shires … great numbers of false and erroneous books, many of which were printed beyond [the] seas … tending to the discredit of the blessed sacrament of the altar and other articles of religion declared by the king by the authority of Parliament and has caused parts of the said books to be translated into English … Although the report made by the translator … has been that the matter has been expressly against the sacrament of the altar, [Cromwell] has after reading the translation, affirmed the heresy so translated to be good.

Cromwell also ‘obstinately maintained that every Christian may be a minister of the said sacrament as well as a priest’. Being Henry’s viceregent for religion ‘to reform errors and direct ecclesiastical causes [Cromwell] has, without the king’s knowledge, licensed heretics to preach and teach and has actually written to sheriffs in sundry shires, as if it were the king’s pleasure, to set at large many false heretics’. Upon complaints made to him about such heretics, Cromwell had by his ‘crafty and subtle means and inventions’ defended them ‘and rebuked the credible persons, their accusers’.

Then comes Norfolk and Gardiner’s final damning accusation. The Attainder said that on 31 March 1539, in the parish of St Peter the Poor in London, Cromwell had ‘arrogantly’ defended reformist preachers like Robert Barnes, saying:

That if the king would turn from it, yet I would not turn. And if the king did turn and all his people, I would fight in the field … with my sword in my hand against him and all others, and held up his dagger, saying, ‘Or else this dagger thrust me to the heart if I would not die in that quarrel against them all and I trust if I live one year or two, it shall not lie in the king’s power to resist or let [hinder] it, if he would.’

He [affirmed] these words with a great oath, raising his right arm, adding, ‘I will do so indeed.’

The last word went to Cromwell’s enemies amongst the nobility:

By bribery, extortion and false promises, he obtained innumerable sums of money and treasure and being so enriched, has held the nobles of the realm in great disdain, derision and detestation … and being put in remembrance [by] others of his estate … said ‘most arrogantly, willingly, maliciously and traitorously’, on 31 January 1540 in the parish of St Martin’s in the Fields, ‘that if the lords would handle him so, he would give them such a breakfast as never was made in England and that the proudest of them should know’.

The attainder declared that he should suffer death as a heretic or traitor, at Henry’s pleasure, and should forfeit all property granted or held since 31 March 1539.
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It was passed, without dissent, on 29 June,
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just before the House adjourned.

In another letter to Henry, Cromwell remonstrated about the bill of attainder passed against him. He had been told that

my offences being [proved] by honest and probable witnesses … I was by your honourable Lords of the Upper House and the worshipful and discrete communes of your Nether House, convicted and attainted.

Gracious sovereign, when I heard them, I said, as I now say, that I am a subject and born to obey laws and know that the trial of all laws only consists in honest and probable witnesses, considering that the … realm had heard and received them.

But then he muses: ‘Albeit, laws be laws.’ Although through one of Henry’s mercurial changes of mind he seems to have received money
from the King to provide some personal comforts in his imprisonment, Cromwell sensed that his time had expired. His main concern now was to protect his family: ‘Sir, upon my knees, I most humbly beseech your gracious majesty to be [a] good and gracious lord to my poor son, the good and virtuous woman [who is] his wife and their poor children and also to my [servan]ts and this I desire of your grace for Christ’s sake.’
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But as far as Henry was concerned, there was still some vital unfinished business in which Cromwell could still prove useful: his loveless marriage and how to end it without too much diplomatic damage. The King, as God’s deputy on earth, saw no problem with having his bishops annul the union – but needed evidence to demonstrate that it had never been consummated and, more importantly, that he had never willingly consented to the marriage.

On 24 June, Anne was sent to Richmond Palace, Surrey, for ‘health, open air and pleasure’ as an outbreak of the plague threatened London, and the King promised reassuringly that he would join her there in two days’ time. This was hardly a credible statement as anyone at court could testify: Henry’s fear of the disease bordered on the obsessional and normally he would have been cravenly in the vanguard of his courtiers heading out of harm’s way at the first suggestion of the plague appearing in the capital. In reality, of course, he wanted her conveniently out of the way so he could resolve the thorny issue of their marriage without any unseemly Germanic tantrums.

He also needed a veneer of legality to lay over the proceedings. For a monarch who disliked paperwork so much, there were rare times when Henry could demonstrate impressive attention to detail, as long as the circumstances were important to him. Accordingly, he sent Norfolk, Audley and Lord John Russell, the new Lord High Admiral, to see his disgraced Minister in the Tower and demand his evidence in support of the case for annulment. Henry sat down and wrote out in his own hand the five questions they would put to Cromwell about the events in his marriage, but in fact these created a template for the desired testimony from the prisoner: Henry’s words merely dictated Cromwell’s answers. His ‘interrogatories’ ended: ‘Doubtless Cromwell remembers how that often, since, the king has said his nature abhorred her [Anne].’
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The deputation solemnly charged him as he would ‘answer God at the dreadful day of judgement and also upon the extreme danger and damnation’ of his soul and conscience, to write down what exactly he knew. He quickly acquiesced and scribbled down on a copy of the questions: ‘All these articles be true by the death I shall die and … as more plainly app[ears by a] letter written with my [own hand] sent by Mr Secretary [Wriothesley unto] the king’s highness.’
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On 30 June, Cromwell sat down to write that letter to Henry, laying out the sorry saga of Anne of Cleves, the ‘very truth, as God shall save me, to the uttermost of my knowledge’.

He described Henry’s romantic gallop to Rochester to meet his new bride and the preparations for the wedding at Greenwich, ‘where I spoke with your grace and demanded of your majesty how you liked the lady Anne; your highness answered, [I thought] heavily and not pleasantly. “Nothing so well as she was spoken of,” saying further, “that if your highness had known as much before as you then knew, she should not have come within this realm.”’ Henry then had added ‘by way of lamentation’ a short, pointed question to his Minister: ‘What remedy?’ Cromwell, caught off-balance, knew of none and was ‘very sorry indeed’ and ‘so God knows I was, for I thought it a hard beginning [to the marriage]’. He faced some difficult questions the following day when the King, speaking of his bride’s appearance, called out to him: ‘My lord, is it not as I told you? Say what they will, she is nothing as fair as she has been reported.’ Cromwell replied: ‘By my faith sir, you say [the] truth,’ but added, rather lamely, ‘I thought she had a queenly manner.’

The Council had been summoned to find a way to stop the imminent wedding and Cromwell, with a lawyer’s mind, had seized on an old pre-contract of marriage between Anne and Francis, the son of the Duke of Lorraine, mooted in 1527 when she was just twelve and he was aged ten. However, the Clevois ambassadors who accompanied her made ‘light matter of it’ and assured the English courtiers that the agreement had never taken effect. They offered themselves as hostages until papers ‘that should put all out of doubt’ were sent over to England.
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Henry was by now building himself up into a characteristic Tudor rage. In his privy
chamber, he had shouted: ‘I am not well handled’ – menacing words to those around him – and Cromwell was told by his sovereign that ‘if it were not that she is come so far into my realm and the great preparations that my states and people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world – that is to drive her brother into the hands of the emperor [Charles V] and the French king’s hands – [I] would never have married her’.