Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (42 page)

Renée de Guise
(1522–1602). Died as abbess of St Pierre de Reims.

FOREIGN RULERS AND THEIR AMBASSADORS

Francis I
, King of France (1494–1547). Crowned at Reims, 1515. Died at Château Rambouillet, 30 miles (48 km) south-west of Paris, and succeeded by son Henry II.

Francis I’s ambassadors to Henry’s court:

Louis de Perreau, Sieur de Castillon
. Ambassador, November 1537–January 1539.

Charles de Marillac
(
c
.1510–60). Ambassador, 1539–43. Later Bishop of Vannes (1550); Archbishop of Vienne (1557).

Charles V
, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor (1500–58). Nephew of Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII. Acceded to Spanish throne 1516. Abdicated in favour of son, Philip (husband of Mary I of England), 1556. Retreated to monastery of Yuste, dying two years later.

Charles V’s ambassador to Henry’s court:

Eustace Chapuys
(d.1556). First embassy, 1529–38. Second embassy, 1540–5.

THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD AND HENRY’S GOVERNMENT

Charles Brandon, First Duke of Suffolk
(?1484–1545). Appointed Warden of the Scottish Marches in 1542. Commanded English army invading France in 1544. Lord Steward of the King’s Household, 1541–4. Died at Guildford, Surrey, 22 August 1545. Buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

Sir Anthony Browne
(d.1548). Master of the King’s Horse, 1539–48.

Sir Thomas Cheney
(?1485–1558). Appointed Warden of the Cinque Ports 1538 and Treasurer of the Royal Household from 1539. Retained office under Edward, Mary and Elizabeth.

Thomas Cranmer
(1489–1556). Archbishop of Canterbury. Supervised preparation and publication of first Prayer Book, 1548. Burnt at the stake in Oxford, 21 March 1556, for repudiating his admissions of the supremacy of the Pope and the truth of Catholic doctrine.

Sir William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton
(d.1542). Lord High Admiral, 1536–40. Died on active service whilst commanding the vanguard of Norfolk’s expedition against Scotland, 1542.

Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester
(
c
.1483–1555). Secretary to Wolsey and later to Henry VIII until ?15 April 1534. Later ambassador to France. Imprisoned from 1547 during most of Edward’s reign for sedition and failure in religious conformity. Appointed Lord Chancellor by Mary I on her accession in 1553. Died at Palace of Westminster, 13 November 1555.

Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk
(1473–1554). Soldier, Earl Marshal and Lord High Treasurer of England. Suppressed Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7. Commanded English forces against the Scots, 1542. Lieutenant General of English army in France, 1544. Condemned to death for treason but saved from execution by Henry VIII’s death. Imprisoned in the Tower of London until Mary’s accession in 1553. Presided at trial of Northumberland, 1553.

Sir Richard Riche
(?1496–1567). Speaker, House of Commons, 1536. Appointed Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, 1536–44, overseeing revenues from dissolved monastic houses. Created Baron Riche on Edward’s accession. Lord Chancellor, 1548–51. After signing the proclamation declaring Lady Jane Grey queen, he later switched sides to declare for Mary and was confirmed as a privy councillor. He was active in Essex in the prosecution of Protestants during the Counter-Reformation and was not confirmed as a privy councillor by Elizabeth on her accession.

John, Lord Russell
(?1486–1555). Comptroller of the Household, 1537–9. Lord High Admiral, 1540–2. Lord Privy Seal, 1542, 1547 and 1553. Created Earl of Bedford, 1550.

Sir Ralph Sadler
(1507–87). Cromwell’s servant and secretary. Made a gentleman of the privy chamber in 1536 and one of the two joint principal secretaries to the King (with Wriothesley) in 1540. He was then knighted and made a member of the Privy Council. Retired from public life during Mary’s reign and became jailor to Mary Queen of Scots in 1572 and 1584 after Elizabeth came to the throne.

Sir Thomas Wriothesley
(1505–50). Joint principal secretary to Henry VIII, 1540. Created Baron Wriothesley, 1544. Lord Chancellor, 1544–7. Created Earl of Southampton, 1547. Deprived of office in 1547, fined £4,000 for acting illegally in his use of the Great Seal and put under house arrest at his London home. Reinstated to Privy Council in 1548. Struck off list of councillors, 1550.

THE CROMWELL FAMILY

Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex
(?1485–1540). Lord Privy Seal and Viceregent for religious affairs. Beheaded for treason, 28 July 1540, on Tower Hill.

Elizabeth
(?–?1528). Cromwell’s wife, daughter of Henry Wykes, a cloth-worker of Putney. Bore Cromwell two daughters, Anne and Grace, who died young, and a son, Gregory.

Gregory Cromwell
(1513–51). Created Baron Cromwell 18 December 1540. Many of his father’s lands restored to him. Died of the ‘sweating sickness’, 4 July 1551.

Richard Williams, alias Cromwell
(?1512–44). Changed his name, 1531. Knighted, 1540. Gentleman of Henry’s privy chamber from 1538. Enriched himself from the dissolution of the monasteries. Ancestor of Oliver Cromwell.

THE VICTIMS

Robert Barnes
(1495–1540). Protestant martyr. In 1539 he was sent to Germany to negotiate the marriage with Anne of Cleves. Preached a sermon attacking Gardiner. Burnt at stake for heresy, 30 July 1540.

William Exemere
(?–1535). Monk of the London Charterhouse. Executed for denying the royal supremacy, 19 June 1535.

John Fisher
(1469–1535). Bishop of Rochester. Counsellor to Catherine of Aragon in 1528 during her divorce from Henry. Refused to take Oath of Supremacy. Executed 22 June 1535.

John Forrest
(1471–1538). Studied at Oxford University and became a friar in 1491, rising to become provincial of the Franciscan Friars in England. Confessor to Catherine of Aragon. Burnt for heresy, 22 May 1538.

Thomas Garret
. Burnt for heresy, 30 July 1540.

John Houghton
(?1488–1525). Prior of the London Charterhouse. Executed for denying the royal supremacy, 4 May 1535.

William Jerome
(?–1540). Vicar of Stepney, East London. Burnt for heresy, 30 July 1540.

John Lambert
, alias John Nicholson. After a show trial, burnt 22 November 1538 for denying the ‘Real Presence’ – the corporeal presence of Christ in the Holy Sacrament of Communion.

Robert Lawrence
(?–1535). Prior of the Carthusian monastery at Beauvale, Nottinghamshire. Executed for denying the royal supremacy, 4 May 1535.

Humphrey Middlemore
(?–1535). Monk of the London Charterhouse. Executed for denying the royal supremacy, 19 June 1535.

Sir Thomas More
(1478–1535). Helped Henry VIII to write his book on the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther. Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, 1525. Lord Chancellor after fall of Wolsey. Refused to take Oath of Supremacy. Executed 6 July 1535.

Sebastian Newdigate
(?–1535). Former page and gentleman of the privy chamber but quit the court over the divorce issue. Executed for denying the royal supremacy, 19 June 1535.

Augustine Webster
(?–1535). Prior of the Carthusian monastery at Axholme, Lincolnshire. Executed for denying the royal supremacy, 4 May 1535.

Thomas Wolsey
(
c
.1473–1530) Cardinal Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor, papal legate and Henry’s Chief Minister 1515–1529. Indicted under the Statute of Praemunire, 9 October 1529, and property confiscated. Died 29 November 1530 at Leicester after being arrested for treason.

Notes

Prologue

1
Fuller, p. 231.

2
Hume, p. 98.

3
Hume, pp. 98–9.

4
Except perhaps Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s principal secretary of state. For an account of his extraordinary life, see Robert Hutchinson,
Elizabeth’s Spymaster: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England
, London, 2006.

5
See Elton, ‘Revolution’, pp. 6–7. Reginald Pole (1500–58), son of Sir Richard Pole and Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of Edward IV’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence. He was appointed a cardinal in 1536 and Archbishop of Canterbury on the accession of Mary I to the throne of England in 1553.

6
At the time of writing, the British government was seeking to itroduce a similar measure. The innocent-sounding Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill would empower ministers to amend, repeal or replace legislation and reform common law. Their proposals, however, would still require limited parliamentary debates.

7
The current British government’s plans for identity cards from 2008 include proposals for storing information about individuals on Whitehall databases.

8
NA SP 1/116/187. See also LPFD, vol. XII, pt i, p. 264.

9
‘Decener’ comes from the old French word
decanier
and describes the chief of a tithing, an administrative division of ten households.

10
NA SP 1/129/73. See also: LPFD, vol. XIII, pt i, p. 103.

11
NA SP 1/162/157.

12
John Stokes of Fulham, Middlesex, was committed to Newgate Prison for saying too openly that Cromwell should ‘at the hour of his death, depart very sorry and penitent and die like a Christian man’ (NA C 1/1,063/75). Edward Eland, chaplain to Dr Knolys, the vicar of Wakefield, was accused in May 1538 of
mischievously teaching his schoolboys ‘seditious’ and malicious songs about Cromwell (NA SP 1/132/163. See also LPFD, vol XIII, pt i, pp. 387–8). Knolys claimed, rather limply, that he had been given the words of the song by a man, aptly named ‘Birkhead’, who lived in Bole, Nottinghamshire, but ‘who is now in London’. Sadly, their defamatory song is lost to us.

CHAPTER ONE
:
The Most Hated Man in England

1
LPFD, vol. IX, p. 289.

2
Merriman, vol. I, p. 5 and LPFD, vol. VI, pp. 311–12. Nicholas Glossop wrote to Cromwell in June 1533, sending him twelve Banbury cheeses, ‘half hard and half soft and wish they were worth £20,000’, soliciting his help in a legal case. ‘I am almost four score years old, impotent, lame of the gout and cramp and one of my eyes is gone. My mistress, your mother, was my aunt.’

3
This information emerged during a conversation in May 1535 with Chapuys about the possibility of Catherine of Aragon, who was forty-eight at the time, ever conceiving again. The ambassador said he knew of ‘some women in this very country who at fifty-four had delivered’. Far from denying the fact, Cromwell himself confessed that his own mother was fifty-two when he was born. See CSP, vol. V, pt i, p. 468.

4
The final battle of the civil war was at Stoke Field, 4 miles (6 km) from Newark, Nottinghamshire, on 16 June 1487, when 12,000-strong Tudor forces slaughtered a smaller raggle-taggle Yorkist army of ‘beggarly, naked and almost unarmed Irishmen’. See Richard Brooks,
Cassell’s Battlefields of Britain and Ireland
, London, 2005, pp. 270–2.

5
Phillips, p. 166. He maintains the property was conveyed to Walter as a reward for his services to Henry Tudor. As he apparently served only as a farrier in Henry Tudor’s contingent at the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485, this seems unlikely.

6
Merriman, vol. I, p. 3.

7
Merriman, vol. I, p. 4 and Phillips, p. 167.

8
LPFD, vol. IV, pt iii, p. 2,573.

9
Foxe, vol. V, p. 365.

10
LPFD, vol. IX, p. 289.

11
Novella 34. They contain 214 tales and were first published in 1554. Shakespeare may have drawn many of his plots, including
Romeo and Juliet
, from the
Novelles
. Bandello (1480–1562) was a Dominican priest who fled Italy after the Battle of Pavia in 1525, when the army of the Spanish Emperor Charles V defeated the French. Bandello’s home in Milan was burnt and his property lost.

12
Collier, vol. II, p. 180, claims Cromwell was a sentry at the sack of Rome. This occurred, however, in 1527, when 20,000 mutinous
Landsknechts
, German Protestant mercenaries in the service of the Spanish, attacked the city. At that time, Cromwell was working for Cardinal Wolsey.

13
Cardinal Reginald Pole,
Apologia ad Carolum Quintum Casarem, Epistolarum pars I
, Brescia, 1744–57, chap. xxviii, p. 126.

14
LPFD, vol. X, p. 508.

15
LPFD, vol. IX, p. 289. Joan, the sister of his wife, married John Williamson, who later worked for Cromwell on his building projects. See LPFD, vol. IV, pt iii, p. 2,573. His brother-in-law Harry Wykes told him on 2 November 1523 that he wanted to see some of his lands in Chertsey ‘on account of his necessities and because his children are not as he would have them’. See LPFD, vol. III, pt ii, p. 1,455.

16
Not Pope Julius II, as DNB2 has it – vol. 14, p. 367. Julius died on the night of 20–1 February 1513. John Foxe, in his
Acts and Monuments
, also has Julius as the Pope, as he says the incidents occurred in 1510.

17
The church tower is 272 ft (83 m) tall and is known locally as ‘the Boston Stump’.

18
Probably the song which begins:
Cold’s the wind and wet’s the rain

Saint Hugh be our good speed

Ill is the weather that brings no gain

Nor helps good hearts in need

Trowl the bowl, the jolly nut-brown bowl,

And here kind mate to thee

Let’s sing a dirge for St Hugh’s soul

And down it merrily.

From the ‘Shoemaker’s Holyday’, recorded in 1600. See Thomas Evans,
Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative
, 4 vols., London, 1810, vol. I, no. LIV.

19
Foxe, vol. II, p. 429.

20
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte
, vol. LXIII, Berlin, 1967, p. 193.

21
See LPFD, vol. IV, pt ii, pp. 155–6 and vol. III, pt i, p. 377. For an account of the nunnery and the protracted legal action, see
Victoria County History of England: Hertfordshire
, vol. IV, Woodbridge, 1971, pp. 426–8. The nunnery was dissolved before 9 September 1536 and the property acquired by Anthony Denny, an up-and-coming courtier and one of Henry VIII’s gentlemen of the privy chamber.