Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (45 page)

37
BL Cotton MS Otho C x, fol. 213.

38
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 251.

39
LPFD, vol. IX, p. 294.

40
See the New Testament, John, 11: 50.

41
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 169.

42
Cited by Fraser, p. 220.

43
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 76.

44
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 167.

45
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 209.

46
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 290.

47
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 195.

48
LPFD, vol. X, p. 3.

49
It is now a co-educational boarding school.

50
BL Add. MS 28,588, fol. 149.

51
LPFD, vol. X, p. 22. No surgeon was allowed near her corpse. Eight hours after her death, her body was opened up by the chandler who embalmed her. It was found to be ‘as sound as possible’ except for the heart, ‘which was quite black and hideous’ with ‘a black round body stuck to the outside’ – ibid., p. 51. She probably died of cancer of the heart, as all this seems symptomatic of a secondary melanotic sarcoma. See Sir Alfred MacNalty, ‘The Death of Queen Catherine of Aragon’,
Nursing Mirror
, 27 December 1962, pp. 275ff.

52
CSP, vol. V, pt ii, p. 59.

53
CSP, vol. V, pt ii, p. 28.

54
LPFD, vol. X, p. 51.

55
A hearse was an elaborate temporary structure, normally covering the coffin, which was set up in the choir of a church during requiem masses.

56
Ellis, ‘Original Letters’, 3rd series, vol. III, pp. 8–10.

57
Her will asked that her body should be buried in a convent of the Observant Friars, that 500 Masses should be said for her soul and that some personage should go to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk and distribute twenty nobles (£6 13s. 4d) on the way on her behalf. She also desired the King to pass on to her estate ‘the money due to her in times past’ and that it should retain the goods in gold and silver she possessed. See BL Cotton MS Otho C x, fols. 216–216B.

58
Because of her first marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales.

59
The inventory demonstrates Catherine’s piety. It includes four needlework altar cloths, one having an image of the Virgin Mary and Child, another the arms of England and Spain. There were also thirteen tablets of ivory, one depicting the martyrdom of St Katherine, another the Virgin and St Anne, and a third, poignantly, figures of Henry and Catherine. Just as moving were the ‘smocks and other things provided … when in childbed’. See LPFD, vol. VIII, pp. 78–9.

60
LPFD, vol. X, p. 71.

61
Bert Park,
Ailing, Aging Addicted: Studies of Compromised Leadership
, Lexington, Kentucky, 1993, p. 44.

62
‘Wriothesley’, vol. I, p. 33 reported that ‘she took such a fright … that it caused her to travail [labour] and so was delivered afore her full time which was a great discomfort to all this realm’.

63
Cited by Ives, p. 344. Chapuys reported his comment as: ‘I see that God will not give me male children.’ CSP, vol. V, pt ii, p. 59.

64
CSP, vol. V, pt ii, p. 28.

65
Cited by Wilson, p. 388. For analysis of Skip’s sermon, see Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Thomas Cranmer
, London, 1996, pp. 154–5 and Eric Ives, ‘Anne
Boleyn and the Early Reformation in England’,
Historical Journal
, vol. 37 (1994), pp. 395–40.

66
Eltham Palace was located in Kent but has now been swallowed up by south-east London. Henry grew up there.

67
BL Cotton MS Otho C x, fol. 209B. Sir Edward Baynton reported that ‘no man will confess anything against her but only Mark [Smeaton] of any actual thing. I cannot believe that the other two be as fully culpable as ever was he.’

68
BL Cotton MS Otho C x, fols. 222–5 and reprinted in ‘Cavendish’, p. 451.

69
BL Cotton MS Otho C x, fol. 225.

70
BL Cotton MS Otho C x, fol. 221.

71
Bell, p. 102.

72
CSP, vol. V, pt ii, p. 137.

73
CSP, vol. V, pt ii, p. 82.

74
BL Cotton MS Otho C x, fol. 223.

75
In February 1866, by command of Queen Victoria, a small brass plaque was erected on the site of her execution, inscribed: ‘Site of the ancient scaffold: on this spot Queen Anne Boleyn was beheaded on the 19th May 1536.’

76
BL Cotton MS Vitellius B xiv, fol. 220B.

CHAPTER FIVE
:
Shaking the Throne

1
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 183.

2
See Elton, ‘Police’, p. 248. The register of the court, kept by William Saye, is in BL Add. MS 48,022, fols. 83–96. The contents were extracted by the Elizabethan Privy Council clerk Robert Beale. His note, dated June 1588, on fol. 83 says they were ‘out of an old book which I borrowed of Mr Saye whose father was Principal Register for Ecclesiastical Causes’.

3
Scarisbrook, ‘Henry’, p. 337.

4
The volumes are in NA E 344/1 to E 344/21/8.

5
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra F ii, fol. 131. Another copy is in BL Add. MS 32,091, fol. 121.

6
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 21.

7
Legh (d.1545) was a cousin of Rowland Lee, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield.

8
Layton (
c
. 1498–1544) met Cromwell in the 1520s, when Layton was vicar of Stepney, north of London.

9
Fuller, p. 214.

10
LPFD, vol. III, pt ii, p. 46.

11
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 249, 24 August 1535. The abbey was first founded as a home for leprous women in 1152 and became a monastery in 1184. Jeyn was appointed rector of Shipton Moyne, Gloucestershire, after its dissolution. Printed in Wright, p. 58.

12
Cook, pp. 55–6 and Ridley, p. 255.

13
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 127.

14
Ellis, ‘Original Letters’, 3rd series, vol. III, pp. 164–7. The abbot resigned and was paid the relatively small pension of £7 a year.

15
An ugly old woman.

16
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 131.

17
Cook, pp. 72–4.

18
LPFD, vol. IX, p. 238. Her romantic attachment to the area continued after the dissolution of the house. In 1602, Robert Manning of Burwell, Cambridgeshire, then aged eighty, remembered that for more than a year after its surrender, she lived ‘in a cave in the ground at the vicarage’. See
Victoria County History of England: Cambridge
, vol. II, London, 1948, pp. 226–9.

19
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 134B. See also Wright, p. 59.

20
There were thirty choir monks and eighteen lay brothers in Houghton’s day, of whom twenty were under the age of thirty-eight when he took office.

21
Edmund Harvel in Venice said their deaths were seen as ‘extreme cruelty’ and ‘all Venice was in great murmuring to hear it and spoke a long time of the business to my great displeasure for the defaming of our nation with the [most] vehement words they could use. They are persuaded of the dead men’s great honesty and virtues … I promise you faithfully I never saw Italians … so vehement as at this thing: it seem[ed] so strange and so much against their stomach’. See BL Cotton MS Nero B vii, fol. 93.

22
Pharisaical: the strict adherence to tradition and law, from ‘Pharisee’, the ancient Jewish sect.

Mumpsimus: a traditional notion obstinately held, even though it is unreasonable.

23
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 227.

24
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 129. See also LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 365.

25
Ling, or cobia,
Rachycentron canadum
, is a deepwater, long, slim-bodied fish of the cod family found in North Atlantic waters.

26
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 35.

27
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 36.

28
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 26. See also LPFD, vol. IX, p. 172.

29
Surviving menus for the Charterhouse brethren for a few days in October 1535 indicate a frugal board. Sunday dinner for each monk was ‘frumenty [hulled wheat boiled in milk and flavoured with sugar and spices], a hot pie of lampreys [an eel-like fish] and three eggs’; the lay brothers had salt fish and cheese. On Monday, all had a pottage of herbs, ‘plenty of Suffolk or Essex cheese and three eggs’. Tuesday’s menu was frumenty, oysters and a piece of ling for each monk; on Wednesday they ate a pottage of herbs, a great whiting and two eggs. The proctor of the house was urged to search foreign ships and ‘all the wharves between London Bridge and the Tower for … salt lampreys, onions, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, vinegar, sardines, dolphins and olive oil’. See LPFD, vol. IX, p. 200.

30
The last to die in Newgate was William Johnson on 20 September. The tenth Carthusian, William Horne, was executed at Tyburn on 4 August 1540.

31
NA E 322/133.

32
Knowles, p. 116.

33
He did not do any work: this was done by Thomas Watson.

34
The first published work from Syon was probably
A Profitable Treatise to Dispose Men to be Virtuously Occupied
, written by Thomas Betson and printed by Wynkyn de Worde in Fleet Street in 1500. See Christopher de Hamel,
Syon Abbey: The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns
, Roxburghe Club, privately printed, Otley, 1991.

35
LPFD, vol. VIII, p. 441.

36
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 125.

37
He died on 21 October 1537 as a result of the squalor of the prison.

38
LPFD, vol. XI, p. 197.

39
Syon was finally suppressed in November 1539 with generous pensions granted to the abbess, fifty-three choir nuns, four lay sisters, twelve brothers and five lay brothers on the day they were expelled. The abbess, Agnes Jordan, received a pension of £200 a year. Her monumental brass remains over her grave in Denham Church, Buckinghamshire. The famous library was dispersed, itself a major crime to lay against Henry and Cromwell.

40
The word ‘convent’ was used in the sixteenth century to refer to an entire community of monks, nuns and friars living in a single house, not to the building in which they lived. Only later was the word’s use adapted to describe the home of nuns.

41
27 Henry VIII cap. 28.

42
27 Henry VIII cap. 27.

43
NA SP 1/239/298. See also Elton, ‘Police’, p. 246.

44
Eliot was also keen that Cromwell should be aware of his full support for religious reform: ‘I would to God that the king and you might see the most secret thoughts of my heart, surely you should then perceive that … I have in as much detestation as any man living [of] all vain superstitions, superfluous ceremonies,
slanderous jugglings, counterfeit miracles, arrogant usurpations of men called spiritual and masking religions and all other abuses of Christ’s holy doctrine and laws.’ Cook, p. 111.

45
Knowles, p. 181.

46
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 234, also printed in Cook, p. 90 and Wright, pp. 119–20. The chantry chapel survives today. The priory was suppressed in 1537 and was granted to Delawarr for £125 13s. 4d. He held it for four years but was then ordered to exchange it with the crown for the abbey of Wherwell in Hampshire. Today, the monks’ choir is the parish church of Boxgrove, the nave having been partially demolished after the dissolution.

47
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 122. Letter from Richard Wharton to Cromwell on behalf of Edward Calthorpe.

48
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E iv, fol. 269, also printed in Cook, pp. 118–19 and Wright, pp. 72–3.

49
Cook, p. 127.

50
Croyland was eventually surrendered on 4 December 1539, with annual revenues of £1,217 6s. 8d.

51
The roads of England and Wales must have sometimes been packed with carts moving tombs and the bodies they contained to other churches of safety. The huge monumental brass of Thomas Nelond, a fifteenth-century prior of Lewes, was dragged 15 miles (24 km) as the crow flies to Cowfold Church in West Sussex. The sculptured tombs of Richard Fitzalan, Second Earl of Arundel (d.1376) and his wife Eleanor (d.1372), Joan de Vere (d.1293) and the monument commemorating the heart burial of Maud, Countess of Surrey, were also taken from Lewes before its suppression on 16 November 1537 to Chichester Cathedral. At Abingdon, Berkshire, the brass to a local benefactor, Geoffrey Barbour, was removed from the local Benedictine abbey to the parish church by the mayor and council. In Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds.), see ‘Tombs of Brass are Spent’, Robert Hutchinson, pp. 452–6.

52
LPFD, vol. XI, p. 26.

53
27 Henry VIII cap. 25.

54
28 Henry VIII cap. 7. Elizabeth was also declared a bastard. This second Succession Act created three new treasons: to speak, write or act against the marriage to Jane Seymour; by ‘words, writing, imprinting or any other exterior act, directly or indirectly’ to ‘accept or take, judge or believe’ the Aragon and Boleyn marriages were lawful; and finally to refuse to take an oath to answer questions concerning the Act or, having taken the oath, refusing to answer. See Tanner, p. 380.

55
Wilding, p. 102.

56
Cook, pp. 101–3.

57
Cook, pp. 119–20. The abbot and the canons escaped execution but spent several months in jail. See Dickens, pp. 51–2.

58
LPFD, vol. XI, pp. 323–4.

59
LPFD, vol. XI, p. 390.

60
An untrue rumour suggested that Bellow had been blinded, sewn up in a bull’s hide and torn apart by dogs ‘with many vigorous words against Cromwell’. See Moorhouse, p. 50. Millicent was also said to have been hanged, but this was also untrue. See LPFD, vol. XI, p. 225.

61
Moorhouse, p. 53.

62
NA SP 1/106/250.

63
BL Cotton MS Vespasian F xiii, fol. 116.