Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (49 page)

8
‘State Papers’, vol. VIII, p. 208.

9
See Carl W. Bouterwek, ‘Anna von Cleve, Gemahlin Heinrich VIII, König von England’,
Zeitschrift des Bergischen Geschichtsvereins
, 9 vols., Bonn, 1863–73, vol. IV, pp. 374ff.

10
The English name was derived from the player gaining 100 points to win. Piquet was established from the early sixteenth century and was popular in Spain and France before being played in England. The game involves two players and a deck of thirty-two cards.

11
‘State Papers’, vol. VIII, p. 213.

12
LPFD, vol. XIV, pt ii, p. 260.

13
It had been suppressed the previous year.

14
Sir Howard Colvin,
History of the King’s Works 1485–1660
, vol. IV, London, 1982, p. 39. The surveyor, James Needham, had 350 men working on the site and had to order 372 candles so they could work at night to finish in time. Needham must have been grateful for the delay in Anne of Cleves’ departure from Calais.

15
Now the site of the Old Royal Naval College on the banks of the River Thames. King Henry V gave Greenwich to his brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who built a defensive tower there from 1427, as well as a large riverside house called Bella Court. Henry VIII’s father substantially upgraded and extended the house and Henry was born there on 28 June 1491. He later built stables, a new banqueting hall and set up armouries attached to the palace, as well as a tilting yard
for jousting. Placentia – the name means ‘a pleasant place’ – was used as a royal palace until the Civil War in 1642. It was demolished by Charles II in the 1660s.

16
Strype, vol. I, pt ii, p. 455.

17
Strype, vol. I, pt ii, p. 457.

18
Ibid.

19
The official version of the meeting was somewhat different. Both Wriothesley and Holinshed talk of warm embraces between the betrothed pair: ‘After [Henry] had spoken to her and welcomed her, she with loving countenance and gracious behaviour him received and welcomed him on her knees, whom he gently took up and kissed. All that afternoon [he] communed and devised [planned] with her, supped that night with her and the next day he departed to Greenwich.’ See Holinshed, p. 811. Cromwell’s propagandists had been at work again.

20
Strype, vol. I, pt ii, p. 455. In the Tudor period, it was unfashionable for women to be suntanned.

21
‘State Papers’, vol. II, pp. 551–2, fn.; SP 1/121/67; and LPFD, vol. XIII, pt i, p. 171.

22
Holinshed, p. 812.

23
Hume, p. 91.

24
Hall, p. 834.

25
Holinshed, p. 812.

26
LPFD, vol. XIV, pt ii, pp. 360 and 505.

27
The remains of the chapel were uncovered during archaeological excavations in 2006. The foundations of the banqueting house that overlooked the palace’s great tiltyard were discovered by Museum of London archaeologists in 2002.

28
Hall, p. 836.

29
The headboard is on display in the Tudor room of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums (registration no. 14.236). It was purchased by Sir William Burrell in 1938 for £800 from the dealer in antiquities John Hunt. My thanks to Patricia Collins, Curator, Medieval and Renaissance Collections, for this information. The headboard is illustrated in Simon Thurley,
The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1574
, New Haven, 1993, p. 237.

30
Burnet, vol. II, p. lxxxvi.

31
Strype, vol. I, pt ii, p. 458.

32
Holinshed, p. 814.

33
Hall, p. 837.

34
Strype, vol. I, pt ii, p. 462.

35
Strype, vol. I, pt ii, p. 461.

36
Hatfield House, CP 1/22, deposition of Dr William Butts.

37
‘Wriothesley’, vol. 1, p. 112. At the time, the Thames was almost destitute of fresh water because of an excessive drought, and the river was salt above London Bridge.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
:
No Armour Against Fate

1
Roper, p. 56.

2
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 250. The title came with an annuity of £20 from the county of Essex.

3
The office of Lord Great Chamberlain was established by Henry I in 1133 and was hereditary. Today, the office-holder has nominal charge over the Palace of Westminster and is entitled to bear the Sword of State at the opening and closing of Parliament, although the work is often delegated to another member of the House of Lords. Previously the role also involved the supervision of the dressing of a new monarch on coronation day and investing the sovereign with the insignia of rule.

4
BL Harleian MS 6,074, fol. 57B.

5
Their appointment must have been early in April as Wriothesley signed his name as Chief Clerk of the Signet on a writ of Privy Seal – NA C 82/764/77 – on 30 March 1540 and was succeeded by Thomas Knight on 14 April. Wriothesley had served as secretary to Cromwell; Sadler, as a gentleman of the privy chamber, acted as his go-between with Henry.

6
The warrant for their appointment is undated but must have taken effect before 14 April 1540, when Sadler wrote to Cromwell as one of the King’s two principal secretaries. The warrant states that Henry ‘is pleased and ordains that all such times as the Lord Privy Seal shall be present in the Court, the said Thomas Wriothesley and Ralph Sadler shall accompany him at his table, and when he shall be absent … then they shall have his diet [daily subsistence] for themselves’. See ‘State Papers’, vol. I, p. 623. Both secretaries were knighted during the ceremony creating Cromwell Earl of Essex.

7
Elton, ‘Revolution’, p. 315.

8
‘Life’, p. 30.

9
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 308, 7 May 1540.

10
See the letter from Richard Hilles to the reformer Henry Bullinger written after Cromwell’s death, LPFD, vol. XVI, p. 270.

11
De Vere, born before 1490, was appointed Lord Great Chamberlain on 19 December 1526. He was bearer of the crown at Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533 and was one of the peers who tried her three years later.

12
The rose window in the western gable of the great hall, minus its glass, remains
today, after being rediscovered following a fire in a later building on the site in 1814. Winchester House, the London home of the Bishops of Winchester from
c
.1145, was turned into a prison for Royalist prisoners by Parliament on 16 November 1642 (
House of Commons Journal
, vol. 2, 1802, p. 848). For information on the palace in its heyday, see Martha Carlin, ‘The Reconstruction of Winchester House’, in
London Topographical Record
, vol. 25 (1985), pp. 33–57. On 18 April 1540, a reformist, evangelical priest hanged himself while imprisoned in Winchester House. He was due to be interrogated by Gardiner. See ‘Wriothesley’, p. 115.

13
Edmund, second son of Thomas, Second Duke of Norfolk, had commanded the English right flank at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513 when the Scots army was cut to pieces. He died in 1538.

14
Catherine Howard was a first cousin to Anne Boleyn. She had spent her childhood and teens living with her pious step-grandmother, Agnes, Duchess of Norfolk, at Horsham St Faith, near Norwich in Norfolk. She was not so pure as she seemed, as Henry was to find to his cost later. She had been seduced at the age of fourteen and already had two lovers. See Robinson, p. 32.

15
L. B. Smith,
A Tudor Tragedy
, p. 103.

16
Nichols, p. 259.

17
Strype, vol. I, pt ii, p. 460.

18
Byrne,
The Lisle Letters
, vol. IV, p. 1,663, letter from Norfolk to Sir John Wallop, the English ambassador in France.

19
A short staff weapon with an axe blade and a spear point, used in fighting on foot.

20
The names of the first Pensioners are provided in LPFD, vol. XIV, pt ii, p. 345.

21
The Pensioners were formally set up in December 1538 (see BL Harleian MS 6,807, fol. 25) in addition to the eighty Yeomen of the Guard, but Cromwell’s ‘remembrances’ show in November and December that much still needed to be decided, and they were not fully instituted until a year later, under their captain, Sir Anthony Browne, later Master of the King’s Horse (see LPFD, vol. XIV, pt ii, pp. 192, 266, 275). In February 1540, Cromwell was still working out whether they should be paid their daily wage of 3s. 4d (17 pence) monthly or quarterly (LPFD, vol. XV, p. 71) and full details of their organisation were not settled until the following month. On 5 April, Cromwell authorised pay increases for them (‘Ordinances’, p. 213). Each Pensioner was to be equipped with ‘three great horses’ and be accompanied by one or two archers and another horseman armed with a lance – a handy, quickly mobilised military force. Henry VII had a similar bodyguard, but this had lapsed and the new force was an entirely new creation. See Thiselton, pp. 2–5 and 12–13, and Sandeman, p. 24. The Pensioners became the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms on 17 March 1834, and their forty members today still accompany the sovereign on state occasions. Their captain is
now a political appointment and is normally the government Chief Whip in the House of Lords.

22
Barnes had returned to London from exile in Antwerp at Cromwell’s invitation in 1535. On Christmas Day 1537, Bishop Latimer had reported to Cromwell about a preaching tour by Barnes in Worcestershire: ‘Surely, he is alone in handling of a piece of Scripture and in setting forth of Christ, he has no fellow.’ See LPFD, vol. XII, pt ii, p. 442.

23
The structure is shown in a diptych of 1616 depicting Old St Paul’s, owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London. See Pamela Tudor-Craig,
Old St Paul’s: The Society of Antiquaries Diptych
, London Topographical Society Publication No. 163, London, 2004.

24
Holinshed, p. 815.

25
Burnet, vol. I, pt i, bk iii, p. 216.

26
Garret did penance by carrying a ‘faggot in open procession from St Mary’s Church to St Friswides, Garret having his red hood on his shoulders like a master of arts’. See Nichols, p. 294.

27
Cited by Williams, ‘Henry VIII’, p. 193.

28
Byrne,
The Lisle Letters
, vol. VI, no. 1,663.

29
Wilson, p. 452.

30
Both were prominent religious conservatives. Tunstall (1474–1559), a former Keeper of the Privy Seal, had prohibited Protestant books and took a leading role in the passing of the Six Articles in 1539. Clerk (d.1541) was Master of the Rolls in 1522–3 and tried to obtain the papacy for Wolsey in 1523.

31
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 206.

32
‘Wriothesley’, vol. 1, p. 115.

33
Byrne, The Lisle Letters, vol. V, no. 1415.

34
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 190.

35
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 196.

36
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 239.

37
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 249.

38
Burnet, vol. I, pt i, bk iii, p. 201.

39
The Enabling Act (32 Henry VIII cap. 26) authorised two committees of bishops to define religious doctrine and to produce a book of approved liturgy.

40
Wilding, p. 291.

41
Nearly £3 million at 2006 monetary values.

42
Elton, ‘Revolution’, pp. 401–3.

43
The last monastery to surrender was Waltham Abbey, on 23 March. The Hospitallers had refused to yield up their revenues to the King at the dissolution of the monasteries.

44
32 Henry VIII cap. 24. The Act says that the knights ‘unnaturally and contrary to their duty of their allegiance sustained and maintained the usurped power and authority of the Bishop of Rome and have not only adhered themselves to the said Bishop, being common enemy to the king, our sovereign lord and to his realm, untruly upholding, knowing and affirming maliciously and traitorously the said Bishop to be Supreme Head of Christ’s Church by God’s Holy Words’.

45
The mutilated accounts are in BL Cotton MS Appendix XXVIII, fol. 52 and partially reprinted in LPFD, vol. XV, p. 302.

46
A list of those taking part is in BL Harleian MS 69, fol. 18. The challengers included Henry’s favourite, Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the privy chamber, who was defeated on foot in mock combat with Richard Cromwell on 5 May, doubtless with much injury to his pride. Gregory, Cromwell’s son, was amongst the defenders during the tournament. See also ‘Wriothesley’, p. 117–18 and Stow, vol. II, p. 99.

47
This thirteenth-century palace was annexed to the Palace of Westminster by Henry in July 1536 in an exchange of property with Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham.

48
‘Wriothesley’, vol. 1, p. 117.

49
Holinshed, vol. 1, p. 816.

50
‘Lords Journal’, p. 134.

51
32 Henry VIII cap. 50.

52
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 221.

53
Wilding, p. 293.

54
32 Henry VIII cap. 50.

55
BL Cotton MS Titus B i, fol. 406. Reprinted in ‘State Papers’, vol. I, pp. 628–9.

56
Hall, p. 816.

57
Kaulek, p. 186.

58
‘
Que bien peut s’en faillit qu’il ne feyt ung sault
…’ Kaulek, p. 187 and LPFD, vol. XV, pp. 350–1.

59
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 336.

60
BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E v, fol. 300.

CHAPTER TWELVE
:
A Traitor’s Cry for Mercy

1
LPFD, vol. XV, p. 377 (letter from the French ambassador Marillac to Annede Montmorency, Constable of France, 23 June 1540); Kaulek, p. 193; Hume, pp. 98–9; Wilding, pp. 298–9.

2
Hume, p. 99.

3
‘Lords Journal’, p. 143.

4
Kaulek, p. 189 and LPFD, vol. XV, p. 363.

5
T. B. and T. J. Howell,
Complete Collection of State Trials
, London, 1828, vol. I, p. 455 and LPFD, vol. XV, p. 364.