Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (5 page)

Cromwell may have harboured fears that he had sired a spendthrift and wastrel, and made provision accordingly. A further share of the Cromwell estate was to be trickled down to him: another £200 ‘of lawful English money’ was to be paid to him at twenty-four. Amongst the bequests of household stuff to Gregory, the plate and other valuable items were to be ‘put in safe keeping’ until his twenty-second birthday. If he died before reaching this age, the goods and chattels were to be sold and the proceeds divided ‘amongst my poor kinsfolk; that is to say amongst the children as well of my own sisters Elizabeth and Katherine, as of my late wife’s sister Joan, wife to John Williamson’.

His servants were not forgotten for their loyal service. Ralph Sadler was to receive 200 marks, together with ‘my second [best] gown, doublet and all my books’. Stephen Vaughan, ‘sometime my servant’, was bequeathed 100 marks and another gown, jacket and doublet. Cromwell added, in his own hand, bequests to other servants: William Brabazon, John Avery, Thurston ‘my cook’, William Body, Peter Mewtes, Richard Swift, George Wilkinson and John Hind, ‘my horse-keeper’.

Piously, he instructed his executors to ‘hire a priest, being a person of continent and good living to sing for my soul by the space of eight years next after my death and to give him for the same, £46 13s. 4d, that is to
say, £6 13s. 4d yearly for his stipend’. He gave £1 to every order of friars within the City of London in payment for them praying for his soul. Being a generous soul, Cromwell also bequeathed £40 to be given to penniless maidens on their marriages, and £20 to be distributed to poor householders so they, too, could pray for his soul. Finally, he gave £10 to the prisoners of Newgate, Ludgate, the King’s Bench Jail and the Marshalsea, across the river in Southwark.
⁷⁴

During his loyal service to Henry VIII, he was to fill some of those prisons with his own victims.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Make or mar’

I am a £1,000 worse [off] than I was when your troubles began
.

THOMAS CROMWELL TO CARDINAL WOLSEY FOLLOWING HIS DOWNFALL, 1530
¹

The blow may have been expected by some, but nonetheless, when it struck, the shock and awe were felt across all England. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, prince of the Church, European statesman and Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, had fallen from power.

His nemesis was Anne Boleyn, whom he described privately as the King’s own ‘night crow’.
²
The olive-skinned, dark-haired daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn had been a maid of honour to Henry’s queen, Catherine of Aragon, who was unlikely now ever to produce his longed-for legal son and heir. In the spring of 1526, the King, having drunk deeply of the sexual favours provided by Anne’s elder sister Mary, fell desperately, ardently in love with the headstrong, determined Anne.

Egged on by an ever-ambitious paramour, Henry was soon obsessed and overwhelmed by his desire for her to be his queen. He had realised, with sudden, fearful insight, that his lack of healthy living sons was God’s own terrible verdict on his existing aberrant marriage, as Catherine had briefly been wed to his fifteen-year-old elder brother Arthur before his death, probably from tuberculosis, in April 1502. To Henry, the holy teachings of the Bible – Leviticus, 20:21 – were as plain as a pikestaff: ‘And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath
uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ So, as far as the King was concerned, for seventeen years he had been living in mortal sin with his dead brother’s wife. Catherine vehemently denied that her first marriage was ever consummated and maintained defiantly that she had wed Henry as ‘a virgin and an immaculate woman’.

Some claimed it was Wolsey who first put the idea of a flawed marriage into Henry’s mind, in 1527. The contemporary historian Polydore Vergil reported:

At a convenient moment, he [Wolsey] approached the king and with an appearance of affection and love of righteousness, warned him of the legal standing of such a marriage … It had no force or vigour because of the marriage Catherine had made with his brother and he urgently besought him no longer to live in such peril, since upon it directly depended the salvation of his soul, the legitimacy of the royal issue, the decency of his life.
³

What Catholic king, particularly one granted the title
Fidei Defensor
– Defender of the Faith – by Pope Leo X in 1521, could resist such compelling arguments expressed by a papal legate? But in offering up this cunning theological argument, the Cardinal had unwittingly sown the poisoned seeds of his own destruction.

His idea was potentially arguable, but obtaining an annulment from Pope Clement VII was more problematical, though some had previously been granted to European royalty on even less certain grounds. After much diplomatic huffing and puffing with the Vatican, a legatine court, presided over by Wolsey and the gout-afflicted Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, sat in judgment on the ‘King’s Great Matter’: the validity of his marriage to Catherine under canon law. During a series of dramatic hearings beginning in May 1529, in the great hall of the Dominican monastery at Blackfriars in London, the cardinals heard testimony from both the King and Queen and a host of learned and pious witnesses. Henry’s lawyers produced reams of evidence with prurient panache. One told the court that if Arthur, Prince of Wales, had ‘carnal conversation’ with Catherine, the marriage with the King could not possibly be valid under God’s law: ‘I have here these two gentlemen of great credit who
will swear that one morning the Prince came out of his chamber, saying, “Gentlemen, I come out glad this morning for I have been during the night six miles into Spain.”’
⁴
Arthur was plainly a boastful youth, well endowed with Tudor sauce and swagger perhaps, though his words were unlikely truthfully to describe his manly attributes. But it was all to no avail. Catherine, all Spanish eloquence and piety, appealed to a higher jurisdiction and the case, still undecided, was referred to Rome. Campeggio pronounced on 23 July, the last day of the tribunal, that the delicate issue could only be settled after full consultation with the Curia in Rome. Vatican bureaucracy was famed for its procrastination and they were already away from their desks, enjoying a leisurely and protracted holiday from the Roman summer heat.

Henry watched the proceedings from the gallery above and stalked away, his face black with anger at Wolsey’s failure to procure the desired verdict. The King’s old friend and jousting partner Charles Brandon, First Duke of Suffolk, was also enraged. He hammered his fist on a table and cried out: ‘By the Mass, now I see that the old saying is true: it was never merry in England while we had cardinals amongst us!’

Threatening storm clouds were still gathering around Wolsey’s head in early autumn as Anne Boleyn mercilessly taunted Henry about his prospects of ever marrying her. The Cardinal’s enemies exploited the King’s keen sense of betrayal, impatience and disappointment with his Chief Minister.

On 9 October 1529, the dam of retribution against Wolsey finally burst. Attorney General Sir Christopher Hales preferred a Bill of Indictment for Praemunire
⁵
against Wolsey in the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall. Eight days later, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk gleefully arrived at York House, Wolsey’s new London palace, to demand the surrender of the Great Seal of England and his resignation as Lord Chancellor. Wolsey was ordered to remove himself to his fifteenth-century red-brick palace of Esher, in Surrey,
⁶
while his fate was decided, and he departed by barge from York House, still smarting from ‘the sharp sword of the king’s displeasure [that] had so penetrated his heart’. Well he might: his lands, offices and possessions were now all forfeit to the crown. On 26 October, a reluctant Sir Thomas More was appointed
Lord Chancellor, understandably apprehensive of taking on any role in the ever-pressing matter of the King’s divorce.

Suddenly, with Wolsey ousted from power, Cromwell’s carefully constructed world crumbled about his ears. Any chance of fulfilling his ambitions disappeared like fleeting dreams on awakening.

When the great and good meet their downfall, their supporters are frequently destroyed with them. Now, with Wolsey’s protective patronage abruptly gone, the loathing that had encircled Cromwell after the dissolution of the religious houses became yet more threatening. Stephen Vaughan, his faithful friend in Antwerp, wrote on 30 October cautioning him that he was more hated for his master’s sake than for anything he had done wrongfully to anyone. Reassuringly, he did not doubt that Cromwell’s wisdom would see him out of danger.
⁷
Sir Thomas Rush, another of the Cardinal’s servants, talked darkly of the evil being spoken about Cromwell in Ipswich: ‘You will be astounded at the lies told of you in these parts.’
⁸

George Cavendish,
⁹
one of Wolsey’s gentlemen ushers, discovered Cromwell alone in the great chamber at Esher on All-Saints Day, 1 November 1529. Cromwell was in the sunlit bay of a tall window, leaning miserably on the sill and holding a Latin primer in his hand. He was devoutly ‘saying of Our Lady’s matins, which had been a very strange sight in him before’. Tears trickled down his chubby cheeks as he gravely muttered and mumbled the versicles, the
Venite
, followed by three groups of psalms, three lessons, and finally ending with a
Te Deum
,
¹⁰
which must have sounded a little lacklustre under the circumstances. Cavendish was plainly astonished at the spectacle. He enquired: ‘Why, Master Cromwell, what means all this, your sorrow? Is my lord in danger, for whom you lament thus? Or is it for any loss that you have sustained by any misadventure?’

Cromwell looked completely downcast. ‘No, no, it is my unhappy adventure. I am likely to lose all that I have travailed
¹¹
for all the days of my life, for doing of my master, true and diligent services.’ His appeals to the Virgin Mary for assistance could not have provided him with much solace, for he shrugged off all Cavendish’s attempts at reassurance and comfort: ‘This I understand right well. I am in disdain with most men for
my master’s sake and surely without just cause. An ill name once gotten will not be lightly put away. I never had any promotion by my lord to the increase of my living.’

At this last outrageous canard, he suddenly seemed to make up his mind on his next course of action. His earnest plea for heavenly help was at once subsumed by a desire to fight destiny and personally confront his many enemies. Self-pity was hastily banished and replaced by steely resolve: ‘This much I say to you. I intend, God willing, this afternoon, when my lord has dined, to ride to London and so to the court, where I will either make or mar, or I come again. I will put myself in the prease
¹²
to see what any man is able to lay to my charge of untruth or misdemeanour.’
¹³

Cavendish could only wish him good luck and Godspeed.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in that rambling palace, Wolsey heard three masses, made his confession to Dr Marshall, his chaplain, and returned to his privy chamber for dinner. Cromwell sat squirming at the table during this unhappy, tense meal and, always practical, strongly advised the Cardinal to now discharge his gentlemen and yeomen from service with ‘good words and thanks’ to give them courage to ‘sustain your mishap in patient misery’. Simple gratitude would be their only reward: the coffers were empty, so they could not be paid off. Wolsey despondently agreed and told him to summon his household together in the great chamber, with the gentlemen positioned on the right, and the yeomen on the left. This Cromwell did immediately.

Wolsey entered the silent room, wearing a modest white rochet (a long lace surplice) over a bishop’s purple cassock. Distressed, he could not bring himself to speak right away and was quickly overwhelmed by bitter tears of abject misery. The great churchman turned his face to the wall, ashamed of his emotion amid the uncomfortable and embarrassed throng of his retainers. Eventually, he wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, took a deep breath and told them:

It has come to this pass, that it has pleased the king to take all that ever I had into his possession, so that I have nothing left me, but my bare clothes upon my back, which [are] simple in comparison to those you have seen me have.

I would not stick [hesitate] to divide them among you, yes, and the skin of my back, if it might countervail
¹⁴
any thing in value among you.

Wolsey put on a brave front and regained a little of his hopeless optimism that he would eventually return fully to Henry’s grace and favour:

I doubt not but that the king, considering the offence suggested against me by my mortal enemies to be of small effect, will shortly restore me again to my living, so that I shall be able to divide some part thereof, yearly among you, whereof you shall be well assured … the surplus of my revenues, whatever remains at the determination of my accounts, shall be, God willing, distributed among you.

I will never, hereafter, esteem the goods and riches of this uncertain world but as a vain thing, more than sufficient for the maintenance of my estate and dignity that God has or shall call me unto in the world during my life.

Such piety and new-found unworldliness must have been downright anathema to the thoroughly materialistic Cromwell, standing quietly and thoughtfully by his disgraced master’s side. He broke the silence by telling the Cardinal:

Sir, there are diverse of these your yeomen that would be glad to see their friends, but they lack money.

Here are … your chaplains who have received at your hands great benefices and high dignities.

Let them therefore show themselves unto you, as they are bound by all humanity to do.

I think their honesty and charity is not so slender and void of grace that they would not see you lack where they may help to refresh you.