House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Read online

  It was surprising that Cromwell could spare the time to retrieve compromising books, preoccupied as he was with the unfamiliar role of marriage broker in a delicate quest to find a fourth wife for Henry. Choosing a successor to Jane Seymour from the great aristocratic houses of England was too risky politically, and, after a number of princesses from the Habsburg and Valois dynasties in Europe were unsuccessfully solicited, the minister at last secured the dimpled, podgy hand of twenty-two-year-old Anne of Cleves, from a north German ducal state,34 at the beginning of October 1539.

  When the king met his new bride, he was aghast at both her pock-marked appearance and deplorable personal hygiene. After much angry prevarication, he reluctantly, unwillingly and resentfully went through with his marriage to her at Greenwich Palace on 6 January 1540. Inevitably the wedding night was a disaster and after four nights of grudging effort, Henry had not consummated the marriage. Very soon, he decided he wanted rid of his ‘Flanders Mare’. He turned on Cromwell for arranging the match - ‘I am not well handled,’ he growled - and there may have been occasions when, as gossip suggested, the enraged and frustrated king slapped and pummelled his minister about the head.35

  Norfolk and Gardiner watched the discomfiture of their enemy at court with something approaching glee, if that is a sentiment either would allow themselves.

  They devised a sophisticated entrapment that would finally overthrow the despised and hated Cromwell, restore everything they cherished in the old liturgy, and provide them with an inestimably powerful political weapon at court.

  The trap came in the shape of another of Norfolk’s nieces, pretty eighteen-year-old Catherine Howard, the giddy, empty-headed daughter of the duke’s recently deceased spendthrift brother, Lord Edmund Howard,36 and his second wife, Joyce Culpeper who had died in the 1520s. Catherine had been brought up by her step-grandmother, Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, at the Howard seats at Lambeth and at Chesworth, in Horsham, in Sussex. The new French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, described her as more graceful than beautiful and short of stature. She was auburn-haired, with hazel eyes, and Norfolk ensured that she was appointed one of the twelve maids in waiting to the unwanted queen.

  Use of the word cannot be avoided, shameful as it sounds.

  To all intents and purposes, Norfolk and Gardiner were pimping.

  They hoped to make Catherine at least Henry’s mistress, but, better still, his fifth queen, who then would be malleable to their influence and compliant to their wishes.

  They succeeded, beyond their wildest expectations.

  Henry first met Catherine at Gardiner’s sprawling fourteenth-century Gothic palace in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, in the spring of 1540. As he watched the youthful dancers pirouette in the bishop’s great hall, his rheumy old eyes alighted on the laughing and giggling Catherine, dressed fashionably in the French style and dancing ‘wilfully’. Always flirting, she knew full well how to please men.

  The king was then frequently invited to banquets at Winchester House and to ‘entertainments’ by the dowager duchess to Norfolk House at Lambeth that spring and early summer. Very soon, he ‘did cast a fancy’ to Catherine and she was put on a royal pedestal, to be adored, ‘a blushing rose without a thorn’.37 How much the teenager understood the ramifications of her uncle’s plot must be a matter of debate. Anyway, she shamelessly accepted Henry’s geriatric attentions. As early as Easter, he was showering expensive jewellery on the Howard girl and granting her the lands of two convicted felons. Ralph Morice, Cranmer’s secretary, observed that Henry’s ‘affection was so marvellously set upon the gentlewoman as it was never known that he had the like to any woman’.38

  The king had fallen madly, deeply in love with yet another niece of the Duke of Norfolk. They made a grotesque couple. He was now forty-nine, and, at six feet three inches tall, towered over the diminutive girl. The mismatch was accentuated by his huge and rapidly increasing girth, probably caused by the early stages of an acute endocrine abnormality called Cushing’s syndrome.39 Catherine was also thirty years younger than him and six years younger than his daughter, Princess Mary.

  As Henry’s appetite for her girlish charms sharpened that hot summer of 1540, his sour distaste for his queen changed into a restless impatience to banish her from his life. He wanted rid of poor Anne of Cleves as soon as possible and, as Cromwell had got him into this marital nightmare, now he could get him out of it. As the king’s resentment grew, he listened to the devious siren voices of those around him who had other agendas, particularly Norfolk and Gardiner.

  Cromwell recognised that Anne of Cleves could become his stolid if unwitting nemesis, and so she proved. He also knew where the danger came from: the minister warned Richard Pate, about to embark on a diplomatic assignment to Germany, that association with the duke was dangerous.40 Cromwell therefore moved to neutralise his enemies.

  His prognosis was quite justified. Norfolk, now back on the Privy Council, felt his political power waxing just as Cromwell’s was waning. The duke returned to London on 1 March after a three-week-long diplomatic mission to France, and had mischievously repeated Francis I’s belief that Cromwell’s removal from office would improve Anglo-French relations. With startling effrontery, on 11 March Norfolk also wrote to Cromwell seeking information about future policy towards France. The duke had been receiving a generous pension from the French government and if this was going to be cut off, he would like to trim his household spending by firing a few superfluous servants.41

  The minister relied upon Wolsey’s tried and trusted formula of finding work for his enemies far away from court to silence their conspiracies. Three days later, he sent Norfolk to the north to superintend the destruction of an abbey and then sought to confine him to Kenninghall because of an infectious disease afflicting one of his servants.42

  All his efforts were to no avail.

  The French ambassador reported on 10 April that Cromwell and Cranmer ‘do not know where they are’. He predicted:Within a few days, there will be seen in this country a great change in many things which this king begins to make in his ministers, recalling those he had rejected and degrading those he has raised.

  Cromwell is tottering. All those recalled, who were dismissed by his means, reserve [not] une bonne pensée [one good thought] for him - among others, the bishops of Winchester, Durham and Bath, men of great learning and experience, who are now summoned to the Privy Council.43

  Norfolk ordered one of his dependants at court, Sir Anthony Wingfield, the captain of the King’s Guard, to the Parliament House early on the morning of Saturday 10 June 1540. He instructed him to bring a file of halberdiers to the Palace of Westminster and to arrest Cromwell after dinner, during a meeting of the Privy Council at the king’s house. The officer was stunned by the mission, but the duke told him peremptorily: ‘You need not be surprised. The king orders it.’44

  The duke’s relationship with Cromwell over the years had swerved, back and forth, between lukewarm friendship and bitter enmity. In September 1534, they had argued publicly over policy on Ireland, yet on Ascension Day, 6 May 1535, he had written: ‘Since I saw you last, you have most lovingly handled me. You will always find me a faithful friend, grudge who will.’45 Two years later, when the widower minister46 stayed with Norfolk, the rough old soldier joked pruriently that if he

  lust not to dally with my wife [?a reference to his correspondence with Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk] he could find him a young woman with pretty proper tetins [breasts] for his entertainment.

  In March 1539, the duke had added a postscript to a letter to Cromwell, surprisingly dropping an important formality: ‘my lord, I require you to [call me your] grace no more in your letters, for surely it is not convenient that one of your sort should do so’.47

  Behind Norfolk’s chameleon façade, however, was his deep-seated hatred and contempt for a brewer and fuller’s son who now pulled the levers of power in England. An Act, passed the previous year, gave Cromwell, as the kin
g’s secretary, precedence over everyone, be they barons, bishops, or commoners.48 It was legislation that proud and arrogant Norfolk found impossible to stomach. Henry’s grant of the Earldom of Essex to Cromwell on 17 April and his appointment as Lord Great Chamberlain of England - both positions held down the centuries by the great noble houses - swelled still more his resentment and umbrage. He despised Cromwell. He envied his wealth, status and influence with the king. He loathed everything this jack-in-office stood for.

  The duke had brought down another of that ilk, Cardinal Wolsey, and now, at long last, he was to add Cromwell’s scalp to his belt. Norfolk was going to savour this day for years to come.

  When an unsuspecting Cromwell walked into the Council chamber at about three o’clock that afternoon, the duke snapped the jaws of his trap. He stood up, a smile of triumph creasing his fleshy features, and shouted at the minister: ‘Cromwell! Do not sit there! That is no place for you!’

  All the pent-up antagonism and jealousy over low-born upstarts occupying the pinnacles of power burst out in Norfolk’s snarling sneer: ‘Traitors do not sit among gentlemen!’

  Wingfield, listening at the door, then entered the chamber with six halberdiers and arrested Cromwell. The minister dashed his cap on to the floor in fury, glared at the duke and cried out reproachfully: ‘This, then, is the reward for all my services.’ He appealed to the other councillors, now crowding round him: ‘On your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?’

  If he was looking for sympathy, he found it wanting. Their answer was robust. Scenting blood, some shouted ‘Yes’ and chanted: ‘Traitor, traitor, traitor’ - their fists beating on the Council table in time with their chants.

  Wingfield, fearful that his prisoner was going to be attacked, began to push and tug a protesting Cromwell out of the room, but a jubilant Norfolk wanted to humiliate and debase his fallen enemy still further. ‘Stop, captain,’ he ordered, ‘traitors must not wear the Garter.’ He marched up and pulled the glittering Order of St George from around Cromwell’s neck and threw it to the floor. The minister’s one-time friend Sir William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, tugged at and finally ripped the Garter insignia off Cromwell’s gown. As they stood back panting from their exertions, he was bundled out of the room and taken by boat to the Tower.49

  Norfolk and Gardiner were now paramount at court and took a leading role in how Cromwell’s downfall was to be presented for propaganda purposes and in drawing up the charges against him. Religion was to be the hook upon which they hung him.

  Hours after the arrest, a ‘gentleman’ of the court brought a letter from the king to the French envoy Marillac. Henry wrote that despite his ‘wishing by all means to lead back religion to the way of truth, Cromwell, as attached to the German Lutherans, had always favoured the doctors who preached such erroneous opinions’.

  Recently, warned by some of his principal servants to reflect that he was working against the intention of the king and of the Acts of Parliament, he had betrayed himself and said he hoped to suppress the old preachers and have only the new, adding that the affair would soon be brought to such a pass that the king with all his power could not prevent it.

  His own party would be so strong that he would make the king descend to the new doctrines even if he had to take arms against him.

  These plots were told the king by those who heard them and who esteemed their fealty more than the favour of their master.50

  The next day, compromising letters between him and the German Lutherans were conveniently discovered at his house at Austin Friars - possibly planted by Norfolk’s agents. Henry was so ‘exasperated’ at their content ‘that he could no longer hear [Cromwell] spoken of, but rather desired to abolish all memory of him as the greatest wretch ever born in England’.51 The minister was stripped of all titles and it was decreed that he should henceforth be called merely ‘Thomas Cromwell, shearman’.

  The French king Francis I wrote to Henry on 15 June, praising God for the minister’s downfall, and for revealing ‘the faults and malversations52 of the unhappy person Cromwell, who alone has been the cause of all the suspicions conceived against not only [Henry’s] friends but his best servants’. Henry would soon realise ‘how much the getting rid of this wicked . . . instrument will tranquillise his kingdom, to the common welfare of church, nobles and people’.53 The French king’s comments indicate the trouble Norfolk had taken to poison his mind about Cromwell. As we have seen, a few months earlier Norfolk had cheerfully reported Francis’s views about the minister. Indeed, the king added in his letter: ‘Norfolk will be able to remember what I said’ so he clearly recalled the duke’s complaints about his treatment at Cromwell’s hands.

  On 17 June, Norfolk and Gardiner introduced a Bill of Attainder against Cromwell in the House of Lords.54 It was a spiteful document, short on facts but long on invective. The fallen minister, whom Henry had raised ‘from a very base and low degree’, had become ‘the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor’ of the king’s reign, as had been proved by many ‘personages of great honour, worship and discretion’. He was accused of being a ‘detestable heretic’ who sowed sedition and ‘false and erroneous books’ that discredited the Blessed Sacraments.

  The religious charges were the work of Gardiner, but Norfolk now had a chance to vent his spleen, accusing Cromwell of holding

  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 [London] 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.55

  The Bill 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. It was passed, without dissent, on 29 June, just before Parliament adjourned.56

  Henry needed Cromwell’s evidence to win his annulment of the loveless marriage with Anne of Cleves. Norfolk gloatingly led a small delegation of senior councillors to question him in the Tower, charging him to declare ‘as he would answer God at the day of judgement and also upon the extreme danger and damnation of his soul’ what he knew of the match. Cromwell quickly supplied the necessary evidence and Henry himself swore that ‘I never for love to the woman consented to marry, nor yet if she brought maidenhead with her, took any from her by true carnal copulation’.57 The duke was among a group of notables, including Cranmer and Bishop Tunstall, who also produced some rather bland testimony, signing himself ‘T Norfolk’.58

  The Clerical Convocation of two archbishops, sixteen bishops and one hundred and thirty-nine learned academics therefore annulled the king’s fourth marriage on 9 July, their decision confirmed by Parliament four days later.59 Anne was pensioned off and awarded an annuity of £500, or £220,000 a year at today’s prices, and a handsome portfolio of property, some of which came from Cromwell’s forfeited estates.

  There was much popular curiosity about what kind of dreadful means would be employed to kill Cromwell. Norfolk promised that his enemy’s demise would be ‘the most ignominious use in the country’. By this, he may have be referring to the decision - was it his? - to execute the disgraced minister with the clearly mad Walter, Lord Hungerford, who had been condemned for a whole raft of heinous crimes: sodomy, raping his daughter, paying magicians to predict when Henry would die and, finally, employing a chaplain who sympathised with the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace.60 His presence on the scaffold was an attempt publicly to humiliate Cromwell at his last hour.

  That came on the morning of 28 July at Tower Hill. The king had decided, in his infinite mercy, that Cromwell would suffer death by simple decapitation.

  Perhaps deliberately, a clumsy or at least inexperienced headsman called Gurrea was employed for the grisly task. One account talks of him and his assistant ‘chopping the Lord Cromwel
l’s neck and head for nearly half an hour’.61

  Norfolk’s eldest son, Surrey sneered: ‘Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ [noble] blood. These new erected men, would by their wills, leave no noble man a life.’ Acts of Attainder - Cromwell’s own device to destroy traitors - had become the instrument of his own demise: ‘Now he is stricken,’ Surrey crowed triumphantly, ‘with his own staff.’62

  On the same day that Cromwell was executed, Henry married Catherine Howard in a private ceremony at Oatlands Palace, near Weybridge, in Surrey.

  The Queen of England was now a Howard.

  Not everyone was jubilant about Cromwell’s death. In September, on his return to court, one of the king’s sewers,63 John Lassells, met three reformist friends, called Jonson, Maxey and Smethwick, in the king’s great chamber. He asked: ‘What news is there pertaining to God’s Holy Word, seeing we have lost so noble a man [Cromwell] which did love and favour it so well?’ Lassells did not believe that Norfolk and Gardiner loved the Bible. Maxey said the duke was not ashamed to declare ‘that he had never read Scripture in English, nor ever would. Only yesterday I overheard him say “It was merry in England before this new learning came up.”’ There were rumours around the court that Norfolk had rebuked a bureaucrat in the Court of Exchequer for marrying a nun, who had been expelled from her religious house. Her new husband had told him simplistically: ‘Well, I know no nuns or religious folk, nor such bondage, seeing God and the king have made them free.’ His response infuriated Norfolk: ‘By God’s sacred Body, that may be, but it will never be out of my heart as long as I live,’ cried the duke as he stormed off.