The Good, the Bad and the Unready (32 page)

Thomas Cromwell, first earl of Essex, c.1485–1540

After early careers as a soldier, accountant and merchant, Cromwell entered the service of Cardinal Wolsey and rose through the ranks to become BLUFF KING HAL’s chief minister. In 1534 he was appointed Henry’s vicar-general and the activities that earned him his nickname began.

Thomas’s remit in implementing the Act of Supremacy of
1534 was the suppression of the monasteries and confiscation of their property and treasures, and this he carried out with such ruthless zeal that he was ruefully dubbed ‘Malleus monachorum’, or ‘Hammer of the Monks’. Initially, all monasteries with an income of less than £200 were dissolved and their contents sold. This did not inflate the royal coffers as much as had been expected, and so in 1539 Parliament passed a law handing all of the country’s monastic houses over to the king. Some abbots resisted Thomas and his policies, and Thomas hammered them hard. Richard Whiting, for example, was dragged by horses from his abbey in Glastonbury to the top of a nearby hill, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered. His head was shoved on a spike above the abbey gate, and his ‘quarters’ were boiled in pitch and put on display in four West Country towns.

Although Thomas’s own religious views may not have been strong, his belief in the sovereignty of the king was absolute, and it was to foster his monarch’s links with the Protestant states of Europe that he arranged the marriage between Henry and Anne the MARE OF FLANDERS. Perhaps it was because he was brought up in a blacksmith’s forge, but Thomas’s inability to detect Anne’s equine attributes proved his undoing. Henry thought his new wife resembled a horse, and Cromwell was summarily accused of treason and beheaded.

Edward the
Hammer of the Scots

Edward I, king of England, 1239–1307

The inscription on Edward’s tomb in Westminster Abbey reads, ‘
Edwardus Primus Malleus Scotorum hicest
’ –‘ Here lies Edward I, Hammer of the Scots’. Scots are quick to remind anyone who would care to listen that while Edward may have hammered their nation, he never conquered it.

On his return from the Crusades (where his wife, Eleanor of Castile, had saved his life by sucking out poison from a dagger wound) Edward quickly subdued Wales and its king ‘Llewellyn the Last’, and then turned his attention to England. Here his
reformation of the legal and tax systems, and establishment of the country’s first formal parliament, won him the titles ‘the English Justinian’, ‘the Lawgiver’ and the rather cumbersome ‘the Father of the Mother of Parliaments’. With both Wales and England now under his sway, Edward finally began his campaign against Scotland in earnest.

In 1296 Edward easily deposed the Scottish king, TOOM TABARD, but the following year his real troubles began when he faced the wrath of Scottish rebel William Wallace and his brave-hearted men. Wallace, who was known by the matching nickname ‘the Hammer and Scourge of England’, was eventually captured and hanged, drawn and quartered. Scotland, however, refused to cave in.

Edward, who once ripped clumps of hair from the head of his son Edward CARNARVON, was not a peaceful sort, and he spent nearly a decade furiously trying to subdue his northern neighbours, but it was not to be. Trying to quell a rebellion led by Robert the BRUCE in the summer of 1307, he contracted dysentery and died near Carlisle, a short distance from a nation whose conquest he ached for but never achieved.

The more popular soubriquet for Edward did not refer to his notable military exploits but rather to a notable physical characteristic. If this had been followed, the inscription on his tomb would have read,
‘Edwardus Primus praeditus pedibus longis hic est
’ –‘ Here lies Edward Longshanks’.

Ferdinand the
Handsome
see
Ferdinand
THE INCONSTANT

Philip the
Handsome

Philip I, king of Castile, 1478–1506

Philip had a long nose, long hair and long limbs. The inhabitants of the Low Countries, over whom he was ruler from 1482, admired the dashing appearance of this son of ‘Maximilian the Penniless’ and styled him ‘Filips de Schone’. Later, the inhabitants
of Castile over whom he became king in 1502 similarly titled him ‘Felipe el Hermoso’.

His people may have admired him, but his young wife, Joan the MAD, was absolutely nuts about him. Historians with an eye for the titillating recount how the couple behaved when they first met. As soon as they clapped eyes on each other, we are told, they immediately summoned a priest to marry them on the spot. The declaration of their union had barely left the minister’s lips before the couple raced into the royal bedchamber to consummate their marriage.

Joan may have been madly in love with the good-looking Philip, but Philip was an inveterate womanizer with a bevy of mistresses. When he died still in his twenties – some say he caught a fever after playing a ballgame and then drinking too much cold water too quickly – many a woman mourned the loss of a sexy sovereign. Joan simply went completely and utterly insane.

John the
Handsome Englishman
see
John the
SILLY DUKE

Claude the
Handsome Queen

Claude, queen consort of Francis I of France, 1499–1524

When Claude, the unattractive daughter of Louis the
FATHER OF THE PEOPLE
, married Francis the
FATHER OF LETTERS
, the French people cruelly called her ‘the Handsome’. According to one contemporary, the Seigneur de Brantome, she was ‘very small and strangely fat’ with an unattractive round face and a squint in one eye. She was also lame, clomping through court with a pronounced limp. The day after their marriage Francis went hunting, and for some years took little interest in his bride except as a mother for his children.

Over time, however, both the king and the French people warmed to their queen. It was not just because she started to produce children at an admirable speed, nor because they had
grown accustomed to her plain, slightly melancholic face, which in a good light made her look like a rustic Madonna. It was because this long-suffering queen was charming. Claude was an excellent mother who adored her husband (bearing his lecherous infidelities with virtuous resignation) and who was unfailingly kind to all who met her. When she died, worn out by childbearing, in 1524, she died universally beloved, with all France mourning the passing of a woman whom one chronicler described as ‘the very pearl of ladies… without stain’. From initial facetious disdain, therefore, the French recognized that in their
bonne reine
true beauty lay within. The fruit known as the greengage in English is called
la reine-claude
in French in her honour.

 
Harold
Harefoot

Harold I, king of England, d.1040

Historical records such as the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
have little to say about Harold’s short reign except that he entered into a dispute with the Church over some lands at the southern port of Sandwich, and that he died in Oxford in 1040. We can deduce from his nickname, which derives from the Old Norse word
harfotr
, meaning ‘swift runner’, that he was fast on his feet and possibly fast on his horse when hunting. We can also deduce by what happened to his body after it was buried that Harthacanute, his half-brother, hated him.