Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (26 page)

His treasonous stance would have come as no surprise: he had been confessor to Catherine of Aragon and had been in and out of prison on several occasions for his creed. Forrest was now repeatedly given the chance to disown his beliefs and to repent, ‘but standing yet stiff and proud, refused to do [so]’ and rejected any penance ‘maliciously by the instigation of the devil’.

After a career of such intransigence, there could only be one outcome for his obstinacy.

On 22 May 1538, he was tied to a sheep hurdle and dragged by horse through the stinking streets from London’s Newgate Prison to Smithfield to be burnt for heresy.

Ten thousand citizens awaited his terrible death, summoned to watch by special proclamation. A wooden stand had been constructed for privileged spectators alongside the gate of the Church of St Bartholomew the Great: amongst them were the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earls of Sussex and Hertford, members of the King’s Council, and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Richard Gresham and his aldermen. Near the railed-off double gallows, a pulpit had been erected from which Bishop Latimer could harangue the prisoner, who was seated on a facing platform.

The choice of preacher had been Cromwell’s and Latimer, a popular orator, was the obvious man for the job. He was curiously jocular in his acceptance of the task. He wrote on 17 May:

If it be your pleasure … that I shall play the fool after my customary manner when Forrest shall suffer, I would wish that my stage [pulpit] stood near to Forrest for I would endeavour myself to content the people, that … I might also convert Forrest, God so helping, or rather working. Wherefore I would that he should hear what I say … If he would yet, with
heart, return to his abjuration, I would wish his pardon, such is my foolishness.
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On the day, in a tiresome three-hour sermon, the Bishop tediously described Forrest’s errors and ‘with many and godly exhortations moved him to repent … but he would neither hear nor speak’. Latimer demanded in what state he would die and Forrest

openly declared … with a loud voice … that if an angel should come down from heaven and show him any other thing than that he had believed all his lifetime, he would not believe him and that if his body should be cut, joint after joint, or member after member, burnt, hanged, or what[ever] pain might be done to his body – he would never turn from [adherence to] his old sect.

These were brave words from a man faced with the imminence of a horrible, lingering death and doubtless goaded by the smug, self-righteous oration he was forced to hear. What is more, Forrest defiantly told Latimer, the Bishop would never have dared to deliver such a sermon seven years before without endangering his own life. But times had changed and the tide of religious reform in England was ebbing back and forth. Forrest was now stranded high and dry and any hopes of an eleventh-hour reprieve had rapidly disappeared.

Cromwell had decided ruthlessly to make a special example of him to maximise the opportunity for showy propaganda and, equally importantly, to create a lasting deterrent to others.

Ellis Price, one of Cromwell’s ubiquitous religious visitors, had the previous month confiscated a giant wooden image from the early sixteenth-century church at Llandderfel, Merionethshire. The crudely carved and painted statue was of St Derfel, a seventh-century warrior-turned-hermit who later became abbot of a monastery on the tiny holy island of Bardsey, or Yns Enlli, 2 miles (3 km) off the Ll
ŷ
n Peninsula in North Wales.
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It portrayed the Celtic saint as a larger-than-life-sized man in armour, carrying a small spear and a shield, with an iron casket hanging by a ribbon around its neck. The Welsh venerated the figure and prayed to it, bringing with them offerings of pigs, oxen, horses and
hard cash.
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It was a very lucrative business for the local church, with almost constant revenues pouring into its coffers. Price had reported:

There were five or six hundred pilgrimages … that offered to the said image the fifth day of this present month of April.
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The innocent people have been sore allured and enticed to worship the image … [and] there is a common saying that whoever offers anything to the image, he [will] have power to fetch him or them that so offers out of hell when they be damned.
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It is hardly surprising that Cromwell’s man had been offered a hefty bribe of £40, or £15,000 in 2006 values, by the distraught parish not to take the wooden statue to London. But he had refused all blandishments and sent it on to the capital on the Lord Privy Seal’s instructions.
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The Welsh also had a superstition that the image, called Darvell Gadarn,
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would set a forest alight. This was to be Cromwell’s little joke. With a macabre sense of humour, he was about to prove the prophecy true. Deliberately, the execution was organised as pure theatre.

Latimer told the onlookers: ‘Oh, what errors has [the Pope] introduced into the church! And in order that you may the better understand this, you shall presently see one of his idolatrous images, by which the people in Wales have long since been deceived.’ Right on cue, the image was carried into Smithfield’s huge open space by eight men, to a great shout from the pressed mass of spectators. Three executioners, laughing and joking, made a clumsy charade of preventing its escape, throwing ropes around it ‘like a criminal condemned to death’.

Cromwell, directing the proceedings like a ghoulish master of ceremonies, turned to Latimer: ‘My lord bishop, I think you strive in vain with this stubborn one. It would be better to burn him.’ He ordered the waiting soldiers: ‘Take him off at once.’
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Forrest was led to the scaffold and brutally hoisted up in the air, suspended by chains around his waist and under his arms. Below his dangling and kicking feet, they started building the fire that would destroy him.

As the three executioners manoeuvred the wooden image into place
on the pyre, Forrest jokingly warned them: ‘Brethren, I pray you do not drop it on me, for my hour is not yet come,’ and, turning to the Bishop, added: ‘All the treasures of the world, Latimer, will not make me move from my will, but I much desire to speak with one of the gentlemen here.’ Norfolk, watching in the stand, stood up to talk to him, but Cromwell immediately silenced him: ‘My lord duke, take your seat again. If he wants to say anything, let him say it out [loud] so that we can all hear.’ Forrest merely responded: ‘Gentlemen, with this body of mine, deal as you wish.’
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Faggots of tinder-dry wood were piled on the image and the fire lit with flaming torches. As the crackling flames rose and scorched Forrest’s feet, he drew them up, shrinking from the heat. He beat his blackened breast with his right hand and offered up prayers in Latin: ‘
Domine miserere mei
’ – ‘God have mercy upon me.’

The friar, swinging in the thick smoke from the blaze, caught hold of the ladder set against the gallows and, as a later (rather partisan) chronicler put it, ‘would not let go, but so unpatiently took his death that no man that ever put his trust in God never so unquietly nor so ungodly ended his life’.
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Forrest took almost two hours to die, finally yielding up his soul when the flames reached his chest. His supporters claimed that a dove ‘as white as snow’ hovered over the place of execution for some time as the fire died down.

After it was finally out, Cromwell arranged for a placard to be nailed to the scaffold with this doggerel verse painted on it ‘in great letters’:

David Darvell Gadarn,

As say the Welshmen,

Fetched outlaws out of Hell.

Now he is come with spear and shield

In harness to burn in Smithfield,

For in Wales he may not dwell.

And Forrest the friar,

That obstinate liar,

That wilfully shall be dead,

In his contumacy

The Gospel does deny,

The king to be Supreme Head.
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Cromwell’s propaganda had an immediate effect. Some time after midnight that night, the Holy Rood – the figure of Christ crucified, flanked by the Virgin Mary and St John – standing atop the chancel screen in one of London’s churches, St Margaret Pattens,
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on the corner of Eastcheap, was smashed to pieces ‘by certain lewd persons, Flemings and Englishmen and some persons of the said parish’.
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The old religion was being slowly but surely swept away.

Cromwell, meanwhile, was also concerned with more personal and lucrative matters. In February 1538, Henry granted Lewes Priory and its possessions to his Minister, with the Duke of Norfolk receiving his share of the proceeds in the valuable properties at Castleacre in Norfolk and a total of 126 manors and lordships, together with the rectories and advowsons
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of twenty-nine parishes in the same county. Cromwell was anxious to speedily destroy the Cluniac priory and provide a new, grand house at Lewes for the enjoyment of his son Gregory, worthy of his family’s status. He recruited the Italian engineer Giovanni Portinari,
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who earlier had built scenery for Henry’s masques, to take charge of the demolition operations. The huge priory church, which had a nave 150 ft (45.72m) long, was one of the great Romanesque churches of Western Europe and its destruction remains an incomparable architectural loss to English culture.

Progress was reported on 20 March, Portinari having previously described how they had sapped under the church walls to bring them crashing down, employing the same methods by which castles were undermined in siege warfare:

I told your lordship of a vault on the right side of the high altar that was borne up with four great pillars, having about it five chapels, which be compassed in with the walls seventy steps of length, that is 200 feet. All this is down on Thursday and Friday last.

Now we are plucking down an higher vault, borne up by four thick and gross pillars, thirteen feet from side to side, about in circumference forty-five feet. This shall [go] down for our second work …

We have brought from London seventeen persons; three carpenters; two smiths; two plumbers; and one that keeps the furnace [to melt the lead taken off the roof] … Ten of them hewed the walls about, among the which were three carpenters [who] made props to underset [the walls] where the others cut away, [while] the others broke and cut the walls. These men exercised [worked] much better than the men we find here in the country.

Wherefore we must both have more men and other things also that we have need of …

On Tuesday, they began to cast the lead and it shall be done with such diligence and saving as may be so that … your lordship shall be much satisfied with that we do.
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Many of the monastic buildings were swept away; others kept for agricultural purposes. One structure, the Prior’s House, was preserved and converted into a suitable dwelling for Gregory Cromwell, called ‘Lord’s Place’. The following month, Cromwell’s son went to see it: ‘Concerning the house and the situation of the same, it does undoubtedly right much please and content me and my wife, and is … so commodious that she thinks herself to be here right settled.’

The local gentry had enthusiastically, sycophantically welcomed the son and heir of the Lord Privy Seal to his new home and ‘both with their presences and their presents, right friendly entertained me and [greeted] me to these parts’.
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Back in London, Cromwell was always worried about safeguarding the Tudor grip on the throne of England, if only because his own flag was nailed so very firmly to Henry’s mast. He always feared that the remaining Plantagenet families were uncomfortably close to the royal line and consequently posed a constant threat to the ageing king and his young heir. These survivors of the White Rose Yorkist faction of the bitter civil wars of the previous century – the Nevills, the Courtenays and the Poles – walked a narrow, dangerous path between life and death, especially since their overt support of Catherine of Aragon over the royal divorce. Henry himself now declared his own intention to finally pluck the White Rose, even though some were his blood relatives.
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The Poles were already suspect because of the treasonable activities of Reginald Pole, a son of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, and niece of Edward IV. Pole had studied in Padua, Italy, and had returned to England in 1527, where he met Cromwell, at that time serving in Wolsey’s household. Their conversation then was a harbinger of the personal strife between them that was to follow. Cromwell told Pole, in an obvious reference to the required divorce from Catherine of Aragon, that princes were not bound by the same code of morals as mere ordinary subjects. Pole later claimed that Cromwell handed him a copy of Niccolò Machiavelli’s controversial book
Il Principe
, which discussed how princes could govern Renaissance states, and told him, dismissively, to read and inwardly digest its contents.
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The lesson was wasted. In May 1536, Pole, back in Italy, wrote a book in the form of an open letter to Henry entitled
Pro Unitate Ecclesiae
, which included an eloquent and stinging attack on the King’s supremacy over the English Church. Even conservative Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham told Pole that the book ‘made me heavy in my heart, seeing the vehemence and eagerness of it all through’.
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With a nervous eye on Henry’s certain vengeance, one piece of information made Tunstall ‘cold in heart … when you wrote of two quires which be not in your hands to repress … Burn them for your own honour and that of your noble house.’ Tunstall bluntly warned Pole ‘of the discomfort it will be to my lady, your mother, to see you swerve away from your Prince and also to my lord your brother’.

Henry was predictably apoplectic with rage and Pole’s family horrified. The Countess of Salisbury told her son, in a letter clearly dictated to her, probably by one of Cromwell’s clerks: ‘I send you God’s blessing and mine though my trust to have comfort in you is turned to sorrow. Alas that I, for your folly, should receive from my sovereign lord such [a] message as I have late done … [and] to see you in his grace’s indignation.’
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His father had the uncomfortable experience of an angry King reading out choice extracts from the book, ‘that it made my poor heart so to lament that if I had lost mother, wife and children, it could no more have done … It is incredible to me that by reason of a brief sent to you
by the bishop of Rome, you should be resident with him this winter. If you take that way, then farewell, all my hope.’
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