Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (23 page)

Henry had been seeking another wife ever since the death of Jane Seymour; another son was likely to guarantee the future of his dynasty. The wives of kings were generally considered to be little more than brood mares. Charles V had proposed the duchess of Milan to him, and the French court had suggested various other ladies for the dubious honour of obtaining his hand. He asked the French ambassador to convey eight of them to Calais, where he could inspect them all at once; the invitation was declined.

Yet Cromwell, favouring a union with the Protestant princes of northern Europe, took the part of Anne of Cleves. Her father, only recently dead, had been a reformer if not precisely a Lutheran; Anne’s older sister was already married to the elector of Saxony. They would be invaluable allies. Henry also feared the collaboration between the French king and the emperor, together with the pope, in any future enterprise against England. At that very moment Charles V was travelling from Spain into France. Henry needed friends.

It was whispered that Anne of Cleves was as modest as she was beautiful; a portrait of her, executed by Hans Holbein, was brought to England. The king gazed upon it and pronounced her to be eminently worthy of marriage. It was reported at the time that she spoke no language but German and that she had no ear for music.
Yet in matters of state these are trifles. After the conclusion of some months of negotiation, the lady was shipped to England at the end of 1539. Henry was so eager to see her that he rode incognito to Rochester, where he looked upon her secretly. He did not like what he saw, comparing her to a Flanders mare. He berated the earl of Southampton for having written, from Calais, about her beauty. The earl excused himself on the grounds that he believed matters had gone too far to be reversed. The king’s anger then fell upon Cromwell. He told him that the proposed bride was ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’. He then asserted that ‘if I had known what I know now, she should not have come into this realm’. At a later meeting he asked him, ‘Is there none other remedy but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’

There was no remedy. He did not dare to renounce her at the cost of alienating his new allies in northern Europe and, as he put it, ‘for fear of making a ruffle in the world’. ‘I am not well handled,’ he told Cromwell. Cromwell would pay the price at a later date. The marriage was duly solemnized on 6 January 1540, even as the king was making it clear to his court that he had taken a great dislike to his bride. He was always scrupulously polite to her and, knowing no English, she may have been unaware of his aversion. The morning after the marriage Cromwell asked him if he now liked her more. No. He suspected that she was not a virgin, and she had such ‘displeasant smells’ about her that he loathed her more than ever. He doubted if the marriage would ever be consummated. In that speculation he proved to be right. The royal couple were married for a little over six months and, although on occasions they lay in the same bed, there was no progeny. Instead the king told one of his doctors that he had ‘
duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno
’ or, in common parlance, two wet dreams.

A courtier had come up to Cromwell as he stood alone in a gallery, leaning against a window. ‘For God’s sake,’ he told Cromwell, ‘devise how his grace may be relieved by one way or another.’

‘Yes, but what and how?’ Cromwell broke away saying, ‘Well, well, it is a great matter.’

Eventually it was proposed that there should be an amicable
separation; Anne of Cleves would not follow the same path as Anne Boleyn or even Katherine of Aragon. The convocation of the clergy were persuaded to declare the marriage null and invalid, on the grounds that there had been no issue, and parliament confirmed the verdict. Anne of Cleves herself did not seem particularly discomfited by the dissolution of her marriage, and was in any case given a generous pension. She learned English quickly enough, and settled down in the country for the next seventeen years with very few regrets. One of the many properties she owned is still to be seen in Lewes.

Henry was all the time attending carefully to the security and education of his only son. Edward was the key to the future. His first portrait, by Hans Holbein, was probably executed in 1540. It shows the infant dressed in rich robes, like a miniature version of his father. Like his father, too, he stares directly and calmly out of the canvas; his right hand is raised, as if he were about to make a declaration, and the rattle in his left hand closely resembles a tiny sceptre.

In this year a tutor, Richard Cox, was appointed to guide the three-year-old boy in all the lessons a virtuous prince must learn; another tutor, John Cheke, was appointed four years later. The two men were humanist scholars in the tradition of Erasmus, and seem to have trodden the same middle path in religion as Henry himself. The teachers of the heir to the throne could never have been Lutherans. Yet the truth remains that Edward endorsed a more radical Protestantism almost as soon as he gained the throne. He was to be called ‘the godly imp’.

He was instructed also in Greek and in Latin, of which he soon had a fair command. He would be introduced to the arts of horseriding and of archery, both fit for a king. As he acquired more learning the prince was given his own study, with a writing desk covered in black velvet; various mathematical and astronomical instruments were at his disposal, including a compass and a metal rule. A chess set lay on a shelf, while an hourglass hung from the wall. He had slates on which to write, as well as a variety of pens. In another room beside his bedchamber he kept miscellaneous papers concerning his mother, Jane Seymour, as well as his books;
he also owned a puppet, and two pairs of spectacles. Diverse carved and painted objects, such as a spear and a staff ‘of unicorns’ horns garnished with silver gilt’, were also to be found.

In the spring of 1540 Thomas Cromwell was created earl of Essex; his bright particular star was still in the ascendant. He was conducting the primary affairs of the nation; soon after his elevation he committed the bishop of Chichester to the Tower of London on the charge of favouring those who refused the oath of supremacy. He had also threatened the bishops of Durham, Winchester and Bath with the consequences of royal displeasure.

Yet there were always mutterings against him. He treated the nobles with a high hand, so that the duke of Norfolk in particular became his implacable opponent. He was accused of being over-mighty and over-wealthy, and of recklessly squandering the king’s treasure.

On the morning of 10 June 1540, he took his place in the Lords, as usual; at three in the afternoon of the same day he proceeded to his chair at the head of the council table. Norfolk shouted out, ‘Cromwell! Do not sit there! That is no place for you! Traitors do not sit among gentlemen.’ ‘I am not a traitor,’ Cromwell replied. Whereupon the captain of the guard, and six other officers, came to him.

‘I arrest you.’

‘What for?’

‘That, you will learn elsewhere.’

In his fury Cromwell threw his cap down on the stone floor of the chamber. ‘This, then,’ he said ‘is the reward for all my services.’ The members of the council then erupted in a fury of antagonism, screaming abuse and thumping their fists on the table.

It is impossible to unravel all the private suspicions and antagonisms that led to his fall. He was hated by many of the nobility who resented the fact that the son of a blacksmith should have risen above them. Those of the old faith detested him for his destruction of their shrines and monasteries. The public accusations against him were manifold. He was accused of taking bribes and of encroaching on royal authority in matters like pardoning
convicted men and issuing commissions. He was indeed guilty of all these, if guilty is the right word. They were really activities that came with the job, and had previously been tolerated by the king. Bribery was the only way, for example, that the system of administration could work.

Another set of charges concerned Cromwell’s beliefs; he was accused of holding heretical opinions and of supporting heretics in court and country. It was claimed that he was a Lutheran who had all the while been conspiring to change the religion of the nation; as the king’s ambassador to the emperor put it, he had allowed the impression that ‘all piety and religion, having no place, was banished out of England’. Letters between him and the Lutheran lords of Germany were discovered, although it is possible that they were forgeries. It was reported to the German princes that he had indirectly threatened to kill the king if Henry should attempt to reverse the process of religious reform; he had said that he would strike a dagger into the heart of the man who should oppose reformation. If such a threat had been made, then Cromwell was guilty of treason. It was of course the principal charge against him.

He was allowed to confront his accusers, but he was not permitted a public trial before his peers. He was instead subject to an Act of attainder for treason, a device that he himself had invented. The bill of attainder passed through both Lords and Commons without a single dissenting vote. Only Cranmer endeavoured to find a good word for him, and wrote to the king remarking on Cromwell’s past services. ‘I loved him as a friend,’ he said, ‘for so I took him to be.’

It is sometimes asserted that Cromwell’s fate was largely the consequence of the fatal alignment between religion and politics, but the bungled marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves also played some part in the matter. The French king and the emperor had failed to forge an alliance, so Henry no longer needed the princes of Germany for allies; the marriage had proved to be without purpose. Although Cromwell had expedited the union at Henry’s request and with Henry’s approval, he could not wholly shield himself from the king’s frustration and anger.

Of course the force of the conservative reaction to Cromwell’s statutes of religion, for which the Pilgrimage of Grace is evidence,
had shaken Henry; the king had colluded with them, but in the popular mind Cromwell was the prime mover of reform. He was the ‘evil counsellor’ who had given wicked advice to his sovereign. It was politic, therefore, that Cromwell should be given up.

Yet there were darker and deeper reasons for his removal. Cromwell had been arrested and tried as part of a diplomatic dance. The French king, Francis I, had always detested Cromwell as a heretic and as a supporter of the Spanish cause; when the duke of Norfolk came to the French court as a special ambassador, Francis suggested to him that an agreement might be reached if Cromwell were removed from office. Norfolk duly repeated this observation to the king. Henry himself was now happy to be characterized as a religious conservative, to ingratiate himself further with the French, and so it suited him to portray Cromwell as a covert Lutheran heretic who had misled his master. The fact that these charges were largely untrue was not important. In effect Cromwell had served his purpose, having enriched the king with the dissolution of the monasteries, and could now be dispatched from the scene.

Cromwell was removed to the Tower to await his execution by the axe. His house was searched and a hoard of ‘crosses, chalices, mitres, vases and other things from the spoils of the Church’ were discovered. Henry stripped him of all his titles, and declared that his former servant was to be known only as ‘Thomas Cromwell, cloth-carder’ in recognition of a former lowly occupation before his royal service. The church bells pealed in rejoicing, and impromptu parties were held in the streets of London.

From his last lodging he wrote a contrite letter to the king in which ‘your highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner, and poor slave’ begged for ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’. Mercy was not a commodity, however, in which the king traded. On the morning of 28 July Cromwell proclaimed on the scaffold that he was dying in the old faith, and then he bowed his head for the axe. The two executioners were ‘ragged and butcherly’, and another contemporary account describes how they were ‘chopping the Lord Cromwell’s neck and head for nearly half-an-hour’.

The fall of Cromwell was the harbinger of a more severe prosecution of those whom Henry and the conservative faction
deemed to be heretics. Robert Barnes, once an Augustinian friar at Cambridge, was one of the reformers whom Cromwell had protected; it was he whom Cromwell had used in the past as an envoy to the German Lutherans. In February 1540, Barnes preached against the leading conservative Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and accused him of setting ‘evil herbs’ in the ‘garden of scripture’. At the end of his sermon he had flung down his glove as a token of defiance against the bishop. Barnes was taken up, but recanted. Three months later, in the spring of 1540, he once again preached what was considered to be heretical doctrine at St Mary Spital; on this occasion he was sent to the Tower. It may be that, at this stage, he was used as part of the case against Cromwell; one of the vicegerent’s closest supporters, after all, was an arrant heretic. Two days after Cromwell’s execution, Barnes was burned at Smithfield.