Henry doted on his only son, immensely proud of siring such a healthy and athletic boy, proof that his lack of legitimate male heirs was not his doing. We do not know what Fitzroy felt for his father, but Mantel’s version has no love for him, and becomes fixated on the crown. Cromwell suspects this is Fitzroy’s father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk’s doing, or that of his brother-in-law, Henry Howard. Certainly the marriage between Fitzroy and Mary Howard in 1533 was most advantageous for the Howards, but would give Norfolk a dangerous amount of power should Fitzroy become king.
Despite Fitzroy’s position, and his belief that he was the logical choice, Chapuys believed he would not be considered, as by mid-1536 the young man was very ill, likely from consumption or lung disease. Mantel’s Cromwell also firmly tries to disabuse Fitzroy of the notion that he might be king, or that he, Cromwell, has the power to persuade Henry. Mantel’s Cromwell makes the salient point that while Fitzroy may be a boy, he is still the son of a mistress – Mary and Elizabeth are at least daughters of queens.
MARGARET DOUGLAS
Margaret Douglas was the daughter of Henry’s sister Margaret and her second husband, Archibald Douglas. They had married during her regency for her two-year-old heir, James V. The marriage caused a civil war in Scotland as warring factions tried to take the crown. Margaret was forced to flee across the border with her daughter to England, with young Margaret being sent to stay in Cardinal Wolsey’s household. Following the Cardinal’s death, Margaret was first transferred to the household of her cousin Princess Mary, where the two formed a close connection, before finally joining Anne Boleyn’s retinue. Diarmaid MacCulloch describes Margaret as a ‘loose cannon in the realm’ and indeed, while serving Anne, Margaret formed a secret attachment to Thomas Howard, the younger half-brother of the Duke of Norfolk.
In the series, the affair does not reach Cromwell’s ears until after Anne’s execution and he is frustrated that he has been so distracted by the chaos that he missed a dangerous relationship between a Howard and a potential heir to the throne. Historically, the affair was a small though troubling event in Henry’s reign, but its literary impact was far more significant.
Mantel’s Cromwell comes into the possession of a volume that contains almost 200 anonymous poems. This manuscript is one of the most important collections of Tudor courtly verse, written predominantly by the young women who served Anne Boleyn – Margaret Douglas, Mary Fitzroy, and Mary (or Margaret) Shelton, with some additions by Thomas and Henry Howard and Thomas Wyatt. The folio, known as The Devonshire Manuscript, housed in the British Library, provides a revealing insight into how men and women expressed themselves while negotiating courtly love, power, faith and politics; it is one of the most valuable surviving records of early Tudor poetry and the literary lives of Tudor women. But to Mantel’s Cromwell and Wriothesley, it provides evidence of an illicit affair that could have had serious dynastic ramifications.
Mantel’s Cromwell and Wriothesley interview Margaret Douglas, who is supported by her closest friend Mary Fitzroy. They quickly discover that the affair had gone well beyond courtly love, with Margaret insisting that they have been betrothed before witnesses. Mantel’s Cromwell quietly urges Margaret to deny the betrothal but she names other women who were witnesses. Both Margaret Douglas and Thomas Howard were sent to the Tower, where Howard was also interrogated.
Cromwell casts his net to bring in the young women who once served Anne Boleyn and who knew about Margaret Douglas and Thomas Howard, including Mary Shelton, Anne’s cousin, and Jane Rochford, George Boleyn’s widow (see chapter 4). An enraged Henry has Cromwell draw up the Bill of Attainder which would allow the crown to convict Howard without a trial, on the grounds that the relationship is a threat to the peace and unity of the realm and so constituted high treason. The bill also forbade any marriage to a female member of the royal family without the king’s assent. As Cromwell says: ‘The new clauses won’t necessarily stop royal persons doing stupid things. But they will create a formal process for dealing with them, when they do.’ On 18 July 1536, Howard was attainted and awaited a traitor’s death, though no execution was planned. Henry, still furious at his niece, kept her in the Tower, but allowed her to move to Syon Abbey when she fell ill, where she remained under house arrest.
Five days after the young Thomas Howard was attainted, Henry Fitzroy died at St James’s Palace. There was no state funeral; instead it was left to the Duke of Norfolk to make the arrangements for his son-in-law. Norfolk planned to have him interred at Thetford Priory, the ancestral resting place of the Howard family. It should have been fairly simple to transport the body from London to Norfolk in a dignified manner but somehow the decaying body ended up in a straw-filled wagon, followed by only two mourners. Henry was understandably incandescent with rage at such negligence. Norfolk wrote to Cromwell, mortified that his plans for the internment should have gone so awry. At the time of the letter, Norfolk was hosting Cromwell’s son Gregory, as part of a plan to immerse Gregory in high society. It marked the end of an era that proud Norfolk would be honoured to host the son of a man he had for years dismissed and disparaged.
RELIGION, THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES AND THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE
Throughout the medieval period, the Catholic Church was the spiritual authority and the lives of the people revolved around it. Everyone attended mass faithfully, sought forgiveness when necessary, and prayed for the dead to hasten their time in purgatory. Each day was punctuated by prayers which marked the passage of the hours and those who were literate read from the Book of Hours, a collection of biblical texts and prayers and elements of the liturgy. The most important book was the Bible, the text of which was in Latin, the language of the church. It was the role of the clergy to act as intermediaries and to interpret God’s word for the masses, a position that gave great power to its priests and nuns.
Throughout Europe, there was no other religious alternative and any discontent with the authority of the church or attempt to reform its practices was silenced. The Church was immensely powerful with an established hierarchy. This hierarchy provided not only spiritual guidance, but became a political and financial empire with its own army; it negotiated peace and war, and bargained with the princes of Europe. Favours could be bought, wealth could be made, and corruption was rife.
The seeds of discontent with the church had been festering across Europe since the Middle Ages. In the late 14th century, Oxford scholar and church dissident John Wycliffe protested against indulgences and other practices which he regarded as the corruption of the Church. He argued that a layperson should be able to read God’s words in a bible of their own language and oversaw an English translation. In Wittenberg, Germany, Martin Luther, a professor of theology, composer, priest and monk, rejected several teachings and practices of the Church, particularly the sale of indulgences, and his Ninety-five Theses made Luther a prominent figure in the Protestant Reformation.
Throughout Mantel’s series, we catch glimpses of the men who steered the Reformation – John Calvin, Desiderius Erasmus, Huldrych Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Wycliffe and Luther. Cromwell read and owned their books – regarded as heretical by the church – but it is difficult to pinpoint his faith. Mantel’s Cromwell states simply: ‘I believe, but I do not believe enough’. Mantel is careful that her Cromwell does not identify with any particular religious philosophy, or in her words, ‘explain himself’, but two of the greatest influences on Cromwell’s spirituality were Erasmus and William Tyndale. Luther became a particular cause of Henry’s, for different reasons.
MARTIN LUTHER
Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben, Saxony, and by 1507 had been ordained as a priest, but over the next ten years he rejected many of the church’s teachings. His key doctrine was that salvation or redemption was attainable only through faith in Christ, that is justification by faith alone. Aided by the Gutenberg printing press and woodcuts by Lucas Cranach, the controversies of matters such as church indulgences were made a matter for
the general public. Pamphlets were widely dispersed in Germany one day and read in Paris the next.
A deeply conventional Catholic, in 1521 Henry took it upon himself to repudiate Luther in writing, accusing him of being ‘a venomous serpent, a pernicious plague, infernal wolf, an infectious soul, a detestable trumpeter of pride, calumnies and schism’. But a spiritual debate had been ignited in Europe to determine, among other issues, how people reached salvation, how and by whom the Bible should be interpreted, the presence of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion, and the Holy Trinity.
DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
Erasmus, a leading philosopher and humanist thinker, was invited to England in 1499, to meet the boy who he hoped would be England’s Renaissance prince.
Erasmus was sceptical of Luther’s assertions, and is described by many as a Christian humanist, with a philosophy of life that combined Christian thought with classical traditions. Neither Erasmus nor Luther wanted their works associated with the other – although Erasmus had been an early critic of the Church and it is believed that the reformation could not have happened without him. When he was accused of laying the egg that Luther hatched, he responded that he laid a hen’s egg, and Luther had hatched a chick of a very different feather. Erasmus was lauded for his Latin and Greek versions of the New Testament, which would become important texts throughout the Reformation and the Counter Reformation.
Cromwell may not have been a patron and friend of Erasmus like Thomas More or Thomas Boleyn, but we do know he held the scholar in high esteem. When Mantel’s Cromwell finds himself in the tower in 1540, it is Erasmus’ book, De praeparatione ad mortem, that he reads, the very work Thomas Boleyn had commissioned from Erasmus seven years previously.
WILLIAM TYNDALE
Cromwell was also connected to William Tyndale, an English scholar and priest, who had also been influenced by Erasmus’ Greek edition of the New Testament, but when he petitioned to be allowed to translate the Bible into English, he was censured and he left England for Germany. The first printing of William Tyndale’s English New Testament was completed in 1526 in Worms, Germany, while smaller editions were smuggled into England; in Wolf Hall, Liz Cromwell receives the secret package along with Cromwell’s longed-for Castilian soap. It was condemned by Henry, Wolsey and More. However, Henry would come to agree with Tyndale on some key issues, not because of any new-found faith, but rather because such arguments suited him, namely Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, which argued that authority belonged to kings in their own realm, rather than the Pope. Unfortunately for Henry, Tyndale also believed that his first marriage was valid and criticized his pursuit of an annulment.
Historically, Cromwell was at the forefront of attempts to entice Tyndale back to England to write in defence of Henry’s annulment, with his friend, Stephen Vaughan meeting with Tyndale in person, but to no avail. Tyndale’s works made him a wanted man throughout Europe and he was always one step ahead of the authorities. He was eventually betrayed, arrested and taken to the castle of Vilvoorde, the great state prison of the Low Countries, and charged with heresy.
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES
Before his fall and death in 1530, Cardinal Wolsey had already begun a series of reforms of monasteries, much of which was carried out by his assistant, Cromwell. They had the authority of Parliament to suppress houses with fewer than 12 monks and transfer their assets to royal colleges at Windsor and Cambridge, and to unite others with larger institutions; no houses were suppressed ‘where God was well served’, only those ‘where most vice, mischief and abomination of living was used’. But when Henry failed to receive a satisfactory answer from Pope Clement in regards to the dissolution of his marriage to Katherine, he declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, and used his newly created Reformation Parliament to pass a series of laws that fundamentally changed the nature of Parliament and the English government. In 1534, Cromwell was appointed to undertake an inventory of the income of every ecclesiastical estate of England and Wales, including the monasteries, to assess their value. After all, these properties now belonged to the English crown, not to Rome. Henry had ushered in the English Reformation and every monastery must submit to the king’s authority.
THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE
The pace of religious change in the early years of the Reformation was too great for many in various areas of the country and not everyone was ready to embrace the break with Rome. Civic unrest morphed into civic insurrection. The autumn of 1536 saw violent religious riots against the king’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in York and Lincolnshire. Previous rebellions had come to nothing, but this one would quickly become an uprising that almost brought the Tudor dynasty to its knees.
The people of the North had long felt neglected and overlooked by a king who had never once visited its counties. Religious change, coupled with a bad harvest and the ever-impending threat of higher taxes, enraged the common people, who blamed Cromwell for leading the country to ruin. Henry ordered the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, to muster their loyal troops to suppress any possible insurrection. Cromwell wrote a letter to Thomas Boleyn, well respected and honoured in his county of Kent, to muster troops, which he did despite the letter being delayed by almost a week, giving him three days to comply. It speaks volumes that Thomas managed to gather 300 men and march to London.
Suffolk managed to contain the situation in Lincolnshire but in Yorkshire the rebels had rallied around a charismatic leader named Robert Aske, a well-connected lawyer who, like Cromwell, was a member of Gray’s Inn. Aske was able to marshal a rabble into a single united force which swelled as it moved south to York and Pontefract. He was careful in presenting the rebellion as a sacred mission and crafted their demands: Henry was to halt his suppression of the monasteries and restore what had been destroyed; Mary was to be reinstated as heir (without any male progeny Henry had no legal succession – he had disinherited them all); the architects of Henry’s religious programme, namely Cromwell and Audley, were to be executed, or at the very least exiled; and Cranmer and the other evangelical bishops were to be burned as heretics.
In The Mirror and the Light, Jane Seymour, who is often coached by Cromwell and her brothers, startles everyone by publicly beseeching her husband to allow his people to return to the old ways. We know that on numerous occasions Jane did plead the case for the rebels. Henry did not tolerate her interference and she was angrily rebuffed and warned not to meddle in royal affairs; however, in Mantel’s version, Henry indicates that he will listen to her complaints when she bears him a son.
Henry was conciliatory toward Aske, and invited him to Greenwich for Christmas, promising safe conduct. Henry used Jane as a beacon for the rebels, who approved of her conservative piety, and promised that she would be crowned in York. Aske left court satisfied, with a message of peace and a promise from Henry that he would open a parliament in the North to decide any further religious matters. However, within weeks a small revolt sprang up, and although it had nothing to do with Aske, it gave Henry a much-needed excuse to renege on his promises and arrest Aske together with dozens of rebels. In May 1537, eleven people, including Aske, were tried and later executed.
Cromwell had taken the rebellion seriously and understood the ramifications had fortunes been different. Now more than ever he was determined to press on with religious change.
The king’s vicious handling of the Pilgrimage of Grace and its leaders did not sit well with the people, who recalled their king being more benevolent in his youth. Cromwell remained deeply unpopular outside London but his countless duties kept him occupied. Mantel’s Cromwell hears of the rebels’ last days before they are executed, cursing Thomas Cromwell’s name. He warns Mary not to speak in their defence, and notes that Jane has likely been warned by her brother.
Peace became the theme of the new year. The rebellions had encouraged further religious reform, and in February 1537, Cromwell convened a vicegerential synod –
a council of the church. His opening speech called for a calm debate of theological issues, a timely plea considering the very first item on the agenda concerned the sacrament, a sore point between Catholics and reformers. All religious changes bore the stamp of Cromwell and his colleagues, Cranmer and Edward Fox, and Henry seemed to approve of his Privy Seal’s reforms, but Cromwell’s political authority had taken a blow following the Pilgrimage of Grace and he faced stern opposition from the Duke of Norfolk.
Cromwell was also active as the chief architect of diplomacy, much to Norfolk’s annoyance, who always preferred a French alliance to an Imperial alliance. In March 1537 we know that Thomas Wyatt, who had returned to some degree of favour, was sent as ambassador to the court of Charles V, ostensibly to improve relations and negotiate a marriage arrangement between Mary and Charles’ son, but also to prevent Charles from moving closer to France – the usual game of diplomacy. Cromwell may have been fond of Wyatt and had saved his life more than once, but he grew frustrated with Wyatt’s carelessness, and penchant for spending more than he earned, something we see in The Mirror and the Light.
After the death and destruction of 1536, marriages, coronations and births must have been welcome themes in 1537. Chapuys reported that Jane’s coronation was due to take place that summer, but speculated that Henry might hold off on such an expense until Jane proved she could carry an heir. Sometime in the spring of 1537 it was announced that Jane at last was pregnant, to the resounding joy of the country and to Henry’s great relief. Ambassadors remarked that he was more attentive than he had ever been, if that were possible, and when she developed cravings for quails he made sure plenty were shipped across from Calais.
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