Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII

by Loades, David

  Gertrude was released shortly afterwards, but Edward remained in custody until he was released by Queen Mary in 1553, and Henry died in the Tower. It is sometimes claimed that the fall of the Poles and Courtenays was a gratuitous bloodbath engineered by Cromwell on account of their proximity to the throne.69 However the Yorkist claim, known as the White Rose, is scarcely mentioned except in circumstantial observations by Eustace Chapuys, who reported that Henry had ‘long since’ threatened to exterminate its offshoots. In fact neither Henry Courtenay nor Reginald Pole had a strong claim. The former was a grandson of Edward IV through his daughter Catherine, who had married his own father, William, and the latter, as we have seen, was a grandson of George, Duke of Clarence, Edward’s brother. Admittedly Henry had only one son, Prince Edward, born to Queen Jane Seymour in October 1537, and the succession was thus fragile, but there is no reason to suppose that either Henry or his Lord Privy Seal were motivated by such a consideration. The accused were all guilty of treason as that was then defined, conspiring to take away one of the king’s titles, that of Supreme Head of the Church, and wishing to invite a foreign power, either the Pope or the Emperor, to intervene in English affairs. There were no overt deeds, but of ‘imagining’ the king’s harm there was abundant evidence; and far more people were implicated than the seven who suffered.70 Nor were the trials rigged in the way which has been alleged. The attendance of peers at the Lord Steward’s court was fairly representative, and the composition of the commission which tried the commoners was unremarkable. The evidence spoke for itself, and the fact that England was threatened by an Imperial or French invasion on account of the amity between Charles and Francis added to the urgency of the situation. For the first time in years, a foreign intervention in England appeared possible, even likely, and anyone guilty of encouraging such an eventuality could expect little mercy. Instead of being blamed for arranging a bloodbath, Cromwell deserves commendation both for the thoroughness of his investigation, and for his restraint in bringing the guilty parties to the scaffold.71

  Cromwell had been reasonably comfortable with the Seymour ascendancy at court, which had begun in the spring of 1536 and found its consummation in the marriage of the king to Jane on 30 May. Her brother, Sir Edward Seymour, whom he would have known from their days with Wolsey, was created Viscount Beauchamp the following month and was a man of talent and substance, but he was nowhere near challenging the ascendancy of the Lord Privy Seal. Nor was Jane herself a political figure of any significance, being quite unlike Anne in that respect. Sir Edward had borrowed money from the king, a deal which Cromwell had undoubtedly set up, but this created no more than an ordinary sense of obligation. There was no sense in which he was Cromwell’s man, but that did not matter. As the king’s brother-in-law he enjoyed a certain prestige in the Privy Chamber, but he had no political agenda. His position was enhanced on 18 October 1537 by his creation as Earl of Hertford, but this was primarily a recognition of his status as uncle of the heir to the throne, who had been born a few days earlier, rather than of any other ambition.72 When Jane died unexpectedly on 24 October, he did not go into eclipse, but remained a substantial courtier. At that stage he was conservative in his religious preferences, as Jane had been, but not militantly so, and as time would show was open to persuasion. There is no evidence that Cromwell addressed himself to this task, and it only became apparent after his fall. Jane’s death did, however, give the Lord Privy Seal a considerable problem, which had nothing to do with the Earl of Hertford. The succession, which had been an issue for so many years, had been solved in a sense by the birth of Prince Edward. However, one very young life did not represent security, and it was imperative that Henry should marry again, and quickly, as time was not on his side.73 The king, however, was deeply affected by his wife’s death, and was not inclined to consider remarriage. In this situation, Cromwell took the initiative, and raised the matter in council, which rapidly agreed that the king should be persuaded to marry again. Henry reluctantly agreed and Cromwell wrote to the ambassadors in France and the Empire, urging them to look for suitable candidates. The king, he admitted, was not personally minded to such a venture, but had agreed to undertake it for the sake of the realm, and because he needed more children.74 The Lord Privy Seal was also mindful of the fact that Henry needed allies abroad, and that another domestic marriage might raise up formidable rivals to him for the king’s favour, as had happened with the Boleyns. Cromwell’s favoured candidate at this early stage was the sixteen-year-old Christina, Duchess of Milan, who was brought to his attention by John Hutton, the Governor of the Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp who doubled as an English agent in Flanders. The recently widowed Christina had just arrived at the court of Margaret of Savoy, the Emperor’s Regent in the Low Countries, and Hutton was lyrical in her praise: ‘A goodly personage of body and competent of beauty, of favour excellent, soft of speech and very gentle of countenance.’75

  Christina was the daughter of the deposed King of Denmark, Christian II, and the niece of the Emperor, so a match with her would favour the Imperial alliance which, as we have seen, was Cromwell’s preferred option in foreign policy. According to Chapuys he proposed a multiple settlement, in which Henry would marry Christina, Edward (still in his cradle) would be espoused to Charles’s daughter Maria, and Elizabeth to a son of the Duke of Savoy.76 However, he was running somewhat before his horse to market, because the king’s preference, when he got around to thinking about it, was for a French marriage. According to the French ambassador, Castillon, he was castigated for intruding into the king’s personal affairs, but the chances are that this was exaggerated, because it was Cromwell’s business to look after his master’s interests internationally as well as domestically.77 In any case he was involved in both sets of negotiations from the beginning, since it was in his letter to Sir John Wallop in France announcing Jane’s death that the possibility of a French marriage had been raised; either the king’s sister Marguerite or the widowed Marie of Guise were mentioned. So two negotiations were launched more or less simultaneously, and Cromwell must have been at some pains not to let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. In December 1537 Henry sent Peter Mewtas, one of the gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, across to France to sound out Marie of Guise, who was the favourite, and he returned with the impression that she was available. However by the time that he returned with the king’s offer in February 1538, she had been snatched from under his nose by James V of Scotland, to whom she was formally betrothed.78 This was not only an unpleasant reminder that the Auld Alliance was in full working order, but a blow to Henry’s amour propre. How could any woman prefer a beggarly fellow like the King of Scots to his majesty of England? Cromwell may not have been too disappointed by this denouement because it enabled him to concentrate on persuading the king of the desirability of Christina of Denmark. In this he appears to have been successful, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, with the Emperor, was instructed to raise the possibility as though it were his own idea. This it was hoped would stimulate Charles into making an offer, which would enable Henry to put forward certain demands in return for his agreement. In particular he was anxious to recruit the Emperor’s support in frustrating Paul III’s proposed General Council of the Church, which he feared would be used against him. As early as October 1537 he had instructed Wyatt to ‘sound out’ the Emperor’s attitude to such a council in view of the fact that both the Lutherans and Henry had rejected it.79 At the beginning of March he sent Philip Hoby, another gentleman of his Privy Chamber, across with Hans Holbein to secure a portrait of the lady, because he was reluctant to commit himself to one of whose very appearance he was in ignorance.80 They returned before the end of the month, and Henry was delighted with the result, soon pretending quite wrongly that he was being wooed from all sides. This must have been self-deception because Cromwell would never have dared to give him so false an impression. Moreover the negotiations soon encountered insuperable obstacles. In the first place Christina was a kinswoman o
f Catherine of Aragon, and a dispensation would have been required for her marriage to Henry. A papal dispensation, favoured by the Emperor, was unacceptable to the English, and an authorisation issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury was equally unacceptable to Charles. In the second place the lady herself was reluctant, claiming that her great aunt had been poisoned, her successor executed, and the third wife lost for lack of care. She had no desire to be the fourth.81 Although the negotiations dragged on past midsummer, there was no real prospect of success.

  At the same time the French, not unaware of these difficulties thanks to their sharp-eyed ambassador, came up with two fresh offers; either Louise de Guise, Marie’s sister, or the third Guise girl, Renee, reputedly the most beautiful of the three. Other ladies were mentioned, and in the summer Holbein was sent back to draw as many of them as possible. He came back with two portraits, and a third was provided by the French themselves. By this time the animosity of Francis and Charles was showing signs of coming to an end, and Henry was anxious to be included in any future treaty between them. This was undoubtedly a clause which Cromwell, ever mindful of his security, would have urged upon him, just as it was Cromwell who inserted the future of Milan into the Imperial negotiations. The suggestion was that the Emperor should confer the duchy on the Imperial candidate for Mary’s hand, Dom Luis of Portugal, that discussion having run alongside the king’s own bid for Christina.82 Milan was a sensitive spot in Franco-Imperial relations, and the Lord Privy Seal was well advised to make an issue of it. Unfortunately such a consideration could not stand in the way of the need of both sovereigns for peace. To Henry’s intense chagrin they met under the Pope’s mediation at Nice in June 1538 and signed a ten-year truce which completely ignored him. So much for his hopes that matrimonial negotiations would keep alive the spirit of animosity between these natural rivals, and the English were left to digest failure on all fronts, because the French discussions had also come to an ignominious end when Henry tried and failed to persuade Francis to parade his beauties at Calais for an inspection. Was this how the Knights of the Round Table treated their womenfolk, he was asked by an outraged ambassador.83 By the autumn of 1538 England was consequently isolated. Henry had been mocked by his fellow monarchs and now stood in danger of the General Council which Paul had been endeavouring to call for two years. On 17 December the Pope at last promulgated the sentence of excommunication which had been suspended over three years earlier, declaring the King of England deposed and absolving his subjects of their allegiance. The situation which Cromwell had worked so hard to avoid had now arisen, and in January 1539 Francis and Charles signed a treaty of mutual friendship at Toledo in which each agreed to enter into no relations with the English without the other’s consent. The withdrawal of ambassadors, economic embargoes and even military invasion would now surely follow.84 As if to emphasise the danger, Cardinal Reginald Pole set off on a fresh mission to mobilise the powers against Henry, and Cardinal David Beaton was sent home to stimulate James V in the same direction. The danger appeared to be acute, and musters were ordered across the south of England. In May the king reviewed his troops in London and responded to the Emperor’s ban on English shipping by detaining all foreign ships in English ports. He also ordered fortifications to be built along the south coast, and Cromwell was kept busy mobilising workmen and arranging for building supplies to be delivered on site at about a dozen locations from Pendennis to Margate.85 At the same time the defences of Berwick and Calais were also strengthened, and the fleet put on standby. The south of England resembled a warzone, as bulwarks were built, and other temporary defences put in place to withstand the expected assault.

  All these precautions proved to be unnecessary as it became clear that neither Francis nor Charles, for all their belligerent talk, was willing to take any action. Ambassadors were indeed withdrawn, but the French one was quickly replaced and in March the French king privately advised Henry that the warlike preparations which Cromwell’s agents had observed were not directed against him. For the time being alarms about Imperial intentions persisted. There was rumoured to be great fleet assembling at Antwerp, and an army preparing in Flanders, but it soon transpired that these reports were exaggerated, and in any case not directed against England. Pole’s mission also foundered on Charles’s reluctance. He was prepared, he said, to do his duty, but only if Francis moved first, which the latter was plainly unwilling to do.86 So unwilling was Francis that he declined to see Pole, who was constrained to send an envoy to receive the discouraging tidings. The cardinal withdrew to Carpentras, and sent to Rome for fresh instructions. Since he had no money and no military resources of his own, his mission had clearly failed, and he was shortly after recalled. David Beaton had no better luck, because James was clearly waiting for the French to move, and when that showed no sign of happening he decided that he had no quarrel with his uncle which would justify an invasion. However, in spite of these failures, England still had no reliable ally on the Continent, and that was a matter of great concern to the Lord Privy Seal. There were two possible ways out of this dilemma. One was to form an alliance with the Schmalkaldic League, which had been tried before without success, though in the new circumstances Henry might be more willing to accept the Germans’ conditions.87 The second was a matrimonial link to the Duchy of Cleves, whose duke shared Henry’s hostility to the Pope without being a Lutheran. Duke John had two daughters, Anne and Amelia, who might be available to seal such a treaty, and had fallen out with the Emperor. The possibility of such an alliance had been raised as early as June 1538, when it had been suggested that Mary might marry a son of the duke and the king take a kinswoman. However at that time it was lost in the welter of other proposals in hand and had not been pursued. Now in January 1539 Cromwell picked up both themes, sending Christopher Mont to the Elector of Saxony, not only to revive the proposal of a league with the Lutherans, but also to sound him out indirectly about the possibility of the Cleves marriage. The elector was the son-in-law of Duke John, so his attitude was important.88 Towards the end of February a second mission, led by the veteran diplomat Edward Carne, was sent directly to the duke for the same purpose, and to recruit some mercenary soldiers that he was alleged to have available. In March Mont reported back. The elector was not enthusiastic about an alliance with the Schmalkaldic League, but he was supportive of the Cleves marriage. Mont had also received excellent reports of Anne’s personal qualities, having heard that she excelled the Duchess of Milan ‘as the golden sun [does] the silver moon’.89 Nevertheless Carne’s negotiation hung fire. Possibly William, the new duke who had succeeded his father in February, was less enthusiastic, or possibly he was holding out for a more supplicatory approach from England. Anyway the ambassador was told that Anne was promised to a son of the Duke of Lorraine, and could obtain no firm guarantee of an embassy from Cleves to England to resolve the matter. Nor could he obtain any portrait of Anne, whom he had only seen under ‘monstrous habit and apparel’, catching a mere glimpse of her face. By the end of June he was becoming distinctly frustrated.90

  Meanwhile the Elector of Saxony had been persuaded to send a mission to London on behalf of the Schmalkaldic League. It was a low-key affair, headed by Francis Burckhardt, the Vice-Chancellor of the Electorate, and it is clear that nothing much was expected of it. This was because they were under strict orders to accept from Henry nothing less than a full endorsement of the Confession of Augsburg, which they knew that he would be unwilling to grant. It is probable that this embassy was set up by Cromwell with no more than a nod from the king, and more in hope than expectation, because it represented a policy to which he had been committed for a number of years. Henry had been let off this time because the hostility between Charles and Francis had surfaced again within weeks of the signing of the Treaty of Toledo, but it might not always be thus and a reliable ally against the papacy was a jewel beyond price. Particularly one so well placed to frustrate the Emperor and keep his attention focused on his own affairs. However his
time was ill chosen, because in the spring of 1539 the king was becoming increasingly alarmed at the disruptive effects which evangelical preaching were having on the kingdom, and decided to act against the preachers. This did not suit Cromwell’s agenda at all, and reflects the fact that Henry was always capable of taking an independent initiative. He set up a series of discussions between conservative bishops and other divines, and the result was a Bill ‘abolishing diversity in opinion’, otherwise known as the Six Articles.91 This measure was introduced into the House of Lords by the Duke of Norfolk, and probably prepared by Stephen Gardiner. It was the last thing that the Schmalkaldic delegation wished to hear as they pursued their fruitless negotiation, especially as the king told them that if they did not like it, they could always go home. In fact they held on until August, perhaps in the hope that Cromwell’s influence would reassert itself, but the Lord Privy Seal knew a lost cause when he saw one, and concentrated on mitigating the effects of the enforcement of the Act; so Burckhardt and his colleagues departed disappointed, as they had expected to do.

  The Act of Six Articles was set back for Cromwell, but it did not mark the end of his predominant influence. It closed off one of the alliances with which he had been hoping to protect his master’s supremacy, but left the other open. Realising that he must now redouble his efforts in Cleves, in early July he sent across another envoy, William Petre, to stir up the existing mission, and followed this by sending Hans Holbein to obtain the elusive portrait which the duke had been so reluctant to provide. By 11 August Holbein was back and presented the results of his efforts to the king who was at Grafton on his summer progress. Henry was impressed, but more impressed by the fact that Petre had secured a breakthrough in the negotiation. On 4 September Duke William finally commissioned an embassy to England for the purpose of arranging a marriage between his sister and the king.92 Henry received these delegates on 24 September, but left the discussions to Cromwell and his team. They moved swiftly and by 6 October a treaty had been concluded, which provided for an alliance of mutual defence as well as for the early delivery of the lady, and both parties professed themselves well satisfied. The duke had the assurance of English aid if he should be attacked by the Emperor on account of the Duchy of Gelderland, which he had inherited the previous summer and which was a bone of contention between them; and the king was guaranteed the duke’s assistance if Charles should change his mind about obeying the Pope’s call to action. Anne duly set off at the end of October, accompanied by a lavish train which drastically slowed her progress, but, rather surprisingly, included no member of her family. The English expected her to sail from Antwerp, but her escort pleaded the dangers of the rather longer sea crossing, and she arrived instead at Calais on 11 December. There she was entertained by the deputy, Lord Lisle, and his wife, and made a good impression in spite of the fact that she spoke no language other than her own Low German. She would be, Lady Lisle decided, a gentle mistress to serve, which was a matter of no small concern to her since her own daughter Anne Basset was one of the ladies appointed to wait on her in England.93 She learned some new card games, and was instructed on the etiquette of the English court. Then the weather relented, and on 27 December she was able to cross to England, landing at Deal the same day. From Deal she proceeded to Canterbury and reached Rochester on 1 January 1540. Meanwhile Henry had passed a lonely and impatient Christmas at Greenwich. At length, consumed with curiosity to see this paragon who was to share his bed, he decided on a little old-fashioned knight errantry. Confiding to Cromwell his intention to ‘nourish love’ he rode to Rochester to intercept her incognito. Making his way into the bishop’s palace, where she was lodged, he burst into her presence unannounced, taking the poor girl completely by surprise. Not knowing the identity of the intruder, she was flummoxed, and seems to have thought that she was about to be kidnapped. Henry was profoundly and unreasonably disappointed by her lack of response, and withdrew, returning later in his own person, his companions deferring to him and making his identity plain. Then Anne found suitable words to welcome him, but the damage had been done. The New Year gifts which he had brought her were delivered the next morning by one of his servants, and he returned to Greenwich in a foul mood. ‘I am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done, and I like her not,’ he confided to Cromwell, adding that if he had known the truth about her, she would never have come to England.94 No doubt puzzled by this encounter, Anne proceeded on her scheduled way, being received two days later on Shooters Hill with splendid pageantry, and solemnly escorted to Henry at Greenwich. There on 6 January they were married.