The Cromwell Enigma
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Derek Wilson is the author of the acclaimed Thomas Treviot historical crime series, in which the protagonist investigates real unsolved Tudor crimes, fighting to bring truth to light in the corrupt world of Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. Derek is also a renowned historian and has written more than seventy books, including The Plantagenets (Quercus, 2011), A Brief History of Henry VIII (Robinson, 2009) and The Uncrowned Kings of England (Robinson, 2005), as well as critically acclaimed biographies of Charlemagne and Holbein. He writes and presents for television and radio, frequently contributes to history magazines, and is the founder of the Cambridge History festival.
Other Tudor mysteries by D. K. Wilson
The Thomas Treviot series:
The First Horseman
The Traitor’s Mark
The Devil’s Chalice
‘Derek Wilson is a fine historian – and he can tell a gripping story. This is historical fiction at its best, effortlessly underpinned by a wealth of research by a writer whose understanding of the period is profound.’
Alison Weir
First published in Great Britain in 2020
Marylebone House
36 Causton Street
London SW1P 4ST
www.marylebonehousebooks.co.uk
Copyright © Derek Wilson 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978–1–910674–52–9
eBook ISBN 978–1–910674–53–6
Typeset by Manila Typesetting Company
First printed in Great Britain by Jellyfish Print Solutions
Subsequently digitally printed in Great Britain
eBook by Manila Typesetting Company
Produced on paper from sustainable forests
Contents
List of characters, real and imaginary, who appear in this story
Introduction
1 How it came to pass
2 London
3 London
4 Sea interlude
5 Antwerp
6 Antwerp
7 Home
8 Florence
9 Florence
10 Florence
11 Southampton
12 London again
13 A royal Christmas
14 A royal Christmas
15 Leicestershire
16 Leicestershire
17 On the road
18 Oxford
19 Putney
Notes on historical characters
List of characters, real and imaginary, who appear in this story
Those marked with an asterisk are more fully described in the Notes on historical characters at the back of the book
Agostino, Luigi
Member of the Frescobaldi banking and merchant family
*Augustinis, Augustino de
Venetian doctor and spy
Barnes, Robert
Prior of the Augustinian house in Cambridge
*Bisley, Richard
Oxford cleric and theologian
*Blagge, Sir George
English courtier
*Bourbon, Nicholas
French poet, Latinist and courtier
Calloni, Luigi
Member of the Frescobaldi banking and merchant family
Carteret, Simon
English merchant, resident in Antwerp
*Chambers, John
Abbot of Peterborough
*Coverdale, Miles
Bible translator
*Cranmer, Thomas
Archbishop of Canterbury
*Cromwell, Gregory
Baron Cromwell
*Cromwell, Lady Elizabeth
Wife of Gregory Cromwell
*Cromwell (aka Williams), Sir Richard
Nephew of Thomas Cromwell
*D’Albret, Marguerite
Queen of Navarre
*D’Albret, Princess Jeanne
Daughter of Marguerite of Navarre
D’Ebret, Claude
Chamberlain to Marguerite of Navarre
De Keyser, Françoise
Proprietor of an Antwerp printworks
*Della Fava, Alessandro
An agent of the Frescobaldi bank
De Somery, Yvette
A weaver’s wife from Colignac
Doughty, Thomas
English privateer captain
Frescobaldi, Francesco
Member of the Florentine banking and merchant family
*Gardiner, Stephen
Bishop of Winchester
Girolamo, Florentine
Dominican prior
Hankley, Mary (née Barton)
Proprietor of Putney Hill mill
*Lascelles, John
English courtier
*Marillac, Charles de
French ambassador at the court of Henry VIII
*Marot, Clément
French Renaissance poet
*Mill, John
English merchant based in Southampton
*Morison, Richard
English courtier and diplomat
*Prior, Mercy
Mother-in-law of Thomas Cromwell
*Rogers, John
Chaplain to the English merchant house at Antwerp
*Seymour, Edward
Earl of Hertford
Speronti, Antonio
Florentine apprentice painter
Susan
A servant girl
Traversi, Maria
Member of the Frescobaldi banking and merchant family
Valdes, Hernando
Spanish naval captain
*Vaughan, Stephen
Head of the English merchant community in Antwerp
Vi
telli, Guido
Member of the Frescobaldi banking and merchant family
Welton, Nicholas
Constable of Putney
*Wilmot, Edward
English merchant based in Southampton
*Wyatt, Sir Thomas
English poet and diplomat
Introduction
Over the last few years numerous works of fact and fiction have been published about Thomas Cromwell. No, let me rephrase that: over the last few years numerous works of fact and fiction have been published about the last two decades of the life of Thomas Cromwell. This remarkable man (the most important non-royal Englishman of the first half of the sixteenth century) lived from c. 1485 to 1540. Yet historians and novelists have been hard put to it to tell us anything about the years before he entered the service of Cardinal Wolsey in the early 1520s and began his meteoric rise to power. The reason is simple: we have virtually no written evidence to draw on. Cromwell himself is largely to blame for this dearth. He was very reticent about his origins and formative years. To his contemporaries Cromwell was an infuriating enigma. How could a nobody from Putney sever England from obedience to the Pope, pull down all the monasteries, reallocate most of the nation’s landed wealth among the nobility and gentry, strip the Church of tradition-hallowed adornments, make the Bible available to all the king’s subjects in their mother tongue and nudge England politically towards the heretical regimes in Germany? And not only ‘how’ but ‘why’.
The answers to that must lie in the hidden years – years during which a teenage Cromwell left England for Renaissance Italy, gained hands-on experience of international commerce and commercial law, established himself as a widely travelled, self-employed merchant-cum-advocate and brought himself to the attention of the great Cardinal Wolsey. By then he was already in his late thirties, his political and religious convictions well formed and deeply felt. Who was this man? What made him tick? We do not know. We can only speculate. But speculation is part of the novelist’s stock-in-trade. What follows, therefore, is an exercise in guesswork, a completely fictional account of what might have happened to turn the Putney runaway into the primary architect of the English Reformation. It is a made-up story and, as such, its primary objective is to entertain; to persuade you, the reader, to willingly suspend disbelief and enter into the adventures and misadventures of its characters.
However, to provide some points of contact with real history I have sprinkled the narrative with a few salient quotations from contemporary documents. They are enclosed in boxes to make them distinct from the main text. They might, perhaps, be thought of as signposts along the road travelled by the main characters, pointing to other events happening at the time – events of which they would have been aware. I hope they will not be seen as irritating interruptions to the story. Readers are, of course, at liberty to ignore them. I have also included at the end of the book some notes on historical characters, so that readers may be clear about who is real and who is made up.
1
How it came to pass
On Nicholas Bourbon
Beside you I am lowly and humble,
Just as lead is duller than silver,
Which is more resonant.
(Clément Marot)
There were three of us there when the news first arrived. Three of us – all poets. Well, Claude d’Ebret thinks himself a poet and Clément Marot and I humour him. ’Tis useful to keep him sweet. As palace chamberlain he has easy access to Queen Marguerite. There we were then, that languid, breathless afternoon, sitting in the courtyard of the Auberge des Larmes d’Or at Nérac, enjoying the shade of the great mulberry tree and solemnly debating what had become of the sestina. Clément was incensed by the Italian ‘whoremongers’ who had debased this verse form perfected by our troubadours. Claude thought Clément oversensitive. And I? Well, it was too hot to argue. Even Alphonse, usually busy keeping his territory free from avarian intruders, lacked the energy to strut. He loitered by the water trough and merely glanced at the doves who fluttered down from the branches. Alphonse? Oh, he is the innkeeper’s prize cockerel.
Was it the wine? The innkeeper’s cousin produced the best Buzet in the whole region. Was it Clément’s sonorous voice? Or just the July heat? Whatever it was, I fought a losing battle with drowsiness. It was the clatter of hooves and the shouts of muleteers that prodded me back into consciousness. A train of some dozen beasts had entered the yard, led by two merchants who wearily dismounted from their horses. Brushing the dust from their jerkins and breeches, they bustled into the inn, eager to slake their thirst.
‘Parisians!’ Claude sniffed his disapproval.
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
Clément laughed. ‘He can smell ’em with that big nose of his.’
Claude ignored the jibe. ‘I know because I recognize the tall one. Deals in silks and satins. Comes here this time every year with the latest fashions for the queen and her ladies.’
Clément stood up and swung his leg over the bench. ‘Then it behoves us to give them a warm Aquitanian welcome.’ He made to follow the strangers inside. In the doorway he turned. ‘And to catch up on the latest gossip from the north.’
And so it was we heard the extraordinary news. The seemingly all-powerful Englishman, Lord Cromwell, was fallen from power and imprisoned by his king. Clément brought the travellers to our table and we plied them with questions.
‘When was this?’
‘We think around midsummer, though the news has been slow coming, thanks to storms in the Narrows.’ The tall Frenchman, introduced to us as Pierre Tracard, thumped his empty beer tankard on the table and nodded to Claude for a refill.
‘You’re sure that ’tis not a mere rumour put about by his enemies?’ I asked.
‘Jesus knows he has those in plenty.’ Tracard’s companion, whose name I do not recall after this passage of time, eased the supple kid gloves from his fingers. ‘The nobility of the court have always resented him.’
‘Norfolk,’ I muttered.
‘Aye, him above all. They say he’s dangling another of his nieces before King Harry as marriage bait.’
‘But sure he’s wed to the German princess from Cleves,’ I protested.
‘Some say she’ll not last the summer.’ The smaller man reinforced the statement with a loud belch.
‘In the devil’s name!’ Clément exclaimed. ‘How many wives does that barrel-belly want?’
‘Well,’ Claude said, ‘he relies on Cromwell too much to leave him long out of favour.’
Tracard shrugged. ‘Haply you know the king better. ’Tis many a year that I was in London. What I can say is that I had the news from one of Cromwell’s intimates, a priest who fled England fearing a new wave of heresy-hunting.’
We plied the visitors with more questions but there was nothing else of moment they could add.
When our informants had left to see to the unpacking of their merchandise the three of us sat for some moments in thoughtful silence. It was Clément who spoke the question in all our minds. ‘I wonder if she’s heard. I think she will not lament the news. Is that not so, Nicholas?’
But my mind was elsewhere. At a well-spread table in a fine London mansion some five years earlier at the end of 1534. I recalled seven or so earnest men gathered around it: courtiers, clerics, merchants, lawyers – but scholars all. Scholars and Bible men. For it was God’s word we discussed and our stocky, genial chairman skilfully presided over the debate, drawing contributions from all. Only occasionally did royal secretary Thomas Cromwell proffer an observation of his own, but when he did so it was crisp and to the point.
‘What say you, Nicholas?’
My mind returned to the present moment and faces turned towards me awaiting a response.
/> ‘My pardon, Clément. I was just reflecting—’
‘I suggested that the queen would not be overly dismayed to hear of Cromwell’s fall.’
‘Because of his part in the Boleyn girl’s death?’
‘Be not so sure.’ Claude shook his head. ‘She admires his tenacity in defence of true religion, particularly since the bringing-out of the English Bible last year.’
‘That may be so but either way she should be told this latest news before wild rumours start flying around the palace.’
‘Aye,’ Claude agreed, ‘and told by someone who knows the Tudor court well.’
I looked up to see my friends once more looking expectantly at me. I was not so rash as to claim familiarity with the English royal household but I had spent several happy months as the guest of Queen Anne before her sudden fall from power. My name is Nicholas Bourbon, subject of Francis, King of France, and currently serving in the court of his sister Marguerite, Queen of the small kingdom of Navarre. My principal responsibility was as tutor to Princess Jeanne, but the queen, who could justly boast the most enlightened salon north of the Alps, liked to include me among her retinue in her court at Nérac.
Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, wife to Henry II of the house of Alba, was sitting in the bower she had had built against the low wall bordering this part of the chateau garden. She prized solitude and often dismissed her ladies to come to this retreat. Her only companions now were the two lapdogs that lay together at her feet. No sounds intruded on this peaceful scene, save the buzzing of insects, occasional birdsong and the languid rippling of the River Baïse beyond the wall. I crossed the lawn and paused several paces from the arbour. The queen sat still, her intense gaze fixed on something beyond the garden. It was as though, far from occupying a place in a peaceful setting, Marguerite herself radiated tranquillity. The moment did not last. One of her dogs raised its head towards me with a protective bark.