The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

by John Schofield

  None of this was extracted under torture. Some of it was overhead by others.

  So had Anne, desperate for a son to secure her position as queen and retain the king’s favour, ceded to the temptation to take lovers in addition to a husband? Gilbert Burnet, one of the greatest of the older historians, who may have had access to evidence no longer available to us, did not believe so. Burnet admitted, however, that ‘she had rallied some of the king’s servants more than became her’, that ‘some indiscretions could not be denied’, and he added – with most exquisite tact – that ‘her carriage seemed too free’, all of which led to her sudden, tragic undoing. A recent re-examination of the case by Greg Walker has broadly endorsed Burnet. It is gentlemanly to seek to absolve Anne in this manner, though whether the argument would have impressed hard-nosed Tudor prosecuting lawyers must be rather unlikely. They might have pointed out that a virtuous queen, knowing how precarious her position was, would have been a good deal more prudent with her ‘carriage’ than this one. We are, however, nearly half a millennium away from the scene of the alleged crimes, and it is impossible to decide for sure between this view and that of George Bernard, who would find Anne guilty of some charges though maybe not all. Suffice to say that for those who cannot believe the evidence, the Burnet-Walker analysis offers a sounder defence than a conspiracy theory. At least it recognises that there is ground for suspicion if not a conviction. For it must be as plain as plain can be that something peculiar had been going on in Anne Boleyn’s circle, and it was not normal, harmless ‘courtly love’ of the kind that Tudor queens and titled ladies were wont to engage in. No evidence exists even from court gossip of Elizabeth of York, Catherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr ‘opening her body’ or flirting with grooms and assorted gentlemen of the king’s Privy Chamber; nor were they ever overheard muttering sweet nothings with handsome young musicians by the window at twilight; and none of them ever, either in jest or in earnest, mused aloud on who might bed her if the king were to suddenly die.34

  On the basis of Kingston’s reports, Smeaton’s confession, and other confessions now pouring from the lips of various ladies of court, the formal charges against the accused were drawn up. It is sometimes claimed that some of these charges cannot be valid because either Anne or her ‘lover’ was somewhere else at the time stated. But apart from the obvious problem of proving where people were on exact days 500 years ago, when not all the relevant evidence has survived, this asks us to believe that government lawyers could not get the dates right on the indictment. Also, as Bernard has already noted, the distances involved – usually Greenwich and Richmond or Westminster – are not great, and with a good horse and cart could easily be covered in a day with time to spare. Besides, illicit lovers are seldom so stupid as to leave themselves without an alibi. Anne’s ‘lovers’, incidentally, were not enemies of Cromwell that he needed to get rid of – they were not big enough.35

  Chapuys, meanwhile, was showing a generous spirit in his letters, sending generally balanced reports of the trials and subsequent events without crowing. Not so Henry – he was now adamant that Anne had had ‘upwards of 100 gentlemen’ for lovers. Nevertheless, he seemed strangely unconcerned about being cuckolded by his wife on so grand a scale. ‘You never saw a prince or husband show or wear his horns more patiently and lightly than this one does’, the ambassador noted wryly. As well as adultery charges, Anne and her co-accused had allegedly cast doubts on Henry’s prowess in the marriage bed; but despite these aspersions on his manhood – or maybe in answer to them? – Henry has ‘more joy and pleasure now’ than ever before, and he has ‘daily gone out to dine here and there with the ladies, and sometimes had remained with them till after midnight’. There was little public sympathy for Anne, Chapuys continued, but ‘still a few find fault and grumble at the manner in which the proceedings against her were conducted’. Apart from Smeaton, the accused ‘were sentenced on mere presumption or on very slight grounds, without legal proof or valid confession’. Henry’s menacing shadow loomed over the trial; at nine o’clock in the morning he told Jane that Anne would be sentenced by three o’clock that afternoon, and so she was. Chapuys was not greatly impressed with Jane – no great beauty or wit – and already he was wondering how long it would be before Henry found witnesses and excuses to put her away too. Despite his disapproval of Anne and his opposition to the Boleyn marriage, however, Chapuys was magnanimous enough to remark on Anne’s courage and readiness to meet death.36

  There is something chilling about Henry in the aftermath of Anne’s arrest. Once he was so infatuated with her that he had rebelled against the Holy See and suffered excommunication for her sake; now her ruin has become his entertainment. His whole performance defies analysis as he showed that curious mixture of mercy and vengeance, so characteristic of him when finishing off prominent victims. He allowed the condemned to die quickly by the axe, but then he insisted on carrying through the original plan to declare his marriage to Anne null; and not only on the basis of her ‘pre-contract’ with Percy, but also on the grounds of an affinity with Anne’s elder sister, Mary, who had once been Henry’s mistress. Besides bastardizing a second innocent daughter as cruelly and needlessly as the first, this was Henry at his most baffling in view of Anne’s unexpected conviction; because as Burnet noted long ago, if she was never his lawful wife, she could not be an unfaithful wife guilty of adultery. Henry’s reasoning must have gone something like this: though the marriage was always null, until it was known to be null, Anne owed him wifely fidelity.

  It is an unusual line in logic. No evidence survives to tell us what advice Henry was receiving from his councillors, so we have to guess what Cromwell’s involvement might have been. He was a lawyer by profession, with years of experience preparing documents for presentation to the courts that would be examined and challenged minutely. As Henry’s councillor and Principal Secretary, Cromwell also drafted bills on constitutional, social and economic matters, every clause of which was subjected to parliamentary scrutiny and debate. He was expertly well practiced in preparing a watertight case for the king, parliament and the judiciary. Is it therefore remotely credible that he would have put forward a settlement containing such a glaring legal anomaly? Hardly. Even if Cromwell was the ogre that modern accounts of Anne imagine, at least he would be a competent ogre capable of getting the details and the documentation right. The ruling bears all the hallmarks of Henry superintending everything, as so often in the Boleyn tragedy, determined to doubly avenge himself on the woman he once loved but now loathed – a faithless woman who should never have been his wife at all. It then fell to the unfortunate Archbishop Cranmer to formally pronounce this nullity the day after he heard Anne’s last confession. Quite justifiably, though frustratingly for inquisitive historians, no record is available of what was said at this final meeting between Anne and Cranmer.37

  It is not surprising that doubts about the affair were soon rising in the minds of those at liberty to speak freely. In Flanders Regent Mary was weighing up Jane’s chances of survival, while others on her council suspected that Henry might have invented the whole thing simply to be rid of Anne. Understandable though these suspicions were, the fact is that Henry, bizarre though his conduct was, did not invent the reports of the three lords, or the confessions of Smeaton and the other witnesses. What is at issue here is not the existence of evidence – there is no doubt of that – but the interpretation of it: whether it is enough to prove actual adultery, or whether it can be convincingly explained away, as Burnet sought to do, by Anne’s ‘indiscretions’ and her undeniably ‘free carriage’. Thus a tantalizing historical mystery is set to remain.38

  This mystery, however, will not be solved by blackening the reputation of Henry’s finest minister, and as the main purpose of this chapter is to answer the charges laid at Cromwell’s door rather than stage the trial of Anne Boleyn one more time, it may now be timely to consider his own version of events given in an official letter dated 14 May to Gar
diner in Paris. The points I have highlighted are especially relevant to the discussion that will follow.39

  ‘The king’s highness thought that I should advise you’ of the queen’s trial, so ‘I shall express unto you some part of the king’s proceeding in the same’. The queen’s ‘abomination both in incontinent living, and other offences’ towards the king was ‘so rank and common’ that her ladies ‘could not contain it within their breasts’. Soon it ‘came to the ears of some of his grace’s council, that with their duty to his majesty they could not conceal it from him’. Then, ‘in most secret sort’, certain persons of the privy chamber and Anne’s entourage were examined, ‘in which examinations the matter appeared so evident, that besides that crime, with the accidents, there broke out a certain conspiracy of the king’s death, which extended so far that all we who had the examination of it quaked at the danger his grace was in’, and gave thanks for the discovery of it. Then Smeaton, Norris, her brother, Weston and Brereton were sent to Tower. ‘I write no particulars, the things be too abominable’, but this shall be enough for you ‘to declare the truth if you have occasion to do so’.

  Virtually all of this can be independently verified. Various other reports mention ladies of the court – including Lady Worcester, Lady Wingfield and Nan Cobham – as witnesses who testified against Anne. The point about councillors reporting the matter to the king tallies with de Carles. The impersonal ‘some of his grace’s council’, ‘their duty’ and ’they’ who could not conceal it, strongly implies that Cromwell was not one of them. Again this agrees with Chapuys that Cromwell was working with Sampson at the time.40

  More interesting is how Cromwell’s own version differs notably from Chapuys’s now famous letter of 6 June, stating that Cromwell, though acting under Henry’s authority, had ‘planned and brought about the whole affair’ beginning on the 18 April. Cromwell, by contrast, calls the matter the ‘king’s proceeding’; he never claims that he instigated anything himself, or that he was acting on a tip-off following ‘prognostications in Flanders’. Investigations do not begin until after reports of Anne’s infidelities have reached the council, and it is during those investigations that a conspiracy against the king’s life is uncovered. Neither does Cromwell claim to have taken the leading part – note the ‘we’ who examined the case, not ‘those with me’ or ‘those under my direction’. This, too, agrees with various independent accounts that mention Norfolk, Fitzwilliam the Treasurer and Sir William Paulet of the King’s Household all involved in questioning suspects and witnesses.41

  Incidentally, these ‘Flanders prognostications’ may, unfortunately, have to remain a mystery, so far as I have been able to trace. As already noted, nothing was said about Flanders at Anne’s trial. Cromwell’s remembrances, possibly in early February, include a note to send Stephen Vaughan to Flanders, but no reason is given and it is not clear whether he even went. There is another letter from Cromwell to Vaughan about a journey to Germany, which includes a passing reference to your ‘last voyage into Flanders’, but the date of this letter is uncertain, and again no reason for the visit is given. Cromwell did have agents abroad who reported regularly on diplomatic affairs, but so far as the record goes, nothing was said about a threat on the king’s life. There is also the case of William Latymer, a chaplain to Anne, who arrived back in England from Flanders on 7 May to be told that Anne had been taken to the Tower. Latymer had been buying books on the continent, and was whisked off to Henry. But no harm came to him; he was soon released, and he lived on till Elizabeth’s reign.42

  Perhaps the part Cromwell did play in the whole affair can now be quickly reviewed. On 18 April he was commissioned by the king to prepare the constitutional case to remove Anne and make Jane queen. During the last week of April he was carrying out this unenviable task with the assistance of Richard Sampson, one of the king’s foremost canon lawyers. Enquiries were focussing on the alleged pre-contract between Anne and Henry Percy. Meanwhile the oyer and terminer was issued from the office of Lord Chancellor Audley. When stories of Anne’s adultery broke, the king ordered Cromwell, along with Norfolk and others, to examine witnesses. Once the investigations were completed, Cromwell must have handed Kingston’s reports over to government lawyers, because his own name does not appear on the indictment against Anne. Stories about Cromwell bribing, bullying and otherwise intimidating juries are no more than fictional tit-bits intended to spice up a conspiracy theory: there is no substantive evidence for them anywhere. Nor is there anything sinister in the fact that Cromwell knew who the jurors were; he was the king’s chief administrative councillor, and this was the most high-profile treason trial imaginable, so obviously the jurors would be men of some standing and influence known to the government. Besides, Anne was tried by the peers of the realm, and Cromwell had no control over peerages. At this point Cromwell must have turned his attention to the forthcoming parliament and the drafting of the new succession bills. It was Norfolk, as Lord High Steward of England, who presided at Anne’s trial and passed sentence. Norfolk also issued the precepts for the trial: to Judge John Baldwin, to return the indictment against Anne; to Kingston, to bring Anne from the Tower; and to the sergeant-at-arms, to summon the lords of the kingdom. Then Cranmer heard Anne’s last confession before formally pronouncing the nullity.43

  The conclusion must be, therefore, that Chapuys has slightly exaggerated when he implies that Cromwell brought the whole affair to completion. Henry was the one in overall control, and, quite understandably in such a momentous case, he ordered his most distinguished councillors – Cromwell, Norfolk, Cranmer and Audley – to deal with various aspects of it.

  Chapuys is an indispensable source of information for researchers of the Tudor period. There is no reason to doubt him when he narrates plain facts or conversations, but when he starts to interpret events or give opinions or make judgements, he does have a tendency to exaggerate. He once gave his opinion that Cromwell had ‘more influence’ with Henry than Wolsey, and that Anne and her father were ‘more Lutheran than Luther’. The first comment is very debateable and probably wrong, while the second is obviously wrong. Chapuys is also on record as saying in October 1533 that but for fear of a rebellion like the German Peasants’ War, Henry would already have declared himself a Lutheran. In fact, Henry’s Lutheran policy did not properly begin at all until the following year, and the reason he never declared himself a Lutheran is that he never was a Lutheran – the peasants had nothing to do with it. Chapuys likes to spray the word ‘Lutheran’ around rather copiously, applying it to just about anyone vaguely unorthodox in religion. Moreover, when the 1536 parliament confirmed the submission of the clergy, Henry was asked to appoint thirty-two men – sixteen clerics and sixteen parliamentarians – to scrutinise the canons and laws of the church to ensure that they contained nothing contrary to the Royal Supremacy. Now Chapuys overdoes it again when he fears that ‘the whole of parliament’s authority and power has been transferred’ to this committee.44

  A touch of hyperbole, therefore, is the likeliest explanation for Chapuys’s letter of 6 June. Nevertheless, the possibility must be reckoned with that sometime after Anne’s death Chapuys learned something new, that there was after all some plan, even as early as 18 April, to bring adultery charges against her. It is never easy to prove a negative, but this has to be extremely unlikely. Why would the government leave Smeaton, the key witness, free for nearly two weeks? Why would Cromwell spend four days at the end of April with Sampson, a canon rather than a criminal lawyer, who played no part in Anne’s trial? And why was Chapuys as amazed as anyone when he first heard the news of Anne’s arrest on 2 May? Alert observer that he was, with many well-placed contacts at court, he never remotely suspected anything treasonable or scandalous. Then there was the Dover visit, planned for some weeks and not called off until 30 April. Was all of this an elaborate government hoax just to deceive Chapuys until he could be told the facts on 6 June? It is getting too far-fetched for words. The only realistic soluti
on is that on 18 April or just after, Henry ordered Cromwell to prepare the divorce case; then about ten days later, after hearing the allegations against Anne, Henry directed Cromwell and others to examine witnesses. Chapuys, three weeks later, when his discussions with Cromwell had resumed, spun the story just a little.

  This, surely, is how Chapuys’s letter should be understood. Having previously told Charles all about Anne’s conviction for adultery, was he now trying to say that murder most foul had been committed? Of course he was not. He was commending Cromwell for the part he had played, and taking the opportunity to talk it up a bit. It might, after the disappointment of 18 April, help restore Anglo-Imperial relations if Charles knew that Cromwell had been the chief prosecutor of the royal mistress, the woman who had stolen the queenly crown from the emperor’s aunt.

  Over the years hundreds of thousands of words on the story of Henry VIII and his second wife have poured from the printing presses, recounting the long, passionate courtship that turned into a doomed marriage with a violent and bloody end. Many more will no doubt follow. Most take Anne’s side, which is understandable though probably credulous. We will never know for sure. This account has necessarily concentrated on Cromwell, because he has been cast as Iago, a pitiless, scheming villain who machinated the destruction of his master’s innocent wife. But Anne Boleyn was no Desdemona, and Othello had no Jane Seymour. Once Henry had turned irrevocably against Anne in January 1536, there was nothing that Cromwell could have done for her except perhaps secure for her as painless a divorce settlement as was possible in the circumstances, and even this slim hope vanished when three anonymous lords went to Henry one day with information that the queen was false to him.

  Henry and Jane were married on 30 May at Whitehall. Cromwell readily accepted the new queen, even though she and her family belonged to the old faith. Never was he troubled by doubts that he had been a party to a terrible travesty of justice. When Stephen Gardiner tried to flush some more details about Anne’s trial out of him, Cromwell had nothing more to say. Henry was married to Jane, Cromwell replied; she was the ‘most virtuous lady and truest gentlewoman that liveth, and one who varieth as much from the conditions of the other as the day varieth from the night’.45