Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  An eggshell-thin façade continued to mask reality. Bustle around the King’s supposed preparations for Dover was a fine distraction, justifying the Council’s unusually long and frequent meetings. So on 28 April Thomas Warley wrote to his master Lord Lisle from London, telling him that Queen Anne expected to meet Lady Lisle at Dover, ‘as Mistress Margery Horsman informed me’ (what did Mistress Horsman really know?); the King and Queen were planning to pause on their journey at Rochester on 3 May. Lisle and his household were being made the useful idiots in all this; that same 28 April, Cromwell dropped broad hints to an excited John Husee that he himself would pay a visit to Calais during the Dover expedition, so the Lisles should prepare accordingly.49 Nevertheless by the fateful 24 April or the following day at the latest, Anne already suspected that she was facing some major disaster. Yet another cleric looking back from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, no less a figure than her Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, Anne’s trusted chaplain in 1536, recalled to another survivor of those years, Sir Nicholas Bacon, that ‘not six days before her apprehension’ he made a special promise to Anne to look after her little daughter Elizabeth.50

  Chapuys glimpsed the truth as well, but only in part. He was distracted by genuine ongoing diplomatic pirouettes around the French, but nonetheless gathered snippets from his conservative aristocratic friends. Lord Montague’s brother Sir Geoffrey Pole told him that on 27 April Bishop Stokesley of London had been consulted in his capacity as canon lawyer and old hand at dispensing with royal wives, as to whether the King might rid himself of Anne. Stokesley, understandably cautious, shut down the legal question by a pragmatic response that ‘he would, before he answered, try to ascertain what the King’s intentions were’. On 29 April, when the juggernaut had actually begun rolling, Chapuys had still not made this all add up to the news for which he would have so ardently wished: to his confidant Granvelle in the same post he said that he had nothing of importance for the Emperor’s information, but he had written anyway ‘for suspicion of negligence’.51

  If only Chapuys had known that two days earlier writs had been prepared for a completely new Parliament, less than a month after the dissolution of the previous one. These writs would have needed the King’s consent, which suggests that he was already inclining towards arrangements for his wife’s downfall; but the most likely use for such an assembly would have been another annulment of marriage, such as was discussed with Bishop Stokesley that same day.52 Simple annulment was only one possible option to be considered. Anyone keeping a watch on the erratic movements of Sir Nicholas Carew’s brother-in-law and the King’s old hunting companion Sir Francis Bryan would tabulate much of interest. Bryan, who had been absent from Court after quarrels with the Boleyns, reappeared briefly early in the month, but then left for home in Buckinghamshire.53 There his friend the Abbot of Woburn saw the arrival of Cromwell’s letter recalling Bryan to Court, ‘wheresoever he was in this Realm upon the sight of the letter . . . a marvellous and peremptory commandment . . . [which] would [have] astonished the wisest man in the realm’. Bryan was called to Cromwell’s presence for a briefing before he saw the King.54

  Matters were going so fast now that we cannot put an exact day to Bryan’s recall. It fits somehow into the action beginning on Saturday 29 April, when there came a charged encounter between the Queen and her young and infatuated musician Mark Smeaton – according to her afterwards, the first time the two of them had been alone together since an evening of music-making back on the autumn progress at Winchester. She insisted later that she had sharply rebuked Mark for his tantrum and over-familiarity in this encounter, but fatally their exchanges were overheard, and within hours Smeaton was under interrogation in Cromwell’s house at Stepney. That was the ideal place for such a crucial component of his plans: secluded, and more or less equidistant by river from Greenwich Palace and the Tower of London. By Monday evening Smeaton’s nerve broke under questioning, and he confessed to adultery with the Queen, which may have been no more than a combination of wishful thinking and current terror. He completed an enforced journey from Greenwich via Stepney to the Tower, from which, like several others in this affair, he would not re-emerge.

  The Queen in her bewilderment and fear exploded in fury at her close friend at Court Henry Norris, and then fatally tried to remedy the resulting susurration of gossip by sending Norris to the King to testify to her good name. Throughout this awful weekend, one is reminded of how difficult it was to get any privacy at the Tudor Court, even among those for whose benefit it was all supposed to be functioning. Alexander Alesius, who happened to have travelled from Cambridge to Greenwich Palace on business at the most dramatic of many dramatic moments of his life, witnessed the extraordinary sight of the Queen with the infant Elizabeth in her arms, pleading with the King. They were at a window out of his earshot, but the body-language told him of King Henry’s rage.55

  Alesius’s account does not make it clear whether that tableau occurred on Sunday 30 April or Monday 1 May. What certainly happened on Sunday was the sudden announcement of a week’s postponement of the Dover plans, duly noted for Lord Lisle by his servant Warley, though placed amid so much other news that it did not read as the symptom of crisis.56 It was hardly surprising that Warley did not understand the whole picture, for on that same Sunday Cromwell shows us how much he was controlling information. In the aftermath of Smeaton’s interrogation, he wrote from Stepney to Ambassador Gardiner in Paris, blandly passing on standard business about the ongoing French negotiations and routine compliments to the English diplomatic staff. The compliments included a gift of cramp-rings, traditionally blessed by the monarch on Good Friday and distributed to the faithful for their sacred curative powers. The gesture to traditional piety, in these circumstances, may have amused him.57

  The noisy rows of the weekend and the emotions they revealed seem to have been the catalyst to transform what might have been a relatively decorous set of annulment proceedings into steadily more insane charges of treason, adultery and incest, and the judicial murders that were their consequence. Henry’s paranoia was best provoked by making the most extreme of accusations. Monday 1 May was the moment for Cromwell to feed in whatever information he had gained from the unfortunate Smeaton, packaged as suggesting the Queen’s infidelity. The King abruptly left the May Day tournament at Greenwich and sailed up-river to Whitehall with a mere six attendants.58 At this point Jane Seymour discreetly retired from the scene to Beddington in Surrey, home of the recently Gartered Sir Nicholas Carew. Anne was arrested at Greenwich the next day, Tuesday 2 May, arriving at the Tower about six o’clock in the evening, and Norris was soon under arrest as well, likewise bound for the Tower.59 Lord Rochford followed the King to Whitehall, perhaps trying to defend his sister, but later that day he too was arrested.

  Over the next week, arrest after arrest sent a variety of courtiers to join those already in the Tower. Cranmer, Anne’s protégé, showed his mettle when on Wednesday 3 May he wrote to the King, replying to a letter Cromwell had sent him on the King’s behalf summoning him up from Kent to Lambeth Palace. It is Cranmer at his finest: trying to comfort the King, frankly pointing out his own debt to the Queen’s patronage, reminding his master of her part in promoting reformation and imploring him ‘to bear no less entire favour unto the truth of the Gospel than you did before’. Finally, in a sad postscript after being briefed in Star Chamber across the river from Lambeth, he acknowledged the serious and specific nature of what the Lord Chancellor and others had told him. No one else had the courage to write any of these things to the King at his most dangerous.60 What Cranmer’s letter also reveals is that Cromwell had kept him as much in the dark as he had Bishop Gardiner.

  By 8 May, Master Secretary had secured all those he wanted neutralized, plus one or two whom he may have felt were best off in protective custody. His protégé Thomas Wyatt was the most obvious among them, for before the King’s marriage Wyatt had undoubtedly been Anne’
s lover – some said dangerously close in time to the King’s own first passion for her. Sir Richard Page, Cromwell’s friend in Wolsey’s service, was another arrest; both Wyatt and Page survived the experience, though Page was told firmly never to come back to Court, and did not.61 The problem was to provide enough damning evidence about Anne: the really imperilled prisoners were remarkable in the consistency of their denials of charges levelled against them of adultery with the Queen – or, in the case of her brother George, of incest. Only Mark Smeaton, no gentleman born, so treated more harshly than the courtiers, was forthcoming, after unspecified pressures physical and psychological at Stepney. Various ladies of the Court provided further bits and pieces, and Anne in her understandable hysteria and collapse of morale furnished still more. None of it, in the fragmentary state of the evidence we have, amounted to the sexual betrayal in which the King wanted to believe to sustain the hatred he had discovered for her. At worst it was witty flirtation, but perhaps the worst thing was indeed that it was witty, and Henry felt himself the target of other people’s sniggers.

  Anne was now victim of the most extreme example of Henry’s ability to turn deep affection into deep hatred, and then to believe any old nonsense to reinforce his new point of view. Cromwell was his minister and must do his bidding, but (if the reader has been in any measure convinced by this retelling of Court politics in the 1530s) the minister had his own reasons for enthusiastically pursuing the Queen to destruction. That is what he did, eliminating both her and the courtiers whom he and the King had singled out. Now the oyer and terminer proceedings provided for so long ago on 24 April, and involving much manic legal and administrative activity, reached conclusions. On 12 May Westminster Hall witnessed the trials of Mark Smeaton, Sir Francis Weston, William Brereton and Henry Norris. The accused might look with a sinking heart on the jurymen who sat in deliberation on them; what attention to detail Cromwell had shown in assembling this team of ill-wishers!62 Anne and Rochford followed on 15 May.

  The various charges of sexual crimes and treasonous talk were full of fictions that can easily be dismissed for putting the accused in locations where they certainly had not been at the time of their supposed offences. As Lord Steward, it was the Duke of Norfolk’s duty to preside at these trials, including those of his niece and nephew. In the case of Anne, Norfolk wept as he pronounced the guilty sentence, though one cynical modern historian may be justified in speculating whether these were tears of relief at his own survival.63 The trial was by Anne’s peers, that is, the nobility of England. That meant that Cromwell was not among those pronouncing the Queen guilty; he was not a nobleman – and, though a royal councillor, not even a knight of the realm. It was not necessary: he had done enough. After his formal naming in the oyer and terminer back in April, his task now was simply to make sure that everything went according to plan. It would be a congenial duty.

  Anne died on 19 May, beheaded in the Tower of London before a thousand spectators. Chapuys, not permitted to watch since he was a foreigner, heard that Cromwell was prominent among those royal councillors close to the scaffold. Like her brother a couple of days before, she died with dignity, saying nothing that could be considered a specific confession of guilt, and her body was given quiet burial in the chapel of St Peter within the Tower. Meanwhile, Cromwell would not have been pleased to know that one of his servants was sitting in a London inn where Alexander Alesius was staying, cheerfully telling the assembled company that, while the Queen was beheaded, the King ‘consoled himself with another woman [se oblectavit cum alia]’ in a secluded country house, the gates shut on royal orders to all except councillors and secretaries. The landlord, another of Cromwell’s servants, joined with Alesius and others terrified at the indiscretion in telling him to hold his tongue, but the landlord did not say that he was wrong.64 After all, in the King’s own eyes, this diversion was not committing adultery.

  On the day the Queen’s brother Rochford was executed, Henry VIII was officially informed by his Archbishop of Canterbury that he had for a second time inadvertently entered a marriage which had never existed. This judgment is in dismal contrast to Cranmer’s letter of defence to the King, and it is not clear on what grounds the Archbishop once more pronounced an annulment: the relevant papers have disappeared, not surprisingly in view of later Tudor history.65 John Stokesley was only one among several senior canonists discreetly approached before the arrests: Chapuys noticed that from 25 April Cromwell had spent the best part of four days with Richard Sampson. Sampson was Dean of both the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s, and also happened conveniently to be Rector of the parish of Stepney, Cromwell’s centre of operations for much of the crisis.66

  One direction not in the end taken in pronouncing an annulment was to explore a possibility that back in the 1520s Anne Boleyn had been contracted to marry Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland. If true, this would have invalidated her marriage to the King. That needs to be considered alongside an odd circumstance at the height of the turmoil, when everything still hung in the balance. The day following Smeaton’s arrest, 1 May, and the day before Anne herself was arrested, Cromwell surrendered back to the King a splendid house at Hackney which he had been granted only the previous September, during the last stages of the West Country progress; he had spent very great sums of money on improving it even before the formal grant.67 It seems strange to have taken time off in the middle of mayhem at Court to arrange a land transaction.

  This gift (or rather regift) to Henry might just seem like a sweetener, a larger version of the ingenious lock for which Ralph Sadler had been courier to the King in January, but why would the King want a house back which he had given away only seven months before? Until now, Cromwell had intended it to become his main country seat, and had actually entertained Chapuys there on Easter Day, the ambassador remarking on its magnificence (see Plate 23).68 The answer must lie in the fact that before Henry’s grant to Cromwell the owner had been the Earl of Northumberland. He had only just surrendered it to the King in 1535, as part of a forced land deal by which the Crown evidently hoped to save the bulk of the Percy inheritance from the Earl’s own vindictiveness towards his heirs.69 Now this same hapless representative of a great and ancient dynasty might be the mechanism to unlock the royal marriage which had taken so much blood and sweat to create. It would be worth offering him the house he clearly loved in return for evidence of a pre-contract.

  Cromwell’s surrender of Hackney therefore looks like the addition of one more card to the Crown’s pack of possibilities for declaring the marriage annulled. In the end it could not be played. On Saturday 13 May, with courtiers already condemned and Anne’s trial opening on the Monday, Northumberland wrote to Cromwell from his current lodging at Newington Green indignantly refusing to contradict the denial of any pre-contract which he had solemnly sworn in 1532; the pre-contract option was not going to work.70 It is remarkable that the Earl could be so firm, for the strain on his fragile health at this time was enormous. He had to be helped out of the chamber after casting his vote for Anne’s condemnation on 15 May. Six days later he had a pitifully public panic attack while trying to fulfil the presidency at the Garter Feast so bafflingly imposed on him in April (perhaps that honour had also been a clumsy attempt to flatter him into compliance). He persevered in the excruciating festivity with some difficulty.71 It is pleasing to record that a year later, after much further national drama had passed, Cromwell yielded to the Earl’s pleas for royal permission to return to Hackney during his last illness. That is where Henry Percy died, attended by Drs Thomas Lee and Richard Leighton, two northerners who rather unexpectedly seemed genuinely fond of him and able to bring him comfort at the last. He was only around thirty-five years old.72

  Confusion about the shape of the coup against Anne has been aided by the embarrassment of Protestant commentators from John Foxe onwards that one Protestant champion should eliminate another, and a consequent lack of comment on the subject. As we have seen, Alexander A
lesius, writing in private to Anne’s daughter, had no such inhibitions. Foxe’s informants would have known the truth about Anne Boleyn’s fall, but it was an unnecessary complication to his heroic picture of Cromwell: pointing out in addition that Cromwell was destroying the chief agent of Cardinal Wolsey’s destruction would make matters even more confusing. Modern historians too have made heavy weather of Anne Boleyn’s fall, because they have taken up these early-established and persistent beliefs that the Queen and Cromwell were allies, and that she had advanced his career because of their mutual enthusiasm for promoting evangelical reformation. The evidence for either proposition hardly exists, and the weight of circumstances in fact shows the reverse, allowing events to take on a much greater clarity and straightforwardness – though they do not make Cromwell’s part in Anne’s destruction any more engaging.

  The evidence for an original Catholic conspiracy which Cromwell then belatedly took over is equally flimsy. Of course conservatives at Court enthusiastically joined in the destruction of Anne and had great hopes for it, as did every Catholic in the land and beyond. We should start from that glimpse of Nicholas Carew and Thomas Cromwell working together to rehabilitate Mary on the King’s terms in February 1536, and the way in which Carew has appeared in the story after that. Some straws in the wind also involve that other southern magnate Sir Anthony Browne, who had been such a long-standing ally of Cromwell from Wolsey days, despite their different religious outlooks.73 During winter and early spring, there was no definite way forward, as Anne’s various enemies discreetly cast around for nuggets to aid their intentions, always watchful of the King’s changing moods. Then came the sudden resolve on 18 April of which Cromwell spoke to Chapuys on 24 May, when after their mutual shock at Henry’s public tantrum Master Secretary had ‘set himself to think up and plot out the whole business’.