Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (13 page)

The first casualty of these events was any hope of reconciliation with Paul III, who wrote to Francis I that Henry had ‘exceeded his ancestors in wickedness’, and sought the French king’s help against this persecutor of the Church. Francis, however, absorbed by his rivalry with Charles, was not prepared to oblige.
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Charles was similarly preoccupied, and Henry’s tentative attempts to avoid isolation through an alliance with the Schmalkaldic League were not followed up. There is, however, no reason to suppose that Cromwell’s attempts to justify the king’s actions and to explain that the accused had been fairly tried, and were ‘undoubtedly guilty’ of the treasons for which they suffered, cut any ice at all, least of all in Rome. Meanwhile the French and Imperial ambassadors in London kept a watching brief and were able to report that Anne’s unpopularity had been increased rather than diminished by these events. So concerned was the king by the evidences of this unpopularity that he compelled Bishop Stokesley of London to preach in support of the Supremacy in St Paul’s Cathedral, and sent Cromwell along to make sure that the correct words were used.
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Alehouse rantings, ‘slips of the tongue’, and more deliberate words of defiance kept the secretary busy with investigations throughout the year. Not all were as penitent as Margaret Chancellor, a Suffolk woman who blessed Catherine as ‘the righteous queen’, but who professed to the Suffolk justices that she had been drunk at the time and that an evil spirit had caused her to utter those treasonable words. She was let off with a caution, but not all delinquents were so fortunate. George Taylor of Newport Pagenall in Buckinghamshire appears to have paid the full price for claiming that he would play football with the Crown of England, so little did he regard it, although he also pleaded drunkenness in extenuation.
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Meanwhile Henry’s relationship with his queen had its ups and downs. In the summer of 1534 Anne miscarried, and Henry was reported to be ‘much enamoured’ of another lady of the court. Chapuys, who carried the story, did not name her and the chances are that it was just another bit of court gossip. Nevertheless there were periods of tension in their marriage, and the king never came to terms with her political agenda, considering such things to be inappropriate in a consort.
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Her business was to give him a son, and towards the end of 1535, Anne was again pregnant. A lot would depend upon her safe delivery, and upon the sex of the child. Many malcontents might reconsider their positions if God gave her a son.

Then, in January 1536, Catherine died, and the political situation shifted slightly but significantly. Henry reacted with relief, declaring that he was now free from any suspicion of war, meaning conflict with the Emperor. Charles was also relieved because he now no longer had an aunt whose honour needed protection, or whose cause he felt bound to promote. The way was open for a ‘normalisation’ of relations between England and the Empire, and Cromwell was free to pick up the option of an Imperial alliance, which he had preferred for some time but which circumstances had appeared to render impossible.
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He began to confer more amicably with Chapuys, and the latter’s reports became less hostile. The main obstacle in the way of improved relations remained Queen Anne. Not only was her position unrecognised by the Imperialists, but her tastes and the whole logic of her position demanded a French connection. So her alliance of convenience with Cromwell broke down, and the secretary began to consider the possibility of getting rid of her. Now that the ending of his second marriage would no longer carry the threat of reviving his first, Henry’s growing affection for Jane Seymour seemed to offer such an opportunity. At the end of January the king had a heavy fall in the lists, and was unconscious for more than two hours. Although he recovered completely and was none the worse apart from some bad bruising, this was a reminder of his mortality and of the urgency of the succession. Then in early February Anne miscarried for the second time. The foetus was male, and Henry became distraught at the thought of losing another son. He blamed Anne for this misfortune, and although she tried to shift the responsibility onto the Duke of Norfolk for springing the news of the king’s accident on her, he was not mollified.
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The possibility of removing her had now climbed up the agenda, and in March Henry sent a letter and a lavish gift to Jane Seymour, who rejected both with a coy profession of her virginity. The king was encouraged rather than dismayed by this demonstration of virtue, and his interest was significantly increased, which suited the Seymour family admirably. What then happened is controversial, but it seems that Cromwell’s breach with Anne was finalised by a disagreement over the fate of the lesser monasteries, which were dissolved by statute in March.
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The queen wanted the proceeds to be devoted to Church causes, such as education and the augmentation of poor livings, whereas Cromwell wished the king to have the free disposal of them, to be deployed on the defence of the realm or in the satisfaction of the demand for royal patronage. In April Anne even authorised her almoner, John Skip, to preach a sermon attacking the anticlericalism of the secretary’s option, and the chips were fairly down.
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Unfortunately for him the Emperor was also proving hard to pin down at that point and was implying conditions about Mary’s right to the succession that Cromwell was in no position to satisfy and which the king was reluctant to concede. At the same time, if Anne were to be displaced, the whole Boleyn faction would need to be removed, and that necessitated an understanding at least with Mary’s friends around the court, who were of course out of favour with Henry. By the end of April, Cromwell was in a cleft stick. As early as the previous July the queen had threatened to have his head if he continued to obstruct her, and that time may now have come. She was far too formidable a politician to be shunted aside as Catherine had been, and it began to look as though it was her head or his. Henry seems to have been genuinely undecided at this point, and as late as 24 April was still writing sincerely about his ‘entirely beloved’ wife. On the other hand, he understood the issues, and measured his favours to the Boleyns and the Seymours equally. On the 27th a special commission of oyer and terminer was established to hear treasons in London and Middlesex, and this it has been argued, was a part of Cromwell’s preparations for his coup against Anne.
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However there is no evidence to support such a supposition, and it is not even certain that the secretary was responsible. No treason was named, and it is likely to have been a mere precautionary measure taken by the Lord Chancellor. Similarly the decision to call a new parliament, which was also taken in April and was unexpected in view of the recent dissolution of the last assembly, looks like Cromwell’s preparation for dealing with the queen’s case. Henry, however, had still not made up his mind, and would not have consented to such a recall unless there had been other pressing business to attend to. Although he was suspicious of the queen’s agenda, he was still speaking hopefully of the sons which she would bear him, and it was not until 29 or 30 April that he was finally bounced into a decision against her.

The critical event seems to have been an altercation between Anne and Sir Henry Norris, which took place on the 29th. Irritated by Norris’s slowness to ‘come on’ to Mary Shelton, whom she had sought out for him, she accused him of waiting for herself to become available, which could only happen in the event of the king’s death.
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Appalled by the implications of this, Norris vehemently denied any such ambition, but the damage had been done. Cromwell’s agents in the Privy Chamber not only made haste to inform him of the queen’s treason, but also conveyed the impression of a long-standing sexual relationship between the two. This was the cue for which he had been waiting, and acting on a similar tip, on the 30th he arrested Mark Smeaton, and accused him too of an adulterous affair with Anne. He knew that Smeaton, who was a court musician, had been mooning over the queen for some time, and had been unwise enough to give voice to his obsession. He charged him accordingly. Perhaps encouraged by a promise of immunity, or perhaps indulging in wish fulfilment, the musician confessed to what was almost certainly an imaginary offence, and Cromwell hastened to inform Henry that he had been cuckolded.
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The king quitted the tournament which he had been attending in a foul mood, and on 2 May Anne was arrested and taken to the Tower, along with Norris, Smeaton and one or two other suspects whom the secretary’s informants had named. These plausible but insubstantial stories appear to have convinced Henry utterly, and from being uncertain he now became the prime agent in Anne’s destruction. Cromwell was given the congenial task of assembling the case against her, and took it upon himself to make sure that their mutual friend Thomas Cranmer had no access to the king while this was under way.
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He interrogated the ladies of her Privy Chamber, and gleaned a number of circumstantial stories which could be made to serve his purpose. Most notably he learned from Jane Rochford of the intimacy which existed between the queen and her brother, Jane’s husband. This may have resulted from strained relations within the Rochfords’ marriage, and the story contained no more than a hint of impropriety, but it was enough to land Lord Rochford in the Tower as well on a charge of incestuous adultery.
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Meanwhile Anne was not helping herself. Since her arrival in the Tower she had chattered inconsequentially about the men in her life, proving nothing but giving substance to the rumours with which she was already surrounded. The trouble was that amid all this fog of innuendo, there was very little solid evidence. As Sir Edward Baynton, one of the interrogators, wrote to Sir William Fitzwilliam,

Here is much communication that no man will confess anything against her but all-only Mark of any actual thing. Whereof (in my foolish conceit) it should much touch the king’s honour if it should no farther appear. And I cannot believe but that the other two [Rochford and Norris] be as fully culpable as ever he was. And I think assuredly the one keepeth the others counsel … I hear farther that the queen standeth stiffly in her opinion … which I think is in the trust that she [hath of the] other two.
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This was all very well, but it did not make Cromwell’s task any easier. Norris and Rochford were two stalwarts of the Boleyn faction which he was by now determined to destroy lest it should have, in Eric Ives’s words, any ‘second strike capability’.
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He built his case as best he could, not utilising Jane Rochford’s testimony, nor Henry’s rather wild conviction that he had been the victim of his wife’s talent for witchcraft, but making heavy use of the evidence of Elizabeth, Countess of Worcester. Elizabeth was carrying a child, which the earl was convinced was not his, and she had responded to his accusations by blaming the atmosphere of the Privy Chamber, for which the queen was to blame. The other story which was central to his case was that Anne had been responsible for poisoning Catherine, and had plotted a similar fate for Mary and the king. All these rumours do not amount to much as evidence to put before a court of law, but of course in a case like this the only person who had to be convinced was the king, and he was absolutely persuaded that Anne had been guilty of adultery with a hundred men, never mind the four who were on trial.
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A grand jury was impanelled on 9 May, not without some judicious manipulation on Cromwell’s part, and a True Bill was found. Norris, along with William Brereton and Francis Weston, two other members of the Privy Chamber who had been similarly charged, was tried on the 12th and found guilty, which left Anne nowhere to go. She and Lord Rochford were tried on the 15th in the King’s Hall at the Tower, with great solemnity as became her rank and the gravity of the charges which she faced. The Duke of Norfolk presided, and twenty-six peers formed the court. Anne had recovered her composure by that time, but was well aware that it was her word against her accusers; ‘if any man accuse me, I can but say nay and they can bring no witnesses’. According to one observer ‘she made so wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her, excusing herself with her words so clearly as though she had never been faulty in the same’.
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It was all to no avail. The peers knew their duty well enough, and the conviction of her accomplices decided her fate. Lord Rochford put up an even more impressive performance, and the general opinion of the spectators was that he should have been acquitted. However, that would not have suited either Thomas Cromwell or the king, and the court duly convicted him as well. He was beheaded at the Tower on 17 May, making a good end in that he acknowledged the justice of the sentence against him, without confessing to his alleged crimes. By the time that Anne followed him on the 19th, she was no longer married to Henry VIII because Cranmer’s court, reversing the decision of three years earlier, found the marriage to be null and void, apparently on the grounds of the king’s earlier relationship with her sister, allegedly discovered since the previous verdict had been reached.
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She had of course lost the Marquisate of Pembroke by virtue of her attainder, and thus went to block as plain Anne Boleyn. The Boleyn party had been destroyed, just as Cromwell had wished, and the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne and George’s father, who had not been involved in their misdemeanours, lost his office of Lord Privy Seal and was forced to withdraw from the court. On 1 July he was replaced by Thomas Cromwell. The secretary thus emerged from what must have been a very tense and difficult time completely triumphant. He had gambled on Henry’s gullibility and had been vindicated, earning the king’s gratitude for the efficient way in which he had handled the case. Their relationship was consequently stronger than ever, and he could look forward with confidence to a period of Seymour ascendancy at court. Henry became espoused to Jane on the day of Anne’s execution, and married her on 30 May, with what was generally regarded as indecent haste.
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However, nobody said so, and the king entered into a period of unprecedented domestic harmony.