Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (17 page)

heard at Bockmar of Hugh Holland being beyond the seas, and that the rumour was that he should go over with letters to Cardinal Pole … and that the disclosing of his often going beyond the seas was made by one Ayer to Tindall…
⁶²

Tindall was not Cromwell’s only source of information in Hampshire, where he had been a considerable figure for several years, rivalling even the influence of the Bishop of Winchester. Indeed the Earl of Southampton looked on him as something of a patron at the centre of affairs, and he had taken a number of Hampshire men into his service. So the chances are that stories about the Pole family and particularly about Hugh Holland, had been circulating for some time and had reached Cromwell’s ears, which would explain why he sent Gervase Tindall down to investigate. Richard Ayer seems to have been sympathetic to the New Learning, which was no doubt why he was prepared to disclose so much to Tindall, and to have been genuinely disturbed by what went on in Margaret’s household. Particularly worrying was the breach of the confessional by so many local priests which caused her to know of the misdemeanours of her neighbours and servants. Even Ayer’s own confession had been betrayed by the curate at Warblington, which he held fully justified his talk about the countess.
⁶³
When Tindall set up an interview for him with Cromwell himself, he became even more revealing and Holland was arrested. By the time that this happened, Tindall had also been interviewed by Geoffrey Pole, acting as a Justice of the Peace. Geoffrey was so concerned by what he learned that he sought an interview with Cromwell himself, and came away with the impression that the Lord Privy Seal was his ‘good lord’. However it appears that Tindall had only told him half a story about what he knew, and that Cromwell, who had other sources of information, was not impressed. It was not long after this that he ordered Geoffrey’s arrest. He languished in the Tower for almost two months, while Cromwell’s agents gathered stories about him and his associates, and on 26 October he was formally interrogated. According to the record, fifty-nine questions were asked, mostly about his relations with Reginald, but his response indicates that he was only asked about those with whom he had discussed ‘a change of the world’, that is of the regiment of England.
⁶⁴
He named a few names, Lord La Warr and his own brother Lord Montague for instance, but stressed the innocence of the conversations. No harm was intended to the king; they were mostly concerned, he averred, with the ‘plucking down of abbeys’. He was interrogated twice more on 2 and 3 November, and his brother and the Marquis of Exeter were arrested on the 4th. There was no direct connection between these events, as Cromwell already had enough on both of them from Hugh Holland’s examination to justify taking action. He also had the examination of one Jerome Ragland, taken on 28 October. Ragland, described as Lord Montague’s right-hand man, alone provided more than enough to incriminate his master, irrespective of anything which Geoffrey may have said.
⁶⁵
The latter was by this time thoroughly intimidated, and anxious only to prove his loyalty to the king:

Now especially in my extreme necessity, I perceive … your goodness shall not be lost on me, but surely as I found your grace always faithful unto me, so I refuse all creatures living to be faithful to you.

He ended, ‘Your humble slave, Geoffrey Pole.’
⁶⁶
He was examined four more times between 5 and 12 November, and each time he delivered more material against his brother, and against Sir Edward Neville, who had also been arrested. Lord Montague’s own examination, by contrast, revealed little of relevance, which may explain why he was only interrogated once. Various other servants and chaplains were arrested and examined during November, and each made his contribution to the pile of evidence which Cromwell was assembling against the Poles and the Courtenays; evidence of support for Mary, of general disaffection with the king’s government and of regular correspondence with the exiled Reginald. Finally, beginning on 12 November, Lady Salisbury was interrogated, being placed under house arrest at Cowdray on the 15th. She admitted nothing beyond the general conservatism of her own and her sons’ religion, apparently not having been made privy to the words which passed between her sons and their servants, although she did concede that she had burned some papers before being placed under restraint.
⁶⁷

Cromwell now had more than enough to go on, and could arrange for the trials to take place. Lord Montague and the Marquis of Exeter were tried by their peers on 2 and 3 December, and were found guilty. Given the flexible nature of the treason laws, and the king’s evident interest in the proceedings, there could be no other verdict. Geoffrey Pole, Edward Neville, Hugh Holland and two others were tried by special commission of oyer and terminer at the Guildhall on 4 December and likewise condemned. Holland, Croftes and Collins were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 9 December, and Neville, Montague and Exeter were beheaded at the Tower on the same day.
⁶⁸
Geoffrey Pole was pardoned on 2 January 1539. The countess was not tried but was included in the Act of Attainder passed against all the defendants in the parliament that convened on 28 April, and was kept in prison until after Cromwell’s fall. Gertrude, the Marchioness of Exeter, her son Edward, and Montague’s son Henry all ended up in the Tower.

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 of 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.