Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (37 page)

Cromwell regained his calm amid all this wrath and the barb-like, jabbing fingers of his fellow councillors. He took a deep breath: ‘I have never thought to offend, but if this is to be my treatment, I renounce all claims to pardon and only ask that the king should not make me languish long.’

If he thought his words would be placatory, he grievously underestimated the depth of their burning hatred for him. No doubt some would have happily stabbed him in the heart then and there in the Council Chamber, but were restrained from such gratifying vengeance only by their fear of Henry’s strictly enforced ordinances prohibiting any form of violence within the precincts of the royal palaces.

Wingfield, probably fearing such bloodshed, turned to take his prisoner away, but Norfolk was intent on inflicting a final, ritual humiliation of his defeated prey. ‘Stop, Captain,’ he snapped, ‘traitors must not wear the Garter.’ And he marched up to Cromwell and ripped off the gleaming Order of St George from around his neck, while Southampton, his former friend, tugged the Garter insignia from the Minister’s gown. Cromwell stood shocked and speechless, pulled this way and that like a rag doll, as the nobles tore at his clothing.
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Finally they succeeded and stood back, panting, as the prisoner was hustled away and taken out of the palace through a small postem gate on the river bank. A waiting wherry took him downriver to the Tower of London. He left behind an exultant Norfolk, his long-time ambition to destroy Cromwell finally and satisfyingly achieved. After Wolsey, the scalp of another upstart Minister had been claimed.

Outside, in the sunshine, more than three hundred of Cromwell’s retainers stood in restless ignorance at Westminster, still expecting their master’s imminent departure from the Council meeting and the instructions he would then issue. Finally, they were told to go away, as the sole means of their livelihood was now being held in the Tower.
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A few yards away, inside the Parliament House, Lord Chancellor Audley announced the news of Cromwell’s downfall to a stunned House of Lords, attended that afternoon by the two archbishops, eighteen bishops and forty-three members of the nobility.
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The list of attendees included Gardiner and Norfolk, the latter having hurried across to enjoy their moment of triumph. The House then adjourned for the day. Only a few hours earlier, Cromwell had been sitting amongst them as a consummate master of the parliamentary process; now his power and influence had completely dissolved away.

Government meanwhile had to continue: Southampton was appointed to replace him as Lord Privy Seal.

De Marillac heard of the arrest within the hour and dashed off an urgent dispatch to his royal master in France. He clearly shared the contempt of the English nobility for Cromwell and his letter reflected his prejudice:

This might be thought a private matter and of little importance, as they have only reduced a personage to the state from which they raised him and treated him as hitherto everyone said he deserved.

Yet, considering that public affairs thereby entirely changed their course, especially as regards the innovations in religion on which Cromwell was the principal author, the news seems of such importance that it ought to be written forthwith.

A ‘gentleman of the court’ had come swiftly to the envoy’s residence with a personal message from the King. Cromwell’s downfall should not astonish de Marillac, he was told, and as the ‘common, ignorant people spoke of it variously’, Henry wished the French ambassador to know the precise truth. The King earnestly desired ‘by all possible means to lead religion back to the way of truth’, said the letter, and Henry had found Cromwell too close to the German Lutherans ‘who preached such erroneous opinions’.

Some of the King’s principal servants had warned him that his Minister was working against both his wishes and the law and that he had ‘betrayed himself … and hoped to suppress the old preachers and have only the new’. The issue had been coming to a head and ‘the king, with all his power, could not prevent it’ – and what was more, Cromwell’s own faction ‘would [soon] be so strong that he would make the king descend to the new doctrines, even if he had to take arms against him’.
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Gardiner’s scheming fingerprints were all over the message, even though Henry had apparently dictated it himself.

After bidding farewell to Henry’s messenger, de Marillac wrote to the Constable of France, pointing out that the fallen Minister’s party, which had appeared the strongest when the Bishop of Chichester had been arrested, now ‘seems quite overthrown’ and there remained on his side only Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘who dare not open his mouth’.

The normally adroit and well-informed Frenchman was quite wrong and had underestimated Cranmer’s undoubted moral courage.

The next day, the Archbishop wrote to Henry pleading for his friend’s life in an impassioned letter full of contradictory emotions. He expressed
his amazement and grief that Cromwell should be a traitor, who had been so advanced by the King and ‘cared for no man’s displeasure to serve him’. This was a servant whose

wisdom, diligence, faithfulness and experience as no prince in this realm ever had. He that was so vigilant to protect your majesty from all treasons that few could be so secretly conceived but that he had detected the same in the beginning. If the noble princes King John, Henry II and Richard II, had had such a councillor about them, I suppose that they should never have been so traitorously abandoned and overthrown as those good princes were.

These were probably unhappy allusions to make, as Henry would never have equated himself with such unpopular or unlucky earlier monarchs of England. Nonetheless, Cranmer pressed on recklessly: he had loved Cromwell

as a friend … but I chiefly loved him for the love which I thought I saw him bear ever towards your grace singularly above all others. But now, if he be a traitor, I am sorry that ever I loved him or trusted him and I am very glad that his treason is discovered in time. But yet again I am very sorrowful, for whom shall your grace trust hereafter, if you might not trust him? Alas! I bewail and lament your grace’s chance herein, I know not whom your grace may trust.

But I pray God continually night and day to send such a councillor in his place … and who for all his qualities can and will serve your grace like to him and that will have so much solicitude and care to preserve [you] … from all dangers, as I ever thought he had.
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Here was a brave sideswipe at the conservative faction – Gardiner and Norfolk – who were now paramount at court and were working urgently to finally seal Cromwell’s fate. But the King was, as ever, more immediately interested in other, more mundane matters – his amassment of cash.

Henry, ever rapacious, had lost no time in seizing his fallen Minister’s wealth. Within two hours of Cromwell’s arrest, the King dispatched Sir Thomas Cheney, the Treasurer of the Royal Household, with an
escort of fifty archers, to the Minister’s home at Austin Friars. A large crowd had gathered outside and watched jubilantly as £14,000 of movable assets – gold and silver-gilt plate, such as crosiers and chalices and other spoil from the monastic churches – were rapidly inventoried, placed in carts and carried off under close guard to Henry’s jewel house at Westminster,
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followed by a jeering rabble. This loot, together with Cromwell’s ready cash held at the house, is estimated to have been worth £6 million at 2006 prices – far too much wealth, sneered de Marillac, for such ‘a villainous, low-born upstart’.
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That night the good citizens of London lit bonfires in the streets to celebrate the downfall of Cromwell, who from his window in the Tower must have seen the orange and red glow of the fires flickering above the dark, ill-lit streets and heard the shouts of the mob.

Edward Hall, the contemporary chronicler, believed that many lamented Cromwell’s downfall, but

more rejoiced and specially such as had been religious men [monks] for they banqueted and triumphed that night, many wishing that day had been seven years before [but] some fearing lest he should escape … and could not be merry. Others who knew nothing but truth by him, both lamented him and heartily prayed for him. Of certain of the clergy, he was detestably hated … for he was a man … [who] could not abide the snuffing pride of some prelates.
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The plunder of Cromwell’s possessions did not stop with Cheney’s raid on his home. Richard Rugeley and David Vincent of the Royal Wardrobe and Beds Department, and Nicholas Bristow, Henry’s clerk, were paid for stripping Cromwell’s ‘stuff’ – how contemptuous that sounds – from his house, under the supervision of Henry’s household ‘fixer’, the odious and thuggish John Gates, then a groom of the robes. They submitted their expenses for conveying the loot in a cavalcade of carts to the Tower, Hampton Court and Greenwich Palace, taking six days and charging twenty pence a day each, the costs charged on the vice-chamberlain’s account. Ever pragmatic, Henry arranged for some of the Minister’s furniture to be appropriated for Anne of Cleves’ use.
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Cromwell’s Garter robes, in crimson and purple velvet, all trimmed with
miniver fur, were taken to Hampton Court and delivered to the Lord Chamberlain on 10 August.
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Amid all this rummaging through Cromwell’s possessions, letters between him and the German Lutherans – possibly planted by Norfolk’s agents – had conveniently been discovered by the diligent searchers. After they had been shown to Henry, he was so exasperated about their contents that he ‘could no longer bear him [Cromwell] spoken of, but rather desired to abolish all memory of him as the greatest wretch ever born in England’, according to de Marillac a few days later. Cromwell had already been stripped of his ranks, titles and estates and now he was to be called merely ‘Thomas Cromwell, shearman’ – a brutal allusion to his humble origins. His less valuable possessions were distributed amongst his servants, who were ordered to no longer wear his livery badge.
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Henry’s propaganda machine slipped easily into top gear. On the day of Cromwell’s arrest, the King’s Council wrote to the English ambassador in France, Sir John Wallop, repeating the official reason for his seizure, as described to de Marillac. They said that although Henry had put his trust in Cromwell over religious issues, he ‘had … only of his sensual appetite, wrought clean contrary to his grace’s most godly intent, secretly and indirectly advancing the one of the extremes’.
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Copies of this cleverly spun version of events were also sent to Ireland, Calais and the Presidents of the Councils in Wales and the North.

Emperor Charles V sank to his knees and prayed to God in thanks when told of Cromwell’s downfall. Francis, the French King, who reportedly shouted with joy over the arrest, told his envoy in London that Wallop had informed him

of the taking of Mr Cromwell, news which has been to me not only agreeable, but such as, for the perfect amity I have always borne towards my good brother [Henry] I have thanked God for …

Tell him from me that he has occasion to thank God for having let him know the faults and malversations [corrupt administration] of such an unhappy person as Cromwell, who alone has been the cause of all the suspicions conceived against not only his friends, but his best servants.

He shall know how much the getting rid of this wicked and unhappy
instrument will tranquillise his kingdom, to the common welfare of Church, nobles and people.
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In the Tower, Cromwell was in the charge of Sir William Kingston, the Constable, who was also Comptroller of the Royal Household. The prisoner must have wryly remembered that it was Kingston who had been sent to arrest Wolsey in the Midlands more than a decade before. History was repeating itself as Henry remorselessly shed another Minister.

The conservative cabal at court was meanwhile working hard to ensure that Cromwell would leave the Tower of London only on his way to the scaffold. There remained fears that he could yet somehow slip the noose and wreak his own revenge on his enemies. Leading members of the Council, including a gloating Norfolk, questioned the Minister closely and passed on the King’s instructions for him to answer the charges against him.

Cromwell penned a cleverly constructed and eloquent letter to Henry on 12 June. He was careful to avoid making any protests against the accusation of treason, as such a denial would contradict the King’s own statements – and this was hardly a propitious time to further enrage Henry. He wrote:

Prostrate at your most excellent majesty’s feet, I have heard your pleasure … that I should write … such things as I thought meet concerning my most miserable state and condition, for which your most abundant goodness, benignity and licence, the Immortal God, Three and One, reward your majesty.

Where I have been accused of treason, to that I say I never in all my life thought willingly to do [any] thing that might or should displease your majesty; much less to do or say that thing which of itself is so high and abominable [an] offence as God knows, who, I doubt not, shall reveal the truth to your majesty.

Henry knew his accusers well – ‘God forgive them!’ But Cromwell had always been concerned to protect and enhance ‘your honour, person, life, prosperity, health, wealth, joy and comfort’ and therefore ‘God so help
me in this my adversity and confound me if ever I thought the contrary’. Cromwell then tried flattery and the one thing he had achieved that would appeal to the King’s inherited Tudor instincts: the accumulation of money and power.

What labours, pains and travails I have taken according to my most bounden duty, God also knows, for if it were in my power, as it is God’s to make your majesty live ever young and prosperous, God knows I would. If it had been or were in my power to make you so rich as you might enrich all men, God help me as I would do it. If it had been or were in my power to make your majesty so puissant as all the world should be compelled to obey you, Christ knows I would.