Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (33 page)

It was not, however, for his corruption, nor for his heresy, that Thomas Cromwell died, but for displeasing the king in that area of Henry’s life which always loomed so large: his marriages. The king dispatched three minions to the Tower to extract from Cromwell the last valuable service that he would perform for the master who was about to become his murderer. To secure the dissolution of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, Henry needed written evidence from Cromwell that he, the king, had been displeased with his royal bride from their first meeting, and that he had consequently refrained from having sex with her on his wedding night. Cromwell did as he was bid.

On 30 June he penned another long letter from the Tower setting out in embarrassing detail all the disobliging comments the king had made to him about the ‘Flanders mare’. Cromwell wrote in cold legalese, signing off that he was ready to ‘take the death’ when God and Henry pleased. But a desperate scrawled postscript to the letter tore off the mask, revealing the naked terror beneath: ‘Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy. Thomas Cromwell.’

Although Henry had Cromwell’s plea read to him three times, he remained unmoved. On 9 July Cromwell’s testimony that the king had found poor Anne repulsive at first sight helped persuade the country’s senior clergy to grant Henry the dissolution of his fourth marriage. Cromwell’s death followed swiftly On 28 July, after a hearty breakfast, he emerged blinking into the summer sunshine from the same lieutenant’s lodging where Anne Boleyn had been held, to walk the well-trodden path
up Tower Hill to the scaffold. He had been stripped of his recently granted Earldom of Essex and as plain commoner ‘Master Cromwell’ he was denied a private death within the Tower’s walls.

Cromwell did not die alone. As an extra humilation he was executed alongside a mentally disturbed peer, Lord Walter Hungerford, sentenced to die for sodomy, for raping his own daughter, and for paying necromancers to predict the king’s death. As the two men walked up the hill between hundreds of grim-faced halberdiers, Cromwell tried to calm the deranged peer, who was gibbering with fear. Calmly, the fallen statesman told Hungerford that if he sincerely repented his sins, he would be forgiven through the mercy of Christ. ‘Therefore,’ he concluded cheerfully, ‘though the breakfast we are going to be sharp, yet, trusting in the mercy of the Lord, we shall have a joyful dinner.’

It is not known whether Hungerford took comfort from these words, but Cromwell’s fortitude remained steady. Reaching the scaffold, he addressed the crowd, confessing that he was a sinner – but affirming that he died in the Catholic faith, rebutting stories that he was a Lutheran heretic. He attributed his own downfall to his pride, and described the man who had ordered his death as ‘one of the best kings in the world’, asking people to pray for the king and his son Edward, ‘that goodly imp’. Then he knelt in the straw for a last prayer, asking both friends and enemies – his foes Norfolk and Chapuys had come to gloat at his downfall – to pray for him.

Spotting a familiar face in the crowd, Cromwell recognised Sir Thomas Wyatt, a fellow reformer implicated in the fall of Anne Boleyn. Wyatt, though imprisoned in the Tower, had miraculously survived and been released on the intervention of Henry’s new love, Katherine Howard. Now the kindly poet was one of the few who wept openly to see Cromwell die. Cromwell told him to dry his eyes. ‘Gentle Wyatt, goodbye. Pray for me and do not weep. For, if I were no more guilty than you when they took you I should not be in this pass.’ Finally, with a plea to the young executioner to cut his head off with a single stroke, Cromwell submitted to the headsman.

The executioner, a Spaniard named Gurrea – did not oblige. He made a bloody mess of Cromwell’s decapitation, hacking and sawing at his head and thick neck amidst the loud protests of the crowd, especially Hungerford who knew he was about to undergo the same butchery. Finally, however, the awful ordeal was over and the heads of Cromwell and Hungerford,
parboiled to preserve them, were spiked on London Bridge. Cromwell’s body joined that of his victim Anne Boleyn in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. That very day, a heartless Henry married his fifth wife: Lady Katherine Howard.

Katherine Howard, for obvious reasons, has often been compared to her cousin and predecessor, Anne Boleyn. But the two women who died at their royal husband’s hands, though close relations, were very different. Where Anne had been intelligent, learned, sophisticated, spiteful and well-travelled, Katherine was virtually illiterate, unintellectual, naive, kind-hearted and had never left England. The daughter of Lord Edmund Howard, younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, she had been born in the early 1520s. Her mother had died early and her education had been neglected.

By puberty, however, it was clear that though small, Katherine had a pretty face and an impishly cheerful, sunny personality. Her ruthless Howard relations cynically brought her to court as bait to catch the monstrous royal fish, and bring Henry under the influence of their family faction. The plan worked only too well. Henry, bloated and old before his time, with his stinking, ulcerated leg, was unlikely to appeal to his spirited, sexy teenage bride. Henry, however, fell for her with senescent, dribbling lust. He called Katherine his ‘Rose without a thorn’ and showered her with gifts – economically including jewels that had belonged to his dead former wives – without wondering whether the lusty girl could be expected to return the feelings of a rotting hulk of flesh.

In his mood of sentimental adoration, Henry indulged Katherine’s requests to free Wyatt from the Tower, and send Margaret of Salisbury the clothes she had pathetically requested to keep her warm in her chilly Tower cell. As a result of Katherine’s kindly intervention, the queen’s own tailor was ordered to send Margaret furred satin nightgowns and petticoats, a worsted kirtle, four pairs of tights and shoes, and a pair of slippers. But the king’s indulgence of his ‘rose’ would not last long.

Katherine’s sexuality had already flowered, and unknown to the king, younger and lustier lovers than he had already had their ways with her. After her mother’s death, Katherine had been sent to the household of her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, in Lambeth, south London. The duchess was often absent at court, and the atmosphere in the house, crowded with fun-loving young people, was morally lax, even licentious.

Katherine’s music teacher, Henry Manox, was the first to enjoy her favours. Although full sex may not have occurred, it certainly did with the man who succeeded Manox in her bed – a certain Francis Dereham. Relations with Dereham were brought to a sudden end when Katherine’s family brought her to court and trailed her before the king. But once she became queen, reminders of her recent past appeared, and, exercising a form of moral blackmail, demanded positions at court. Manox returned like a bad penny, followed by Dereham himself, who turned up at Pontefract Castle in August 1541 while the king was on a northern progress with his bride.

When Katherine appointed her ex-lover as her private secretary, a puzzled Henry asked why the unqualified youth should receive preferment. Embarrassed, Katherine pretended that she was giving the young man a job as a favour to her grandmother, the dowager duchess. The besotted Henry accepted this lame explanation, but Katherine’s cover-up of her past could not last long. While the royal couple were on their leisurely progress, the leader of the Protestant reformers in London, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, was handed the weapon to destroy Katherine and discredit her family.

Cranmer was approached by a fellow Protestant, John Lascelles, who revealed that his sister, Mary Hall, had information that would incriminate the new queen. Though not a vindictive man, Cranmer was aware that unless he moved against the Howards, his own position as the realm’s leading Protestant reformer would be in severe danger and he might well follow his friend Cromwell to the block. Mary Hall, another former member of the jolly Lambeth household, told Cranmer the details of Katherine’s dalliances with Manox and Dereham, claiming she had taken Dereham to her bed more than a hundred times. The girls at Lambeth shared a dormitory, and Katherine’s friends were left in little doubt about what had gone on after Dereham, dressed only in doublet and hose, had climbed between her sheets. Cranmer set out the allegations in a letter to Henry just as the king and Katherine arrived back at Hampton Court Palace after their northern progress.

Ironically, Henry was attending a special service of thanksgiving for his happy union with Katherine in the palace’s Chapel Royal when Cranmer dropped his bombshell. The archbishop quietly left his letter beside the king and glided out without a word. Henry’s first reaction – horrified
disbelief – was rapidly replaced by a determination to establish the truth. Summoning Cranmer, a humiliated Henry ordered his friend to dig out the whole dirty story and ‘not to desist until he had got to the bottom of the [chamber] pot’. Meanwhile, Katherine was placed under house arrest in her apartments. He would never set eyes on his ‘rose’ again. Their marriage had lasted for just fourteen months.

During her progress, with naivety amounting to stupidity, Katherine had compounded her innocent teenage dalliances (before she had met Henry) with actual adultery. Her partner was Thomas Culpeper, a distant cousin on her mother Joyce Culpeper’s side. Culpeper had been one of the many hopefuls who had flocked to the new queen’s court jockeying for the favour of the foolish girl. Young Thomas became a particular favourite of the king, but he too was arrested. Unlike Katherine, he, along with Manox and Dereham, went straight into the Tower.

Katherine was dancing with her ladies when a group of grim-faced guards burst in to tell her that ‘the time for dancing was over’. The distraught queen raced along the corridor to the door of the Chapel Royal, screaming desperately. Remorselessly, she was caught and dragged back whence she had come. (Her shrieking ghost is said to haunt the corridor to this day.) She would neither eat nor drink, nor sleep, and spent hours helplessly weeping. Her only companion was hardly encouraging. Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, her Lady of the Bedchamber, was the widow of the ill-fated George Boleyn, brother of Queen Anne Boleyn. Jane’s evidence at her husband’s trial for incest with his sister had helped put both Boleyns’ heads on the block. Now, her foolish conniving at her mistress’s adultery would send both her and Katherine to the scaffold. Knowing the peril they were in, the two women repeatedly threw themselves into each other’s arms, sobbing with despair and fear.

Jane Rochford had acted as Katherine’s go-between with Culpeper, running messages between them, ensuring that the coast was clear before their clandestine adulterous meetings, and smuggling the queen’s lover in and out of her apartments. All this was revealed as Cranmer doggedly pursued his inquiries. By 6 November he reported to the Privy Council, presided over by Henry, that Katherine had indeed enjoyed premarital sex with Manox and Dereham. Moreover, added the archbishop, he believed that worse revelations were to come. ‘She betrayed you in thought,’ he told Henry ominously, ‘and if she had an opportunity would have betrayed you in deed.’ At this, self-pity overwhelmed Henry. He wept openly in
front of his embarrassed councillors. Then hiding his shame, the cuckolded king took refuge in his secluded palace at Oatlands, near Weybridge, bidding Cranmer continue his investigation. For the first time, the archbishop confronted Katherine directly. He found the queen ‘in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature’. So distressed was Katherine, often screaming in panic, that Cranmer was unable to get any sense out of her at first. Eventually, after seeing a letter from Henry in which he promised to show mercy so long as she made a full confession, she calmed down somewhat.

Katherine was persuaded to pen a confession to Henry in which, excusing herself because of ‘my youth, my ignorance, my frailness’, she admitted having allowed Manox to ‘touch the secret parts of my body’. Dereham ‘by many persuasions procured me to his vicious purpose’ and ‘used me in such sort as a man doth his wife, many and sundry times’. The confession might have saved Katherine’s life since it only admitted to sexual misconduct before her marriage. Fatally, however, it made no mention of Culpeper. On 11 November, while the king considered how best to punish her ‘abominable behaviour’, Katherine, stripped of the finery and jewels her doting husband had lavished on her, left Hampton Court by river for Syon Park further downstream at Brentford. She was separated from Lady Rochford whose barge was bound for a more sinister destination further downstream: the Tower.

It was to the Tower – and its rigorous interrogation methods – that Cranmer looked to find the evidence to condemn Katherine and her family faction which posed such a deadly threat to him personally and the future of reformed religion. The first to be questioned there by experienced interrogations from the Privy Council led by Sir Henry Wriothesley was Katherine’s earliest suitor, Henry Manox. While admitting touching her private parts, Manox strenuously denied having had full sex with Katherine, whose affections, he alleged, had been transferred to Dereham.

The council homed in on Lady Rochford – newly arrived at the Tower – as the queen’s abetter in her adultery with Culpeper. Their suspicions were confirmed by the discovery among Culpeper’s papers of a damning letter which the queen had stupidly sent her swain, and which Culpeper had failed to destroy. The letter confessed that ‘it maketh my heart die … that I cannot always be in your company’, and concluded, ‘Yours as long as life endures. Katherine.’

When Lady Rochford herself was summoned before the council, she tried to save her skin by throwing all the blame on Katherine. Jane Rochford readily admitted her mistress’s adultery with Culpeper, and further confessed that she had kept guard during their illicit trysts. Culpeper himself was next. He candidly confessed that he had fallen in love with the queen, and had striven hard to overcome his cousin’s resistance to his amorous advances. Although – knowing the dire penalties – he denied adultery, it was obvious that more than sweet nothings had passed between them.