These three, the bishop of Rome, the French King, and the Emperor, be all one, and the King of Scots is the French King’s man; and so we be left alone, and nobody with us but these Germans, a sort of beggarly knaves, and they are able to do nothing.
Finally, to cap the diplomatic blunder, it quickly became manifest that thc much-heralded meeting between Charles and Francis in Paris when it actually took place in January of 1540 was a brittle, if sumptuous, display of chivalric posing and lavish courtesy, and Henry was gratified to discover that each side continued the tricky and damnable game of negotiation with the English heretics.
Henry had good reason to be unhappy in the spring of 154o, and the ranks of the conservative opposition were confidently anticipating the fruits of the royal discomfort, for the King’s matrimonial disappointments had a peculiar tendency to coincide with political, social and religious change. Thomas Cromwell had risen in the royal estimation because he alone had been able to offer a means of marrying Anne Boleyn and divorcing Catherine of Aragon. That method had been the daring and successful policy of a break with Rome and the settlement of the divorce in an English court in defiance of the Catholic world. It now remained to be seen whether the Vicar- General could ride out another matrimonial storm and offer his sovereign escape from the marital yoke imposed by the alliance with Protestant Germany. The moment the King’s shocked sensibilities had recovered from the sight of his bride, violent and unpredictable change both in ministers and policy was almost inevitable. The only question now concerned the nature of that change, and whose head would fly – Cromwell’s, or Norfolk and Gardiner’s?
Francis Bacon once remarked that Elizabeth’s guiding principle in government was that matters of conscience, ‘when they exceed their bounds and grow to be matter of faction, lose their nature’.20 Whether it is worse to murder and intrigue in the name of factional hatred or of idealistic principle, is a debatable point, but the situation in the winter of 1539-40 was following Bacon’s prescription – personal rivalry and the strife of personalities were beginning to outweigh both religious and diplomatic considerations. The aim of each faction was not so much a godly policy in religion, but simply the destruction of certain key individuals.
First, there was ‘busy Gardiner’, the wily Bishop of Winchester, ‘the wittiest, boldest, and best learned of his faculty’.21 Choleric and touchy, so unmanageable that only Henry’s iron will and strong hand could curb him, and possibly a better Englishman than a Christian, the Bishop was the brains of the conservative forces. Winchester’s opposite number and persistent rival was Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal and Vicar-General in matters spiritual. Both men were lawyers by instinct and training, both had the saving grace of humour and both could be terrifyingly ruthless, but here the similarity ceases.
There is something almost satanic about the King’s chief minister, whose origins and education included soldiering, the law, moneylending, trading and the civil service. While Stephen Gardiner often gibbered with rage and blundered simply through exasperation, Cromwell never seemed to do anything without a calculated reason. His anger may at times have been real, but more often it was feigned. His ruthlessness was strangely impartial – he destroyed, but rarely hated his victims. Possibly this was why he was feared and detested by his contemporaries, for somehow Thomas Cromwell never seemed to have expressed the proper human emotions. He was far too impervious; he was immune to insults because he never made a pretence at being a gentleman; he was coldly tolerant, if only because he felt no passion. Outwardly bland and imperturbable, he ruled by the sheer force of his intelligence. For his own society he remained an enigma, and one baffled critic shook his head and said that for himself he would not be in Cromwell’s shoes, ‘for all that ever he hath, for the King beknaveth him twice a week, and sometimes knocks him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pummelled about the head’, the Vicar-General would enter the great chamber ‘shaking off the bush with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost.’22 Looking more like a pub-keeper than a minister of state, the man harboured a massive pride, and the agility and brilliance of his mind made him more than a match for wily Winchester. When the great oak finally fell, it was almost as though it crashed before the gale of historic necessity rather than to the ineffectual chopping of the Bishop’s axe.
Behind each individual, Tudor society aligned itself. Norfolk, cunning and mercurial, was Gardiner’s ally in favouring conservatism in religion, a pro-French policy in diplomacy, and an intense distaste for the hated Cromwell. If Gardiner supplied the brains and the pen of the conservative position, Thomas Howard lent it his sword and his brawn. Unpopular but indispensable, the Duke was a necessary evil, since Norfolk alone was able to supply the means of crushing rebellious subjects and curbing the unpredictable Scots. Norfolk was neither intelligent nor strong enough to be a serious threat to the Vicar-General, who allowed him to retain his rather uncomfortable seat upon the King’s Council. In the conservative fold was also Cuthbert Tunstal, the venerable and affable Bishop of Durham, whose ‘stillness, soberness, and subtlety’23 won him the respect of both sides, and earned him a permanent place among Henry’s closest advisers.
Of the opposite opinion was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual foster-father of the Reformation in England. Pliable and naive, one of the few men for whom Henry ever felt real affection, and imbued with a quiet common sense and a divine gift for translating enduring ideas into the magic and majesty of the English language, Cranmer was helpless without the political acumen of Thomas Cromwell. More Christian than Winchester – deep down perhaps stronger than any of his colleagues or rivals – the Archbishop is of more ultimate importance than any of them, but in the crisis of 1540 he played a minor role, viewing what happened with something of the shocked astonishment of the child.
The struggle between personalities had been going on for years, but the crisis was reached in the late autumn of 1539 when Cromwell achieved the dismissal from the privy council of his two old enemies, the Bishops of Winchester and Chichester.
Behind the scenes, idle tongues were gossiping, rumours of promised change were being whispered abroad, and Cromwell’s position, though strong on the surface, was slowly but surely being weakened. During the same autumn there were persistent hints that Cromwell was out of favour, and that Tunstal, Bishop of Durham, might replace him as the King’s chief minister. Moreover, there was mounting hatred of the Vicar-General himself. As the instrument of a sovereign who could commit no wrong, the Lord Privy Seal was the whipping-boy for everyone who disliked his prince’s doings. He was detested as a social climber, as a Protestant, as the scourge of the great abbeys and monasteries, and, above all, as a successful politician who controlled the good things of political life. Though Cromwell more often than not spoke for his master and not himself, he alone won the hatred inspired by Henry’s rough and tactless policies. The situation was summed up by the French Ambassador when he reported in April of 1540 that should the Vicar-General remain in power, it would only be because ‘he does nothing without first consulting the King.’24
In the meantime, Stephen Gardiner was not inactive. He also was developing his openings, countering his opponents’ moves, pushing forward his own pawns, and endeavouring to undermine the Vicar- General’s grasp of the political situation. In this he was immeasurably helped by the fiasco surrounding the King’s fourth marriage. From the start the nuptials were unsuccessful. When the German princess arrived at Greenwich, Cromwell inquired of his sovereign how he liked his new bride, and Henry answered sharply, saying that ‘she is nothing fair.’ The Lord Privy Seal desperately endeavoured to point out to the King the bright side of the predicament and optimistically said: ‘By my faith, you say truth, but me thinketh she hath a queenly manner withal.’25 To this, Henry magnanimously agreed, but it shortly became obvious that he wanted a pretty wife and not a regal queen. The King snatched like a drowning man at the hope that perhaps Anne was legally in
capable of marriage since she had been precontracted to the son of the Duke of Lorraine; and, when he learned that this constituted no barrier to his wedding, he grimly told Cromwell that he was ‘not well handled’.
Neither the Lord Privy Seal nor any other member of the council could think of a way by which the King might escape the consequences of Cromwell’s foreign policy, and pathetically Henry pleaded: ‘Is there none other remedy but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’26 He sighed over the sad lot of monarchs who must wed for duty and not for love, and announced that he would marry the lady only because honour and duty demanded it. Henry and Anne were wed on Monday 6 January, and the next morning Cromwell hopefully trotted round to find out the result of a night in the connubial bed. The experience was not to Henry’s taste, and he growled that he liked her worse than ever, ‘for by her breasts and belly she should be no maid; which, when I felt them, struck me so to the heart that I had neither will nor courage to prove the rest.’27 This was to be the monarch’s position ever afterwards – that ‘if she brought maidenhead with her’, he never ‘took any from her by true carnal copulation. Whether the world believed it or not, this was Henry’s ‘true and perfect declaration’.28
Cromwell was sufficiently alarmed by the course of events to try to shift the blame to the Earl of Southampton. That nobleman had escorted the Lady of Cleves from her barbarian homeland to England, and presumably should have noted that Anne was plain and not to the King’s fancy. Southampton, not unreasonably, argued that he had been commissioned to accompany the princess to London, not to pass judgment on her beauty or lack thereof. Nor were the Vicar- General’s fears allayed with time, for the King’s complaints increased as the winter wore on, and in April ‘he lamented his fate that he should never have any more children if he continued, declaring that before God he thought she was not his lawful wife.’29 The ghosts of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn must have smiled at such words, for here was history repeating itself with almost ludicrous exactness. Again Henry’s tender conscience was doubting the legality of his marriage; again he was justifying his actions in terms of an heir to the throne; and again his conscience had ‘crept too near another lady’ of the court, for by April the King’s interest in one of the Queen’s maids of honour was public knowledge. There is little doubt that Norfolk and Gardiner assiduously fanned the flame of Henry’s lust in the hope that Catherine Howard might not only replace the red queen of Cleves, but also encompass the destruction of the King’s Vicar-General.
Suddenly Mistress Catherine began to appear in more sumptuous garments; the Dowager Duchess gave advice on ‘how to behave’ and ‘in what sort to entertain the King’s Highness and how often’;30 and the Duchess’s house at Lambeth was thrown open to the King. The entire Howard clan was at pains to ‘commend and praise Catherine for her pure and honest condition’,31 while Gardiner was no less busy making his sovereign welcome at Winchester House, where Catherine and her royal lover were feasted and entertained by the hospitable ecclesiastic. By June of 1540 the citizens of London were commenting upon the frequency of Henry’s daytime and midnight visits to Lambeth. Observers, however, misinterpreted the facts and concluded that these excusions across the river augured adultery, not divorce.32 The King’s loyal and interested subjects had forgotten that ‘when this King decides on anything he goes the whole length.’33
From every side evidence of the Vicar-General’s insecurity was mounting. Norfolk returned in February from a brief mission to France with words from Francis that augured ill for Cromwell. The French monarch had suggested to the Duke that the removal of that ‘wicked and unhappy instrument’ would ‘tranquillize the kingdom’ and solve most of Henry’s international difficulties.34 A month later, in March, Cromwell went so far as to conciliate his rival, and over dinner he and Gardiner ‘opened their hearts’ to each other and pledged that ‘not only all displeasures’ should be forgotten, but also that henceforth they would ‘be perfect entire friends’.35 In April it was murmured abroad that ‘Cromwell is tottering’ and that the Bishops of Winchester, Durham, and Bath were all back on the council despite the opposition of the Lord Privy Seal. In fact, the situation was so serious that some time during these crucial months, Cromwell began to think in terms of flight, for he asked the German traveller, Hubertus Leodius, whether his prince had ‘any castles or offices to sell or lease’. The Vicar-General then presented Leodius with a silver cup for his wife, so that ‘she might be able to recognize him if ever he came to Germany and he were to refer to the said cup’. The Lord Privy Seal at this time was the picture of a man living under an unbearable strain and the shadow of the block. The German observer noted that he, ‘walked with me through the gardens or galleries, for the most part sunk in thought’, and he would ‘stand still from time to time, as if he were about to say something but did not quite dare to do so’.36
The end came in May and June when the Vicar-General wrote Richard Pate that, ‘the whole of Christendom hangs in the balance.’37 On 10 April the French Ambassador had confidently written that, ‘there will be seen in the country a great change in many things; which this King begins to make in his ministers, recalling those he had rejected and degrading those he had raised.’38 A week later Marillac was forced to reverse his opinion, for all expectations were confounded by the elevation of Cromwell to the earldom of Essex. Then in rapid succession followed a series of Cromwellian triumphs. On 19 May Lord Lisle, the King’s deputy in Calais and the bastard son of Edward IV, was sent to the Tower post-haste, charged with treasonable designs to turn the city of Calais over to the papal forces. No one, concluded the French Ambassador, expects him to escape, ‘unless by a miracle.’39 On all sides conservative pawns continued to be swept aside by the Vicar- General’s offensive, and by 1 June, Marillac was reporting that ‘things are brought to such a pass that either Cromwell’s party or that of the bishop of Winchester must succumb’, and he thought that ‘things seem to incline to Cromwell’s side.’40
The exasperated Frenchman, who concluded that English politics were beyond Gallic logic – ‘so great is the inconstancy of the English’ – was in for yet another surprise when Richard Sampson, Bishop of Chichester and Dean of St Paul’s, ‘with all solenmity’ was elevated to the new bishopric of Westminster on 30 May, and then ‘two hours later was led to the Tower as accused of treason’. The unfortunate clergyman remained, ‘with life only, which he shall lose immediately according to the usual penalty decreed to high treason, as horrible to tell as frightful to see.’41 Even Sampson’s ecclesiastical mule was confiscated to the Duke of Suffolk. No one doubted that the Bishop of Chichester had become the hapless victim of the duel between Gardiner and Cromwell, and it was reliably reported that the Vicar- General had a little list of five other bishops deserving the same fate. Presumably Gardiner and Tunstal stood high on the roster, and the imprisonment of Sampson and the nomination of Thomas Thirlby as Cromwell’s selection to the See of Westminster, were merely the Lord Privy Seal’s preliminary attack upon wily Winchester.42
Marillac was in for still a final shock. Ten days after the successful attack on Sampson, Cromwell himself was carried off, a prisoner to the Tower; eighteen days later the Vicar-General was executed. Cromwell’s successes had been only on the surface. On 6 May he confided to his friend and disciple, Thomas Wriothesley, that no matter what he did, one problem continued to plague him – ‘The King liketh not the Queen.’ Wriothesley was ‘right sorry that his Majesty should be so troubled’ and suggested that the Lord Privy Seal should ‘devise how his Grace may be relieved by one way or another’. Cromwell simply murmured in reply: ‘Yea [but] how?’43 During all the moves and counter-moves, the checks and counterchecks, the desperate fact remained that the Vicar-General had been unable to strike at Gardiner’s most dangerous and essential pawn – Catherine Howard, who had cast her charms about the royal person.
Once Cromwell was removed, events developed smoothly and rapidly. A statute governing the n
ature of divorce and the degree of consanguinity of the marriage partners was rushed through parliament, because Catherine, as first cousin to Anne Boleyn, was within the prohibited degree. Anne of Cleves was quietly removed from court and sent off to Richmond on the pretext that she was in danger of the plague. Henry, however, continued to brave the contaminated air of the city, and observers were quick to perceive that more was involved than met the casual eye. Then on 6 July, 1540, the first step in the carefully rehearsed drama of the divorce commenced.
A delegation of the Lords and Commons made humble suit to the King that they were in doubt as to the validity of his marriage to Anne, and they requested his grace to place the matter in the hands of Convocation. Very properly, Henry replied that canon law prescribed that this could only be done with the consent of the Queen herself. Instantly, Gardiner and the Duke of Suffolk were dispatched to Richmond to interview the Flemish lady, who proved herself both obliging and perceptive. The very next day, the Bishop assembled the clergy in convocation and presented them with the problem – again the monarch was worried about the legitimacy of his marriage; again his conscience pricked him; and again he feared that continued doubt might place the true succession in jeopardy. Almost two hundred ecclesiastics pondered the evidence, and discovered ample proof that the marriage was invalid. The precontract between the princess of Cleves and the Marquis of Lorraine was sufficient, if not to negate, at least to refuse a future marriage; Henry had entered matrimony in good faith that no such uncertainty existed; and he had been forced by diplomatic necessity to solemnize a marriage about which he had the gravest doubts. Finally, upon the evidence presented by the sovereign himself, and by a host of lesser but obliging figures, it was proved beyond dispute that the marriage had never been consummated. On these considerations it was discovered that Henry’s marriage to Anne was null and void, and though society may have doubted whether Henry had in actuality been so continent as he claimed, two archbishops, sixteen bishops, and 139 learned doctors determined otherwise.44
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