by Jones, Nigel
Catholic conservatives at court, who had long hated Cromwell for being a base-born upstart, and for having ruthlessly pillaged the houses of religion to fill the king’s empty coffers, saw their chance to bring the hated minister down. They dangled yet another young woman before Henry’s porcine features as a temptation he would not resist. The chosen victim was eighteen-year-old Katherine Howard, like her cousin Anne Boleyn a niece of the Duke of Norfolk who led the anti-Cromwell faction at court. The times were propitious for the conservatives to strike. Norfolk had recently put down a dangerous religious rising directed against Cromwell’s spoilation of the religious houses: the Pilgrimage of Grace.
The Pilgrimage of Grace broke out in Lincolnshire in October 1536, five months after Anne Boleyn’s death. The revolt, supported by the ancient aristocratic families who had long held sway in the north – the Percys, the Nevilles, the Dacres and the Darcys – although suppressed in Lincolnshire, spread to Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. The uprisings were triggered by Cromwell’s assault on the monasteries which were the mainstay of the social and economic fabric of northern life. The great Yorkshire abbeys – Fountains, Jervaulx, Rievaulx and Byland – were forcibly closed, along with scores of smaller houses, their clergy turned out and their goods and lands confiscated or sold. Stirred by secret funds and encouragement from the imperial ambassador, Chapuys, the northern peasants, led by their lords and priests, rose under the banner of the five wounds of Christ, demanding Cromwell’s head, a return to Rome, a revival of tradition, and the reversal of the Henrician Reformation.
To the Tudors, rebellion was the one unforgivable sin, and Henry was determined to wreak a terrible revenge on the rebels. He was, however, cunning enough to string them along with false promises of pardon until their formidable armies dissolved, and he was able to punish them at leisure. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the most serious threat to the Crown between the Peasants’ Revolt and the Civil War of the 1640s. With considerable cunning, Henry put the Duke of Norfolk, a Catholic and a known enemy of Cromwell, in charge of negotiating with the rebels whose army had seized Pontefract Castle, traditional key to the north.
The Tower played its part in the suppression of the revolt, with a fleet of ten warships laden with guns and ammunition from the armoury being sent north in November to reinforce the royal forces. The ships left the Tower’s wharf after an attempt to dispatch the ordnance by land under Cromwell’s nephew Richard Cromwell had literally bogged down in the autumn mud. Soon afterwards, Marmaduke Neville, the first of the pilgrimage’s leaders to be held at the Tower, arrived in the fortress after being arrested trying to spread the revolt into East Anglia. He would not leave it alive. Equally doomed were two members of the powerful Percy family, the Nevilles’ old rivals, Sir Ingram and Sir Thomas Percy, who made the mistake of believing the blandishments of Henry and Norfolk, came south voluntarily, and were promptly thrown in the Tower. They would only leave its walls to be executed. Many other leading ‘pilgrims’ were given ‘safe conducts’ to London, only to be arrested and sent to the Tower, whose cells were soon bursting with northern rebels.
The pilgrimage’s two principal leaders, the honourable one-eyed Yorkshire squire Robert Aske, and Lord Darcy, who had surrendered Pontefract Castle to the rebels before joining their cause, were among the most tragic victims of Henry’s bloodlust. Aske, a moderate man who had met the king at Christmas 1536 and been commended for persuading his fellow rebels to disband, suffered for naively trusting Henry’s honeyed words. He too was flung in the Tower.
After tasting the Tower’s rigours for a month, Aske’s spirit began to crack. He wrote pathetically to those who had jailed him:
I most humbly beseech you all to be good unto me … for unless the King’s highness and my Lord Privy seal [Cromwell] shall be merciful and gracious unto me I am not able to live, for none of my friends will do nothing for me, and I have need to have a pair of hose, a doublet of fustian, a shirt (for I have but one shirt here) and a pair of shoes. I beseech you heartily that I may know your mind herein and how I shall be ordered that I may trust to the same for the love of God.
Aske’s appeal went unheard, and his family – as was normal with prisoners in the Tower – bore the cost of his imprisonment there which, austere though it was, was still set at six shillings and eight pence per week. Aske was eventually hanged in chains from the walls of York Castle, along with hundreds of lesser rebels who were hunted down and suffered similar fates.
Old Lord Tom Darcy’s incarceration was easier since as a peer he had privileges denied to commoners like Aske. His Tower expenses were set at twenty shillings a week. Darcy had no doubt who was the chief villain responsible, boldly penning a direct attack on the king’s minister:
Cromwell it is thou that art the very original and chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief, and art likewise causer of the apprehension of us that be noblemen and doe daily earnestly travail to bring us to our end and to strike off our heads, and I trust that or thou die, though thou wouldst procure all the noblemen’s heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet there shall one head remain that shall strike off thy head.
Both of Darcy’s grim prophecies were fulfilled. His own head was struck off on Tower Hill in June 1537, and spiked on London Bridge. Viciously, Henry denied the old man’s last request – to be buried next to his wife – and his body was contemptuously tipped into a common burial pit near the scaffold. In an act of particular spite Henry posthumously stripped Darcy of his Garter knighthood, awarding it to the dead man’s mortal enemy Cromwell. But Darcy, as he had foretold, would be avenged: Cromwell’s head would soon join his, grinning from London Bridge.
* * *
Buoyed by his triumph over the Pilgrimage of Grace, Norfolk and his Catholic faction felt strong enough to move against the hated Cromwell. It was he and his heretic friends who had caused the rebellion, they whispered to Henry – and destroying him would head off any similar revolts in the future. The king, still irritated by Cromwell having saddled him with his unwanted German bride, was ready to listen. Cromwell attempted to deflect the gathering storm to other victims. The pilgrimage, he argued, had been an attempt to restart the Wars of the Roses, setting north against south, and with the old feudal families who had fought then – the Percys and the Nevilles – again coming out against the Crown. Above all, urged Cromwell, it was high time to exterminate the last descendants of the House of York, for as long as such potential royal rivals lived, the Tudors could never sit securely on their thrones.
The chief target in Cromwell’s sights was Reginald Pole, grandson of Edward IV’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, and of Warwick the Kingmaker’s daughter Isabel. Pole had become a churchman, an ardent opponent of Anne Boleyn and the Protestant reformers. At the height of the marriage crisis he fled to Rome where he became the de facto leader of exiled English Catholics. Created a cardinal, Pole orchestrated foreign Catholic support for the Pilgrimage of Grace, even while his two brothers, Henry and Geoffrey, served with the royal forces. Cromwell employed secret agents in failed attempts to abduct or assassinate him.
In August 1538 the king, prompted by Cromwell, arrested Reginald’s younger brother Sir Geoffrey Pole. Geoffrey was flung into one of the Tower’s darkest, filthiest and dampest cells and kept there for two demoralising months. Detained in permanent semi-darkness; lonely, cold and hungry; threatened with the rack and repeatedly interrogated by the thuggish William FitzWilliam, Earl of Southampton, one of the king’s ‘enforcers’, it is little wonder that Geoffrey’s will weakened. After the first of his seven interrogations, Geoffrey tried to take his own life by stabbing himself in the chest. Mercilessly, the authorities then piled on the pressure by confronting him with his wife, Constance, who, observing that he was approaching breaking point, warned other family members that her husband was about to implicate them in treason. In late October Geoffrey finally cracked, accusing members of his own family and other friends with Yorkist blood of treasonous talk against
the Tudors.
As soon as he had the confession, Cromwell acted. He had Geoffrey’s brother Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, arrested, along with Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, another aristocrat with Yorkist blood. Not content with sending the two Henrys to the Tower, Cromwell locked up their wives and children with them. Montagu and Exeter were tried for high treason and conspiring with the exiled Cardinal Pole, but the only pieces of evidence produced against them were that the former had once compared life in Henrician England to that in a gaol; and that Exeter had condemned ‘these knaves which rule about the king’ and said that he hoped to live to see ‘a merry world one day’. Such words in Henry’s England were enough to cost a man his life. The two noblemen were beheaded on Tower Hill on 9 December. Geoffrey, guilt-stricken for betraying his brother, was freed by a contemptuous government to wander, isolated and miserable, until his death.
This effusion of Yorkist blood was not enough to slake Henry’s thirst for more. The two dead men’s sons, Henry Pole and Edward Courtenay, remained as captives in the Tower where little Henry Pole, distant heir to the Yorkist claim to the throne, literally rotted away. He was so strictly confined and ill-fed that he stopped growing and died a year later. Edward Courtenay survived there for fifteen years until he was released in 1553 by Henry’s daughter Queen Mary. That, however, was not destined to be the end of the young man’s acquaintence with the Tower.
Even more unforgivable than Henry’s cruelty towards these innocent boys was his treatment of young Henry’s grandmother, the matriarch of the Pole clan, Margaret Plantagenet, Duchess of Salisbury. This blameless old lady (she was sixty-eight at the time of her hideous death) was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence – whose bizarre death in the Tower she commemorated by wearing a tiny silver barrel on a bracelet – and the granddaughter of Warwick the Kingmaker. Margaret had been honoured as a fellow royal by Henry in his youth. But when her son Reginald came out against the king’s divorce and remarriage, and Margaret herself remained loyal to Queen Katherine and her daughter Mary, Henry turned against her with a vengeance.
Cross-examined at length across two whole days like her son Geoffrey, by the fearsome Earl of Southampton, the canny old woman gave nothing away, stoutly denying that she had had contact with her exiled son. Even after being taken to Cowdray, Southampton’s Sussex home, and held there for almost a year she did not talk. In frustrated respect, Southampton reported to Cromwell: ‘We may call her a strong and constant man rather than a woman.’
Finally, in the autumn of 1539, the countess made her final journey – from Cowdray to the Tower. Despite her sex, her age, and her royal blood, Margaret and her two female maidservants were sadistically refused any change of clothing. So harsh was her treatment that even her jailer, Thomas Philips, was moved to write to Cromwell protesting against the conditions in which the countess and her gentlewomen were held: ‘[She] maketh great moan for that she wanteth necessary apparel both for to change and also to keep her warm.’ Henry was in no mood for mercy. In 1541, after an attempt to reignite the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry belatedly decided to visit the disaffected north. Before departing, he issued an order to kill all state prisoners held in the overcrowded Tower – including the aged and ailing Margaret.
The hasty decision to dispose of the last Yorkist having been made, no delays were allowed. The execution order was issued so suddenly that there was no time to summon the official headsman, and the grisly work was left to an amateur. Early in the morning of 27 May 1541, Countess Margaret was roused from sleep and told to prepare for death. After Anne Boleyn, she would be the second royal person to die on Tower Green – within a few yards of where her father Clarence had also died – on a bright spring morning. Margaret walked calmly to the block at 7 a.m. There had been no time to build a scaffold and only a scattering of straw surrounded the spot. Arriving at the site north of the White Tower where Anne had died, the old countess asked the witnesses to pray for the king, queen and royal children, especially the Lady Mary whom she had known as a child.
Before she had finished, she was brutally interrupted and told to lay her head on the block. At that point, Margaret seems to have lost her self-control and tried to run away, shrieking that she was no traitor and did not deserve a traitor’s death. The poor old lady was caught and pinioned down on the block. But the young lad drafted in to carry out the execution, understandably unnerved, botched the job. His trembling hands hacked ineffectually with the axe at the screaming woman, reducing her head and neck to a bloody pulp, before death mercifully intervened.
Cromwell himself had not survived to see this horrific shambles. A year before, though newly created Earl of Essex, he had finally fallen victim to Henry’s displeasure and his Catholic enemies’ hatred. His fall was as sudden as it was final. Arriving at Westminster Palace for a routine meeting of the Privy Council on 10 June 1540, Cromwell, carrying a bundle of state papers, was taking his usual place at the head of the table when he was suddenly interrupted by his arch-enemy, the Duke of Norfolk.
‘Cromwell! Do not sit there! That is no place for you! Traitors do not sit among gentlemen!’
Numbly, as though knowing that his days of power would end like this, Cromwell replied in a low voice, ‘I am not a traitor.’ At that moment, by a prearranged signal, the captain of the guard, Sir Anthony Wingfield, strode into the room with half a dozen burly guardsmen at his back, and seized the minister by his arm, announcing, ‘I arrest you.’ Cromwell knew this drill: he had presided over the arrest of too many ‘traitors’ to have any illusions about the fate awaiting him. Nonetheless, he went through the motions of denial, demanding to be allowed to speak to the king. When this was refused, in impotent rage he threw his cap to the floor, teeth grinding and eyes starting from his head in fury. Reading the hatred in the cold eyes of the council, he demanded, ‘Is this a just reward for all my services? On your consciences I ask you, am I a traitor?’
Like a pack of hounds long denied their prey, the council turned as one man on Cromwell, spitting suppressed hatred. ‘Traitor!’ they chorused. Some moved physically to attack the man whose upstart power they had feared for so long. Wingfield, mindful of the strict rule that no blood should be shed in a royal palace (except for the Tower, of course), had the fallen minister hustled away. A boat was waiting to row Cromwell to the Tower.
Courageously, only Thomas Cranmer stood by his fallen friend as others scrambled to distance themselves. The archbishop wrote to Henry praising Cromwell’s ‘wisdom, diligence, faithfulness and experience’. It was to no avail. Henry was determined to have his faithful servant’s blood. Within two hours of Cromwell’s arrest, the king sent his thugs to take possession of Cromwell’s palatial London residence, Austin Friars, stripping it of gold and silver plate and other treasure worth £15,000 in sixteenth-century values – perhaps as much as £10 million today. The loot went straight into Henry’s coffers. On the principle of killing two birds with one stone, property that Cromwell had confiscated during the dissolution of the monasteries – the large Southover Priory at Lewes in Sussex, for example – went to Henry’s discarded queen, Anne of Cleves, as her reward for quietly accepting a quickie divorce. Cromwell’s scores of servants were paid off with their master’s less expensive clothes and other articles.
Meanwhile, in the Tower, Cromwell wrote long grovelling letters to the king protesting his innocence, ‘prostrate at your most excellent majesty’s feet’. One ended abjectly, ‘Written with the most quaking hand and the most sorrowful heart of your most sorrowful subject and most humble servant and prisoner, this Saturday at your [Tower] of London.’ Bizarrely, Cromwell forgot to write the dread word ‘Tower’ (a Freudian slip), as if by omitting the name of the fortress he could somehow avoid the doom there to which he had sent so many. Cromwell’s enemies were working hard to relieve him of his head as soon as possible. The parliamentary bill of attainder against the ‘most false and corrupt traitor’ accused him not only of using his high offices to line his own nest,
but also of spreading ‘detestable heresy’ under the cloak of dissolving the monasteries.
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.