The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

by John Schofield

  The couple’s only child, Princess Elizabeth, had now become the focus of marriage talks with the French, and a match between her and the duke of Angoulême was considered. An English delegation to France to negotiate the matter during spring 1535 was originally to have included Norfolk, Foxe and Cromwell, though for reasons unclear, Cromwell did not go as planned, and Rochford, Anne’s brother, took his place. Maybe Anne was behind this rescheduling. Francis was still supporting Henry’s second marriage in his talks with the pope, though somewhat less enthusiastically than before. To his councillors, Francis was saying highly uncomplimentary things about Henry, calling him unstable, arrogant and ‘the strangest man in the world’. Francis feared that no good would come of Henry, but ‘I must put up with him, as it is no time to lose friends’. Francis was grieved to hear of John Fisher’s death, and his fondness for Anne had cooled. There were no more personal letters or gifts of luxurious sedan chairs as seen in Chapter 4. Cromwell was kept informed about the negotiations, but no marriage treaty with the French was actually agreed. One difficulty was Henry’s insistence that the young duke should be brought up in England. The atmosphere among the English party may not have been particularly cordial; for although Norfolk repeatedly avowed his loyalty to Henry and Anne, the Boleyns and the French suspected that Norfolk was secretly hoping to marry one of his own sons to one of Henry’s daughters, in the hope of securing the crown for the Norfolk dynasty. It also appears that Henry and his council had now accepted that his second marriage might not, after all, produce an heir. It was even suggested that Angoulême might be included in the succession to the throne of England if he married Elizabeth.23

  The missing heir remained an acute dilemma, a huge disappointment for the king and a constant threat to the queen. According to one French visitor to England, Anne’s dearest wish was to have a son. (Her second was to see the queen of Navarre again.) In October, however, her fortunes revived; she was pregnant once more, and king and queen were reportedly merry on a trip to Hampshire. Next month Chapuys was horrified to hear a rumour, which he feared could be true, that Henry had decided to ‘rid himself’ of Catherine and Mary at the next parliament. Again he blamed Anne, who now ‘rules over and governs the nation; the king dare not contradict her’. But once more appearances were deceptive, and within a few short weeks Henry would be heard muttering darkly about being seduced into his marriage by witchcraft, and vowing to take a new wife.24

  On 7 January 1536, Catherine’s miserable last years came to a merciful end. Chapuys, still convinced that Anne had been plotting to poison her, was shocked at the tasteless celebrations that followed. ‘No words can describe the joy and delight which this king and the promoters of his concubine have felt at the demise of the good queen, especially the earl of Wiltshire and his son’. Cromwell is not mentioned in this part of the letter. Elsewhere, however, Cromwell remarked to Chapuys that Catherine’s passing would be ‘advantageous’ for the Anglo-Imperial friendship that they both wanted. Again, this is likely to be more unsentimental than unsympathetic. Chapuys gives no indication that he took offence, and relations between these two men, already quite good in the circumstances, would soon get even better.25

  The joy of the Boleyns did not last. According to Hall, Anne miscarried in February. Chaupys dated this fateful event to 29 January, with cutting irony the day of Catherine’s funeral. Wriothesley records it ‘three days before Candlemas’. Candlemas was 2 February, so if he calculated three full intervening days, his account would tally with Chapuys. As the evidence is in favour of 29 January, the following discussion will assume that this is correct.26

  The usual version of events in accounts of Henry and Anne is that the miscarriage aroused Henry’s suspicions of divine disfavour on his second marriage, after which the various factions at court set to work to contrive Anne’s downfall. The evidence, however, tells a different, a stranger story.

  On this point Chapuys is very specific with his dates. It was on the morning of 29 January that he heard, from ‘sufficiently authentic’ sources, that Henry had recently made an astonishing admission to one of his ‘principal courtiers’. Chapuys immediately dashed off a letter to Charles telling him that:

  This king had said to one of his courtiers in great secrecy, and as if in confession, that he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges [sic] and charms, and that, owing to that, he held it as null. God, he said, had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children. He, therefore, considered that he could take a third wife, which he said he wished much to do.

  This letter says nothing about the miscarriage. Chapuys had not heard of that yet. It had not even happened when a messenger brought this news to him.27

  Henry’s confessions, therefore, and his anxiety about divine disapproval, and his belief that his marriage to Anne was null, and even his intention to marry again, were not a set of knee jerk reactions to the tragic news of the miscarriage, as is commonly supposed. These were the thoughts flooding through his restless mind before the morning of 29 January and before Anne miscarried. The miscarriage is thought to have occurred in the afternoon or early evening of the 29th, probably when Henry was out hunting. Faction theories employed to explain Anne’s fall are now rendered redundant. The worst that Anne’s enemies at court could do was to try and hasten the inevitable. Henry personally, not some faction or other, had decided that he no longer wanted Anne as his queen. The miscarriage would have forcefully confirmed his fears and his plans; but it was not the prime cause of them.

  Chapuys had also heard, though on this point he admitted that his sources were not quite as reliable, that even though Anne had rejoiced at Catherine’s death, she had also ‘cried and lamented … fearing lest she herself might be brought to the same end’. Chapuys was amazed to hear all this, and promised he would do his best to find out more.

  So even during Anne’s latest pregnancy, even before she miscarried, neither king nor queen could look ahead to a blessed outcome. Fear and apprehension, not expectancy or hope, filled the hearts of both, while Henry was already minded to marry another woman. How much this shared despondency owed to these strange ‘sortileges and charms’, only Henry and Anne will ever really know; but we have already seen Henry consulting ‘witches and wizards’ as well as ‘physicians and astrologers’ before the birth of Elizabeth (see here). It now looks as though this troubled, turbulent king had been taking similar mysterious soundings before marrying Anne, which were weighing on his mind and vexing his conscience.

  Fascinating though it would be to learn more, and tempting though it is to indulge in speculation, this is as far as the evidence allows us to go. The veil covering the inmost thoughts and the dark secrets of Henry and Anne is only partly lifted. Readers who would like a more inventive (and controversial) interpretation of these words will find one in Retha Warnicke’s account of Anne Boleyn, wherein are contained, to quote Elton’s apt understatement, ‘highly original variations’ on the usual version.28

  Meanwhile, news of the miscarriage filtered out, and rumour spread quickly around the capital. The Tudor chattering classes were saying that Anne would never conceive, and the still birth was an ill omen. Anne blamed her miscarriage on Norfolk for his ill-timed announcement that Henry had suffered a riding accident. Chapuys was not convinced. He put it down to her fear of rejection – for Henry had recently made ‘very valuable presents’ to Jane Seymour.29

  This was nothing less worrying for Anne than the loss of her child. For it is a curious feature of Henry’s moral make-up that in spite of the occasional fling, he seems not to have approved of an official royal mistress. He would put away his wives for another woman, bastardize his innocent daughters, lead his realm into religious schism and constitutional crisis, cut off the heads of his best ministers for no good reason; but his conscience would not suffer him to have a mistress, at least not for long. Once he got attached to another woman, he had to make her his queen. By January or February 1536, the
refore, the reign of Anne Boleyn was effectively over.

  However, the view that Anne’s fall can be explained by her husband’s love for Jane is far too straightforward for some tastes. The modern age loves a conspiracy theory, especially one with a really nasty villain at the centre of it, and a novel account of Anne’s demise has assigned this role to Cromwell. Provoked by Anne’s disapproval of him, so the story goes, Cromwell devised a fiendish plot based on lies and fake charges to ruin her. To bring it to execution he bullied and threatened innocent people into making false confessions which convinced Henry of his wife’s unfaithfulness. Thus Thomas Cromwell’s hands are stained with the blood of a guiltless queen. None too subtle variations on this theory have Henry more or less conniving at Cromwell’s bloody deeds.30

  With the end of Anne’s reign now as imminent as it was certain, the first reaction to such a story must be to wonder how anyone could be so foolish as to waste his time and go to all the unnecessary trouble. Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory has attracted a large following, for it can be found in one form or another in most accounts of Henry and his wives. The next chapter will be devoted to answering it on Cromwell’s behalf.

  Notes

   1 SP 7, p. 509.

   2 CSP Ven. 4, no. 846; BL Additional MS 19398, fol. 49 = LP 8, no. 1057.

   3 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1058, p. 629; no. 1164, p. 893; no. 1165, pp. 897–8; LP 6, nos 1541–3. Catherine seems to have stayed where she was, at least for some time; she sent a letter to Charles from Buckden on 8 February 1534: CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 252, p. 605.

   4 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1073, p. 679.

   5 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1100, p. 739.

   6 CSP Span., 1531–3, nos 1123–4, pp. 788–9.

   7 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1130, p. 811; no. 1154, p. 865; LP 6, no. 1572, pp. 637–8.

   8 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1144, pp. 839–41.

   9 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1153, pp. 859, 864.

  10 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1149, p. 854; no. 1157, pp. 870–71; CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 75, p. 219.

  11 LP 7, App. 8, nos 11–13, pp. 630–34; CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 26, p. 83; no. 31, p. 95; no. 211.

  12 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 45, pp. 125, 129–31.

  13 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 10, p. 33; no. 60, pp. 169–72.

  14 Catherine’s refusal: LP 7, no. 786. Catherine’s letter: PRO SP 1/85, fol. 157 = LP 7, no. 1126. An English translation is printed in T. Hearne, Sylloge epistolarum, a variis Angliae scriptarum … (Oxford, 1716), pp. 107–8.

  15 Hall tells us that Catherine could speak French – Hall, p. 756. For Butts, see LP 7, no. 1129.

  16 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 90, p. 264; J.A. Froude, (ed.), The Pilgrim: A Dialogue of the Life and Actions of King Henry VIII, by W. Thomas, Clerk of the Council to Edward VI (London, 1861), pp. 100–103.

  17 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 102.

  18 CSP Span., 1534–5, nos 139, 142–6; no. 150 p. 437; no. 156, p. 454; no. 178, p. 500.

  19 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 165, pp. 468–9.

  20 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 122, p. 355; no. 170, p. 484.

  21 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 239.

  22 CSP Ven. 5, no. 54, p. 27; CSP Span.,1534–5, no. 174, p. 493.

  23 LP 8, nos 554, 557, 561, 591, 712, 726, 793, 823, 837, 846, 891, 909, 985 (pp. 389–90).

  24. LP 9, nos 378, 571; CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 229, pp. 569–71. For Henry’s forebodings, see note 27 below.

  25 CSP Span., 1536–8, no. 9, pp. 11–12, 19.

  26 Hall, p. 818; CSP Span., 1536–8, no. 21, p. 39; Wriothesley 1, p. 33.

  27 CSP Span., 1536–8, no. 13, p. 28.

  28 R. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge, 1989); G.R. Elton, England under the Tudors (London, 2001), p. 494 (36).

  29 LP 10, no. 283; CSP Span., 1536–8, no. 21, pp. 39–40.

  30 See especially, but not only, E. Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 2004), part 4.

  8

  In the Line of Duty

  Like most conspiracy theories, this one draws on various sources. The first has been noted in the previous chapter – Anne told Cromwell to his face that she would like to see his head off. Hence Cromwell and Anne are supposed to have been at each other’s throats.

  These pleasantries, however, have nothing to do with Anne’s fall or the events leading up to it. They were uttered in June 1535, nearly a year before her arrest, and during the intervening period the main cause of Anne’s anger had disappeared with Catherine’s death. Besides, Cromwell was not particularly worried about Anne, and he had shrugged the incident off. It would have to be proved that she still wanted his head off a year later, and also that something pretty devastating had occurred to turn Cromwell’s unconcern into deadly hatred.

  The second piece of evidence comes from an account of Anne’s life written twenty-three years after her death by Alexander Alesius, a Scots Protestant divine, for Queen Elizabeth I in 1559. From this it is alleged that Anne had provoked Cromwell by opposing his policy on the monasteries.1

  It is a strange claim for a Protestant writer like Alesius to make, especially as he admitted that he was out of the country for much of the time when the early dissolution was underway. More importantly, as seen in Chapter 6, Cromwell’s policy regarding the monasteries was to place supporters of the Royal Supremacy and the new learning into positions of influence wherever and whenever he could. Nowhere does Alesius explain why Anne should have objected to this. Anne’s admirers like Alesius now contradict themselves. She is decked out as the evangelical darling, and then made an adversary of Cromwell. She cannot be both. If she really did oppose Cromwell’s evangelical reforms, then she had an evangelical outer shell but not much more. Jeremy Collier’s verdict on Anne may have been a perceptive one: he described her as a ‘favourer of the Reformation, but not to the length of Foxe’s opinion’. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Anne was a bit like Henry on religion, neither wholly medieval nor wholly Lutheran; a free-spirited lady, who, though she certainly absorbed evangelical ideas, may have preferred to seek her own independent way. It is also possible that Cromwell, more perceptive than some of Anne’s over zealous supporters like Alesius, sensed this better than they did; hence the coolness between the queen and the Vicegerent.2

  Be that as it may, it is also claimed that Anne sharply disagreed with Cromwell on the most beneficial way of spending the revenue from the sale of the monasteries. She wanted to see much more being done for poor relief, and she was filled with righteous indignation against Cromwell for abundantly feathering his own nest with bribes. We will return to this point in a moment, but meanwhile more needs to be said about our friend Alesius.

  He seems to have been captivated by Anne Boleyn. He claims he knew evangelical bishops whom Anne had ‘appointed’ – but in fact whatever recommendations Anne or Cromwell may have made, bishops were only officially ‘appointed’ by the king (and in any case, Cromwell was the one behind these appointments – see Chapter 6). Alesius also likes to call Anne ‘your most holy mother’, a unusual way to describe a woman who had schemed her way to the throne, contrived Wolsey’s ruin en route, rowed with most of the council, and, unless Chapuys was dreaming, had harboured ideas about poisoning Catherine and Mary. But even Alesius is overdoing it when he says that ‘true [evangelical] religion in England had its commencement and its end’ with Anne. Alesius has apparently forgotten about Tyndale, Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley and nearly 300 Protestant martyrs under Mary.

  Sentimentalising over Anne is matched by whinging about Cromwell. Alesius claims that he sought to leave England after Anne’s death, but Cromwell dissuaded him and ‘retained me for about three years with empty hopes’ until the Act of Six Articles was passed. Yet it was this same Alesius who wrote a detailed account of Cromwell’s first Vicegerential synod in 1537, in which he speaks well of Cromwell as the evangelical leader (to be discussed in more detail i
n Chapter 10). Moreover, an examination of Cromwell’s accounts shows that he supported Alesius financially while he was in England: payments or gifts include £5 in January, March, May and October 1537; 10 marks in February 1538, and a further £5 in October. Then, after the anti-Lutheran Act of Six Articles in 1539, Alesius left England for Wittenberg from where he wrote a seemingly cordial letter to Cromwell. He thanked him for his kindness when he was in England, wrote that he appreciated that Cromwell was not responsible for the act, and that he hoped that Cromwell might be able to soften its effects.3

  Alesius also has difficulty sifting fact from fiction. He claims that Anne was the one who persuaded Henry to send an embassy to the German Lutherans. But there is no evidence that Anne had any love for the Lutherans, especially as they continued to take Catherine’s side in Henry’s Great Matter. All contemporary evidence – as the most detailed analysis of Anglo-Lutheran relations (Rory McEntegart’s) has shown – points to Cromwell as the man organising and driving Henry’s Lutheran policy forward (see Chapter 6).

  Alesius further claims that Henry was angry with Anne because the German princes would not make an alliance with him. Here, too, he is much mistaken. In Anne’s last year the German princes were prepared to offer Henry a religious and political alliance, including membership of the Schmalkaldic League, if agreement could be reached on theology. At the time of Anne’s fall, the Germans were waiting for Henry’s answer to their proposals and the Wittenberg Articles – a set of articles based on Melanchthon’s Loci which had been agreed between the Lutherans and the English delegation to Germany. In fact, Henry’s anger with Anne had nothing whatever to do with the Lutherans. It had everything to do with their sonless marriage, with Jane Seymour, and stories about Anne’s infidelities that emerged from within her own circle.4