The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (4 page)

On 24 June, Anne was dispatched to Richmond Palace, Surrey, for ‘her health, open air and pleasure’ under the guise of a convenient threat of plague in London. In reality, Henry had delicate matters to settle and in order to achieve his objective, the queen had to be absent from court. The marriage was to be nullified by his two archbishops, sixteen bishops and 139 learned academics on the legally subtle grounds that Henry did not consummate it (since he knew it to be unlawful) because of Anne’s elusive pre-contract with Francis of Lorraine. Henry had, to all intents and purposes, never agreed to the marriage: ‘I never for love to the woman consented to marry; nor yet if she brought maidenhead with her, took any from her by true carnal copulation,’ he wrote in his ‘brief, true and perfect declaration’
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to the commission. The king liked such matters to be tidy and to appear legal, but there were still a few loose ends to tie up. His disgraced and discarded chief minister could provide one last faithful service before execution. Cromwell, incarcerated in the Tower, was instructed to provide testimony fully confirming Henry’s case if he wanted to avoid the traitor’s hideous death of half-hanging, evisceration whilst still living and then beheading.
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Cromwell signed the required full statement of events, concluding:

I am a most woeful prisoner, ready to take the death when it shall please God and your majesty. Yet the frail flesh incites me continually to call to your grace for mercy and grace for my offences. And thus Christ says preserve and keep you.

Written at the Tower, this Wednesday the last of June, with the heavy heart and trembling hand of your Highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner and poor slave.
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Desperation and despair then overwhelmed him and he added, as a shaky postscript, ‘Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.’ His piteous, anguished plea inevitably fell on deaf ears, although Archbishop Cranmer had bravely pleaded with Henry for Cromwell’s life on 11 June, writing that he

much magnified his diligence in the king’s service and preservation and had discovered all plots as soon as they were made. [Cromwell] had always loved the king above all things and [had] served him with great fidelity and success.

Cranmer added that if the minister really was a traitor, he was glad he had been arrested, but he prayed God earnestly

to send the king such a counsellor in his stead who he could trust and who, for all his qualities, could serve him as he had done. I am very sorrowful: for whom shall your Grace trust hereafter, if you may not trust him?
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But Cromwell was finished and as good as dead already, as far as the king was concerned: Henry was already seizing his considerable wealth. Only hours after the arrest, around £14,000 of moveable assets – gold and silver-gilt plate, such as crosiers and chalices, and ready cash (worth nearly £6 million at 2004 prices) – were rapidly inventoried and removed during the night from Cromwell’s home at Austin Friars, near the north wall of the City of London. The bullion and coinage were taken, escorted by fifty archers under the command of Sir Thomas Cheyney, to Henry’s secret jewel house at Westminster.
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Cromwell’s other household
goods were systematically looted soon after.
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There were also his considerable holdings of lands and revenues elsewhere to sequester, all of it a welcome windfall for the ruthless and avaricious king.

Cromwell – ‘a person of as poor and low degree as few be within [the] realm’ – was condemned without trial by Act of Attainder on 29 June
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for being ‘the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor against your royal person and the imperial crown of this realm that had ever been known in your whole reign’. He was also labelled a heretic and accused of circulating many erroneous books amongst Henry’s subjects, particularly some that contradicted the belief in the holy sacrament of communion, as well as licensing heretics as preachers. He had taken bribes in exchange for permission to export money, corn, horses and other commodities, contrary to Henry’s own proclamations. He had issued many commissions without the king’s knowledge and, being of base birth, had confidently said that ‘he was sure of the king’.
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Cromwell’s conveniently discovered crimes knew no bounds.

After the enjoyable and profitable diversion of sequestering his chief minister’s wealth, Henry still faced two major problems in seeking his new annulment. Firstly, there was the reaction of Anne herself – her contradictory evidence could damage or invalidate his claim of non-consummation – and secondly, the continuing and pressing diplomatic need to keep the Duke of Cleves, Henry’s all-important Protestant ally in Germany, happy, even after the rejection of his sister as a wife and the queen of England. The typically Henrician solution was copious quantities of hard cash and maintenance of status. It was dire news for the always hard-pressed royal exchequer, but that was a factor that never entered the king’s head when he wanted something badly enough.

In return for remaining in England as ‘the king’s good sister’, where she would be firmly under Henry’s surveillance and control, Anne was to receive a generous annual pension of £500 for life (£216,265 in today’s values), together with a number of manors and lands, most of them, with heavy irony, forfeited by Cromwell himself, who was to pay the scapegoat’s horrific price on the scaffold for his hand in arranging
the disastrous marriage. What the king taketh away, the king giveth. Anne would remain the premier lady in all England after any new queen and Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. She could keep all her clothes, jewels and plate. She was given a fifteen-strong household of German servants appropriate to her rank and station, including Schoulenburg, her own cook. No doubt she could also keep her pet parrot.

Wriothesley, Southampton and Suffolk journeyed to Richmond by river to tell her the awful news. There were wild rumours afterwards that she fainted when told of the annulment, possibly with relief at the prospect of freedom from further nights of fumbling attention by the grunting, obese and probably flatulent Henry, but these naturally do not figure in the courtiers’ report of this difficult meeting. More likely, their unexpected appearance sparked instant fears that
she
was to be taken to the Tower, where a violent death perhaps awaited her. The frightened queen was swiftly reassured. Anne listened to their silky, flowing phrases through an interpreter, apparently ‘without alteration of countenance’ and, with little thought, meekly agreed to the terms of the settlement. Behind that stolid, pockmarked face, she was no fool. All in all, it was not a bad deal and to turn it down, Anne must have fancied, could well lead to an appointment with the executioner, given Henry’s usual method of dispensing with inconvenient wives such as Anne Boleyn. Self-preservation was a more powerful emotion now than the remote possibility of her romantic attachment to a vindictive monarch with a known violent streak in his character. She seized the chance of freedom with a zest that speaks volumes for the absolute sterility of the royal marriage and with an alacrity strongly suggestive of her own frustrations and fears.
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There only remained some tiresome formalities. After the Clerical Convocation had ended her marriage on 9 July, confirmed by Parliament just four days later, she docilely wrote to Henry on 16 July promising to be ‘your Majesty’s must humble sister and servant’, signing herself merely as ‘Anna, daughter of Cleves’.
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Her surrender of the status and trappings of royalty was complete. In a letter to her brother, Duke William, almost certainly dictated by Henry’s officials, she said, ‘I
account God pleased with [what] is done and know myself to have suffered no wrong or injury’ and averred that her body was still ‘preserved in the integrity which I brought into this realm’. The English king was ‘a most kind, loving and friendly father and brother’ and he was treating her ‘as honourably and with as much humanity and liberality as you, I myself, or any of our kin or allies could wish or desire’. She earnestly begged him not to be difficult about the agreement.
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For his part, Duke William was ‘glad his sister had fared no worse’. And for Henry, it was the tidiest and most convenient end to any of his marriages, wrapped up not in the six uncomfortable years it took to rid himself of Catherine of Aragon, but in just six days.
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France’s new ambassador in London, Charles de Marillac, reported disapprovingly, ‘As for her who is now called Madame de Cleves, far from pretending to be married, she is as joyous as ever and wears new dresses every day.’
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After six months and three days of an arranged marriage choked by dark humiliation and intimate despair, a golden life now beckoned after Henry. Anne of Cleves began to enjoy drinking wine, casting aside her previous abstinence. She had metamorphosed into a rich, merry widow in all but name or title. In the very ending of the marriage, and probably for the first time, Anne had not disappointed the king.

The reasons behind Henry’s desire for a speedy annulment of his marriage were not only those of physical revulsion, or even royal protocol and diplomatic convenience. He had another matter on his mind, one that was very much closer to his heart and dipping libido: the frivolous and vivacious eighteen-year-old Katherine Howard, a first cousin to Anne Boleyn and niece to the reactionary Thomas, Third Duke of Norfolk. The king probably saw Katherine in March 1540 at a grand banquet given by the conniving Bishop of Winchester Stephen Gardiner in the great hall of Winchester House in Southwark, his palatial home on the South Bank of the River Thames, built in the shadow of St Saviour’s Church. No more flattering portraits, no envoys’ carefully euphemistic reports now for Henry. He immediately fell in love with the diminutive, sensual, auburn-haired girl as she danced and frolicked
in the rainbow light thrown down by the huge rose window above Gardiner’s feast. She was fashionably plump and considered attractive rather than beautiful.

The love match looked incongruous, if not grotesque. She was more than thirty years younger than the king; indeed, she was six years younger than Princess Mary and probably stood well over a foot shorter than the man-mountain the monarch had become as a result of frequent overindulgence at the festive board since Jane Seymour’s death. But in Katherine’s presence, Henry felt and acted like a romantic young man again – in stark contrast with the bored, empty feelings he had experienced for his unwanted queen, Anne of Cleves. Norfolk, his eyes ever firmly set on increased political power, actively and enthusiastically encouraged the relationship, praising Katherine’s ‘pure and honest condition’ to the king, whose amorous appetites were thoroughly roused.

Henry was already shamelessly showering gifts on the Howard girl by the Easter of 1540. Ralph Morice, Cranmer’s secretary, wrote that the ‘king’s affection was so marvellously set upon that gentlewoman as it was never known that he had the like to any woman’.
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To Henry, she was a ‘blushing rose without a thorn’.
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He
had
to make her his fifth wife, and his regal desires would never brook denial, once expressed. As the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, perceptively wrote later:

For if this king’s nature and inclination be taken into account; if we consider that whenever he takes a fancy to a person or decides for an undertaking, he goes the whole length, there being no limit or restriction whatever to his wishes.
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Although a Howard, Katherine came from a far from wealthy background. Her education had been neglected because of the poverty of her father Lord Edmund Howard, the feckless son of the Second Duke of Norfolk. Her bluff and ambitious uncle Thomas Howard, who succeeded his father to the title in 1524,
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was a soldier, Earl Marshal and Lord High Treasurer of England, the third most important office in the realm. He was also one of the leaders of the religiously conservative
party. That year, 1540, he had told a clerk in the exchequer who had married a former nun:

I never read the Scripture, nor ever will read it. It was merry in England before the new learning came up: yes, I would all things were as has been in times past.
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He and Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester (an even more fervent opponent of liturgical reform), could not believe the luck that Henry’s roaming eye had brought them. If Katherine became queen, they would capture greater influence at court, providing the opportunity to return the troubled realm to the traditional religion and to exploit the possibility, albeit dim, of reconciliation with Rome. They were already triumphant at the fall of Cromwell – that scorned and hated religious reformer. Their hopes that their lascivious bait would be snapped up were soon realised. With perfect timing, they led the other members of the Privy Council to humbly beg the king ‘to frame his most noble heart to love’ – indeed, to marry again and to create, they coyly added, ‘some more store of fruit and succession to the comfort of his realm’.
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Henry needed no second bidding. A bare nineteen days after the clerical annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, he wed Katherine at Otelands Palace, near Weybridge in Surrey, on 28 July 1540, the same day that the unpopular Cromwell met his bloody fate, ‘barbarously’ at the hands of a clumsy and unskilled axeman at Tower Hill.
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Deliberately and ignominiously, his fellow victim on the scaffold was selected to be Walter, Lord Hungerford, who was beheaded for committing buggery and for raping his own daughter.
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Norfolk’s arrogant son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, said scornfully of Cromwell’s end: ‘Now that foul churl is dead, so ambitious of others’ [noble] blood; now is he stricken with his own staff.’ These ‘new erected men [want to] leave no noble man in life’.
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The royal couple were now sternly cautioned to use the marital bed ‘more for the desire of children, than bodily lust’, as their marriage was ‘a high and blessed order, ordained of God in paradise’.
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Henry was almost delirious with happiness about his new bride and on 8 August,
Katherine was publicly displayed as queen at a spectacular banquet at Hampton Court. The wedding seemed to have given the king a fresh zest for life, coupled with a new willingness to listen to his hard-pressed doctors’ advice to curb his overeating and control his burgeoning weight.