House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (21 page)

On 17 June, Norfolk and Gardiner introduced a Bill of Attainder against Cromwell in the House of Lords.
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It was a spiteful document, short on facts but long on invective. The fallen minister, whom Henry had raised ‘from a very base and low degree’, had become ‘the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor’ of the king’s reign, as had been proved by many ‘personages of great honour, worship and discretion’. He was accused of being a ‘detestable heretic’ who sowed sedition and ‘false and erroneous books’ that discredited the Blessed Sacraments.

The religious charges were the work of Gardiner, but Norfolk now had a chance to vent his spleen, accusing Cromwell of holding

The Bill declared that he should suffer death as a heretic or traitor at Henry’s pleasure and should forfeit all property granted or held since 31 March 1539. It was passed, without dissent, on 29 June, just before Parliament adjourned.
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Henry needed Cromwell’s evidence to win his annulment of the loveless marriage with Anne of Cleves. Norfolk gloatingly led a small delegation of senior councillors to question him in the Tower, charging him to declare ‘as he would answer God at the day of judgement and also upon the extreme danger and damnation of his soul’ what he knew of the match. Cromwell quickly supplied the necessary evidence and Henry himself swore that ‘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’.
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The duke was among a group of notables, including Cranmer and Bishop Tunstall, who also produced some rather bland testimony, signing himself ‘T Norfolk’.
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The Clerical Convocation of two archbishops, sixteen bishops and one hundred and thirty-nine learned academics therefore annulled the king’s fourth marriage on 9 July, their decision confirmed by Parliament four days later.
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Anne was pensioned off and awarded an annuity of £500, or £220,000 a year at today’s prices, and a handsome portfolio of property, some of which came from Cromwell’s forfeited estates.

There was much popular curiosity about what kind of dreadful means would be employed to kill Cromwell. Norfolk promised that his enemy’s demise would be ‘the most ignominious use in the country’. By this, he may have be referring to the decision - was it his? - to execute the disgraced minister with the clearly mad Walter, Lord Hungerford, who had been condemned for a whole raft of heinous crimes: sodomy, raping his daughter, paying magicians to predict when Henry would die and, finally, employing a chaplain who sympathised with the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace.
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His presence on the scaffold was an attempt publicly to humiliate Cromwell at his last hour.

That came on the morning of 28 July at Tower Hill. The king had decided, in his infinite mercy, that Cromwell would suffer death by simple decapitation.

Perhaps deliberately, a clumsy or at least inexperienced headsman called Gurrea was employed for the grisly task. One account talks of him and his assistant ‘chopping the Lord Cromwell’s neck and head for nearly half an hour’.
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Norfolk’s eldest son, Surrey sneered: ‘Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ [noble] blood. These new erected men, would by their wills, leave no noble man a life.’ Acts of Attainder - Cromwell’s own device to destroy traitors - had become the instrument of his own demise: ‘Now he is stricken,’ Surrey crowed triumphantly, ‘with his own staff.’
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On the same day that Cromwell was executed, Henry married Catherine Howard in a private ceremony at Oatlands Palace, near Weybridge, in Surrey.

The Queen of England was now a Howard.

Not everyone was jubilant about Cromwell’s death. In September, on his return to court, one of the king’s sewers,
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John Lassells, met three reformist friends, called Jonson, Maxey and Smethwick, in the king’s great chamber. He asked: ‘What news is there pertaining to God’s Holy Word, seeing we have lost so noble a man [Cromwell] which did love and favour it so well?’ Lassells did not believe that Norfolk and Gardiner loved the Bible. Maxey said the duke was not ashamed to declare ‘that he had never read Scripture in English, nor ever would. Only yesterday I overheard him say “It was merry in England before this new learning came up.”’ There were rumours around the court that Norfolk had rebuked a bureaucrat in the Court of Exchequer for marrying a nun, who had been expelled from her religious house. Her new husband had told him simplistically: ‘Well, I know no nuns or religious folk, nor such bondage, seeing God and the king have made them free.’ His response infuriated Norfolk: ‘By God’s sacred Body, that may be, but it will never be out of my heart as long as I live,’ cried the duke as he stormed off.

Lassells said the evangelicals at the court should not be ‘too rash or quick in maintaining the Scriptures, for if we let them [Norfolk and Gardiner] alone and suffer a little time, they would (I doubt not) overthrow themselves. They stand so manifestly against God and their prince that they cannot long survive.’

With an element perhaps of wishful thinking, the four courtiers then discussed whether Norfolk’s words could possibly be construed as treasonable and the next day Smethwick repeated them to an official who advised him to speak to a member of the king’s Council. Nothing, of course, came of it. Lassells underestimated Norfolk and six years later he was to be burned at the stake for heresy.

Meanwhile, Henry was still captivated by his bride. In September, Marillac said the king was ‘so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others’.
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He was determined to show her off and that summer took her on a whirlwind progress through the counties of Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, hunting and feasting all the way.

The sun was now smiling again on the House of Howard and honours and positions were heaped upon them. Surrey was created a Knight of the Garter and appointed Cupbearer to Henry. His sister Mary became a member of the queen’s household and Catherine’s brother Charles was made a Gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber. Marillac believed that Norfolk ‘nowadays has the chief management of affairs’ in the realm.

The following year the royal couple went north for a long-promised progress, reaching York on 16 September, where their subjects cherished hopes, subsequently unfulfilled, that Catherine would formally be crowned queen. By now, the frivolous, flighty queen was bored with her obese husband’s fumbling, flatulent attentions and began to look elsewhere for affection.

Henry returned to Hampton Court at the end of October and gave instructions that on 1 November 1541 - All Hallows Day - there would be special prayers offered for ‘the good life he led and trusted to lead’ with ‘this jewel of womanhood’, his queen.

Unbeknown to him, John Lassells, whom we have just met, had been talking to his married sister, Mary Hall, a nurse to one of the children of Lord William Howard, Norfolk’s half-brother, and from 1533, chamberer to the dowager duchess. Her disclosures about the queen’s earlier nocturnal shenanigans at Chesworth and Lambeth sent Lassells running hotfoot to the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the most scandalous news.

Cranmer was astonished, havered for a while, and finally screwed up enough courage to scribble a letter to his sovereign, which he left sealed in Henry’s pew in the Chapel Royal. On the note’s cover, the Archbishop prudently asked him to read it in private.

The king was incredulous, disbelieving, and, unusually, struggled for words. Cranmer’s letter informed him that his beloved wife had behaved licentiously with Henry Monox, a lute player from Streatham in Surrey who had taught her the virginals when she was just fifteen while she stayed at the Norfolk house in Horsham. Unfortunately, she learned more from him than just nimble finger work on the keyboard. Two years later, she had a lusty affair with a gentleman page called Francis Dereham - the same man whom the queen had recently appointed her secretary and usher of her chamber. Henry asked Southampton, now Lord Privy Seal, secretly to investigate the allegations.

Worse was to come.

Under interrogation at the Tower, Dereham named Thomas Culpeper, one of the king’s especial favourites in the Privy Chamber, as having ‘succeeded him in the queen’s affections’. Marillac later commented dryly that here was a young man who shared the king’s bed who now ‘wished to share the queen’s too’.
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A week later, at Gardiner’s palace at Southwark, a hesitant and apprehensive Council laid out the evidence that was accumulating against the queen before a still sceptical Henry. It must have been a tense, torrid meeting; it went on all day and most of the night, but finally the king was convinced of his wife’s past debauchery and her current betrayal of him - with Culpeper of all people.

The effect was so terrible that his councillors, Norfolk among them, cowered in their robes. Henry treated them to the most terrifying of all rages. He called for a sword so that he could kill Catherine ‘that he loved so much’. And that ‘wicked woman’ had ‘never such delight in her incontinency as she [will] have torture in her death’, he screamed at the courtiers. They believed his anger had driven him insane, and they shrank from his rage, as he blamed them for ‘soliciting’ him to marry her. His frenzy eventually broke down into tears and, blubbing like a child, he sobbed about his ‘ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’.
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They departed the meeting looking ‘very troubled, especially Norfolk, who is esteemed very resolute and not easily moved to show by his face what his heart conceives’, reported the perceptive Marillac.

On 12 November, the Privy Council wrote to Sir William Paget, ambassador to France, reporting ‘a most miserable case lately revealed’. Dereham had confessed that he had known her carnally ‘many times, both in his doublet and [hose between] the sheets and in naked bed’. The ‘puffing and blowing’ emanating from the heaving blankets on Catherine’s bed had tiresomely kept the others awake in the girls’ dormitory on several nights. Monox admitted he used ‘to feel the [secret parts] of her body before Dereham was familiar with her’. The king’s heart ‘was pierced with pensiveness, so it was long before he could utter his sorrow and finally, with plenty [of tears] (which was strange in his courage) opened the same’. The letter added pessimistically: ‘Now you may see what was done before her marriage. God knows what has been done since.’
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The investigation gathered speed, as a devastated king shunned his wife at Hampton Court. Marillac said the queen

Her brother Charles Howard was also exiled from court. Marillac added:

Norfolk interrogated Catherine roughly but it was Cranmer’s gentler manner, plus his promise of mercy, that made her admit her licentious romps with Dereham.
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There were further distressing questions, and she refused ‘to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so they must take away things by which she might hasten her death’, according to her uncle.

Witnesses recounted how the dowager duchess discovered Dereham in Catherine’s arms, ‘and she beat her and gave Joan Bulmer a stroke who stood by. Often she blamed him . . . for keeping company together, saying he would never be out of Catherine Howard’s chamber.’ On another occasion she asked where he was, muttering ‘I am sure he is sleeping in the gentlewomen’s chamber.’
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Piece by piece, the evidence against the queen was mounting. The Privy Council was told that when the royal party was at Lincoln, Culpeper had entered her chamber ‘by the backstairs’ at eleven o’clock at night and had remained there until four the next morning. Another tryst had occurred in the cramped and noisome surroundings of the queen’s stool chamber, or lavatory. Hardly romantic. Her servant, Margaret Morton, testified that she never mistrusted the queen until at Hatfield, when she saw her glance out of her chamber window ‘on Mr Culpeper after such a sort that she thought there was love between them’.
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Culpeper himself admitted ‘many stolen interviews’ with Catherine, which had been arranged by her lady of the Privy Chamber, Lady Jane Rochford, widow of Anne Boleyn’s beheaded brother, George. The queen clearly had a liking for intrigue and in every house during the northern progress would ‘seek for the back doors and back stairs’ herself. At Pontefract, she feared the king had set watch at the back door’ and her servant ‘waited in the court to see if that were so’.
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The Howards were soon compromised in the investigation and many were dragged off to the Tower. The Lieutenant there warned the Privy Council that there were not enough rooms to ‘lodge them severally’ unless the king and queen’s own lodgings were used. The king agreed to this, but his keys to the apartments could not be found and accommodation for some prisoners had to be arranged elsewhere.

Lord William Howard and Margaret, his wife, were among those arrested. He admitted that he knew of his niece’s behaviour with Dereham and, when told of it, had exclaimed: ‘What mad wenches!’ The dowager duchess and her daughter, the Countess of Bridgewater, were also imprisoned. All were accused of misprision of treason.