Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (40 page)

As he approached, with firm, confident step, the straw-strewn wooden scaffold on the huge open space just north of the Tower of London’s walls, he noticed wryly the presence of his old adversary and diplomatic sparring partner, the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys, positioned on a privileged vantage point. The two men’s eyes must have met, but their
half-smiles of recognition were motivated by different emotions: the Spaniard’s, by contempt and perhaps triumph; Cromwell’s, by the certain knowledge that nothing short of divine intervention would have prevented the envoy from the pleasure of witnessing his bloody end.

He had committed his last words to memory, and after mounting the stairs to the crowded scaffold, he stepped forward to the wooden balustrade surrounding the platform and looked down at the multitude behind the serried ranks of soldiers and the forest of halberds and partisans pointing skywards.

The crowd was strangely silent. In a flat, toneless voice, Cromwell addressed them:

Good people, I am come here to die and not to purge myself, as some may think that I will. For if I should do so, I [would be] a wretch and a miser [a miserable man].

I am by the law condemned to die and thank my Lord God that has appointed me this death for my offence.

For since the time that I have had years of discretion, I have lived [as] a sinner and [have] offended my Lord God, for which I ask Him heartily for forgiveness.

Cromwell paused and looked the crowd in the face. Amongst them, he must have recognised some as his gloating enemies and others as his worried servants. He hastened on: ‘And it is not unknown to many of you that I have been a great traveller in the world but being of a base degree, was called to high estate.’

He sought the royal pardon in words spoken ‘carelessly and coldly’:
⁴¹
‘Since the time I came thereunto, I have offended my prince, for which I [also] ask him [for] hearty amnesty. I beseech you all to pray to God with me that he will forgive me. O Father, forgive me; O Son, forgive me; O Holy Ghost, forgive me; O three Persons and one God, forgive me.’

Cromwell was anxious to firmly dispel the widespread popular belief that he was a Lutheran:

And now I pray you that be here, to bear record [that] I die in the Catholic faith, not doubting any article of my faith – no, nor doubting any sacrament of the church.
⁴²

Many have slandered me and reported that I have been a bearer [supporter] of [those who] have maintained evil opinions, which is untrue.

But I confess that as God, by His Holy Spirit, instructs us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us – and I have been seduced.

He repeated his central theme, anxious that no one should be in any doubt as to his religious beliefs and fidelity:

Bear witness that I die in the Catholic faith of the Holy Church.

I heartily desire you to pray for the king’s grace [and] that he may long live with you in health and prosperity and after him, that his son, Prince Edward, that goodly imp,
⁴³
may long reign over you.

And once again, I desire you to pray for me, that so long as life remains in this flesh, I waver nothing in my faith.
⁴⁴

These words were to be printed, under official imprimatur, and widely disseminated.

Another eyewitness reported some especial words of advice Cromwell dispensed to the courtiers he saw in the press of the crowd near the scaffold:

Gentlemen, you should all take warning from me, who was, as you know, from a poor man made by the king into a great gentleman and I, not contented with that, not with having the kingdom at my orders, presumed to a still higher state. My pride has brought its punishment.

I confess I am justly condemned and I urge you, gentlemen, study to preserve the good you possess and never let greed or pride prevail in you.

Serve your king, who is one of the best in the world, and one who knows best how to reward his vassals.

His words may have been interrupted by poor, mad Hungerford, who, almost in frenzy, called out again and again for the executioner to get his bloody business over with.

Cromwell then knelt down on the straw and made his peace with his Maker: ‘O Lord, grant me that when these eyes lose their use, that the
eyes of my soul may see Thee. O Lord and father, when this mouth shall lose his use that my heart may say “
O Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum
” [“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”].’

He stood up and told those with him on the scaffold: ‘Pray for the prince and for all the lords of the council and for the clergy and for the commonalty [people]. Now I [beg] you again that you will pray for
me
.’
⁴⁵

Taking a last long look around, Cromwell spotted his old friend Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder
⁴⁶
in the front ranks of the shifting and pressing crowd. He called out: ‘Gentle Wyatt, goodbye – and pray for me.’ Wyatt, imprisoned in the downfall of Anne Boleyn, immediately dissolved into tears. ‘Do not weep,’ Cromwell added, ‘for if I were no more guilty than you were when they took you, I should not be in this pass.’

With that, he told the executioner: ‘Pray, if possible, cut off the head with one blow, so that I may not suffer much.’
⁴⁷
It was a faint hope. The headsman was called Gurrea, ‘a ragged and butcherly wretch’, and moments later he botched the execution: some claimed he was deliberately chosen because of his lack of experience. It seems likely that his axe stroke missed Cromwell’s neck and bit deeply into the back of his skull; one account grimly talks of two executioners ‘chopping the Lord Cromwell’s neck and head for nearly half an hour’.
⁴⁸

The arrogant Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and the son of Cromwell’s arch-enemy Norfolk, 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.’ Triumphantly, he pointed to the process of attainder, the Minister’s own personally devised weapon against traitors, as being the instrument of his eventual downfall: ‘Now he is stricken,’ he said, ‘with his own staff.’
⁴⁹

Hungerford was swiftly dispatched and the two bodies carried back to the Tower to be buried in unmarked graves in the tiny Church of St Peter ad Vincula, within the walls of the fortress.
⁵⁰
Irony of ironies, Cromwell’s body was buried within a few feet of Anne Boleyn, the queen whose downfall he had so efficiently engineered.

The heads of the two traitors – Cromwell’s badly mangled – were parboiled and set on pikestaffs above London Bridge.

The same day as Cromwell was executed, Henry married Catherine Howard in a private ceremony at Otelands Palace, near Weybridge, in Surrey. The old ogre was almost deliriously happy.

Epilogue

If we consider his coming up to such high degree as he attained, we may doubt whether there be cause to marvel at his good fortune or at his worthy and industrious demeanour
.

RAPHAEL HOLINSHED, CHRONICLER
¹

After Cromwell’s execution, an extraordinary propaganda war of pamphlets and broadsides broke out in London. A ‘Ballad on Thomas Cromwell’ was swiftly published containing sixteen doggerel verses, each with a repetition of the last line. It begins:

Both man and child is glad to tell

Of that false traitor Thomas Cromwell

Now that he is set to learn to spell

Sing troll
²
on away.

And it ends:

God save King Henry with all his power

And Prince Edward that goodly flower

With all his lords of great honour

Sing troll on away

Sing troll on away

Here and now rumellow,
³
troll on away.

Several rebuttals quickly followed, broadly sympathetic to Cromwell but careful to avoid any direct or implicit criticism of the King. One such broadside, ‘A Ballad Against Malicious Slanderers’, was written by Thomas Smyth, sewer
⁴
to Henry and possibly a member of the evangelical faction at court. This was in the form of eighteen verses beginning:

Although Lord Cromwell a traitor was

Yet dare I say the King of his grace

Has forgiven him that great trespass

To rail on dead men, thou art to blame

Troll now into the way again for shame.

In that he the law has offended

By the law he is swiftly condemned

This mortal life full godly he ended

Wherefore to rail thus they are to blame.

Troll etc.

For all his offences in everything

He asked God’s mercy and grace of the King

And of the wide world for his transgressions

Then nor no man can say nay to the same.

Troll etc.
⁵

Henry meanwhile was demonstrating his even-handedness in punishing transgressors in religion. Two days after Cromwell’s death, the three evangelicals Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome were brought out from the Tower to be burnt at Smithfield for heresy. Alongside them, en route to Tyburn, were three papists, Richard Featherstone, Thomas Abel and Edward Powell, who were to be hanged, drawn and quartered for their denial of the royal supremacy. As they were bumped along on the traditional wooden sheep hurdles, they argued furiously about which of them were truly facing a martyr’s death.
⁶

This incident personifies and encapsulates Henry’s constant changes of mind in the creation and fulfilment of religious policy in the later years
of his reign. How much Cromwell pushed this most single-minded of all English sovereigns can only be a matter of debate: his Minister’s problem was that the King had a number of different minds at times on difficult religious issues. Henry’s accusation that Cromwell was in league with the Lutherans, plotting to impose radical new Protestant doctrines in England, was either convenient propaganda for the moment or the product of the fevered brain of Stephen Gardiner. Certainly Cromwell had an interest in Lutheranism in the 1530s and some sympathy for its adherents. But there is no evidence that he denied Christ’s Presence in the sacrament of communion or wanted to move further down the road of Protestantism than other evangelicals at Henry’s court.

What Cromwell did achieve was to widen the access of ordinary people to their religion by providing worship in their own language, through the
Great Bible
of 1539. Although Henry was nervous about its impact and sought to restrict its readership, by 1541 parishes were being fined for failing to buy a copy. Cromwell also destroyed some of the superstitious flummery that pervaded much of the Catholic Church of the time through his attacks on images, pilgrimages and shrines.

His real attainments, however, were in government. He reformed the royal household and machinery of administration in England, laying down the foundations for today’s departments of state. His loyalty to Henry was unquestionable: all his inventive measures, all his punitive actions were directed at safeguarding the Tudor dynasty. He would have heard his brutish father talk of the mayhem of the Wars of the Roses more than five decades before. Cromwell was determined that his England would never be torn apart by internecine rivalry between aristocratic power bases; he thus ensured that the nobility’s loyalty was purchased by the redistribution of monastic property. The proceeds of that privatisation also spread to a new class of emerging gentry, who became stakeholders in the peace and tranquillity of a prosperous England.

Cromwell may appear authoritarian, cruel and malevolent to our modern eyes, with a cynical contempt for Parliament and justice, but his actions were always motivated by what he perceived to be the best interests of his royal master and his realm. Naturally, Cromwell’s own best interests also lay in keeping the despotic Henry happy, with the
benefits of ever-increasing power and the opportunity for enrichment. He was single-minded in pursuit of his policy objectives and there was no room in his heart for compassion or the quiet, still voice of conscience. No doubt Thomas Cromwell would have felt comfortable in the government of a twentieth-century totalitarian state. Many who governed those states could plead similar motivations to Cromwell’s in seeking to justify their actions. In his case, he could not have sought to hide behind appeals that he was ‘only following orders’. Within the limits on his authority always imposed by Henry, he was the one issuing the orders.

He enjoyed (almost) absolute power, and in fulfilment of the old dictum, he was certainly corrupt. His apologists point to the widespread practice of bribery in Tudor times, but Cromwell went far beyond that. His greed and avarice knew few bounds, except stealing from his King. His wealth and property at the end of his life surpassed that of all except the King himself and the ‘old money’ of the Duke of Norfolk. That eventually spelt his ruin and he became a victim of those nobles consumed with envy and hatred for a self-made man doing far better than them.

Surprisingly, Cromwell’s downfall did not damage his family, perhaps in return for his meek acceptance of his guilt or even some faint, lingering gratitude deep in the King’s black heart for a loyal servant’s services through thick and thin.

Five months after his father’s death, Gregory was ennobled himself, becoming Baron Cromwell on 18 December 1540, and in the following year was granted the house and site of the abbey at Launde in Leicestershire, together with some of his father’s lands. There were other grants of property before Henry died in January 1547 and at the coronation of his son, Edward VI, Gregory was one of the forty who were knighted in celebration of the event.

Gregory’s wife Elizabeth wrote obsequiously to Henry thanking him for his ‘pity and gracious goodness’ after the execution of her father-in-law as a traitor.

Whereas it has pleased [your majesty] of your mercy and infinite goodness, notwithstanding the heinous trespasses and most grievous offences of my
father-in-law, yet graciously to extend your benign pity towards my poor husband and me, as the extreme indigence and poverty wherewith my father-in-law’s most detestable offences had oppressed us, is thereby much helped and relieved.