In April, Henry VIII had advanced Thomas Cromwell to the earldom of Essex and the office of Great Chamberlain. On the tenth of June, 1540, at the King’s council board, the Duke of Norfolk charged him with high treason. Guards laid hands upon him in the chamber; the insignia of the Order of the Garter were torn from his breast, and he was hurried down a privy stair to an awaiting barge. He was rowed across the Thames and brought within the Tower through Traitors’ Gate. But the day before, he had been Henry’s foremost servant, entrusted with the weightiest affairs of Church and State. He remained a close prisoner while the Lords framed a bill of attainder against him.
Cromwell had known the sun of royal favor as few men ever did. Borrow accounts him the son of a blacksmith of Putney; he had climbed to the realm’s highest dignities: Vicegerent in Spirituals, Lord Privy Seal, Chamberlain, and Master of the Rolls. Yet he had also drawn upon himself a multitude of enemies, chiefly within the House of Howard, where religious antipathies and the King’s impending marriage to Catherine Howard lent fresh venom to the contest for supremacy.
A dinner at Lambeth had already laid bare this enmity. Henry had sent Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cromwell to Archbishop Cranmer to assure him of his royal affection after the prelate’s resistance to the Six Articles. At table, the dukes commended Cranmer and his eloquence. Cromwell observed that while the King gave ear to complaints against his other councillors, he would not so much as listen to those leveled at the Archbishop. He then drew a parallel between his own standing and that of Thomas Wolsey. Norfolk, who had once served Wolsey, retorted that he knew the late Cardinal well. Cromwell, according to Borrow, thereupon reminded the Duke that he had sought to attend Wolsey to Rome when the latter aspired to the papacy. The Duke denied it; Cromwell pressed the point. The altercation was smoothed over by the other guests, but the humiliation, the chronicler writes, rankled long in Norfolk’s breast.
Cromwell stood for the Reformation and had labored to hold Henry and the Emperor apart; Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner, as Borrow has it, favored an accommodation with Rome. Meanwhile, the King had grown weary of Anne of Cleves and had cast his eye upon Catherine Howard, the Duke’s niece. In such an hour, a doctrinal dispute was readily bound up with a feud of blood and courtly favor.
Yet the alliance with Anne of Cleves had been devised as a masterstroke of statecraft. Cromwell had proposed a German princess, and Henry sent Holbein to paint her likeness. The portrait pleased the King; negotiations moved swiftly, and Anne reached English shores at the close of 1539. The encounter dashed the minister’s hopes. Henry made no secret of his aversion, and the marriage was doomed to annulment a few months later. This reverse did not, however, work Cromwell’s immediate ruin: the earldom bestowed in April 1540 followed Anne’s arrival. His adversaries had yet to labor to turn the sovereign’s disgust into an accusation of treason.
On the seventeenth of June, the Lords laid a bill of attainder before Parliament. The instrument charged Cromwell with releasing prisoners held on suspicion of treason, granting commissions and passports without royal license, harboring preachers and circulating books deemed heretical, and shielding those who spoke against the established doctrine. It asserted, moreover, that he had extorted monies, held the ancient nobility in contempt, and uttered menaces against the peers. According to the act cited by Borrow, he was reported to have boasted that he was “sure of the King,” vowing he would draw his dagger against all men should his master alter his religion.
One precise article in the bill recounted an occurrence said to have taken place on the thirty-first of March, in the parish of St. Peter le Poor, where certain men had come to lay complaint against preachers such as Robert Barnes. The act affirms that Cromwell took their part and declared that, though the King should turn his coat, he himself would never turn; whereat he drew his dagger and swore he would fight to the death for that cause. Another threat was laid to his charge, arising from a discourse at St. Martin-in-the-Fields: that if the lords treated him ill, he would serve them such a breakfast as they should not soon forget. These scenes formed the very body of his condemnation. Borrow relates them as formal charges, not as facts tested by cross-examination.
The bill was read to the Lords on the seventeenth of June and debated for ten days in the Commons. The Lower House returned it with a proviso reserving the title of the Bishop of Bath and Wells and his chapter in certain lands exchanged with Cromwell; the King gave his royal assent on the very same day. This reservation of private estate was thus embedded in an act that confiscated the whole of Cromwell’s remaining goods, including all that he had acquired since the thirty-first of March. In the selfsame statute, commissions, passports, and intercessions for prisoners were forged into instruments of treason and heresy. The prisoner was never brought before Parliament to answer for his life.
In the preceding year, Cromwell had himself promoted the attainder of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, and Gertrude Courtenay, Marchioness of Exeter. Borrow observes that they, too, had been denied the right to answer the charges laid against them. The fallen minister now found himself crushed by that very engine of parliamentary condemnation.
From the Tower, Cromwell addressed a letter to the King, which he prayed might be delivered into his own royal hands. Borrow records that Henry caused it to be read thrice over and was moved to tears. A surviving epistle cited by Historic Royal Palaces, bearing the date of the last day of June, concludes with this lamentable cry: “Most gracious Prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.” Henry showed no mercy. After nearly seven weeks’ confinement in the Tower, Cromwell was led forth to Tower Hill.
On the twenty-eighth of July, standing beneath the scaffold, he declined, says Borrow, to justify himself before the people. He besought their prayers for the King, the Prince, and his own soul, and declared that he died in the Catholic faith, abjuring all heretical errors wherewith he had been charged. The records of his petition to his sovereign and of his dying words have reached posterity through divergent channels: the letter from the Tower sued for life, while his public speech was no vindication of his administration. Having spoken as reported, the former minister laid his head upon the block.
His body was returned to the precincts where he had waited in vain for clemency. Historic Royal Palaces records that his head, having been set upon London Bridge, was subsequently restored to his remains for burial in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula. There already lay Sir Thomas More and Anne Boleyn, in whose downfalls he had played so heavy a part. The minister whom the guards had brought by water down the Thames found his final rest beside those he had once brought low.