AS THE ‘RAGGED and butcherly’ executioner swung the axe down onto Cromwell’s neck for the third time, finally severing his head from his body, the king was joyfully anticipating his fifth wedding, which would take place later that day.1 With Cromwell’s help, he had finally secured an annulment from Anne of Cleves so that he could marry the infinitely more beguiling young Katherine Howard. Cranmer, too, had played his part by chairing a Convocation committee that proved the marriage had been invalid because of a previous contract between Anne and the Duke of Lorraine. That he felt anxious in the wake of his ally’s fall is proven by the fact that when some of the clerics involved in drafting the annulment gossiped about the rivalry that had existed between Cromwell and Gardiner, the archbishop had them brought before the council to make an apology.
Henry clearly hoped that Cromwell’s death would put an end to the vicious sniping and backbiting between the rival factions at court. While Norfolk and Gardiner may have taken it as a victory for the conservatives, the king made it clear that he wanted to achieve a middle way in religion from now on. He signalled this in typically brutal fashion two days after Cromwell’s execution by ordering the burning at the stake of three evangelicals and three conservatives known to be loyal to Rome. There was insufficient evidence against any of them, but Henry was determined to express his desire for unity with their blood.
One man who emerged triumphant from the controversy was Charles Brandon. He had led the team that negotiated the terms of the annulment with Anne of Cleves. Although he had counted Cromwell as an ally for the past three years, he did not suffer by association now. Yet neither had he turned his coat like so many other courtiers by helping to bring down the chief minister. In the new atmosphere of compromise and accord that Henry was trying to promote, his old friend Suffolk fitted in perfectly. Not for the first time in Henry’s reign, the duke became a symbol of stability at a time of political turmoil.
In the weeks that followed, Henry betrayed no regret at the execution of his one-time favourite, but instead gave every appearance of a love-struck teenager. If he mentioned Cromwell at all, then it was as a ‘knave’. In the meantime, the distribution of the late minister’s possessions and offices continued. Thomas Wriothesley, who had been quick to distance himself from his former patron, was granted Cromwell’s newly refurbished mansion at Austin Friars. Meanwhile, the king had ordered that some of the choicer pieces of Cromwell’s furniture be removed from Austin Friars and given to Anne of Cleves as part of her annulment settlement. The symbolism of the gesture was obvious to all: even in death, Cromwell was paying for the fiasco of his master’s fourth marriage.2
Meanwhile, among those to profit from the offices that Cromwell had surrendered was his former ally, Sir John Russell, whom Henry appointed Lord High Admiral on the same day that Cromwell was executed. Although he lost out when his royal master, in haste to eradicate all trace of a former favourite, had Cromwell’s Council of the West disbanded soon afterwards, the wealth and status that he had given Russell in the region endured and would prove a source of stability there for the crown long into the future.
Marillac gleefully reported on the division of the spoils that followed Cromwell’s demise. ‘The Privy Seal has been given to the admiral Fitzwilliam, while Master Russell has become Lord High Admiral of England in his room. The bishop of Durham [Cuthbert Tunstall] has been appointed first secretary, or viceregent in ecclesiastical causes … For the affairs of justice, the Chancellor [Audley] has been deputed.’3 Within days, it was as if the king’s most powerful servant had never existed. Cromwell’s noble rivals crowed in triumph. ‘Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood,’ cried Norfolk’s son the Earl of Surrey. ‘Now is he stricken with his own staff … These new erected men would by their wills leave no nobleman on life.’4
By contrast, a number of the king’s men found themselves in danger after Cromwell’s fall. Even though he had benefited from his former patron’s demise, Wriothesley was subjected to an examination by the king’s officials soon afterwards. He was even accused by Walter Chandler of slandering the king and of unlawfully retaining some manors near Winchester. To Wriothesley’s great relief, the charge was judged malicious, and in December 1540 Chandler was compelled to apologise to Wriothesley before the Privy Council. Shaken by the experience, Wriothesley resolved to ally himself to the conservatives, evidently judging that it was worth sacrificing his principles in order to retain the king’s favour. He struck up a close alliance with Gardiner, and it was soon noted that he had ‘obtained considerable power’ in the wake of Cromwell’s fall, and that ‘he advised the King in everything’.5 Wriothesley’s alliance with Gardiner also brought him material rewards. For example, in October 1542 the bishop granted him the mastership of the game in Fareham Manor and annuities worth £86, citing his ‘great love and singular affection’ for Wriothesley.6 Gardiner’s generosity came at a price, though: it was strictly conditional upon the secretary’s willingness to further the conservative cause.
Meanwhile, the handful of men who had remained faithful to Cromwell were immediately under the king’s suspicion, notably the secretary Sir Ralph Sadler, who had been knighted around the same time that his former patron was made Earl of Essex, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, who had openly wept for the minister at his execution. Both men were arrested in January 1541, along with several others who had been closely connected to Cromwell. This may have been at the behest of Norfolk and his party, rather than Henry. Marillac opined: ‘There could be no worse war than the English carry on against each other; for after Cromwell had brought down the greatest of the realm, from the Marquis [of Exeter, Henry Courtenay] to the Grand Esquire Caraud [Sir Nicholas Carew], now others have arisen who will never rest till they have done as much to all Cromwell’s adherents, and God knows whether after them others will not re-commence the feast. [I] never saw them look more troubled,’ he concluded.7
Sadler and Wyatt were released two months later. It was partly thanks to Katherine Howard that the latter was pardoned. Like many women before her, she had been charmed by the charismatic poet. The king’s own abiding affection for Wyatt had undoubtedly also played a part. Chapuys recorded that Henry imposed a condition on his pardon, namely that he should take back his wife, Elizabeth Brooke, ‘from whom he had been separated for upwards of fifteen years’.8 This was an onerous condition for the poet, who included a veiled reference to her in a later verse as the ‘clog’ on his wheel. But he was too desirous of the king’s renewed favour to gainsay him. Whether he still revered Henry after what he had done to Cromwell is another matter. Soon after his release, Wyatt retired to Allington, his estate in Kent, for a few months, and it may have been during his stay that he composed his penitential psalms on the theme of enemies and tyrannical rulers.
By the time of Wyatt and Sadler’s release, Henry was already regretting his haste in having their patron put to death. As early as December 1540, the king had betrayed signs of remorse. That month, he bestowed a barony upon Cromwell’s son Gregory. He also showed favour to Cromwell’s nephew, Richard, who was later given a sought-after position in the privy chamber.
Even though he had been quick to fill the offices that Cromwell had vacated, Henry had not been able to find another man with the same exceptional ability, shrewdness and capacity for hard work to act as his chief minister. After Wolsey had been ousted from power, Cromwell had soon stepped into his shoes. But there was no man to do so now, and the role would remain vacant for the rest of the reign. Too late, Henry had realised the extent of Cromwell’s genius. That he had taken Cromwell for granted during his decade of service had been partly Cromwell’s fault for having made it look easy: he had fulfilled every task that Henry had set for him with minimum show and maximum efficiency. Now, as Foxe observed: ‘The king did afterwards greatly and earnestly repent his death, but alas too late, who was heard oftentimes to say, that now he lacked his Cromwell.’9
In characteristic style, Henry lashed out at others, rather than accepting any measure of the blame. On 3 March 1541, a little over seven months after the former chief minister’s execution, Marillac reported that the king regularly reproached his councillors that ‘upon light pretexts, by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he had ever had’.10
But Henry did not brood on his loss for long. Instead, he made a virtue out of necessity and resolved that never again would he allow one of his ministers to enjoy such power as Cromwell – and, before him, Wolsey – had done. Now the forty-nine-year-old king was determined to rule alone for the first time in his reign. His character had undergone a similar, if more gradual, transformation. Gone was the convivial, open-hearted king of his youth; in his place was a suspicious, paranoid and boastful tyrant – ‘very stern and opinionated’ – who recognised no will but his own and would bring even the greatest of his subjects down on little more than a whim.11
‘Although formerly everyone condescended to his wishes, still there was some form of justice,’ remarked the French ambassador Marillac in August 1540, ‘but now will be only the King’s pleasure.’ He added that Henry had become not merely ‘a King to be obeyed, but an idol to be worshipped’.12 Henry himself declared that he ‘would be obeyed whosoever spake to the contrary’.13 One courtier noted that if the king began a sentence with the word ‘Well’, everyone knew that his mind was made up and it would be foolhardy to argue.14 Henry’s court, which had long been a dangerous place for those seeking advancement, was now a deadly one.
But for the time being, everything was set fair for Katherine Howard’s male relatives and associates following her marriage to Henry. Utterly besotted with his new wife, the king was blind to her faults, as well as to those of the Howards. The principal beneficiary was her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who enjoyed both political and material rewards at his sovereign’s hands. Two other men rose to prominence after the conclusion of the vows. Katherine’s cousin, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, became a Knight of the Garter. Meanwhile, Robert Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, whose son Henry had married Norfolk’s daughter Elizabeth, attained the pinnacle of his career in royal service when he was made lord great chamberlain for life.15 It was particularly satisfying for Norfolk to see Cromwell’s former office go to one of his close allies.
But the flighty young queen was a good deal less enamoured of her ageing, obese husband than he was of her. There is reason to suppose that the king was suffering from impotence by the time he married her. Certainly there was little sign that Katherine had fallen pregnant. In fact, she was soon looking elsewhere for sexual gratification.
If Katherine’s promiscuous past had come to light, it would have been shocking enough, but she compounded the situation by taking a lover soon after she became Henry’s fifth queen. Thomas Culpeper was a ‘beautiful youth’ who served as gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. Distantly related to the new queen through an ancestor in the reign of Edward II, he is first noted at court in 1535, when he began acting on behalf of Arthur, Viscount Lisle, the lord deputy of Calais, and his wife, Honor. By November 1537 he was a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. A further indication of how much the king esteemed him came the following January. One of Culpeper’s serving boys had been condemned to death for theft at Westminster Palace, but was reprieved from the gallows when a royal pardon arrived just as the hangman was removing the ladder.
Although Culpeper must have been charming and affable to win such favour with Henry so soon, he had a darker side. In 1539, he was accused of raping a park keeper’s wife. One of the villagers who tried to arrest him was killed – whether by Culpeper or a member of his entourage is not clear. In an age when even petty crime could carry the death sentence, this was more than enough to have had Culpeper sent to the gallows. But the king pardoned him, and just a few months later Culpeper attended the reception of Anne of Cleves upon her arrival in England. Trouble never seemed to be far away, though, and in March 1541, some of his servants were imprisoned for their role in a brawl at Southwark, an area of the city notorious for its bawdy houses and taverns.
Quite when the affair between Culpeper and Katherine Howard began is not certain. They had attended many of the same court functions since she became Henry’s wife, but the first hint of an attachment came on Maundy Thursday 1541, when the queen presented him with a velvet cap. Culpeper knew the dire consequences that would follow if he bedded the king’s wife, but perhaps this piqued his attraction even more. They began to meet in secret, with the assistance of Katherine’s lady of the privy chamber, Jane Boleyn, widow of George, and Katherine Tilney, another attendant.
The affair continued throughout the king’s progress to the northern counties that summer. Culpeper was later recorded as having visited the queen’s bedchamber at several locations en route, including Pontefract and Lincoln. It may have been at the latter place that Katherine penned the now infamous letter to Culpeper. On the surface it appears to be an expression of love and desire – certainly that is how it was later interpreted by the king’s officials. Culpeper had been ill, so the couple had not been able to meet for a while, and Katherine expressed a yearning to see him. ‘It makes my heart die to think I cannot be always in your company,’ she wrote, before signing off: ‘Yours as long as life endures.’16
This letter may not be all it appears, however. The emotional language could have been driven less by Katherine’s desire than by her desperation to escape the plight that she was in. Culpeper had a reputation for lechery as well as violence, and it is easy to imagine him as a dangerous and controlling suitor who refused to let the young queen escape their liaison. Katherine herself was vulnerable to such a domineering and manipulative man. Attractive and vivacious but hopelessly naïve, she had been preyed upon by unscrupulous men since her youth, and seems to have played an essentially passive role, responding to their demands rather than her own inclinations.
The invidious situation in which she now found herself was compounded by the arrival of one of her former lovers, Francis Dereham. Undoubtedly, he was seeking to blackmail the queen into giving him a position at court in return for his silence about their earlier affair. It worked. Four days after his arrival at Pontefract Castle, Katherine appointed Dereham her secretary. But this only bought his silence for a short while, and the hapless Katherine was obliged to offer him further bribes.
By the time that the royal progress reached York in September, the queen had reached breaking point. She sent word to Culpeper that she would not meet him in private again. Predictably, he refused to accept her decision but continued to pester and threaten her. On 6 October, the king and his entourage left Hull, the final stopping place on their tour, and began the slow journey back to London. Unbeknownst to Katherine, events were unfolding there that would seal her fate.
But as far as Henry was concerned, this was one of the happiest periods of his life. He had a beautiful young wife, whom he relished showing off during his progress, and he had also just received news that his ‘entirely beloved son’ and heir was thriving.17 Although he is often depicted as a fragile, sickly child, Edward enjoyed robust health for much of his childhood. In the portrait that Holbein painted when the prince was a little over a year old, he has full cheeks and chubby hands. The report that Henry received of his son in October 1541 tactfully described him as ‘well fed’, but also ‘handsome’ and ‘remarkably tall for his age’.18 Having just turned three years old, Edward was still under the supervision of Lady Bryan and the other women of his household. It would soon become apparent that Audley’s earlier remark about the young prince being too much indulged was justified.
Barely was the ink dry on this dispatch than the king received another, altogether more alarming report of his son. Edward had contracted malaria at Hampton Court. This was one of the most feared diseases of the age, and it carried symptoms akin to influenza, notably high fever. Henry was aghast when he heard the news. Upon Edward’s young shoulders rested the entire future of the Tudor dynasty. With rumours of the king’s impotence circulating since his short-lived marriage to Anne of Cleves, there was little hope of a ‘spare heir’. All of the obsessive care that Henry had lavished upon the upbringing and security of his ‘precious jewel’ had apparently been in vain. Panic-stricken, Henry at once summoned ‘all the doctors in the country’, including Dr William Butts, his own personal physician, who had also attended his illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. Upon arriving at the prince’s bedside, Butts asked him if he ‘felt any disposition to vomit’. Edward’s reply displayed all the petulance of this indulged four-year-old. ‘Go away, fool,’ he exclaimed.19
As Henry hastened towards Hampton Court, events were conspiring in London that would soon heap more misery upon his shoulders. John Lassells was a sewer in the king’s privy chamber and a former servant of Thomas Cromwell. A staunch reformer, he had long desired the downfall of Norfolk and his party, and in early October 1541 he thought that he had found the means. His sister Mary had formerly served in the household of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and she now confided to her brother what she had witnessed involving the young Katherine Howard. Lassells went straight to Archbishop Cranmer, who was no doubt shocked at the revelations. Not wishing to bear the burden of the knowledge alone, he consulted Edward Seymour and Thomas Audley. All three men knew that the only recourse was to relay the news to the king. If they did not, then they could be accused of colluding with the queen’s deceit. But they also knew that their royal master was besotted with his young wife and would react to the revelation with shock and fury, lashing out at whichever unfortunate man was to relay it.
Cranmer must have wished that Lassells had not come to him first, because Seymour and Audley insisted that he should be the one to tell Henry as soon as he arrived at Hampton Court. This was not the first time that Cranmer had proved the most resilient when other men had flinched from delivering unpalatable news or advice to the king, as his secretary Richard Morice recalled: ‘His estimation was such with his prince, that in matters of great importance wherein no creature durst once move the king, for fear of displeasure or moving the king’s patience or otherwise for troubling his mind, then was my lord Cranmer most violently by the holy council obtruded and thrust out, to undertake that danger and peril in hand.’20
Now, Cranmer had to undertake the most dangerous move of his career to date. Like Seymour and Audley, he was fully aware 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, so that no man durst take in hand to open to him that wound, being in great perplexity how he would take it’.21 But the archbishop knew that his master’s ire would be greater still if he found out that Cranmer had concealed the news from him. He therefore made his way to Hampton Court to receive his royal master, who arrived on 2 November. By now filled with fear and apprehension, Cranmer stopped short of relaying the news in person, but rather presented the king with a written statement of the allegations.
Having just given thanks for his marriage in the Chapel Royal, Henry’s first reaction was one of disbelief. Perhaps thanks to Cranmer’s strategy, his royal master did not immediately explode into fury. Rather, he sent his trusted attendant William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, to interview John Lassells and his sister. He also dispatched Thomas Wriothesley to question Francis Dereham and Henry Manox, Katherine’s former music tutor. Both men soon confirmed the truth of the allegations. Devastated and humiliated in equal measure, the king met Wriothesley and the Duke of Norfolk in secret and went with them to an all-night Privy Council meeting at Southwark Palace on 6 November. Only then did he accept the truth about his wayward young wife and he utterly renounced her, vowing never to see her again.
Everything now unravelled with alarming speed. The queen was kept to her chambers at Hampton Court while Cranmer, Audley and Sir William Paulet interrogated her about her relations with Manox and Dereham. The Lord Chancellor detained the Duchess of Norfolk at his house in Aldgate while she was questioned. He and the other men were soon joined by the Duke of Norfolk, no doubt anxious to prove that his loyalty to the king far outweighed any ties of kinship to the beleaguered queen.
Katherine withstood their combined pressure for two days, but then confessed the truth of the allegations to Cranmer alone, perhaps swayed by his gentler persuasions. The archbishop evidently felt some sympathy for the young woman, because in reporting her testimony to Henry, he told him that he had found her in ‘lamentation and heaviness, as I never saw no creature; so that it would have pitied any man’s heart in the world to have looked upon her’.22 This echoed his attempt to make his royal master look more kindly upon Anne Boleyn five years earlier. Now it seemed to work to better effect, though, because the king instructed his archbishop to give Katherine hope of clemency – but only after making it clear just how ‘grievous’ her transgressions were.
Cranmer duly returned to Katherine’s chambers and found her almost deranged with fear. He therefore went against his master’s instructions by trying to calm her with the hope of Henry’s forgiveness first. But rather than being appeased, she lamented that ‘this sudden mercy’ made her crimes appear even more ‘heinous’. The archbishop was a patient and kindly man, and stayed with the queen until he had brought her to ‘quietness’. This did not last for long, however, because at about six o’clock, she suffered another ‘pang’ when she realised that this was the time that the king’s groom of the stool, Sir Thomas Heneage, usually brought her a message from her husband.23
Henry might have been persuaded by Cranmer to show clemency towards his wife, but he immediately changed his mind when Dereham confessed, under torture, that he had been replaced in the queen’s affections by Thomas Culpeper. That his wife had lied about her sexual past was bad enough; this latest revelation shook the king to his core. He was now a cuckold and, worse still, the perpetrator was one of his most intimate servants. The queen was immediately interrogated about Dereham’s allegations. At first she denied them, but then she admitted to the affair, blaming Culpeper for pressuring her into it. Even Cranmer could do nothing to help her now. On 12 November, he and the council signed the queen’s statement, and the following day Wriothesley went to see her at Hampton Court and ‘declared certain offences that she had done in misusing her body with certain persons afore the king’s time, wherefore he there discharged all her household’.24 The day after, Katherine was moved to the former monastery of Syon, west of London.
The king’s only solace in the midst of the crisis was that Prince Edward had recovered. Dr William Butts was now even higher in his royal master’s favour than he had been before. But the episode had been a salutary reminder of the vulnerability of Henry’s regime. Thanks to his rejection of papal authority, he had alienated the most powerful potentates of Europe. His own health was beginning to fail, and if his only son and heir were to succumb to another disease – fatally this time – then his kingdom might be seized by his continental rivals.
For now, though, Henry had more immediate concerns. His wife’s lover was being subjected to intense interrogation. Culpeper insisted that Katherine had initiated their meetings, but did not admit to having sex with her, only that he had desired her. But his admission of motive was enough to condemn him, since the Treason Act of 1534 recognised intent to harm the king as high treason. He was convicted with Dereham by a special commission held on 1 December and attended by all of the king’s most influential men, including Lord Chancellor Audley, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and Sir William Fitzwilliam. Nine days later, both of the accused were put to death. Culpeper was beheaded at Tyburn, an unusual location since beheadings were usually carried out at Tower Hill. But the king’s council wished to make an example of him in this more public place, and also decreed that he should be taken there strapped to a hurdle pulled by a horse. Dereham, meanwhile, suffered the full horrors of a traitor’s death, being hanged, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered.
What had begun as a clandestine scandal now became a witch hunt, as numerous other relatives of the queen were rounded up – so many, in fact, that they exceeded the capacity of the Tower. Ralph Sadler applied his energies to gathering evidence of the queen’s adultery, which he knew would help to discredit his former patron’s adversary, Norfolk. Displaying the same ruthlessness that had characterised many of his late master’s dealings, he did everything he could to transform a case of treason into a purge of those who had orchestrated Cromwell’s downfall.
Spying an opportunity for further advancement, Sadler’s former colleague Wriothesley was also prominent in the interrogations of the Duchess of Norfolk and her household. The Duke of Norfolk himself must have feared that he would soon be summoned, but in the event he escaped implication, and those who had been imprisoned were all eventually pardoned and released. Katherine herself was condemned under a bill of attainder and beheaded at the Tower on 13 February 1542. Her cousin Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was among the small crowd that assembled to witness the macabre spectacle. Soon afterwards, he penned a lament to the tragedies that had befallen the Howards. Casting them as the ‘white lion’ and the Seymours as the ‘white wolf’, he vowed:
I shall be glad to feed on that that
would have fed on me.25
Even after the release of the various family members who had been sent to the Tower in the wake of Katherine’s fall, the Howards remained under suspicion. Surrey himself found this to his cost when in July 1542 he was imprisoned in the Fleet, ostensibly for challenging John à Leigh to a duel. But there was clearly more to it than that, for he later attested that he had been charged with matters concerning his fidelity to the king. John à Leigh was accused of maintaining a treasonable association with Cardinal Pole. Surrey himself was suspected of retaining a servant who had been in Italy with Pole, and of employing as a jester an Italian man who was reputedly a spy. He was released the following month and accompanied his father on an expedition to Scotland in October. But the king remained suspicious of him ever after.
In contrast to the demise of his former marriages, which, with the exception of Jane Seymour, Henry had met with a combination of self-righteousness and cold indifference, Katherine Howard’s betrayal plunged him into a deep depression. His councillors were dismayed to see the king so distressed. They wrote to Sir William Paget, who, as well as serving as secretary to three of Henry’s wives, had performed a number of diplomatic missions for the king and was his now ambassador to France. Upon receiving the council’s letter, he learned how their royal master was so choked with sorrow that for a while he could not give vent to it, but that at last he had wept ‘plenty of tears’.26 Henry’s melancholy had not lifted two months after his fifth wife’s execution, when Chapuys reported to the emperor: ‘Since he heard of his late wife’s conduct he has not been the same man, and Chapuys has always found him sad, pensive and sighing.’27
It would be the beginning of a steady decline for the king, which none of his men could halt. Culpeper’s betrayal made Henry watchful and suspicious of the other men who served him. Never again would he trust any of them to the same extent. From now on, he increasingly ruled by fear, abandoning the desire for unity that he had expressed in the wake of Cromwell’s execution.