Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [53]
When letters from the Lutheran lords of Germany were found in his house, the chief minister’s fate was sealed. “The King was thereby so exasperated against him that he would no longer hear him spoken of, but rather desired to abolish all memory of him as the greatest wretch ever born in England.”12
AT 3 P.M. ON SATURDAY, June 10, 1540, Cromwell was arrested in the Council Chamber by the duke of Norfolk. His goods were seized and confiscated, and he was sent to the Tower, charged with heresy and treason and of plotting to marry Mary.13 He had lost Henry’s confidence, and the king had disavowed him.
From the Tower Cromwell wrote to Henry protesting his innocence and begging for mercy, signing himself “with the heavy heart and trembling of your Highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner and poor slave.”14 He was condemned on June 29 as “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.” Cromwell was paying the price for the failed match, for his reformist inclinations, and for the rise in ascendancy of the conservative Howard family. He was kept alive only to recount all that he knew about the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves and of Henry’s conversations with him as to the nonconsummation of the marriage.
On June 24, Anne of Cleves was ordered to go to Richmond Palace, ostensibly to avoid an outbreak of the plague.15 The convocation of the clergy was instructed to examine the king’s marriage after doubts had been raised about its validity. The investigation concluded that Anne had been precontracted to the prince of Lorraine, that the king had wed her against his will, and that the whole nation desired the king to have more heirs. On the twenty-fifth, the king’s commissioners visited Anne and informed her that her marriage was invalid.16 She consented without protest, agreeing to the divorce proceedings and confirming that the marriage had not been consummated.17 Her acquiescence was rewarded: she was endowed with lands to the value of £4,000 annually and Richmond and Bletchingley manors, and was thereafter known as “the old Queen, the King’s sister.” On July 9, the convocation found their marriage to have been unlawful given its nonconsummation, her precontract with the duke of Lorraine, and the fact that Henry had acted under compulsion. Four days later, Parliament confirmed the verdict and Henry was declared free to remarry.
On July 28, Cromwell was finally taken to the scaffold on Tower Green. Maintaining his innocence to the end, he denied that he had supported heretics but accepted the judgment of the law. He knelt, prayed, and, laying his head on the block, “patiently suffered the stroke of the ax,” it taking a number of attempts to remove his head. Two days later, three well-known reformers, Robert Barnes, William Jerome, and Thomas Garret, were burned as heretics at Smithfield. At the stake, Barnes utterly denied his guilt: he was condemned to die, “but wherefore I cannot tell.”18 The others made similar declarations. On the same day, three defendants of the old faith were put to death: Edward Powell; Richard Fetherstone, Mary’s former schoolmaster; and Thomas Abel, Katherine of Aragon’s chaplain, were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. All had refused to acknowledge the Act of Supremacy. The heretics and