The meeting on 1 June 1540 should have been an ordinary gathering of the Privy Council. Cromwell arrived slightly late, surprised that his colleagues were about to start without him. As he sat, he was told the council did not sit with traitors. Mantel imagines the scene:
The councillors fall on him. They tug, kick, haul. He is barged and buffeted, his gold chain is off.
Marillac gleefully reports to Francis I how Cromwell was humiliated.
It was a blur. Cromwell was subject to a bill of attainder that denied him a trial. The charges cited grounds of treason and heresy – that he had been elevated from a base and low degree to a position of trust and power which he had abused, and was a heretic, but Henry needed Cromwell to attend to the arrangements that would extricate him from the Cleves marriage. Men who Cromwell previously trusted, like Wriothesley, Audley and Rich, proved to be, as Marillac wrote, men who bent to all winds. In The Mirror and the Light, he learns that Rich is pawing through Austin Friars to uncover further damning evidence.
The annulment of the Cleves marriage took only a few weeks, and when Anne was informed on 9 July, she was shocked but respectful of Henry’s wishes, and took his rejection more gracefully than any other wife. Cromwell’s imprisonment lasted seven weeks, during which Cromwell desperately wrote to Henry:
Sir, upon [my kne]es I most humbly beseech your most gracious Majesty [to be a goo]d and gracious lord to my poor son, the good and virtu[ous lady his] wife, and their poor children.
Mantel’s Cromwell remembers the words of Erasmus: ‘No man is to be despaired of, so long as the breath is in him.’
Cromwell signed his letter to the king: ‘Written with the quaking hand and most sorrowful heart of your most sorrowful subject and most humble servant and prisoner.’
What Henry enjoyed more than anything, apart from a hunt, was a wedding and an execution, and if they were on the same day then so much the better. On 28 July, Cromwell walked the short distance from his cell in the Tower to the scaffold as Henry married the young Catherine Howard at Oatlands Palace in Surrey. The game of chess could begin again, with new players. In Cromwell’s final minutes, his often-sung Italian folk song, ‘Scaramella to the War is Gone’, becomes muddled with one of Thomas Wyatt’s poems: ‘I am as I am and so will I be. But how that is I leave to you, false or true.’ Words reminiscent of those spoken by Anne Boleyn: ‘If anyone shall meddle with my cause I ask them to judge the best.’ Anne’s soul departed between sighs, Cromwell’s between a pulse-beat.
‘He is far from England now, far from these islands, from the waters salt and fresh. He has vanished. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.
THE AFTERMATH
We do not follow Cromwell in death, but many others would follow him to the scaffold: Margaret Pole, Jane Rochford, Catherine Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s son, Henry Howard, and both Seymour brothers, the men being executed on the orders of their nephew, Edward VI. Cromwell’s boys – Rafe, Gregory and Richard – would struggle in the first year following Cromwell’s death, but they all continued their careers at court, and remained close-knit throughout their lives. Gregory Cromwell would eventually participate in several high-profile parliamentary proceedings, including the attainders of Catherine Howard, and his father’s enemies, Norfolk and his son, Henry Howard.
Although Cromwell’s family publicly distanced themselves from the patriarch as Cromwell had likely recommended, he was mourned by them and loyal friends, and not least by the king. Marillac reported that Henry had raged at his councillors, ‘saying that, upon light pretexts, by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’. Henry never took accountability for his own poor decisions – it was always someone else’s fault. Men like Rich, Wriothesley and Audley, who quietly side-stepped Cromwell’s grisly fate, became Henry’s new henchmen – Rich and Wriothesley’s reputations forever tainted for racking the outspoken reformer Anne Askew with their own hands in 1546. Following Cromwell’s death, Henry’s court became more fractious and factional than it had ever been, with Henry becoming the irrational, tyrannical and vengeful monarch so well-known to history. Marillac, like Chapuys and other foreign ambassadors, had his measure, and he wrote frankly that Henry would go on dipping his hands in blood. It was more a prophesy than a speculation.
The real Cromwell once wrote to Thomas Wyatt that Henry was ‘the Mirror and the light of all Kings and Princes in Christendom’. Henry was indeed the mirror, in whose reflection courtiers existed; and in whose light they thrived. But as Mantel’s Cromwell tells us, he shed no lustre of his own, but spun in the reflected light of his master – if it moved, he was gone.
Mantel’s trilogy casts Cromwell across multiple reflections. Even Cromwell notes, there have been so many versions he doesn’t always recognize himself. But somewhere between fact and fiction there is the real Cromwell: Putney boy, statesman, politician, henchman, father, loyal servant and loyal minister. If we are to learn anything from Mantel’s writing it is that beneath every history is indeed another history, and each one deserves to be told.
FURTHER READING
Bernard, G. W., Fatal Attractions (London: Yale University Press, 2010)
Bernard, G. W., Power & Politics in Tudor England (London: Ashgate, 2000)
Block, J. S., Factional Politics and the English Reformation 1520–1540 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1993)
Borman, Tracy, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful
