HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/thomas-cromwell Sun, 17 May 2026 14:30:04 GMT en hourly 1 The ultimate Cold War sex scandal – and 11 other political outrages from British history https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ultimate-cold-war-sex-scandal-and-11-other-political-outrages-from-british-history/ Sun, 17 May 2026 14:30:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ultimate-cold-war-sex-scandal-and-11-other-political-outrages-from-british-history/ From the fall of Thomas Cromwell to Cold War sex dramas, James Osborne examines some of the most extraordinary episodes in British political history The first English parliaments were intended as countermeasures to bad kingship, protecting the realm from the worst excesses of rogue royals.

From these medieval beginnings, and through its evolution into the modern parliament of the United Kingdom, the institution has spread across the world as a model of representative government and as a symbol of democracy. But that doesn’t mean that it has been without controversy.

Since its inception, parliament has been dogged by scandals that have affected its reputation and altered its procedures. But which episodes have had the most lasting influence and infamy – and why? James Osborne investigates…

1. Alice Perrers and the Good Parliament (1376)

By the start of the 1370s, King Edward III had ruled England for nearly half a century. He was a transformative monarch who had taken the country into the Hundred Years’ War with France. But age and illness had left him diminished, and he had withdrawn from day-to-day rule. Filling that vacuum of power were the king’s courtiers and confidants, including Alice Perrers.

Perrers had risen from relatively modest origins to become the king’s closest companion after the death of Queen Philippa. She was ever-present at court, decorated with jewels belonging to the crown. She had accumulated lands, wealth and influence on a scale that positioned her as one of the most powerful women in England. Both in appearance and power, she had assumed the role of a pseudo-queen.

Chroniclers accused her of inserting herself where she didn’t belong, interrupting legal proceedings and persuading the king to reward her allies. Whether these claims were true (or an instance of medieval misogyny) didn’t matter. The perception was that royal power was being manipulated for personal gain.

When parliament met in 1376, the long war with France was going badly, taxes were high and confidence in the royal household had collapsed. With Edward III’s power eroded, this assembly (later known as the Good Parliament) was able to be unusually assertive. Alice Perrers quickly became its central target.

MPs accused her of using her sexual relationship with the king to enrich herself, distort justice and dominate access to royal favour. Parliament forced Perrers to swear an oath to never again approach the king, stripped her of property, and removed her from court.

But within a few months, Perrers had returned, protected by the king and his allies, and many of the reforms of the Good Parliament were undone. It wasn’t until Edward’s death in 1377 that Perrers was tried for corruption and subsequently exiled.

The episode marked parliament’s growing confidence in naming, shaming and punishing abuses of power – even when those abuses were entangled with sexual politics and the private life of the crown.

2. The fall of Thomas Cromwell (1540)

In the mid-16th century, during the apogee of Tudor England, Thomas Cromwell was second only to Henry VIII as the most powerful man in the realm.

The son of a blacksmith, Cromwell had risen from simple origins, elevating himself with a combination of fierce intelligence, canny administrative skill and absolute loyalty to the king. He was the architect of the English Reformation, the man who used parliament to break with the pope, dissolve the monasteries, and place the king at the head of the Church of England.

But by tying himself so closely to the king, Cromwell’s power was predicated on his patron’s favour. When Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, proved a humiliating failure, Cromwell was blamed. It proved disastrous: his numerous enemies at court seized the moment, assembling accusations of treason and heresy.

Cromwell was arrested in June 1540, stripped of office, and executed a month later on Tower Hill. The man who had expanded parliament’s authority was killed by the same institution, at the king’s behest. Later generations would look back on cases like Cromwell’s as examples of how parliamentary power could be abused, and why limits on that power were necessary.

3. The ship money crisis (1630s)

The second Stuart king, Charles I, deemed parliament a nuisance. He dissolved it in 1629 and chose to govern without it. This period, later dubbed the ‘Personal Rule’, lasted 11 years. This wasn’t illegal in itself – and parliaments were only called periodically anyway – but it created a practical problem: war, government and the royal court all required money. But taxes were meant to be raised only with parliament’s approval.

So, Charles and his advisers turned to older forms of revenue that didn’t require parliamentary assent. The most controversial was ‘ship money’, a levy traditionally raised from coastal towns to fund naval defence in emergencies. In the 1630s, the crown extended ship money across the country and began demanding it in peacetime.

In effect, this was a tax by another name, imposed without parliament’s consent. Ship money wasn’t the largest source of royal income, but it did become the clearest example of royal overreach.

When Charles later faced rebellion in Scotland and needed funds for an army, he was forced to recall parliament in 1640 – which was now an assembly brimming with pent-up anger. In the long term, the scandal became part of the chain of events that led to civil war.

4. The South Sea Bubble (1720)

The South Sea Company was founded in 1711. A joint-stock company, it took on government debt in return for guaranteed interest payments, and in 1713 secured a significant contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish South America. This was one of many examples of complex arrangements between government and private companies, as the state sought to deal with the heavy burden of debt accumulated from protracted wars.

In 1719, the company proposed a new and ambitious scheme. It would absorb a large portion of the national debt, and in return, it would offer its shares as a route to great wealth. Parliament approved the plan, and ministers, MPs and members of the royal family were given shares on favourable terms.

The value of the company’s shares rose rapidly, driven by hype rather than financial stability or impressive profits. Similar opportunist ventures quickly popped up, many with no serious business behind them. Ordinary investors, encouraged by the involvement of political leaders, poured their savings into the schemes. By the summer of 1720, the bubble burst and prices collapsed, ruining the finances of thousands who had become involved.

Against a backdrop of intense public anger, parliament was forced to act against its own members who had accepted bribes in the form of shares and loans, or unscrupulously promoted legislation from which they stood to profit directly. Several politicians were expelled or otherwise left in disgrace.

One figure who emerged strengthened was Robert Walpole, who helped stabilise the system and limit the fallout. He would later become Britain’s first prime minister.

• Read more | The South Sea Bubble: when was it formed and what happened?

5. The Wilkes affair (1763–74)

As the Georgian era progressed, Britain was becoming a more politically engaged society. With growing press freedoms, newspapers had taken on a new and important role, and elections were becoming fiercely contested. Parliament was no longer such a distant institution.

John Wilkes benefited from these changes. He was a journalist, pamphleteer and MP who made his name by attacking the government in print.

Wilkes was elected to parliament in 1757, and within a few years he had become a sharp critic of the ministry and of George III’s advisers. In 1763 his newspaper, The North Briton, published an issue accusing the king’s speech to parliament of being deliberately misleading.

Fearing the damage he might cause to royal reputations, the government responded by issuing a general warrant for Wilkes’s arrest. Wilkes was imprisoned, but successfully argued that as an MP he was protected by parliamentary privilege. He was released and became a public cause célèbre.

The conflict between Wilkes and the government escalated when he fled abroad and was convicted of obscene and seditious libel in absentia.

On his return, he was repeatedly elected as MP for Middlesex. Each time, the House of Commons expelled him. At one point, parliament declared his defeated opponent the winner of the election, despite Wilkes having the most votes. The affair dragged on, but, eventually, parliament retreated. Wilkes was allowed to take his seat in 1774.

Wilkes’s name became a shorthand for a wider series of demands: freedom of the press, fair elections and limits on parliamentary privileges.

6. The Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial (1776)

For much of its history, parliament acted in certain cases as a court. Members of the peerage could only be tried by the House of Lords. This placed some of the most private and scandalous disputes of elite life at the centre of public politics – including the trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh in 1776.

Elizabeth Chudleigh had built a reputation as one of the most flamboyant figures of Georgian high society. She served as a maid of honour at court, cultivated powerful patrons, and was well known for her conspicuous wealth and independence. In 1769 she married Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston, only enhancing her status further.

But after the duke’s death in 1773, questions were raised about whether the marriage had been legal. In 1744, Chudleigh had secretly married a naval officer, Augustus Hervey. The marriage was poorly documented and later disputed, but it had never been formally dissolved. If it was valid, her later marriage to the Duke of Kingston would have amounted to bigamy – a serious criminal offence.

Because she was now a duchess, the case was heard in the House of Lords, and the trial became a public spectacle. The personal life of a prominent woman was dissected in full view of parliament, attracting enormous public interest and extensive press coverage.

The Lords found Chudleigh guilty. She was spared imprisonment but stripped of her title.

7. The Charles Dilke affair (1885–86)

Toward the final decades of Queen Victoria’s long reign, Britain’s political system was becoming more democratic, but it remained shaped by Victorian ideas about morality and respectability. Public figures were expected to embody private virtue, as well as public service.

Charles Dilke was a wealthy Radical Liberal MP, first elected in his mid-twenties and widely regarded as a future prime minister. He supported republican ideas, social reform, and the expansion of the franchise. By the mid-1880s he was president of the Local Government Board and one of the most recognisable faces in British politics.

But Dilke’s highest political ambitions were derailed by allegations that surfaced in Donald Crawford’s 1885 divorce petition against his wife, Virginia. The scandal became public at the first hearing of Crawford v Crawford and Dilke on 12 February 1886, when Donald Crawford told the court (repeating a confession Virginia had made to him in July 1885) that she had committed adultery with Dilke and described lurid “French vices”, including an allegation that Dilke involved her in a ménage-à-trois.

Although the judge dismissed the case against Dilke for lack of evidence while granting Crawford a divorce, press and political pressure made this an inadequate vindication for Dilke. Seeking to clear his name, Dilke helped trigger a second hearing in July 1886, in which further explicit testimony and admissions proved disastrous for him.

The MP lost his seat in the general election that same month, and although he re-entered parliament in 1892, Dilke’s political career never fully recovered.

8. The Marconi scandal (1912–13)

The Marconi scandal centred on a government contract to build a chain of wireless telegraphy stations across the British empire.

The contract was awarded to the British subsidiary of the Marconi Company, a firm at the forefront of a new and strategically important technology. But not long after the decision, questions were raised in parliament about whether ministers had financial interests connected to the deal.

It emerged that several senior figures in the Liberal government, including the chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, the attorney general Sir Rufus Isaacs and the postmaster general Herbert Samuel, had bought shares in the American Marconi Company. Although this was a separate business from the British subsidiary that received the contract, the distinction was subtle, and widely misunderstood. Opposition MPs accused ministers of insider trading and misleading parliament and, thanks to interest from the press, the issue became a prolonged public controversy.

As for the fallout, Professor Nicholas Allen of Royal Holloway University of London tells HistoryExtra, “Lloyd George obviously survived Marconi after a (perceived friendly) select committee inquiry, and, indeed, went on to prosper!”

• Read more | 6 shocking presidential scandals that rocked the White House: from the Petticoat Affair to Clinton-Lewinsky

9. Cash for honours (1916–22)

During the First World War and its immediate aftermath, Britain was governed by a coalition led by David Lloyd George, a forceful and unconventional prime minister. Lloyd George relied heavily on political fundraising to maintain his position, particularly after the war.

For many years, honours such as knighthoods and peerages had been influenced by political service and donation. Under Lloyd George, this informal system evolved into something altogether more formal. Wealthy individuals were invited to make large contributions to party funds with the clear expectation that an honour would follow: a knighthood for thousands of pounds, a peerage for a sizeable sum more.

The practice was an open secret in political circles, but it came to the attention of the public after Lloyd George left office in 1922. Former associates and journalists published details of the dealings, including lists of honours that appeared to match donations with suspicious precision. The idea that seats in the House of Lords could effectively be bought by the wealthy created widespread public anger.

The scandal damaged trust in the honours system and reinforced perceptions of postwar politics as cynical and corrupt, though Lloyd George managed to avoid any formal consequences – the second time he dodged punishment for a scandal within the space of a few years.

The wider impact has also been limited, according to Professor Allen. “Cash for honours led to legislation that made explicit sales illegal. But, of course, the correlation between party donations and honours has continued ever since.”

10. Hugh Dalton’s accidental budget leak (1947)

Hugh Dalton was chancellor of the Exchequer in the postwar Labour government led by Clement Attlee. Dalton was an experienced figure, a key architect of Labour’s economic policy and the expansion of the welfare state.

On 12 November 1947, he arrived at the House of Commons to deliver his latest budget. While waiting outside the chamber, Dalton chatted briefly to a journalist and mentioned a small detail of the forthcoming budget: a proposed increase in the rate of purchase tax.

Working quickly, the journalist was able to rush from parliament and publish the information almost immediately. As a result, a detail from the budget appeared in print before Dalton had even finished presenting it to parliament.

The next day, Dalton resigned – though this was only a “formal resignation”, according to Professor Allen, who says that, in reality, the chancellor was “swiftly sacked by Attlee”.

There wasn’t any suggestion of personal gain, corruption or deception. Dalton’s only mistake had been to unintentionally break the convention that parliament should be the first recipient of major financial information from the government – but it was a fatal mistake.

Surely one of the strangest and most arcane scandals in parliamentary history, Professor Allen says that Dalton’s downfall “was more of an executive failing. Though, of course, Dalton re-entered government later in Labour’s term.”

11. The Profumo affair (1963)

John Profumo was the secretary of state for war in the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan.

Profumo was seen as a reliable figure in a sensitive defence role during the peak of Cold War tensions. Profumo was married, but in 1961 he began a brief sexual relationship with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model and showgirl connected to social circles that included prominent diplomats and figures within the intelligence community.

But Profumo wasn’t Keeler’s only romantic liaison. Keeler was also intimately acquainted with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché widely believed to be an intelligence officer working for the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold War, the possibility that a prominent cabinet minister – and the secretary of state for war, no less – might have shared a lover with a Soviet spy raised shocking security concerns.

Rumours began circulating in Westminster in early 1963, prompting Profumo to make a personal statement to the House of Commons in which he categorically denied any impropriety. Within weeks, mounting evidence made that denial untenable. Profumo was forced to admit that he had conducted a sexual affair with Keeler and, crucially, that he had deliberately misled parliament.

He resigned immediately. That resignation helped to embed the expectation that lying to parliament or misleading the house would be widely accepted (though not entirely accepted) as a resigning matter.

The affair eroded confidence in the judgment and competence of Macmillan’s government, reinforcing simmering perceptions of moral decay and elite irresponsibility. Macmillan’s personal authority never fully recovered, and he resigned later in 1963, officially citing ill health.

• Read more | "We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century

12. The Jeremy Thorpe affair (1976–79)

In 1967, during Harold Wilson’s tenure as prime minister, homosexuality between consenting adults had been partially decriminalised in England and Wales. But well into the 1970s, parliament still clung to old expectations about private conduct.

Jeremy Thorpe was leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 and, for a time, one of the most prominent politicians outside the two leading parties. He was articulate, media-savvy, and played a key role in the closely fought general elections of 1974, when the Liberals briefly held the balance of power at Westminster.

But Thorpe had a secret that would quickly spiral out of control. Thorpe had met a man called Norman Scott (then known as Norman Josiffe) in the early 1960s, and the pair began a relationship. However, noting the damage that it would do to his political career if this secret relationship were to become public, Thorpe allegedly threatened Scott into silence. This escalated into a botched conspiracy to have Scott killed to ensure that the secret would never get out.

In 1975, Scott’s dog was shot by an associate of Thorpe who was sent to intimidate Scott. Scott himself was unharmed, but the incident triggered a police investigation.

Thorpe was charged in 1978 with conspiracy to murder. The trial, held at the Old Bailey, was followed with immense interest by the press. Thorpe denied the charges and was ultimately acquitted, but the damage was irreversible. He had already resigned as party leader, and his parliamentary career had effectively ended.

]]> Thomas Cromwell's death – a rapid descent from the pinnacle of power https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/thomas-cromwell-death/ Fri, 13 Dec 2024 16:10:45 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/thomas-cromwell-death/ Thomas Cromwell’s final six months were a Greek tragedy of hubris and political venom, all presided over by a tyrannical king. Diarmaid MacCulloch charts Cromwell’s rapid descent from the very pinnacle of power to the executioner’s block As downfalls go, it was spectacular – and brutally swift. On 10 June 1540, Thomas Cromwell arrived at court for what should have been a routine meeting of the Privy Council. As this son of Putney was soon to discover, the meeting was anything but routine.

On entering the council, Cromwell – Henry VIII’s immensely gifted chief minister and among the most powerful men in England – dressed in his formal splendid attire as Knight of the Garter, was arrested and humiliated by his old enemy the Duke of Norfolk. The duke ripped the collar of St George from Cromwell’s neck, while the Earl of Southampton, not to be outdone in malice, untied the garter from his knee.

Cromwell was then bundled off to the Tower of London down the Thames by barge from Westminster. He would never see the king again. Cromwell’s anguished plea to Henry – “Most gracious prince: I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!”, written in desperation in his Tower cell – was met with a stony silence. On 28 July, Cromwell was led out to the scaffold on Tower Hill to face his executioner. On that very same day, the king distracted himself by marrying a new wife, Catherine Howard.

How had it come to this? How had a man who that April had reached the pinnacle of his success by being appointed 16th Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain suffered such a vertiginous fall?

What led to Thomas Cromwell’s death?

For once, the picturesque traditional story deserves priority. That story is the personal disaster of physical repulsion that destroyed the marriage of Henry VIII to his hapless wife, Anne of Cleves. The marriage had seemed such a neat idea to Cromwell – for it was his idea.

Anne’s chief virtue for Cromwell as he sought to secure the king a fourth bride was that she was not the daughter of an English nobleman, and so as queen consort, she would not disturb the uneasy balance in English court politics between leading aristocrats. Diplomatically, advantages stacked up. Anne’s family had carried out their own Reformation in their ducal territories in western Germany, while not decisively breaking with the pope. They were also one of the counterweights to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V inside his empire.

• Read more | Europe's holy war: how the Reformation convulsed a continent

There’s another element to these negotiations that have for centuries been overshadowed by the Cleves debacle. Cromwell was actually orchestrating an international ‘Two-Princess Deal’, twinning the Cleves match with negotiations to marry Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, the Lady Mary, to Philip Duke of Bavaria, a German prince with similar credentials to those of Cleves.

Remarkably, when Anne of Cleves arrived in England, Duke Philip was already there, discreetly making the right marital overtures to Mary. He even gave her a kiss in the garden of the abbot of Westminster in front of witnesses. Nothing came from this promising start, which was caught up in the unfolding nuptial disaster that was the Cleves marriage, and Mary would have to wait another 14 years before securing the hand of a continental royal: the prince (later king) of Spain.

The symmetry of the diplomatic moves with Cleves and Bavaria made it all the more devastating when Henry departed from Cromwell’s script and loathed the Lady Anne at first sight at Rochester as she journeyed up to court, on New Year’s Day 1540. The reasons are locked for ever in the mystery that is Henry VIII; no one else could see much wrong with her.

Henry’s efforts to find a legal way out of the marriage were all futile, and so from January 1540, he was trapped humiliatingly in Cromwell’s project. That revealed the minister’s vulnerability: from his first rise to power in 1532, he was always at the mercy of the king’s moods and demands. Like his predecessor and patron, Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell would be high in favour only as long as he delivered a successful result for the king.

But the Cleves debacle was more than just a diplomatic failure: it also heaped personal sexual humiliation on Henry VIII. From the first night that the ill-starred couple had shared a marital bed, the king found himself repelled at the thought of any physical intimacy with her.

Now those who hated Cromwell simply for being Cromwell could play on the king’s emotional impulses, just as Cromwell himself had done in sealing the downfall of Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, back in 1536. Cromwell had never been close to Boleyn, despite their common interest in religious Reformation.

More important to their relationship was her central role in destroying his beloved master, Wolsey, whose memory Cromwell had ostentatiously commemorated in his heraldry even while Anne consolidated her position as Henry VIII’s bride. Anne’s execution in May 1536 brought Cromwell his first public honours that summer, which she had probably blocked previously: not just a knighthood but a peerage, Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon.

He also acquired the very senior legal office of Lord Privy Seal: third-ranking office of state after the Lord Chancellor and Lord Treasurer, with control over a crucial stage in the production of documents for sealing after the initial royal signature on any grant or decision. Those promotions were galling for the existing nobility, led by the biggest snob in Tudor England, the Duke of Norfolk (whose peerage titles were all of six decades older than Cromwell’s new title).

Thomas Cromwell's early brush with death

In the crisis of autumn 1536, during the northern risings known as the Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, this nearly brought ruin to the upstart. The pilgrims saw Cromwell as their chief enemy, and in their fury at the destruction of northern monasteries (which they blamed on him), they were not intimidated by the royal armies sent against them under Norfolk’s generalship.

There was a terrifying moment for Cromwell in the first week of November 1536, during which the king hesitated, pondering whether to sacrifice his minister as the centrepiece of sweeping concessions to the rebels. Henry changed his mind after retreating to his then rarely used Palace of Richmond, which happened to be significantly near a newly acquired Surrey country house of Cromwell’s at Mortlake.

That vital element of face-to-face contact, which Cromwell’s enemies succeeded in preventing when he did eventually fall from power, brought Henry second thoughts. Instead of being destroyed by the king, Cromwell now enjoyed his increasing favour.

Indeed, in summer 1537, Baron Cromwell celebrated a spectacular dynastic triumph. His teenage son, Gregory – much-loved, charming but otherwise not exceptionally talented – married Elizabeth Seymour, slightly older than him and already widow of a Yorkshire knight. More importantly, she was the sister of Henry’s current queen, Jane Seymour.

The genealogical results of this wedding were intriguing: in an informal sense, they made Cromwell the king’s uncle by marriage, and in a specifically formal sense, Gregory Cromwell became uncle by marriage to the heir to the throne who was born that autumn (the future Edward VI). It was a formidable alliance: newly ennobled Seymours and a potential new English noble dynasty of Cromwells.

That marked the Lord Privy Seal as a future danger to everyone else vying for power under the king, particularly those who felt that the greater antiquity of their noble titles was a sign that God singled them out for rule under Henry VIII.

Thomas Cromwell played a dangerous game

Parallel to that dynastic complication was the polarising effect of religion. With Anne Boleyn removed, Cromwell was the chief promoter of evangelical reformation amid the uncertain theological future of Henry VIII’s newly created Church of England. His quasi-religious office as ‘Vice-Gerent in Spirituals’ replicated the power that Cardinal Wolsey had enjoyed, but was now exercised under the king’s authority, not that of the pope.

By 1538 it would be obvious to the politically well-informed that the Vice-Gerent was not always following initiatives from the king, but instead using the ill-defined power of an ill-defined office to push his own reformist agenda in such matters as enforcing circulation of the Bible in English or attacking traditional cults of saints and pilgrimage to shrines. There was much more activity of the same character behind the scenes.

• Read more | The dissolution of the monasteries: mindless violence or planned precision?

Cromwell was playing a dangerous game if anyone chose to draw the king’s attention to what was happening – or more precisely, if the king chose to listen to that information. Henry always decided which noises rang most loudly in his ears at any one time, and during the 1530s the opposed voices had taken on a poisonous religious resonance.

Around Cromwell gathered gentry and nobility (including the Seymours) who sympathised with his reformist aims in religion, in contact with Reformations in mainland Europe. Ranged against them was a wide spectrum of those who might feel any combination of dynastic or religious hostility towards the Vice-Gerent, and who would be alert to any opportunity to discredit him.

Cromwell’s love for his only surviving child pushed him into ever more reckless confrontations with more established politicians. In late 1537, Gregory and his near-royal bride were sent to Sussex to constitute a local power for king and Cromwell on the south coast. The young couple were provided with the beginnings of a stately mansion that the Lord Privy Seal planned to convert from a major monastery in a fine spreading valley site below the hill-town of Lewes.

It needed an accelerated surrender of Lewes Priory to make this rehousing work in time for the already pregnant Elizabeth Seymour. During autumn 1537 the haste was evidenced by a new departure in policy during the monastic dissolutions: for the first time all the Lewes monks were offered a pension if they co-operated with the surrender.

• Read more | Q&A: Where did the monks go after the dissolution of the monasteries?

Then a year after all was safely settled, in late autumn 1538 Gregory committed some scandalous exploit in Sussex, the details of which are now obscured but were probably sexual in nature. That required his hasty removal with Elizabeth and son from Sussex to a conveniently vacant royal castle at Leeds in Kent. Lewes lost its chance to be the ancestral home of a great Cromwell dynasty.

The prompt arrival of Gregory and his wife in the splendour of Leeds Castle in March 1539 was politically necessary to provide minimum propriety for one of Cromwell’s riskiest moves yet. That spring, the government carefully managed new parliamentary elections for the House of Commons county by county, to balance local political forces and produce an assembly that would co-operate with the king’s various plans.

In Kent, however, the pairing of the leading representatives, the two ‘knights of the shire’, was bizarre. One was indeed the sort of eminent knight one might expect, Sir Thomas Cheyney. The other was Gregory Cromwell: a rackety teenager who within about a month of taking up residence in Kent, now occupied a place normally reserved for most respectable county gentry.

The oddity of that choice for parliament is emphasised by the fact that at no stage in 1539–40 can Gregory be found named as a justice of the peace in Kent. Whatever had happened in Sussex probably made that seem unwise for the moment, but to make Gregory a knight of the shire was the first sign of what became increasingly apparent over the next 12 months: Cromwell was losing his grip on his previously acute sense of what was not just politically possible but also politically sensible.

It is significant that the trigger for this corruption of Cromwell’s judgment was dynastic: his love for the erratic, energetic boy who was his only legitimate heir.

Why the Duke of Norfolk pushed for Thomas Cromwell's downfall

The sheer scale of the problems facing any would-be reforming minister in Tudor England, Wales and Ireland, let alone the increasing political turmoil, would have stretched anyone’s powers of management, even someone with Cromwell’s exceptional talent and energy. From spring 1539, events revealed his deteriorating sense of discretion and control, and even what at first seemed a smart move, the Cleves marriage, proved the most toxic of mistakes.

Cromwell’s bravura improvisations in politics and policy enraged traditionalist leaders in national politics, moving them towards the conclusion that he must be stopped. Most fatally for the minister, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk was now prepared to lead the charge.

• Read more | Thomas Cromwell: the best Italian in all England

Over the previous few years Norfolk had normally been careful to cast the appearance of bluff friendship over his relations with Cromwell, even under the considerable provocation represented by the Cromwell/Seymour marriage in 1537. Now he was pushed over the edge by a move offensive in both religious and dynastic terms: the dissolution of a Cluniac priory at Thetford in Norfolk that served as mausoleum for the Howard family and their noble predecessors as earls and dukes of Norfolk.

Howard had made plans to save the mausoleum by turning the priory into a non-monastic collegiate church, as happened to a number of other monasteries (most to become cathedrals) during the monastic dissolutions. In the end, the complete suppression of Thetford Priory in February 1540 was one of the very last to take place, postponed with surely deliberate delay to a few days after the duke had left England on a hastily organised embassy to France.

It was a direct blow to Howard’s always brittle family pride: later he and his stepmother went to the extraordinary length of moving Howard tombs and their occupants from Thetford Priory to two parish churches in Suffolk and at Lambeth.

Whatever nuances we may now find in Cromwell’s supervision of monastic closures through the 1530s, his old enemy would see Thetford’s dissolution without a collegiate future as yet another calculated insult to Howard honour. Hence the prominent part that the Duke of Norfolk played in the dissolution of Cromwell in spring and summer 1540: not merely the drama in the Privy Council chamber, but much quiet priming of ambassadors to spread the right narrative quickly across Europe.

Thomas Cromwell’s fall from grace

Perhaps it was always inevitable that great ministers of Henry VIII would fall from grace, defeated by his impossible and incessant demands. That was accentuated by the fact that early Tudor England was always disadvantaged in European politics, not nearly as powerful or important as Henry thought it should be.

For both Wolsey and Cromwell, the trigger for downfall was failure in foreign policy. Wolsey had found it impossible to persuade a pope intimidated by Charles V to annul the long-standing marriage of Charles’s aunt Catherine of Aragon to a selfish king of England. In Cromwell’s case, the problem was his understandable inability to deal with Henry VIII looking a gift horse from Cleves in the mouth.

After that, with the king characteristically looking for a reason to blame someone else for his own decision, the jackals were free to gather. Any charge would do: treason or heresy. Cromwell was lucky not to be burned at the stake for heresy in 1540, instead suffering a comparatively swift (albeit still gruesome) death by the executioner’s axe. Maybe the tide was already ebbing on King Henry’s malice.

How Thomas Cromwell got his revenge

The minister’s enemies would suffer dearly for the role they played in his death

Thomas Cromwell’s death did not immediately end the killing. Two days later a notorious event embodied Henry VIII’s idiosyncratic notion of ‘middle way’. Six priests were executed: three evangelicals burned for heresy, and three papalist Catholics hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. The evangelical clerics Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrad and William Jerome were clearly identified with Cromwell, and their clashes with the conservative bishop Stephen Gardiner had sparked much political turmoil in Cromwell’s last months. What is extraordinary is how little Cromwell’s friends suffered after that. From the moment that Henry was satisfied in his urgent quest not to be married to Anne of Cleves – through the legal pronouncement that the marriage was null because of non-consummation – his rage against Cromwell began cooling. In fact, by winter 1541 he was ranting at his councillors that “upon the pretexts of trivial faults that [Cromwell] had committed, they had laid several false accusations on him, by which [the king] been made to put to death the most faithful servant he ever had”. The king’s new mood soon benefited Gregory Cromwell. As early as December 1540, Gregory was granted a new barony in his own right, after his wife (Jane Seymour’s sister) had skilfully written to the king for mercy. After Henry VIII’s death in 1547, Cromwell’s Seymour allies, such as Sir John Dudley and Henry Grey Marquess of Dorset, formed an evangelical government for Edward VI. In effect, the opening weeks of the new reign saw a coup of Cromwellians against Thomas Cromwell’s enemies: a reversal of the debacle of 1540. The new regime spearheaded a religious revolution that followed the Protestant trajectory of Cromwell’s policies. It also marginalised or imprisoned some of the chief actors in his fall: Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk; Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner. Cromwell’s posthumous revenge was a dish inevitably but still satisfyingly served cold.

Diarmaid MacCulloch is emeritus professor of the history of the church and fellow of St Cross College and Campion Hall, University of Oxford

This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> What was Mary Tudor and Thomas Cromwell's relationship – did they plan to marry? https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/relationship-mary-tudor-thomas-cromwell-what-like/ Sun, 17 Nov 2024 21:45:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/relationship-mary-tudor-thomas-cromwell-what-like/ It was thanks to Thomas Cromwell that Mary Tudor – daughter of Catherine of Aragon – was demoted from heir to the throne to illegitimate outcast. So what was the relationship between the two really like? The relationship between Thomas Cromwell and Princess Mary, Henry's VIII's daughter with Catherine of Aragon, is under the spotlight in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. Here. Tudor historian Tracy Borman explores the true relationship between the disinherited princess and the Lord Privy Seal – and whether she really was his 'loving friend'

The future Mary I and Thomas Cromwell were diametrically opposed in every way that mattered.

She was a staunch Roman Catholic; he a reformist who masterminded the destruction of the monasteries and England’s break from Rome.

She was the daughter of Henry VIII’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon; he helped engineer the annulment of their marriage so that the king might marry Anne Boleyn.

Thanks to Cromwell, Mary suffered the misery and humiliation of being demoted from heir to the throne to illegitimate outcast.

• Read more | Thomas Cromwell on screen: is Wolf Hall the best depiction of the Tudor statesman?

Was Princess Mary Thomas Cromwell's 'loving friend'?

On the surface at least, relations between the two were cordial. Their letters were filled with respectful, even affectionate sentiments.

These should not be taken at face value, however. Even the fiercest of enemies would disguise their antipathy with the elaborate, courtly language of the Tudor age.

Thus, Elizabeth I referred to her most deadly rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, as her “beloved sister” right up until the point when she ordered her execution.

Nevertheless, there did seem to be a rapprochement between Mary and Cromwell after Anne Boleyn’s death in 1536.

Did Thomas Cromwell hope to marry princess Mary?

It was even rumoured that the king’s chief minister harboured secret plans to marry the Lady Mary so that his heirs might inherit the crown of England.

There is little reliable proof that Cromwell ever presumed so far. Even if he had, it is highly unlikely that Henry VIII would have sanctioned such a marriage, or that Mary herself would have agreed to it.

In fact, the real reason behind the apparent cordiality between Cromwell and Mary during the mid-1530s was that he was trying to persuade the king’s stubborn eldest daughter to acknowledge the invalidity of her parents’ marriage and accept her father’s new status as supreme head of the church.

When Mary continued to resist, Cromwell dispensed with the niceties and bluntly told her: “To be plain with you, I think you the most obstinate woman that ever was.” The gloves, at last, were off.

• Read next | What did Mary Tudor think of her stepmothers, including Anne Boleyn?

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]]> Thomas Cromwell on screen: is Wolf Hall the best depiction of the Tudor statesman? https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/wolf-hall-a-look-at-thomas-cromwell-on-screen/ Fri, 08 Nov 2024 15:17:35 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/wolf-hall-a-look-at-thomas-cromwell-on-screen/ Move over Thomas More – Tracy Borman argues that it was Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's 'faithful servant' who was truly the man for all seasons This weekend sees the release of the long-awaited BBC dramatisation of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final instalment of her globally bestselling and Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall trilogy that traces the meteoric rise and dramatic fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.

Here, historian Tracy Borman looks at five of the most famous screen portrayals of Henry’s trusted adviser – and makes the case for which comes closest to reality.

Wolf Hall (2014 & 2024)

The late Hilary Mantel’s compelling portrayal of Henry VIII’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, (traditionally one of history’s greatest villains) so fired the public imagination that scriptwriters scrambled to translate it to stage and screen.

The RSC’s production, starring Ben Miles, attracted sell-out crowds in the UK and US. The BBC’s screen version followed hot on its hills, a lavish six-part dramatisation starring Mark Rylance in the lead role and Damian Lewis as his royal master, Henry VIII.

Rylance gave us an altogether different Cromwell to the ruthless schemer who masterminded Anne Boleyn’s fall, destroyed the monasteries and lined his own pockets in the process. The screen version was both more sympathetic and attractive: a tender husband and father, charming and self-deprecating, a self-made man and – as Mantel put it – “clever as a bag of snakes”. Rylance’s Cromwell was quiet and watchful, his expression conveying a thousand words without his lips uttering a single one.

There was a dazzling supporting cast. Damian Lewis was just as charismatic, mercurial and, at times, psychopathic, as the Tudor king himself. Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn was masterful: capricious, magnetic and vulnerable, with a hint of a French accent (‘Cremwell’) that was both condescending and entirely authentic. Jonathan Pryce gave us a charming, clever and humorous Cardinal Wolsey; Mark Gatiss was suitably snide and sinister as Cromwell’s archenemy Stephen Gardiner; and Saskia Reeves played his love interest with a gentle, heartbreaking touch.

Some – notably Rylance, Lewis and Pryce – will return for the new series, while others, such as Tom Holland, who played Cromwell’s hapless son Gregory, has since been catapulted to Hollywood superstardom when he bagged the part of Spiderman. The Mirror and the Light will also feature new stars. I, for one, cannot wait to see Timothy Spall as the villainous Duke of Norfolk.

• Read more | What was Princess Mary and Thomas Cromwell's relationship – did they plan to marry?

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

Every film needs a hero and a villain, and in most screen portrayals of Henry VIII’s reign, Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell adopt these roles.

Diametrically opposed on everything, from the king’s divorce to the Reformation, these two arch-enemies provide ideal fodder for film makers. But until Wolf Hall, it was patently clear who the hero really was.

The villainous Cromwell here is played by Leo McKern (later famous for playing the title role in TV’s Rumpole of the Bailey). It is not such a one-dimensional portrayal as others, however. McKern’s Cromwell may be an untrustworthy schemer, but he has humanity, humour and warmth. He also brings out Cromwell’s formidable intelligence, as well as a certain amount of chubby uncouthness to represent his humble origins.

But overall – and particularly as the film makes it way towards its climax – McKern’s Cromwell is undoubtedly the embodiment of evil. He preys upon the weakness of Richard Rich in an almost diabolical manner in order to secure the condemnation of the saintly Thomas More, played by Paul Schofield.  The audience is left in no doubt who they should be rooting for.

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Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)

A more extreme version of Cromwell the villain is found in Anne of the Thousand Days. Here, Thomas Cromwell is played by John Colicos (more famous for playing the Klingon commander Kor in Star Trek) in a manner more chilling in its depiction of the king’s minister than any other.

Described in the film as “entirely without scruple”, Colicos uses a monotone voice and piercing eyes to portray Cromwell as almost devoid of any humanity whatsoever. This is seen most vividly in his cool indifference to the torture of Mark Smeaton, whom he frames for adultery with Anne Boleyn.

In fact, the only point where any sense of humanity is allowed to emerge in Colicos’ Cromwell is when, having suggested the break with Rome to Richard Burton’s Henry VIII, he retreats through a doorway to breathe a huge sigh of relief at the apparent success of this risk.

Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972)

Yet another Cromwell appears in Henry VIII and His Six Wives. Cromwell is played by Donald Pleasence (later to play the Bond villain Blofeld in You Only Live Twice), alongside Keith Michell’s celebrated Henry. In contrast to the choleric McKern and the icy Colicos, Pleasence’s Cromwell is more weasel-like, mumbling through a nasal voice and insincere smile in his constant efforts to ingratiate himself with the king.

Unlike Anne of the Thousand Days and A Man for All Seasons, Henry VIII and His Six Wives continues long enough to depict Cromwell’s alienation of the nobility and his resulting arrest as he is led away from the council in dazed indignation at the sudden accusation of treason. Odd, and somewhat too quirky to be convincing, Pleasence’s Cromwell has the virtue of portraying the over-confidence that preceded the minister’s dramatic fall and his failure to anticipate the fickle indifference of the king to his fate.

The Tudors (2007–10)

While much of the credit for Cromwell’s rehabilitation in recent times is given to the novels of Hilary Mantel, the major revision in terms of the screen actually preceded Wolf Hall. James Frain’s portrayal of Cromwell in The Tudors gave us an altogether more rounded and human figure.

One of the key factors here was the much longer running time of the lavish production, which appeared to liberate it from the need to provide the more one-dimensional hero versus villain portrayals of shorter films. Rather than being depicted in sharp, unflattering contrast to the Thomas More of Jeremy Northam, Frain’s Cromwell is allowed to possess a conscience and very obvious convictions alongside being extremely clever and hard working.

Examples of this are the distaste that he shows during the torture of Mark Smeaton; the affection for his son Gregory, and the genuine Protestant convictions that shaped much of his service to the king. But this is no whitewash: Cromwell’s ruthlessness is displayed alongside the high handedness towards the nobility that later proved his undoing.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the entire four seasons of The Tudors is its depiction of Cromwell's gruesome execution in 1540. Even if some of the details of this are largely imaginary, such as the executioner being plied with drink so that he botches Cromwell’s beheading, it is a very effective portrayal of the hatred felt for him by his opponents.

So which of these portrayals comes closest to the real Cromwell? In researching his extraordinary life for my biography, I discovered a character at once warm, affectionate and humorous, but one who did not flinch from acts of astonishing ruthlessness and cruelty. In truth, Cromwell defies typecasting, and instead combines elements of all five portrayals. He, rather than More, was truly a man for all seasons.

More from us

HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives

• Wolf Hall: Author Hilary Mantel talks Tudors and Thomas Cromwell
• The Mirror & The Light book review: Hilary Mantel's epic finale "lives up to the hype"
• Thomas Cromwell: the best Italian in all England

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]]> Who was the real Thomas Cromwell? Your guide to Henry VIII's "faithful servant" https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/thomas-cromwell-who-facts-biography-life-henry-viii/ Thu, 02 May 2024 13:35:28 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/thomas-cromwell-who-facts-biography-life-henry-viii/ How much do you know about Thomas Cromwell? As Henry VIII's chief minister, he became one of the most powerful men in England – but little is known about his origins. Here, historian Tracy Borman answers all the questions you need to know – from his meteoric rise to his spectacular fall from favour… What is Thomas Cromwell remembered for?

Thomas Cromwell enjoyed a meteoric rise from the son of a Putney blacksmith to the chief minister of Henry VIII. A man of exceptional ability and with an enormous capacity for hard work, he dominated England’s political and religious life for a decade. He ruthlessly dispatched those who stood against him and his royal master, notably his rival Thomas More and Henry’s notorious second wife Anne Boleyn. He also masterminded the seismic religious changes of the 1530s, playing a key role in the split from Rome, the establishment of Henry as ‘Supreme Head’ of a new Church of England, and the dissolution of the monasteries that followed in its wake.

When and where was Thomas Cromwell born?

The man who would one day become the most powerful in England was of such humble origins that nobody can be sure when or where he was born. The likeliest date for his birth is 1485, which would be appropriate, given it was the year the Tudors seized the throne following the battle of Bosworth. His birthplace is often cited as Putney, which at the time would have been a small village by the river Thames, west of the City of London.

What were Thomas Cromwell's origins?

Records suggest that Thomas was the youngest of three children – and the only boy – born to Walter Cromwell and his wife Katherine née Meverell. Considerably younger than his sisters, he may have been an unexpected child. In the only recorded reference to his mother, Thomas made the unlikely claim that she was 52 when she bore him. He made the remark during the debate about Henry VIII’s annulment with reference to whether Catherine of Aragon was still capable of bearing a living son.

Walter Cromwell was an enterprising if disreputable man with a number of different professions, including blacksmith, fuller (cloth dresser) and cloth merchant. He had ingratiated himself with the new Tudor dynasty by serving as a farrier in the future Henry VII’s contingent at the battle of Bosworth in 1485.

He also owned a hostelry, called the Anchor, and a brewery. This was situated close to their home at the top of Brewhouse Lane, which today still runs the short distance from Putney Bridge Road to the river Thames. A house by the river in modern-day Putney would demand a premium, but the area was a good deal less salubrious in the 16th century.

Cromwell’s father was often in trouble with the law. He was fined six pence by the manor court on no fewer than 48 occasions between 1475 and 1501 for "breaches of the assizes of ale" (which meant that he had been watering down the beer that he sold). But his most serious conviction came in 1477 when he was found guilty of assault.

Although the sources reveal little of Thomas’s relationship with his father, a remark he made many years later suggests he had inherited some of Walter’s less admirable traits. He confided to his friend Archbishop Thomas Cranmer what a "ruffian he was in his young days". But he was eager to escape the family home.

In 1503, when he was aged about 18, Cromwell left England for what would be a lengthy spell abroad. After a brief spell as a mercenary in the French army, he entered the household of the wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco Frescobaldi. Living in one of the most culturally vibrant cities in the world had a profound impact upon Cromwell’s character, beliefs and interests. Artists such as Michelangelo were regular visitors to Frescobaldi’s house, and Niccolò Machiavelli was beginning to exert his influence in the government of Florence.

Cromwell showed far more promise as an apprentice merchant than he had as a soldier, and by the time he returned to England in around 1512 he had both the experience and contacts to flourish in that profession. But like his father, he was not content to follow just one career path and soon after arriving back in London he was practising law. It was this profession that would win him greatest renown.

Cromwell’s years on the continent had transformed him from a poorly educated, if precocious and streetwise ‘ruffian’, to a cultured, well-connected and successful man of business. If he had stayed in Putney and become an apprentice blacksmith or brewer, history would have turned out very differently.

Did Thomas Cromwell marry?

Soon after his return to England in 1514, Cromwell married Elizabeth Williams, née Wykys, a wealthy widow. It was a sign of how far he had come that he was able to make such a good match. It would prove a successful marriage and produced at least three children: Alice (or Anne), Grace and Gregory. The family lived in Fenchurch, on the eastern side of the City of London, a popular area with merchants, before moving to nearby Austin Friars.

The contemporary sources provide very few details of Cromwell’s marriage and family life, but it appears to have been settled and harmonious. Tragically, Cromwell lost both his wife and daughters to the sweating sickness within the space of a year (1528/9). He never remarried and instead focused all of his affection upon his surviving child, Gregory. Although it is sometimes claimed that one ‘Jane Cromwell’ who appears in the contemporary sources was his illegitimate daughter, there is no proof of this.

What was Thomas Cromwell's relationship with Cardinal Wolsey?

By the time of his wife and daughters’ deaths, Cromwell was one of the most successful businessmen in London. He had also secured an influential patron in the form of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister. It is not clear when Wolsey first enlisted Cromwell’s services, but he soon rose to become one of his most trusted servants. Wolsey once wrote to express his gratitude for Cromwell’s "good, sad, discreet advice and counsel".

It is to Cromwell’s credit that in stark contrast to the majority of Wolsey’s sizeable entourage, Cromwell stood by his patron when Wolsey was thrown out of office in 1529 for failing to secure the annulment of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Indeed, he went further still by going to court in order to secure Henry’s pardon for his master – apparently oblivious to the dangers of doing so.

How did Thomas Cromwell come to power?

Against the odds and within the space of just one year, Cromwell had not only succeeded in rehabilitating his fallen master but had won such favour with Henry VIII that he was appointed a member of the Privy Council. In consistently defending his fallen patron, Cromwell not only softened Henry’s mind towards Wolsey but also impressed him with his own loyalty.

Cromwell’s quick-wittedness, irreverence and obvious ability also attracted the king. Self-taught rather than formally educated, he was more intelligent and articulate than most of the nobly born members of court, and he soon gained renown as an orator. His cosmopolitan upbringing also gave him an edge over them. But his lack of refinement showed in what one observer described as a "rough" style of management. While this upset his noble rivals, his direct and bullish approach appealed to a king who had spent so much of his life surrounded by sycophants and flatterers.

In April 1532, Henry awarded Cromwell his first formal office, that of Master of the Jewels. The 17th-century antiquarian John Strype opined that this appointment was a sure sign that Cromwell had "grown in great favour with the King".

Many more promotions would follow, bringing Cromwell great riches as well as immense power. His private businesses were also continuing to flourish, and together with his court appointments it has been estimated that by 1537 his annual income was around £12,000 – equivalent to more than £3.5m in today’s money.

What is the story behind Hans Holbein's famous portrait of Thomas Cromwell?

It was almost certainly to celebrate his appointment as Master of the Jewels that Cromwell commissioned Hans Holbein, the most celebrated artist of the age, to paint his portrait.

Far from flattering the sitter, it offers a brutally honest appraisal. The first impression is of a pensive and rather grumpy bureaucrat. Cromwell has a bulky frame and appears to be of middling height, although as he is seated this is difficult to judge. Turned slightly to the right, his small, prying eyes stare intently at something in the middle distance. His eyebrows are slightly raised in a questioning, vaguely cynical stance, and his long, thin lips are pressed together in a line.

Little wonder it is often thought that Holbein disliked Cromwell. In fact, though, they were firm friends. It was as the public statesman, not the private man, that Cromwell wished to be remembered.

The portrait presents a compelling – if unflattering – testament to his brilliant mind and enormous capacity for hard work. It is as if the painter has happened upon him in his study, deep in thought on some weighty matter. This is no unworldly academic, consumed by the ideas contained within the letters and books by which he is surrounded; it is a man of action, a shrewd and decisive pragmatist driven by a desire to succeed in all things.

When did Thomas Cromwell die?

Thomas Cromwell was executed on 28 July 1540, Tower Hill, London. It took three blows of the axe by the "ragged and butcherly" executioner to sever his head. There is a theory that, in a particularly cruel fit of revenge, the Duke of Norfolk had either bribed the axeman or plied him with alcohol.

Where is Thomas Cromwell buried?

According to the established tradition for traitors, after his execution in 1540, Cromwell’s head was displayed on London Bridge. It was then reunited with the rest of his remains and buried at the Tower’s Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where his erstwhile rivals Anne Boleyn and Thomas More had been laid to rest. The woman whom Henry had married on the day of Cromwell’s execution would join him there just 18 months later.

Are Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell related?

Yes, Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell are related through Thomas’s nephew, Richard, the son of his sister Katherine and her husband Morgan Williams. Richard changed his name to Cromwell upon entering his uncle’s service.

Oliver Cromwell was Richard’s great-grandson. Given the fate he suffered at Henry VIII’s hands, Oliver’s great-uncle Thomas might have approved of the fact that his descendant would one day rid the country of monarchical rule.

]]> Hilary Mantel on the secrets of successful historical fiction https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hilary-mantel-interview-challenges-historical-fiction-thomas-cromwell-wolf-hall-mirror-light/ Fri, 23 Sep 2022 09:45:14 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hilary-mantel-interview-challenges-historical-fiction-thomas-cromwell-wolf-hall-mirror-light/ Following the news that Dame Hilary Mantel has died aged 70, we revisit a 2017 interview in which the award-winning author of Wolf Hall and The Mirror & The Light spoke about the challenges of fictionalising the past Rob Attar: Why do you think historical fiction has become such a popular genre in recent years?

Hilary Mantel: I think what’s happened is that it’s been lifted out of genre. Historical fiction used to be conflated with ‘historical romance’ and looked down on as cheap escapism, even though some of the greatest novelists have set their fictions firmly in the past. War and Peace is a historical novel, and no one ever suggested it was trivial.

In recent years, the form has been incorporated into the literary mainstream. And why not? It employs all the techniques of other types of fiction and exists at all levels of ambition. You can judge any individual example as good or bad; what you can’t do, legitimately, is to place it in a separate category, or generalise about the type of reader it attracts.

It’s become an enticingly unpredictable way of describing human experience.

• Looking for something new to read? We pick our favourite historical fiction books to help you escape to the past

How can historical fiction add to our understanding of the past?

It makes us turn our attention to the 99.9 per cent of human activity that never made it on to the record – and which can only be recovered by the imagination. It can offer insight and new ways of thinking about some of the puzzles the past represents. It can also send readers to history texts, whetting their appetite to know more.

• Read more | Does The Mirror & The Light live up to the hype?

Does historical fiction need to be grounded in fact? If so, what room is there for the imagination?

Different types of historical novels require different kinds of preparatory work, all of them intensive. Even if you simply use the past as a backdrop, you need to be grounded in the culture; you need to know about everyday life, how people think, what is the story they tell about themselves and their world.

If you want to foreground real people as actors in your story, you must know as much about them as a biographer would, and then add value by taking the story where the historian and biographer can’t go: into the private aspect of the individual, the unshown and unshowable.

However much you learn, factually, there is plenty of scope for imagination. You are allowed to speculate, and to fill gaps, as long as you do it plausibly. If you don’t want to pay attention to plausibility, it is more honest to write some other kind of novel. The facts are not a constraint; they are your raw material and your source of inspiration.

• Read more | The downfall of Thomas Cromwell

Do authors of historical fiction have a responsibility to treat their subjects fairly, as their works often shape public understanding?

You must be fair – yes. Neutral – no. You can leave that to the historian. It’s permitted, if you’re dealing with real people, to pick your man or woman and get behind them. Essentially, you are making a case, it can be argued. You are offering a version; there will be other versions. If you find all historical persons and causes equally appealing, and can view them all with dispassion, then you lack the ferocity of imagination required to keep your reader entertained.

• On the podcast | Listen to Diarmaid MacCulloch discuss the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell

Can you understand why some historians dislike historical fiction, and how would you counter their views?

Perhaps they think we are parasites and that we steal their sales. To be fair, I think historians worry about the prospect of the public being misled. And if a novelist is giving factual information, I think she shares the historian’s obligation to be accurate, to be up to date with research and to be aware of variant versions.

But readers know what they’re doing when they pick up a novel. They don’t blunder into fiction by accident. They are able to work out, I think, what can be drawn from evidence, and what can’t. A novelist does not have access to private conversation whispered behind the hand, nor to letters burned on receipt, nor to the stream of consciousness of long-dead men and women. If she offers these things to the reader, clearly there’s an element of invention.

And if the reader wonders, “Is this true or made up?” and does a little investigation, isn’t that all to the good? One of the things a historical novel can do is to prompt a reader to think about what we know, and what we could know – given luck and diligence – and what kind of things we can never know.

• Read more | Does historical accuracy really matter in period dramas like Wolf Hall?

In general, historians are more friendly to the form than they used to be. They recognise the need to engage the public and that our efforts are complementary, and that some aspects of our trade are the same. All narratives depend on shaping, selection and emphasis. They have to hold their audience by pace and style. These virtues are intrinsic to good communication – they are not optional extras. The narrative historian will wrestle with complexity: how to simplify without distorting and how to foreground what seems to him important, without slighting other factors. He wants to tell the truth, but it can’t be the whole truth; his book cannot be as long as life.

The novelist faces the same difficulties, the same tasks of organising her story, choosing what to show and what to tell, how to mediate competing versions to the reader. No novelist, I guess, thinks historians have an easy job. If historians think fiction is easy, you wonder what novels they are reading.

Does a historical novelist also have to be a historian?

Very few of us have the skills of a trained professional historian. We depend on their deep archival work. So in the narrow sense, no. In the broader sense, I don’t think you can write good historical fiction without a deep curiosity and engagement with the discipline.

• Read more | Why did Anne Boleyn have to die?

What are the crucial elements for ensuring historical fiction works well in TV and film?

Time is the enemy. TV screen time is limited; only bloated American dramas drag themselves out until their audience is weary.

If we’re talking about adaptation, it’s necessary to pick strands from the master narrative, prune the number of characters and storylines, and concentrate on good storytelling for what’s left, finding a visual language to replace exposition. You need a team with a dedication to the source material and ingenuity in finding equivalents for what is lost. Readers may lament what’s missing – but after all, the original is not wiped out.

Feature films are notoriously inaccurate, sometimes to the point of distortion. I think writers and editors seldom set out to deceive. But a tiny change in a rewrite can lose or alter a vital point, without anyone noticing at the time. But how much can anyone do in 104 minutes? Better to slice history fine – concentrate on a small incident, let its implications ripple – than to try to digest mighty storylines.

The screen can do wonderful things. It can do in a split second what takes a novelist six pages. It can achieve effects with heart-stopping precision. But you can’t really adapt one medium to another – you have to reconceptualise. Throw down the book and dream it…

• Read more | 11 historically inaccurate films you need to watch

What advice would you give an aspiring historical novelist?

Take your time until you feel comfortable in your chosen era. And if you are writing about a real person, make sure it’s someone you don’t understand. You write to find out, to make sense, rather than to tell what you already know: to discover and explore. Your constant, puzzled engagement with the characters keeps the story nimble.  If the characters seem to be changing, as living persons change, you are on the right track.

• Read more | How to write a historical novel and get it published

If you had the time, which historical character or characters’ stories would you most like to tell?

Kind readers are not slow to make suggestions. But when they say “You should write about Elizabeth I”, or Oliver Cromwell, or Napoleon, I smile and say: “Maybe you should. Maybe it’s your book.”

There’s so much I want to do, ancient and modern. But with Thomas Cromwell’s story still to complete, I am fully occupied. Luckily for me, I know less every day; I am more enthralled and creatively baffled than when I began the trilogy 10 years ago.

The late Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (2009 and 2012, both Fourth Estate), the first female British author to win the award twice. The final part of her Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was released in March 2020 and is among the novels longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> The Tudors: 51 moments that shaped the royal dynasty https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/guide-tudors-history-key-moments-facts-timeline-kings-queens/ Tue, 16 Feb 2021 06:18:28 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/guide-tudors-history-key-moments-facts-timeline-kings-queens/ The Tudors are one of the best-known royal dynasties in history, popularised by the likes of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I. What are the most important moments that shaped the period? In this timeline spanning the Tudor era, historian Tracy Borman selects 51 pivotal events from 1485–1603… From Henry VII’s victory at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 to the dazzling reign of Elizabeth I, this chronological guide from historian Tracy Borman charts the history of England’s best-known royal dynasty through the 51 moments that mattered most. Read on to learn about the formidable characters and pivotal events that shaped the Tudor era…

The battle of Bosworth

22 August 1485

The Tudor age began on a remote field in Leicestershire. The battle of Bosworth pitted the forces of the Yorkist king Richard III against those of his Lancastrian challenger, Henry Tudor. Richard’s reign had begun only two years before upon the death of his brother, Edward IV, who appointed him lord protector during the minority of his 12-year-old son and heir, Edward V. But Richard had soon declared Edward and his younger brother illegitimate and claimed the throne for himself – they later became known as the Princes in the Tower. The two boys had disappeared in the Tower of London in the summer of 1483, and had almost certainly been put to death – at whose orders is still hotly debated.

• Read more: Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower?

The turbulence that followed presented Henry Tudor, who was waiting in the wings (or rather Brittany), with his chance. Although his claim to the throne was tenuous, he was one of the few surviving Lancastrian descendants and whipped up what support he could for an invasion. His forces were considerably outnumbered by those of the king, but Richard was undone by the treachery of the powerful Stanley brothers, who changed sides halfway through the fighting. He was hacked to death in the heat of the battle. Legend has it that his crown was found under a hawthorn bush and brought to Henry Tudor, who was proclaimed king – Henry VII.

Henry VII marries Elizabeth of York

18 January 1486

Henry Tudor may have triumphed at Bosworth, but his hold on the throne was by no means secure. Many of his subjects saw him as a usurper and there were other claimants with arguably stronger blood claims than his. Henry’s own claim was on the side of his indomitable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. She was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III, and his third wife (and long-standing mistress) Katherine Swynford. But Katherine had given birth to Henry’s great-grandfather when she was still John’s mistress, so Henry’s claim was through an illegitimate line. It was something of which he was painfully aware and it would make him increasingly paranoid about rival claimants, particularly those of Yorkist descent.

• Read more | Monarchy timeline: from Hastings to the Windsors in 122 moments

Henry VII therefore decided to boost the legitimacy of the new Tudor dynasty by marrying a bride of that house. And chief among the candidates was Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV. Elizabeth’s beauty and royal blood had attracted other suitors in the past – perhaps including her own uncle, Richard III, who was rumoured to have planned to marry her shortly before Bosworth. Elizabeth proved an excellent choice for his Tudor rival. Just eight months after the wedding, she gave birth to a son, Arthur. Six more children followed, three of whom survived into adulthood. The Tudor dynasty had been established.

• Q&A: Why were they called the Tudors?

Battle of Stoke Field

16 June 1487

Henry VII’s paranoia about rival claimants grew stronger as his reign progressed – with good reason. The 30 years leading up to his accession had seen the crown change hands numerous times, and there was no reason to suspect that this latest king would survive any longer than the one he had usurped. The first serious challenge to Henry’s authority came in 1487 in the form of the 10‑year-old pretender, Lambert Simnel. Struck by the boy’s resemblance to the sons of Edward IV, Simnel’s tutor, Richard Simons, decided to turn kingmaker. At first he planned to masquerade Simnel as Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes who had disappeared in the Tower. But when he heard rumours that the princes had been murdered, he switched the boy’s identity to Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of Edward IV’s brother George, Duke of Clarence.

Henry VII had taken the precaution of confining Warwick to the Tower of London, but Simons spread the rumour that he had escaped. Gaining support from those sympathetic to the House of York, he took the boy to Ireland and began to gather an invasion force. Bolstered by 2,000 Flemish, German and Swiss mercenaries sent over by Warwick’s aunt, Margaret of York, Simnel’s army landed in Lancashire on 5 June 1487. They were defeated by the king’s forces at Stoke Field 11 days later in what is commonly regarded as the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Henry pardoned Simnel and made him a spit-turner in his kitchens.

Henry VIII is born

28 June 1491

By 1491, Henry VII had reason to feel more secure on his throne. He had seen off the early threats to his authority, and his marriage to Elizabeth of York – which, somewhat against the odds, had grown into something of a love match – had yielded a male heir and a daughter, Margaret Tudor. Now, Elizabeth was pregnant again and, in June, she entered her confinement at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich. Originally built by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1443, it remained one of the principal royal palaces for the next two centuries.

The birth of a second son was the cause of great rejoicing for the king, who always had an eye to strengthening his dynasty. The prince was christened Henry and later made Duke of York. He received an excellent education, becoming fluent in Latin and French, and showed a natural aptitude for sports. He spent a great deal of his childhood with his mother at Eltham Palace, and was devastated when she died in February 1503. Given that he had an elder brother, Henry was not expected to be king and it is possible that he was intended for the church – a career that this boisterous young prince was quite unsuited for.

The last pretender is executed

23 November 1499

Little is known of the early life of Perkin Warbeck, although – according to his later confession – he was born in Tournai and began his training as a merchant in Antwerp and other key trading cities in the Netherlands. In 1490, at the age of about 16, he travelled to Burgundy and first made the claim that he was Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV.

Burgundy was a centre for Yorkist sympathisers. Its regent, Margaret, was the sister of Edward IV and willing to support anyone who challenged Henry Tudor’s rule. On 3 July 1495, Warbeck landed at Deal in Kent with a small army provided by Margaret. He was swiftly defeated by Henry’s forces and fled first to Ireland and then Scotland, where he found favour with James IV, who promised to help him invade England. This came to nothing, and Warbeck was on the run once more.

In September 1497, he landed near Land’s End and found ready support among the Cornishmen who had recently rebelled against Henry’s rule. Having been declared Richard IV on Bodmin Moor, he and his army of 6,000 men marched eastwards towards London. But Warbeck was captured at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire.

Although Henry initially showed clemency towards the imposter, even welcoming him to court, Warbeck posed too great a danger to remain at liberty. He was confined to the Tower of London alongside Edward, Earl of Warwick, and the two were executed in November 1499.

Prince Arthur marries Catherine of Aragon

14 November 1501

Henry VII had ambitious marriage plans for his eldest son and heir, Arthur, Prince of Wales. He knew that securing a bride of sufficient stature would not only further legitimise his dynasty, but provide England with a much-needed international ally. The lady upon whom he had set his sights was Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Allying with these powerful Catholic monarchs would greatly strengthen Henry’s hand against England’s traditional enemy, France, so he pursued negotiations with vigour. The Treaty of Medina del Campo was duly signed on 27 March 1489, pledging Arthur and Catherine (then aged two and three) to be married when they came of age.

The Spanish princess eventually arrived in England in October 1501; Catherine and Arthur were married the following month and took up residence at Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches.

Death of Arthur, Prince of Wales

2 April 1502

Soon after the marriage Arthur’s health began to fail and, on 2 April 1502, he died, aged just 15, possibly from the sweating sickness. His parents were devastated upon hearing the news – a contemporary account records how the weeping king and queen comforted each other in their grief. Meanwhile, England had a new heir: Henry, Duke of York.

Arthur’s young wife Catherine was then betrothed to Prince Henry, but his father and Catherine’s parents disagreed over her dowry, and Catherine languished in political limbo until after Henry VII’s death.

Arthur's death certainly changed the course of English history, as Henry succeeded his older brother. Perhaps the largest issue of contention, which directly influenced Henry’s dramatic break with Rome, was whether Catherine and Arthur had consummated their marriage. Although it was never proven one way or the other, Henry claimed it was the catalyst for his later annulment.

Margaret Tudor marries James IV of Scotland

8 August 1503

The eldest daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, Margaret was born in 1489. Although it was sons that counted in royal families, daughters were useful for forging alliances; even before her sixth birthday, Henry had made plans for Margaret’s marriage. Greatly troubled by the King of Scots’ support for Perkin Warbeck, Henry resolved to tempt him into an alliance by offering his eldest daughter in marriage. A truce was concluded in 1497, but it wasn’t until January 1502 that the marriage treaty was finally agreed. Some of Henry’s councillors were against the match, arguing that it would give the Stuarts a claim to the English throne. But Henry retorted: “I foresee that our realm would suffer no harm, since England would not be absorbed by Scotland, but rather Scotland by England.”

The marriage was completed by proxy a year later at Richmond Palace and, in August 1503, Margaret arrived in Scotland. The wedding ceremony between the ‘thistle and the rose’ was conducted soon after.

Just as Henry’s councillors had predicted, it gave the Scottish rulers a claim to the English throne, although it was one that they would have to wait a while to capitalise upon. A century after the marriage, one of Margaret and James’s descendants would take the English throne.

Death of Henry VII; accession of Henry VIII

21 April 1509

The death of his wife and eldest son had plunged Henry VII into a deep melancholy from which he never fully recovered. Increasingly paranoid and miserly, he had failed to win over the English people, but had succeeded in establishing a relatively stable new dynasty – as well as a much healthier treasury. This was the legacy that he passed on to his 17-year-old heir, Henry, upon his death at Richmond Palace in April 1509.

“For the future, the whole world will talk of him,” remarked the Venetian ambassador with remarkable foresight upon the accession of Henry VIII. Everyone was full of praise for this ebullient, charismatic, intelligent and pleasure-loving new king – a true Renaissance prince, and the antithesis of his father in almost every possible way.

Henry had inherited the charm, charisma and good looks of his mother’s family, the House of York. Affable, quick-witted, idealistic and hugely generous, he was “the man most full of heart,” according to Erasmus. As if to distance himself from the old king, one of Henry’s first acts was to have his father’s despised ministers, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, arrested and executed for high treason. He also took his late brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, as his bride – this would have far-reaching consequences in the years ahead.

• Read more: Henry VIII’s six wives: your guide to the Tudor king's queen consorts

Battle of Flodden

9 September 1513

The treaty signed by Henry VII and James IV in 1502 was hardly one of ‘perpetual peace’, as it claimed to be. The long-standing hostilities had resumed soon afterwards and, in 1513, they spilled out into open conflict. James declared war on England to honour the Auld Alliance with France by diverting Henry VIII’s troops away from their campaign against the French king Louis XII. Henry had already antagonised James by claiming to be overlord of Scotland and, in late August 1513, the Scottish king gathered his troops and marched south towards England.

He encountered the English force, under the command of the Earl of Surrey, near the village of Branxton (rather than Flodden, from which the battle of Flodden takes its name) in Northumberland. What followed was the largest clash of arms ever between England and Scotland – and one of the most fiercely contested battles in history. “The battle was cruel, none spared other, and the king himself fought valiantly,” stated one contemporary chronicler.

James paid a high price for his bravery: he was mortally wounded by an arrow as he was advancing upon Surrey. His wife, Margaret, was appointed the formal guardian of their infant son (by now James V), and initially given powers of regency, although these were withdrawn when she remarried.

• Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century

Wolsey is appointed lord chancellor

24 December 1515

Thomas Wolsey’s rise to power was thanks to his own political guile and the young king’s obvious preference for pleasurable pursuits over the business of government. Having served Henry’s father, Thomas Wolsey rapidly proved his worth to the new king. His servant, George Cavendish, observed how he “dayly attendyd uppon the kyng in the Court beyng in his especyall grace & favour”. His ecclesiastical appointments – notably as archbishop of York and cardinal – were swiftly followed by political ones. Towards the end of 1515, Henry raised him to the position of lord chancellor.

Not long after, Erasmus, who spent some considerable time at Henry’s court, described Wolsey as governing “more really than the king himself”. The fact that Wolsey was merely the son of a butcher made his rise to prominence a bitter pill to swallow for the blue-blooded members of Henry’s council and he soon had a coterie of dangerous enemies. But Wolsey cared little for that and his ambition knew no bounds. In the same year that he was made lord chancellor, he set about building a magnificent new palace for himself – Hampton Court – which he filled with priceless furnishings and works of art, together with a household of more than 400 staff. Soon, envious courtiers were whispering that Wolsey’s magnificence was beginning to eclipse that of his royal master.

Birth of the future Mary I

18 February 1516

Although the early years of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s marriage were happy and harmonious, a string of stillbirths and miscarriages had started to put a strain on their relationship. The joy that accompanied the birth of a son on New Year’s Day 1511 proved short-lived: the little prince died just seven weeks later. The birth of a healthy princess, christened Mary (and later to become Mary I), in February 1516 eased relations between Henry and Catherine. Even though she was not the hoped-for son, she could still be useful in the international marriage market and, more importantly, she was proof that Catherine could bear healthy children.

But Mary would be the only surviving child from the marriage, and Henry became increasingly convinced that he had displeased God by taking his late brother’s widow as a bride. For the first few years of her life, though, Mary was a source of delight to her parents. A pretty and precocious child, she entertained a visiting French delegation with a performance on the virginals when she was just four and a half years old. She would grow to be particularly close to her mother, with whom she shared a devout Roman Catholic faith and a love of all things Spanish. By contrast, her relationship with her father became increasingly strained.

• Q&A: Did Henry VIII acknowledge any of his illegitimate children?

The Field of the Cloth of Gold

7-24 June 1520

Henry VIII and Francis I, king of France, were natural rivals. Close in age, they were both lauded for their good looks, sporting prowess and cultural accomplishments, and had established magnificent courts. But on the surface, they were careful to maintain the impression of cordiality. To this end, they had signed a treaty in 1514 and, six years later, it was decided that the two kings should meet to “increase their bonds of friendship”.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which was organised by the Francophile Cardinal Wolsey and took place near Calais in June 1520, was one of the most ostentatious ever seen. This was an opportunity not just for a political rapprochement, but for each king to try to outshine the other. A dazzling array of fireworks, feasts and tournaments was staged, costing Henry and Francis millions in modern-day money. The tents, clothes and other fabrics displayed so much cloth of gold that it gave the meeting its name. The English king triumphed with an enormous temporary palace (covering an area of 10,000 square metres and erected by 6,000 men sent ahead for the purpose) and a wine fountain, but his French rival outwitted him in the field of combat.

Their natural competitiveness ensured that the meeting actually worsened, rather than cemented, their relationship. Within a short time, they were at war again.

Anne Boleyn arrives at court

Early 1522

In 1522 the ambitious politician and diplomat Thomas Boleyn secured a place for the younger of his two daughters, Anne Boleyn, in Catherine of Aragon’s household. Having taken up her appointment, Anne swiftly established herself as one of the leading ladies of the court. What set her apart was her style and sophistication, both of which had been honed to perfection during her service at the French court. Although she had strikingly dark eyes which “invited conversation”, Anne was no great beauty. The Venetian ambassador was clearly bemused by Henry VIII’s later fascination with her. “Madam Anne is not one of the handsomest women in the world,” he wrote. “She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised.”

The early relationship between Henry and Anne showed little of the intensity that it would later develop. Indeed, Anne had been at court for four years by the time there was any hint of romance. This was very different to Henry’s previous infidelities; Anne proved to be the most unyielding of mistresses. She persistently held out against the king’s increasingly fervent advances, insisting that while she might love him in spirit, she could not love him in body unless they were married.

It was an extraordinarily audacious ploy. She would not be a mistress; she would be queen.

• Read more: Did Anne Boleyn crave the crown?

Exit Wolsey, enter Cromwell

31 October 1529

When Henry’s VIII’s chief adviser Cardinal Wolsey fell from grace in October 1529 for failing to gain his master an annulment from Catherine of Aragon, it was expected that his favourite servant, Thomas Cromwell, would fall with him. Cromwell feared this himself and wept bitter tears of regret. But he soon rallied, pronouncing that he would go to the court and “make or marre”.

Acting as an intermediary between his fallen master and the king had all the makings of a thankless task, but Cromwell turned it to his advantage with spectacular success. Henry was quick to appreciate the skill of this self-trained lawyer and soon put it to his own use. Within days of his arrival, Cromwell had secured a seat in parliament and he was appointed a member of the council the following year. Far from being overawed by such a meteoric rise, he was outspoken and persuasive in his opinions, much to the annoyance of his higher-born colleagues. The similarity between this new kid on the block and the man whom he had effectively replaced could not have been lost on the king. Wolsey and Cromwell shared more than their humble birth: both were highly intelligent, ambitious, audacious and extraordinarily industrious.

But Henry had had his fingers burnt with the cardinal and was not about to entrust another adviser with as much power as he had enjoyed. Cromwell would have to work hard to gain his trust.

Henry marries Anne Boleyn

25 January 1533

In late 1532, Anne Boleyn finally submitted to Henry’s advances and became his mistress. The gamble seemed to have paid off: Eustace Chapuys, the Holy Roman empire’s ambassador to England, noted with some disgust that “the king cannot leave her for an hour”. By December, Anne was pregnant. Her royal lover and his ministers now had to act fast if the baby was to be born legitimate. On 25 January 1533, Henry married Anne in his private chapel at Westminster. The ceremony was conducted in great secrecy, for the divorce from Catherine of Aragon had not yet been secured. Convinced that the child Anne carried was a son, the king immediately ordered Cromwell to legitimise their union. The very day after the wedding, parliament was recalled to pass the necessary legislation. The divorce was finally confirmed on 23 May, and Anne was crowned on 1 June.

But the child that was born to Anne on 7 September was not the expected son and heir. It was a girl. Henry was devastated. He had overturned the entire religious and political life of England in order to marry Anne, on the promise that she would give him the prince upon which the stability of his realm depended. Little did he know that this “useless girl”, Elizabeth, would go on to become the longest-reigning of all the Tudor monarchs, Elizabeth I.

First Act of Supremacy

16 November 1534

In November 1534, during one of the most revolutionary parliaments of the Tudor age, the Act of Supremacy was passed. This legislation is often seen as the beginning of the English Reformation, although the foundations had been laid during the previous five years.

It declared Henry VIII to be supreme head of the Church of England and rejected all “foreign authority”.

At a stroke, this ended centuries of papal jurisdiction over the religious life of England. The initial inspiration for this seismic shift had been the king’s desire for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon: when the pope refused to grant it, Henry’s ministers concluded that the only option was to reject his authority. But the wording of the act made it clear that there were more revolutionary changes to come. It stipulated that Henry and his heirs “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offences, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be”. This gave Cromwell carte blanche to undertake a thoroughgoing reformation of the English church, but its revolutionary tendrils would reach even further than that. By the end of his ascendancy, the entire government of the realm had been overhauled by his reforms.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries

21 January 1535

On 21 January 1535, Henry appointed Cromwell viceregent in spirituals, or ‘vicar-general’. This gave him considerable new powers over the church and he wasted no time in dispatching commissioners across the country to assess the state of each religious house. With typical attention to detail, he even investigated a few himself. Eustace Chapuys reported: “Wherever the King goes, Cromwell, who accompanies him, goes about visiting the abbeys in the neighbourhood, taking inventories of their lands and revenues.”

Motivated as much by tales of widespread corruption as by the prospect of seizing their immense wealth and landholdings, Cromwell began a programme of systematic dissolution which would see the closure and demolition of hundreds of monasteries. At the same time, he organised a series of executions to make an example of those who refused to recognise Henry’s supremacy. Principal among his victims were Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, both of whom had been thrown in the Tower for refusing to sign the oath of supremacy.

When Fisher and More resisted intense pressure from Cromwell to conform, they went to the block. His favour with the king now seemed unassailable. The Venetian ambassador scathingly remarked that although “this Cromwell was a person of low origin and condition; he is now Secretary of State, the King’s prime minister, and has supreme authority”.

• Read more: The dissolution of the monasteries: mindless violence or planned precision?

Anne Boleyn is executed

19 May 1536

Although Henry VIII had pursued Anne Boleyn relentlessly for seven long years, shaking England to its core in the process, once won, she had proved a disappointment. Her high-handed and ‘unqueenly’ manner made her dangerously unpopular and sparked frequent rows with her husband. Most damning of all her ‘sins’, though, was her failure to produce the longed-for Tudor prince. When she miscarried a male foetus on the day of Catherine of Aragon’s funeral in January 1536, things began to unravel rapidly. “This king has not spoken 10 times to the Concubine… when formerly he could not leave her for an hour,” reported a gleeful Eustace Chapuys in February.

Worse still, for Anne, was the fact that her royal husband had already found a new favourite to replace her: the virtuous and rather insipid Jane Seymour. Henry wanted rid of Anne and there was only one man who could fix it: the same man who had arranged the marriage in the first place. Cromwell was swift to act. He gathered ‘evidence’ (flimsy at best) of her adultery with not one but five men, including her own brother. It was one of the most brutal plots in history, resulting in the beheading not only of the queen, but of all her alleged lovers.

• Read more: The final days of Anne Boleyn: why did she die?

Pilgrimage of Grace

1 October 1536

On 1 October 1536 Thomas Kendall, vicar of Louth in Lincolnshire, used his weekly sermon to speak out against the royal commissioners who were expected in the town the following day. It was rumoured that these men were planning to raid all of the local churches, as well as the monasteries, seizing their treasures and laying waste to their adornments. The rumours spread like wildfire and, within days, almost all of northern Lincolnshire was up in arms. Henry VIII’s religious reforms had swiftly sparked widespread resentment among his subjects – and this was the first open expression of their fury.

The uprisings, which became known collectively as the Pilgrimage of Grace, spread rapidly across the northern counties, winning support from nobility and commoners alike. They constituted the greatest threat to Henry’s authority that he had faced during his 27 years on the throne.  Although he was inclined to clemency at first, when fresh revolts continued to break out during the early months of 1537, he took swift and brutal action. All the ringleaders were executed, including the most influential: Robert Aske, a one-eyed Yorkshire lawyer, who was hanged from the walls of Clifford’s Tower in York as a grim warning to the inhabitants of that rebellious city. For all his bluster, though, Henry’s confidence in the Reformation had been badly shaken.

Birth of Edward VI

12 October 1537

Henry VIII had married his third wife just 11 days after the execution of his second. Jane Seymour had proved a welcome contrast to Anne Boleyn. Meek and compliant, she was likely to give the king little trouble as a wife. What he hoped she would give him was a son. In May 1537, it was announced at court that the new queen was pregnant. Henry was transported with joy, convinced that this time God would grant him a boy. A mass was held to celebrate later that month.

Jane’s pregnancy progressed without incident and, in the middle of September, she began her confinement at Hampton Court. The king and his courtiers waited anxiously for news as Jane’s labour dragged on for two days and three nights. Finally, at about two o’clock on the morning of 12 October, the child was born. It was a boy. Henry’s long struggle for a son and heir was over at last. There was great rejoicing throughout the court and beyond. England had a male heir; her troubles would surely now be over. But Jane never recovered from the long and tortuous birth. She died, possibly of puerperal fever, some 12 days later. The grief-stricken king lamented: “Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of the death of her who brought me to this happiness.”

Every parish is given an English Bible

1539

One of the greatest legacies of the English Reformation was to provide every parish church in the country with a copy of the Bible in English. This gave the king’s subjects direct access to the word of God for the first time in history. The move was masterminded by Thomas Cromwell, whose reforming drive was motivated by personal piety, not just a desire to swell the royal coffers. So committed was he to the project that he had contributed £400 of his own money to bring it to fruition.

In 1538, he ordered that “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English” should be set up in every church, so “that every man having free access to it by reading of the same may both be the more apt to understand the declaration of it at the preacher’s mouth, and also the more able to teach and instruct his wife, children and family at home”. The task of distributing copies of the ‘Great Bible’, translated by Miles Coverdale, to all 8,500 parishes in the country was a gargantuan one. It took several false starts before it was finally achieved.

Did you know…? Tudor London was a mudbath

Andreas Franciscius, an Italian visitor to London in 1497, was horrified by what he found. Although he admired the “fine” architecture, he was disgusted by the “vast amount of evil-smelling mud" that covered the streets and lasted a long time – nearly the whole year round. The citizens, therefore, in order to remove this mud and filth from their boots, are accustomed to spread fresh rushes on the floors of all houses, on which they clean the soles of their shoes when they come in.” Franciscius added disapprovingly that the English people had “fierce tempers and wicked dispositions”, as well as “a great antipathy to foreigners”.

• Read more about life in Tudor London

Henry VIII marries Anne of Cleves

6 January 1540

Within weeks of the death of the king’s third wife, Jane Seymour, the search was on for a successor. With no obvious home-grown candidate, the net had to be cast further afield. Anne, daughter of the Duke of Cleves, soon became the lead contender. Her father had expelled papal authority from his realm and was therefore a natural ally for the English king.

But Henry’s ambassadors admitted they had heard “no great praise either of her personage or of her beauty”, so Henry demanded that Holbein be dispatched to Cleves to paint Anne’s likeness. The result was flattering enough to convince him that she would make a pleasant wife and the marriage treaty was duly signed. But when Henry met Anne of Cleves upon her arrival in England in December 1539, he was bitterly disappointed. “I like her not! I like her not!” he shouted at a dismayed Cromwell, and ordered him to find a way out of the marriage.

But the treaty was binding; it was with extreme reluctance that Henry was obliged to “put his neck in the yoke” and marry Anne on 6 January 1540. He found his bride so repugnant that he was unable to consummate the union. This at least made it easier to secure an annulment, which Henry succeeded in doing just six months later on the grounds that Anne had been betrothed to someone else before their marriage.

Cromwell goes to the block

28 July 1540

In a move that sent shockwaves across the court, Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was arrested at a meeting of the Privy Council on 10 June 1540. His fall from grace had been spectacular, even in a court renowned for its swift turns of fortune: just two months earlier, the king had shown Cromwell great favour by making him Earl of Essex. The coup was almost certainly engineered by the minister’s arch rivals, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who had long sought his destruction.

A bill of attainder was passed on 29 June. This claimed that the base-born minister had plotted to make himself more powerful than the king in all matters – political as well as religious – and had thus committed high treason, for which Cromwell was condemned to die. It went on to list a host of trumped-up charges, the most outlandish being that he had plotted to marry the king’s eldest daughter, Mary. A beleaguered Cromwell wrote a long and impassioned letter to his royal master from the Tower, begging for “mercye mercye mercye”’. His plea fell on deaf ears and, on 28 July, Cromwell was beheaded with three blows of the bungling executioner’s axe. Within a few short months, Henry was bemoaning the death of “the most faithful servant he had ever had”.

• Read more: The downfall of Thomas Cromwell

Catherine Howard is executed

13 February 1542

Henry VIII married his fifth wife on the very same day as Cromwell’s execution. Catherine Howard was only about 16 years old, making her the king’s junior by more than 30 years. A lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves, Catherine had quickly beguiled the king with her seductive charms. But the new queen’s past did not bear scrutiny. Her first sexual liaison was with her music teacher when she may have been as young as 12 and it had been followed by a relationship with her kinsman, Francis Dereham.

• Read more: Did Catherine Howard commit adultery?

None of this was known to Henry, who prized chastity in his brides. Neither was he aware that, not long after the wedding, Catherine began an illicit affair with Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the privy chamber. When their affair was discovered, an investigation was launched into the queen’s conduct. Her previous indiscretions soon came to light. Confronted with the evidence, Catherine confessed on 8 November 1541. Her affair with Culpepper had been testified to by her lady-in-waiting, Jane Rochford, as well as by a love letter that Catherine had written to him, which she had signed: “Yours, as long as life endures.” Meanwhile, Dereham, she said, had used her “in such sort as a man doth use his wife many and sundry times”. Heartbroken and humiliated, Henry had no hesitation in sending her to the block.

Head to page 2 for more moments in our Tudor history timeline…

Henry marries Katherine Parr

12 July 1543

Henry spent a year licking his wounds after the humiliating betrayal of his flighty young fifth wife before yet again turning his thoughts to marriage. The lady he set his sights on was something of a contrast to his previous wives. The twice-widowed Katherine Parr joined the household of the king’s eldest daughter, Mary, in February 1543. At 31 years of age, Katherine was a comely, if not exactly beautiful woman. In contrast to her direct predecessor, she was highly intelligent and articulate, with strong religious principles of a reformist nature.

Despite Henry’s terrible track record (not to mention his increasing age and girth), being the wife of the king was still an attractive prospect, but Katherine was far from flattered by his attentions. In fact, she loved another: the handsome but reckless Thomas Seymour, brother of the late Queen Jane. Sensing a rival, the king found an excuse to send him away from court.

Katherine remained reluctant but eventually put her own desires aside and consented to be the sixth wife of this much-married monarch. The wedding took place on 12 July 1543 in the queen’s private apartments at Hampton Court Palace. There were just 18 guests.

The third Act of Succession is passed

Spring 1544

The first and second Acts of Succession (1533 and 1536) had declared Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, Mary, and her half-sister, Elizabeth, to be bastards. Elizabeth – just two years and eight months old at the time of the second act – had been quick to appreciate the change in her status, demanding of her servants: “How happs it yesterday Lady Princess and to-day but Lady Elsabeth?”

She and Mary had lived under the stigma of illegitimacy since the birth of their half-brother, Edward, in 1537, which had moved them further from the throne. But the benign influence of Henry’s last wife, Katherine Parr, changed all of that.

Taking pity on the disinherited girls (Elizabeth in particular, with whom she shared a passion for Protestantism), Katherine persuaded her husband to invite them to court more often. It was almost certainly her influence that led the king to assent to the third Act of Succession in spring 1544, which acknowledged Mary and Elizabeth as heirs to the throne once more.

This transformed the status of both girls from illegitimate daughters to royal princesses. But no one could have expected that they would actually come into their inheritance: Edward was a strong, healthy boy with every prospect of a long life.

Siege of Boulogne

19 July 1544

For most of his reign, Henry played a complex game of diplomacy with the two great potentates of Europe: Francis I of France and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. But peace never lasted long, and in 1543 Henry was on the offensive yet again.

When he discovered Francis had helped fortify Scotland against England, Henry made an alliance with Charles V and agreed to invade France. In early 1544, an English force departed from Calais and marched towards the coastal town of Boulogne, laying siege to it on 19 July.

Desperate to prove he was still a warrior king, Henry set out to join his troops a few weeks later. He arrived shortly after the French surrender on 13 September. But his triumph proved short-lived. The emperor promptly made a separate treaty with Francis I, and they agreed to unite their forces to reclaim Boulogne for the French.

Henry returned to England at the end of September, leaving the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk in charge of holding the town. But they disobeyed his orders and withdrew most of the troops to Calais.

The remaining English forces managed to withhold the French bombardment for several years, but it was an expensive and largely futile campaign. In 1550 a treaty was signed that finally returned Boulogne to the French, by which time both Henry VIII and Francis I were dead.

Katherine Parr narrowly avoids arrest

1546

Katherine Parr’s passion for the ‘new faith’ became ever more pronounced during her marriage to Henry as his sixth and final wife. Gathering around her like-minded women (including her stepdaughter Elizabeth), she would spend hours debating the finer points of reform and even wrote some religious treatises herself. In doing so, she made some dangerous enemies among the religious conservatives at court, notably Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester.

When the king confided in him that he resented his wife’s outspokenness on matters of religion, Gardiner seized his chance. He and his faction gathered enough evidence of Katherine’s heresy to secure a warrant for her arrest. By chance, the queen heard of this before the men could reach her and immediately took to her bed, claiming that she was mortally ill. When the king rushed to see her, she cleverly told him that she was sick with fear that she had displeased him and proceeded to give a skilfully submissive defence of her actions, pleading that she was “a simple poor woman so much inferior in all respects of nature to you”.

Katherine had literally talked herself out of trouble. Henry was instantly mollified and railed against Gardiner for daring to question his wife’s loyalty. The queen knew, though, that it had been a close-run thing. She had narrowly escaped with her life and would not risk it again.

• Read more: A seventh wife for Henry VIII? The story of Katherine Willoughby

The Earl of Surrey is executed

19 January 1547

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was the eldest son of an old stalwart of Henry VIII’s court, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. A gifted poet, Surrey was also highly volatile and a notorious drunk, whom the king called a “foolish, proud boy”.

Surrey made a dangerous enemy of the late queen Jane Seymour’s brother, Edward, who was a dominant force at court. Edward played on the ageing king’s increasing paranoia, convincing him that the Howards were plotting to place Surrey on the throne when Henry died. The fact that Surrey had displayed royal arms on his coat of arms was evidence enough for the king, who ordered his arrest and that of his father, Norfolk.

Both were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. But Surrey hatched a daring plan to escape from the Tower of London, where he and his father awaited their death. This involved squeezing through the shaft that ran from the latrine into the river below.

He almost succeeded, but guards raised the alarm when they saw his empty bed and found him making his way down the shaft. The hapless earl was executed on 19 January 1547. The king’s own death nine days later won Norfolk a stay of execution, and he was pardoned by Henry’s daughter Mary when she became queen in 1553.

Henry VIII dies

28 January 1547

In his later years, Henry was increasingly incapacitated by an old jousting wound in his leg, which had turned ulcerous. As a result, he had long since lost his sporting prowess and his girth had expanded at an alarming rate. When he became king, he had boasted a trim 32in waist; by the end of his reign it had expanded to a colossal 52ins.

A sketch taken by the Antwerp artist Cornelis Massys at the end of Henry’s life shows him as a grotesque figure. His beady eyes and tiny, pursed mouth are almost lost in the layers of flesh that surround them. He appears to have no neck, and his enormous frame extends beyond the reaches of the canvas. A contemporary chronicler corroborated this portrait: “The king was so stout that such a man has never been seen. Three of the biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet.”

Henry’s obesity hastened his death, at the age of 55, on 28 January 1547, in the palace of Whitehall. He was buried next to his beloved third wife, Jane Seymour, at Windsor Castle and was succeeded by their nine-year-old son, Edward VI, under the protectorship of Jane’s brother Edward.

• Read more: The forgotten Tudor king: why Edward VI had the makings of a monster

Did you know…? Edward VI might have had a 'whipping boy'

Education was seen as something of a luxury for most Tudors, and it was usually the children of the rich who received anything approaching a decent schooling. There were few books in Tudor schools, so pupils read from 'hornbooks' instead. Pages displaying the alphabet and religious material were attached to wooden boards and covered with a transparent sheet of cow horn (hence the name). Discipline was much fiercer than it is today. Teachers would think nothing of punishing their pupils with 50 strokes of the cane, and wealthier parents would often pay for a ‘whipping-boy’ to take the punishment on behalf of their child. Barnaby Fitzpatrick undertook this thankless task for the young Edward VI, although the two boys did become best friends.

The first Act of Uniformity is passed

31 January 1549

Although still very young, by the time of his accession, Edward VI was already strongly committed to the reformist faith. He and his half-sister Elizabeth had been tutored by men known to be sympathetic to the new Protestant teachings that were gaining ground across Europe.

Although he had spearheaded the English Reformation, Henry VIII had been a faithful Catholic at heart, only tolerating the radical new ideas when it served his interests to do so – notably in securing a divorce from his first wife.

But Edward was determined to introduce a full-scale Protestant reformation into England. He immediately issued a set of injunctions to the church which provided a blueprint for reform. Then, at the beginning of 1549, the first Act of Uniformity was passed. This established the Book of Common Prayer as the only legal form of worship in England.

Largely the work of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, the book not only provided an English-language translation of the Latin liturgical books, but set down – for the first time – a consistent form of worship for all the king’s subjects. It was nothing if not controversial: it was passed by the House of Lords with a majority of just two votes, and sparked riots later that year.

The Duke of Somerset is executed

22 January 1552

The turbulence that so often accompanies the succession of a minor soon dominated Edward’s court. A deadly rivalry sprang up between the lord protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Seymour’s position was rendered increasingly unstable by the behaviour of his volatile and ambitious brother Thomas, who recklessly attempted to get physical possession of the king in January 1549.

Breaking into Edward’s privy garden at Westminster, pistol in hand, Thomas tried to gain access to the king’s bedroom but was bitten by the boy’s pet spaniel. Without thinking, he shot the dog dead, which prompted a furore as the royal guard rushed forward, thinking an assassin was in the palace.

Thomas was arrested and taken to the Tower. He was found guilty of treason and his own brother was obliged to sign the death warrant, which was carried out on 20 March.

The Duke of Somerset survived for three more years, though, and was even allowed back into the privy council. But when he was discovered plotting against his rival, Dudley, the new de facto leader of government, he was rearrested and executed.

Somerset’s young nephew, the king, noted with cold detachment in his diary: “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.”

• Read more: Who decided Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, should be executed?

Did you know…? Edward VI might have had a 'whipping boy'?

Education was seen as something of a luxury for most Tudors, and it was usually the children of the rich who received anything approaching a decent schooling. There were few books in Tudor schools, so pupils read from 'hornbooks' instead. Pages displaying the alphabet and religious material were attached to wooden boards and covered with a transparent sheet of cow horn (hence the name). Discipline was much fiercer than it is today. Teachers would think nothing of punishing their pupils with 50 strokes of the cane, and wealthier parents would often pay for a ‘whipping-boy’ to take the punishment on behalf of their child. Barnaby Fitzpatrick undertook this thankless task for the young Edward VI, although the two boys did become best friends.

Edward VI dies

6 July 1553

In the spring of 1553, the 15-year-old king suddenly fell ill. An apparently minor chest infection had turned into something altogether more serious, and within weeks it was clear the boy was dying.

Anxious to prevent the accession of Edward’s staunchly Roman Catholic sister, Mary, Dudley orchestrated a coup by marrying his youngest son, Guildford, to Lady Jane Grey, the great-niece of Henry VIII, and placing her on the throne.

On 8 July, two days after Edward’s death, Jane (then aged 16 or 17 at most) was proclaimed queen and entered the Tower of London with great ceremony – and reluctance. She would reign for just nine days.

• Read more: Who was Lady Jane Grey? The tragic story of the 'Nine Days Queen'

For all her dogmatism, Mary was a true Tudor princess and wasted no time in rallying thousands of subjects to her cause. Soon, the council turned its coat and declared for her. On 19 July, Mary was proclaimed queen, to the great rejoicing of Londoners.

Jane and her husband were convicted for treason in November, but the new queen bore them no ill-will and it was rumoured she would pardon them. A series of uprisings at the beginning of 1554 changed all of that.

Mary reluctantly acknowledged that Jane was too dangerous a threat to be allowed to live. She was led to her execution on 12 February, having watched the headless body of her husband, Guildford Dudley, being carried back from Tower Hill.

Wyatt’s Rebellion

January 1554

In stark contrast to her half-sister, Elizabeth, Mary was resolved from the start of her reign to marry as quickly as possible. But her choice was deeply unpopular among her xenophobic subjects: the Catholic king of Spain, Philip II.

Shortly after their marriage settlement was agreed in January 1554, Sir Thomas Wyatt (son of the famous poet) raised an army of 3,000 rebels and marched towards London from Kent with the stated aim of deposing Mary and replacing her with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was almost certainly innocent of any involvement in the plot, but Wyatt claimed he had written to her of his plans. Mary was taking no chances: having defeated the rebels – Wyatt would soon be executed – she had her sister brought to the Tower.

As she slowly mounted the steps, Elizabeth suddenly stopped and exclaimed: “Oh Lord! I never thought to have come in here as a prisoner; and I pray you all, good friends and fellows, bear me witness, that I come in no traitor, but as true woman to the queen’s majesty as any is now living.”

Subjected to interrogation by Mary’s ministers, Elizabeth defended herself so stoically they were eventually forced to concede defeat and she was released on 19 May – 18 years to the day since her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been executed in the fortress.

• Did Thomas Seymour sexually abuse the teenage Princess Elizabeth?

The first Protestant martyr is burned

4 February 1555

Upon her accession, Mary had made it clear that her most urgent priority was to return England to the papal fold. Driven on by an evangelising zeal, she ordered increasingly drastic measures in order to achieve this, not flinching from burning those subjects who persisted in their ‘heretical’ beliefs.

The first Protestant martyr was John Rogers, who went to the flames on 4 February 1555. Rogers had spent time in Antwerp, where he had met the influential reformer William Tyndale, whose teachings so inspired him that he immediately abandoned the Roman Catholic faith.

• Read more: Mary Tudor: brutal but brilliant

Rogers soon befriended other leading reformers and proceeded to evangelise about their teachings when he returned to England in 1548. This won him great favour with Edward VI, but he alienated Mary as soon as she succeeded to the throne by preaching about the “true doctrine taught in King Edward’s days”, and warning his hearers against “pestilent popery, idolatry and superstition”.

During the next three years, the fiercely dogmatic queen sent more than 300 Protestants to the flames in her quest to re-establish Catholicism’s supremacy in England. Most prominent among them were Thomas Cranmer, former archbishop of Canterbury,  and the bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. Many more Protestants might have followed if it had not been for ‘Bloody’ Mary’s early death after just five years as queen.

Mary I dies

17 November 1558

Mary had never enjoyed good health, and it deteriorated rapidly after she became queen. Desperate to conceive an heir, she suffered the humiliation of two phantom pregnancies during which she displayed all the symptoms of an expectant mother. But her swollen stomach may have been due to a cancerous tumour.

Early in 1558, as Mary persisted in believing that she would soon be delivered of an heir, it was obvious to everyone else that she was dying. By 28 October, wracked with pain, she finally acknowledged that there would be no “fruit of her body”, and confirmed that the crown would pass to Elizabeth. She begged her half-sister to uphold the Roman Catholic faith, but the knowledge of how unlikely Elizabeth was to honour this request tormented Mary until her last breath.

Upon hearing that Mary was dead and that she was now queen, Elizabeth proclaimed: “My Lordes, the law of nature moveth me to sorrowe for my sister: The burdaine that is fallen uppon me maketh me amazed.” When Elizabeth was proclaimed queen in the City of London, there was great rejoicing. All across the capital, church bells were rung and at night bonfires were lit, around which thousands of people gathered to drink and make merry.

The brief, brutal reign of Mary Tudor was over: now the nation’s hopes rested upon her beautiful and charismatic successor.

The Act of Uniformity

1559

Elizabeth I once famously declared that she had no wish to “make windows into men’s souls”, and this became immediately apparent during her first parliament.

The most pressing issue of the new reign was to provide clarity on the vexed question of religion. Elizabeth had witnessed first-hand her late sister’s disastrously dogmatic religious policy, which had torn the country in two and created a dangerous groundswell of opposition to the monarchy.

Although she was inclined to the Protestant faith, Elizabeth had no intention of trying to impose it upon her subjects in the same way that Mary had with Roman Catholicism.

The keynote of her religious settlement, which was expressed in the Act of Uniformity of 1559, was moderation. This reinstated the English Book of Common Prayer that had been introduced by Edward VI in 1549, and set down that all of Elizabeth’s subjects must attend church at least once a week or be fined 12 pence – a considerable sum for the poor.

Meanwhile, Matthew Parker was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. He shared the queen’s vision for a single, united Church of England; it was thanks to his influence that the Anglican theology began to take shape.

Mary, Queen of Scots flees to England

May 1568

From the earliest days of her reign, Elizabeth had been plagued by rival claimants to the throne. Chief among them was Mary, Queen of Scots. Nine years younger than Elizabeth and widely acclaimed for her beauty, Mary had a strong blood line to the English throne. And as a Catholic, she also rapidly became a figurehead for all of those opposed to the ‘heretical’ English queen.

That Elizabeth resented her charismatic cousin on a personal as well as a political level there can be no doubt. She quizzed her Scottish ambassador as much about Mary’s appearance as about affairs of state. On one occasion, she demanded to know whether Mary was taller than her, and when the beleaguered ambassador reluctantly acceded, Elizabeth snapped: “Then she is too high!”

Her jealousy increased when, in June 1566, Mary gave birth to a son, James. But things soon began to unravel for the Scottish queen. Always one to rule with the heart rather than the head, she formed a passionate attachment to Lord Bothwell, the chief suspect in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley.

Forced out of Scotland by a coup, Mary unwisely chose to throw herself on the mercy of Elizabeth, who had sent her messages of support.

But when Mary arrived in England in May 1568, Elizabeth wasted no time in making the Scottish queen her prisoner.

• Read more: Deadly rivals: Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots

Did you know…? Elizabeth I owned more than 2,000 dresses

When her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed, Elizabeth was so neglected by her father, Henry VIII, that she soon outgrew all of her clothes, and her servant was forced to write to ask for new ones. Perhaps the memory of this humiliation prompted Elizabeth, as queen, to stuff her wardrobes with more than 2,000 beautiful dresses, all in rich fabrics and gorgeous colours. But despite her enormous collection, she always wanted more. When one of her maids of honour, Lady Mary Howard, appeared in court wearing a strikingly ostentatious gown, the queen was so jealous that she stole it, and paraded around court in it herself.

The Ridolfi Plot is revealed

Summer 1571

As Elizabeth’s reign progressed, the number of plots against her increased. Most were Catholic conspiracies, aimed at placing Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne.

In 1571, the most serious plot yet was discovered. At its heart was the dangerously ambitious Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, who planned to marry the captive Queen of Scots and with her seize the English throne.

In early 1571, Mary wrote to the papal agent, Roberto Ridolfi, urging him to solicit help from the pope, Philip II and the Duke of Alva. Mary criticised her cousin for feigning a “willingness to entertain the suggestion of my liberation, to amuse herself at my expense”, and accused her of having been “many a time… on the point of compassing my death”.

This was treasonous enough, but there was still more evidence: Mary had embroidered a cushion for the Duke of Norfolk with a design that showed a hand clipping off a barren vine so that the fruitful vine might flourish. The message was clear: she, the fertile Queen of Scots, should supplant her childless cousin.

When Elizabeth heard of the plot, she reportedly flew into a “ferocious rage”. Norfolk was executed the following year, but Mary – “that devilish woman”– was allowed to live… for now.

• Read more: Who betrayed Mary, Queen of Scots?

Robert Dudley proposes to Elizabeth

1575

Although famous for being the ‘Virgin Queen’, Elizabeth enjoyed an intimate relationship with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

Friends since childhood, they had rapidly developed a relationship that many said went beyond the niceties of court gallantry. The pair acted more like lovers, even in public, as they shared intimate conversations and spent many hours together hunting, dancing and enjoying other courtly pastimes.

Rumours abounded that the pair would marry, particularly after Dudley’s first wife, Amy Robsart, was found dead at their home in Oxfordshire. But for all her flirtatiousness, Elizabeth showed no inclination to marry Dudley – or anyone else.

This did not stop him from trying, though. In 1575, Dudley staged a spectacular series of entertainments for the queen at his Warwickshire home, Kenilworth Castle, as a last-ditch attempt to persuade Elizabeth to marry him. But while she revelled in his attentions and at times seemed to be giving serious consideration to his proposal, Elizabeth remained tantalisingly out of reach.

Frustrated, Leicester turned his attentions to the beautiful and vivacious Lettice Knollys, whom he secretly married in 1578. When Elizabeth found out, she was incandescent with rage, boxing Lettice’s ears and screaming that “as but one sun lightened the Earth, she would have but one queen in England”.

The Duke of Anjou courts Elizabeth

1579

For the first 20 years of her reign, Elizabeth faced intense pressure from her councillors to marry and beget an heir. Although she flirted with several home-grown and foreign suitors, in reality she had no intention of ceding her power to a husband, famously declaring: “I will have but one mistress here, and no master.”

Elizabeth seems to have harboured a deep psychological fear of marriage, which is perhaps not surprising given the fate of her mother and stepmothers – not to mention her half-sister, Mary. But she appreciated the diplomatic necessity of at least pretending to consider the proposals of the various foreign princes who courted her.

Principal among these was Francis, Duke of Anjou and Alençon. Some 21 years Elizabeth’s junior, Anjou arrived in England in 1579, becoming the only foreign suitor to court the English queen in person.

Elizabeth, still smarting from Robert Dudley’s betrayal, welcomed Anjou with every courtesy and the pair struck up a flirtatious relationship. The queen nicknamed the young duke her ‘frog’ and conducted many private audiences with him. When he left the English court in 1581 with nothing more than “fair promises”, Elizabeth penned an apparently regretful poem On Monsieur’s Departure.

Sir Francis Drake circumnavigates the globe

1580

The Elizabethan age witnessed greater overseas exploration than ever before. One of its most celebrated adventurers was Francis Drake, a highly skilled sailor, navigator, privateer and politician. In 1577, he embarked upon what was termed a ‘voyage of discovery’, which was in fact an ambitious raiding voyage that marked the beginning of England’s challenge to Spanish global domination.

The queen heartily – but secretly – approved of the enterprise and gave it her financial backing, as did several leading members of her court, including Robert Dudley, Christopher Hatton and Francis Walsingham.

Their investment brought rich returns. By 1580, Drake had achieved considerably more than a modest ‘voyage of discovery’: he had circumnavigated the globe – the first Englishman to do so. Along the way, he and the crew of his famous galleon, the Golden Hind, had looted scores of Spanish ships and ports, and the treasures that they brought back swelled the royal coffers considerably.

Anxious to avoid war with Spain, Elizabeth played down Drake’s achievement in public, but in private she was delighted, and rewarded him with £10,000 and a knighthood.

Drake’s capture of treasure ships belonging to the most powerful monarch in the world made him a national hero and transformed England into a force to be reckoned with.

• Read more: Francis Drake’s forgotten role in the English slave trade

Walter Ralegh founds ‘Virginia’

1585

The other great Elizabethan adventurer was the charismatic Sir Walter Ralegh. A multi-talented courtier, politician, soldier, sailor, philosopher, historian and poet, he was one of the best-known men in England and a great favourite of the queen.

Although 21 years Elizabeth’s junior, he paid court to her like a lover, showering her with romantic poems and letters, all praising her beauty. Ever the gallant, he treated his royal mistress like a precious jewel and went out of his way to fulfil her every desire. According to popular legend, on one occasion, he threw down his cloak over a “plashy place”, so that the queen might walk over it without getting her feet wet.

But his ultimate compliment to Elizabeth came from his overseas ventures. Ralegh had for some time organised and financed exploration in North America, with the aim of generating huge wealth by mining gold and increasing trade (notably in tobacco, which he insisted was a cure for coughs).

Elizabeth did not allow her favourite to risk such hazardous voyages himself, so the first one, in 1584, was commanded by members of his household. The following year, Ralegh sent a party of colonists to found a settlement on the east coast of North America. They landed in North Carolina, which Ralegh named Virginia in honour of his royal mistress, the Virgin Queen.

• Read more: What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke Island?

The Treaty of Nonsuch

10 August 1585

Among the vast domains of Philip II of Spain were the 17 provinces of the Low Countries. The area was a flourishing centre of trade and brought great riches to the Spanish king. But it was also a centre of Protestantism, and the increasing religious tensions between the Dutch and their Roman Catholic overlord spilled out into open revolt in the 1560s, resulting in the seven northern provinces breaking away from Spanish rule and establishing themselves as an independent territory.

The proximity of the southern (Spanish) provinces to England’s coastline had always constituted a threat to Elizabeth, and in 1584 Philip II laid siege to the key port of Antwerp, part of the northern provinces.

In the same year, he signed the Treaty of Joinville with the Catholic League – a powerful body of Roman Catholic leaders committed to eradicating Protestantism altogether.

Elizabeth hated embroiling England in foreign wars, but Philip’s actions were too aggressive to be ignored. So, at Nonsuch, she made an alliance with the independent Dutch provinces, pledging 6,400 foot soldiers, 1,000 cavalry and 600,000 florins a year to support the revolt. To Philip II, it was a declaration of war. Three years later he would wreak his vengeance.

• Read more: Elizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics

Mary, Queen of Scots is executed

8 February 1587

For as long as she remained a prisoner on English soil, Mary Stuart was the focus of plots and rebellions against Elizabeth. She had always carefully avoided being implicated in any of them, but by 1586, after 18 years of captivity, she had started to lose patience.

Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, sensed her desperation and lay a trap. He had discovered a plot led by Anthony Babington that aimed to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne, and intercepted letters between Mary and the conspirators. This was evidence enough to condemn her, and Mary was sentenced to death. But Elizabeth flinched from signing her death warrant. If she executed an anointed queen, then it would give tacit permission for someone to do the same to her. Eventually, under extreme pressure from her council, she put her signature to the document. It was carried out before the notoriously fickle queen could change her mind, and Mary was executed at Fotheringhay Castle. No sooner had this been done than Elizabeth furiously upbraided her councillors, screaming that Mary’s execution was “a thing she never commanded or intended”.

It was all an act: anxious about the reprisals from Catholic Europe, Elizabeth was desperately trying to distance herself from all blame for Mary’s death. But she was fooling no one and would soon pay the consequences.

The Armada is scattered

August 1588

If Elizabeth had hoped that by putting Mary to death, she had extinguished her most dangerous rival for good, then she was mistaken. Her cousin had made sure that in the eyes of the world she died a martyr, not a traitor.

Mary had called upon the Catholic powers to avenge her death and, the very next year, the greatest of them took her at her word. In May 1588, Philip II launched his Spanish Armada against England. Of course, it was not entirely due to Mary, but her death had given Philip the excuse he needed finally to destroy this troublesome heretical queen whose privateers never ceased plundering his treasure ships. It was the greatest threat that Elizabeth had faced in her reign – and that England had faced since the Norman invasion more than 500 years before.

Philip gathered 150 ships laden with 30,000 men – the largest fleet ever seen in Europe – and set sail for England. The Armada was soon spotted off the coast of Cornwall, and Sir Francis Drake, who commanded the English navy, ordered his men to attack it as it sailed along the English Channel.

After a series of skirmishes, the English fleet rallied for a final, decisive attack near Gravelines in the Spanish Netherlands. Philip II’s ‘invincible’ Armada was scattered. It was Elizabeth I’s finest hour.

• Read more: The Spanish Armada: one of history’s biggest fibs?

The Globe Theatre opens

1599

There were no purpose-built theatres in London until 1576, when the actor-manager James Burbage built the Theatre in Shoreditch. In the 1580s, it welcomed its most famous member in the form of the talented young playwright and actor, William Shakespeare, who joined the company, known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, Shakespeare became a father at the age of just 19. What first brought him to London is not certain, but he rapidly established a name for himself as a writer, with such early works as Henry VI, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors.

Shakespeare’s genius for wordplay, dramatic dialogue and characterisation was unprecedented, and the fact that he was also an actor gave him an edge over other notable playwrights of the age, such as Christopher Marlowe.

In 1598, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men leased a plot near the Rose, a rival theatre in Southwark, and the following year built the Globe out of the timbers of their previous playhouse, the Theatre. The quality of Shakespeare’s plays and Elizabeth I’s love of theatre (which made it respectable for the first time) ensured the Globe was packed with spectators every night for the next 14 years.

In 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, wadding from a stage cannon ignited the thatched roof and the theatre burned down in less than two hours.

It was rebuilt and remained the home of Shakespeare’s plays until the closure of all theatres by Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan regime in 1642.

The Essex Rebellion

February 1601

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex was Elizabeth’s last great favourite. Some 30 years younger than the queen, he played the game of courtly love to perfection. Before long he was the queen’s closest confidant and enjoyed many promotions as a result. But in 1599 he overreached himself by defying her express command to quell a rebellion in Ireland and instead returned home in disgrace, having concluded a humiliating truce. Desperate to regain her favour, he burst unannounced into her bedchamber early one morning and found his royal mistress without her makeup, wig and other adornments with which she attempted to keep the ‘mask of youth’ in place.

• Read more: What did Elizabeth I really look like at 60?

Elizabeth was furious and refused to listen to his excuses. Scorning the queen as “crooked in her mind as she is in her carcass”, Essex gathered together a body of supporters, including his close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and launched a desperate, badly organised revolt against Elizabeth and her council. This soon ended in ignominious defeat, and Essex and Southampton were conveyed to the Tower, along with many of their followers. A verdict of treason was swiftly passed, and Essex was beheaded at the Tower on 25 February.

The last Tudor parliament

30 November 1601

The business to be considered at the parliament that opened on 11 September 1601 was mundane enough: recent economic issues had raised some pricing concerns that needed to be addressed. But the speech Elizabeth gave when she attended on 30 November has secured its place in history.

To the astonishment of the 141 members of the House of Commons who were present that day, Elizabeth revealed that it would be her last parliament. She was determined to go out with a bang. Her ensuing speech was the most beautifully crafted and moving expression of love for her country that she had ever given – greater even than her famous Armada speech of 1588.

She told the hushed assembly: “I do assure you there is no prince that loves his subjects better, or whose love can countervail our love. There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel: I mean your love… And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving.”

The ‘Golden Speech’, as it became known, was printed and reprinted numerous times. Ironically, its name derives from a version published during Oliver Cromwell’s interregnum, which was inscribed: “This speech ought to be set in letters of gold.”

Elizabeth I dies

24 March 1603

Although in her later years Elizabeth started to lose her grip on the affairs of the court, she enjoyed good health almost until the end of her life. She still rode in the hunt, enjoyed her accustomed long walks “as if she had been only 18 years old”, and danced energetically until well into her sixties. But even this formidable lady could not defy time forever.

In January 1603, the queen left the court in Whitehall and moved to Richmond Palace, her “warm box”, to which she could “best trust her sickly old age”. Once there, she slipped into a steady decline and it soon became clear that it would be her final illness. Elizabeth, too, realised this and – ever mistress of her fate – apparently resolved to hasten her end. Her attendants looked on in despair as day after day the queen turned food and drink away, “holding her finger almost continually in her mouth, with her eyes open and fixed upon the ground, where she sat on cushions without rising or resting herself, and was greatly emaciated by her long watching and fasting”.

• Read more: Elizabeth I: the great unifier

Finally, in the early hours of 24 March, the queen breathed her last, relinquishing her hold on life “easily like a ripe apple from the tree”. The throne passed to James VI of Scotland, the son of her old rival, Mary, Queen of Scots. The brilliant, dazzling, incomparable Tudor age was at an end.

Tracy Borman is an author, historian and broadcaster, specialising in the Tudor period.

This article first appeared in the Christmas 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> The Dissolution: everything you wanted to know https://www.historyextra.com/membership/dissolution-monasteries-everything-you-wanted-know-podcast-hugh-willmott/ Sun, 14 Feb 2021 12:32:14 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/dissolution-monasteries-everything-you-wanted-know-podcast-hugh-willmott/ Dr Hugh Willmott responds to listener questions on Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries in the 16th century In this special live edition of our ‘everything you wanted to know’ series, Dr Hugh Willmott responds to listener questions about the suppression of the monasteries in the 16th century, exploring why Henry VIII targeted religious houses, how they were repurposed, and what happened to the monks and nuns that lived in them.

Watch this live recording as a video, exclusive to HistoryExtra.com:

View Green Video on the source website ]]> The downfall of Thomas Cromwell https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/downfall-thomas-cromwell-what-happened-why-executed-henry-viii-final-years/ Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:34:37 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/downfall-thomas-cromwell-what-happened-why-executed-henry-viii-final-years/ The Mirror & the Light, the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, focuses on the final four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life, from 1536–40. This also happens to be one of the most dramatic periods in British history. Tracy Borman explores the fascinating events for HistoryExtra… Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light opens with Thomas Cromwell riding high – as indeed he was in 1536. At the beginning of the year, Henry VIII’s controversial second wife, Anne Boleyn, had miscarried on the same day that his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was laid to rest. According to the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, the infant "had the appearance of a male", although at just 14 weeks it is doubtful whether they could have been able to tell. Already deeply dissatisfied with the woman who had promised so much, the king took it as a sign that this marriage, too, was cursed. It is likely that he privately instructed Cromwell to get him out of it.

By now, Cromwell and Anne were sworn enemies, so he had his own reasons to seek her destruction. Drawing on rumour and hearsay prompted by Anne’s flirtatious behaviour, he constructed a case of adultery against her that involved no fewer than five men, including her own brother George. She was arrested on 2 May and taken to the Tower, where she was tried and found guilty a little over two weeks later. Cromwell was among the witnesses who gathered to see her beheaded there on 19 May.

This was the zenith of Cromwell’s career. Not only had he rid the king of his troublesome second wife, but he soon engineered a marriage between the sister of wife number three, Jane Seymour, and his son Gregory. This made the Cromwells almost part of the royal family. When Jane gave birth to Henry’s longed-for son and heir, Edward, the following year, the Seymours became invincible – as, apparently, did Cromwell. Nobody could have predicted that in less than three years’ time, he would be dispatched in as brutal a fashion as the woman he had brought down.

• Your guide to Thomas Cromwell

How did Thomas Cromwell fall out of favour?

Even before the close of the year 1536, cracks had begun to appear in Cromwell’s relationship with his royal master. In October, opposition to the religious reforms that he had orchestrated broke out into open rebellion with the Pilgrimage of Grace, a large-scale revolt that quickly spread across the Midlands and northern counties. The rebels made it clear that the focus of their fury was not the king but "that heretic Cromwell". Although Henry eventually put down the rebellion, his faith in Cromwell had been shaken. Increasingly, he began to distance himself from his chief minister. Things got so bad that he even took to beating up Cromwell. One shocked eyewitness described how the hapless minister was regularly “well pommelled about the head, and shaken up, as it were a dog”. He added: “the King’s Majesty hath called my Lorde Privy Seal [Cromwell] villain, knave, bobbed him about the head, and thrust him out of the privy chamber.” Although Cromwell would “laugh” at such treatment, he was acutely aware of the danger he was in.

Desperate to claw back favour, Cromwell thought he had the perfect means when, in 1539, he found a new bride for his royal master. Jane Seymour had died shortly after giving birth to Prince Edward and the search for a fourth wife for Henry began almost immediately. The candidate whom Cromwell put forward was Anne of Cleves, a German princess who would bring England a powerful new alliance at a time when Henry was under threat from the combined might of Spain and France. Before he would agree to the idea, Henry insisted on seeing what his prospective bride looked like. He therefore dispatched his faithful court painter, Hans Holbein, to take her likeness. He was so satisfied with the result that negotiations immediately proceeded and Anne made her way to England in December 1539. But when Henry met her in person, he was appalled. “I like her not! I like her not!” he shouted at the beleaguered Cromwell, complaining that Anne was “nothing so well as she was spoken of”. The marriage was annulled a few months later. Although Holbein seems to have escaped any reprisals for what may have been an overly flattering portrait of Anne, Cromwell was not so fortunate. The king made his displeasure all too clear and tasked him with securing an annulment in order to make amends.

However, contrary to popular belief, the Anne of Cleves disaster was not the end for Cromwell. Although one of his critics gleefully observed "Cromwell is tottering", the king soon forgave him and in April 1540 he created him Earl of Essex. This infuriated Cromwell’s enemies – chief among whom were the Duke of Norfolk and his side-kick, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester – and made them determined to get rid of this low-born upstart for good. They whispered in the king’s ear that his chief minister was plotting treason. They pointed to the fact that Cromwell had many men in his service whom he could arm against the King, and even hinted that he was planning to marry Henry’s eldest daughter Mary. It was all groundless, but the king was so paranoid by this time that he did not hesitate to order Cromwell’s arrest.

On 10 June 1540, Cromwell arrived late to a meeting of the privy council. There was a cry of “traitor” and he was seized by the king’s guards. Norfolk then ripped the seal of office from around his neck and watched with satisfaction as his rival was taken to the Tower of London. Given Cromwell’s prowess as a lawyer, his enemies dare not risk putting him on trial so they persuaded the king to bring a bill of attainder before Parliament. This was passed in late June and Cromwell was condemned to die. His only chance of survival was to persuade Henry to pardon him. He therefore wrote a series of impassioned letters from the Tower, the last of which ended with a desperate postscript: “Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.”

The most faithful servant Henry VIII ever had?

The king did not heed his words and Cromwell was executed on 28 July – the very same day that Henry married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. In the immediate aftermath of Cromwell’s demise, his royal master was still convinced of his treasonous guilt and took every opportunity to blacken his name even further. Legend has it that whenever he was dealt a knave at cards, he exclaimed: “I have got Cromwell.”

• "The finale lives up to the hype": Tracy Borman reviews Hilary Mantel's The Mirror & the Light

But Henry soon realised the enormity of his mistake in having such an able and loyal minister put to death. It seems that he had taken Cromwell for granted all those years. His chief minister had been such a brilliant and able administrator that he had made it look easy. Perhaps, too, the king assumed that someone would step into his shoes, just as Cromwell had with Wolsey’s. It was a bitter realisation for him that there was nobody even approaching Cromwell’s ability. Just a few short months after the chief minister’s execution, the French envoy reported that the king “sometimes even reproaches [his ministers] with Cromwell’s death, saying that, upon light pretexts, by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he had ever had”.

Tracy Borman is an author and historian specialising in the Tudor period.  A new edition of her biography, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, is published by Hodder & Stoughton and out now.

This article was first published in February 2020

]]> The truth about Thomas Cromwell https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/the-truth-about-thomas-cromwell/ Tue, 14 Apr 2020 09:10:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/the-truth-about-thomas-cromwell/ For most of the five centuries since Henry VIII sent his chief minister to the scaffold on 28 July 1540, historians have cast Thomas Cromwell as a scheming, rapacious vulture. But does this characterisation really do him justice? Writing for BBC History Magazine, Diarmaid MacCulloch investigates… Poor Thomas Cromwell. He has rarely been given a good press – even in the triumphant island story as told by the champions of Protestant England, in which the pope’s deluded followers were repeatedly put in their place so the British empire could flourish and spread Christian civilisation far and wide. In that telling, Henry VIII receives all the credit for leading Tudor England in walking tall – and he had the glamour that his most effective minister notoriously lacked.

The various surviving copies of Hans Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell – showing him as pudgy and watchful, expensively but plainly dressed – are distinctly unflattering to this busy royal minister, to the extent that I wonder if vengeful Catholics in Queen Mary Tudor’s reign destroyed any pictures that presented him in a kinder light.

Cromwell has long been unpopular among many Roman Catholics. Curiously, he has also been derided by many Anglicans who have turned away from their Protestant Reformation heritage and waxed sentimental about England’s monastic ruins – Cromwell’s central role in the destructive Dissolution can’t be denied. In his days, many politicians and notables hated him out of sheer snobbery: how, they must have felt, could talent and efficiency possibly be allowed to snatch power from good breeding and ancient pedigree? So, from several different points of view, Cromwell ends up being seen as a thug in a doublet, doing the bidding of Henry VIII, the Tudor Stalin.

• Who was the real Thomas Cromwell? Your guide to Henry VIII's "faithful servant"

Learning from letters

In two brilliant novels, with another to come, Hilary Mantel has worked to alter this dismal picture. She has done in semi-fictional style what I seek to do, first in an hour-long television documentary, then in a full-scale historical biography: recapture the complexity of this fascinating, self-taught man.

Cromwell emerged from the back alleys of rural Putney (his father really was a thug) to become Earl of Essex, one of the oldest noble titles in the realm – yet in the moment of this greatest triumph, he was destroyed.

There is a difficulty in ever writing Cromwell’s life story properly. His papers survive in abundance, thanks to a political accident: at his arrest they were seized from his filing system, and have stayed in government hands ever since – but they amount to the contents of his in-tray, rather than letters he wrote himself. I suggest that this is the result of a quick decision made by his household when he was arrested: they burned the out-tray because that is where the incriminating material would be. It would, they believed, be much harder for Cromwell’s enemies surrounding the king to build an accusation on letters written by others.

• What sort of relationship did Mary Tudor have with Thomas Cromwell?

Once we try to penetrate the silence, a rather different Cromwell emerges. His intimate friendship with thoughtful, carefully candid Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, is telling: I have deduced from surviving archives that in the 1530s they were so much a team that Cranmer kept a special file just for their exchanges of letters, separate from other correspondence. During his service to Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s, Cromwell became a quiet friend to the Thames Valley Lollards, a group of religious dissenters that questioned the established church.

Over the following decade, when Henry VIII effectively granted him Wolsey’s powers in the church, he became a busy and effective promoter of the new religion and its enthusiasts. And in his latter years, he became a discreet organiser of contacts with the most radical European mainstream Reformations, in Zurich and northern Switzerland – far beyond anything the king could have approved, and highly dangerous for him. That was not the action of a political cynic.

Talented upstart

When members of the Catholic aristocracy persuaded Henry VIII that Cromwell should die, the clincher for the king was the accusation that Cromwell was a heretic. So in Henry’s mind, Cromwell was executed for the right reason – heresy. But he also died because members of the English nobility were affronted that this talented upstart usurped what they regarded as their natural place in government.

• Tracy Borman explores the downfall of Thomas Cromwell

By 1539–40 Cromwell was increasingly unwell and his political judgment faltered, giving his enemies the opportunity that they had lacked in his brief period of unrivalled power just a couple of years earlier.

Cromwell made four terrible mistakes in his last year of life. One is very well known, two are less so, and one has previously been missed altogether. First, and famously, it was Cromwell’s idea to marry the widower king to the German princess Anne of Cleves, believing that it would draw England closer to the German Reformation – religion again! But it would also stop Henry marrying an English nobleman’s daughter – and the upstart feared the toffs.

If only Cromwell had listened to Archbishop Cranmer’s opposition, and not placed his faith in over-ingenious portrait-painters and the arts of the Tudor advertising industry, who had exaggerated the bride-to-be’s charms. As it was, when the king met Anne of Cleves, it was a disaster: he could not bear the sight of her (couldn’t get an erection, his lawyers claimed).

Fatal mistakes

That was a ghastly error, but worse was to come – the element in the story previously forgotten. Thetford Priory in Norfolk was the family burial place of the dukes of Norfolk. Thomas Howard, the third duke, was a crusty old religious traditionalist who wanted to save the priory from dissolution and refound it as a college of priests, singing masses for his family’s souls for ever.

Thetford hung on longer than almost any other monastery in England but eventually, in February 1540, it closed – and there was no college in the offing. Cromwell, absurdly over-confident, had made sure that the priory was simply shut down, and the duke’s plans were frustrated. Howard had to move some of his family tombs and ancestral bones 35 miles to Framlingham in Suffolk. Imagine the feelings of England’s senior nobleman at this insult to his family.

Two dark coincidences then made matters even worse. First, in March 1540, came the death of Henry Bourchier, 15th Earl of Essex – an aristocrat of equal standing to the Duke of Norfolk. Cromwell decided that it would be agreeable if he himself became Earl of Essex, one of the oldest titles in England – and so, within a few weeks, he was.

A week after Bourchier’s death came that of John de Vere, the 15th Earl of Oxford, another ultra blue-blood who had been hereditary Great Chamberlain of England, one of the oldest royal offices in the land – which Cromwell hoovered up, too. Again, imagine how the Duke of Norfolk felt – that Putney boy does it again!

So the Duke of Norfolk had both the motive and, with Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, the opportunity to strike back. The king felt humiliated, and Cromwell was to blame. Henry was always easy to influence, if one knew how, and became very ready to listen to those who gave him a reason to cut Cromwell down to size – not least the fact that his chief minister had pushed ahead with religious change behind his back. The king was easily persuaded that Cromwell was a heretic and a traitor.

It was a time of wild swings of fortune, with religious conservatives and Protestants both being imprisoned in turn. The wildest swing of all came on 10 June 1540 when Cromwell was arrested as he turned up for a routine meeting of the Privy Council. (The arrest was performed with relish by the Duke of Norfolk, who personally tore the Garter badge of St George from Cromwell’s clothing.)

• Listen | Diarmaid MacCulloch discusses his book on the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell

The upstart’s legacy

Cromwell was sent to the Tower of London and never saw the king again. If he had, he might have been saved, but his letters begging for an audience were ignored – perhaps Henry never saw them. Parliament voted him legally dead (even Cranmer voted for that), and soon he was actually dead, executed on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540.

Within a few months, Henry was lamenting that his courtiers had deceived him, saying, according to the French ambassador, that “on pretexts of some trivial faults… they had made several false accusations to him, as a result of which he had put to death the most faithful servant he had ever had”.

Too late for Cromwell the man, but not too late for his legacy. The young Protestant bureaucrats that he had trained in the 1530s went on to rule Reformation England: Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil lived until 1579 and 1598 respectively, becoming the statesmen who steered the triumphant Protestantism of Elizabethan England.

That is the measure of Cromwell’s greatness, and of the way in which he shaped the future of these islands. We need to put Cromwell back in the centre of Tudor England’s picture. We should question if he really was “an ambitious and totally corrupt statesman… an opportunistic jack-the-lad, a ruffian on the make,” as his recent biographer, Robert Hutchinson, labelled him.

I must emphasise that, though there’s much that seems modern in Cromwell’s story – high political infighting in a Tudor version of the satirical comedy The Thick of It – we should realise that the Tudors viewed politics through two lenses that have been removed from the eyes of modern British politicians. We don’t do God, while they did God all the time. And we don’t worry too much about family trees and heraldry; Cromwell’s story illustrates that the Tudors were obsessed by them both.

So Cromwell died first for being a man of the Protestant Reformation, and second for not having an ancient pedigree – effectively insulting and upstaging those who did, just because he existed and flourished. He was the victim of the blue-bloods who found it insufferable that a man should govern just because he had talent.

So I present to you Thomas Cromwell: a cool, self-contained idealist who wanted to shape the kingdom of England in the name of a new religion – the remaker of this realm. I have given you a taste of some of the revelations to be found in the archives, but you will discover many more in my BBC Two documentary. And you may be most surprised by some of the locations at which we chose to shoot. For example, did you know that a complete Tudor palace hides in the middle of Croydon?

Well, you do now!

This article was published in the March 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine

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