CHAPTER 22
ON DECEMBER 27, 1539, ANNE OF CLEVES ARRIVED IN ENGLAND. “The day,” the duke of Suffolk reported to Cromwell, “was foul and windy, with much hail [that blew] continually in her face.”1 She journeyed to Canterbury and then to Sittingbourne and Rochester, where she remained for New Year’s Eve. The following day, a party of six gentlemen went unannounced into Anne’s chamber at Rochester. All were disguised, yet one was the king. He had been scheduled to meet Anne formally at Blackheath on January 3, but curiosity had gotten the better of him.2 “How ye liked the Lady Anne?” Cromwell asked the king on his return to Greenwich. “Nothing so well as she was spoken of,” Henry replied, adding, “if [he] had known as much before as [he] then knew, she should not have come within this realm.” He now asked his minister, “What remedy?” To which Cromwell responded, “I know none, he was very sorry therefore.”3
The twenty-four-year-old was not the beauty that Hans Holbein’s portrait, sent to England before her arrival, had portrayed. Henry immediately questioned her virginity, observing that she had the fuller figure expected of an older woman rather than the slender figure of a maid. He believed she was already married to François, heir to the Duchy of Lorraine, to whom she had been betrothed at the age of twelve.
The marriage was postponed while Cromwell investigated whether the Lorraine match had been properly broken off. Two days later, with assurances from the Cleves ambassadors, Henry reluctantly resumed preparations for the wedding. Francis I and Charles were celebrating the New Year together in Paris, and Henry needed to maintain the alliance with the German princes. As he later declared, “If it were not … for fear of making a ruffle in the world—that is, to be a means to drive her brother into the hands of the Emperor, and the French King’s hands, being now together, I would never have married her.” 4
When Anne made a solemn declaration before the Privy Council “that she was free from all contracts,” Henry urgently petitioned his chief minister. “Is there none other remedy,” he questioned, “but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?” Cromwell hurried away without offering a reply.5 Within a few months the cost of Cromwell’s blunder would become clear.
AT EIGHT IN the morning on Tuesday, January 6, 1540, the Feast of the Epiphany, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, celebrated the marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich. Both Mary and Elizabeth attended the service.6 The next morning, Cromwell visited the king in the Privy Chamber. “How liked the Queen?” he asked, to which Henry replied, “Surely, as ye know, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse. For I have felt her belly and her breasts, and thereby, as I can judge, she be no maid.” The king continued, “[The] which struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in matters…. I have left her as good a maid as I found her.”7
For the next six months, despite repeated efforts, the marriage remained unconsummated. As Henry explained to his physician, “He found her body in such sort disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him. Yea, [it] rather minister[ed] matter of loathsomeness unto [him], that [he] could not in any wise overcome that loathsomeness, nor in her company be provoked or stirred to that act.”8 Now he lamented the fact that he would never have any more children for “the comfort of the realm, if he should continue in marriage with this lady.” Cromwell responded that “he would do his utmost to comfort and deliver his Grace of his affliction.”9
By the summer, Henry had decided to sever his ties with the German princes and to seek an annulment. He could afford to break the alliance. The Franco-imperial entente had become strained, and another phase in the Habsburg-Valois conflict had begun. Some weeks before, he had started an affair with one of Anne’s maids, Katherine Howard, a niece of the duke of Norfolk. “The King is,” the French ambassador reported, “so amorous of her that he knows not how to make sufficient demonstrations of his affection.” He “caresses her more than he did the others” and lavished her with jewels.10
As Henry’s infatuation with Katherine grew, his calls for a divorce from Anne became more strident. The leading religious conservatives, Norfolk and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, saw an opportunity to install a queen supportive of their cause and effecting the downfall of their great enemy, Thomas Cromwell. As Marillac wrote, “The King, wishing by all possible means to lead back religion to the way of truth, Cromwell, as attached to the German Lutherans, had always favoured the doctors who preached such erroneous opinions and hindered those who preached the contrary.” Having been recently warned that he was working “against the intention of the King and of the acts of Parliament,” Cromwell had “betrayed himself.”11
When letters from the Lutheran lords of Germany were found in his house, the chief minister’s fate was sealed. “The King was thereby so exasperated against him that he would no longer hear him spoken of, but rather desired to abolish all memory of him as the greatest wretch ever born in England.”12
AT 3 P.M. ON SATURDAY, June 10, 1540, Cromwell was arrested in the Council Chamber by the duke of Norfolk. His goods were seized and confiscated, and he was sent to the Tower, charged with heresy and treason and of plotting to marry Mary.13 He had lost Henry’s confidence, and the king had disavowed him.
From the Tower Cromwell wrote to Henry protesting his innocence and begging for mercy, signing himself “with the heavy heart and trembling of your Highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner and poor slave.”14 He was condemned on June 29 as “the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor against your royal person and the imperial crown of this realm that had ever been known in your whole reign.” Cromwell was paying the price for the failed match, for his reformist inclinations, and for the rise in ascendancy of the conservative Howard family. He was kept alive only to recount all that he knew about the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves and of Henry’s conversations with him as to the nonconsummation of the marriage.
On June 24, Anne of Cleves was ordered to go to Richmond Palace, ostensibly to avoid an outbreak of the plague.15 The convocation of the clergy was instructed to examine the king’s marriage after doubts had been raised about its validity. The investigation concluded that Anne had been precontracted to the prince of Lorraine, that the king had wed her against his will, and that the whole nation desired the king to have more heirs. On the twenty-fifth, the king’s commissioners visited Anne and informed her that her marriage was invalid.16 She consented without protest, agreeing to the divorce proceedings and confirming that the marriage had not been consummated.17 Her acquiescence was rewarded: she was endowed with lands to the value of £4,000 annually and Richmond and Bletchingley manors, and was thereafter known as “the old Queen, the King’s sister.” On July 9, the convocation found their marriage to have been unlawful given its nonconsummation, her precontract with the duke of Lorraine, and the fact that Henry had acted under compulsion. Four days later, Parliament confirmed the verdict and Henry was declared free to remarry.
On July 28, Cromwell was finally taken to the scaffold on Tower Green. Maintaining his innocence to the end, he denied that he had supported heretics but accepted the judgment of the law. He knelt, prayed, and, laying his head on the block, “patiently suffered the stroke of the ax,” it taking a number of attempts to remove his head. Two days later, three well-known reformers, Robert Barnes, William Jerome, and Thomas Garret, were burned as heretics at Smithfield. At the stake, Barnes utterly denied his guilt: he was condemned to die, “but wherefore I cannot tell.”18 The others made similar declarations. On the same day, three defendants of the old faith were put to death: Edward Powell; Richard Fetherstone, Mary’s former schoolmaster; and Thomas Abel, Katherine of Aragon’s chaplain, were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. All had refused to acknowledge the Act of Supremacy. The heretics and traitors were dragged facedown on sheep hurdles through the streets of London, a heretic and a papist strapped to each.19 The king would not tolerate opposition of any kind. A major inquisition for heresy now began.