While searching, he was careful to avoid Catholic candidates. Cromwell's rise to power was directly connected to the fall of Catholicism in England and he wanted to keep England on the path of Protestantism. Therefore, he sought a Protestant ally for Henry VIII. Naturally, his gaze turned to the Protestant states of Germany, birthplace of the Lutheran revolution. Meanwhile, Henry VIII was concerned with more aesthetic matters, sending artists (namely, Hans Holbein the Younger) to France and Milan to paint potential brides. Among those painted was Christina, duchess of Milan (niece of the Holy Roman Emperor); she famously remarked that she would be happy to marry Henry - if she had two heads! Henry also considered Marie de Guise, a widowed cousin of the French King; Marie, however, chose to marry Henry's nephew, James V of Scotland, thus creating a French-Scottish alliance along Henry's troublesome northern border. (Their only child is famous in history as the tragic Mary Queen of Scots).

Cromwell was well aware that - as seemed likely - if France and the Holy Roman Empire ended hostilities, England would be left out in the cold. So he was quite happy when the French and Imperial marriage negotiations fell apart. But as the search wound on, Henry became increasingly desperate for a wife. No doubt he was lonely; also, his court needed a Queen to be complete. A King was not meant to be a bachelor, as every European monarch knew. Finally, Cromwell found a Protestant ally with two available sisters - the Duke of Cleves, whose lands were strategically located and wealthy. He had two sisters not yet wed - Anne and Amelia. As the eldest, Anne was chosen as the possible bride - and Holbein immediately went to Cleves to paint her portrait. This painting would become of paramount importance in the coming year. Henry was determined to have a beautiful wife and specifically asked his various Ambassadors probing questions - does Marie de Guise have wide hips for childbearing? is Christina of Milan pock-marked? does Anne of Cleves play the lute? Holbein's famous portrait of Anne cannot be adequately judged in our time - after all, standards of beauty have changed. However, it is amusing to note that she (rumored to be the ugliest of Henry's wives) is the most attractive by twentieth-century standards.

Anne set sail for England, little realizing what lay ahead. The King, meanwhile, was ecstatic that - after almost three years - he would be a husband again, able to play one of his favorite roles. The entire country was thrilled at the news, in fact, and after Anne arrived, Cromwell finally secured his greatest ambition - an earldom. He was titled Earl of Essex by Henry VIII on 18 Apr 1540, after the marriage was finalized.

During this time, he also attempted to placate the nobility by redistributing lands to the great magnates, providing them with near-autonomous controls of great sections of land. (For example, the Duke of Suffolk traded East Anglian lands for lands in Lincolnshire - the Duke of Norfolk already held lands in Anglia while Lincolnshire needed a strong leader). Earlier, Cromwell had attempted to befriend Henry's oldest child, the stubbornly Catholic Princess Mary. She rebuffed his attention, largely on religious grounds.

Two years of marriage-brokering were often interrupted by rumors of rebellion. The Pilgrimage of Grace had made Henry more sensitive to popular sentiment. While Cromwell searched for a wife, rumors spread that the King planned new taxes. Also, the last remnants of the legitimate Plantagenet line - the Nevilles, Poles, and Courtenays - were suspected of encouraging rebellion - and Henry used this convenient excuse to order more executions. But popular unrest needed to be assuaged in some manner - so Cromwell engineered the passing of the Six Articles at Parliament in Apr 1539. These articles attempted to stamp a more conservative gloss on the Henrician reformation, thus placating conservative European nobles - and the Catholic nations in Europe, now forced to concede Henry was not so great a heretic after all. It was a supreme example of Cromwell's talent for diffusing domestic tension. In effect, it was all talk and no action - it didn't alter the course of the reformation one bit.

Finally, on 6 Oct 1539, the marriage treaty with Cleves was finalized, this was just 2 months after Holbein delivered his portrait. Princess Anne, once betrothed to the Duke of Lorraine, was now destined to be Queen of England. It was the fulfillment of Cromwell's domestic and foreign policies. On 11 Dec, Anne was at Calais waiting for a favorable wind to carry her to Dover. She was there for almost two weeks while Henry waited at Greenwich. Finally, on 27 Dec she landed at Deal - then traveled to Dover and Canterbury before arriving at Rochester on 1 Jan 1540. Henry, desperate to see his bride in person, rushed in disguise to meet her ('to thus nourish love', he told Cromwell).

The meeting was an unmitigated disaster and the beginning of Cromwell's end. The New Year gifts Henry had brought for Anne were delivered the next day by a courier with a brief note of welcome. 'I am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done, and I like her not', the King said ominously; he told Cromwell that Anne was 'nothing so well as she was spoken of' and, if had known the truth of her appearance, she would never have come to England.

The next day, his betrothed arrived in Greenwich and the marriage, scheduled for that day, was delayed for two days while Henry sought escape. But there was none to be had - the Holy Roman Emperor was in Paris meeting with the French King and Henry, locked out by those two great powers, could not risk offending the German princes who approved the union with Anne. They were, after all, his only allies at the moment. So Anne was not sent back and Henry moaned that he must 'put my neck in the yoke'. He wrote to Cromwell, 'My lord, if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing'.

Poor Anne of Cleves - barely able to speak English, in a foreign land, and despised by her intended husband! The confused woman was led to a private marriage ceremony at Greenwich and, then, to her equally humiliating marriage-bed. The union was not consummated, a subject which Henry was firm upon - he spoke openly of how disgusted he was ('struck to the heart' by distaste, he 'left her as good a maid as he found her'.) They lay together for the entire length of their marriage but were never physically intimate. After a few months had passed, the French-Imperial alliance showed signs of cooling and Henry's natural boldness had returned. He wanted out of this fourth marriage - and told Cromwell to arrange it.

What were Cromwell's options? There were two ways to nullify the marriage (in essence, arrange a divorce) - Henry had not consented to the marriage (this was proved by his failure to consummate it) and Anne had not consented to the marriage (this was proved by Anne's precontract to the Duke of Lorraine). Henry had long been concerned with the latter problem - but had been assured that the contract was completely repudiated. Still, the day before his marriage to Anne, he called the Clevian Ambassadors to him and raised the issue. They were astonished (and rightly so) and offered to remain as prisoners in England until the formal repudiation papers were delivered from Cleves. Meanwhile, Thomas Cranmer told the King that Anne could simply swear that the betrothal had been repudiated - no official documents were necessary. His friend Cromwell 'travailed on him [Henry] to pass the matter over'; he hoped that once Henry was married to Anne, the King would resign himself to the marriage.

But instead Henry turned to the precontract when his distaste could not be overcome. On 9 Jul, Parliament declared the marriage null and void and Anne, surprising Henry and the court, was content to be called 'sister' and receive a handsome income and household in England. She had no desire to return to Cleves, where she would remain under her brother's thumb and perhaps married again. (It is likely she found Henry as unattractive as he found her). Henry was so pleased with this unexpected docility that he gave her status second only to his daughters, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth (both of whom came to befriend Anne).

However, the time had come to search for a convenient scapegoat - the person responsible for the disastrous union. Henry railed against his Ambassadors who had so misled him with descriptions of her beauty - though, in truth, the Ambassador's descriptions had been honest. It was soon alleged that Cromwell had kept them from the King, for fear of discouraging the union. Now, Cromwell was arrested on 10 Jun 1540, at 3pm on a Saturday, while at a Privy Council meeting. This was a full month before the marriage was nullified. Henry and Cromwell's enemies were in the midst of finding scapegoats for the marriage, while not yet assured of its outcome. Henry, in a fit of temper and pique, complained bitterly that his minister had betrayed him while trying to further his own influence; the nobility were only too happy to encourage such thoughts. They urged Henry to arrest Cromwell and teach the upstart his final lesson - namely, that it does not pay to mislead a King.

So the captain of the guard arrived at the council chamber and arrested Cromwell, while a table of his enemies looked on. The moment the guard entered the room, Cromwell recognized the danger - and threw his hat upon the table in rage. Norfolk and Southampton stripped his decorations from his robe of state and Cromwell was then escorted to a barge - and, then, the Tower of London. The events which follow are far from clear - Cromwell's fall and execution are among the most mysterious events of Henry VIII's reign and cannot be easily understood. In Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty, my favorite Tudor history, the great L.B. Smith even fails to explain it.

First, if Cromwell fell from favor because of the Cleves marriage (as most believe), why did Henry title him Earl of Essex in Apr 1540 - months after the marriage had been finalized and while negotiations for divorce were underway? Second, if Cromwell was executed because his government policies angered the King (as has been alleged), why did Henry give his voluntary approval to all of Cromwell's legislation? Third, is his enemies were in the ascendancy, why had Henry only recently shown the Duke of Norfolk (Cromwell's great enemy) open favor? After all, Norfolk had only recently been sent abroad on diplomatic work - away from the King.

What are we left with? The charges eventually listed in Cromwell's attainder did not list the above - Cromwell was not accused of misleading Henry on matters of policy, he was not held responsible for the disastrous marriage, and he was not charged with leading England into an unwanted Lutheran alliance. Instead, he was charged with selling export licenses illegally, granting passports and commissions without royal knowledge, freeing people suspected of treason and - of course - that he, base-born and ignoble, had usurped and deliberately misused royal power. Most significantly, however, he was charged with heresy - this charge was the bulk of his attainder and apparently swayed Henry decisively. Norfolk, allied with the Catholic bishops Cromwell had forced from power, engineered this charge. Cromwell, they charged, had encouraged and spread heretical literature, allowed heretics to preach, released them from prison, and allied himself against their enemies. Significantly, it was reported that Cromwell said (in Mar 1539) that, even if Henry turned from Protestantism, 'yet I would not turn, and if the King did turn, and all his people, I would fight in this field in mine own person, with my sword in my hand against him and all other'. That was treason.

Shortly after his arrest, incriminating letters to Lutherans were found in Cromwell's home (placed there by Norfolk probably); they were so inflammatory that the King was outraged. Cromwell's name, Henry swore, would be abolished forever. Cromwell wrote two desperate letters from the Tower (the one that survives is in tatters) - he assured his monarch that he was a good, loyal servant and a faithful Christian. But Henry, surrounded by Cromwell's enemies and - more significantly - newly infatuated with Norfolk's niece, Catherine Howard, would hear nothing. Furthermore, Norfolk was shrewd enough to create a Lutheran conspiracy - three popular reformers, Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret, and William Jerome, were executed just days after Cromwell. None of the men were allowed an open trial. That would allow the public opportunity for them to dispute the false charges. Instead, they were condemned by Act of Attainder, a parliamentary tool which dispensed with justice in favor of speed.

The executed men were also neighbors of Cromwell, which was their only link to the Earl. And they were as innocent as Cromwell of the charges against them - as evidenced by the confusion of contemporary chroniclers. Edward Hall, one of the great chroniclers of Tudor England, could find no real evidence against them although he 'searched to know the truth'.

So Cromwell was executed privately on Tower Green on 28 Jul 1540, still protesting his innocence. He died with dignity - but the whole sordid affair of his death would not rest. For the volatile Henry VIII was soon despairing of his loss, just a few months after he allowed the execution. He raged at his council, accusing them of lying and deliberately destroying his 'most faithful servant'. Cromwell's destruction had been engineered on 'light pretexts' and against the King's wishes. In truth, Henry was a victim as well - of a determined group of nobles and clerics, led by Norfolk, who hated Cromwell and carried the King along on their path of destruction. Events were rapid and deliberately confused. By the time Henry realized what had happened, it was too late. He could only bemoan his loss, while never understanding exactly why it happened.

to Bios Page	to Family Page
to Peerage Page	to Home Page