‘I will be happy to serve you, sir,’ he said at last. And then he did something he had never done before. He bowed.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Come, then, let’s go to Chancery Lane. See if we can bring a little order into this wicked world. A tiny bit.’
We walked through Temple Gardens. Ahead lay Chancery Lane. Beyond that Smithfield, where the fires would be lit now. Behind us the river, flowing to London Bridge where Cromwell’s head stood fixed on its stake. Between Smithfield and the river the roiling city, ever in need of justice and absolution.
HISTORICAL NOTE
By the summer of 1540, the hottest of the sixteenth century, Thomas Cromwell’s position as Henry VIII’s chief minister was under threat. The king had repudiated Rome and declared himself head of the Church eight years before and had at first welcomed reformist measures. The dissolution of the monasteries, masterminded by Cromwell, had brought him vast wealth and Henry had allowed Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer much latitude in ending Latin ceremonies and printing the Bible in English for the first time.
By the late 1530s, however, the tide was turning. Henry’s innate religious conservatism was reasserting itself and he was afraid that the overturning of the old religious hierarchy might turn into a challenge to the secular class structure, as had happened in parts of Germany. The religious edicts of 1539 began a process of doctrinal backpedalling.
England, moreover, was now isolated in Europe and the pope was urging the main Catholic powers, France and Spain, to unite and reconquer the heretical island for Roman Catholicism. There was genuine fear of invasion and huge sums were spent in training young men in arms, fortifying the south coast, and building up the navy.
Cromwell sought to strengthen both reform at home and England’s military position abroad by marrying the king (a widower since his third wife Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth in 1537) to a princess from one of the states associated with the German Protestant League. However, his choice, Anne of Cleves, was a disaster. The king disliked her on sight and declared himself unable to have carnal relations with her. Although he had approved the match, Henry VIII always sought someone else to blame for his problems and now he blamed Cromwell. To make matters worse for the chief minister, an incipient Franco-Spanish alliance broke down as the two Catholic powers resumed their traditional hostilities and the threat of invasion receded.
Meanwhile the king, aged nearly fifty, had become infatuated with Catherine Howard, the teenage niece of the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk headed the religious conservatives at court and had long been Cromwell’s most dangerous enemy. When the king sought to divorce the newly married Anne of Cleves and take Catherine for a fifth wife, Cromwell was caught in a trap. He had previously helped the king rid himself of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, but a Howard queen would inevitably mean a challenge both to his power and to reform. Perhaps, as Shardlake speculates, if Cromwell had helped the king to a divorce he might, just, have saved himself—he had escaped from tight corners before - but he tried to keep the Cleves marriage alive and this was probably the final straw for the king.
Nonetheless, the dramatic suddenness of his arrest at the council table on 10 June 1540 on obviously trumped-up charges of treason surprised contemporaries and has puzzled historians. My story of the Greek Fire fraud as a final nail in Cromwell’s coffin is, of course, entirely imaginary, but it fills a gap. Everybody, including Sir Richard Rich, turned their coats; Secretary Grey is a fictitious character, but there must have been many like him.
Thomas Cromwell was executed on 28 July 1540. Henry divorced Anne of Cleves, who was happy enough to escape marriage to her terrifying husband, and married Catherine Howard in secret the day after Cromwell’s execution - a marriage that only a year later was to end in yet another gruesome tragedy.
The return to Rome, however, did not happen. For the rest of his reign Henry governed without a chief minister, playing one faction off against another. A year after Cromwell’s execution he was complaining that he had been tricked into sacrificing ‘the most faithful councillor I ever had’. In time the Duke of Norfolk too fell from grace.