Thomas Cromwell's death – a rapid descent from the pinnacle of power

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.

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

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.

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