– The Fate of Henry’s Court –
by Ben Dowell | The Times | December 15, 2024
The curtain — or rather the axe — came down on Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell on BBC1 on Sunday night, in one of the most moving scenes seen on the small screen. As he laid his head on the block on Tower Hill he indulged in a bucolic fantasy, imagining his hoped-for retirement among the beekeeping friars of Launde Abbey in Leicestershire. It was, as anyone with a basic knowledge of history knew, never to be.
Imprisoned in the Tower for most of the sixth and final episode of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell at least got to face up to courtiers such as Richard Rich and the Duke of Norfolk who, in Mantel’s telling, were the chief architects of his downfall.
“When Henry dies and comes to judgment he will answer for me and he will have to account for what he did to Cromwell,” he told Rafe Sadler (Thomas Brodie Sangster), one of the few of his allies to visit him in his quarters — the same room that housed Anne Boleyn before her execution (which Cromwell facilitated). Cromwell’s last words to Sadler suggested that he’d had enough of working for the King. He couldn’t go through the “sleepless toil” and the “axe work” again.
But what of the fate of the other protagonists? Aided by John Guy, history fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, plus the show’s historical adviser, Dr Kirsten Claiden-Yardley, we have the answers.
Rafe Sadler (played by Thomas Brodie Sangster)
Cromwell’s former apprentice and loyal ally survived under Henry VIII after Cromwell’s execution. Later, because he had a role in settling the crown on Lady Jane Grey in 1553, he had to forfeit his estates under Queen Mary after Grey’s execution. But he returned to favour under Elizabeth I, and was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1568. He died in 1587, reportedly as the “richest commoner in England”. He is thought to have kept the famous Holbein portrait of Cromwell safe for posterity.
“He moved up the food chain quite a bit,” Guy says. “He was loyal to the reform cause, loyal to Cromwell all the way through. He was involved in diplomacy, but comes into his own big time as a privy councillor when Elizabeth comes to the throne. And when Mary, Queen of Scots is a prisoner in England, he’s one of the jailers.” How did he survive Henry VIII? “It wasn’t all that difficult … you just professed your loyalty to the king and carried on.”
Stephen Gardiner (Alex Jennings)
The return to England of the preening Bishop of Winchester was the first sign that things weren’t looking good for Cromwell. The wily Catholic conservative, and Cromwell’s implacable opponent, was one of the key architects of the plot that brought him down. After Cromwell’s fall, he became chancellor of Cambridge University but didn’t enjoy the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553). “He spent most of Edward’s reign in the Tower and had a tough time,” Guy says. He was released by Mary I on her succession in 1553, made lord chancellor and lived until 1555 — 15 years after Cromwell’s death. He died peacefully aged 72 in Westminster.
Richard Rich (Tom Mothersdale)
Survived in court and became Edward VI’s lord chancellor. Notably participated in the torture of the “heretic” Anne Askew, turning the rack. He managed to escape the block and live, fairly happily, until he was 70. He has not been treated favourably by posterity, emerging as the chief villain in Robert Bolt’s play about Thomas More, A Man for all Seasons, and also in the Wolf Hall trilogy where his disloyalty is disparagingly presented. “He was an absolute snake,” Claiden-Yardley says.
Thomas Wriothesley (Harry Melling)
He enjoyed a fairly successful career in the privy council after Cromwell’s death and did, as depicted in the books and TV series, take over Cromwell’s house at Austin Friars. “He gets this wonderful, wonderful house,” Guy says. “In fact, he gets it practically the minute Cromwell’s head is off … He seems rather a slippery, nasty piece of work.” For Cromwell sympathisers there is at least the satisfaction in Wriothesley’s premature death in 1550 in circumstances, says Guy, that some say were “natural causes, some say suicide — possibly, rather like Cardinal Wolsey, from over-medication, we cannot be sure. He certainly writes himself out of the script.”
Gregory Cromwell (Charlie Rowe)
Cromwell’s son and another survivor, he had to distance himself from his father to guarantee his life. He married happily and held various offices and was made Baron Cromwell. He managed the estate at Launde Abbey, which his father had bought. His advantage? “He married Jane Seymour’s sister and, for Henry, Jane was the queen who could do no wrong because she gave him a son,” Guy says. “Sometimes you can just slip away and Gregory slipped away.” He sure did, though he died aged 31 of sweating sickness. He rests under a magnificent tomb at Launde.
The Duke of Norfolk (Timothy Spall)
A brute in the TV series, he had a quick temper and was “probably abusive to his wife”, Claiden-Yardley says. His survival was always pretty much guaranteed, even though he introduced his niece Catherine Howard to Henry VIII. “After something like that, you just give up your offices and step back,” Guy says. “But Norfolk came from the conservative nobility who are the bedrock of the society, who, from the monarchist point of view, are the guys that have got the land and can raise the troops.” He was lucky at the end. After losing a factional battle over the succession at the end of Henry’s reign, he was due to be executed. But Henry died and with it the writ of the sentence, though his hot-headed son Henry Howard was executed. “He was saved by the gong,” Guy says. “He managed to die in his bed, aged 81 in 1554. Another injustice, you might think.
Catherine Howard (Summer Richards) and Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford (Lydia Leonard)
A rather pitiable end befell the woman Henry VIII married on the day Cromwell died. Some historians believe Catherine was only aged 19 at her death. And the same fate befell Lady Rochford, who was accused of facilitating Catherine’s alleged infidelity with her distant cousin Thomas Culpeper. Both were decapitated in 1542. It seems likely that Catherine was unfaithful to Henry, but Guy is less sure of Lady Rochford’s complicity. “She was accused of being an accessory and watching the door for Culpeper. I don’t doubt she did it — on that there is firm testimony. Maybe from ill-advised loyalty to the Queen whom she served? The alternative was going to Henry to report Catherine, but who would dare do that?”
Henry VIII (Damian Lewis)
Lived for seven rather unfortunate years after Cromwell’s death. He didn’t fill Cromwell’s post, choosing to be his “own first chief minister”, Guy says, and embroiling himself in hugely costly foreign campaigns. He also grew morbidly obese and probably diabetic, which didn’t help his sex life. In fact he was almost certainly impotent in later life, Guy says. “In the end, he finishes up being hoisted up and down the staircases in Whitehall Palace, between his study and his bedroom.” His kingdom was also close to a “police state” in the later years, Guy says, with the interception of letters commonplace. “He’s an extreme narcissist, he’s the extreme egoist. He’s a sort of a sort of Stalin-like figure, I suppose, without the tech that Stalin had.” His son, the ardent Protestant Edward VI, succeeded him but didn’t live long enough to see his vision realised.
Jenneke (Ellie de Lange)
We cannot tell you what happened to Cromwell’s illegitimate daughter, who travels from Antwerp to meet her father, because she is essentially fictional. According to Claiden-Yardley, we have evidence in the records for one illegitimate daughter, but she is called Jane. “She turns up possibly in Gregory’s household,” Claiden-Yardley says. “At one point, there’s some payments for clothes to her. Ironically she ends up married to a steadfast recusant [someone who refused to attend Church of England services] in Cheshire.” Her reforming father would probably not have approved.
Cromwell (Mark Rylance)
The last we saw of Cromwell in the drama he was putting his head on the block. There is a story that his enemies got the executioner drunk and that he delivered several botched blows but, according to Guy, “we don’t have evidence for that … there are always stories around executions.” His remains were deposited in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower and his head was displayed on a spike on London Bridge for many months. His significance and personality continues to be disputed, with Guy rather eschewing Mantel’s idealised reading and preferring to see him more of an “enforcer … the man who steers things through the system”.
For Claiden-Yardley, Mantel and the books and TV show have “done a great thing in sort of presenting a slightly more rounded view of him, because he has always been this villain … It’s a more nuanced view.” It was reported by the French ambassador that Henry later regretted his decision to execute his “most faithful servant”, though Guy is sceptical of the significance of that utterance, if it was made at all. “Henry is not a great man for sympathy.”
Now that is definitely true.
Read the rest of the original article at The Times