Fall of Thomas Cromwell (1540): Henry VIII's Minister Executed

Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex and for most of the 1530s Henry VIII’s chief minister, was arrested at a meeting of the king’s council on 10 June 1540 and beheaded on Tower Hill on 28 July. The architect of the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries fell within weeks, undone by the failed royal marriage to Anne of Cleves and by powerful enemies at court. He was condemned without trial by an Act of Attainder.

Background: a self-made minister

Cromwell was born in about 1485 in Putney, the son of a tradesman. After an adventurous youth that took him to Italy and the Low Countries as a soldier, merchant and clerk, he became a lawyer and entered the service of Cardinal Wolsey. He survived Wolsey’s fall in 1529 and joined the king’s council.

From about 1532 he was Henry’s leading minister. He steered through Parliament the laws that made the king Supreme Head of the Church, ran the Church as royal vicegerent from 1535 and organised the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He also played a central part in the fall of Anne Boleyn in 1536. He was rewarded with high office, a barony and, in April 1540, the earldom of Essex.

The Anne of Cleves marriage

After the death of Jane Seymour in October 1537, Henry was free to remarry. Fearing an alliance between the Emperor Charles V and King Francis I of France against England, Cromwell promoted a match with Anne, sister of Duke William of Cleves, a German ruler opposed to the emperor and sympathetic to reform.

Henry agreed, partly on the strength of a portrait by Hans Holbein. But when he met Anne at Rochester on 1 January 1540 he was disappointed, and he went through with the wedding at Greenwich on 6 January only reluctantly. The marriage was never consummated. Meanwhile the diplomatic reasons for it faded as tensions between Charles V and Francis I revived.

Enemies at court

Cromwell had many enemies. Traditional nobles such as Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, resented the power of a low-born minister, while conservative bishops led by Stephen Gardiner of Winchester distrusted his religious views. The Act of Six Articles of 1539 had already shown that Henry was moving back towards traditional doctrine.

In the spring of 1540 a public quarrel between Gardiner and the Protestant preacher Robert Barnes, a friend of Cromwell, damaged the minister further. Norfolk also had a personal weapon: the king was attracted to his young niece, Catherine Howard. If Henry wanted to be free of Anne of Cleves, Cromwell, who had arranged the marriage, was the obvious scapegoat.

Arrest, attainder and execution

On 10 June 1540 Cromwell was arrested at a council meeting at Westminster. According to contemporary reports, Norfolk tore the insignia of the Order of the Garter from his neck before he was taken to the Tower. He was accused of treason and of heresy, including supporting radical Protestants and protecting heretics.

There was no trial. Parliament passed an Act of Attainder declaring him guilty, which received the royal assent at the end of June. From the Tower Cromwell wrote letters to the king, providing evidence that helped Henry annul his marriage to Anne of Cleves, and ending one of them with repeated pleas for mercy. Convocation declared the marriage void on 9 July.

Cromwell was beheaded on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. In his speech on the scaffold he declared that he died in the Catholic faith, a phrase that historians interpret in different ways. According to the chronicler Edward Hall, the executioner did his work clumsily. On the same day Henry married Catherine Howard. Two days later Robert Barnes and two other Protestants were burned, while three Catholics who had denied the royal supremacy were hanged, drawn and quartered.

Consequences and legacy

Cromwell’s fall left the king’s council dominated for a time by Norfolk and Gardiner, though Henry soon showed that he would not let any one faction control him. Catherine Howard was herself executed in February 1542. According to the French ambassador, by 1541 Henry was complaining that he had been tricked into killing his most faithful servant.

Historians have long debated Cromwell’s achievement. G. R. Elton argued that he carried out a “Tudor revolution in government”, creating modern bureaucratic institutions; later scholars have questioned how far this was planned. Diarmaid MacCulloch has emphasised his sincere evangelical faith. Popular culture has been shaped by Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, which present him with unusual sympathy.

Timeline

• 1537, 24 October: death of Jane Seymour.
• 1539: the Act of Six Articles is passed; Henry agrees to marry Anne of Cleves.
• 1540, 6 January: Henry marries Anne of Cleves at Greenwich.
• 1540, 17 April: Cromwell created Earl of Essex.
• 1540, 10 June: Cromwell arrested at a council meeting.
• 1540, late June: the Act of Attainder receives royal assent.
• 1540, 9 July: the marriage to Anne of Cleves declared void.
• 1540, 28 July: Cromwell beheaded on Tower Hill; Henry marries Catherine Howard.

Why it matters

The fall of Thomas Cromwell showed how dangerous service to Henry VIII could be, even for the most powerful minister in England. It ended the career of the man who had done most to carry out the English Reformation and marked a conservative turn in the last years of Henry’s reign.