Cromwell, Government Reform and the Fall, 1534–40

Between 1534 and 1540 Thomas Cromwell rebuilt the machinery of English government, managed the king through three new marriages, and orchestrated the fall of the most famous queen in Tudor history. Then, in the space of three months in the summer of 1540, the same machinery turned on him. He went to the block on Tower Hill on 28 July, three weeks after the king had shed the German bride he had chosen for him, with a conservative faction in command of the Privy Chamber. The story of Cromwell’s last six years is the story of Tudor government modernising under one minister — and then proving, decisively, that the king was still in charge.

The Fall of Anne Boleyn, May 1536

Anne Boleyn had been Cromwell’s political ally during the break with Rome. By spring 1536, that alliance had broken. The two clashed over how monastic wealth should be spent — Anne wanted it directed to education and charity, Cromwell wanted it to fund the crown and to bind gentry buyers to the Reformation. They also disagreed over foreign policy: Anne favoured France, Cromwell wanted reconciliation with Charles V’s empire after Catherine of Aragon’s death in January 1536. Anne had also failed to produce a male heir; her January 1536 miscarriage of a son weighed heavily on Henry.

In late April 1536 Cromwell took action. Five men were arrested on charges of adultery with the queen, including her brother George (incest) and the court musician Mark Smeaton, the only one who confessed — almost certainly under torture. Henry Norris denied everything to the end. Anne was arrested on 2 May, tried at the Tower on 15 May, and convicted by a jury that included her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and her former suitor Henry Percy. Cranmer annulled the marriage on 17 May; Anne was beheaded with a French sword on 19 May 1536. Eleven days later Henry married Jane Seymour.

Jane Seymour and the Birth of Edward, 1537

Jane Seymour was a quiet conservative member of the Privy Chamber who had served both of Henry’s previous wives. Her appeal lay in her gentleness and her conservative religious sympathies, which steadied an exhausted king. She used her influence carefully: most famously interceding to ask for the restoration of the dissolved abbeys at the height of the Pilgrimage of Grace — Henry told her sharply not to meddle in his affairs. On 12 October 1537, after a long labour, she gave birth to a son: Prince Edward, Henry’s long-awaited male heir. Twelve days later, on 24 October, Jane died of puerperal fever. Henry mourned her for years.

Reform of Government and Royal Finance

In the same years Cromwell continued to remake government. Geoffrey Elton called this a ‘Tudor revolution in government’; later historians (John Guy, David Starkey) think the changes were piecemeal. Either way the changes were real. Cromwell turned the office of Principal Secretary into the central coordinating role of Tudor government. He created new revenue departments — the Court of Augmentations to manage monastic income, the Court of First Fruits and Tenths to manage church revenues, the Court of Wards for feudal incomes, and the Court of General Surveyors. Each had a permanent staff and account books separate from the medieval Exchequer.

Cromwell also began the transition from the medieval royal household to a smaller, more formal Privy Council. By 1540 around 19 named councillors met regularly with formal agendas and clerks taking minutes — the predecessor of the modern Cabinet. Whether all of this counts as a ‘revolution’ is debated, but contemporaries certainly noticed: government in 1540 was conducted in writing, through department heads, with parliamentary statute as the engine of policy — very different from the personal monarchy of 1509.

Management of Parliament

Cromwell’s most lasting innovation was his use of parliamentary statute as the engine of state. Between 1532 and 1540 the Reformation Parliament passed legislation of a scope no medieval monarch could have imagined: the Acts in Restraint of Appeals (1533), of Supremacy (1534), of Succession (1534), the two Acts of Dissolution, the Statute of Uses (1536), and the Act of Six Articles (1539). Cromwell drafted bills, lobbied MPs through patronage and persuasion, and managed proceedings on the floor of the Commons. He treated Parliament as a working partner in government, not merely a tax-granting body. The medieval doctrine that the king-in-Parliament was the highest authority in the realm was now operating practice.

The Cleves Marriage Disaster, 1539–40

By 1539, Catholic Europe was reuniting under Pope Paul III’s diplomatic offensive. Charles V and Francis I had signed the Truce of Nice (1538), and Cromwell feared a joint Catholic invasion. His response was a Protestant alliance: a marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves, sister of the Protestant Duke of Cleves on the Lower Rhine. Hans Holbein the Younger was sent to paint her in 1539. Cromwell’s ambassadors enthused over her appearance. Henry, looking at the portrait, agreed.

Anne reached Rochester on New Year’s Eve 1539, and on New Year’s Day Henry made his trademark surprise visit in disguise to greet his future wife. He found her plain-looking, awkward in the language and unsuited to courtly flirtation. The marriage went ahead on 6 January 1540 because cancelling would humiliate the German alliance, but Henry was furious. He told Cromwell that he ‘liked her not’. Within weeks the king was seeking grounds for an annulment. Anne, sensibly, agreed to it; the marriage was declared void on 9 July 1540, and she was rewarded with manors and the title of ‘the king’s sister’.

The Fall, June–July 1540

Cromwell’s enemies moved fast. The Duke of Norfolk, his niece Catherine Howard, and Bishop Stephen Gardiner formed the conservative faction. Through spring 1540 they presented Catherine, a teenage cousin of Anne Boleyn, to the king at Norfolk’s house in Lambeth. Henry was infatuated. By June, with the Cleves marriage looking like a personal humiliation, Henry was prepared to listen to the conservatives’ long-running case against Cromwell — that he was a heretic who had pushed evangelical reform too far, and a low-born minister now elevated above his station as Earl of Essex (April 1540).

On 10 June 1540, at a Privy Council meeting, Norfolk personally tore the Order of the Garter from Cromwell’s neck and accused him of treason and heresy. Cromwell was arrested without trial, denied a hearing, and condemned by Act of Attainder — the same legal weapon he had used against the Nun of Kent and Anne Boleyn. Henry kept him alive long enough to provide a witness statement on the Cleves annulment, then executed him on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540 — the same day Henry married Catherine Howard. The man who had concentrated more power than any commoner in English history died on charges he was given no chance to answer.