The increasing influence of conservative churchmen around Henry was an implicit threat to the dominance of Thomas Cromwell, who strove to counter it by pursuing his own favourite policy: alliance with the Protestant princes of Germany. A somewhat flattering portrait by Hans Holbein helped him convince Henry to take a new bride from one of those princely dynasties, that of the Duke of Cleves. The marriage which might have saved Cromwell’s career actually ended it. Although Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves was celebrated on 6 January 1540, it was never consummated. Henry found his new wife unattractive, and the embarrassment of impotence in her company led him to reject with equal ferocity the marriage and its architect. Worked on by the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, who at some point waved before his eyes the shapely person of the duke’s teenage niece, Catherine Howard, Henry set in motion the wheels of divorce. Vengeful as ever, the full force of his wrath fell upon Cromwell, who as recently as April 1540 had been rewarded with elevation to the earldom of Essex.
Anne of Cleves, wife number four. Henry VIII aggrievedly observed that she was not as attractive as he had been led to believe, leaving him unable to consummate the marriage.
The decade of revolution in Henry’s reign was brought to a close by Thomas Cromwell’s dramatic arrest in the Council Chamber on 10 June 1540. The pace of religious change had already slowed almost to a halt, and the debacle of the Cleves marriage temporarily reduced Cromwell’s credibility to zero. That window of opportunity was all his enemies needed to persuade the king that he had been fomenting heresy and meditating treason. The latter charge was of course absurd, but there was enough substance in the former, and the reliable Richard Rich was as willing as ever to see to the legal niceties. Cromwell was convicted by attainder without trial - a crime which was ironically suited to the punishment he had so often meted out to others - and went to his death on 28 July 1540 protesting his loyalty and his orthodoxy (although his confession of belief in fact included nothing which a convinced Lutheran could not have said in perfect good faith).
The fall of Cromwell precipitated one of the defining achievements of the reign of Henry YIII, the formal establishment of the Privy Council as a department of government. Although in some ways a traditional institution (kings had always had their councils), and although in others a creation of Thomas Cromwell’s (the name ‘Privy Council’ first appears in the 1530s, notably when Henry YIII was refuting the Pilgrims’ charge that he was surrounded with baseborn, evil councillors), the Privy Council only came into its own with Cromwell’s fall. Henry never again allowed one man to dominate policy as Wolsey and Cromwell had done in their day. The Privy Council was to become the primary instrument for the formulation and execution of the sovereign’s will for the next century or so. In the immediate term, its significance perhaps lay more in the new rules of courtly precedence which were associated with it. Although men of noble birth were frequently recruited to the council and held high office under the Crown, and although gentlemen who worked their way up to the council in royal service were often rewarded with peerages, Henry YIII laid down rules by which the highest officers of royal government and household as such took precedence over nobles, whatever their rank. This was in effect to underline the point he had made to the Pilgrims in 1536, that nobility derived from and depended upon the Crown, and that its ultimate criterion was not so much birth as service to the king.
On 8 August 1540, less than a fortnight after Cromwell’s execution, Henry YIII married Catherine Howard. Unfortunately for Norfolk and Gardiner, the weapon which they had deployed against Cromwell was, though powerful, unstable, and in the end blew up in their faces. Catherine may have inflamed the passion of the middle-aged king, but his feelings were not entirely reciprocated. During their summer progress in 1541, which for the first and only time in the reign took the royal household to the north (reaching York by way of Lincoln, Gainsborough and Pontefract), she began to hanker for the company of one of her old friends and suitors, Thomas Culpeper, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Their nocturnal assignations were relatively discreet, and although it would only have been a matter of time, they had not in fact become lovers when the court returned to the south in autumn. They were not to get the chance. It was shortly after Henry YIII’s return to Hampton Court that Archbishop Cranmer shared with his sovereign, by means of a
Catherine Howard, the fifth wife, who was not entirely satisfied by the attentions of her aging husband.
Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife. to Queen Catherine’s comfortable relationship with Henry, her quiet sympathy for the cause of ‘evangelical’ (i. e. Protestant) religion helped retain for it some breathing space in the otherwise hostile religious atmosphere of Henry’s declining years.
Tactful letter, some extremely disturbing news: namely, that Catherine had enjoyed intimate sexual relationships with two young men before her marriage to Henry. Her frank confession of the youthful indiscretions which a delicate but thorough investigation soon brought to light might just have saved her. But once the hounds caught the scent of her summer dalliance with Culpeper, her fate was sealed. They had not become lovers, but her record made it impossible to credit the innocence of their intentions (which they made no attempt to maintain). Catherine was condemned for treason by act of attainder, and was beheaded on 13 February 1542. The act included a declaration that it was treason for a woman to marry the king if she had had premarital sex. As the Imperial ambassador caustically observed, this rather narrowed the field.
It was a year and a half later, on 12 June 1543, that Henry took his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, a mature but still relatively young widow (it was premarital sex, not previous marriage, that constituted treason), the sister of one of his Privy Councillors, William Parr. It is worth remarking that, for all Henry’s claims of excellent sexual health at the time of his marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1540, neither of his last two wives became pregnant by him. Yet Catherine Parr, who was to marry Thomas Seymour with almost indecent haste after the king’s death, was soon with child by her third husband. Henry’s health was generally worsening throughout the 1540s. He was persistently troubled by a festering sore in his leg, and was massively overweight. It was in this context that, in 1544, Henry put through his final Act of Succession, which established the succession, in order, on Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, tacitly passed over the Scottish line of the Stuarts, descended from his elder sister, Margaret, and provided that, in the event of his own line failing, the succession should pass to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, who had married the Duke of Suffolk.
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