Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII. Gareth Russell

      Renounce the thought of greatness, tread on fate,

      Sigh out a lamentable tale of things

      Done long ago, and ill done; and when sighs

      Are wearied, piece up what remains behind

      With weeping eyes, and hearts that bleed to death.

      – John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy (1628)

      A benefit of being executed was that one avoided any chance of the dreaded mors improvisa, a sudden death by which a Christian soul might be denied the opportunity to make their peace. So when Thomas Cromwell was led out to his death on 28 July 1540, he had the comfort of knowing that he had been granted the privilege of preparing to stand in the presence of the Almighty. The day was sweltering, one in a summer so hot and so dry that no rain fell on the kingdom from spring until the end of September, but the bulky hard-bitten man from Putney who had become the king’s most trusted confidant and then his chief minister1 walked cheerfully towards the scaffold.2 He even called out to members of the crowd and comforted his nervous fellow prisoner Walter, Lord Hungerford, whose sanity was questionable, and who had been condemned to die alongside him for four crimes, all of which carried the death penalty. Firstly, he had allegedly committed heresy, in appointing as his private chaplain a priest rumoured to remain loyal to the pope. Secondly, he was accused of witchcraft, by consorting with various individuals, including one named ‘Mother Roche’, to use necromancy to guess the date of the king’s death. Treason was alleged through the appointment of his chaplain and his meeting with the witch, which constituted a crime against the king’s majesty. He was also found guilty of sodomy, ‘the abominable and detestable vice and sin of buggery’, made a capital crime in 1534, in going to bed with two of his male servants, men called William Master and Thomas Smith.3

      Rumours, fermenting in the baking heat and passed between courtiers, servants, merchants and diplomats who had nothing to do but sweat and trade in secrets, had already enlarged the scope of Lord Hungerford’s crimes. The French ambassador reported back to Paris that the condemned man had also been guilty of sexually assaulting his own daughter. It was whispered that Hungerford had practised black magic, violating the laws of Holy Church that prohibited sorcery as a link to the Devil. Others heard that Hungerford’s true crime had been actively plotting the murder of the king.4 None of those charges were ever mentioned in the indictments levelled against Hungerford at his trial, but the man dying alongside him had perfected this tactic of smearing a victim with a confusing mélange of moral turpitudes guaranteed to excite prurient speculation and kill a person’s reputation before anyone was tempted to raise a voice in their defence.

      The hill where they now stood had been the site of the finales to some of Cromwell’s worst character assassinations. It had been there, four years earlier on another summer’s day, that George Boleyn had perished before similarly large crowds after Cromwell arranged a trial that saw him condemned to death on charges of incest and treason. The details of Boleyn’s alleged treason had been kept deliberately vague during the trial, while the prosecution’s fanciful descriptions of his incestuous seduction of his sister had been excruciatingly, pornographically vivid. Boleyn, as handsome as Adonis and proud as Icarus, had defended himself so well against the accusations there had been bets that he would be acquitted.5 When he was not, when he was condemned to die alongside four other men two days later, no one could risk speaking out for a man found guilty of committing such a bestial act.

      Boleyn had died in sight of the Tower’s brooding walls, its cupolas and fortifications twin testaments to the inescapably neurotic nature of power. Within the Tower’s sheltered courtyards, George’s Boleyn’s sister, Queen Anne, was executed in a more private setting, before a carefully vetted crowd of around one thousand, which was tiny in comparison to that allowed to gather beyond the walls to watch her brother perish – and now Cromwell and Walter Hungerford.6 Like Thomas More before her, another political heavyweight in whose destruction Cromwell had been intimately involved, Anne Boleyn had embraced the sixteenth century’s veneration for the ars moriendi – the art of dying.

      The veil between life and death was made permeable by the teachings of Christianity. Everywhere one looked, there was proof of society’s lively fascination with the next life. Death was the great moral battleground between one’s strengths and weaknesses; the supreme test came when the finite perished and the eternal began. To die well, in a spirit of resignation to the Will of God and without committing a sin against hope by despairing of what was to come next, was a goal endlessly stressed to the Faithful in art, sermons, homilies and manuals. Within the great basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris, the tomb of King Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, his queen, showed the couple rendered perfect in the stonemasons’ marble, united atop the monument, their bejewelled hands clasped in prayer, their robes and crowns exquisitely carved; but beneath that sculpture the craftsmen had offered a very different portrait of the royal forms – there, the bodies of the king and queen were shown twisting and writhing in the first stages of putrefaction, their feet bare, their hair uncovered and their flesh pullulating with the onset of corruption.7 Throughout Europe, these cadaver tombs, the transi, were commissioned by the rich and the powerful to show their submission to the final destruction of their flesh and with it the removal of this sinful world’s most potent temptations. In corruption they had been born and so through corruption they could be born again.

      In the sixteenth century, life was precious, truncated at any moment by plague, war or one of a thousand ailments that would be rendered treatable in the centuries to come, and so the people embraced it with a rare zeal. But living well, as Anne Boleyn had noted at her trial, also meant dying well.8 Christians were supposed to die bravely because of the surety of mercy that even the weakest and most sinful was guaranteed by their religion, provided he or she had respected its doctrines and honoured its God. Before they were marched to the hill, Cromwell told Lord Hungerford that ‘though the breakfast which we are going to be sharp, yet, trusting to the mercy of the Lord, we shall have a joyful dinner’.9 To the overwhelming number of Henry VIII’s subjects, Christianity was not a theory, it was not a belief system, it was not one religion among many – it was, more or less, a series of facts, the interpretation of which could be debated, but whose essential truth was inescapable and uncontested. The result of this way of accepting and experiencing their faith was that sixteenth-century Christians often behaved in ways which were paradoxically far more devout but also far more relaxed than their modern-day co-religionists. The line between sinners and the flock was not so clearly delineated, because even the worst members of society were still, in one way or the other, almost certainly believing Christians.