Crown of Thistles by Porter Linda

Author:Porter, Linda [Porter, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780230771697
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

YET DESPITE the richness of court life and his own personal splendour, unforgettably captured in the portrait by Hans Holbein that has passed into national consciousness as our image of this man of overwhelming presence and sheer physical bulk, all was not well in England as the decade of the 1540s dawned. The previous two years had been full of alarm. There were fears of foreign invasion, of a deadly threat to English shores posed by the unlikely temporary rapprochement of Charles V and Francis I, who might target Henry VIII as a heretic without legitimate rule. To safeguard his coastline, Henry embarked on a massive programme of fortification. The greatest of his coastal forts, at Deal in Kent, can still be seen. At home, Henry moved against the remaining upholders of the White Rose, the descendants of Edward IV’s brother, the duke of Clarence, when he quashed the so-called Exeter conspiracy. Abroad, he looked for allies elsewhere – among the Protestant princes of Germany who continued to disrupt the Holy Roman Empire and plague Charles V. Encouraged by Thomas Cromwell, Henry embarked on the fiasco of his fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves (who was actually a Catholic, but whose brother was an important player in German politics), a lady for whom he seems to have felt it impossible to feel any sexual attraction. Henry was clearly humiliated by his inability to consummate the marriage and a humiliated king was a dangerous proposition. Anne of Cleves, a discreet and canny woman, survived the debacle of her speedy divorce unscathed but Cromwell, the faithful servant who had helped Henry VIII transform England in the 1530s, did not. As with Anne Boleyn, there are many things still unclear about the fall of Cromwell but, again, Henry’s personal animosity, so unpredictable and so deadly when aroused, seems to have played a major part. Perhaps he really did believe the charges of heresy brought against Cromwell. There may have been a genuine parting of the ways for them over the pace of religious reform and, if so, it was not an argument Cromwell was going to win. He had seemed the perfect servant, but, like all masters, Henry viewed servants as dispensable. For whatever mix of reasons, Cromwell, a remarkable man whose character still eludes historians as it may have eluded contemporaries, went to the block in July 1540.

In Scotland, James V was also getting rid of opponents and strengthening his rule during these years. There were three high-profile cases, beginning with the trial and execution of the Master of Forbes in July 1537 and culminating with the death of Hamilton of Finnart three years later. Though James’s record of reprisals is nothing like that of his uncle, there was a vindictiveness in his treatment of at least one of these victims that may be perfectly explicable when one considers the king’s past (and the accepted punishments of the time) but it still had the power to shock contemporaries. Within two weeks of

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