Follow the Money (as ever)
I have been listening to Anton Lesser on the radio this week (best known these days as Qyburn from Game of Thrones) reading Hillary Mantel’s concluding book in her trilogy about Henry VIII’s chamberlain Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light. It is exceptionally good, of course. What can you say? It encouraged me, though, to read up on some of the background. There is a mystery about the downfall of Cromwell. It was so abrupt, so sudden and so unopposed:
Cromwell arrived late for a meeting of the Privy Council on 10 June [1540]. As he entered the chamber, the captain of the guard came forward and arrested him on charges of treason and heresy. Barely had he time to draw breath before he was conveyed to the Tower. Cromwell’s arrest sent shock waves across the country and was soon reported in the courts of Europe.
(Tracy Borman writing for the magazine HistoryExtra)
...on 10 June [1540] [Cromwell] was suddenly arrested at the council table, hustled to the Tower, condemned without a hearing, and kept alive until a belated execution on 28 July only because Henry still wanted his testimony against Anne of Cleves...
(G.R. Elton, 1951, The Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2)
Not even Mantel can quite account for it any more than could Elton. Why was Cromwell turned upon so spectacularly by his enemies and by the king? And why were these men his enemies? There is a lot that doesn’t seem to add up, even in Mantel’s gripping account.
For me the main thing is looking at it from a ‘bigger-picture’ perspective. It makes considerable sense to see Cromwell’s downfall as part of a power struggle between two controlling dynasties. Both Borman and Elton, among others, agree that Cromwell’s real enemy was the Duke of Norfolk. Britannica, in its biography of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, states that “Upon Cromwell’s execution (1540) Norfolk emerged as the second most powerful man in England.” So, personal gain must have figured large as a consideration in his action against Cromwell.
I was most interested to discover that this same Duke of Norfolk had once been promised that he would become heir apparent in the event that Henry VIII did not produce a legitimate heir himself. This was a touchy subject because of Anne Boleyn. The Boleyn family were related directly to the Howards, who were the Duke of Norfolk’s family. So it’s the same extended family insinuating Anne Boleyn into the royal household as who, later, encouraged the marriage of Henry to Catherine Howard. In fact, Catherine even had another Boleyn girl as her lady-in-waiting.
What if the Howards sought to have influence over the throne through their becoming the heir’s family? This was taken away from them when Anne was executed and Henry’s next wife had a boy, Edward. Both these events would have been severe blows to the Howards’ ambitions. Would they have harboured a grudge against Cromwell for Anne’s death? Highly likely! That lost them a lot of power and patronage!
There is controversy about whether Thomas Cromwell concocted a fake accusation against Anne. John Schofield in his book The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell (on page 166) argues against the testimony of the so-called ‘Spanish Chronicle’ (which said he did) because of its palpable inaccuracies later on. He puts his faith instead in the letter Chapuys (Charles V’s ambassador to England) wrote to his master in Spain.
I’m not sure, though, that he translates this thoroughly enough. It is true that Chapuys clearly stated Cromwell had the backing of the king in investigating Anne. ‘Et que a luy avoit este lauctorite de descouvrir et parachever les affaires digelle concubine,’ he wrote. He had the authority to act, which could only have come from the king. Yet, later on in the same missive, Chapuys says that ‘il [Cromwell] se mist a fantasier et conspirer le dict affaire...’ Cromwell ‘fantasied’ and ‘conspired’ the case against Anne? That’s what the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador made of it. Schofield ignores this last part of this key sentence (probably because, as he says, it is incomplete) but Chapuys goes on to tell that ‘one of the things that put him [Cromwell] in suspicion and animates [him] to investigate the case...’
Was? Was what? We will never know for sure but the implication is that, whatever it was, it was directly connected to the conspiracy and fantasy in which Chapuys felt that Cromwell was indulging. According to the ‘Spanish Chronicle’, this involved the physical coercion of witnesses and innocent ‘suspects’ to force them into incriminating themselves. By the way, the Spanish Chronicle’s version of events is the direct basis of John Colicos’ chilling portrayal of Thomas Cromwell as a lying, scheming, torturing thug in the 1969 film Anne of the Thousand Days.
From Chapuys’ letter (to which Schofield gives full credence) we can conclude that (a) Cromwell was acting on the king’s authority and (b) he cooked up a fabricated case against Anne. In this, for all the slipshod chronology in the ‘Spanish Chronicle’, if the two texts agree on this second point, we have to give it some serious credibility.
In a paper published in 1987, (‘Sexual Heresy at the Court of Henry VIII’, The Historical Journal, Volume 30, Issue 2, June 1987 , pp. 247-268) Retha M. Warnicke wrote that “...Thomas Cromwell, wanted to exclude [Anne Boleyn’s] family from positions of power at court... [and historians have concluded] that Cromwell succeeded in orchestrating a wide-ranging conspiracy involving numerous people with the intention of using the legal system to kill six innocent victims in order to satisfy both his own schemes for power and the king’s domestic whims.” (emphasis added).
Suzannah Lipscomb adds the names of Eric Ives, David Starkey and George Elton to the list of those drawing this same conclusion. If that’s a reasonable summing up of the court of scholarly opinion, then Cromwell’s guilty as charged.
So, he had Anne and a number of other quite blameless people condemned for treason and then watched them executed. I can’t help but feel it is a delicious irony that he, in the end, suffered the exact same fate that he had devised for them.
That would come later, though. Anne Boleyn’s death saw the Howards out of the picture and they became even more isolated from power in the next twist. Henry’s third wife was part of a rival family to theirs: the Seymours. It was they who were to hold the trump card in that it was their daughter who gave birth to the heir - Prince Edward. This then put the Howards at a massive disadvantage. The duke himself had no hope of being the heir apparent. Moreover, the true heir to the throne would be part of the Seymour family.
The Howards saw an opportunity for themselves later when Cromwell arranged the marriage of the king and Anne of Cleves. This, famously, did not go well. What we end up with is a situation where the Howards could turn this reversal for Cromwell to their own advantage, but they would have to act fast.
Henry was already enamoured of the Duke’s niece, Catherine Howard. To see him safely married to her they would have needed to make sure Cromwell wasn’t going to interfere. There was a danger he might suggest another candidate to the king instead, for the purposes of political alliance again. Henry needed allies. War was brewing.
Tracy Borman writes that “Henry married Catherine Howard on the very day of his former minister’s execution...” and puts this down to “[his] callousness...” It can be no coincidence, certainly, but perhaps this beheading and bedding on the same day was driven more by symbolism than mockery. “[Anne Boleyn] miscarried on the day of Katherine’s funeral” writes Lipscomb (p.44). Omens don’t come much iller than that and it may be that Henry was trying to chase away that earlier shadow. Killing the most powerful man in the kingdom after himself on the day of his own wedding may have looked to onlookers as him bolstering his own prowess and masculinity. The timing does also make it look suspiciously like a blood sacrifice, though, but it is likely the real meaning lies in the idea of the wedding only being possible because of the execution. ‘You can’t have one without the other’ would seem to be the message. The Howards surely knew their longed-for union of House Howard and House Tudor might not have gone ahead with Cromwell there to disapprove. The king wanted it too and would brook none standing in his way.
I would suggest, though, that the Howards may have had another reason to speed things up, too. The king was not a well man. By 1540, Cromwell had been appointed lord great chamberlain and was therefore effectively ‘vicegerent’ to the king. He had already been ‘appointed the king’s deputy as head of the church’ in 1536 (source: Britannica, biography). Everybody knew the king would probably not live all that much longer (although to say so was treason!) and, when he went, the new king would be a child. Whoever became regent would hold huge power. Cromwell was already the king’s de facto regent, in matters spiritual and secular.
Some older Howard family members might have recalled what had happened the last time a regent had been appointed protector to a boy-king. It was only just within living memory. Well, that king was never seen again. Shortly after his ‘mysterious’ disappearance, his ‘protector’, the Duke of York, walked into Westminster Abbey. When, a little while later, he walked out again, he was King Richard III. The idea that Cromwell, the newly created ‘Earl of Essex’, might one day think to place the crown on his own head would thus have seemed far from fantastical. A pretender is only a pretender if he loses. If he wins, he is king.
By removing Cromwell the Howards could position themselves to be, again, in line to connect directly with the royal family through the king’s marriage to the duke's niece, Catherine Howard. They needed to make sure Cromwell couldn’t stand in their way. They did indeed get rid of him. One can speculate (all right then, I can speculate!) that this may even have been partly in revenge for his destruction of Anne Boleyn. Perhaps this may explain why the king was not inclined to go out of his way to be merciful to Cromwell.
Maybe. Oh, but he could have had some sound financial reasons too. As Elton said: “some important factors - such as, for instance, the act of attainder which condemned Cromwell - have been too much neglected...” Indeed. Always follow the money!
Cromwell was far from the only powerful man to be faced with a Bill of Attainder, which automatically ceded all the accused’s wealth and lands to the king. Bills of Attainder had become a regular source of extra cash for Henry VIII. Cook up a treason charge against a rich magnate, chop his head off and then rake in every penny and every acre he ever had. Profitable business. Cromwell had commented on the king’s avarice, even when money was not scarce. By 1540 and war with France in the offing, it was in short supply:
Luckily for Henry VIII, the English Reformation and Dissolution of the monasteries had doubled the funds available to the exchequer and monastic land was sold off at reduced rates. Other sources of finance included forced loans, the seizure of noble estates and the debasing of the coinage...
(‘Inflation And Dearth In The Sixteenth Century - The Modern Economic Perspective: Valid Or Misleading?’ Rowena Gray, Student Economic Review, Vol. 17, 2003, pp. 7-15) (emphasis added)
Another incident that adds weight to this reading is reported by Lipscomb again (p.53):
If Katherine had not been queen, then she died a widow, and a ‘woman sole’ with the right to dispose of her goods as she wished (they would not automatically go to Henry)... Richard Rich, the solicitor-general, the man whose word had sent Thomas More to his death, wrote to Henry about this tricky legal situation suggesting that Henry ‘might seize her goods by another means’, without admitting her to be his wife...
No matter who they were, what they meant to him, or whether it was legal or not, if Henry wanted someone’s money, by hook or by crook, Henry would get it! If that meant killing them, so be it.
The stories of the king physically attacking Cromwell even before he awarded him the title of the Earl of Essex would tend to suggest that perhaps by this time King Henry VIII may have been losing his mind a bit. His marriage to Catherine Howard was not a success. In what was virtually a carbon-copy of the suit against Anne Boleyn (her music teacher had been accused too!) Catherine was arrested for treason on various grounds, including adultery. After her trial and execution, the Howards found themselves at a double disadvantage. Only a few years later another treason charge was brought - against them.
This doesn’t massively surprise me. By 1546, only a few months before his death, Henry was seriously ill. The succession was bound to be on everyone’s mind. The Seymours must have seen that the Howards still represented a serious threat to their own position. It was because of an alleged boast that he would make himself king in place of Prince Edward that they, the Seymours, urged Henry to bring the treason charge against Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and his father, the Duke of Norfolk. (Source: Britannica, biography).
Surrey was executed and the Duke of Norfolk, who had engineered the death of Thomas Cromwell, was - just like Cromwell before him - due to suffer the exact same fate he had devised for his own enemy. He would have done, too, had not King Henry’s death intervened. Tradition required clemency for prisoners in the Tower on the passing of a king. The Duke had the luck of that Devil all right. He was scheduled to be executed in the afternoon. Henry died in the morning. His death sentence was lifted, but he still stayed in prison throughout the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI.
As I see it, the whole thing is a powerplay between two families wishing to exercise control behind the throne. The Seymours, as history shows, were in the perfect position to do this. They became the protectors of the boy king and were his own family. The role of heir, once promised to Norfolk, was gone from him and influence gone from his clan. You can just see him boiling with rage through all this time with no hope of ever reclaiming that position.
The commentators make much of Thomas Cromwell being a working class lad who was not nobly born. Perhaps that was why the king treated him in the way that he did. I don’t see that. For one thing, the king was probably not in his right mind for a long period and also it seems much less to do with the fact that Cromwell was not born of a noble family. It would be much more likely that it was the fact that he was not related to the particular noble families in question. He was not one of the people who felt they were entitled to a closeness to the throne or to wield control behind that throne. My reading is that they were afraid Cromwell was getting a little too near that power himself and that he would really be regent while Edward VI was in his minority.
Who was to say that Edward VI might not have disappeared as mysteriously as the poor little prince who was Richard III’s immediate predecessor? That concern, coupled with the king’s desire to grab back all the money he had given Cromwell over the years, I think, have to be the primary motives for them all needing him out of the way. In spite of his remarkable abilities, it was just their naked greed and ambition that did for him.
Cromwell arrived late for a meeting of the Privy Council on 10 June [1540]. As he entered the chamber, the captain of the guard came forward and arrested him on charges of treason and heresy. Barely had he time to draw breath before he was conveyed to the Tower. Cromwell’s arrest sent shock waves across the country and was soon reported in the courts of Europe.
(Tracy Borman writing for the magazine HistoryExtra)
...on 10 June [1540] [Cromwell] was suddenly arrested at the council table, hustled to the Tower, condemned without a hearing, and kept alive until a belated execution on 28 July only because Henry still wanted his testimony against Anne of Cleves...
(G.R. Elton, 1951, The Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2)
Not even Mantel can quite account for it any more than could Elton. Why was Cromwell turned upon so spectacularly by his enemies and by the king? And why were these men his enemies? There is a lot that doesn’t seem to add up, even in Mantel’s gripping account.
For me the main thing is looking at it from a ‘bigger-picture’ perspective. It makes considerable sense to see Cromwell’s downfall as part of a power struggle between two controlling dynasties. Both Borman and Elton, among others, agree that Cromwell’s real enemy was the Duke of Norfolk. Britannica, in its biography of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, states that “Upon Cromwell’s execution (1540) Norfolk emerged as the second most powerful man in England.” So, personal gain must have figured large as a consideration in his action against Cromwell.
I was most interested to discover that this same Duke of Norfolk had once been promised that he would become heir apparent in the event that Henry VIII did not produce a legitimate heir himself. This was a touchy subject because of Anne Boleyn. The Boleyn family were related directly to the Howards, who were the Duke of Norfolk’s family. So it’s the same extended family insinuating Anne Boleyn into the royal household as who, later, encouraged the marriage of Henry to Catherine Howard. In fact, Catherine even had another Boleyn girl as her lady-in-waiting.
What if the Howards sought to have influence over the throne through their becoming the heir’s family? This was taken away from them when Anne was executed and Henry’s next wife had a boy, Edward. Both these events would have been severe blows to the Howards’ ambitions. Would they have harboured a grudge against Cromwell for Anne’s death? Highly likely! That lost them a lot of power and patronage!
There is controversy about whether Thomas Cromwell concocted a fake accusation against Anne. John Schofield in his book The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell (on page 166) argues against the testimony of the so-called ‘Spanish Chronicle’ (which said he did) because of its palpable inaccuracies later on. He puts his faith instead in the letter Chapuys (Charles V’s ambassador to England) wrote to his master in Spain.
I’m not sure, though, that he translates this thoroughly enough. It is true that Chapuys clearly stated Cromwell had the backing of the king in investigating Anne. ‘Et que a luy avoit este lauctorite de descouvrir et parachever les affaires digelle concubine,’ he wrote. He had the authority to act, which could only have come from the king. Yet, later on in the same missive, Chapuys says that ‘il [Cromwell] se mist a fantasier et conspirer le dict affaire...’ Cromwell ‘fantasied’ and ‘conspired’ the case against Anne? That’s what the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador made of it. Schofield ignores this last part of this key sentence (probably because, as he says, it is incomplete) but Chapuys goes on to tell that ‘one of the things that put him [Cromwell] in suspicion and animates [him] to investigate the case...’
Was? Was what? We will never know for sure but the implication is that, whatever it was, it was directly connected to the conspiracy and fantasy in which Chapuys felt that Cromwell was indulging. According to the ‘Spanish Chronicle’, this involved the physical coercion of witnesses and innocent ‘suspects’ to force them into incriminating themselves. By the way, the Spanish Chronicle’s version of events is the direct basis of John Colicos’ chilling portrayal of Thomas Cromwell as a lying, scheming, torturing thug in the 1969 film Anne of the Thousand Days.
From Chapuys’ letter (to which Schofield gives full credence) we can conclude that (a) Cromwell was acting on the king’s authority and (b) he cooked up a fabricated case against Anne. In this, for all the slipshod chronology in the ‘Spanish Chronicle’, if the two texts agree on this second point, we have to give it some serious credibility.
In a paper published in 1987, (‘Sexual Heresy at the Court of Henry VIII’, The Historical Journal, Volume 30, Issue 2, June 1987 , pp. 247-268) Retha M. Warnicke wrote that “...Thomas Cromwell, wanted to exclude [Anne Boleyn’s] family from positions of power at court... [and historians have concluded] that Cromwell succeeded in orchestrating a wide-ranging conspiracy involving numerous people with the intention of using the legal system to kill six innocent victims in order to satisfy both his own schemes for power and the king’s domestic whims.” (emphasis added).
Suzannah Lipscomb adds the names of Eric Ives, David Starkey and George Elton to the list of those drawing this same conclusion. If that’s a reasonable summing up of the court of scholarly opinion, then Cromwell’s guilty as charged.
So, he had Anne and a number of other quite blameless people condemned for treason and then watched them executed. I can’t help but feel it is a delicious irony that he, in the end, suffered the exact same fate that he had devised for them.
That would come later, though. Anne Boleyn’s death saw the Howards out of the picture and they became even more isolated from power in the next twist. Henry’s third wife was part of a rival family to theirs: the Seymours. It was they who were to hold the trump card in that it was their daughter who gave birth to the heir - Prince Edward. This then put the Howards at a massive disadvantage. The duke himself had no hope of being the heir apparent. Moreover, the true heir to the throne would be part of the Seymour family.
The Howards saw an opportunity for themselves later when Cromwell arranged the marriage of the king and Anne of Cleves. This, famously, did not go well. What we end up with is a situation where the Howards could turn this reversal for Cromwell to their own advantage, but they would have to act fast.
Henry was already enamoured of the Duke’s niece, Catherine Howard. To see him safely married to her they would have needed to make sure Cromwell wasn’t going to interfere. There was a danger he might suggest another candidate to the king instead, for the purposes of political alliance again. Henry needed allies. War was brewing.
Tracy Borman writes that “Henry married Catherine Howard on the very day of his former minister’s execution...” and puts this down to “[his] callousness...” It can be no coincidence, certainly, but perhaps this beheading and bedding on the same day was driven more by symbolism than mockery. “[Anne Boleyn] miscarried on the day of Katherine’s funeral” writes Lipscomb (p.44). Omens don’t come much iller than that and it may be that Henry was trying to chase away that earlier shadow. Killing the most powerful man in the kingdom after himself on the day of his own wedding may have looked to onlookers as him bolstering his own prowess and masculinity. The timing does also make it look suspiciously like a blood sacrifice, though, but it is likely the real meaning lies in the idea of the wedding only being possible because of the execution. ‘You can’t have one without the other’ would seem to be the message. The Howards surely knew their longed-for union of House Howard and House Tudor might not have gone ahead with Cromwell there to disapprove. The king wanted it too and would brook none standing in his way.
I would suggest, though, that the Howards may have had another reason to speed things up, too. The king was not a well man. By 1540, Cromwell had been appointed lord great chamberlain and was therefore effectively ‘vicegerent’ to the king. He had already been ‘appointed the king’s deputy as head of the church’ in 1536 (source: Britannica, biography). Everybody knew the king would probably not live all that much longer (although to say so was treason!) and, when he went, the new king would be a child. Whoever became regent would hold huge power. Cromwell was already the king’s de facto regent, in matters spiritual and secular.
Some older Howard family members might have recalled what had happened the last time a regent had been appointed protector to a boy-king. It was only just within living memory. Well, that king was never seen again. Shortly after his ‘mysterious’ disappearance, his ‘protector’, the Duke of York, walked into Westminster Abbey. When, a little while later, he walked out again, he was King Richard III. The idea that Cromwell, the newly created ‘Earl of Essex’, might one day think to place the crown on his own head would thus have seemed far from fantastical. A pretender is only a pretender if he loses. If he wins, he is king.
By removing Cromwell the Howards could position themselves to be, again, in line to connect directly with the royal family through the king’s marriage to the duke's niece, Catherine Howard. They needed to make sure Cromwell couldn’t stand in their way. They did indeed get rid of him. One can speculate (all right then, I can speculate!) that this may even have been partly in revenge for his destruction of Anne Boleyn. Perhaps this may explain why the king was not inclined to go out of his way to be merciful to Cromwell.
Maybe. Oh, but he could have had some sound financial reasons too. As Elton said: “some important factors - such as, for instance, the act of attainder which condemned Cromwell - have been too much neglected...” Indeed. Always follow the money!
Cromwell was far from the only powerful man to be faced with a Bill of Attainder, which automatically ceded all the accused’s wealth and lands to the king. Bills of Attainder had become a regular source of extra cash for Henry VIII. Cook up a treason charge against a rich magnate, chop his head off and then rake in every penny and every acre he ever had. Profitable business. Cromwell had commented on the king’s avarice, even when money was not scarce. By 1540 and war with France in the offing, it was in short supply:
Luckily for Henry VIII, the English Reformation and Dissolution of the monasteries had doubled the funds available to the exchequer and monastic land was sold off at reduced rates. Other sources of finance included forced loans, the seizure of noble estates and the debasing of the coinage...
(‘Inflation And Dearth In The Sixteenth Century - The Modern Economic Perspective: Valid Or Misleading?’ Rowena Gray, Student Economic Review, Vol. 17, 2003, pp. 7-15) (emphasis added)
Another incident that adds weight to this reading is reported by Lipscomb again (p.53):
If Katherine had not been queen, then she died a widow, and a ‘woman sole’ with the right to dispose of her goods as she wished (they would not automatically go to Henry)... Richard Rich, the solicitor-general, the man whose word had sent Thomas More to his death, wrote to Henry about this tricky legal situation suggesting that Henry ‘might seize her goods by another means’, without admitting her to be his wife...
No matter who they were, what they meant to him, or whether it was legal or not, if Henry wanted someone’s money, by hook or by crook, Henry would get it! If that meant killing them, so be it.
The stories of the king physically attacking Cromwell even before he awarded him the title of the Earl of Essex would tend to suggest that perhaps by this time King Henry VIII may have been losing his mind a bit. His marriage to Catherine Howard was not a success. In what was virtually a carbon-copy of the suit against Anne Boleyn (her music teacher had been accused too!) Catherine was arrested for treason on various grounds, including adultery. After her trial and execution, the Howards found themselves at a double disadvantage. Only a few years later another treason charge was brought - against them.
This doesn’t massively surprise me. By 1546, only a few months before his death, Henry was seriously ill. The succession was bound to be on everyone’s mind. The Seymours must have seen that the Howards still represented a serious threat to their own position. It was because of an alleged boast that he would make himself king in place of Prince Edward that they, the Seymours, urged Henry to bring the treason charge against Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and his father, the Duke of Norfolk. (Source: Britannica, biography).
Surrey was executed and the Duke of Norfolk, who had engineered the death of Thomas Cromwell, was - just like Cromwell before him - due to suffer the exact same fate he had devised for his own enemy. He would have done, too, had not King Henry’s death intervened. Tradition required clemency for prisoners in the Tower on the passing of a king. The Duke had the luck of that Devil all right. He was scheduled to be executed in the afternoon. Henry died in the morning. His death sentence was lifted, but he still stayed in prison throughout the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI.
As I see it, the whole thing is a powerplay between two families wishing to exercise control behind the throne. The Seymours, as history shows, were in the perfect position to do this. They became the protectors of the boy king and were his own family. The role of heir, once promised to Norfolk, was gone from him and influence gone from his clan. You can just see him boiling with rage through all this time with no hope of ever reclaiming that position.
The commentators make much of Thomas Cromwell being a working class lad who was not nobly born. Perhaps that was why the king treated him in the way that he did. I don’t see that. For one thing, the king was probably not in his right mind for a long period and also it seems much less to do with the fact that Cromwell was not born of a noble family. It would be much more likely that it was the fact that he was not related to the particular noble families in question. He was not one of the people who felt they were entitled to a closeness to the throne or to wield control behind that throne. My reading is that they were afraid Cromwell was getting a little too near that power himself and that he would really be regent while Edward VI was in his minority.
Who was to say that Edward VI might not have disappeared as mysteriously as the poor little prince who was Richard III’s immediate predecessor? That concern, coupled with the king’s desire to grab back all the money he had given Cromwell over the years, I think, have to be the primary motives for them all needing him out of the way. In spite of his remarkable abilities, it was just their naked greed and ambition that did for him.