A month later he was beheaded. On his way to Tower Hill he met Lord Hungerford, bound on a similar errand—the distance from the Tower to Tower Hill takes but five minutes, walking very slowly—and whilst these two were making their way to their final earthly destruction, Cromwell appears to have encouraged his fellow-sufferer, who was complaining and bewailing the approach of death, as they faced the Hill together, and the grim shadow that was closing round them. “And so,” writes Foxe, “went they together to the place of execution, and took their death patientlie.”
What Cromwell said in his dying speech on the scaffold has been made uncertain by the garbled accounts of his words; but, to judge from these, he made a better exit from the world than his career in it would have led one to expect. The executioner was awkward, and, according to the chroniclers, Stowe, Hall, and Foxe, “very ungoodly performed his office.” Cromwell was fifty years of age when his career thus ended. From the son of a blacksmith, and with no manner of advantages, he had risen from his humble surroundings at Putney to become an Earl, a Knight of the Garter, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Lord Great Chamberlain of England. He did much evil, but he accomplished two good things for the benefit of his country, which should be put upon the other side of his account; he caused the Bible to be printed in English in 1538, and he instituted the system of parish registers, which he himself superintended.
St. Thomas’s and Curfew Towers
The Lord Hungerford of Heytesbury, who has been mentioned as having been beheaded at the same time as Cromwell, had been accused of having persuaded some persons to prophesy how long the King would live. It was probably only a trumped-up charge, and certainly, if true, not of any greater offence than that of lèse majesté, but it was considered quite sufficient to bring the too curious inquirer to the scaffold. In the same year, as has already been stated, Lord Leonard Grey was executed.
An apparently justifiable execution took place in the year 1541, that of Lord Dacre, on Tower Hill, he being, according to Holinshed’s Chronicle, guilty of murder.
Cromwell, although not a professed Protestant, had always protected the followers of that faith, but with his death they were again persecuted by Henry, and at the end of July 1541 three of the most prominent of the Lutherans, Dr Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard, and William Jerome, were haled to the dungeons of the Tower, and thence dragged through the City on hurdles, and burnt at Smithfield. On the same day (30th July) Henry, with his almost incredible impartiality when engaged on persecution, caused four Roman Catholic priests—Doctor Abel, Fetherstone, Powel, and Cooke—to be burnt to death at the same place (Hall).
In the Beauchamp Tower is a carving, representing a bell, on which the capital letter “A” is cut. This is a rebus carved by the learned and unfortunate Dr Abel, while he was awaiting his trial and execution in this tower. Abel was a man of great learning, and had been domestic chaplain to Catherine of Arragon, and had offended the King by championing Catherine’s cause during the trial of divorce between her and Henry. Below Dr Abel’s rebus appears the name of “Doctor Cooke, 1540,” which is the inscription of Lawrence Cooke, Prior of Doncaster. These four priests were martyrs for the old faith, like More and Fisher, and many less known Roman Catholics, who preferred death rather than acknowledge Henry’s supremacy in the Church of England.
Queen Catherine Howard
Six years after Anne Boleyn’s execution upon Tower Green, another of Henry’s Queens was led out from her prison in the Tower, to a similar doom on that same spot.