The old historian Stowe thus relates the fall of the newly created Earl of Essex: “The King’s wrath was kindled against all those that were preferrers of this match, whereof the Lord Cromwell was the chief, for the which, and for dealing somewhat too far in some matters beyond the King’s good liking, were the occasions of his hasty death.” On the 10th of June 1540, Cromwell, who had been in his place in the House of Lords the same afternoon, was arrested and placed in the Tower; so sudden was the effect of Henry’s rage. Cranmer, who appears to have been a true friend of the fallen Minister, wrote to Henry in his behalf, but with the usual result.
Foxe, the martyrologist, bears witness to the courage and unshaken firmness evinced by Cromwell during his imprisonment. On the 29th of the month he was condemned to death by both Houses of Parliament. The day after he wrote a piteous letter to the King, which ends thus, “Most Gracious Prince, I can say but mercy, mercy, mercy!” But Henry and mercy were strangers, and the former slayer of women and children must have bitterly regretted the little of the same quality that he had shown to others in the days of his power.
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.