Faction, Intrigue and Influence at the Mid-Tudor Court

On 3 July 1540, Thomas Cromwell wrote to Henry VIII from the Tower of London as his ‘poor slave’. ‘Most gracious Prince’, he implored, ‘I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy’. But none was forthcoming. Before the month was out, the man whom David Starkey once dubbed ‘the arch-politician of faction’ was cold and headless in the ground, gruesomely hacked over two attempts by a bungling headsman – ‘a ragged, butcherly miser’, to use John Foxe’s description, who ‘very ungodly performed the service’.