Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The charges against Buckingham remain puzzling, but are unmistakably an early example of King Henry’s ability to destroy members of the nobility with a penchant for boasting about their Plantagenet blood. The proceedings against the Duke show that there had been boasting enough. Over the previous century and more, the Austin Friars of London had come to render a specialist service to whoever was on the English throne, providing a last resting-place for those whom the regime deemed to be its enemies and beheaded as traitors. Treason was not quite so dire a crime as heresy, so such victims of politics deserved a decent Christian burial: only not too decent, nor as honourable as they and their families had no doubt planned. A number of city friaries were drawn into this grisly post-mortem diplomacy (the best-known example now is from outside London, the Franciscan friary of Leicester which famously received the corpse of King Richard III after the battle of Bosworth, to lie eventually under a car park), but the London Austin Friars were way ahead.99 The unfortunate Duke of Buckingham was in fact the last such ‘traitor’ whom the Austin Friars received into their mercy. The great advantage of their church was that its lay congregation was dominated by foreigners, thus going some way to quarantining such politically charged corpses from the wider Tudor public.