Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII

by Loades, David

  Meanwhile events were moving on. On 23 March 1534 Pope Clement at last pronounced a definitive sentence in favour of Catherine of Aragon. This carried a renewed threat of excommunication for Henry, but again the sentence was not fully promulgated, probably because Clement realised that neither Francis nor Charles would be willing to enforce it. England had effectively renounced papal authority by then, but it may well have been these events which prompted Henry to make his position abundantly clear by the Act of Supremacy in the autumn.58 Consequently when Clement died in September 1534 and was succeeded by Paul III, the latter’s tentative hints at renewed negotiations were not acted upon. Henry was no longer interested in reconciliation, and Cromwell, who was certainly consulted about this attitude, must have breathed a sigh of relief. One of the reasons for this recalcitrance lay in the preamble to the Act for the Succession, which had unequivocally asserted that Catherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated, and that therefore the papal dispensation for her second marriage was invalid:

  The Bishop of Rome and see Apostolic, contrary to the great and inviolable grants of jurisdictions given by God immediately to Emperors, Kings, and Princes in succession to their heirs, hath presumed in times past to invest who should please them to inherit in other men’s kingdoms and dominions, which thing we your most humble subjects both spiritual and temporal do most abhor and detest.59

  Such usurpation was to cease forthwith, and all the king’s subjects were to swear an oath to observe the succession laid down in the Act. This should not be taken literally. There was never any intention that ploughmen and labourers should be required to swear, but by July over 7,000 clergy and gentlemen had taken the oath, which was administered by commissioners appointed for the purpose.60 Resistance was slight but significant. Sir Thomas More was summoned from his retirement in Chelsea to swear in April, and refused to do so. He was, he professed, willing to accept the succession, but declined to set his hand to anything which implied the rejection of papal jurisdiction, as that was set out in the preamble. On 13 April John Fisher, summoned with other bishops to do his duty, likewise declined, and a few days later both of them were sent to the Tower.61 At the same time the visitors entered the religious houses of London, and as a result four Carthusians, one Brigettine and a secular priest, John Haile, were arrested on Cromwell’s orders and similarly imprisoned for refusing the oath. The Viceregent then commenced the long and frustrating task of attempting to persuade them to change their minds. In this context just about the last thing that he needed was martyrs to the Old Faith. Nevertheless that was what he got. Even before the Carthusians were arrested, in the spring of 1534, Thomas Bedyll had been sent into the Charterhouse, armed with a variety of books and ‘annotations’ in an effort to persuade them. He may have succeeded with the less obdurate, but not with the four who ended up in the Tower.62 It was obviously not in Cromwell’s interest that these men should be executed, and he kept up a steady pressure, using a variety of agents and methods to persuade them to recant, but without success. In April 1535 he reminded himself to ask the king what to do about them, and the answer was apparently to put them on trial, and on the 29th of that month they duly appeared before the court of King’s Bench at Westminster. Once the indictment had been properly found, and perhaps with the intention of intimidating them, Cranmer visited them himself, and reminded them of the awful consequences of continued obstinacy, but had no more success than lesser agents.63 In the course of their trial it emerged that Syon was a hotbed of treasonable gossip. One of the accused, Richard Reynolds, alleged that the king had kept a ‘company of maidens’ at Farnham Castle in Surrey while he was staying with the ‘old lord’ Bishop of Winchester (Foxe), while an anonymous layman attached to the house expressed the view that he had kept ‘many matrons … in the court … almost all he has violated … and now he has taken to his wife of fornication this matron Anne not only to the highest shame and undoing of himself, but also of all this realm’.64 With opinions like this being expressed it is not surprising that all the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to the extreme penalty of the law. Finally, Cromwell himself visited not only the imprisoned monks but also the house from which they had come. In the latter case he engaged in disputation with various of the monks on the subject of Peter’s pre-eminence among the Apostles, denying vigorously that the Royal Supremacy made the king a priest, but he had no better success than Bedyll had had before. The prior submitted and so did some of the monks, but the remainder were sent off to Newgate and the house was closed. The six who had been convicted were executed at Tyburn on 4 May. They had not been degraded as was customary with clerical felons, but were hanged in their habits to make a point about the nature of their treason. According to one report which reached Paris soon after the whole city was horrified ‘because they were of exemplary and holy life’, but in fact opinion in London was divided, a fair proportion of the onlookers feeling that they had got what they deserved.65 They had undoubtedly been guilty of treason as that was then defined, and so were those who had been sent to Newgate. For some unknown reason the latter were not brought to trial, but were left to rot in prison where they died of starvation and maltreatment, a fate which reflects credit on neither the king nor Cromwell.

  The more exalted prisoners were not similarly neglected. Indeed in the case of Thomas More Cromwell seems to have had a great deal of sympathy with the man, if not with his opinions. They had belonged to the same humanist group as Lord Morley and Richard Pace, and had passed many congenial hours in discussing the classics before their views on the scriptures and the Royal Supremacy drove them apart. In his memoirs written during his interrogation, More describes the secretary as his ‘good master’, and ‘one that tenderly favoureth me’, not language which he would have employed about one whom he was convinced was harrying him to his death, although it is possible that More was being ironic.66 It seems that Cromwell did his level best to save More from himself, and might have been prepared to accept an equivocal submission, which was the most that More was prepared to offer. To this he was urged by Thomas Cranmer, who shared his respect for the sage of Chelsea, and it was the king himself who scotched that scheme on the harsh but logical grounds that it would encourage others in similar evasions. Even just before his trial, Cromwell was prepared to assure him that Henry would still be a good lord to him if only he would swear the oath without dissimulation. More was prepared to insist that he was the king’s good subject, but not to take the oath:

  He did no one any harm, said no harm and thought no harm, but wished everyone good. If this was not enough to keep a man alive, he longed not to live … his poor body was at the king’s pleasure, and he wished that his death might do him good.67

  This plea (if such it was) went unheeded and he was tried in Westminster Hall on 1 July 1535. What happened then is well known, but owed nothing to Thomas Cromwell, who had parted with More in a state of some exasperation on 3 June. The chief witness for the prosecution was Sir Richard Rich, who alleged that on visiting the Tower to collect More’s books on 12 June, he had become involved in a discussion with him on the powers of Parliament, in the course of which he had declared that Parliament did not have the authority to make the king Supreme Head of the Church, an opinion which Rich probably transmitted to Cromwell, who ensured that it took its place in the trial. More of course denied that he had said any such thing, making the valid point that since he had refrained from saying anything so incriminating in the course of his interrogations, he was unlikely to have made such an observation in the course of casual conversation.68 The court, however, chose to believe Rich, and More was condemned. Following his condemnation, and in order to clear his conscience as he put it, he proceeded to confirm the substance of Rich’s testimony by asserting that his indictment was grounded upon a statute ‘directly repugnant to the laws of God’ and invalid for that reason. This, as the Duke of Norfolk put it, confirmed his ‘malice’ in the terms of the Act, and Lord Chancellor Audley observed th
at if the statute was valid, which he did not doubt, then the indictment was good enough.69 More was executed on Tower Hill on the morning of 6 July, and Cromwell was, as his duty bound him, present at his death. This was a consummation which was far from what he had desired and worked for while More was alive. During his sojourn in the Tower he had indeed appeared to be so solicitous for his welfare that he had attracted a series of grateful letters from his wife, Alice, saying that she was ‘most deeply bound … for your manifold goodness and loving favour, both before this time and yet daily now also showed towards my poor husband and me’.70 In fact More’s death, and the circumstances of it, was a setback for Cromwell, although he could not afford to admit it.

  In a way John Fisher’s execution had also been a setback, although there is much less evidence to demonstrate the fact. Fisher had originally been condemned for misprision, for not revealing the nun Elizabeth Barton’s prophecies, but remained in the Tower after he had refused to take the oath. Imprisonment took its toll upon his health. He was an old man, and suffered from the cold and the poor prison diet, in spite of the supplements which he received from Antonio Bonvisi. Just before Christmas 1534 he wrote to Cromwell pleading for some relief, identifying him as the only person whom he could approach in his distress.71 He had corresponded with Cromwell before, and although only the latter’s reply survives, it is clear why he felt that he could be appealed to. Cromwell’s letter, which was about the nun and her delinquencies, was crisp and theologically well informed, taking the bishop to task for misapplying texts of scripture, but it was not at all hostile, and that must have given Fisher his cue. Unfortunately we do not know what the result of his appeal may have been, although the fact that he survived to stand trial indicates that there may have been some improvement. It was not Cromwell who was after Fisher’s blood – it was the king – and the key factor was probably Pope Paul’s decision to confer the cardinalate upon him. This may have been done under the mistaken impression that the rank would offer him some kind of protection, although the sanctity of his life and the circumstances of his imprisonment would have constituted sufficient reasons. Henry was furious. A papal honour for his suspect traitor was an insult of the first order, and he is alleged to have remarked that he would send Fisher’s head to collect his hat, ‘so the twain met not’.72 The bishop was tried by a special commission of oyer and terminer on 17 June, and inevitably found guilty. Unlike More, he probably was guilty, although the crucial evidence against him could not be produced in court. According to Chapuys, Fisher had urged Charles to intervene and ‘undertake a work which must be as pleasing in the eyes of God as war upon the Turks’, which was treason even by the unmodified law of 1352.73 Cromwell was a member of the commission that condemned him, and had been involved in the interrogations which had preceded his trial, although there is no evidence about what part he played. He is alleged to have urged the bishop to confess his errors and to throw himself on the king’s mercy, but this met with no response. However, it shows a good understanding of Henry’s psychology, because the one thing which might have turned aside the royal wrath was the spectacle of this learned and ascetic prelate grovelling for mercy. As it was that wrath was fully expressed on 22 June 1535 when Fisher, who was too weak to walk, was borne to his death on Tower Hill. On the scaffold, after his gown was removed, men ‘marvelled to see [any man] bearing life to be so far consumed, for he seemed a lean carcass; the flesh clean wasted away … as one might say death in a man’s shape and using a man’s voice’.74 His body was left lying for several hours under guard, until it could be quietly interred nearby. Thomas Cromwell was left with the unenviable task of justifying both these executions (and those of the Carthusians) to the hostile courts of Europe.

  The first casualty of these events was any hope of reconciliation with Paul III, who wrote to Francis I that Henry had ‘exceeded his ancestors in wickedness’, and sought the French king’s help against this persecutor of the Church. Francis, however, absorbed by his rivalry with Charles, was not prepared to oblige.75 Charles was similarly preoccupied, and Henry’s tentative attempts to avoid isolation through an alliance with the Schmalkaldic League were not followed up. There is, however, no reason to suppose that Cromwell’s attempts to justify the king’s actions and to explain that the accused had been fairly tried, and were ‘undoubtedly guilty’ of the treasons for which they suffered, cut any ice at all, least of all in Rome. Meanwhile the French and Imperial ambassadors in London kept a watching brief and were able to report that Anne’s unpopularity had been increased rather than diminished by these events. So concerned was the king by the evidences of this unpopularity that he compelled Bishop Stokesley of London to preach in support of the Supremacy in St Paul’s Cathedral, and sent Cromwell along to make sure that the correct words were used.76 Alehouse rantings, ‘slips of the tongue’, and more deliberate words of defiance kept the secretary busy with investigations throughout the year. Not all were as penitent as Margaret Chancellor, a Suffolk woman who blessed Catherine as ‘the righteous queen’, but who professed to the Suffolk justices that she had been drunk at the time and that an evil spirit had caused her to utter those treasonable words. She was let off with a caution, but not all delinquents were so fortunate. George Taylor of Newport Pagenall in Buckinghamshire appears to have paid the full price for claiming that he would play football with the Crown of England, so little did he regard it, although he also pleaded drunkenness in extenuation.77 Meanwhile Henry’s relationship with his queen had its ups and downs. In the summer of 1534 Anne miscarried, and Henry was reported to be ‘much enamoured’ of another lady of the court. Chapuys, who carried the story, did not name her and the chances are that it was just another bit of court gossip. Nevertheless there were periods of tension in their marriage, and the king never came to terms with her political agenda, considering such things to be inappropriate in a consort.78 Her business was to give him a son, and towards the end of 1535, Anne was again pregnant. A lot would depend upon her safe delivery, and upon the sex of the child. Many malcontents might reconsider their positions if God gave her a son.

  Then, in January 1536, Catherine died, and the political situation shifted slightly but significantly. Henry reacted with relief, declaring that he was now free from any suspicion of war, meaning conflict with the Emperor. Charles was also relieved because he now no longer had an aunt whose honour needed protection, or whose cause he felt bound to promote. The way was open for a ‘normalisation’ of relations between England and the Empire, and Cromwell was free to pick up the option of an Imperial alliance, which he had preferred for some time but which circumstances had appeared to render impossible.79 He began to confer more amicably with Chapuys, and the latter’s reports became less hostile. The main obstacle in the way of improved relations remained Queen Anne. Not only was her position unrecognised by the Imperialists, but her tastes and the whole logic of her position demanded a French connection. So her alliance of convenience with Cromwell broke down, and the secretary began to consider the possibility of getting rid of her. Now that the ending of his second marriage would no longer carry the threat of reviving his first, Henry’s growing affection for Jane Seymour seemed to offer such an opportunity. At the end of January the king had a heavy fall in the lists, and was unconscious for more than two hours. Although he recovered completely and was none the worse apart from some bad bruising, this was a reminder of his mortality and of the urgency of the succession. Then in early February Anne miscarried for the second time. The foetus was male, and Henry became distraught at the thought of losing another son. He blamed Anne for this misfortune, and although she tried to shift the responsibility onto the Duke of Norfolk for springing the news of the king’s accident on her, he was not mollified.80 The possibility of removing her had now climbed up the agenda, and in March Henry sent a letter and a lavish gift to Jane Seymour, who rejected both with a coy profession of her virginity. The king was encouraged rather than dismayed by this demonstration of virtue, and his
interest was significantly increased, which suited the Seymour family admirably. What then happened is controversial, but it seems that Cromwell’s breach with Anne was finalised by a disagreement over the fate of the lesser monasteries, which were dissolved by statute in March.81 The queen wanted the proceeds to be devoted to Church causes, such as education and the augmentation of poor livings, whereas Cromwell wished the king to have the free disposal of them, to be deployed on the defence of the realm or in the satisfaction of the demand for royal patronage. In April Anne even authorised her almoner, John Skip, to preach a sermon attacking the anticlericalism of the secretary’s option, and the chips were fairly down.82 Unfortunately for him the Emperor was also proving hard to pin down at that point and was implying conditions about Mary’s right to the succession that Cromwell was in no position to satisfy and which the king was reluctant to concede. At the same time, if Anne were to be displaced, the whole Boleyn faction would need to be removed, and that necessitated an understanding at least with Mary’s friends around the court, who were of course out of favour with Henry. By the end of April, Cromwell was in a cleft stick. As early as the previous July the queen had threatened to have his head if he continued to obstruct her, and that time may now have come. She was far too formidable a politician to be shunted aside as Catherine had been, and it began to look as though it was her head or his. Henry seems to have been genuinely undecided at this point, and as late as 24 April was still writing sincerely about his ‘entirely beloved’ wife. On the other hand, he understood the issues, and measured his favours to the Boleyns and the Seymours equally. On the 27th a special commission of oyer and terminer was established to hear treasons in London and Middlesex, and this it has been argued, was a part of Cromwell’s preparations for his coup against Anne.83 However there is no evidence to support such a supposition, and it is not even certain that the secretary was responsible. No treason was named, and it is likely to have been a mere precautionary measure taken by the Lord Chancellor. Similarly the decision to call a new parliament, which was also taken in April and was unexpected in view of the recent dissolution of the last assembly, looks like Cromwell’s preparation for dealing with the queen’s case. Henry, however, had still not made up his mind, and would not have consented to such a recall unless there had been other pressing business to attend to. Although he was suspicious of the queen’s agenda, he was still speaking hopefully of the sons which she would bear him, and it was not until 29 or 30 April that he was finally bounced into a decision against her.