Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII

by Loades, David

  We knowledge and confess that we have none authority either to assemble ourselves together for any pretence or purpose, or to publish anything that might be by us agreed on and compiled…

  It also asked the king to make any corrections which he thought fit.46 This preface was accompanied by a note from Henry to the effect that he had not had time to read it, but that was the nearest it got to royal approval. It was only after Jane’s death, in December, that the king got down to the task of correcting the text of the Bishops’ Book, and then he was fairly drastic, implying that the saints are mediators between God and man, and adding the name of Jesus Christ to the first commandment. Where the book had stated that all men are equal in God’s eyes, he added the proviso, ‘Touching the soul only’ and added the warning ‘that there be many folk which had liever live by the graft of begging slothfully’ than earn an honest living. He also deleted astrology from the list of superstitions warned against, because he was a keen believer in that pseudoscience.47 In general his corrections were in a conservative direction, and greatly annoyed Cranmer, to whom they were communicated. Cromwell, to whom the archbishop passed them on, was equally concerned, and was able to make sure that as long as his influence prevailed, they never saw the light of print. A number of them appeared eventually in the King’s Book, but that was not published until 1543.48

  Cromwell’s reform programme was not much set back by Henry’s eccentric doctrinal opinions, which remained within the confines of the court. Publicly he inspired the destruction of the shrines and the emergence of the English Bible. The king’s views on the saints were not entirely consistent. While he continued to regard them as intercessors between God and man, he rejected as superstitious the value of relics and the uses of pilgrimage. He also endeavoured to distinguish between the acceptable appearance of images as reminders of the Godly lives of those commemorated, and the unacceptable worship of the same. He therefore objected to the reformers desire to remove all images from churches, while at the same time supporting the abolition of shrines. The latter activity began in 1535 with the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Thomas had been, in the king’s eyes, a traitor to his prince and therefore in no way worthy to be regarded as a saint.49 Moreover his shrine was the richest in England, and several wagons were required to take away the loot which accrued to him from its abolition. The most celebrated destruction came two years later in the context of the pressure building on the greater abbeys; the exposure of the so-called ‘Rood of Boxley’ by Cromwell’s commissioners in 1537. This was an image which appeared to respond to petitioners, particularly those bearing gifts, and was revealed to be animated by a subtle system of wires and levers operated by the brother in charge. It was seized and exhibited with much derision first in Kent and then in London, where it was publicly hacked in pieces and burned.50 Another fraud was the ‘blood of Hailes’, which was brought to Cromwell by the reforming abbot, who was uncertain what to do with it. He swore that it had not been tampered with during his incumbency, and a commission appointed to look into it could only decide that the phial contained ‘a thick, red, sticky substance’ that was certainly not blood. It was valueless, and was returned to the abbot for safekeeping until the king’s pleasure respecting it should be known. What Henry decided is not known, but the treasures of the shrine went the same way as all the others – into the king’s coffers. There is no doubt that the profit to be made from this destruction was a considerable motive, particularly in Cromwell’s case, but it could not have been carried out without Henry’s full consent and support. His sense of pastoral responsibility was also engaged by the question of an English Bible. The first attempt in this direction had been William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526, which conservative bishops hastened to assure him was full of heretical errors, and which he had banned for that reason.51 However he was more than half-persuaded that it was his responsibility to bring the gospel of Christ to his people in their own language. Perhaps he was convinced by the value of Bible study to his own matrimonial cause, or perhaps by the words of St Paul about worshipping in a strange tongue, but in any case as early as 1530 he had promised convocation that he would authorise a new translation by ‘wise and Catholic men’.

  He did not, however, commission such a work, but rather, advised by Cromwell, waited for a suitable effort to emerge from the work which was already ongoing. The first candidate to appear was Cromwell’s friend Miles Coverdale, who completed his translation in 1535. This was based mainly on the Vulgate, Erasmus and Luther, and Cromwell was not overly impressed, perhaps because he was looking for a version derived from the original Greek and Hebrew, and he knew that Coverdale’s Hebrew was not up to the task. He would also have been aware that much of the New Testament was derived from Tyndale, and that the king would also have known that. He toyed with the idea of getting it authorised, and included in his first draft of the injunctions of 1536 a requirement that every parish should possess a copy.52 However he then drew back, and that clause did not appear in the injunctions as issued. Coverdale thus missed out on being the first authorised version, but it was not banned and continued to circulate, being reprinted in 1537 by James Nicholson of Southwark. By the time that this happened, a rival had appeared on the scene in the form of the ‘Mathew’ Bible, printed in Antwerp. This claimed to be the work of Thomas Mathew, but had in fact been prepared by John Rogers, another of Cromwell’s protégés and a friend of Tyndale.53 It was derived from the Greek and the Hebrew, but the New Testament was unadulterated Tyndale, although taken from his 1534 revision, not the 1526 original. The Pentateuch was also Tyndale’s work with minor revisions, and the Psalms and the Prophets were taken from Coverdale. They had probably been prepared by one of his collaborators, and the historical books may well have been Rogers’ own contribution. Aware of Henry’s reservations about Coverdale, Cranmer commended this version to Cromwell on 4 August 1538, and asked him to present it to the king in the hope of securing royal authority for it to be sold throughout the land.54 In spite of its close similarity to Tyndale this rather surprisingly produced a favourable response, and Cromwell was able to insert in his second set of injunctions, sent to Cranmer on 30 September, the clause which he had omitted from the first set. Every parish was now to purchase a copy and display it in the nave of their church for everybody who was literate to read on at their will. The clergy were expressly forbidden to inhibit access to these scriptures, and were enjoined to encourage all who could do so to study them.55 Cranmer was delighted and thanked his friend in terms which suggest that Henry’s approval was by no means to be taken for granted. Cromwell’s ‘high and acceptable service’ to God and the king ‘shall so much redound to your honour that, besides God’s reward, you shall obtain perpetual memory for the same within the realm’.56 Henry’s attitude towards the English Bible is a somewhat puzzling one, because within months of having approved it for general access he was worrying about the holy scriptures being ‘railed on’ in every alehouse instead of treated with the reverence which was their due, and in April 1539 he issued a proclamation limiting access to the educated. This did not, however, prevent him from authorising Cromwell in November of the same year to approve a new translation, the result of which was the Great Bible, which was issued with a preface by Thomas Cranmer in 1540;57 or the issuing of a new proclamation in May 1541 repeating the order contained in the injunctions of 1538. In spite of his reservations, the king seems to have been convinced that it was his duty as a Christian prince to make the Bible available to his subjects, and it was Cromwell who persuaded him of that. In so doing he was following unintentionally the reformers’ agenda, and creating a demand which proved stronger than the conservative instincts of his people, as some of his bishops ruefully acknowledged at the time.

  The year 1538 was a difficult time for Henry in diplomatic terms, as the Truce of Nice brought Francis and Charles into unusual alignment, and as his marriage negotiations struggled on into the autumn. Cromwell was using Robert Barnes to keep his
lines of communication with the Lutherans open, and Barnes had been in trouble for heresy over a number of years. This had never come to a head because of the Lord Privy Seal’s protection, but he was undoubtedly taking a risk in using Barnes in this way as the authorised agent of a king who prided himself upon his doctrinal orthodoxy. As the Pope prepared to promulgate the sentence of excommunication issued against him three years earlier, Henry felt it to be necessary to demonstrate this orthodoxy in order to prove that Paul was acting out of malice and not for any genuine religious reason, and an opportunity was presented to him by the case of John Lambert.58 Lambert was a sacramentary, that is to say one who denied the real presence in the Eucharist, and as such was not much more popular with the evangelicals than he was with the conservatives. In fact it had been the reformers Barnes and Rowland Taylor who had first complained about him to Cranmer. The archbishop questioned him and endeavoured to reason with him, as he was accustomed to do, but for some extraordinary reason, Lambert appealed over him to the king.59 He must have been aware of Henry’s extreme dislike of sacramentaries, and the suspicion is that he wished to make a martyr of himself in the most public possible way. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he may have been encouraged in this appeal by Cromwell, who would have been anxious to give Henry an occasion to demonstrate his orthodoxy in a way which did not compromise his relations with the evangelicals, who, as we have seen, were on his side in this matter. The king decided to make an exhibition of Lambert, and laid on a show trial in November 1538. At this a number of bishops and peers were in attendance, and the former played a full part in the arguments, which went on for nearly five hours, at the end of which time Lambert, who had not budged an inch in his resolution, appealed again directly to the king. Henry, who had also played a full part in the debate, is alleged to have referred him to the reserved sacrament, which was present in the room, saying, ‘There is the maker of us all’; at which he doffed his bonnet.60 But Lambert was not moved and the king called upon Cromwell, who had sat silent throughout the proceedings, to read the sentence against him. When reporting these proceedings to the ambassadors abroad, the Lord Privy Seal commended Henry’s ‘excellent gravity and inestimable majesty’, but he might as well have commented upon his stamina. He called Lambert that ‘miserable man’ and there is no reason to suppose that he had any sympathy with him at all, but on the day of his execution a few days later, he was taken first to Cromwell’s house where they engaged in an extended discussion. It is reasonably supposed that he had word that Lambert’s death would be unusually protracted on the king’s orders, and that he was endeavouring to secure a last minute recantation. If that was the case then he failed, and Lambert was burned in a slow fire a few hours later.61 Cromwell’s recorded part in Lambert’s end was purely formal, but it is hard to believe that he did not derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that he and Cranmer and the king were all on the same side, because it was very important to distance the evangelicals from the radicals who were beginning to appear, and whose extreme notions gave the conservatives the opportunity to tar all reformers with the same brush, as Cromwell had pointed out to Lord Lisle in May 1538.62

  As we have seen, the idea of dissolving the greater monasteries was probably the king’s rather than Cromwell’s, and there is some evidence that the two were at cross purposes in 1538 and 1539. The nunnery of Godstowe is a case in point because the king, on Cromwell’s suggestion, had recently appointed a reforming abbess, one Katherine Bulkeley, and Katherine had named Cromwell as her steward with many expressions of gratitude. Then, in November 1538, Dr John London turned up at Godstowe, pressing for the surrender of the house. The abbess promptly appealed to Cromwell, asking him to ‘continue my good lord, as you have ever been’, and asking for ‘the stay of Dr London’. This was apparently achieved because on 26 November she wrote again, thanking him for having sent a ‘contrary commandment’. ‘Be assured,’ she went on,

  there is neither pope nor purgatory, image nor pilgrimage, nor praying to dead saints used or regarded among us; but all superstitious ceremonies set apart, the very honour of God and the truth of his holy words … is most tenderly followed and regarded by us…63

  So she and her sisters were permitted to continue with their reformed life – for a little while. By the end of the following year the house had gone down, and there was nothing further that Cromwell was able, or willing, to do about it. The prior of Malvern, faced with a similar threat, had also appealed successfully to the Lord Privy Seal, but in his case also it amounted to no more than a stay of execution. Whether Cromwell was genuinely converted to the king’s view of the situation, or realised the impossibility of further resistance, we do not know. After the Act of May 1539, vesting all the property of the dissolved houses in the Crown, his main interventions relate to the securing of generous pensions for those whom he had placed only a short while before in the hope of furthering his evangelical programme. In Katherine Bulkeley’s case this was a generous £50 a year.64 He was apparently more successful in persuading the king to devote some of the proceeds of the Dissolution to good causes than he was in checking the process. Richard Lee’s appeal to convert the Abbey of Coventry into a collegiate church was heard and acted upon, and the Grey Friars church of Carmarthen was converted into a school on the petition of the mayor and aldermen. The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge was also gratified to learn that the dissolved religious foundations within the university would be transformed into places of learning and true doctrine.65 Six abbeys were converted into secular cathedrals to serve the new dioceses which were created, but this did not happen until after Cromwell’s fall, and whether his influence can be traced there also is hard to determine. Since a plan to that effect was being actively discussed as early as May 1539, it is probable that it can.

  By the time that that happened there are distinct signs that the king and the Lord Privy Seal were pursuing different agendas. Earlier in the year Cromwell had persuaded Henry to send Robert Barnes to Copenhagen to discuss Anglo–Danish relations, in particular the prospect of an anti-papal alliance, and Christopher Mont to the Duke of Saxony with a promise of England’s adherence to the League of Schmalkalden. Mont was to ask for a high-level delegation to be sent to England, possibly led by Philip Melanchthon, to discuss the Confession of Augsburg, which had always been the sticking point in earlier negotiations.66 The Germans were understandably cool, feeling that they had been this way before without success, but agreed eventually to send a low-key mission, which did not include Melanchthon, and which arrived on 23 April, to a warm welcome from Cromwell, for whom their presence represented a diplomatic success. Christian III of Denmark was more positive, and suggested a meeting in England involving Danish and Leaguer representatives to suggest a way forward. He also warmly urged Henry to accept the Confession of Augsburg and become a full member of the League.67 Unfortunately, by the time that these tidings reached him in May, Henry was off on a different tack, and not prepared to listen to Lutheran urgings. Worried by the evidence of religious dissent, and the troubles being caused by clashes in the pulpit between old and new believers, he consulted a selection of his bishops, including Gardiner and Cranmer, and caused to be introduced into Parliament a Bill ‘abolishing diversity in opinions’. This Bill, which was moved in the Lords by the Duke of Norfolk on 16 May, was a victory for Catholic orthodoxy and Cromwell was considerably disconcerted. He had, as usual, vetted the returns of members of the Commons, but that was with a view to ensuring that government measures were passed, and he had not bargained for this thumping conservative declaration. It was vigorously debated but there was never a chance that it would be rejected, and Henry, realising how strongly it would offend Cranmer’s conscience, licensed his archbishop to be absent from the discussions in the Lords.68 No similar indulgence was extended to the Lord Privy Seal, and it is not known whether or to what extent he made his opposition clear. It was, however, the last thing that the Lutheran delegation wished to hear, and even be
fore it was passed their talks with the king became bogged down in an unseemly row over clerical celibacy. This was an issue about which Henry felt strongly, but it was not the only reason why the negotiations broke down soon afterwards. That was largely because word was received from Germany that the Lutheran princes had come to terms with the Emperor at the Diet of Frankfort. This made them useless as allies, and the king told the delegation that they might as well go home.69 He had suspected that this might happen, which was one of the reasons why he had been reluctant to receive them in the first place, but this confirmation did nothing to sweeten his temper. Cromwell’s affairs were not going well, but fortunately the Cleves negotiation was still alive, and he began to devote his whole attention to that, which was brought to a successful conclusion in August. In spite of the failure of the Schmalkaldic negotiations, Henry had an ally within the Empire, and by October was committed to a new bride.

  The Act of Six Articles, which passed the Commons on 2 June, was undoubtedly a setback for Cromwell, but perhaps not as great as has sometimes been assumed. The first article ran,

  In the most blessed sacrament of the altar, by the strength and efficacy of Christ’s mighty word, it being spoken by the priest, is present really, under the form of bread and wine, the natural body and blood of our saviour Jesus Christ, conceived of the Virgin Mary, and that after the consecration there remaineth no substance of bread or wine, nor any other substance but the substance of Christ God and Man…70

  This was an affirmation of transubstantiation, although the word was not used. It would have offended the Lutherans, who believed that after consecration the substance of bread and wine remained in the elements, along with the spiritual presence of Christ, but there is no reason to suppose that it distressed Cromwell. As far as we know, and in spite of the accusations later levelled against him, his Eucharistic theology was strictly orthodox. More disturbing would have been the second article, in favour of communion under one kind, but this merely stated that it was not necessary ad salutem by the law of God for the laity to receive the cup as well as the bread. A full Lutheran would have disagreed, and Cromwell seems to have preferred both kinds, but it was not a major issue to him. Clerical celibacy, which forms the third article, was an issue and he disagreed with it. It did not affect him personally as a layman and a widower; but it was a serious embarrassment to Cranmer, who was secretly married, and who was forced to send his wife back to Germany when the Act came into force.71 The fourth article, on the binding nature of religious vows, was also an issue, although a strictly practical one. Cromwell could see no point in enforcing vows taken in a monastic context when that context had disappeared. It would surely be better to encourage former nuns, for instance, to marry rather than to remain dependent upon their families, because except for the heads of houses, none of them received a living wage as a pension. He did not accept the indelible nature of religious vows, but that was an issue of purely secondary importance. The fifth and sixth articles were affirmations of good Catholic practice, and ran counter to the reformed teachings that Cromwell is thought, but not known, to have embraced. The fifth affirms the validity of private masses, which Luther had set his face against, maintaining that there should always be a congregation present and receiving, to make the mass a true sacrament; and the sixth affirms that auricular confession (to a priest) is ‘expedient and necessary to be retained’.72 On neither of these matters is Cromwell known to have expressed an opinion, but his general endorsement of evangelical teaching makes it reasonable to suppose that he would have opposed these clauses also, if he had been given the chance.