Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII

by Loades, David

  He no doubt derived his extended account of the disputation in convocation in 1537 from a similar source, Alexander Alesius still being alive when he was writing. Alesius’s oration on that occasion is quoted at length, along with similar speeches by Cranmer, Stokesley and Cromwell himself, all designed to emphasise the Lord Privy Seal’s godly credentials. ‘How desirous and studious this good Cromwell was,’ he comments, ‘in the cause of Christ’s religion, examples need not to be brought. His whole life was nothing else but a continual care and travail how to advance and favour the right knowledge of the Gospel and reform the House of God, as by his many proclamations, above specified by his means set forth, may well appear.’16

  He then proceeded at some length to give examples of the ways in which Cromwell had used his position to protect those sympathetic to reform, particularly Thomas Freebarne and his wife, who, being pregnant, had craved meat during Lent, thus getting herself into trouble with the bishop, and Ralph Morice, Cranmer’s secretary, who had lost his master’s representations against the Act of Six Articles. To this last he added authenticity with the marginal note that Morice was ‘yet alive’. Nor was it only the Lord Privy Seal’s godliness which Foxe praised. In an extended account derived from Bandello, he describes how the aged Frescobaldi arrived in London in pursuit of moneys which were owed to him, and being spotted by Cromwell in the street, was welcomed by him with open arms for old times’ sake.

  ‘This is he,’ he told the lords of the court, ‘by whose means I have achieved the degree of this my present calling, and because ye shall not be ignorant of his courtesy when I greatly needed, I shall tell it to you’ … [and] holding him by the hand, entered his house, and coming to his chamber, where his dinner was prepared, he sat him down to the table…17

  Frescobaldi’s creditors were soon persuaded by his means to settle their debts, and the Italian returned to his country a happy man. Foxe then proceeded by means of other examples to demonstrate the ‘fruits full of gratitude and courtesy’ which his subject displayed, and his zeal for peace, both domestic and international. Throughout all the time of Cromwell’s prosperity the king ‘never had war with any foreign nations’, notwithstanding that the Pope, the Emperor and the kings of France and Scotland were ‘mightily bent and incensed against him’, an outcome which he attributes to the secretary’s irenic influence. Inevitably much is made of the destruction of those monuments of superstition, the shrines of the saints, particularly the Rood of Boxley and the blood of Hailes, the ‘idolatrous forgery’ of these being disclosed by Cromwell’s means. Finally he came to the minister’s fall, which he attributed not to the king but to a conspiracy of certain ‘religious persons’, in the description of which he largely followed Hall. He ended his account with the patient sufferings of Cromwell in prison, and with his ‘true Christian confession’ at his death, giving what purports to be a verbatim rendering of his final prayer, and his quiet submission to the stroke of the axe.18

  Foxe’s narrative proved to be normative for the next generation of historians who dealt with the subject, and for long after. Raphael Holinshed for example, comments, ‘If we consider his coming up to such high degree as he attained, we may doubt whether there be cause to marvel at his good fortune or at his worthy and industrious demeanour…’19

  Other Protestant authors, such as Gilbert Burnet and John Strype, also followed Foxe in making Cromwell the hero of the English Reformation, but stressed his influence on the king rather than his independent policy. To such writers the key developments of the period were the break with Rome, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the authorisation of the English Bible, in each of which they had no difficulty in tracing the hand of the secretary. The only biography, Michael Drayton’s History of the Life and Death of the Lord Cromwell (1609) followed the same line, largely ignoring the alternative tradition which derived from Pole.20 The latter was followed, however, by Catholic authors such as ‘Charles Dodds’, whose Church History of England was published, ostensibly in Brussels, in 1742.21 It was not until the nineteenth century that this sectarian approach to the minister was abandoned in favour of a more secular interpretation. From about 1850 onwards the Renaissance took the place of the Reformation as defining the beginning of ‘modern times’, and the emphasis shifted from the Church to the State. The crucial date became 1485, and Henry VIII the central figure in this transformation. William Stubbs, the constitutional historian, identified Henry as the central figure in the creation of a ‘Tudor despotism’.

  ‘I am inclined,’ he wrote, ‘to regard Henry himself as the main originator of the greatest and most critical changes of his reign; and I am sure that, after the fall of Wolsey, there is no minister great or small, who can claim anything like an original share in determining the royal policy.’22

  Not everyone agreed with him. J. A. Froude, writing in 1856, regarded Henry as the interpreter of a popular will and allowed Cromwell a leading part in the transmission of that will. ‘For eight years his influence had been supreme with the king … the nation … was absolutely controlled by him, and he left the print of his individual genius stamped indelibly … into the constitution of the country.’ The debate was hot, and occasionally bad-tempered. Writing in 1874, J. R. Green agreed with Stubbs. ‘Parliament,’ he wrote ‘assembled only to sanction acts of unscrupulous tyranny, or to build up by its own statutes the great fabric of absolute rule.’ To this view of Cromwell’s role as essentially subservient, Pole’s near-contemporary portrayal of him as a Machiavellian was central, and led to a revival of interest in the cardinal’s opinions, and a corresponding diminution of the influence of Foxe, in spite of the appearance of two new editions of the Acts and Monuments during these years.23

  The most influential, as well as the most exhaustive study of Cromwell to appear during these years was undoubtedly R. A. Merriman’s Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, which was published in 1902. Merriman was inclined to agree with Green, and portrayed the minister as an unscrupulous secularist, whose priority was consistently his own position. He was not convinced that the policies involved in the break with Rome were Cromwell’s idea, nevertheless ‘he was the man who planned and carried through the various measures which have rendered famous the period of his ministry’. He was effectively the man who showed the king how to do what he wanted, but did not necessarily tell Henry what he ought to want.24 Merriman believed that Cromwell was totally dedicated to the business in hand, and did not allow morality or justice to stand in his path. He showed a complete lack of emotion, ‘ticking off in his memoranda the lives of human beings as if they were items in an account’. The morality of any action which he planned lay in its utility for his desired purpose, and that created its own justification. ‘Whether his desires were obtained by fair means or foul mattered little to him; he kept his eyes steadily fixed upon the goal.’ This being so, his enthusiasm for religious reform was a mere pose.25 Committed as he was to the idea of the Royal Supremacy, the reformers were his natural allies, and his protection of them has to be seen in that light. It was part of his constant campaign to retain the king’s favour. His patronage of the English Bible should be viewed in the same way. He did not care a jot for the scriptures, but the translation formed a useful way of maintaining the reforming initiative upon which he depended for purely secular reasons. Merriman was prepared to concede that his subject had an agreeable social manner. ‘Of his charm as a host,’ he wrote, ‘there is no room to doubt.’ But this also had its utility, and he quotes Chapuys to the effect that even the most experienced politicians (himself included) were often completely disarmed by Cromwell’s pleasing manner, uttering in the course of casual conversation things which they would have been better advised to keep to themselves.26

  Cromwell was also incurably venal. He allegedly wrote to the Prior of St Faith’s on 23 September 1536, informing him that although his house was scheduled for closure, through the Lord Privy Seal’s diligence it had been redeemed, and suggesting that a reward would
be acceptable. A similar letter, written shortly after to the Prior of Coxford, is also reproduced by Merriman. Both these letters were probably forgeries, and their appearance in the Cromwell archive is something of a mystery, unless they were planted.27 Cromwell certainly took rewards for similar services, but these were freely offered and only occasionally took the form of cash. More often they were preferential leases of abbey properties, either for himself or for one of his clients. On those occasions when he asked for leases, they were often refused on the grounds that the property concerned was already granted. Cromwell clearly received fees in return for services rendered, and these could be represented as bribes by those unfamiliar with sixteenth-century practices, but they would not have been seen in that way at the time. He did not see any reason why he should not enjoy the fruits, official and unofficial, of the offices which he held, and these included a number of stewardships and receiverships for noblemen and corporate towns as well as for abbeys.28 Although he enjoyed a handsome lifestyle, he never sought to emulate the opulence of Wolsey, or indeed the Duke of Norfolk. Merriman’s accusation that Cromwell took bribes, and allowed his actions to be influenced by the inducements which he received, therefore rests upon a very selective use of evidence, and on a mistaken conception of what those inducements represented. Similarly his statement that ‘Catholicism and Protestantism passed over his head. He was not touched by either of them’ now seems a serious misreading of the facts. Merriman did not like Cromwell, whom he regarded as an amoral upstart, but he was prepared to concede his diligence, and his efficiency.29

  A. F. Pollard’s Henry VIII was published only shortly after Merriman (1905), but presented a very different view of the situation. Henry was Pollard’s hero, and the events of the 1530s were almost entirely due to his management. Parliament was an instrument of royal absolutism, and the Royal Supremacy was his idea, building on the position which had been established as long before as the fourteenth century, and reiterated by Henry himself in 1516.30 Cromwell was a useful functionary, but special only in the efficient manner in which he carried out the king’s decisions. His influence compared unfavourably with that of Wolsey, and was in any case brought to a crunching halt by his fall in June 1540. He was the instrument used for the destruction of Anne Boleyn, which again owed nothing to his initiative, and was used as a scapegoat when the Cleves marriage ended in tears. Only in his dismissal of any serious content in Cromwell’s religious programme did Pollard agree with Merriman. The English Bible was the king’s idea, and the minister got caught out badly when Henry decided that a reforming agenda no longer served his purposes, and turned back to the conservative party in 1539. Pollard’s secular and rather small-scale Cromwell was the orthodox view of the middle years of the twentieth century, until the monumental researches of G. R. Elton turned the situation around in 1953 with the appearance of The Tudor Revolution in Government. This had begun its life as a PhD thesis for the University of London, submitted in 1948, but had been substantially reworked in the interval. Elton’s hero was a secular Thomas Cromwell, and the main theme of his study was the transformation of a medieval household government into a recognisably modem bureaucracy by his means.31 The essentially personal office of king’s secretary was turned by him into an office of state, controlling all kinds of business which he ensured passed over his desk; the affairs of Ireland and the workings of royal commissions no less than the minutiae of royal patronage. The realm was centralised in a manner never before contemplated, Wales was aligned with England and the old franchises were abolished. Above all, the Church was turned into a department of state, with full authority vested in the king. For the first time the papacy and its courts had no place in the English polity, a situation which went far beyond that envisaged by the praemunire laws of 1394. All this was done through the medium of Parliament, and it is in Cromwell’s use of that institution that Elton’s thesis goes furthest.32 Admittedly the secretary’s main aim was the augmentation of royal power, which was completely consistent with the king’s wishes, and has left the way open for controversy over responsibility for the strategy. But Elton was in no doubt that the initiative lay with Cromwell, whom he portrayed as having a vision of constitutional monarchy in which the king and his parliament were equal partners. The king was the head of the executive, spiritual as well as temporal, and of the judiciary; but only Parliament could make the laws which the king enforced.33 This in itself did not involve a revolutionary change in the functions of Parliament, which had long been recognised as a representative assembly with an exclusive right to make new laws and to vote on taxes. However, the extension of its jurisdiction to the Church gave it a competence recognisable as modern sovereignty, and that elevated it to a different plane. In addition, Cromwell transformed the revenue administration of the Crown, moving the main spending department from the Chamber, which was part of the household, to the Court of Augmentations, which he had created himself and staffed with like-minded colleagues.34 In other words he transformed the medieval constitution, court-centred and personal, into that of a bureaucratic and sovereign state. Of course that state depended heavily upon its head, but his power was in no sense absolute. It was circumscribed by the law and by the will of the nation represented by Parliament. It was as a constituent element of Parliament that the king stood ‘highest in his estate royal’, as he himself expressed it in 1545.35

  Needless to say, Elton’s thesis came under immediate attack. Medievalists like Gerald Harriss stressed the continuities which ran through the period, and would not admit that any very revolutionary changes had taken place in the 1530s, while Tudor specialists of a different persuasion, such as Penry Williams, tended to place the responsibility for the changes on Henry himself. Cromwell was undeniably a good minister, even a great one, but they denied him the constitutional vision which Elton had proposed.36 The latter’s thesis was nevertheless a compelling one, and excellently presented, especially when set in context, as the author himself did in his England under the Tudors, first published in 1955. This traced the whole history of the dynasty, and pointed out that Henry had never shown any originality of thought on political issues either before or after Cromwell’s time, and that the developments which took place later in the sixteenth century can be traced largely to those who had been trained by Cromwell, or consciously modelled themselves on him. The century as a whole saw the transformation of a medieval monarchy into a modern sovereign state, and the epicentre of that revolution was the 1530s. The polemical balance on the whole lay with Elton, and in 1973 he extended his interpretation in the published version of his Wiles lectures, given at the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1972. In this work, called Reform and Renewal, he proposed a rather different Thomas Cromwell; not only an intellectual, persuaded by the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua, but a man who added a vision of the commonweal to his concept of the state.37 Again proceeding largely by statute, he sought to revitalise the economy by encouraging the trade in unfinished cloth, and created the first poor law worthy of the name. This not only distinguished the impotent poor from the ‘sturdy vagabonds’, which earlier legislation had been designed to punish, but provided a system of local relief for them. This was set up on a parish basis, and involved the appointment of collectors and distributors of the relief payments, operating under the supervision of those favourite workhorses of Tudor government, the Justices of the Peace. This Act of 1536 created the model for all subsequent poor law legislation down to the seventeenth century, and Elton argued that it reflected Cromwell’s sensitivity and compassion as well as a willingness for the state to assume a degree of responsibility for the well-being of all its subjects.38 Law enforcement was no longer his primary concern.

  This thesis proved equally controversial. David Starkey pointed out that, far from creating a kind of impersonal bureaucracy, Cromwell had actually created a highly personal ascendancy, the main difference from the medieval system being that it was not centred on the court. Nevertheless, he argued, the court,
and particularly the Privy Chamber, not only retained but actually increased its importance during these years, as the king sought agents and means of communication that did not depend upon his ubiquitous chief minister.39 He was inclined to agree with Penry Williams and with Pollard that Henry had himself been responsible for the Royal Supremacy, although he did not deny that Cromwell had shown him the best way to realise his ambitions. Altogether Starkey regarded the whole Elton thesis of the visionary Cromwell with scepticism, pointing out that many of his actions can be explained just as plausibly by the minister’s need to respond to immediate and urgent situations which had developed, as to any vision, whether political or social. John Guy showed a similar scepticism, although with a narrower focus, when he challenged Elton’s view that the development of the Privy Council, which the latter had attributed to the Lord Privy Seal and dated to 1536–38, was actually the result of his fall and did not occur before 1540.40 Was it likely, he asked, that a man who had spent his public career building up a highly personalised administration, would have surrendered a large part of his control to an institution over which not he, but the king had ultimate authority? Guy and Starkey between them created another orthodoxy, which did not deny the revolutionary nature of the changes which had taken place during the 1530s, but were inclined to emphasise contingency in the actions which were taken, thus diminishing Cromwell’s role from that of a visionary statesman to that of an inspired opportunist. At the same time, they did not really address that other aspect of the Elton portrait, the generous and compassionate Cromwell, who could always be appealed to by the unfortunate with a reasonable chance of success. In place of the harsh and avaricious minister of Merriman’s biography, Elton had portrayed a man with a highly developed sense of justice, careful to investigate every case which was brought before him, and scrupulous in the administration of the law.41 He was also a man of faith, or at least of the Bible, which he regarded as an infallible guide to life and morality. So devoted was he to the promulgation of the scriptures that he risked falling out with his master over them, and although not a heretic in any obvious sense of that word was nevertheless a Protestant in certain aspects of his beliefs.42 There is no room here for the cynical scepticism of Merriman, whose Cromwell treated religion merely as a means of his own personal advancement. He was a man who took his faith seriously. He was also a man of charm and humour, some of whose more lapidary utterances can be attributed to the quality of his hospitality, which not even his worst enemies denied.