Cromwell began loyally. He proclaimed Henry’s ‘good and just title’ to the throne of France – a most worthy cause, and ‘who would not gladly give not only all his goods but also his life for it’. Cromwell appreciated the revenues that would stream into England if France were recovered, ‘to the great enriching and prospering’ of all the king’s subjects. He powerfully extolled the king’s goodness and virtue. Then the speech takes an unexpected turn. Cromwell looked ahead with dismay to the impending dreadful conflict among the rulers of Christendom, ‘so great a number princes, noble men and other subjects’, with ‘swords in their hands, to try where the pleasure of God shall be to strike … of which slaughter must needs ensue the most lamentable cries and sorrowful wringing of hands that hath happened in Christendom many years’. The heart and outlook of the speaker were surely forged by his personal experience, as a youth, of the horrors of war for ordinary soldiers and people.
Realizing the belligerent mood of many in the country, however, Cromwell accepted that now might not be the most appropriate time to talk of peace. So ‘insatiable’ was the appetite of the French to extend their boundaries ‘to the great molesting and troubling of all the nations about them’, that no remedy sufficed except they be ‘scourged else they will surely be a scourge to others’. How righteous indeed, Cromwell admitted, was the anger of our dread sovereign and his ally, the emperor; how laudable were Charles’s successes in Italy and elsewhere, and Henry’s victories over France’s ally, Scotland. Many loyal Englishmen would surely contend that the time was now ripe to press home the advantage, to attack France and ‘vanquish him utterly and subdue him’.
At this point Cromwell digressed slightly. He had heard something that ‘putteth me in no small agony’ – our most gracious sovereign intended to take the field in person. ‘Which thing I pray God for my part I never live to see.’ Cromwell begged his audience’s pardon, but he ‘cannot consent to obey’ for fear of the calamity that would befall the realm should any harm come to the king. For his subjects’ sake, his kingdom’s sake, and especially for the sake of his ‘dear and only daughter’ – for upon her, next only to the king, ‘dependeth all our wealth’ – Cromwell appealed to Henry to restrain his undoubted courage and zeal for a just cause, and remain within his own realm.
Then Cromwell examined the harsh practicalities of war. As many as 30,000 footmen and 10,000 horsemen would be needed. The cost of supplying such a vast army abroad, with the unpredictable Channel in between, could be ruinous for England – it might ‘consume all the coin and bullion in this realm’. If the king were taken captive on the battlefield, ‘how then should we be able to redeem him back again?’ Then to military tactics: the French might not take the field directly, but withdraw to Paris, lie in wait, seek to cut off supplies and leave our main army at the enemy’s mercy. Cromwell invoked the memory of Henry VII, who concentrated on Bolougne rather than venturing further inland; and also Charles V, who, in more recent campaigns, had not stretched his forces too far for fear of being surrounded. Further, even if victory in battle was achieved, how ‘should we be able to possess the large country of France’ without reliable allies there? In times past English invaders of France enjoyed the support of ‘assured confederates and allies … and assured friends’, while French towns possessed nothing like the fortifications and ‘marvellous strength’ that they did now.
So, Cromwell concluded, rather than waging war on France, let Henry concentrate on Scotland, to ‘join the same realm unto his’, and thereby ‘win the highest honour’, higher than any of his predecessors. This would be a far greater victory for England and a far greater defeat for France, for Scotland was France’s traditional ally against England. As the saying went, ‘who that intendeth France to win, with Scotland let him begin’. So the maiden speech ends.
It is not the speech of a sycophant, or an unscrupulously ambitious politician seeking only to ingratiate himself with his masters. Cromwell’s suggestion that Henry should remain at home was not designed to flatter, because leading armies into battle in person was just the sort of showy but unnecessarily dangerous gesture that would have appealed to Henry. This he would do in the post-Cromwellian 1540s, when the strategic value of his presence on the field was dubious. Cromwell’s words demonstrate good sense – a king with no adult heir should not take needless risks, especially with the instability of the previous century and the Roses Wars still alarmingly fresh in the minds of the English people.
Besides Cromwell’s concern for costs, trade and the suffering of a nation at war, the speech showed remarkable foresight, because only two years later King Francis was taken prisoner by the emperor’s troops at Pavia, and not released until the French were compelled to pay a huge ransom. Cromwell was also right about Scotland, because any English attack on France would expose England to the risk of war on two fronts – on the continent with France, and at home with France’s traditional northern ally. Scarcely less interesting is Cromwell’s reference to Princess Mary – upon whom ‘dependeth all our wealth’. Assuming that Cromwell was reflecting a general view rather than giving his own purely personal opinion, his words suggest that the absence of a male heir was not seen as a great threat to the stability of the Tudor dynasty.
Also interesting is the style of speech, and the technique used to try and persuade the king to change his mind. Employing the right kind of flattery at all the right places, Cromwell emphasized at some length the justness of the cause and the zeal of the king. Only after these points were eloquently made did he urge Henry not to go abroad for the sake of the realm. It was the sort of argument that even Henry could hardly reject outright. Then Cromwell focussed on the immense practical difficulties that a guerrilla campaign in France would pose, invoking unpleasant memories of prolonged conflict and hardship in the past – all skilfully calculated to dampen enthusiasm for war.
No evidence survives of any reaction to the speech, if indeed it was given, but a great deal else was discussed in that parliamentary session. Cromwell gave a wry account of affairs in a letter to his friend, John Creke:
I among others have endured a parliament which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we commoned of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, perjury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemprance, treason, murder, felony, conciliation, and also how a commonwealth might be edified and also continued within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say as well as we might, and left where we began.15
The letter reveals a little of the personality of the writer, because it continues in similar tongue-in-cheek tone: ‘All your friends to my knowledge be in good health and especially they that ye wott of: ye know what I mean. I think it best to write in parables because I am in doubt’. As Elton has already said, it would be foolish to read a cynical contempt for parliament into these words. Elton has quoted several extracts of famous parliamentarians expressing exasperation with the institution, the workload, the disappointments and the frequent difficulty in converting constructive ideas into effective legislation.16
However, what Cromwell’s letter may reveal is not frustration exactly, but rather a dry, worldly-wise sense of humour, and a judgement of mankind and human affairs that is mature and realistic but neither contemptuous nor cynical. Certainly he was no naïve idealist. In style and content his letter is somewhat reminiscent of the Old Testament preacher:
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh … The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose … The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:4–9.)
When parliament was dissolved, Cromwell resumed his legal and business interests. At an inquest in December, he and others made various claims against church officials and their properties; th
ese included such diverse matters as defective pavements, noisy geese on church lands, brawling neighbours, doors that needed fixing and cantankerous women. The following year (1524) Cromwell was admitted to Gray’s Inn, one of the English legal societies that formed the Inns of Court. Land deeds continued to take up much of his time, but he also investigated a dispute among the family of the earl of Oxford regarding inheritance, and he drafted a licence for William Collyns to carry on his trade as a blacksmith in any city or town. Cromwell drafted a petition of Robert Leighton, gentleman porter of the Tower, to Wolsey alleging assault during a church service. He also received a petition from Edward Smything, addressed to him as ‘councillor to the lord legate’, requesting recovery of cloths depicting Christ on Maundy Thursday, Christ praying in the Garden and bearing the Cross.17
Around the turn of the year (1525), Cromwell was forced to put the lands of one John Fleming in Yorkshire into execution for breach of covenant. In May he revised a draft for a lease of church lands in York; the draft was originally composed by Thomas Wriothesley, a man also in Wolsey’s service, who would become a lifelong associate of Cromwell’s. In June a Mr Cowper sought Cromwell’s help to obtain a benefice for a relative, while in November another business dispute concerning alleged non-payment of goods required attention.18
In February 1526 he was involved in the allocation of benefices, though the papers do not state whether he had authority to recommend appointments, or whether he was just administering the matter – probably the latter. A more interesting assignment was a draft of a petition to Henry on behalf of the merchants of Hanse for safe conduct and a licence to trade. The licence itself, also in Cromwell’s hand, was granted by Wolsey, acting for the king. In June Cromwell was invited to inspect and audit accounts. In July one Lawrence Starkey asked him if he could use his influence to obtain a benefice. Starkey also complained about alleged wrongs done to him by the bishop of London and the abbess of Syon, and asked Cromwell’s help. Land and testate affairs remained the most common legal tasks, and they could be pleasingly profitable when clients like George Monoux, an alderman, promised Cromwell twenty marks for a favourable outcome.19
Not all his life was taken up with business and law. By now he had acquired a reputation for generosity with money as well as a flair for making it. Lawrence Giles sent greetings to Cromwell and his wife, thanking him for kindnesses he could not repay, observing how God provides for those who help the poor, ‘as I understand … your mastership is provided’. Cromwell was also able to afford an education for his son Gregory. Cromwell’s sister had married a farmer with the wonderfully English rustic name of Wellyfed, and in the early 1520s Gregory and young Wellyfed began their schooling together in Cambridge. Letters survive from Gregory to his father promising to do his best and work hard – ‘we apply our books diligently’, he assured him. School was not ‘all work and no play’, however, and the boys were thrilled when a local lord took them out for a day’s hunting and ‘let us see such game and pleasure as I never saw in my life’.20
With Wolsey’s domestic political policy, Cromwell seems to have had little to do. It was fortunate for his reputation and later career that he was not one of the commissioners appointed by Wolsey in spring 1525 to raise yet more money from the clergy and laity to finance the military aspirations of the king and his cardinal. This so-called ‘Amicable Grant’ provoked unexpectedly stiff opposition in the country, and had to be withdrawn in the face of threats of a rising in south east England. Nor is there any evidence that Cromwell was a part of Wolsey’s foreign policy team in the cardinal’s complex diplomatic manoeuvrings with France, Rome and the emperor.
Cromwell was, however, closely involved in the administration of Wolsey’s colleges. In January 1525 Wolsey appointed Sir William Gascoigne, William Burbank and Cromwell to survey six monasteries to be converted for the use of Cardinal’s College at Oxford, for which Cromwell drafted the letters patent. Cromwell and one John Smith were also attorneys for four other religious houses. At the dissolution of monasteries at Begham and Blackmore, Cromwell was present as a witness, though not the chief officer. It is from Begham that we have the only surviving letter of Cromwell to his wife, though it does not reveal very much about their married life – he sent her a nice fatted doe and asked for news of home.21
During the next four or five years until Wolsey’s fall, twenty-nine small monastic communities were closed. These dissolutions were not a proto-Protestant measure; they were decided on by Wolsey with the approval of both the king and Rome, with a view to funding and beautifying Wolsey’s grand colleges in Oxford and Ipswich. Cromwell’s involvement continued in various ways, as surveyor, administrator, and attorney. He was not acting alone, and in February 1525 Wolsey was urging Henry not to listen to bad reports of the behaviour of some of his officers during the suppressions. No names were mentioned, so it is not known for certain whether Cromwell was one of those who had carried out his tasks with heavy-handed efficiency. Two years later, however, Wolsey was told that the ‘king and noble men speak things incredible of the acts of Mr Alayn and Cromwell’. If this was meant as a complaint it did Cromwell no harm either with Henry or Wolsey, for in September 152 Cromwell was described on an official document as ‘receiver-general’ of Cardinal College at Oxford.22
So far as can be discerned, Cromwell played no part in Wolsey’s anti-Lutheran measures. Following the birth of the Reformation in Germany, a variety of unorthodox religious ideas had been filtering into England. Men like Thomas Bilney and Robert Barnes were preaching justification by faith and attacking the worship of the saints, though they had not yet denied papal authority or the sacraments of the church. A Protestant underground movement had begun in England, and it was smuggling literature into the country, successfully evading the authorities’ book-hunting and book-burning drives. The most famous English evangelical of these years was William Tyndale, now forced to flee and live in exile on the continent where he worked on his translation of the Bible; but in the mid to late 1520s, there is nothing to directly connect Cromwell with either Tyndale or Lutheranism. Cromwell was, however, a friend of Miles Coverdale, a man soon to become part of English Protestant history as a reformer and Bible translator. In a letter to Cromwell dated May 1527, Coverdale thanked him for his goodness, and recalled a conversation ‘in Master Moore’s house on Easter Eve’. It is not certain whether this was Thomas More. Knowing Cromwell’s ‘fervent zeal’ for ‘virtue and godly study’, Coverdale sought his help, for he had begun ‘to taste of Holy Scriptures … holy letters … and the ancient doctors’. He appealed for more books, promised to dedicate himself to learning, and offered his services to Cromwell. The letter reads as though Coverdale was not particularly piously inclined until he came under Cromwell’s influence. Soon Coverdale would meet and befriend Robert Barnes, and both would move quickly in a Protestant direction.23
Coverdale’s letter, though brief, is a useful pointer to Cromwell’s spiritual mindset in the late 1520s. It compliments Foxe’s story that Cromwell had learned by heart Erasmus’s Latin New Testament during one of his visits to Rome. It shows that Cromwell was far from the irreligious secularist depicted by Merriman and others. He was no Lutheran yet, but Coverdale has told us what kind of Catholic Cromwell almost certainly was. He belonged, it would seem, to the ranks of Christian humanists, who, though still ‘Catholic’ in the broadest sense of the word, had become disillusioned with the medieval scholastic theologians, and preferred to read the Scriptures and the works of the church fathers (the ‘ancient doctors’). The seeming relish with which Cromwell went about suppressing monasteries suggests that he had little love for monastic traditions or conventional piety. The term ‘Erasmian’ – if it means a church still loosely Catholic though stripped of some of the outward piety that Erasmus and other humanists disdained – may be safely used to describe Cromwell in these years.
Meanwhile, he continued his legal business, though there is little sign in 1527 that either his clients or his
cases were significantly more prestigious than a few years earlier. He was again involved with several claims between merchants. When his close friend, Stephen Vaughan, suffered losses after having his goods seized on the high seas, and was being pursued by unsympathetic creditors, Cromwell drafted a petition to Wolsey on Vaughan’s behalf. A certain Henry Lacy asked Cromwell for help in a testate matter, and also in a property dispute between him and the wife of a cousin who had left her husband. One of the first signs of any contacts between Cromwell and a powerful new political faction – the Boleyns – occurred in December 1527, when Cromwell wrote to Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, now Viscount Rochford; Cromwell was acting as counsel for the wife of Sir Robert Clare, Rochford’s sister.24
According to Foxe, Cromwell also found himself ‘in the wars of the duke of Bourbon at the siege of Rome’. On this story Foxe is frustratingly brief, but Bourbon’s imperialist troops sacked and wrecked carnage in Rome in May 1527. It is possible, though not especially easy, to fit such a visit in with Cromwell’s legal business that year – most of the cases noted above, apart from the Clare matter, took place in March or April. This, however, is not enough to reject Foxe’s story completely. A hurried, secret visit could have been undertaken on Wolsey’s instructions, because Henry and Wolsey were supporting Bourbon against King Francis. Beyond that, unfortunately, nothing is known about it.25
The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell Page 2
