The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

by John Schofield

  An inventory of Cromwell’s goods dated June 1527 confirms the impression that, though not excessively rich, he was now a man of some means, who had done rather well for himself since fleeing the country from his step-father as a youth. As well as furniture and clothing, items listed include images of Christ and Mary and the Magi, an ornament of Venetian gold, a picture of Lucretia Romana, and a gold broach with an engraving of Mary Magdalene. Other miscellaneous letters and papers also suggest that Cromwell was a collector of ornaments and furniture. Sub-sections of the inventory include ‘Mr Prior’s chamber’ and ‘Mistress Prior’s chamber’ – these were his in-laws, presumably living with him and his wife. Mistress Prior was quite a lady. Her possessions included a range of clothing and household goods, a silver brooch, purses, a silk Spanish girdle, seven pearls, plus pieces of velvet and satin. Stephen Vaughan, when asking Cromwell to commend him to her, once described her as ‘after you my most singular friend’.26

  Here, then, is a historical snapshot of Thomas Cromwell in 1527. It shows a self-made man, a thriving freelance lawyer with profitable commercial interests, employed in the service of the king’s most powerful minister, happily married with a growing family and enjoying a satisfying social life. No sign can be detected of a deep religious conversion or burning political ambition. Independent of, and happily unthreatened by, the intrigues of factions and power struggles at court and in the ruling council, his was an altogether agreeable manner of living. But it was not his destiny to remain in it, and like many of his friends and colleagues, he would soon be caught up and carried along by the momentous events about to unfold in King Henry’s reign.

  Notes

   1 Othello Act 2, Scene 3.

   2 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 228. A report by the Venetian ambassador in England to the Venetian senate dated 3 June 1535 also included a short biography of Cromwell, but for reasons best known to themselves, the transcribers left out all the details. See CSP Ven. 5, no. 54, p. 26, footnote.

   3 3 From Pole’s Apologia ad Carolum Quintum, printed in Merriman 1, p. 18.

   4 Bandello 1, pp. 1010–11.

   5 Foxe 5, pp. 362, 365, 392–3.

   6 Merriman, 1 pp. 1–8; Calendar of Close Rolls … Henry VII (London, HMSO, 1963), vol. 2, 1500–1509, no. 57.

   7 Ellis 10, pp. 237–9; PRO SP 1/89, fol. 6 = LP 8, no. 11; CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 165, p. 468. The admission of the mother’s age is discussed in context in chap. 7.

   8 PRO SP 1/87, fols 97–9 = LP 7, no. 1515.

   9 Foxe 5, pp. 363–5.

  10 LP 1, no. 1473 (3556); Elton, Studies 3, p. 374; CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 228; Merriman 1, p. 12.

  11 Foxe 5, p. 365; LP 1, no. 3195 (5355); Elton, Studies 3, p. 374; G.R. Elton, Reform & Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1973), p. 34. Cromwell may have made further visits to Rome on the subject of Boston pardons, because in April 1529 the Guild of our Lady in Boston thanked him for all that he had done for them: LP 4 (3), no. 5460.

  12 LP 3 (1), nos 1026, 1289, 1963; LP 3 (2), nos 2437, 2441, 2557.

  13 LP 3 (2), nos 2447, 2461, 2624, 2754, 3015. For miscellaneous legal affairs see also LP 3 (2), nos 2753, 3081, 3502 (from his cousin, Henry Wykys), 3530, 3681 (2).

  14 The speech is printed in Merriman 1, pp. 30–44. See also the note in Elton, Tudor Const., p. 309, fn. 170.

  15 Merriman 1. p. 313.

  16 Elton, Studies 1, pp. 277–80.

  17 Merriman 1, p. 47; Elton, Studies, p. 375; LP 3 (2), no. 3657; LP 4 (1), nos 106 (7), 294, 304, 327, 368, 388 (2, 7, 2), 393 (2), 643, 681, 969, 979.

  18 Merriman 1, pp. 314–15; LP 4 (1), nos 1348 (2), 1386, 1794.

  19 LP 4 (1), nos 1989 (2), 2106, 2229, 2347–8; LP 4 (2), nos 2375, 2387, 2400, 2755.

  20 LP 4 (1), no. 1732; Ellis 9, pp. 338–9.

  21 Merriman 1, p. 314; LP 4 (1), nos 99, 989–90, 1137, 1138 (2), 1499 (3).

  22 J. Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London, 1971), p. 27; Merriman 1, pp. 319–21; LP 4 (1), nos 1881, 1964, 2193, 2217; LP 4 (2), nos 2538 (8), 2738; SP 1, pp. 155–6, 261; LP 4 (2), no. 3461.

  23 Remains of Coverdale, ed. G. Pearson (Cambridge, 1846), pp. 490–92; J.F. Mozley, Coverdale and his Bibles (London, 1953), pp. 2–3.

  24 LP 4 (2), nos 2844, 2989–91, 3014, 3032, 3053 (1), 3079; Merriman 1, pp. 316–18.

  25 Foxe 5, p. 365; Cavendish, pp. 37–41, 209.

  26 LP 14 (2), nos 3197, 4613, 4884, 5034; LP 4 (3), nos 6429, 6744.

  2

  To Make or Mar

  After the tragic and untimely death in 1501 of Prince Arthur, eldest son and heir of King Henry VII, the king was anxious to preserve the alliance he had made with Spain. Consequently he had arranged for the marriage of his second son, then Prince Henry, to Catherine of Aragon, Arthur’s widow. Because a marriage to the wife of a dead brother could be problematic in ecclesiastical law and practice, the English and Spanish authorities decided to ask for a papal dispensation. This they duly obtained from Pope Julius II. Henry VIII then married Catherine when he became king in 1509.1

  The marriage began happily enough, but it had failed to produce a male heir. Catherine had been pregnant many times, but royal babies, including males, were either still-born or died soon after birth. The queen had also suffered several miscarriages. Princess Mary was the only surviving child, and though Henry did have an illegitimate son in Henry Fitzroy, no royal bastard had ever succeeded his father to the English throne.2

  At some point difficult to determine, Henry VIII, a prince with a keen interest in theology, and a high opinion of his own abilities in the subject, fastened on to texts in the book of Leviticus which appeared to forbid sexual relations or marriage to a brother’s wife, and which warned that anyone who disobeyed this command would be punished with childlessness (Leviticus 18:6, 20:21). However, another text from Deuteronomy did allow a man to marry his dead brother’s wife, if that marriage had produced no children (Deuteronomy 25:5). Some theologians saw no contradiction between the two, on the grounds that Leviticus simply forbad marrying the wife of a brother who was still alive; in other words, it prohibited bigamy. Others disagreed, and Henry’s divines set to work on what would become known as the King’s Great Matter. For his own part, Henry became convinced that his marriage to Catherine was unlawful, and that the papal dispensation issued by Pope Julius clashed with the divine law of Leviticus, and was therefore invalid.3

  It would be easy – perhaps too temptingly easy – to suspect that all this disputing about Leviticus and dispensations amounted to nothing more than a giant constitutional red herring, because Henry’s affections for Catherine had now faded, and he was in love with the younger, spirited Mistress Anne Boleyn. It is an undeniable historical fact that in each of Henry’s three divorces (or annulments, as he preferred to call them), the appearance of another woman in his life just happened to coincide with the discovery of complications over the validity of his present marriage. However, whether passion for Anne prompted or emerged from Henry’s qualms of conscience over Leviticus is something that must be left to others. What matters here is that, according to the Tudor historian Edward Hall, it was in 1527 that Henry’s confessor and other clerics told him that his marriage to Catherine was not lawful, and that he was free to consider marrying again.4

  Anne Boleyn had once been a maid of Queen Catherine’s. Then Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, fell in love with her, though with miserable ill luck he did so at about the same time that she caught Henry’s roving eye. Displeased to hear that Percy and Anne were courting and might be wishing to marry, Henry ordered Wolsey to thwart the young couple’s plans. Wolsey summoned Percy to appear before him and rebuked him, heir as he was to one of the greatest earldoms in the country, for wanting to marry a mere gentleman’s daughter. Wolsey warned him that Henry would never give the necessary royal consent, disingenuously adding that the king already had someone else in mind for Anne. When Perc
y gallantly maintained his love for Anne, the earl’s father, unwilling to incur the disfavour of Wolsey and the king, threatened to disinherit his obstinate son. Eventually the combined pressure of the cardinal and the father, backed by the king, forced young Percy to give way, and instead of Anne he married one of the earl of Shrewsbury’s daughters. Anne was furious, though mainly with Wolsey; she did not yet know either the king’s involvement or his feelings for her.5

  It fell now to Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s chief minister and Thomas Cromwell’s master, to secure a divorce for the king. International opposition was, predictably, fiercest from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Catherine’s nephew. In May 1527 Charles’s ambassador in England, De Mendoza, reported that Wolsey ‘had been scheming to bring about the queen’s divorce’, and that Henry was about to assemble a gathering of divines to declare his marriage null. In the diplomatic haggling now under way the French, again according to De Mendoza, promised Wolsey the archbishopric of Rouen. To counter this the ambassador hinted to Wolsey that Charles could make a better offer and facilitate Wolsey’s elevation to the papacy – provided his ‘actions deserved it’. Meanwhile Catherine and Anne, despite their intense rivalry for the king’s affections, at least shared one thing in common – both were equally suspicious of Wolsey’s motives. Anne had by now forgotten Henry Percy, but her loathing of Wolsey simmered as intensely as ever, and she suspected him of trying to secretly arrange a French match for Henry. She, her father and the duke of Norfolk, so De Mendoza reported, had now formed a factional league against the cardinal.6

  It comes as something of a relief for a writer on Thomas Cromwell to be able to say that he seems to have had virtually nothing to do with all of this. This would be, at least partly, because he was neither a bishop nor a divine, and unlikely to be asked to consider the theological aspects of the case. He was, however, fluent in Italian and Latin, and had travelled to Rome two or three times, maybe more, since settling in England; so he could have been employed in some capacity in the long drawn out negotiations that followed between Henry and the papacy. Fortunately for him, he was not called upon.

  During 1528 Cromwell was more preoccupied with his son Gregory’s schooling than Henry’s marital trials. The boys’ new tutor, John Chekyng, may have known Cromwell personally, because some of his letters concern subjects of general and presumably mutual interest. Chekyng had been reading Erasmus’s edition of Saint Augustine’s works, and he praised them highly to Cromwell. However, he was also a bit pressed for cash, and chasing Cromwell for unpaid bills. Gregory’s end of term report was somewhat less than glowing – he was a bit slow – but Chekyng blamed his previous tutor for the lack of progress. Once again Gregory’s letters to his father were full of promises to work hard and do well.7

  Still in 1528, while Wolsey grappled with Henry’s Great Matter, Cromwell continued his work on the cardinal’s colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He prosaically assured his master that the building ‘of your noble college most prosperously and magnificently doth arise’ in so imposing a manner that ‘the like thereof was never seen nor imagined’. Cromwell was busy sorting out all the documentation, letters patent and administration. He also took up the cause of English merchants whose ships were detained in France, and completed a valuation of Wolsey’s lands in York. Suppression of selected smaller monasteries continued, though it is noteworthy that when the priory of Felixstowe was suppressed, Stephen Gardiner, now Archdeacon of Worcester, and Rowland Lee were named as ‘judges’, with Cromwell present officially only as a ‘witness’. Gardiner, Lee and Cromwell then supervised the transfer of all the priory’s possessions to Ipswich. Then in October comes the first indication that Cromwell by now knew Thomas Cranmer, when Cranmer went up to London and then to Ipswich with a letter for William Capon, the new dean of Wolsey’s college there, which had been written by Cromwell.8

  Also in October, Cardinal Campeggio arrived in London from Rome as the papal representative to hear the king’s case. He and Wolsey then went to see Queen Catherine to officially inform her that proceedings were about to start. She responded regally. ‘Is it now’, she demanded, ‘a question whether I be the king’s lawful wife or not, when I have been married to him almost 20 years’? Catherine scathingly reproached Wolsey for his ‘high pride and vainglory … voluptuous life and abominable lechery … power and tyranny who of malice you have kindled this fire … especially for the great malice that you bear to my nephew the emperor … because he would not satisfy your ambition and make you pope by force’. Wolsey pleaded that he was ‘neither the beginner nor the mover’ of the affair, but had merely been appointed to hear the case.9

  According to De Mendoza, Henry and Anne were already looking ‘on their future marriage as certain, as if that of the queen had been actually dissolved’. Wolsey, however, was trying to delay things. ‘It is generally agreed’, the ambassador added, that Wolsey and Campeggio ‘will secretly agree to keep the matter in suspense’. Wolsey’s fear was that he would lose power if Anne, now nagging Henry mercilessly to settle his divorce quickly, became queen. For his part, Henry was ‘so blindly in love with that lady that he cannot see his way clearly’. The ambassador suspected that Henry was loading Campeggio with gifts.10

  George Cavendish, Wolsey’s first biographer, agreed that Anne was now keeping ‘an estate more like a queen than a simple maid’. Anne was urging Henry to consider ‘the danger the cardinal hath brought you’, how he had been working to the king’s ‘slander and dishonour’, and that if anyone else had done ‘but half so much as he hath done, he were well worthy to lose his head’. At the turn of the year (January and February 1529), De Mendoza reported that Henry was becoming impatient with Wolsey for not fulfilling his promises. Anne was certain that Wolsey was stalling, and her alliance with her father and the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk to undermine the cardinal was now in full swing.11

  One of the clearest insights into Wolsey’s strategy is revealed in his own letter to Stephen Gardiner dated 7 February 1529. Wolsey urged Gardiner, now one of the king’s emissaries to Rome on the divorce case, to do all he could to help Wolsey become pope, a plan that Wolsey claimed enjoyed the king’s support. Gardiner will be ‘informed of the king’s mind and mine concerning my advancement unto the dignity papal’, Wolsey wrote, trusting that Gardiner would ‘omit nothing … to serve and conduce to that purpose’. He addressed Gardiner as the man ‘whom I most entirely do trust’, a view which would soon change. He referred to the king’s ‘secret matter, which, if it should be brought to pass by any other means than by the authority of the church, then I count this prince and this realm utterly undone’. Wolsey, already fearing the ghastly prospect of a breach with Rome, was convinced that he was the only cardinal ‘that can and will set remedy’ in the great affair. However, he denied seeking power or glory for himself.12

  It was around this time that personal tragedy struck the Cromwell family. The last surviving reference to his wife occurs in a letter from Richard Cave to the Cromwells in June 1528. It may have been the deadly sweating sickness plaguing the country that stole her and his two daughters away sometime shortly afterwards. Whatever it was, he decided he must make his will in July 1529, which opened in impeccably medieval fashion:

  I bequeath my soul to the great God of heaven, my Maker, Creator and Redeemer, beseeching the most glorious Virgin, our Blessed Lady Saint Mary the Virgin and Mother, with all the holy company of heaven, to be mediators and intercessors for me to the Holy Trinity, so that I may be able … to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

  The will names Gregory as his heir. Poignantly it refers to his ‘late wife’, and provisions made for his daughter Anne and his ‘little daughter Grace’ are crossed out. It provides for his sister, Elizabeth Wellyfed, his nephews and niece, and his mother-in-law, Mercy Prior, all still living. Smaller gifts are assigned to Ralph Sadler and Stephen Vaughan along with other friends and servants. He required his executors to ‘conduct and hire a priest being an honest person of continent
and good living, to sing for my soul by the space of seven years after my death’. A list of donations to causes he supported included ‘the making of highways in this realm … every of the five orders of friars within the City of London to pray for my soul’, plus gifts to the poor, not forgetting the ‘poor prisoners of Newgate’. He asked for a funeral ‘without any earthly pomp’, and named Sadler, Vaughan, and his brother-in-law, John Williamson, as executors.13

  Meanwhile, he had to carry on with his normal duties. He was occupied with Wolsey’s colleges and his own legal business, which included a request to procure a papal bull, though nothing to do with the king’s affair. He also arranged for the education of one of his nieces. He then stung John Chekyng with a criticism that Gregory and young Wellyfed had not progressed well enough under his tutorship. Indignantly Chekyng protested that he had brought up many fine scholars, including six MAs and fellows of colleges. He continued to press Cromwell for outstanding bills, including the cost of a feather bed, burned when master Wellyfed fell asleep reading a book by candlelight and the candle dropped onto the bed starting a fire. However, the dispute was soon resolved, the bills were paid, and for the time being Gregory continued as a pupil of Mr Chekyng.14

  But far more important affairs of state were now reaching their climax. In July 1529, Campeggio effectively stymied any further progress on Catherine’s ‘trial’ by insisting that the court should follow Roman legal custom and adjourn till October. It never reconvened. Henry either discovered or suspected that the pope had yielded to the demand of Charles V to hear the case in Rome, exactly the thing Henry had hoped Wolsey could somehow prevent. On 9 August writs were issued for a new parliament. Eustace Chapuys, Charles’s new ambassador in England, predicted that if Anne had her way, Wolsey would soon be gone. Henry and Wolsey met for the last time at Grafton on 20 September. Three days later Cromwell received a letter from a friend telling him that the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, along with Thomas Boleyn (Anne’s father), were all showing deference to Wolsey, but ‘what they bear in their hearts I know not’. Wolsey himself now suspected the loyalty of some in his own circle. The trust he had shown in Stephen Gardiner earlier in the year vanished and was replaced by suspicion and bitterness.15