The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

by John Schofield

Notes

   1 Bandello 1, pp. 1012–16 = Foxe 5, pp. 392–3.

   2 LP 5, nos 1197, 1413–14, 1657; LP 6, nos 156, 1215–16; LP 7, no. 923 (26).

   3 The standard story of her life is A. Neame, The Holy Maid of Kent: The Life of Elizabeth Barton 1506–1534 (Hodder and Stroughton, 1971).

   4 Merriman 1, p. 361; PRO SP 1/78, fol. 119 = LP 6, no. 967; LP 6, nos 1149, 1468; Cranmer, Misc. Writings, p. 274.

   5 Morrison quoted in Neame, Holy Maid, pp. 239–41.

   6 LP 7, nos 48, 52; G.R. Elton, Reform and Reformation (London, 1977), p. 180; Elton, Policy, pp. 274–5, 390; S. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament: 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 194–6.

   7 PRO SP 1/82, fol. 81 = LP 7, no. 70. See also discussion in Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, p. 194.

   8 Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, pp. 196–9.

   9 Elton, Tudor Rev., pp. 124–5; Merriman 1, p. 380.

  10 LP 7, nos 1261–3; CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 97.

  11 Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, p. 202.

  12 Elton, Tudor Const., pp. 42, 53–6; Elton, Reform and Reformation, pp. 189–90; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, pp. 206–7.

  13 Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, pp. 207–9; CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 118, p. 346.

  14 Elton, Policy, pp. 263–92; Elton, Tudor Const., pp. 62–4; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, pp. 202–5.

  15 Milan ambassador: CSP Ven. 4, no. 601.

  16 SR 1, p. 320; Elton, Policy, pp. 288–9.

  17 Elton, Policy pp. 217, 230–34.

  18 Elton, Policy, p. 175; A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, politics and reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986), p. 101.

  19 Pocock 2, pp. 385–421; Elton, Policy, p. 176; LP 5, no. 1338.

  20 Elton Policy, p. 177.

  21 R. Rex, ‘Jasper Fyloll and the Enormities of the Clergy: Two Tracts Written during the Reformation Parliament’, SCJ 31/4 (2000): 1043–62.

  22 Pocock 2, pp. 523–31, 539–52; Elton, Policy, pp. 180–84.

  23 E. Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (London, 1997), p. 146.

  24 Elton, Policy, p. 186.

  25 D. MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London, 2003), p. 81.

  26 Marsiglio of Padua: The Defender of Peace, trans. A. Gewirth, (New York, 1956), passim.

  27 Marsiglio, p. xvii, footnote 1; Elton, Studies 2, pp. 228–30; LP 11, no. 1355.

  28 J. Strype, Memorial of … Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, 1812), vol. 2, pp. 691–3; Cranmer, Misc Writings, p. 286; Merriman 1, p. 381.

  29 W. Roper, Life of Thomas More (London, 1907), p. 70; E.F. Rogers (ed.), Correspondence of Thomas More (Princeton, 1947), p. 506 (line 129), p. 517 (128), p. 541 (59), p. 552 (50–54), pp. 554–5.

  30 Merriman 1, p. 119; Rogers, More pp. 555–9. On More and Cromwell, and More’s trial, see also Elton, Policy, pp. 402–25.

  31 CSP Span., 1531–3, no. 1130, p. 813; no. 1133, p. 821.

  32 Merriman 1, pp. 373–9.

  33 C.A. Hatt (ed.), The English Works of John Fisher. Bishop of Rochester, 1469–1535 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 12, 350; LP 8, no. 856 (39); Rogers, More, pp. 559–63.

  34 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 178, p. 505; LP 8, nos 742, 1117; Merriman 1, pp. 416–19; 427–30.

  35 Wright, pp. 40–41.

  36 LP 8, nos 475, 565, 600.

  37 Cranmer, Misc Writings, p. 303.

  38 LP 8, no. 661.

  39 CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 156, p. 453.

  40 LP 8, no. 895; LP 9, nos 523–4, 1150; D. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 3: The Tudor Age (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 219–20.

  41 SP 1, p. 459; Knowles, Religious Orders 3, p. 235; Elton, Policy, p. 423.

  42 Wright, p. 162; Elton, Policy, p. 371, fn. 1.

  6

  Vicegerent

  A collection of Cromwell’s personal notes, possibly made around March 1534, includes measures to proclaim and enforce the Supremacy and the new Succession Act, and later, a separate item, ‘to appoint preachers throughout the realm to preach the Gospel and the true Word of God’. It reads as though Cromwell consciously made a nuanced distinction between these two aims.1

  The previous chapter concentrated on the establishment of the Royal Supremacy by legislation, backed up by booklets, circulars and other propaganda. Apart from a few high profile cases, resistance was generally muted. The formidable new laws sufficed to ensure enough outward conformity to maintain civil peace and good order. But now a new challenge faced Cromwell, namely this: how to win the hearts and minds of the English people for the Reformation. How could he turn a schismatic kingdom into a Protestant kingdom? It was a much more intricate and even dangerous task. By drafting and steering to completion the Appeals and Supremacy bills, Cromwell was acting as the king’s obedient though undeniably willing servant; but by spreading the evangelical message throughout the land he would be acting more on his own initiative and taking a considerable risk, because Henry, his sovereign lord and master, was no Protestant. Modern historians talk freely about Henry’s ‘middle way’, but there was no middle ground with Henry on justification by faith, the mass and clerical celibacy. On these fundamental points he was thoroughly medieval. Cromwell would have to win the king round somehow, or at least soften his well-known antagonism to Luther. He would also have to work within the parameters permitted by Henry. Nor was the cause of Reform much helped by the new queen’s reformist sympathies, because she remained a highly unpopular figure in the country, while Catherine of Aragon, a very pious Catholic, was still alive and much loved. The Catholic nobility wielded considerable power and influence, while the people remained attached to the medieval religion, more devoted to their images, masses, saints and ceremonies than to the renaissance popes. Weaning king and country away from the medieval faith, and persuading them to accept Luther, would be a greater challenge than tightening up the treason laws or replacing the pope with King Henry as Head of the Church. This and subsequent chapters aim to show how he set about it.

  A good start had been made already with the arrival of Melanchthon’s Apology in England and Christopher Mont’s translations of Lutheran works in Cromwell’s house (see Chapter 3). The next major phase concerned the monasteries. In January 1535 Cromwell was appointed the king’s Vicegerent in spirituals, specifically for the purpose of a national visitation of all religious houses.2

  Cromwell, according to John Foxe, was the man who persuaded Henry to suppress first the chantries, the friars’ houses and the smaller monasteries, then the abbeys and the large monasteries, leaving the ‘synagogue of Antichrist … utterly overthrown and plucked up by the roots’. For all this, Foxe had nothing but fulsome praise for Cromwell. Foxe thanked God for raising up Cromwell, ‘His servant’, to uproot these ‘sinful houses which rebelled against Christ’s religion’, and it was due to Cromwell that England no longer had ‘swarms of friars and monks possessed in their nests’. It is stirring stuff from Foxe at his most entertainingly biased, and Cromwell’s reputation as the grim despoiler of the monasteries may date from him. There are, however, reasons to wonder whether Foxe has slightly exaggerated and maybe even misunderstood Cromwell’s policy regarding the religious houses. It is likely that Cromwell’s mind worked in ways somewhat more subtle than the heavy bulldozer method implied by Foxe.3

  Henry had been monitoring the monasteries for some years, ever since Wolsey had obtained royal approval to dissolve some of the smaller houses in which, the cardinal had said, ‘neither God is served, nor religion kept’. Nearly six years ago, in autumn 1529, Du Bellay and Chapuys both reported that the nobility of England were directing their covetous eyes towards the wealth of the church, and that if Wolsey fell, the lords of the land would try and seize for themselves the clergy’s goods. Even then the powerful duke of Suffolk and his supporters at court were advocating dissolution as the answer to the coun
try’s financial problems. In December that year, Henry told Chapuys that he had decided on a reform of the clergy; the main reason, says Chapuys, was the king’s anger at the pope for insisting that the divorce case should be heard in Rome. Chapuys expected before long to see money from church property flowing in to the king’s coffers, and because ‘nearly all the people here hate the priests’, Henry hoped it might win public support for the divorce. In Convocation that year John Fisher was worried that Henry was already planning some action against the smaller monasteries. Even then Fisher feared that the larger ones might also be in danger.4

  A year on in November 1530 Henry told Chapuys that it ‘would be doing God’s service to take away the temporalities of the clergy’. He did not proceed with this threat immediately, but three years later he was once again ‘thinking of uniting to the Crown the lands which the clergy of his dominions held’.5

  Henry, therefore, had had the lands and property of the church in his sights long before Cromwell’s time, and the dissolution of the 1530s needs to be seen in this light. Like the schism, the Royal Supremacy and the Boleyn marriage, it was not specifically a Cromwellian measure, or even a Protestant one. It fell to Cromwell to take charge of a policy whose origin pre-dated his rise to power. This time, however, he had the opportunity to turn that policy to direct evangelical advantage.

  Cromwell began more gently and discreetly than Foxe implies. When Chapuys reported on the proposed confiscation of church properties, he noted that Norfolk and Suffolk, both nobles of the old faith, had received a generous helping. But ‘I am told’, added Chapuys, that though Cromwell once supported the suppression of the religious houses, yet ‘perceiving great inconveniences likely to arise from that measure, he has since made attempts to thwart it’. For this, Cromwell had angered the king. Chapuys does not name his source but it was not Cromwell personally. This was not a case of Cromwell putting on a show of moderation for the benefit of Chapuys and Charles V in order to improve Anglo-Imperial relations.6

  A generation later George Wyatt recorded a similar story, presumably based on things he had heard from his parents and grandparents. According to Wyatt, Cromwell addressed the king and council one day, advising a dissolution ‘little by little, not suddenly by parliament’. Because this religion is so ‘odious to the wiser sort of people’, Cromwell had said, ‘they may be easily persuaded to leave their cowls and to render their possessions to your majesty’. However, Wyatt continued, the rest of the council opposed Cromwell and pressed the king to proceed by act of parliament, and after this Chancellor Audley and Richard Rich devised two acts for the suppression of smaller monasteries. Elton was inclined to believe Wyatt on the grounds that the act of 1536 was not an especially impressive piece of work, and unlikely to have been Cromwell’s.7

  A word of caution may be advisable before rushing to conclusions about Wyatt’s story. Cromwell was a Lutheran diplomat, and every good diplomat knows the art of getting others to do what he wants. Cromwell may have been simply pretending to be less eager to act against the monasteries than he really was, tactfully disguising his own Lutheran feelings, and letting popular dissatisfaction with the monasteries, and the laity’s greed for monastic lands, do the job for him. However, a clue to his real thoughts, which corroborates Wyatt, may be found in an item from his own personal notes on the ‘the abominations of religious persons throughout the realm, and a reformation to be devised therein’. My italics here could highlight something significant. Cromwell had in mind a ‘reformation’, but not, at least not yet, a dissolution or destruction. Rather than close the monasteries down, he would set about reforming them from within.8

  The first key aspect of Cromwell’s policy was the national visitation. The result of this massive undertaking was the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a register of all church lands and revenues completed by the end of 1535. Commissioners included bishops and local gentry, most of them in the king’s and Cromwell’s service. The Compendium Compertorum, the commissioners’ reports, gave a generally negative view of monastic life. Many historians have assumed that all this was deliberately biased, but bias alone can hardly explain Richard Layton’s report to Cromwell after arriving at Langden with a Mr. Bartlett, a servant of Cromwell’s. Layton went alone up the abbot’s lodging where, ‘even like a cony clapper full of starting holes’, he spent a long time knocking on the abbot’s door. There was no response except for the dog that ‘barked and barked’. Eventually Layton forced his way in and found the abbot with ‘his whore’, who, in panic, ‘bestirred her stumps towards her starting holes’. (I think I have this right: the original is ‘bestyrrede hir stumpis towards hir startyng hoilles’.) Bartlett, waiting outside, then caught the ‘tender damsel’, and Layton sent her to Dover to the mayor to ‘set her in some cage or prison for eight days’. After finding ‘her apparel in the abbot’s coffer’, Layton brought the ‘holy father abbot’ to Canterbury. ‘To tell you all this comedy, but for the abbot a tragedy, were too long’, Layton remarked, and he promised Cromwell that he would tell a lot more next time he saw him. Layton seems to have had a sense of humour, whereas complaints of arrogance reached Cromwell about another of his visitors, Thomas Legh. Not surprisingly, Legh strenuously denied them.9

  Meanwhile, the visitors were sending their reports to Cromwell. The overall picture was a decidedly unpleasant one. However, the dossiers were not uniformly hostile, and this is what casts doubt on the rather convenient assumption that all this was nothing more than government propaganda designed to bring the religious houses and orders into public disrepute. Layton’s indictment of the prior of Shelbrede (sic) is fairly typical: the prior had seven women, each of his monks had four or five, and the prior had also misused funds. But John Tregonwell had visited a number of houses, and, though critical of some, he also reported one abbot, a prioress and her sisters who lived chastely and above suspicion, and another abbot and a prior with a good knowledge of the Scriptures. George Giffard, after visiting several houses in midlands, asked Cromwell if Woolstrope Abbey could be spared dissolution because of the genuine devoutness and hospitality of its monks. Cromwell and his visitors may well have been biased in the sense that they had long since lost their reverence for monasticism, but they were never ungracious enough to ignore or despise examples of sincere, unfeigned piety when they came across them.10

  The royal injunctions for the monasteries, which the visitors carried with them, are more interesting than the visitors’ reports. The first three articles demanded loyalty to Henry and the Succession, and the ‘extirpation and taking away of the usurped and pretended jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome … and all manner of obedience’ towards him. The next articles forbad monks from going out of the precincts, and banned women from going in, unless they could produce a licence from the king or an authorised visitor. Directions were also laid down for meals. Before they ate, the monks were required to listen to a reading from the Old or New Testament. Meals should be taken in moderation, not from ‘oversumptuous and full of delicate and strange dishes …but common meats’, and to ‘gently entertain strangers and guests’. Surpluses should be distributed to the poor and the sick. Monks should give alms and live humbly. No brother or monk was allowed to ‘have any child or boy lying or privily accompanying with him, or other wise haunting unto him, other than to help him to mass’. The abbot should seek university education for ‘one or two of his brethren’, so that they may ‘instruct and teach their brethren and diligently preach the word of God’. Each day one hour had to be devoted to reading the Scripture. All brethren were to ‘observe the rule, statutes and laudable customs of this religion as far as they do agree with the Holy Scripture and the word of God’ – my italics here highlight the obvious implication that not all of ‘this religion’ did agree with Scripture. Furthermore abbots and priors were to instruct their brethren that ‘ceremonies or other observances of religion’ must be conformable to ‘true Christianity, or to observe an order in the church’. In addition, ‘true religion is
not contained in apparel, manner of going, shaven heads, and other such marks, nor in silence, fasting, uprising in the night, singing and such other kind of ceremonies, but in cleanness of mind, pureness of living, Christ’s faith not feigned, and brotherly charity …’ – a pretty sweeping dismissal of many monastic values and customs. No one should be ‘allured’ into the house or order ‘with persuasions and blandishments to take religion upon him’. No relics or ‘feigned miracles for increase of filthy lucre’ were to be displayed. The religious should ‘exhort pilgrims and strangers to give that to the poor that they thought to offer to their images or relics’. No ‘fairs or markets’ would be allowed in monasteries. Prayers should be made for the king and ‘his most noble and lawful wife Queen Anne’. Infringements of these injunctions should be reported to the king, his visitor-general or deputy.11

  These injunctions, which Cromwell as Vicegerent approved and may well have composed, give another clue to his policy regarding the religious. Consider, for example, the first three articles, upholding the Supremacy and denying papal authority. A monastery that denies the spiritual authority of the pope is no longer a monastery at all, at least not in the sense that the word is normally used and understood. The same applies to a house which is not allowed to have any religious relics. We note also the requirements for Scripture readings, and the statements about ‘Christ’s faith not feigned’, and ‘brotherly charity’ being superior to the monastic habit. Before the birth of the Reformation this might have been fairly harmless, depending on the disposition of a given abbot; but in the religious context and climate of 1535, with Cromwell as Vicegerent, it was nothing less than an open door to Lutheran ideas. Cromwell’s meaning when he penned that note for the ‘reformation’ of the monasteries rather than their disappearance may now be becoming clearer. If monasteries were well run and obedient to Cromwell’s injunctions; if the monks denied papal authority, accepted the Royal Supremacy, read the Bible and trusted in faith and charity more than their own ceremonies – if, effectively, they turned themselves into semi-evangelical theological colleges – then for the time being at least they could stay. On the other hand, there was plenty of scope to close down monasteries not this way minded. Then the king and nobility’s greed for church lands would also be satisfied. Either way, Cromwell would get what he wanted. The monasteries as learning centres of the medieval faith would go into terminal decline, while those that remained would become sort of evangelical, as well as providing useful service to community.