The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

by John Schofield

  There is no evidence that Cromwell, in his years as a widower, kept a mistress. Ever since he made his will, in which he had requested a priest ‘of continent and good living’ to pray for his soul, he seems to have been a man of upright living and known for it. During the Dissolution, when Thomas Legh was visiting monasteries he found ‘certain of the knights and gentlemen’ with ‘concubines openly in their houses … putting from them their wives’, to the great offence of many. Legh ordered them to put away their ‘whores’ and take back their lawful wives, else they would have to appear before Cromwell and answer for themselves.45

  However, Cromwell did not live apart from women entirely. A letter survives from his friend, Rowland Lee, telling him that ‘my good lady Oxford, who came to court on Sunday, intends to be merry with you on Monday or Tuesday at supper … she is a woman of high wit and loves her friends’. Cromwell himself once addressed the countess of Oxford self-effacingly as ‘your poor friend’. Another letter from Vaughan to Cromwell has a reference to ‘your great friend Mrs. Addington’, to whom Vaughan was also ‘much bound’. But there is nothing here to nourish scandals. All it shows is that Cromwell, now well into middle age by Tudor standards, was an affable, expansive fellow, who, when affairs of state granted him the time, enjoyed the company of his friends, both ladies and gentlemen.46

  Women seem to have found Cromwell an approachable man. Examples seen already include Catherine of Aragon, Alice More, the duchess of Norfolk and the petitions in the previous chapter. Another woman with an ungrateful husband, Lady Hungerford, also sought and received his help – Cromwell knew Lord Hungerford and told him he should give his wife a yearly allowance. Ironically, Hungerford ended his life on the same scaffold as Cromwell, though for widely different reasons. He was attainted for a grim litany of offences including supporting a Papist priest, incest, sodomy and trying to divine the king’s death by sorcery.47

  Anne Boleyn may have wished to see Cromwell’s head cut off, but her sister Mary looked on him far more graciously. Sometime in late 1534, Mary was banished from court when she became pregnant by her new husband, William Stafford, a commoner she had secretly married. Like other distressed women, Mary turned to Cromwell for help. She was appalled that her marriage had caused such anger to Henry and Anne; but ‘good master secretary’, she pleaded, ‘consider that he was young, and love overcame reason’. It is intriguing how she knew that Cromwell, of all men, would show understanding in an affair of the heart. She valued her husband’s simple honesty, and ‘I loved him as well as he did me’. Feeling rejected by the world, she chose to ‘live a poor honest life with him’. She ‘might have had a greater man of birth, and a higher, but I assure you I could never have had one that should have loved me so well, nor a more honest man’. She urged Cromwell to intercede for them to Henry and Anne. ‘For God’s sake help us’, she implored; she had ‘rather begged my bread with him than to be the greatest queen christened’. Would Cromwell also ‘pray my lord my father and my lady … and my lord of Norfolk and my brother’ to be good to them. She ‘dare not write to them, they are so cruel against us’. There is no surviving letter from Cromwell in response, but fortune smiled on William and Mary Stafford. They did not return to court, but they did live quietly and contentedly in the country together until Mary’s death in 1543.48

  Cromwell also listened attentively to Lady Bryan, appointed governess to Princess Elizabeth after Anne Boleyn’s death. She was sufficiently concerned to write to him about the young lady’s upbringing now that she was ‘put from that degree she was afore’. But this was not just a routine request for instructions, and Lady Bryan was quite unabashed at giving the king’s chief minister a few candid facts about her royal charge. Elizabeth needed clothing, for she ‘hath neither gown nor kertel, nor petticoat … nor hankerchiefs’ – Would Cromwell please ensure that she had all that was needful? The child ‘hath great pain with her teeth, and they come very slowly forth; and this causeth me to suffer her Grace to have her will more than I would’. She was annoyed with a Mr Shelton, now claiming to be ‘master of this house’. He and Lady Bryan were quarrelling over household affairs, including arrangements for Elizabeth’s meals. She hoped Cromwell would not forget or despise her, and nor did he. He had words with Shelton, and it seems that her ladyship’s wishes prevailed.49

  It should not be too difficult to imagine what a really ruthless Machiavellian would have done with this letter, or with oversensitive evangelicals like Nicholas Shaxton, or rivals on the loose like Stephen Gardiner; or how much time, patience and sympathy he would have spent on the sorrows of Elizabeth, duchess of Norfolk, or all those entreaties from ordinary folk of the previous chapter. But Cromwell’s approachability and his understanding heart were widely appreciated and taken advantage of by a variety of his fellow countrymen and women. Revisionists and others will doubtless claim that not everyone in England felt the same way towards him as those we have met in these chapters. That is true, so far as it goes. Cromwell certainly had enemies besides admirers at court and in the country, and those who resented his authority or opposed his policies knew better than to express their feelings in letters that could be used to incriminate them. In that sense, a one-sided survey has been given. However, it is not an entirely invalid survey. No chief minister of the crown expects to be universally loved. Opponents and controversy are no more than routine occupational hazards for anyone holding high offices of state, especially in times of great constitutional and spiritual change. We cannot, unfortunately, conduct an opinion poll to discover Cromwell’s true overall approval rating; but the short case studies summarised here prove that alongside the detractors and the malcontents, he enjoyed a sizable reservoir of trust, admiration and even warmth among the Tudor populace.

  And it takes an extraordinary kind of man to attract, apparently effortlessly, the attention of such a disparate group of men and women. Unsolicited letters arrived on his desk from hopefuls looking for employment, from monks disillusioned with their religion who were turning to the Gospel, from budding writers and scholars seeking his patronage, and from merchants canvassing government support for commercial ventures. Men and women including ‘poor widows everywhere’, whether frustrated by insensitive local officialdom, or weighed down by the cares and worries of life, sought his help. Wronged and broken-hearted wives like the duchess of Norfolk, victims of family feuds like Mary Boleyn turned to him to unburden themselves. There they found a strong shoulder to lean on and cry on. Their own kith and kin failed them, so they spoke to Cromwell from the heart with the candour and trust that no cold, callous, unprincipled politician could ever inspire. All these people knew, somehow, that he would listen understandingly and do what he could. Even prominent religious and political opponents could speak well of him. Rarely during the Reformation can Protestants and Papists be found paying each other compliments, but we have seen Catherine of Aragon, Princess Mary, Thomas More and his wife Alice all thanking Cromwell for his personal kindness and consideration. There may be a single word to describe such a man – but Machiavellian will hardly do.

  Notes

   1. Harvey is quoted and discussed in G.R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 10–12. For Cromwell as Maecenas, see LP 10, no. 356; LP 12 (1), no. 746.

   2. CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 228, p. 569; LP 10, no. 1130 (an example of a letter in Italian to Cromwell from one Antony Vivali – many more could be given); Ellis 10, pp. 177–8; Elton, Reform and Renewal, p. 13.

   3. LP 13 (2), nos 335, 383, 616, 938.

   4. Letters of Gardiner, ed. J.A. Muller (Cambridge, 1933), p. 399.

   5. Gardiner, Letters, pp. xvi, xxiii, 44, 64, 66, 92, 100–22, 136–8, 262, 351, 358.

   6. LP 4 (3), no. 5860.

   7. R. Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London, 1967), p. 14; S. Foister, Holbein and England (London, 2004), pp. 103–6; LP 7, no. 1668; LP 15, no. 1029 (6), p. 512. Note there is nothing unLutheran abou
t devotional works on Mary.

   8. Elton, Reform and Renewal, pp. 13–16; LP 6, nos 717, 1448.

   9. Elton, Reform and Renewal, p. 14; LP 10, nos 819, 840, 855; Foxe 5, p. 401; LP 14 (2), no. 782, p. 333.

  10. Elton, Reform and Renewal, pp. 48–51; T. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist politics and religion in the reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 2–3, 216–20, 238–43. On Starkey’s Dialogue, one of the major political writings of the age, see pp. 139–68 and also T. Mayer, ‘Faction and Ideology: Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue’, HJ 28/1 (1985): 1–25.

  11. Quoted and discussed in B. Thompson, ‘Monasteries and their Patrons at Foundation and Dissolution’, TRHS 6th ser., 4, p. 103.

  12. S. Lehmberg, Sir Thomas Elyot: Tudor Humanist (Texas, 1960), pp. 30, 115–24, 150–51, 157–8, 167.

  13. Elton, Reform and Renewal, pp. 18–23.

  14. Chapuys: CSP Span, 1531–3, no. 1107, p. 752; no. 1132, p. 819; Castillon: Ribier 1, p. 351 = LP 13 (2), no. 1162, p. 482; Marillac: Kaulek, p. 108 = LP 14 (1), no. 1208; Ribier 1, p. 513 = LP 15, no. 486.

  15. J. Stow, A Survey of London, (Oxford, 1908), vol. 1, p. 179.

  16. Stow, Survey of London, 1, pp. 89, 91.

  17. LP 10, no. 1231.

  18. PRO SP 1/72, fols 11–12 = LP 5, no. 1509; Foxe 5, pp. 391, 394–6.

  19. LP 8, no. 938; Elton, Policy, p. 423.

  20. Merriman 2, pp. 133, 135, 161.

  21. LP 5, nos 1435, 1464, 1467, 1472, 1483, 1509; LP 6, nos 1183, 1594; LP 7, nos 257, 882, 1151, 1525 (5), 1644; LP 14 (2), no. 782.

  22. Ellis 9, pp. 341–5; LP 5, no. 359; LP 6, nos 1011, 1014; LP 7, nos 940, 967–8, 1473.

  23. LP 12 (1), no. 678; LP 12 (2), nos 97, 269, 423–4, 629, 881; LP 13 (2), no. 967 (54).

  24. Ellis 10, pp. 281, 285–6; LP 6, no. 1226, Cranmer, Misc. Writings, p. 274.

  25. LP 7, no. 988.

  26. Elton, Policy, pp. 101–6.

  27. J. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials under Henry VIII (Oxford, 1822), vol. 1 (2), pp. 222–8.

  28. Merriman 2, pp. 128–31.

  29. LP 13 (1), no. 674.

  30. LP 7, no. 905; LP 8, no. 542; Gardiner, Letters, pp. 60–61; Cranmer, Misc. Writings, p. 304.

  31. Merriman 2, p. 136.

  32. Correspondence of Reginald Pole: vol. 1: A Calendar, 1518–1546, ed. T. Mayer (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 77–86, 98–101, 135–6; LP 12 (1), nos 429–30.

  33. Mayer, Correspondence of Pole, pp. 155–6, 162–7, 177–8.

  34. Merriman 2, pp. 84–6.

  35. Merriman 2, pp. 86–90.

  36. LP 12 (1), no. 1032; LP 13 (2), nos. 797, pp. 309–10; 830, p. 342 (5); Mayer, Pole, p. 67. More cloak and dagger stories can be found in S. Brigden, ‘“The Shadow that you know”: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Francis Bryan at Court and in Embassy’, HJ 39/1 (1996):1–31.

  37. LP 8, no. 673; LP 11, nos 233, 236; LP 12 (1), nos 1157, 1173, LP 12 (2), nos. 206, 332.

  38. LP 12 (2), no. 101.

  39. LP 6, no. 475; LP 12 (2), no. 976, p. 342.

  40. LP 7, no. 1083; LP 8, no. 319; LP 12 (1), no. 252.

  41. LP 12 (2), nos 143, 1049.

  42. LP 14 (1), nos 160, 425, p. 171.

  43. LP 12 (2), nos 35, 100–101.

  44. LP 11, no. 41; LP 12 (1), nos 532–3; LP 13 (1), no. 1082; LP 14 (2), no. 782, pp. 333, 339, 344, entries under ‘December’.

  45. Merriman 1, p. 61; Wright, p. 243.

  46. PRO SP 1/75, fol. 193 = LP 6, no. 381; Merriman 1, p. 425; BL Cottonian MS Titus B. I, fol. 340 = LP 9, no. 330.

  47. LP 15, nos 498 (59), 1029 (34).

  48. CSP Span., 1534–5, no. 118, p. 344; LP 7, no. 1655.

  49. Ellis 5, pp. 78–82; LP 11, no. 312.

  PART IV

  How Have the Mighty Fallen

  14

  The Vicegerency in Eclipse

  In January 1538, Cromwell sent his friend and emissary, Christopher Mont, to the Lutheran Landgrave Philip of Hesse. For the sake of the cause of the Gospel in England, Cromwell was trying to encourage the Germans to send the embassy they had been half promising. In spring Cromwell was also preparing royal injunctions. Justices and local officers were commanded to ensure that priests and curates preach the Word of God and let the people hear the Bible in English; for here is the ‘undoubted will, law and commandment of Almighty God, the only straight mean to know the goodness and benefits of God towards us’. (It is very Lutheran.) Should any difficulties arise from readings of the sacred texts, the people were to avoid contentions, and seek guidance from ‘such learned men as be or shall be authorised to preach and declare the same’. Neither the Coverdale nor the Matthew Bible was specified, so presumably either was acceptable. Evangelical bishops enthusiastically complied, Shaxton insisting that all clergy in his diocese should read a chapter a day, and learn by heart the equivalent of one chapter every fortnight.1

  More aggressively, Henry was determined to crush what little resistance remained to the Royal Supremacy. John Forest, the Observant Friar, or ‘obstinate friar’ as Hall unsympathetically called him, was the prominent, ill-fated victim, burned at Smithfield in May. Forest’s papal loyalties had been known to Cromwell for nearly five years, and it was Cromwell who arranged for Latimer to preach at his execution in an attempt to persuade him to repent, confess Henry’s headship of the church and accept the royal pardon that was dangled in from of him. Forest had made a submission once before only to retract it later. However, if the government hoped that the sight of the gibbet and the wood ready to be lit would induce another climb-down, it would be disappointed. Latimer delivered his lengthy sermon in vain. Forest then perished miserably along with an image of Derfel Gadarn taken from a Welsh shrine, which, according to semi-religious folk lore, contained miraculous powers that could even rescue of the souls of the damned from hell.2

  A grim curiosity of Forest’s case is that those who refused to submit to the Supremacy were normally hanged, drawn and quartered as traitors, not burned as heretics; but because the formal proceedings against Forest have been lost, it is not clear why an exception was made of him. Rather predictably, it has been insinuated that this double burning of Forest and a medieval image was another of Cromwell’s nefarious deeds.3 Besides being based on circumstantial evidence only, this argument ascribes to Cromwell powers that he never had. He did not have the authority to change the method of execution that had been in force for centuries. Only Henry could do that. From the incomplete evidence that is available, it could just as easily be argued that Cromwell and Cranmer, who was also involved, suggested the idea of Latimer’s sermon in order to offer Forest a reprieve.

  Diplomatic developments on the continent also demanded attention. Henry’s attempts to put himself forward as a mediator between Francis and Charles were made redundant in summer when the two hitherto warring monarchs concluded a truce. Henry affected to be unconcerned, but Cromwell began probing Chapuys about the emperor’s plans, particularly his forthcoming visit to France. Nevertheless, the threat of a Franco-Imperial alliance, and the danger that it might pose to England, was not enough to persuade Henry to abandon his interest in the Lutheran princes. Despite hold-ups and delays, a German embassy eventually arrived in June. Henry and Cromwell had hoped to see Philip Melanchthon leading it, but Elector John Frederick disappointed them both by deciding that Melanchthon could not be spared from his duties as lecturer in philosophy and theology at Wittenberg University. Instead the delegation was headed by Francis Burkhardt, Vice Chancellor of the Elector of Saxony, Dr George Boyneburg, a Hessian nobleman, and Frederick Myconius, overseer of the church in Gotha. Theological discussions then began between the Germans and English divines, and a document known as the Thirteen Articles was soon prepared. As in the earlier Wittenberg Articles, agreement was reached quite quickly on a number of points, including the central issue of justification – ‘through faith freely for Christ’s sake’ – but
with the rider that good works were ‘necessary to salvation’ in the manner Melanchthon had laid out in his Loci dedicated to Henry in 1535 (necessary as a consequence, though not a cause). The statement was consistent with Cromwell’s Ten Articles, though significantly different from Henry’s collection of ramblings in the Bishops’ Book. Despite this anomaly, Henry let it pass.4

  But the absence of Melanchthon may have nettled Henry, because when the Germans arrived in June the king summoned Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall from Durham to London to be his personal theological adviser that summer. Though Tunstall had accepted the Royal Supremacy, he had long been a bitter opponent of Luther; and, unlike Henry, there is little evidence that he had warmed to the more soothing voice of Melanchthon. Tunstall’s journey south boded ill for the evangelical cause in England, especially as the Lutheran Elector John Frederick had directed his delegation to deal with three problematic issues – communion in one kind, private masses and clerical celibacy – on which both Henry and Tunstall held very medieval views.5

  Cromwell was not involved in the day-to-day discussions with the Germans. He was, however, being lobbied by evangelicals to take stronger action against pilgrimages, images and shrines. Sir John Hercy urged him to take away a prominent image at Doncaster and to send some good preachers up there. Some of Cromwell’s enthusiastic supporters, like Hercy, expected him to conjure evangelical preachers out of thin air. Latimer was also pressing him to put at end to ‘our great Sybil’, an image of Our Lady in Latimer’s Worcester diocese, and ‘the devil’s instrument to bring many, I fear, to eternal fire’. Latimer demanded similar treatment for ‘her old sister at Walsingham’, and other wicked sisters at Ipswich, Doncaster and Penrice in Glamorgan; and he looked forward to a ‘jolly muster at Smithfield’ for the lot of them. In July the Walsingham image was unceremoniously disposed of, but for her sisters Cromwell had something even more dramatic in his mind than a mere ‘jolly muster’ in Smithfield.6