The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

by John Schofield

  On 18 August he received a letter from Cranmer, informing him that the Germans wanted to discuss the ‘abuses’ (by this he meant communion in one kind, private masses and clerical celibacy). Then Cranmer introduced the name of Thomas Becket, the twelfth-century archbishop and medieval saint, famous as the defender of papal authority against the claims of Henry II to extend his control over the church. As if in defiance of four years of schism and evangelical advance, Becket’s shrine was still standing, proudly and provocatively, in Cranmer’s Canterbury. Cranmer gave his opinion that Becket’s blood in Canterbury cathedral might be ‘feigned’. Reading this letter it is easy to suspect that he and Cromwell had been discussing Becket before, and how they might get rid of him. A few days later Cranmer wrote again to say that talks with the Germans had run into difficulty. Knowing Henry’s strong views on the three disputed points, the Germans had written directly to the king in an attempt to persuade him. Henry, with Tunstall by his side, had now decided to enter into a theological debate with the Lutherans.7

  The medieval church normally administered communion in one kind only – that is, the laity received the consecrated bread but not the wine. Luther denounced this practice as a violation of the Lord’s Supper and the Words of Institution (Luke 22:19–20), according to which the laity should receive both bread and wine. Henry, as if trying to arbitrate from a perch of lofty neutrality, argued that either one kind or two kinds may be permitted.

  Henry then turned to private masses. Again he appeared to be trying for some sort of compromise. The Roman mass as a propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead was rejected by Luther for two main reasons. It was another perversion of the Words of Institution – This is my Body … this is my Blood given for you. The Sacrament is a divine gift to the church, not a sacrifice to be offered by the church, and moreover, it is a gift for the living, not the dead. Besides, the whole concept of a sacrifice performed by a priest for the soul’s salvation clashed irreconcilably with the Gospel of God’s grace freely given and received by faith alone. These points were made afresh by the German delegation as gently as possible. Henry’s reply suggested that the Lord’s Supper may yet be called a sacrifice because Christ, once sacrificed for our sins on the Cross, was present on the altar. But he disingenuously avoided the real issue, the propitiatory sacrifice, still in practice in England. Consequently, the fundamental difference between Luther and the medieval church remained unresolved.

  The third disputed point – clerical celibacy – contained all the elements of a Tudor farce. For Luther, priestly marriage enjoyed Scriptural sanction, though it was not commanded. It was a matter of Christian liberty, and a most welcome one especially for those who could not cope with the demands of a strict celibate life, which were well nigh impossible anyway. The issue brought out the religious legalist in Henry. He insisted that priests ought to be able to cope with the celibate life. On this point, Henry sought neither a compromise nor a middle way. Blissfully unaware of his own archbishop’s secret marriage six years ago, he quoted abundantly from the church fathers on the virtues of celibacy. Lutheran ideas about Christian liberty were brushed aside. All fleshly temptations must be resisted. Priests who could not keep their vows should be defrocked. Henry would never know that it was a married clergyman who had confirmed his own marriages and divorces, as well as his Supremacy in the English church.

  Despite his strong views, however, Henry did not mean to shut the door on the Lutherans entirely, or send them away empty-handed. He was simply indulging his love of arguing and debating. His replies to the Lutherans were more a set of counter proposals than a final rejection. When they took their leave of him, he commended their piety and learning to the Elector, and he looked forward to hearing further from them after they returned to Germany for consultations. Nevertheless, English evangelicals hoping for a breakthrough had suffered a setback, and a response was called for.

  Cromwell rushed through a second set of royal injunctions, issued on 5 September. Besides reinforcing the earlier set, they specified that a Bible was to be placed in every church, and that persons were to be examined on the ‘articles of our faith and the Pater Noster’. A more vigorous line was taken against images, relics, saints and ‘wandering to pilgrimages’. Registers of baptisms, marriages and burials were also required.8 A few days later Becket’s shrine was ceremonially destroyed in the presence of the king. This strike against that great symbol of papal power in England, almost certainly organized by Cromwell, served to soften the disappointment of the failure to persuade Henry on all the disputed theological points. The Germans took the news home with them, where it was well received. Prominent medieval shrines had now become a target for the government, though under Henry and Cromwell, unlike Edward’s reign later, images and paintings in churches were left largely untouched. When Stephen Gardiner returned to England from his ambassadorial service in France on 28 September, one of the first things he learned was that the famous shrine in his own Winchester diocese had been smashed up just like Becket’s. It is more than likely that Cromwell, who might have preferred to keep Gardiner out of the country if he could, had staged this welcome home for his most formidable rival.9

  However, Cromwell’s grip on power and his influence on Henry were slowly but perceptibly beginning to loosen. Even if all the shrines in England were razed to the ground, it would still not be enough to induce Henry to take the Augsburg Confession, and from now on much of Cromwell’s efforts would be directed at trying to prevent evangelical fortunes going into reverse. He may have hoped by now to be superintending the Lutheran Reformation in England, but instead he was required by the king to set up commissions to investigate religious radicalism, particularly the Anabaptists. Besides rejecting infant baptism, some extreme members of this sect were now denying more fundamental Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the Deity of Christ. Then a king’s proclamation on 6 November, though condemning Becket and alleged superstitions, also declared – Henry insisted on this – that clerical marriage was contrary ‘to the wholesome admonitions of St Paul to Timothy and Titus and to Corinthians … and many of the old fathers’. Getting carried away with his crusade against married clergy Henry was now talking utter nonsense, because these epistles of St Paul clearly state that priests are permitted to marry (1 Corinthians 7:28; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6). Cromwell carried on his campaign against superstition and Becket, and he managed to modify some statements on religious ceremonies in a slightly reformist direction; but he was a long way from persuading Henry to become a Lutheran.10

  Another distraction for Cromwell was that although he had succeeded in making Lutherans acceptable in some ways to Henry, many English evangelicals were now drawn to the ideas of the Zürich reformers, who, following their deceased founder, Huldrych Zwingli, denied the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. They emphasized instead the Lord’s Supper as a distinctive expression of the bond among Christians, and they admitted a spiritual, but not a substantial, divine presence. In England Zwingli’s supporters were commonly referred to as sacramentaries. In the 1530s Cromwell, Cranmer and most leading English reformers all held the Lutheran view of Christ’s real presence in the sacrament, which was fortunate for them because Henry detested the sacramentaries almost as must he detested the Papalists. In July 1533 John Frith and Andrew Hewitt had been burned for this heresy despite the efforts of Cromwell and Cranmer to persuade them to repent and recant, but the fires had failed to extinguish Swiss ideas from the hearts and minds of some in the English evangelical movement. During 1538 attempts were being made on the continent to reconcile Wittenberg and Zürich, and during this pleasant thaw in relations Luther and Bullinger were writing civilly and understandingly to each other. Cromwell knew of these developments and welcomed them, and he may even have authorised his own agents to make discreet contacts with the Swiss, but there is nothing to suggest that he had undergone a change of heart on the Eucharist.11

  In summer 1538 a voluble and radical sacramentar
y called John Lambert was questioned by Cranmer, following complaints made against him by Robert Barnes and Rowland Taylor. Cranmer tried to reason with Lambert, just as he had tried with Frith five years earlier. But then Lambert did a very odd thing – he appealed over the gentle Cranmer’s head to the king. Why Lambert did this is a mystery. He must have known of Henry’s aversion to the sacramentary heresy. He was, unfortunately, the kind of man who rushed in where angels fear to tread; he now found himself at the centre of a prominent public trial in November, presided over by Henry, robed augustly for the occasion in solemn white. On Henry’s orders the assembled bishops – including Cranmer, Gardiner and Tunstall – all tried to turn Lambert back to more orthodox views. After five arduous hours of arguing and debating had failed to convert Lambert, Henry then turned to Cromwell, who had sat silently through it all thus far, and ordered him to read the sentence.12

  Reporting the trial to ambassadors abroad, Cromwell commended Henry’s ‘excellent gravity and inestimable majesty’ in his proceedings against the ‘miserable man’ Lambert. It was, of course, part of Cromwell’s duty to present a favourable image of Henry at all times. There would be no reason to suspect that Cromwell had any sympathy for Lambert except for a passage in Foxe, which, in view of the later accusation that Cromwell supported sacramentaries, calls for some notice. On the morning of his execution, says Foxe, Lambert was led to Cromwell’s house, where he had a private meeting with him, and then took his last breakfast before going to die. ‘It is reported of many’, Foxe adds, that Cromwell asked Lambert’s forgiveness for his part in the trial. The somewhat non-committal ‘it is reported’ suggests that Foxe was relying on hearsay and not entirely sure. Besides, executioners customarily asked forgiveness of those they were about to send out of this world, but it did not mean that they agreed with them, or with what they had done.13

  A possible explanation of this last meeting between Cromwell and Lambert may lie in Foxe’s account of Lambert’s death. Rather like the unfortunate Forest a few months earlier, Lambert was burned deliberately slowly. After his legs were burned ‘up to the stumps … two that stood on each side of him with their halberts pitched him up on their pikes’ before letting him down again, after which he ‘fell into the fire, and there gave up his life’. This added torment was unusual, and unlikely to have been carried out on the whim of those supervising the execution. Someone must have given an order that an example should be made of Lambert as a warning to other sacramentaries. Given Henry’s loathing of this particular heresy as well as his judicial role in Lambert’s trial – for seldom did a king preside over a heresy trial as Henry had done – the likelihood must be that the order had come from the king. So Foxe’s story may have a fairly simple explanation: Cromwell met Lambert that morning to warn him that his death in the fire would be even more ghastly than normal, and he was trying to persuade Lambert to see sense and recant at the last moment. But Lambert, a rash and foolhardy fellow apparently, took no more notice of Cromwell than he had done of Cranmer a few months before.14

  About the same time as the Lambert affair, the so-called Exeter conspiracy was unravelling. Henry Courtenay, marquis of Exeter, was the son of Katherine, daughter of Edward IV. As such he would have had a claim of sorts to the throne if Henry died without an heir. Exeter’s close circle of friends included Lord Montague, Sir Edward Neville and Geoffrey Pole, brother of Reginald the cardinal, the man hated by Henry above all others. Montague and the Poles, like Exeter, were of the house of York. They also followed the old faith and opposed Cromwell’s reformist policies. They were tried for treason in December 1538. Exeter, Montague and Neville were beheaded, while Geoffrey Pole was pardoned, mainly because he supplied much of the incriminating evidence. Reginald Pole’s elderly mother, the Countess of Salisbury, was imprisoned and attainted in 1539, but not executed until two years later.15

  The main work on the Exeters remains the one by the Dodds sisters. According to the Dodds, although the Exeters were opponents of Cromwell, and had even become estranged from the king, they were guilty of no treasonable conspiracy. Their downfall is explained by the ruthlessness of Henry and Cromwell in pursuing to the end anyone remotely likely to be a threat to the regime.16

  Naturally, Henry and Cromwell saw things differently. Cromwell told Thomas Wyatt that the Exeters were convicted not ‘by light suspicion, but by certain proofs and confessions’. His assistant, Wriothesley, told foreign contacts that Exeter ‘had been a traitor these twenty years and ever studied how to take his master’s place from him, and to destroy all his children’. Via Ambassador Wyatt, Henry told Charles V that the Exeters had conspired to destroy not only Henry but Edward, Mary and Elizabeth as well – this is according to Geoffrey Pole’s confessions. The government told the French ambassador, Castillon, of the Exeters’ plot to chase out the king and receive Reginald Pole back. Exeter’s treason, added Cromwell, was amply proved by copies of letters between him and Pole, found among the possessions of Exeter’s wife (the originals had been burned) and Exeter had been scheming to gain control of England by marrying his son to Mary and destroying Edward. Neither Castillon nor Chapuys were entirely convinced, while the Misses Dodds suspect that these letters were largely imaginary.17

  The Exeters were convicted when Geoffrey Pole, at first one of their party, turned informer. What motivated him to do so is not known, but even the Dodds concede that no evidence exists of torture. It may be accepted, therefore, that Pole confessed more or less freely. He was no longer the same man Chapuys had known so well a few years before. Back in 1534, Chapuys told Charles that Geoffrey Pole ‘ceases not, like many others, to importune and beg me to write to your Majesty, and explain how very easy the conquest of this kingdom would be, and the inhabitants are only waiting for a signal’. Chapuys was being ‘daily assailed on every side’ by people ‘soliciting the execution of the apostolic censures against Henry’. Many were convinced that ‘such a resolution of Your Majesty’s [Charles’s] part would be a sufficient remedy, considering the great discontent prevailing among all classes of society at this King’s disorderly life and government’.18

  So Geoffrey Pole was one of a number of influential people begging a foreign power to attack and conquer England. If this is not treason, the word has lost its meaning. Chapuys does not incriminate Exeter or Montague directly, but who else could Pole’s co-conspirators have been? Not Cromwell, or Cranmer or Audley. This question alone may not be enough to convict Exeter, but it would be mightily strange if Geoffrey Pole had often talked about the subject with Chapuys without ever mentioning it to his friends the Exeters.

  Here now are some of the things that Exeter and Montague said, according to Pole’s confessions. First, ‘knaves rule about the king’, and Exeter hoped to ‘give them a buffet one day’. This is not necessarily treasonable, though a lot might depend on what ‘buffet’ really meant.19

  Then this: ‘The Turk was more ch … h … su … than the king being a Christian prince’. Unfortunately the document is too badly damaged to be more accurate, but it is plain that Henry was being compared, somewhat less than favourably, with the Turk.

  Now this: ‘Even though we have a prince [Edward] … the king and his whole issue stand accursed’. And this: ‘knaves and heretics and smatterers of small learning were the king’s assisters [in Henry’s divorce]’. And especially this, which the Misses Dodds have curiously declined to quote:

  Yet we should do more, and here when the time should come, what wt [sic] power and friendship, nor is it the plucking down of these knaves that will help the matter; we must pluck down the head.20

  Other evidence has Montague calling Darcy a ‘fool’ during the Pilgrimage of Grace; for ‘he went to pluck away the council: he should first have begun with the head, but I beshrew them for leaving off so soon’. Montague had also recalled Henry saying to his lords that ‘he should go from them one day’; to which Montague added: ‘if he will serve us so, we shall be happily rid.’21

  Then, accordi
ng to Exeter’s wife, when her husband joined Norfolk against the Pilgrims, Sir Edward Neville, a family friend and brother-in-law of Montague, visited her one day. She was downcast, and Neville tried to raise her spirits. ‘Madam’, he told her, ‘be not afraid of this, nor of the second, but beware of the third’. Neville’s words are a mystery to the Misses Dodds, but they were no mystery to the government, especially in view of what has been seen above. Cromwell’s personal files include a note that the ‘words touching the insurrection, which was “beware of the third”, were spoken at Windsor’. The government obviously took Neville’s words to be evidence of a conspiracy of a future, more successful rising than the Pilgrimage of Grace.22

  There are other quotes from various people, mostly servants of Exeter, to the effect that Exeter would be king one day, though this does not prove that he encouraged such words. Servants of Exeter and Montague also told investigators that they saw many letters being unaccountably burned on the orders of their masters. Cromwell was convinced that these letters were destroyed to get rid of treasonable evidence.23

  So was this a dangerous conspiracy, or was it a Tudor despotism determined to destroy all opposition and every conceivable threat to the throne, if necessary on the lightest of pretexts? There is a certain similarity between the fall of the Exeters and that of Anne Boleyn. In both cases evidence exists against the accused, though whether it is decisive may have to remain debateable. History can only record an open verdict. It is, however, far too naïve to imagine that Montague was simply injudiciously letting off steam with his threats of ‘plucking down the head’. This kind of talk, even if it progressed no further, could easily have been construed as treason even before the Treason Act of 1534. The same applies to the unflattering comparison of Henry with the Turk, to say nothing of the solicitations to Chapuys urging the emperor to invade England. The Dodds are quite right – Cromwell did indeed pursue the Exeters relentlessly – but the man responsible to king and country for the security of the realm could scarcely have done less. The previous century had shown what havoc and misery frustrated, grasping noblemen could cause. If the Exeters were not traitors, neither were they spotless innocents. According to Castillon, Henry had wanted to eliminate the White Rose Yorkists for some time. If so, then the Yorkists, like Anne before them, had rather obligingly supplied him with every excuse he needed.24