Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Wherever the English kings held sway, it was prudent to learn their language, so the Welsh, Cornish and Manx acquired it if they wanted to make a successful career beyond their own lands. Even some Gaels in the neighbouring island of Ireland did the same, for dealings with the ancient English-speaking enclaves in their midst, especially with English government based in the city of Dublin. Since the twelfth century English monarchs had maintained a rather unstable ‘Lordship of Ireland’ from Dublin, claiming a grant from the Pope in Rome for this amorphous dignity. Dublin’s administration for the Lordship was modelled on England’s royal government, though very old-fashioned by the standards of early Tudor Westminster. Ireland had occasional meetings of its own Parliament, representing the comparatively Anglicized territory around Dublin called ‘the Pale’, together with a scattering of English-style boroughs around the coasts, and other parts of the island that Anglo-Norman noblemen had conquered long ago; their descendants still lived in aristocratic pomp alongside the territories of the Gaelic chieftains. If anything united the much fragmented island, it was the shared institutions of the Western Latin Church: archbishops, bishops and monastic orders for Anglo-Irish and Gaels alike.

  No one in mainland Europe bothered to learn the English language unless they had regular business with the subjects of the king of England. The English did produce remarkably good cloth for export; otherwise, there was not much point in making the effort. English folk remembered fondly various past imperial glories they had enjoyed beyond their shores. In memory of particularly cheering moments in this chequered story, when Henry II, Edward I or Edward III had commanded allegiance from Galway to Berwick to the Pyrenees, English monarchs were generally called Henry or Edward. After an especially glorious and exceptionally futile King Richard I (the Crusader ‘Lionheart’) in the twelfth century, neither of the two subsequent Richards could be counted a success.

  In the sequence of generally shortlived English territorial conquests in mainland Europe, a last effort crashed in ignominy fifty years before Thomas Cromwell’s birth. The Plantagenet dynasty ruling from London spent a century from the 1330s trying to displace the Valois dynasty ruling from Paris, with no more long-term success than against the Stewarts in Scotland. The English still massage their egos with the memory of occasional military victories on the way – Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt – but the reality was that by 1453 they had been roundly expelled from France, retaining only a toehold with some islands off the French coast, plus a heavily guarded coastal town called Calais, which defended the shortest sea-route to England towards Dover.

  That mid-fifteenth-century defeat was a terrible humiliation for the Plantagenets, and it was one of the reasons that the royal line descended into murderous quarrels which for a while made Plantagenet England into something of a failed state. Out of civil wars between Plantagenet factions, Lancastrians and Yorkists, the least likely winner emerged, the grandson of a personable Welshman called Owen Tudor (ap Tewdwr in his native language), who had married the widow of martial hero King Henry V. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, possessed the most tenuous of hereditary claims to the crown when he arrived in London in 1485, having killed the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, in battle at Bosworth in the English Midlands. Henry, to whom remaining Lancastrians looked in default of any more convincing candidate, was aided by the King’s general unpopularity among the English nobility, who probably rightly blamed Richard for the mysterious death of the previous boy-king, Edward V.

  As Henry VII, the new King spent a troubled quarter-century on the throne convincing his subjects that the decision in 1485 had been God’s, though well aware that he needed to exercise his considerable personal talents to sustain that notion. His victory at Bosworth did suggest divine favour to pious contemporaries, but Henry backed up God’s choice by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of King Edward IV. The Tudor dynasty was henceforward slightly more plausible in terms of royal descent. Henry’s surviving son, eighth Henry on the English throne, grew up with a profound sense of divine favour for his crown; in this he was much encouraged by the intense piety of Henry VII’s extremely capable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, whose political skill had done much to aid Heaven in the rise of the Tudors.

  The second Tudor king nevertheless remained keenly conscious that some members of the English nobility also enjoyed a high quotient of Plantagenet blood. Like his father, Henry VIII paid due deference to the Church, which gave its blessing to the change of monarchs in 1485 just as it had done for each previous change. Ecclesiastical power and wealth in his kingdom were formidable. Around 600 religious houses – monasteries, nunneries, friaries, colleges devoted to soul-prayer – dotted the landscape, the immense value of their estates and rents never so far totalled. There were twenty-three magnificent cathedral churches for some of the most richly endowed bishoprics in the whole of Western Christendom, and thousands of parish churches, each financed by the levy of a tenth of farm produce (the ‘tithe’). Monarchs like Henry VII and the young Henry VIII might cast envious eyes at the Church’s wealth, but they did not seriously challenge churchmen’s right to enjoy possessions which, in many cases, had been given by devout Anglo-Saxon kings and aristocrats before ever there was a single kingdom of England.

  The Tudor kings nevertheless remained resentfully conscious of the constraints on their ability to raise revenue from their subjects. They were constantly hobbled by the fact that England had become a centralized polity much earlier than other European kingdoms, and so its tax system, sophisticated by fourteenth-century standards, was now creaky and incapable of doing justice to the riches represented by England’s farms and fisheries. Customary lay taxation was also dependent on the consent of meetings of commons, nobility and leading clergy in Parliament, together with agreement to taxation on churchmen by two clerical assemblies which met in parallel to Parliamentary sessions, called Convocations.* Both Tudor Henrys spent much of their energy finding ways round these obstacles, and it was to be a major theme of the reign of Henry VIII, particularly since he much enjoyed spending money in spectacular ways – on palaces, castles, soldiers, ships, works of art and even books and manuscripts.

  Henry became heir to the Tudor throne on the death of his teenage elder brother Arthur in 1502. He was formidable in his own way: tall even by our standards, good-looking, possessed of boisterous charm, and more intelligence than the average product of hereditary rule. When he succeeded his father in 1509 (Thomas Cromwell then being in his mid-twenties), the new King married Catalina, a Spanish princess of impeccable royal lineage whom Henry VII had originally acquired for Prince Arthur and who was too much of a dynastic asset to be lost when Arthur died. Such marriages of a deceased brother’s wife were tricky in the law of the Western Church, but the marriage went ahead, despite doubts expressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham. Katherine of Aragon proved a capable and popular queen, despite a worrying record of miscarriages or infant death in her essential duty of providing heirs for this still fragile dynasty. Yet even in the early 1520s, there was biological time to spare, and meanwhile King Henry did his best to stride the European stage as if he were one of its really important monarchs, doing his best to equal the Valois King of France, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor or the Jagiellon King of Poland-Lithuania.

  In the first year of his reign, the King began promoting a talented churchman, a former Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford, to more and more responsibilities in government. Thomas Wolsey started his public career as a protégé of one of old King Henry’s principal advisers, Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester. His chief duty came to be the promotion of Henry’s mission of self-glorification in constant European-wide diplomacy, but his general busy competence and appetite for good administration won him his master’s gratitude and even affection. Basking in royal approval, Wolsey gathered wealth, estates and honours. Henry prevailed on the Pope to appoint him as a cardinal, and even made two attempts to get Wolsey himself elected pope. Since
there had not been an English pope since Nicholas Breakspear in the twelfth century, this was characteristic over-assertion, but the King did secure Wolsey the office of special papal representative in England: legate a latere (literally, ‘on the side’, bypassing the power of Archbishop Warham). Henry also promoted the Cardinal to be Lord Chancellor, the highest legal office in the land. Wolsey’s power outstripped that of everyone in the kingdom under the sovereign, sidelining both Warham and his old patron Fox.

  Not only these veteran councillors but England’s leading noblemen were furious at Wolsey’s triumph. Nobles saw themselves as born royal advisers, and deeply resented an upstart whose father had been no more than a prosperous butcher and livestock-dealer in the provincial port town of Ipswich. England in Tudor times was a society obsessed with gradations of hierarchy and status (some say it still is), but there was nothing that outraged nobility and gentry could do while Wolsey continued to please the King, and of course many of them hastened to profit from his spectacular good fortune. The busy folk of Putney would see the Cardinal’s barge passing upstream on the Thames as his great new palace of Hampton Court, a gift from the King, took shape. There was much traffic of the powerful along their river: the King himself, moving between the ancient castle of Windsor and his array of palaces reaching down-river beyond London to Greenwich; Archbishop Warham’s barge sailing upstream from his chief palace at Lambeth to his country house at Mortlake, 3 miles beyond Putney; ambassadors, courtiers, hopefuls of all sorts.

  * * *

  *

  In this story, Putney is nothing and everything. Cromwell’s smartest move was to flee it while still in his teens, to travel through mainland Europe and thus refashion himself as much more than a Tudor Englishman. Yet once he could enjoy the reward for his travels and administrative drudgery, he triumphantly reasserted his link to that ferry-side village on the Thames. In summer 1536, he vaulted up the social scale in a move whose chutzpah did much to destabilize politics and sparked a great upheaval of rebellion in northern parts of the realm, the Pilgrimage of Grace: he was made Lord Privy Seal and a peer of the realm. He took the title Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. This was a very calculated gesture, deliberately provocative to the English nobility. As everybody knew, for half a millennium Putney had been a limb of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s manor of Wimbledon. Now that great and ancient lordship, with its stately house at Mortlake, had fallen to the newly minted baron, born on its soil fifty years before.

  Before 1536, Cromwell had not a scrap of land in the village of his birth, though he had by then built up handsome estates elsewhere. This assumption of a title from Wimbledon was a statement that the Putney boy had come a long way: a symbolic return of the native. How did a brewer’s son from Putney become (late in his career) Cardinal Wolsey’s trusted servant and then, in nine years serving Henry VIII, transform Tudor England? He was around forty-five when he became a royal councillor, and the King left him only one more decade to live before sending him to the executioner’s block. His spectacular tightrope act in the 1530s can be properly understood only in light of his earlier life – about which we apparently know so little. Yet there are ways of penetrating it; sources from his years of greatness can be squeezed for meaning and reminiscence, and ranging forward into the 1530s restores precious glimpses of those early years from 1485.

  The scrappy evidence about Walter Cromwell alias Smith has traditionally been taken to suggest that Thomas made a sensible choice in getting away from him as soon as possible. Yet most of this picture is Victorian fantasy, the work of an imaginative nineteenth-century local antiquary.5 Even the arresting opening of Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the boy staggering under his father’s blows, is no more substantial than that. The few reliable elements are drawn from the court rolls of the Manor of Wimbledon, which do include charges against Walter of assault and falsifying deeds. However, court records are constructed to be records of offences, even when these are purely technical, aimed at triggering a judicial process to resolve a dispute: Walter was not the only Tudor yeoman to bear such a record. One consistent set of entries about him in the court rolls, no fewer than forty-eight instances between 1475 and 1501, are fines for breaking the assize of ale. Commentators on Cromwell’s early life have assumed that this reveals Walter’s consistent penchant for watering the ale he sold. The very frequency of the fines should have aroused doubts: what we are seeing here is a routine manorial system of licensing ale-selling, couched in terms easy to mistake for a fine in the modern sense.6

  The one traceable mention of Walter in the thousands of letters in Cromwell’s personal archive throws a completely positive light on the Putney yeoman. In October 1536, Anthony St Leger (or Sellinger), future Lord Deputy of Ireland and a protégé of Thomas Cromwell, was worried about his lack of promotion and his uncertain finances, so he appealed to the now Lord Privy Seal to remember him. He stressed how much he already owed not just to Thomas, but to Walter Cromwell before him: ‘[But] for the goodness that I found in your father, and also in you in my Lord Cardinal his days . . . I had been utterly undone, and so I shall pray for you and all your blood.’7 St Leger was born about 1496 into an ancient gentry family from a village in central Kent called Ulcombe. Walter Cromwell’s goodness to him would have come in his childhood and teenage years, for most of which time young Thomas Cromwell was overseas, before Thomas himself returned to carry on the favours in the 1520s.

  The link of the Cromwells with St Leger came through Putney’s ancient manorial relationship with the archbishops of Canterbury, because Anthony was a favourite nephew of William Warham, Archbishop from 1503. This kinship is likely to have brought him as a boy from his Kentish home scores of miles from Putney up to the Archbishop’s house at Mortlake (it is possible that the Cromwell family already had a much humbler link there in domestic service to the Archbishop).8 In another fulsome letter of around 1533, St Leger professed himself grateful for promotion in equal shares to Archbishop Warham and Thomas Cromwell. As the deceased Archbishop’s shadow diminished a year or two later, a further letter revised St Leger’s estimate of his gratitude to Cromwell up from half to ‘all my living’.9 Here is a glimpse of how the returned native in the 1510s already had one sure entry into the goodwill of Kentish gentry through a significant and well-connected family, the St Legers. Cromwell had much to do with their many relatives in Kent, in ways important not just for him but for the remoulding of Tudor politics after his death.

  Walter Cromwell may actually have come from Ireland. That was the confident statement of an anonymous chronicler in early Tudor London who certainly knew the precise facts that Walter kept a brewhouse and lived in Wandsworth, and the story was repeated in bilious and probably bibulous remarks about Cromwell by the courtier George Paulet in 1537: he ‘was so affectionate unto the same land because his ancestors were born there’.10 Thomas’s mother was, however, English. She remains so obscure that we do not know her Christian name for certain, though it is generally given as Katherine. Her maiden surname has rarely been noticed, which is puzzling because she came from an identifiable gentry family, a reminder that the lowliness of Cromwell’s origins has often been exaggerated. In 1535 a correspondent of one of Cromwell’s servants was trying to obtain the office of prior at the Staffordshire monastery of Tutbury for its Sub-Prior, Arthur Meverell, and he mentioned hopefully that Cromwell’s mother had been one of the same family, the Meverells of Throwley, on the Staffordshire side of the Peak District. In fact Arthur Meverell did get the appointment.11 A relationship with the Meverells gave Cromwell a different sprinkling of potential gentry contacts: around the Peak into Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

  In his years of prosperity, Cromwell became friendly with the head of the Throwley family, Francis Meverell, and did small favours for him and his close relatives in neighbouring Derbyshire, the Babingtons of Dethick. One of the latter, John Babington, actually became a servant of Cromwell’s in the 1530s, after being a colleague in Ca
rdinal Wolsey’s service. He shared his reformist religious outlook, and championed vulnerable members of the minority in the northern Midlands who also sought religious reformation.12 Another relative via Cromwell’s mother was a young gentleman called Francis Bassett of Blore in Derbyshire, whose mother was also one of the Throwley Meverells. In 1538 he too proved a useful agent of Cromwell’s iconoclastic policies in that same area. Bassett’s reforming convictions are attested by the fact that he became a favourite servant of Nottinghamshire-born Archbishop Cranmer, who was not slow to invoke the young man’s kinship to Cromwell when seeking to intimidate the Earl of Shrewsbury in a Staffordshire land dispute.13

  Descending the social scale, various other needy relatives from the Peak badgered the rising politician and succeeded in embroiling him in their legal business, but it was a question of activating a fairly dormant relationship.14 One correspondent of Cromwell at the beginning of the 1530s was an aged minor servant of the Bishop of Lincoln called Nicholas Glossop. Glossop introduced himself as the son of Cromwell’s aunt, and mentioned another relative from the Derbyshire Peak town of Wirksworth, around 15 miles from Throwley, but it is significant that Glossop had to explain all this to Master Secretary in order to get the letter of recommendation he was after.15 The maternal Staffordshire and Derbyshire side of Cromwell’s family were not high in his priorities, even those who gave him some claim to straddle the contested border between yeoman and gentle status.