Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Most remarkable of all was the Marchioness’s tribute to Cromwell when the young Marquess was launched at Court in 1534. She begged her old servant to look after her son:

  Whenever you shall see in him any large playing [gambling] or great usual swearing, or any other demeanour unmeet for him to use, which I fear me shall be very often, then it may please you, good Master Cromwell, for my late Lord his good father’s sake, whose soul God pardon, in some friendly fashion to rebuke him.118

  So Cromwell, a long way now from Putney, was asked to step into the role of father for one of England’s senior peers. This is not of mere anecdotal significance; for it needs to be remembered that this teenager in need of a firm paternal hand, at that time Marquess of Dorset by inheritance, later gained the even more exalted title Duke of Suffolk and in that capacity tried in 1553 to inaugurate a new royal dynasty through his ill-fated daughter Lady Jane Grey. That was important enough, but there were more profound results of Cromwell’s relationship to the Grey family. They must await their proper place in his story (see below, Chapter 15).

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  This Grey connection suggests new answers for an old puzzle: when Thomas Cromwell became a member of Parliament for the first time, in 1523, for which borough did he sit? A borough constituency it would have to be; it was inconceivable at this stage of his career for such a nonentity to have been chosen as one of the pairs of knights representing a shire. It was too early for him to have looked to Wolsey for a place in Parliament, and in fact the long speech opposing military intervention in France which he may or may not have delivered to the Commons in that Parliament would have been decidedly unwelcome to the King and his chief minister.119 The Marquess of Dorset was not as rich as his title implied (thanks partly to major estates held for the time being in dower by his mother), so there is little detectable long-standing Grey interest in the many constituencies for which we have no record of representation in the 1523 Parliament. All the more reason for the Marquess to get his man in.120

  One fragment of evidence might lead us in that direction. It is part of a small bundle in Cromwell’s papers dateable to 1523 that also contains his surviving draft note to Margaret Marchioness of Dorset forwarding her husband’s and brother-in-law’s letters. This memorandum in his own hand concerns an abortive private bill evidently intended for the 1523 Parliament, a petition for the Cistercian abbey of Holm Cultram in Cumberland for tax exemption because of its military importance on the borders.121 The Marquess of Dorset’s family had substantial estates in a more southerly part of Cumberland, and we find Cromwell doing legal work connected with them in 1523.122 Yet, perhaps more significantly, in 1523 the Marquess of Dorset was on a major mission into Scotland and the Borders, as indeed Cromwell mentioned in his draft letter to the Marchioness. So it is possible that Holm Cultram Abbey lobbied Dorset while in the north, and so his servant sought to handle their request in Parliament. The draft bill for Holm Cultram might place Cromwell in the northern Parliamentary boroughs of Carlisle in Cumberland or Appleby in Westmorland: their MPs in the 1523 Parliament are presently unknown.123 Otherwise, a natural borough for Cromwell to represent would be Southampton, where one burgess for the 1523 Parliament remains unnamed. The even greater port of Bristol, where neither name survives, would probably have been too big a prize for him at that stage.124

  Cromwell writes to his friend John Creke, 17 August 1523; in later years, he rarely bothered to keep his hand this neat. In the middle is the famous satirical list of topics covered in the recent Parliamentary debates, ending, ‘Howbeyt in conclusyon we have do[ne] as o’r p’decessors have bene wont to doo that ys to say as well as we myght and lefte wher we begann.’

  Cromwell’s humorous reflections on his experience in this very turbulent Parliament have been the subject of much comment, not least because they occur in the very first letter of his we possess, from 17 August 1523, four days after the Commons had been sent home.125 It is written with a careful though not especially successful attempt to make his undistinguished handwriting stylish, and its recipient was that same John Creke who had addressed him with such Italianate affection the previous year. Historians have rarely bothered to ask how we can still find within Cromwell’s own archive an original letter of his written to a man in Bilbao: the answer probably appears if one fast-forwards Creke’s life to the early 1530s. By then he was in deep financial trouble and made a series of characteristically impassioned appeals for help from his old friend (see below, this page). It is plausible that having treasured this warm letter, worn from much folding and with pen-trials on the back, the stricken merchant then sent it back to its writer in 1531 to stimulate memories of the time when they were close.

  Cromwell’s letter rounds up London gossip for his friend in Spain, and demonstrates a relaxed satirical wit on the subject of Parliament, speaking volumes about his capacity for making friends:

  by long time I, amongst other, have endured a parliament, which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemperance [moderation] – treason, murder, felony [?]concealed – and also how a commonwealth might be edified and also continued within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion, we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.

  As Geoffrey Elton observed with justifiable tartness, ‘it is a little difficult to understand why writer after writer has taken this amusing note to show contempt for Parliament’: testimony that a sense of humour might be a useful tool of historical method.126 Cromwell’s voice resonates with the whimsical ruefulness of a man who could have organized things better if he had been in charge; anyone will recognize the tone if they have experienced the frustrations and incidental comic consolations of a committee meeting that could have been shorter. Windbaggery need not stop business getting done in the end. A good instance of Cromwell’s combination of clubbability and efficiency survives from 1523, in a letter from a satisfied client and fellow-MP, Sir Richard Cornwall, from those same weeks following Parliament’s end, ‘for the great kindness that ye shewed unto me . . . in my time of business in the Parliament’.127

  The presence in Cromwell’s papers of a speech criticizing government plans to invade France has given this text a significance which is unwarranted. If it was in fact delivered, it is an echo from thousands of such frank contributions to Parliamentary debate, a great many of which would have been far more bilious and less well expressed than his. It is almost impossible to find a Parliament in early Tudor England not resounding with gritty opposition; King Henry VIII would have rolled his eyes in weary longing at modern historians’ talk of ‘Tudor despotism’. Parliament was a ‘high court’ of the realm, which meant that on many occasions, in conformity with the assumptions of the time, it showed due deference to the monarch’s wishes, particularly when God’s anointed ruler had properly explained the justification for what he wanted. At other times, it fulfilled the role of any good advisory council in remonstrating, but on a scale intimidating to any monarch: an assembly several hundred strong, ranging exuberantly from peers of the realm to borough burgesses, brimming with opinions and local knowledge, and many understandably grumpy at being uprooted from their families and businesses.

  Parliament needed good managing if anything was to get done; often a great deal did not get done. Cromwell quickly learned how results might be achieved, and though as we will see on several occasions Parliament defeated even his capacities, he clearly loved the task. The Speaker of this Parliament, Sir Thomas More, with whom his acquaintance would both deepen and darken, may not have been so enthusiastic.128 In Cromwell’s meteoric career under the King in the 1530s, he amply demonstrated that he had acquired highly important lessons about the use of Parliament from those seventeen weeks back in
1523. This was in fact the main reason why the King raised him from the ranks of the merely useful among senior royal servants. He also made significant friendships from parts of the kingdom as yet beyond his experience, which in later manically busy years he never had a chance to visit. Now even more opportunities beckoned.

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  In the Cardinal’s Service: 1524–1528

  Early in 1524, towards the age of forty, Thomas Cromwell entered the service of Cardinal Wolsey. It was a plum job, as Gray’s Inn recognized in admitting Cromwell to their number this year, and had the Cardinal lived and flourished for decades longer, it would no doubt have remained the basis of an honourable but unmemorable career.1 No one has succeeded in pinning down exactly who launched him in Wolsey’s employment. One relative, Robert Cromwell, Vicar of Battersea, had been Wolsey’s Receiver-General, and might look promising, but Robert died in 1517 and he is probably irrelevant to Thomas’s arrival in the Cardinal’s service seven years later.2

  Instead, there are connections aplenty among Cromwell’s friends around the Greys, the Allens of London and Essex and the Dorsets’ Essex abbey of Tilty – right up to Cromwell’s previous employer the second Marquess of Dorset himself, who was a schoolboy when he first knew Wolsey in Oxford, and whose father the first Marquess had given Wolsey his first benefice in the Church.3 Dr John Allen should be high on the list of candidates: a fellow Anglo-Italian with years of residence in Rome, who had been Commissary-General for Wolsey since 1518 – and strongly linked to the Greys.4 The earliest piece of paperwork pulling Cromwell into Wolsey’s business, from early March 1524, is a set of land conveyances involving Dr Allen’s cousin, Alderman John Allen, apparently preliminary to the Cardinal’s major acquisition of Yorkshire property. Cromwell’s role, as ‘gentleman of London’ (in other words a lawyer), was in a routine service as nominal grantee of the property from its previous owners.5

  Likewise, we do not have any explanation for why Cromwell left the service of the Greys; but that may not be the right question to ask, for the answer is provided by his entering Wolsey’s employment. What Wolsey wanted, he got. What did he want from Thomas Cromwell, apart from a decent jobbing lawyer, when there were swarms of them to choose from? The answer is the Cardinal’s legacy project: a monstrous tomb for himself, outclassing the tombs of kings, plus a pair of memorial colleges at Ipswich and Oxford. Wolsey may have been inspired by Pope Leo X’s project for giving a tomb to Henry VIII in 1521 (see above, this page); certainly it followed soon after that eventually unfulfilled proposal. It is still not absolutely clear where Wolsey planned his tomb to end up, and perhaps he himself left the matter open, waiting to see what the most splendid setting might be, while the craftsmen busied themselves in Westminster. The twin Cardinal Colleges would in any case stand both as chantries for his soul and places of education – education was always a theme of great importance to the former Oxford don, and one of his solaces amid the crushing burden of his royal duties. A school textbook which adapted William Lily’s grammar was published in Wolsey’s name and branded with the name of Cardinal College Ipswich; it ran into multiple editions in England and Antwerp.6

  Only a month after his first work on the Yorkshire conveyance, Cromwell was off on what became extensive travels. His brief was to close a considerable number of small monasteries and nunneries, one of the more dramatic proofs of Wolsey’s willingness to exploit his powers as papal legate over the Church in England in the name of what he could claim was reform. There had been dissolutions of such small religious houses before, particularly during the long fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wars with France, when the Crown confiscated priories with mother houses across the Channel. Just as Wolsey did now, the monarchy had used the monastic estates for new religious purposes: Henry VI’s colleges at King’s Cambridge and Eton drew on such former monastic endowments, and the Cardinal’s new colleges followed the lead of King Henry’s lavish creations in this and in other respects, though always concerned to outdo the royal saint in fostering education and liturgical prayer. Such minor religious houses could be easily characterized by those concerned to reform the Church as being superfluous to ecclesiastical needs, too small-scale and poor to function properly.

  It was a major administrative task to sort out the transfer of assets. All through his time in Wolsey’s service, it was this ‘legacy project’ which was Cromwell’s main work for the Cardinal, even when the Cardinal’s power started disintegrating in 1528, and his servant moved in to cover duties deserted by men less loyal to Wolsey than himself. As the Cardinal said more than once amid the agony of disgrace and vanishing power, the Colleges had become ‘in a manner, opera manuum tuarum [the work of your own hands]’.7 Cromwell’s first port of call was the small priory at Wallingford on the Thames in Berkshire.8 He initially kept on his private legal practice in Chancery, and it is not always easy to distinguish between what came to him via his private office and what concerned Wolsey, whose administrative tentacles extended in many directions.9

  Soon after his arrival in Wolsey’s employment in 1524, Cromwell was drawn into disputes around a troublesome young protégé of the Cardinal’s, Thomas Stanley Lord Monteagle, who had become the centre of a huge custody battle. His involvement in that particular tangle over several years may have been primarily on behalf of the royal servant Sir John Hussey; it was Hussey who had arranged for Monteagle’s placement in Wolsey’s household to keep other predators of the Stanley estates at bay, and who from 1526 paid Cromwell an annual pension, which must have been in connection with this prolonged affair. The Monteagle business was another way in which Cromwell’s acquaintance with the nobility was widening beyond his early service to the Greys, since a great many noblemen took sides in this issue or were brought in to arbitrate. Among them were the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk and Thomas Lord Darcy of Templehurst, as well as Hussey and Cromwell’s old patron Thomas Marquess of Dorset.10

  Wolsey made Cromwell a member of his personal council in 1527, which might have given him some leeway to diversify his duties. Nevertheless, right up to Wolsey’s last months in 1530, Cromwell’s chief business remained helping the Cardinal to shepherd his soul into the next life, and it is likely that the promotion was intended to facilitate that intricate project.11 Moreover, we have concentrated too much on the very large amount of archive material about Wolsey’s dissolution of monasteries which funded the two Colleges, not paying enough attention to the centrality of Cardinal Wolsey’s tomb in Cromwell’s duties.12 The vital clue is provided by two letters which survive not in the State Papers but in partial copies in an invaluable collection of notes made for Lord Herbert’s life of Henry VIII by his secretary Thomas Master in the 1620s, now preserved in the archives of Jesus College Oxford.13 Both letters were written at the moment when Wolsey’s efforts to do King Henry’s bidding in matters of high policy had finally failed and brought the Cardinal disaster.

  The most important of the letters was written on 31 January 1530 to Wolsey, who was by that time ill and in disgrace at Esher, by the Florentine sculptor Benedetto Rovezzano. Rovezzano was the chief sculptor working on the Cardinal’s tomb, as well as on a major altar for Cardinal College Oxford. He was seeking to get a final reckoning of his accounts on the tomb project, and return to his wife and children in Florence, from whom he claimed to have been separated for a decade. No doubt Rovezzano’s knowledge of the dire state of the Cardinal’s affairs spurred him on to this sudden rediscovery of family responsibilities and a reignited sense of urgency on a project which, until then, he had been happy to see drift serenely on its way.

  Four bronze angels by Rovezzano topping Wolsey’s tomb survived eventually at Harrowden Hall (Northamptonshire), though their wings went missing as late as the 1970s. The angels themselves are now safe in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  What is noticeable is Cromwell’s centrality to every aspect of the tomb’s creation. It had been Cromwell, said Rovezzano, who ordered the contract wit
h Antonio Cavallari, the King’s agent for gilt work. Conspicuously, Rovezzano had received his first payment in June 1524, soon after Cromwell had entered Wolsey’s service. There had followed very substantial further payments over five years, the regal scale of which he pointedly commented was appropriate, since the project was ‘of not less workmanship, beauty or cost than the tomb of Henry VII’ in Westminster Abbey. The money had come via Cavallari and his fellow-Lucchese merchant Antonio Buonvisi, both of whom happened to be long-standing friends of Cromwell.14 Rovezzano had laid out his own money on bronze and Florentine marble, and now he would appreciate Cromwell, Wolsey’s ‘consiliarius’, rounding up matters so he could go home. A previous letter from Cavallari to Wolsey made similar points, and also asked him to let the gilder (a separate cost) return to Antwerp. There is no hint that either of the Italians was dissatisfied with Cromwell’s dealings with them; indeed Rovezzano praised him as ‘a man of great talent and exceptional skill’.15 Over the next decade, Cromwell, now risen to much greater heights, continued to be good to Cavallari’s widow in various troubles.16