Thomas Cromwell
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Phillip Lindley’s reconstruction of Wolsey’s tomb, side and end elevations; unlike even the grandest of medieval English tombs, the footprint of this ultimate Renaissance monument was almost square.
All this suggests that the key to Cromwell’s employment by Wolsey was his ability to deal with Italians. One more piece of evidence strengthens this idea, once we realize its significance: in 1525, Wolsey secured Cromwell’s appointment as Town Clerk of Salisbury. This was Cromwell’s very first appointment to public office anywhere, and actually it was more or less his only such appointment while Wolsey employed him, explaining perhaps his bitter remark to George Cavendish at the time of the Cardinal’s fall that ‘I never had any promotion by my lord to the increase of my living.’17 So why Salisbury? It was not because Cromwell had any personal connection with the city, as became clear from the correspondence around his appointment. The Salisbury Cathedral prebendary John Bigges, who wrote Cromwell a letter of welcome, had not previously met him, and clearly also thought that it would be helpful to suggest a local deputy if the incumbent deputy died. Bigges even had to tell Cromwell the date of the next local ‘law day’ (the day for holding courts).18
Cromwell had become Town Clerk after a tip-off to Cardinal Wolsey from the diocesan Vicar-General, Dr Thomas Bennet, that the office was vacant through the death of the previous Clerk, Roger Twynhoe.19 This happenstance was more important than it might seem. The city of Salisbury was very much in the hands of its bishop and cathedral; as Bigges pointed out, the Town Clerk’s deputy customarily doubled as receiver of the bishop’s rents.20 Twynhoe had also been an executor of the lately deceased Bishop of Salisbury, Edmund Audley, a veteran churchman with a mind of his own, who had never been one of Wolsey’s soulmates. Now, thanks to Audley’s death, Wolsey had the chance to acquire effective control of the city and diocese, as its newly nominated Bishop was an Italian absentee, Lorenzo Campeggio, who left Wolsey to run the diocese, an opportunity of which the Cardinal took full advantage.
Twynhoe’s death was a bonus. Within a month of Bennet’s initial letter, Wolsey had shoehorned Cromwell into the office: who could be better than an officer of his own, familiar with Italy, to negotiate when necessary with the absentee Campeggio?21 The Clerkship remained at a local level in the hands of a deputy supervised by Bennet. It did not personally involve Cromwell overmuch, sometimes to the vexation of the city fathers. He probably did a better job as Town Clerk than did Wolsey’s talentless illegitimate son Thomas Winter as diocesan Chancellor; yet it may be significant that, when Cromwell was desperately looking for a Parliamentary seat in 1529, there is no evidence that he turned to Salisbury (see below, this page).22
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Dissolving small monasteries for the endowment of the new Cardinal Colleges sent Cromwell right across southern England and the Midlands as far north-west as Staffordshire. This brought several new dimensions to his life. The cosmopolitan European traveller had a fairly limited acquaintance with his own country: largely London, Surrey and Essex and the ports of Southampton and Bristol. Now he was given the chance to roam widely (on travel expenses) across the whole of lowland England, and used his considerable charm to make all sorts of interesting friendships. This meant that, just at the moment when the kingdom was beginning to divide on religious lines under the influence of the Reformation in mainland Europe, Cromwell came to the King’s service on the fall of Wolsey equipped with a range of acquaintance on both sides of the gulf.
In East Anglia, for instance, Cromwell had previously known few people north of Essex (one exception was the Norwich merchant Reynold Littleprow, who may have got to know Cromwell in Antwerp, and through the 1530s exercised the prerogative of long friendship repeatedly to urge him to measures of social reform).23 The plans for Cardinal College Ipswich changed all that. Cromwell’s central role in creating the College there threw him into the company of men in Wolsey’s service who had come from Suffolk or who were still important in the borough’s affairs. What started as business relationships blossomed into real friendships, especially with the Suffolk gentleman Thomas Rush and his stepson Wolsey’s servant Thomas Alvard. Rush and Alvard were beneficiaries in Cromwell’s never-executed will of 1529, and it was to Rush that Cromwell first turned that same year in trying to find a new seat in the House of Commons. What is striking in this Rush/Alvard circle is that very few of its members went on to show enthusiasm for the developing Reformation; on the contrary, several were not afraid to be aggressively traditionalist. That did not stop them from being numbered among Cromwell’s friends who went on expecting and getting favours: what bound them together was a shared reverence for the memory of Cardinal Wolsey. This catholicity of friendships is a dimension of Cromwell’s mastery of English government which we will encounter again and again in the coming story.24
In his travels in west Sussex, Cromwell gained permanent gratitude from a small Augustinian house called Shulbrede by securing it a reprieve from dissolution. Here the threat came not from Wolsey’s dissolution programme but from parallel moves by the energetic and independent-minded Bishop of Chichester, Robert Sherburne. Sherburne was evidently trying to use surplus monastic resources to help finance four brand-new prebends which he had just founded for his cathedral.25 In 1525 he got as far as demolishing part of the church and domestic buildings at Shulbrede, no doubt intending to create a feasible prebendal house there, but desperate pleas from the monks to local gentry friends resulted in two of these gentlemen buttonholing Cromwell while on legal business in Westminster Hall. On their suggestion, he lobbied the hereditary patron of the priory, the Earl of Northumberland, via his eldest son Henry Lord Percy. As a result, Shulbrede Priory survived in its truncated premises another decade (not greatly to the edification of the monastic life in England), and gratefully voted its saviour an annuity. This was Cromwell’s earliest pension from any monastery, no doubt an eye-opener for him as a possible source of income.26
There is further evidence at exactly the same time of Cromwell’s involvement in a reprieve of one of Wolsey’s intended dissolutions: another small Augustinian priory called Bilsington, in Kent. Sir Henry Guildford (as we have noted, brother-in-law of Cromwell’s late employer the Marquess of Dorset) wrote in notably friendly terms asking him to call in on him at Leeds Castle on his way back to London to continue their conversations about a lease of Bilsington from the Cardinal, since he understood that Cromwell was supervising its dissolution alongside another Kentish Augustinian house at Tonbridge.27 In fact Bilsington remained undissolved for another decade. It is difficult not to see its escape as connected to the fact that its Prior was Arthur St Leger, brother to another Kentish gentleman, Cromwell’s friend Anthony St Leger. When Anthony reminisced in 1536 about ‘the goodness that I found . . . in you in my Lord Cardinal his days’, this may have been what he was thinking of. The community of Bilsington ceded Cardinal Wolsey the right to appoint a new prior to Bilsington in 1528, because Prior St Leger had moved on to head a slightly larger Augustinian house, Leeds Priory. It acted as chaplaincy to the neighbouring castle of Leeds, home to Sir Henry Guildford. This was a cosy set of arrangements.28
Cromwell the defender of monasteries is an unfamiliar figure. It must be pointed out that the Cardinal’s programme of dissolutions triggered bitter opposition around some of the houses that he did indeed close. At the other end of Sussex, and over the border into Kent, there was serious trouble in summer 1525. Tenants of the Thames-side Augustinian abbey of Lesnes were downright obstructive when Cromwell’s servant Stephen Vaughan turned up with a team to carry out surveys and hold courts.29 Thirty miles south of Lesnes, the townsfolk of Tonbridge preferred the continuance of the Augustinian priory there to offers of scholarships at Cardinal College, while another 11 miles south in Wealden Sussex there was a full-scale riotous attempt to reopen Premonstratensian Bayham Abbey; in the two latter instances, there is a suspicion that Archbishop Warham had discreetly encouraged th
e resistance.30 It is tempting to see Cromwell’s lasting friendships with the Guildfords and Darrells, both local families of upper gentry with strong Court and government connections, as based on their common experience of riding out the storms at Bayham. Yet given that the Guildfords were so closely allied to the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset, the chain of relationships may have worked the other way round, as Cromwell sought local backing in his work in difficult circumstances.
To these outbreaks of anger in Sussex and Kent, we might add evidence of trouble at Ipswich in early 1526. Cromwell and Thomas Rush obtained a legal order there that the Ipswich gentleman George Fastolf should keep the peace against Cromwell’s friend and fellow-employee of Wolsey, John Smith.31 Rather alarmingly for Cromwell, he and his friend and colleague John Allen were linked in 1527 in a worried report by the diplomat William Knight to Wolsey about gossip at Court, warning him not to use Allen as a messenger to Henry VIII: ‘I have heard the King and noblemen speak things incredible of the acts of Master Allen and Cromwell, a great part whereof it shall be expedient that your Grace do know, as at your coming ye shall.’ John Allen did indeed acquire a fearsome reputation in the monasteries he visited as inspector for Wolsey, as was recalled by a sarcastic remark a decade later about one of Vice-Gerent Cromwell’s own monastic visitors: monks ‘were never so much afraid of Dr Allen as they be of him, he uses such rough fashion with them’.32 Unpopularity was the drawback of doing one’s job efficiently. At least Wolsey appreciated the results, for this was the year that he promoted Cromwell to be styled one of his council.33
Despite understandable expressions of popular anger against Wolsey’s agent in dissolution, it is clear that at the same time Cromwell became a welcome visitor in a widely dispersed range of monasteries beyond those which might be threatened. He appears (rather remarkably for a layperson in a cardinal’s employ) to have taken on a general informal portfolio for monastic affairs. One is not surprised that he maintained a relationship with John Burton, former Prior of St Frideswide’s Oxford, whose premises became Cardinal College; this was at the centre of his concerns in the legacy project. In April and May 1524 William Barton, the Augustinian Abbot of Osney outside Oxford, was induced to resign by Wolsey’s officials, to make way for Prior Burton from St Frideswide’s, now out of a job thanks to the creation of Cardinal College.34 The newly promoted Abbot Burton of Osney remained a regular correspondent and dinner guest of Cromwell’s into the 1530s, and made him the Abbey’s High Steward.35
Other relationships with monasteries and friaries beyond Cromwell’s explicit portfolio are particularly worthy of note. Some must be the result of simple proximity, so predictably he took an interest in the affairs of his landlords the Austin Friars, and surviving in his papers is a wonderfully colourful if semi-literate memorandum from an elderly member of the community, detailing the troubles there that contributed to the abrupt retirement of the aged Prior Bellond in the mid-1520s.36 Richard Ingworth, a Dominican friar later to become Cromwell’s main agent in destroying all friaries in the kingdom, dated their friendship to 1526, by which time Ingworth was probably already Prior of the important Dominican friary at King’s Langley in Hertfordshire. That was close to Cardinal Wolsey’s favourite country retreat, The More, as Ingworth, now promoted as Bishop of Dover, reminded his patron in a letter of 1538.37
Other lasting monastic friendships of Cromwell’s reflect Wolsey’s nationwide interventions which sprang from his legatine powers or his wider dominance of politics in the late 1520s. As late as 1538, the long-suffering Abbot Stonewell of the great Benedictine house of Pershore in Worcestershire expected Cromwell not only to remember straight away that Wolsey had placed him at Pershore after removing an unsatisfactory predecessor in 1526, but also to know something of the priory over which he had previously presided (and clearly much preferred), Tynemouth: ‘I trust your lordship doth not forget now what I left when I came to this.’ Stonewell did not even think it necessary to remind him of the name of Tynemouth.38
Cromwell developed a special relationship with an equally venerable Benedictine house south of Pershore on the edge of the Cotswolds, Winchcombe Abbey. This probably resulted from Cardinal Wolsey’s tutelage after 1528 of the young heir of the extremely wealthy Sir William Compton, who had been one of Wolsey’s chief rivals at Court up to an abrupt retirement from royal service, and whose death provided a chance too good to miss of completing a political triumph.39 Wolsey made Cromwell a chief administrator of Compton’s property, an example of a small widening of his duties now that he was the Cardinal’s councillor. The connection with Winchcombe was that Compton’s will had shown his deep affection for the Abbey (arising from local family connections) and he made it custodian of a fund to deal with any testamentary legal disputes.40 Now Cromwell became Steward of Compton’s chief London property at Tottenham, installed by Wolsey. He also saw to the technicalities of dealing with the royal Escheator for Compton’s estates, and some of the drafts to do with this are in the hand of his clerk. Winchcombe would have been on his circuit of responsibilities.41
From this time onward, Cromwell became a recipient of warm letters from the retired Abbot of Winchcombe Richard Kidderminster, one of the most outstanding and respected churchmen of his age. As late as 1532 or 1533, the aged Kidderminster could write to Cromwell, now ‘Councillor to the King’, to affirm after many pious compliments, ‘that I do daily hear of the increase of your honour and authority is more to my comfort in Jesu than I may express in writing’. Others of a traditional cast of mind in religion might not then have been so enthusiastic at Cromwell’s rise into the King’s favour.42 Kidderminster’s successor as Abbot was also a friendly correspondent, more than once expecting to see Cromwell at Winchcombe, and saying with mild reproach in one letter that the Abbey had thought to have entertained him over the Christmas season.43 In forming friendships with such great figures of the Benedictine tradition, Cromwell was establishing links with English monasticism at its most scholarly and reform-minded: Winchcombe, Hailes and Evesham, near neighbours in the Cotswolds, enjoyed a lively and interconnected intellectual life, fully aware of humanist advances in learning, and also in close contact with the University of Oxford.44 The intimate relationship between Winchcombe Abbey and the King’s chief minister persisted until its belated dissolution on the eve of Christmas 1539, as we will discover.
Other relationships may have emerged out of Cromwell’s continuing private legal practice or from his moneylending business. There were a good number of prominent abbeys and priories among his debtors when he rounded up his accounts in early 1529.45 No later than that year, he was receiving an annual fee for legal services from one of the greatest and most politically significant monasteries in the North of England, St Mary’s in York: this retainer was not a great sum at 40s per annum, but Abbot Whalley, who may have been a relative of servants of his, asked him to ‘be good and friendly in all my causes as I shall stand need, which ye said ye would be at my last being in London, at what time I found you very loving and kind’. Before the Abbot died in 1530 he also made Cromwell a grant of the reversion of one of the abbey’s Yorkshire parsonages.46 Very many abbeys would be following suit with fees once Cromwell was prominent in the King’s service, but such an early example as York deserves noting. St Mary’s acted as depository for royal revenue in the North, so even more than in the case of Winchcombe there were good reasons for Cromwell’s intimate contact with it to persist after Wolsey’s fall.
One of the most charming examples of Cromwell’s relationships with monasteries comes from the Augustinian priory of Launde in Leicestershire, for which Cromwell did several favours during his Wolsey years, and which after his execution was to become the chief home and indeed burial place of Gregory Cromwell. Thomas Frisby, a canon of Launde, wrote to Cromwell probably in 1531, presenting him with six cheeses and cheerfully reminding him of one of his visits to the priory when they were out together walking home from a neighbouring village,
and Frisby fell over on his back in the snow.47 None of these letters from Winchcombe, York or Launde were written at a time when Cromwell was the all-powerful statesman to be flattered and placated, unlike his depressingly voluminous pile of sycophantic monastic correspondence from 1532 onwards.
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Altogether, Cromwell in his travels around monasteries gained an interest in and country-wide knowledge of monastic life which was very unusual among laypeople in his day, and which fatefully transmogrified with remarkable speed after he gained real power under King Henry in 1532. This distinctive set of relationships reflected his anomalous place among Wolsey’s servants dealing with Church affairs. Most were clergy, as one would expect from the Pope’s legate a latere in England, but Cromwell was not, because of his specialist role in preparing the Cardinal’s plans for immortality in both this world and the next. In the typical style of his improvisatory genius, Cromwell was to develop this anomaly when as a layperson he revived Wolsey’s legatine powers in the name of the King in the 1530s, eventually as Vice-Gerent.
There was also a very different and directly contradictory outcome of Wolsey’s legacy project, which takes us deeper into Cromwell’s religious outlook in the later 1520s. Drawing together a great deal of evidence will reveal his discreet but decisive and effective commitment to the forces of religious reform subverting traditional religion from various different directions.48 At the centre of it all was the extraordinary circumstance that in 1528 Wolsey’s new foundation of Cardinal College Oxford was revealed as a nest of England’s leading clerical converts to evangelical religion. They were mostly imports from Cambridge, and their exposure was a national sensation. Dr John London, Warden of New College Oxford, wrote in frustration to John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln and University Chancellor, about one of the leading vipers in the bosom, John Clerk: ‘Would God my Lord’s Grace had never been motioned to call him or any other Cambridge man unto his most towardly [promising] College.’49