But who was doing this ‘motioning’? It can only have been Cromwell. His involvement with Cardinal College Oxford did not end with setting it up, because from 1528 he was its Receiver-General and Surveyor, and he clearly went on spending a lot of time there: in March 1528, his friend the great humanist Thomas Elyot issued a standing invitation to his Oxfordshire home at Long Combe, but added self-deprecatingly, ‘I cannot make you such cheer as you have in Oxford.’50 The Sub-Dean of the College, Thomas Canner, wrote to thank him for securing the pleasant Oxfordshire benefice of East Hendred from the Cardinal, ‘as I suppose by your special motion and procurement to my lord’s Grace’.51 At much the same time, a Suffolk gentleman wrote to Cromwell soliciting a place for a friend’s son at Cardinal College Oxford; he evidently considered that a natural route to follow.52 Most directly of all, the legal entanglements of William Cockes, a learned though troubled Dominican, have preserved a direct reference to Cromwell’s central role in admissions to Cardinal College, for, as Cockes reminded the Lord Privy Seal eight years later, back in 1528 his wrongful arrest for debt and apostasy from his order had blocked his application to ‘Your Goodness’ and to Wolsey’s other senior servant Thomas Arundell ‘for a room in my Lord Cardinal’s College’.53
At the very least, Cromwell was responsible for the costs of bringing the evangelical scholars over from Cambridge, but he could easily make informed choices in recruitment because he had so many personal contacts in Cambridge University, which as we will see, despite all these links with Cardinal College, he chose over Oxford to supervise his son Gregory’s education.54 The arrival of so many suspect men at Cardinal College was neither accident nor carelessness; there could have been quite different recruits from Cambridge. We know of at least one traditionalist-minded Cambridge don who refused to accept the siren call to Oxford: his name was Thomas Cranmer.55 Several strands of evidence reinforce this notion, and bear witness to Cromwell nurturing this evangelical group once they had arrived. First is the remarkable resonance of this Oxford scandal with an earlier phase of Cromwell’s career: Boston, which provided some of the actors in the Oxford affair.
Boston was an odd place in the early Reformation, with much going on below the surface of its extrovert public religious life. The impressively long list of evangelical books from Germany and Switzerland rounded up in Oxford might usefully and unobtrusively have entered England via its quayside.56 While, as we have seen, its Gild was a symbol of some of the most demonstrative late medieval devotion in all England, among the fleet of chaplains whom the Gild employed on a short-term basis to sing their round of masses in Michaelmas Term 1521 was one William Tyndale, surely the future biblical translator, while in 1525 the Gild accounts reveal a startling conjunction of later prominent evangelical names in the musical and clerical staff: Robert Testwood (with John Taverner just up the road at Tattershall College) and, among the clergy, Thomas Garrett, the master of Boston Grammar School, and Thomas Lawney.57 Of these four, Testwood became master of the choristers at Cardinal College Ipswich, while Garrett, Lawney and Taverner appeared in the new foundation of Cardinal College Oxford; Garrett was in fact the leading actor in the 1528 scandal, though unlike most of the miscreants he had already been an Oxford man.58
But there is more. One of the small religious houses which Thomas Cromwell dissolved for Wolsey in 1525 was Poughley Priory, at the foot of the Berkshire Downs, 27 miles south of Oxford. Vivid snapshots of its dissolution and subsequent fate come from two discursive letters from Edward Fetyplace, a senior official of the Duke of Suffolk and a local gentleman with whom Cromwell was much engaged while winding up the priory’s affairs. From Fetyplace’s first letter in 1525, we glimpse furniture being removed from the priory for Oxford, presumably to help out in the chaotic first stages of setting up scholars at Cardinal College, but the residential buildings at Poughley remained habitable.59 In Fetyplace’s second letter, written just short of two years after Poughley’s dissolution, he complained that the Cardinal scholars had thoughtlessly misused fittings while they stayed in the former priory in summer 1526.60 The Dean and canons claimed that this transfer to Poughley was an attempt to escape the plague in Oxford – it was indeed a bad year for plague nationwide. Cardinal Wolsey was sceptical, and instituted enquiries into what he clearly suspected was a mere summer jaunt, but the visitors seem to have turned their time away from the building site that was Cardinal College into the equivalent of a long-vacation reading party.61
It is then clear from Dr London’s letter of 1528 to Bishop Longland that there was a second summer stay in 1527, and now the Cardinal’s suspicions were in one sense fully justified. On this second occasion, thanks to London, we know that the reading was on specifically evangelical texts and was led by John Clerk, canon of Cardinal College and a former colleague of Thomas Cranmer at Jesus College Cambridge. Clerk was a ringleader in the Oxford evangelical circle, fated to be one of those who sickened and died in August 1528 while imprisoned in the College cellars for his religious misdemeanours – an early martyr for the English Reformation. We have a letter from Clerk himself, written to Cromwell in August probably of 1527. In it he mentions a previous letter of his carried to Cromwell by one of the evangelical Fellows of Cardinal College, no less a figure than that better-known early Reformation martyr John Frith, another recruit from Cambridge.62
And there is still more about the Poughley adventures. A man Cromwell employed to collect the rents at Poughley Priory appears both in Cromwell’s accounts for the priory and in the two letters from Edward Fetyplace, to whom he was consistently obstructive, nevertheless without earning dismissal from Cromwell.63 He was a minor gentleman from nearby Hungerford who boasted two surnames, as was not uncommon at the time, though on this occasion both of them are rather frustratingly capable of major variation, and have been effective in concealing him from subsequent scrutiny by historians. He was called John Hidden or Eden alias Clydesdale, Glydesdale or Ledesdale – and he was a Lollard.64 Although his surname ‘Hidden’ probably came from the Hungerford manor he held, it was appropriate for an activist in this discreet group of religious dissenters.
Lollardy was an irritant a century and a half old in early Tudor England’s otherwise placid religious landscape: a native movement, taking its inspiration in the late fourteenth century from bitter critiques of the official Church developed by the Oxford philosopher John Wyclif. Official persecution by both Church and monarchy had rooted Lollards out of the universities and normally out of gentry society, but they clung on in their clandestine religious life, generally keeping a tepid outward conformity to their community’s public worship. Not many made enough public fuss to attract examination by authority, though some suffered death at the stake as heretics, particularly if a bishop or Church official was unusually enthusiastic for ferreting them out. Lollards cherished increasingly tattered Bibles in English translation (banned by the Church) and read aged handwritten pamphlets condemning the Church’s power and wealth. They had their own unofficial teachers helping them keep in touch with one other across various regions of the country where they had some strength; the Thames valley was one. When in 1517 Martin Luther’s dispute with the official Church erupted far away in Saxony, the reverberations reached England in no more than a year or two; English Lollards knew that they were no longer alone in their dissidence, and they reached out to the first evangelicals, some of whom may have started life in Lollard circles.
John Hidden’s family were unusual among Lollards in having some claim to gentry status, and his sister Alice in particular emerges from documentation lovingly preserved by John Foxe as one of the most charismatic among them in the Oxfordshire/Berkshire area. After two marriages and on the eve of a third to a local gentleman called Thomas Doyley, she was exceptionally wealthy, worth well over a thousand pounds in money and moveables, plus lands and tenements.65 This rare example of a Lollard gentlewoman had a galvanizing effect on her three successive husbands and their families; in th
e last case, negatively. In 1527 the Court of Chancery had to be dragged in to shore up at least the legal side of the collapsing marriage of Alice and Thomas Doyley. The lawyer responsible for the paperwork in this enforced reconciliation between a Lollard wife and a traditionalist husband, in the same year that Poughley had been subverted by Oxford scholars on vacation, was none other than Cardinal Wolsey’s councillor Thomas Cromwell.66 Those around him saw his partisanship for Alice as odd. A friend and colleague in Wolsey’s service, a friend of Thomas Doyley as well, reproached Cromwell in an otherwise very cordial letter with being ‘much friendly to the woman in obtaining the same [settlement]’.67
Poughley was not the only setting for Cromwell’s contacts with Cambridge evangelicals and their various connections among the Lollards. During 1527–8, he was near neighbour at his home in Austin Friars to one of the chief actors in the early English Reformation, the Augustinian friar Robert Barnes. Barnes’s dissidence was a sign that the divisions that a decade earlier tore apart the Augustinian friars in Germany were now spreading to the English Province. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1526 for a reformist sermon preached in Cambridge at Christmas 1525, while Prior of the Austin Friars there. He bitterly denounced the Church’s wealth; clearly the English Austin Friars’ own reckless pursuit of profits through their indulgence sales (see above, this page) was causing the order deep heart-searching. After around six months in the Fleet Prison in London, Barnes was transferred to a curiously open house arrest at the London Austin Friars. He was active there in distributing copies of William Tyndale’s New Testament, and received a steady procession of visitors from as far away as north Essex, fruitfully reconciling the two uneasily related streams of new evangelical and old Lollard dissent. Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall was well into a crackdown on Lollards in the London diocese before he recognized the folly of allowing Barnes’s nominal confinement in the capital, and shipped him off to the Austin Friars at Northampton.68
It is inconceivable that Thomas Cromwell did not meet his extrovert evangelical neighbour at Austin Friars, and tempting to wonder if he had a hand in Barnes’s move from the Fleet Prison to the friary. In the 1530s, unsurprisingly, Barnes became an eager client of Cromwell’s. Yet if that early connection with Barnes remains clouded in discretion, there is nothing hidden about Cromwell’s exactly contemporary relationship with Barnes’s colleague and admirer at the Cambridge Austin Friars, Friar Miles Coverdale. Coverdale became one of the most important among those who created Tudor England’s vernacular Bible; his psalm translations are still those sung by Anglican choirs from the Book of Common Prayer. Between 1525 and 1527, certainly before his abandonment of the regular life and flight from the kingdom in 1528, Coverdale wrote two letters to Cromwell remarkable for their fervently evangelical tone and deep gratitude to Cromwell for his encouragement.
Coverdale reminisced fondly in his first letter about his ‘godly communication’ with Cromwell on ‘Easter even’ and asked for financial help ‘now I begin to taste of Holy Scriptures, and godly savour of holy and ancient doctors’.69 The tone is both evangelical and humanist, fascinated by the biblical text and the early theologians of the Church now readily available in good editions, many by the great editor Erasmus. Cromwell is cast in the role of a humanist patron, whom Coverdale, ‘your child and bedeman in Jesu Christ’, can address in Latin without embarrassment to his correspondent, teasingly seeking a father’s blessing like an unworthy son, as Jacob had done from the unsuspecting patriarch Isaac. A second letter is very similar in its warmth, its ready switching between Latin and English; it cheerfully conveys the latest scandal from Cambridge University.70
The Cromwell reflected in Coverdale’s letters is a man versed in humanist culture, interested in goings-on at Cambridge and also happy to be addressed in the devotional rhetoric of the first generation of English evangelicals. Significantly both Coverdale and Barnes were currently active in establishing and widening communications between East Anglian Lollards and the developing Reformation in mainland Europe, distributing books and introducing religious dissidents to each other from these two different worlds, native dissent and university-based evangelicalism. This is the same pattern revealed through Cromwell’s activities at Poughley Priory.71
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Cromwell’s careful plans for the education of his son Gregory are relevant here. He did not try to repeat his own triumphantly successful history of self-tutoring, but was concerned to do the best for his son. Over the years, as his own status rose, his priorities shifted from scholarly grounding to the moulding of a potential courtier (a move in any case encouraged by Gregory’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for scholarly pursuits). What is significant is strong evidence of evangelical connections in the academic foundations of Gregory’s programme of schooling. At the end of the 1520s, a year or two after Cromwell’s correspondence with Coverdale and maybe before the death of Mistress Elizabeth Cromwell, he entrusted overall supervision of Gregory’s education to Margaret Vernon, Prioress of the small Benedictine nunnery at Little Marlow on the Thames. They may have met during Cromwell’s Oxford duties, though Prioress Vernon was clearly not a devotee of strict monastic enclosure, and had much acquaintance among Cromwell’s friends in the City of London. She was a forceful and articulate lady, and her frequent holograph letters are written in a strong confident hand that her pupils would have done well to emulate. Even in later years she was not too intimidated by the Lord Privy Seal’s power to refrain from haggling with him if necessary; significantly, while it was normal to send small boys to be educated by nuns, Cromwell was prepared to accept her insistence that her responsibility should extend as late as his son’s twelfth birthday.72
Gregory’s first academic tutor under the Prioress’s regime was Cromwell’s friend the internationally renowned exponent of language teaching John Palsgrave, prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral, but evidently this did not prove satisfactory, and in 1529, when Gregory was nine or ten, Vernon and Cromwell consulted about a replacement.73 Her recommendation was William Englefield, a Fellow of Lincoln College Oxford, whom she had watched approvingly through his tutoring of another small boy at Little Marlow. To her annoyance, Cromwell overruled her and looked to the other university, despite her pointing out that his own friend ‘Mr Somer’ considered the Cambridge choice ‘a man that will not take the pains which would be for my pleasure’. We have already encountered this London merchant Thomas Somer, involved in a Bedfordshire building contract, and with impeccable and precocious evangelical credentials (see above, this page).
Consequently, although Prioress Vernon retained her overall supervision of Gregory, Cromwell sent his son to be tutored in Cambridge in company with Gregory’s older cousin Christopher Wellifed and a boy called Nicholas Sadler, who may have been a younger brother of Cromwell’s talented young servant Ralph Sadler. The first chosen instructor who elbowed aside the Oxford don was a Fellow of Pembroke Hall, John Cheking, a fussy and assertive individual whose keen eye on his own interests nevertheless did not make him think it tactless to write to the vigilant parent in elegant humanist Latin, just as Coverdale had.74 Pembroke Hall was already notable in the University for its group of Fellows who had an interest in evangelical reform, and Cheking was no exception: the reminiscences of the combative biblical translator George Joye place him squarely among the evangelical activists of Cambridge in the late 1520s. The inventory of his library at his death in March 1536 shows that it was bulging with avant-garde literature from across the spectrum of Reformations in mainland Europe: Bucer, Bugenhagen, Bullinger, François Lambert, Luther, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Zwingli.75
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The evidence for Cromwell’s involvement in England’s networks of early evangelicals and even Lollards in the 1520s is thus inescapable. It is true that in his years of power under Henry VIII, while he steadily promoted his own dynamically evangelical agenda, he went on being capable of publicly making appare
nt gestures towards traditional religion. In 1517, at the dawn of the Reformation, Cromwell’s service to the Gild of Boston promoted the very indulgence trade which in the same years sparked Martin Luther’s wrath. Then he made his greatest career move so far on the basis of a spectacular project of soul-provision for England’s papal legate.
Yet such apparently paradoxical employments were always on Cromwell’s own terms, and ended up clandestinely promoting his private religious agenda. In his audacious manipulation of the new foundations of Cardinal College Oxford and Ipswich, he prefigured an equally ambitious and risky enterprise in 1536–40, when in effect he used Archbishop Cranmer as a front-man to create permanent links with Zürich (see below, Chapter 15). That Reformed city-state, leader of Swiss evangelical expansion, symbolized everything his master Henry VIII loathed most in the Reformations across the Channel, and yet Cromwell persisted in this project. Indeed, to this we can add Vice-Gerent Cromwell’s steady official promotion in the 1530s of a vernacular Bible, the text of which was largely from William Tyndale, the man at whose murder the King had connived and whom he never forgave for heresy – ably supplemented by the work of Cromwell’s early client the renegade friar Miles Coverdale.76 In all these cases, Cromwell for a while got away with the sleight of hand.
How can we characterize this form of religion, already forged in Cromwell’s career in the 1520s? It is deceitful, certainly, hypocritical perhaps: very different from the stentorian public proclamation which marked out the magisterial Reformations of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin. At the time, Cromwell was often called a Lutheran, particularly by those who hated the Reformation. But the reality of his religion is anything but Lutheran. Ultimately, its nearest relative in mainland Europe is Italian. Frequently, beginning with diatribes from Cardinal Pole, Cromwell has been called a disciple of Machiavelli, not least by his most indefatigable and imperceptive of biographers, R. B. Merriman. Another Florentine might be just as relevant: the reformer Girolamo Savonarola, burned at the stake after his brief but dramatic dominance of Florence less than a decade before Cromwell knew the city. Savonarola’s memory was still very much alive when he was there.
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