Part of the King’s preparations for Parliament had been to summon an informal assembly or Great Council of noblemen to Westminster on 1 October 1529, at which he instructed them to ‘devise divers acts . . . for reformation of certain exactions, done by the clergy to the lay people’: Wolsey was put through the ordeal of attending this event.56 The King’s aim in stirring up this activity, apart from his still equivocal response to efforts to punish Wolsey, was to put pressure on the English Church hierarchy to make a decision for his annulment on theological grounds, to match the support he had gathered among the secular peerage. The Commons eagerly responded to the anti-clerical cue from the Crown conveyed through the Speaker, Thomas Audley. Once the whole House had had its say in grievances against the Church hierarchy, Audley appointed a committee of lawyers to hammer out concrete proposals from the welter of angry noise the King’s move had released.57
Cromwell would have an obvious interest in sitting on this committee, but disappointingly no list of its members survives to place him definitely on it. The one committee from which definite evidence remains of his membership concerns a minor piece of technical legislation on trade protection promoted by the London Mercers’ Company, which was not even enacted.58 Given his mercantile connections, his membership of the Merchant Taylors’ Company and a clutch of his London-based friends also on that committee, his presence in that time-wasting group was more or less inevitable, but the circumstances of 1529 equally present the logic of his volunteering to deliberate on lay grievances against the Church. Happily, one document does reveal him active in drafting a petition ‘concerning an order to be taken and set in the spirituality’.59 The body of this petition is in a standard clerk’s script, but it is punctuated by emendments in Cromwell’s distinctive hand, the overall effect of which was to tone down the broad-brush bitterness and make it more dignified, while retaining the main thrust of curbing clerical excess. That sounds like All Hallows’ Day at Esher.
Straight away in the petition’s third line, Cromwell subtly refined its overall subject of complaint, adding the phrase ‘having cure of souls’ to the phrase ‘spiritual persons’. This may seem trivial, but there was an important practical distinction between clergy who actually had pastoral responsibilities (‘cure of souls’) for layfolk (such as parish priests or bishops) and other clerical dignitaries such as cathedral canons who might be supported in their careers by some particular piece of Church revenue. Singing the praises of God in a great church does not count as pastoral care, and there might be good and defensible reasons for such clergy holding such income, as well as some unimpressive ones. Wolsey’s clerical employees, and Cromwell’s friends among them, afforded examples of both; there was necessary pragmatism here. A similarly tiny correction at folio 40v confined a denunciation of greedily excessive fee-taking to ‘divers’ rather than ‘any’ spiritual persons presented to Church office by the King or other patrons.
A concern for decorum of language is suggested when Cromwell altered a description of layfolk being ‘extremely pilled and polled’ to ‘so very extremely handled’ (f. 41r), and boiled down ‘like a sort of ravenous wolves nothing else attending but their only private lucres’ to ‘coveting so much their private lucres’ (f. 39v). Nevertheless, he did not tamper with a condemnation of clergy who gave benefices to ‘certain young folks calling them their nephews being in their minority and within age’ (f. 41r): any alteration of this on his part might have given rise to unkind comment about Thomas Winter. There was an incoherence in such anti-clerical vitriol which Cromwell the defender of Wolsey would have noted. If it was aimed at the Cardinal, it equally applied to his ultra-conservative enemies in the Church hierarchy who rejoiced at his humiliation, the foiling of his plans for radical restructuring in the Church and his infuriating lenience towards heretics.60
What were they after, the wide spectrum of those who raged at Wolsey? At one end were men frankly hostile to the power of the Church because they were enthusiasts for evangelical reformation, though that was still a dangerous cause to champion in public in 1529. At the other extreme were conservative secular peers like the aristocratic conspirator Thomas Lord Darcy of Templehurst, who included in his angry indictment of the Cardinal (intended for discussion in the forthcoming Parliament) ‘whether the putting down of all the abbeys [that is, Wolsey’s dissolutions to finance his Colleges] be lawful and good or no’, along with ‘all the surmises of the Cardinal for obtaining of his authorities and totquots [licences for holding plural church benefices]’. Darcy clearly regarded these as equal misuses of Wolsey’s legatine powers which would justify praemunire charges against him.61 He lined up in his fury beside traditionalist-minded monks like the anonymous chronicler at Butley Priory in Suffolk, a near observer of Wolsey’s East Anglian monastic suppressions, who described them as being to the shame, scandal, destruction and ruin of all the monks and nuns of England.62
Anti-clerical rhetoric there certainly was in this Parliamentary session, but its main effect was to provoke a rejoinder in the House of Lords from Bishop John Fisher, grand old man of the episcopal bench, respected across Europe for his austere piety, humanist learning and closeness to the English royal family. He furiously denounced the Commons complaints against the clergy as likely to bring the Church ‘into servile thraldom’. Fisher’s further mention of Martin Luther and Jan Hus implied that elected members of the Lower House were heretics; this provoked a general row between the bishops in the Lords and secular peers in the Lords such as the Duke of Norfolk who aligned themselves with the Commons. The King himself had to intervene and force Fisher to make conciliatory noises. The chronicler Edward Hall reports that the Commons were still dissatisfied. The confrontation underlines the multiform and incoherent nature of anti-clericalism at this stage.63
The main statute on Church matters to survive debate, eventually agreed and passed through to royal assent, did not reflect the views of any anti-clerical hotheads in the Commons. It placed some carefully defined limits on clergy holding more than one benefice ‘with cure of souls’ – that same vital phrase which Cromwell had inserted in the Church committee’s petition – and restricted clergy engaging in economic activities beyond their vocations. It was accompanied by two Acts of lesser significance regulating certain fees charged by clergy. This was hardly the most intimidating of assaults on the Church. The number of exceptions inserted into the Act on non-residence testified to how bitterly and relatively successfully the clergy in the Upper House contested it, maybe joined by traditionalist laypeople as well. Yet this Act, which was destined to remain the central regulatory legislation on the subject, was the first cautious step in a radical curtailing of clerical power: one of the great political themes of the 1530s under Cromwell’s guidance.
Another important strand is worth exploring amid the general struggles over the Church which have to be reconstructed from the fragmentary evidence for this Parliamentary session. Modern historians have long doubted the authenticity of Bishop Fisher’s speech: it is preserved only in hagiographical sources, and seems to contain one big anachronism, Fisher’s emphasis on opposing proposed legislation to dissolve smaller monasteries. Surely that notion belonged to 1536, by which time Fisher had been dispatched to sainthood via the executioner’s block. Henry VIII’s biographer J. J. Scarisbrick first championed the basic accuracy of the text we have, and the only good reason for doubting the dissolution proposal is that no other source recorded it.64
If the Commons were enraged at Fisher’s accusation of heresy, one reason is that in 1529 there was nothing necessarily heretical about dissolving monasteries. For who was then the arch-dissolver of monasteries? No anti-clerical radical, but Cardinal Wolsey. The most recent of his suppressions had taken place only seven months before the opening of Parliament, when on 1 April 1529, in the presence of Thomas Cromwell and Ralph Sadler, Dr Roland Lee took the surrender of the diminutive Augustinian priory of St Laurence Mountjoy in north Norfolk, to complete th
e endowment of Cardinal College Ipswich. Realistically, if any house deserved suppression as superfluous, it was Mountjoy.65 Cromwell’s activity in Cardinal Wolsey’s dissolutions was the one thing most people knew about him that autumn (and hated him for it); that rebarbative pairing of Reginald Pole and John Foxe is in full agreement on this.66
A new proposal for dissolution would bridge the two matters currently on Cromwell’s mind, which might otherwise seem incompatible: an attack on clerical wealth, and the defence of Thomas Wolsey’s proceedings. The suggestion that more monasteries be dissolved was a red rag to Fisher, but would also have been of great interest and gratification to another keen observer of Parliamentary proceedings: King Henry VIII. The reason given to justify a dissolution programme, according to Fisher and his hagiographer, was to recompense the King for his great expenses in seeking an annulment of his supposed marriage. There is much resonance for the future here.
The confrontation provoked by Fisher’s outspokenness in any case had lasting consequences. It began to shift the ground from a general attack on Wolsey to an increasingly polarized struggle between defenders and enemies of the Church hierarchy’s centuries-old privileged status in the kingdom. The changing political configuration placed Sir Thomas More, who had only just replaced Wolsey as Lord Chancellor, in an increasingly awkward position at the moment of his greatest elevation in Tudor politics. More was in any case no natural enemy of Wolsey, and now found himself one of the chief defenders of traditional religion.67 But for the moment there was still the matter of the Cardinal. More was prepared to join forces with the coalition of peers who had hoped to destroy Wolsey in the previous summer, but he did so probably only because the King had ordered him to.
On 1 December, the new Lord Chancellor (who by his office presided over the Lords like the Speaker in the Commons) put his signature to a petition against his predecessor. This substantially reproduced the aristocratic accusations against Wolsey drawn up in July, but, as is often the way in fast-moving political situations, appears to have changed its purpose and significance. More was not the only former friend of Wolsey in the list of signatories: alongside him was Sir William Fitzwilliam, one of Wolsey’s most reliable allies at Court.68 In fact, virtually all those signing it had attended an unusually high-profile meeting of the royal Council in Star Chamber on 19 October, designed to publicize Wolsey’s fall. The fact that Edward Hall (a burgess for Wenlock) saw a copy of the petition bearing the Cardinal’s signature suggests that the King had taken over the document, and that he was now using it to keep control of Wolsey’s fate. Its public scrutiny in Parliament (Hall tells us that it was ‘read in the common house’, despite its considerable length) united leading politicians behind a document which Wolsey’s signature had turned into a confession of guilt, without specifying what penalty that guilt deserved. The King could then use it in determining the Cardinal’s fate as harshly or as leniently as he pleased.69
The Commons’ consideration of this petition was surely the occasion when Cromwell openly defended his master. Cavendish gave his admiring praise to the performances of the burgess for Taunton, despite the fact that (like Gage) Cavendish can only have deplored Cromwell’s later part in the English Reformation. He portrayed Cromwell as repeatedly making ‘incontinent’ ripostes to anything said against Wolsey, even speaking successfully against a bill to condemn him for treason. Cavendish probably meant a bill attempting to implement this set of articles, which were shot through with accusations of actions capable of being construed as treason, should the King wish to do so. There was irony here, considering that in 1523 Cromwell may have delivered a set-piece speech in the House against Wolsey’s French war policy.70
To defend the Cardinal in open Parliament was a high-risk thing to do, but it would have got Cromwell noticed, and might not necessarily be contrary to the unstable inclinations of Henry VIII. Cavendish said it made a good impression on people, and interestingly gets contemporary support from an Essex parson who was a good friend of Cromwell’s and became one of his chaplains. Thomas Shele wrote on 27 November, probably from the remote salt-marshes of Walton-le-Soken,
I was informed that you were in great trouble for my lord Cardinal’s causes and matters, which right sore did grieve me. Howbeit sithen I have had comfortable tidings that you be in favour highly with the King’s Grace, Lords, and the Commonalty, as well spiritual as temporal, which to me is a comfort and pleasure as anything can be in this world, and so I beseech Our Lord continue you, as I have no doubt in you but you know what you have to do better than I can advise you.71
Lord Herbert a century later said something similar, in what sounds like an echo of Cavendish, and specifically referring to the petition of 1 December: ‘upon this honest beginning, Cromwell obtained his first reputation.’72 A reputation not, one notes, as an evangelical hothead, but as judicious defender of the stricken Cardinal against all comers, at a time when it was not necessarily in his own best interests, and when he was the public face of Wolsey’s monastic dissolutions. Observers would and did decide whether this combination made him worthy of praise or hatred.
Wolsey in his own neat hand begins his letter of 17 December 1529 with a desperate plea: ‘Myn owne enterly belovyd Cromvel, I beseche yow as ye love me and wyl evyr do any thyng for me, repare hyther thys day as sonne as the Parlement ys brokyn up.’ His second postscript says that Cromwell’s warning about the Duke of Norfolk’s visit went missing, and that he only knows of it via ‘Mr Agusteyn’, the Italian physician Dr Agostino de Augustinis.
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Sir Thomas More finally closed Parliament on 17 December. Cromwell had no doubt been commuting between Westminster and Esher to keep the Cardinal informed; now Wolsey desperately sought him on the very day that Parliament broke up. In a note in his own hand he begged ‘mine own entirely beloved Cromwell’ to hasten down, as ‘for my comfort and relief I would have your sad [judicious] and discreet advice’ and ‘commit certain things requiring expedition [speed] to you on my behalf to be solicited there’ – ‘there’ being of course the Court. Cromwell had already been much engaged ‘there’, picking up what news he could. As the Cardinal noted in a postscript, Cromwell had tried to warn him about an impending visit of the Duke of Norfolk to Esher soon after the publication of the petition in Parliament.73
Since Wolsey now had a much reduced staff, Cromwell was tasked with managing gifts for courtiers who might help him. On 13 December, while Parliament was still in session, Thomas Winter (abruptly recalled in October from the pleasures of Parisian student life) was walked through a surrender of his only recently gained lead and coal leases in the Bishopric of Durham to one of the royal Knights for the Body, Sir Anthony Browne (who also happened to be son-in-law to Cromwell’s friend Sir John Gage).74 An even more strategic sweetener across the factional divide was a pair of grants of annuities from Wolsey’s lands as Bishop of Winchester and commendatory Abbot of St Albans Abbey to Anne Boleyn’s brother George, newly decked out as Viscount Rochford on their father’s promotion to an earldom. Cromwell’s corrections to the draft grants carefully upped the amount of honorific flummery.75
Ralph Sadler continued to act as Cromwell’s agent at Court when he was not there. He heard gloomily from Gage that ‘such as be my Lord’s hinderers and enemies have had time with the King before his friends, nevertheless he trusteth that their purpose shall take small effect.’ Sadler added his frank contempt for Stephen Gardiner, now royal Secretary, to whom he had also made overtures in person: ‘in mine opinion the said Mr Secretary will do little or nothing that shall be to the avail or profit of my Lord his Grace, or any of his friends, more than he may not choose for very shame, considering the advancements and promotion that he hath had at my Lord his hand. I assure you I have in him small trust or affiance.’76
Several of the Cardinal’s very personal letters to Cromwell survive from the next twelve months right through to his death, though so
me remain only in Thomas Master’s seventeenth-century summaries. They reveal how dependent he became on his servant’s loyalty and efficiency. Master made a judicious round-up of epithets from them: ‘My only comfort’; ‘My only help’; ‘Mine own good Thomas’; ‘My only refuge and aid’.77 They are shot through with the miserable anxieties of a sick man, desperately concerned for his preferment and possessions in the face of ever-shifting signals from Court. ‘For God be my judge,’ he wrote to Cromwell probably in December,
I never thought, and so I was assured at the making of my submission [of 22 October 1529], to depart from any of my promotions . . . I hope his Grace will consider the same accordingly. I have had fair words, but little comfortable deeds, &c. Those noblemen did otherwise promise on their honours to me, upon trust whereof I made the frank gift of mine whole estate . . . If it might be possible to retain Winchester, though the King had the most part of the profits, &c., or else there might be some good sum made for the retention of the same.78
It was just one more deathly blow when at the end of January 1530 Wolsey received that polite but businesslike letter from the chief sculptor of his tomb, centre of the whole legacy project (see above, this page). Benedetto Rovezzano was in effect serving notice of his intention to settle his accounts and go home to Florence.79
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