Rovezzano was no doubt responding to what he had heard about the other components of the Cardinal’s plans for immortality, Wolsey’s Colleges and their ex-monastic endowments. Ever since the Cardinal’s condemnation in October, East Anglian predators from the Duke of Norfolk downwards had been circling the hapless Dean Capon of Cardinal College Ipswich, waiting for the collapse of his institution and the disintegration of its estates. Cromwell continued to do his best to cope with this and other fallout from Wolsey’s praemunire amid all his busyness in Parliament.80 On 29 December, a month before Rovezzano’s letter to Wolsey, Thomas Rush wrote to Cromwell from Ipswich, breaking bad news Speaker Audley had told him while they shared the journey back to their home country:
[Audley] and Master Bonham had commandment to enter into Wix [Priory suppressed] by reason it was holden of the duchy [of Lancaster], and the licence of the King not obtained under the duchy seal, so that all is void. And over this, he said to me that he thought the King’s Grace would take all the monasteries suppressed, by reason of the attainder of my Lord Cardinal, for the forfeiture of him had relation from the first time of his offence, and so that all is in the King’s Grace, and that His Grace lawfully might set all the farms [leases] belonging to the said monasteries at his pleasure.81
One can catch authentic echoes of Audley’s unmistakable lawyerly pedantry in this bombshell (which affected Rush’s own leases). It cannot have been cheering either to read Rush’s observation that ‘to write to you the manifold tales and lies and slanderous words hath been spoken of me and you in these parts, ye would marvel.’ That suggests the reason why Rush, Cromwell and Alvard had been rebuffed in the Orford election; they were too closely identified with the rise and now likely fall of Cardinal College Ipswich.82
Nevertheless Rush also made an interestingly positive comment beyond the normal simple polite finalities: ‘I beseech you heartily: write to me of your affairs and estate at this presents, which I doubt not but all is to your pleasure; notwithstanding, I am much desirous to hear the good success of the same from time to time, which I pray God may long continue.’ He may have heard via his stepson Alvard that their friend’s transactions at Court for Wolsey were doing him no harm, putting him in a new position and moving him closer to the King than existing friendships had so far achieved. One could never predict the King’s attitude in such tense situations: he valued authentic loyalty such as Cromwell was showing the Cardinal, and his attitude to his stricken minister was still remarkably volatile. Cromwell would soon graduate to serving two masters, and while he fought to preserve what he could of the legacy project which for half a decade had been his own great matter, he succeeded in making a far more graceful move into royal service than Stephen Gardiner had done. That in turn pitched him into far more momentous and dangerous business than any he had known in the Cardinal’s service.
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It may have been in these times of desperate uncertainty, with his wife and daughters dead and his future thrust back into his own hands, that Thomas Cromwell fathered an illegitimate daughter, Jane. Her chronological place in his story is a matter of back-projecting much later facts with the aid of a fairly generous dose of supposition, but the most likely conclusions place her birth at this juncture. One has to go as far forward as 1559 to find Cromwell’s granddaughter by Jane as aged nine years old, which implies that the marriage of her mother to William Hough, a Cheshire and Oxfordshire gentleman, took place around a decade earlier: so 1549–50. If Jane was then around twenty or in her late teens, which is at least plausible since her husband had been born about 1527, we end up with Jane’s birth at the beginning of the 1530s. The one glimpse of her in the Cromwell milieu is in 1539, by which time she was in the household of her half-brother Gregory, now himself a married man: Lord Cromwell paid Gregory’s wife Lady Ughtred the very considerable sum of £12 14s 6d for ‘apparel for mistress Jane’. It is to his credit that Jane had any place in the Cromwell circle at all; not all such children had such consideration.83
From the early 1530s, William Hough’s father Richard was a servant of Cromwell’s, particularly in his native Cheshire, but we must not ascribe to him the responsibility for William’s match with Jane. It still rankled with Richard when he made his will as late as 1574, in which he commented sourly that William had ‘married himself without his consent and goodwill to a stranger, not known who was her father’. Coming from Cromwell’s former servant, this was a pointed, deliberate untruth.84 The heralds were less tight-lipped about Jane Hough, making her ‘base daughter of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex’.85 One likely reason for Richard’s ill-will was that the younger Houghs, who acquired a home in Oxfordshire as well as Cheshire, were by then among the most pronounced and steadfast Catholic recusants in their countries. This was probably thanks to influence from a formidable pair of Catholic luminaries of Marian and Elizabethan England: their Oxfordshire landlord Sir Francis Englefield and William Hough’s former master the Oxford don Nicholas Sander, who in his scathing accounts of the English Reformation had rather a lot to say about Jane Hough’s putative father.86
One hopes that someone in this unexpected set of relationships found amusement in the paradoxical outcome of Cromwell’s decades-old indiscretion. It would have been difficult in Elizabethan England to avoid brooding on how much difference a servant of Cardinal Wolsey with a fierce determination to escape consequences from his master’s fall had made to the future of the realm.
5
Serving Two Masters: 1530
Some time in late January 1530, it became public knowledge that Thomas Cromwell’s tottering fortunes had decisively changed for the better. He wrote as much to his servant and friend Stephen Vaughan, who on 3 February sent suitably mercantile congratulations from his Low Countries business in Bergen op Zoom that ‘you now sail in a sure haven.’ Vaughan swiftly moved, as was his wont, to extended monitory moralizing. Still, he was not wrong in ending his peroration with the sage observation that ‘more threateneth them which enterprise difficult and urgent matters than those which only seeketh easy and light matters.’1 Only three days later, another merchant friend, Reynold Littleprow, had the same story independently in Norwich (though he was more prosaic by temperament): ‘I do hear you be the King’s servant, and in his high favour.’2
Stephen Vaughan had heard a piece of gossip which he discounted, but which places Cromwell in a much more elevated room of the rumour factory than any he had known before. ‘I hear of my Lord of Rochford’s departure out of England towards the Emperor as ambassador for the King’s Highness, and I heard also that you should go with him. If so it had been and as you desired, I would have been glad.’ In fact Rochford’s companions were John Stokesley, Edward Lee and Thomas Cranmer, by then all long-standing advocates of the royal annulment; yet the very fact that Cromwell was even seen as a possible candidate for this high-powered initiative in winning friends for the King’s plans overseas shows how far he had travelled in a very short time. Wolsey’s surviving correspondence with him is innocent of any discussion of the King’s Great Matter – no doubt the stricken Cardinal was thankful to leave that particular worry behind – but it had never been Cromwell’s business anyway.
Cromwell’s rise into royal favour was so swift and unexpected that subsequent commentators were confused as to how it happened, and who constituted his chief champions. We have met some of the possible candidates in his correspondence: that nexus of courtiers including Vice-Chamberlain Sir John Gage, Treasurer Sir William Fitzwilliam and Sir Anthony Browne. Yet John Foxe has other names. Even when one discounts Foxe’s misunderstandings or small slips about what he was told, his testimony should always be taken seriously, given his historical hotline to Cromwell and Cranmer through that survivor of their turbulent times, Ralph Morice. Foxe’s story maps on to the events already surveyed, beginning with Cromwell’s efforts among Wolsey’s household servants ‘to be retained into the King’s service’:
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There was at that time one Sir Christopher Hales . . . who notwithstanding was then a mighty papist, yet bare he such favour and good liking to Cromwell, that he commended him to the King, as a man most fit for his purpose, having then to do against the Pope.3
Christopher Hales, then Attorney-General, was indeed a very good friend of Thomas Cromwell, quite apart from the fact that they had both been MPs in 1523. He married the sister of Nicholas Caunton, who became one of Cromwell’s servants (although Hales’s opinion of Nicholas was low).4 His first surviving letter in Cromwell’s archive dates back to 1526, in which Hales thanks him for ‘all kindnesses shewed unto me’ and asks him to use his influence with the City authorities to get a friend chosen as Common Serjeant.5 Another note from the same period is full of New Year cheer, accompanying a piece of home-made brawn from Hales’s wife in return for ‘the pleasures which you gave her’, a reference to some recent seasonal supper-party or Christmas hamper.6
Such friendly courtesies and offers of hospitality continued on into the 1530s. Equally significantly, as late as December 1533, by which time few would have dared cross the royal Secretary, Hales sent a really rude and frank letter about another young relative of his now in Cromwell’s service, whom he regarded as a wastrel and whom he felt Cromwell was ridiculously indulging. Hales’s aggression was tempered by a postscript with warm commendations to that other intimate mutual friend, Roland Lee, ‘and to good Mr Bedell’. This was a relationship which could withstand such storms, and weather the two men’s religious differences.7 In fact, Hales was still associated with Cromwell in the popular mind in 1536, when the Lincolnshire insurgents included him in a wishlist of evil royal counsellors to be punished, otherwise dominated by evangelicals. Hales had then just then succeeded Cromwell as Master of the Rolls, a rare example of Cromwell relinquishing an office once he had been granted it.
Foxe continues his story equally circumstantially, describing the resentment some courtiers felt at Cromwell’s actions in dissolving monasteries for Wolsey, and revealing a second supporter at Court:
But here before is to be understood, that Cromwell had greatly been complained of, and defamed by certain of authority about the King, for his rude manner and homely dealing in defacing the monks’ houses, and in handling of their altars, etc. Wherefore the King hearing of the name of Cromwell, began to detest the mention of him: neither lacked there some standers-by, who with reviling words ceased not to increase and inflame the King’s hatred against him . . . Among other there present at the same hearing, was the Lord Russell Earl of Bedford, whose life Cromwell before had preserved at Bononie [Bologna], through politic conveyance, at what time, the said Earl coming secretly in the King’s affairs, was there espied, and therefore being in great danger to be taken, through the means and policy of Cromwell escaped. This Lord Russell therefore . . . in a vehement boldness stood forth, to take upon him the defence of Thomas Cromwell . . . declaring withal how by his singular device and policy, he had done for him at Bononie, being there in the King’s affairs, in extreme peril. And forasmuch as now his Majesty had to do with the Pope, his great enemy, there was (he thought) in all England, none so apt for the King’s purpose, which could say or do more in that matter than could Thomas Cromwell.
This account of Cromwell’s public reputation as scourge of the monasteries matches events in autumn 1529, and Sir John Russell (as he actually was in 1530, with a peerage still nine years off) is a very interesting patron to have gained. Their early lives have curious similarities: mutual obscurity for two decades after their births around 1485, including substantial foreign travel, which in the seventeenth century led that often quirkily well-informed historian Thomas Fuller to assert that Russell was ‘bred beyond the seas’. This gave Russell fluency in at least French and Italian, maybe other languages too. He was another exotic in the provinciality of early Tudor England – it is no coincidence that he and Cromwell both became great friends with a further rare English cosmopolitan, Sir Thomas Wyatt.8
Russell thus attributed a narrow escape in Bologna to his fellow-‘Italian’, Cromwell, which has always made commentators doubt the reliability of Foxe’s reminiscence, seeing that Cromwell was blamelessly busy at home in Wolsey’s service by late 1524–5 or 1527, the periods when Russell was engaged on royal diplomatic missions in Italy. Foxe is, however, precise: Russell came to Bologna ‘secretly in the King’s affairs’ – and those later expeditions were high-profile embassies with little chance of a royal ambassador passing incognito. Secret missions tend by their nature not to leave traces in the records, and hence we should be thinking further back, to a moment in the first two decades of the century, when the young Russell was serving as a gentleman usher or in the English overseas garrisons at Calais or Tournai, and when Cromwell was indeed still in Italy. Maybe it was then that Russell undertook a clandestine and risky visit to Bologna for Henry VIII or even for Henry’s father, during which young Cromwell had used his local knowledge to do some quick thinking.
It is also worth noting that John Russell was one of those at Court marked out for two causes that were unfashionable at the beginning of 1530. First, he was especially sympathetic to Wolsey. We have seen him as the royal emissary bringing Wolsey’s pardon to Esher at the beginning of November. Around the time that Russell interceded with the King for Cromwell, as he told the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys in February, he earned himself the fury of both Anne Boleyn and her uncle the Duke of Norfolk by defending the Cardinal to the King; Anne would not speak to him for nearly a month after that.9 In June 1530, with Wolsey now relegated to a new and circumscribed career as Archbishop of York, Russell wrote to Cromwell asking him to draft yet another diminution of Wolsey’s revenues in the form of a grant from his diocese of Winchester to a courtier, Lord Chamberlain Sandys. Sandys, ‘knowing the great familiarity and also you my special friend’, was approaching Cromwell via Russell to smooth the administrative path of a concession that Wolsey would find distressing. Russell, aware of how regularly Cromwell was in touch with his old master, asked him to forward a note to Wolsey ‘not for no great matter that is in it, but because I would His Grace should not think I had forgotten him’.10
Russell’s affection for Wolsey was allied to the fact that he detested Anne Boleyn. He remained a partisan of Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, and during Anne’s ‘reign’ that seriously slowed up his career. It was Russell who in 1536 after Anne’s death made the ill-natured contrast between the fair and godly impression Jane Seymour made when richly dressed and Anne’s appearance: ‘the richlier she was apparelled, the worse she looked’ – and at much the same time he commented even more dramatically, ‘the King hath come out of hell into heaven for the gentleness in this, and the cursedness and unhappiness in the other.’11 Russell’s antipathy to Anne was shared by Cromwell’s other friend at Court, Vice-Chamberlain Gage, who went so far as to resign his position there after her triumph, retiring to lodge with the Carthusians of Sheen (suitably austere, but near enough to the Court to overhear the gossip). Only when Anne was safely in the grave did Gage reappear from that disapproving eyrie and his home in remote Sussex, to continue his political career.12
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A pattern emerges from all this. Cromwell’s supporters at Court were those who owed Wolsey much and now felt sorry for the Cardinal and his man. Not much surprise there. But it is also clear that generally they coupled that with a low opinion of Anne, and were complying with the drive to annul the Aragon marriage only out of loyalty to the King. They were by and large religious conservatives, but they shared or publicly professed to share King Henry’s fury with the Pope over his betrayal in the Blackfriars trial, and they were prepared to support a campaign of harassment against the exercise of papal power in the kingdom.13 Cromwell would have felt the same anger, for Campeggio’s adjournment at Blackfriars had been a cynical abandonment by the Papacy of his own beloved master, now struggling for survival. Attack
ing papal power and ecclesiastical wealth was congenial to a man who had entered the evangelical camp in the 1520s, and was a safe card to play in his delicate introduction to royal favour.
And so he did, says Foxe, in the crucial meeting with the King which after Russell’s recommendation clinched his fortunes: ‘providing beforehand for the matter, [he] had in readiness the copy of the [English] bishops’ oath, which they use commonly to make to the Pope at their consecration, and so being called for, was brought to the King in his garden at Westminster.’14 That last specification of the garden at Westminster is a typical example of Foxe’s capacity for artless detail that triangulates with other sources, and narrows down the date of this interview to the second half of January 1530. The King was at Greenwich until at least 9 January, and thereafter moved to Westminster, actually to sample the considerable amenities of York Place so recently confiscated from the Cardinal.15
Some eight or nine years later, in a characteristically interminable treatise addressed to Charles V, Reginald Pole wrote his own version of what happened in the garden. Highly coloured and hostile, it represents the ‘maximalist’ view of what was transacted in that fateful meeting between the King and his future chief minister.16 Pole’s account has to be treated with some caution since at the time of these events he was in France. He prefaced his narrative by conscientiously noting that he had been absent from England (though he did not choose to remember that he had been away as part of Henry’s team seeking French approval for the annulment of the royal marriage).17 Although he could not affirm word for word what Cromwell had said, Pole emphasized with some elaboration how he had reconstructed it from various testimonies of those who were then at Court, and even subsequently from Cromwell himself.18
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