Thomas Cromwell
Page 16
Pole would have had many opportunities to meet Cromwell while back in England over the next year. His approach to reconstructing the course of events is remarkably like that of John Foxe, and is not to be dismissed with undue cynicism.19 In general terms, his account tallies with what we have learned so far, highlighting Cromwell’s twin agenda of attacking the Papacy’s power in the English Church and offering the King the benefit of lessons learned in dissolving monasteries. Pole’s Cromwell, whom he named at this stage in his diatribe only as ‘an ambassador of Satan’, counselled the doleful King to ignore his councillors’ indecision. Princes made and changed laws, so they were themselves above the law. All the universities had agreed with Henry’s interpretation of the biblical prohibition on marrying one’s deceased brother’s wife. ‘Indeed in this case, when the Prince had the law of God joined to his own resolve, what death would be cruel enough for the man who dared to oppose him?’ That, it must be admitted, does sound like retrospective sarcasm, born out of the arrest and execution of so many of Pole’s relatives and friends in 1538–9.
It would be worth making every effort, Cromwell continued, to get papal approval for the annulment, but if the Pope persisted in obstinacy he did not see why the Prince had any reason to fear that judgment. He might indeed seize this as the best of opportunities ‘to deliver himself and his realm from slavery to the Roman pontiff’, as the princes of Germany had realized that they could do:
Two heads in one realm seemed a monstrosity in appearance. It was a priestly myth that clergy were exempt from royal jurisdiction. Just let him resume his right in what they had cunningly stolen; he would at a stroke honour, increase and enrich his royal power, in a manner never seen under any of his predecessors.
Pole now elevated his narrative to echo the Gospel stories of the Temptation in the Wilderness, brushing aside the rhetorical inconvenience that this cast Henry in the role of Jesus Christ:
And when he had taken him, as it were, to a pinnacle of the Temple, or to a high mountain, from where all things subject to the Church might be viewed, he showed him all the numerous and wealthy monasteries of the Kingdom, the bishoprics and all the inheritance of the Church and concluded, ‘All these are yours; only cause yourself to be styled what indeed you are, head of the Church, and cause yourself to be given this title with the agreement of the Supreme Council of the Realm [Parliament] which will not be difficult to accomplish, if you have the right servants who propose it in the right manner.’20
The only element in which Pole’s narrative exceeds Foxe’s is this account of a very specific recommendation to use Parliament for a break with Rome and a declaration of royal supremacy. Pole was writing with bitter hindsight in 1539, and he was describing what had actually happened: Cromwell’s management of a break with Rome through innovative and energetic use of Parliament. Yet that in itself does not render his reconstruction of Cromwell’s words utterly implausible.
While it is perfectly possible that Thomas Cromwell made this suggestion now, it does not make him the man who brought King Henry VIII the royal supremacy on a plate. The idea was already in the King’s mind. In a well-attested story, Anne Boleyn had introduced the King to an evangelical tract of 1528 forcefully advocating a royal resumption of power from the Papacy: William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man.21 The King was flailing around for any suggestion to resolve his marital dilemma, and royal supremacy, while flattering his capacious ego, was still only one potential way forward – as indeed Pole’s rhetorical reconstruction of Cromwell’s speech acknowledged. Even the most fervent Boleyn supporters were still doing their best to win the Pope round, and were happy to draw on papal bounty: this same year, Thomas Cranmer profited from his time on embassy in Rome by becoming Penitentiary-General for England and securing the grant of a plum benefice in Worcestershire from one of England’s absentee Italian bishops. Cromwell’s advice, whether circumscribed or expansive, was one voice among several on strategy and the matter of royal supremacy.22
One of the two men walking in the garden at Westminster remained the servant of Wolsey most identified with a programme of monastic dissolutions, offering a concrete and successful example of how Church reform might be modelled with profit, if there was enough power in the right hands. That would be enough to please a frustrated and perplexed monarch, even if conversation turned additionally and expansively to annulment strategy, royal supremacy and possible ways of securing it. For Cromwell, royal service offered not only a way forward, but a chance to manage the still open future of his old master, and save something from what he now knew was the King’s intention to confiscate Wolsey’s Colleges and their estates. Logically enough, the King now gave him charge of them (or, more precisely, did not remove them from his charge), since Cromwell was the person who knew them best.23
We need also to remember the linked project sitting at the heart of the Cardinal’s plans for his legacy: his magnificent tomb, still being prepared by some of the Italian craftsmen with whom Cromwell had been liaising for six years, and by now nearly complete. Here was another logical use to which Wolsey’s servant could be put: his fluency in Italian was as convenient for the King as for the Cardinal. It was not long before the King’s eyes turned to Wolsey’s tomb as well as his estates, seizing for himself the bronze and marble components still accumulating in the Italians’ workshop in Westminster. Later in 1530, the Cardinal wrote in deep depression from Yorkshire to Cromwell in London, asking him to arrange to send up to York Minster ‘mine image, with such part of the tomb as it shall please the King that I shall have, to the intent that now at my being at my church, I may order and dispose the same for my burial, which is like, by reason of my heaviness, to be shortly’.24
It was not to be. In the end Henry seized everything, and cannibalized for his own projected monument all the parts with no specific reference to Wolsey, discarding and no doubt melting down the other pieces such as the Cardinal’s ‘image’, that is his bronze recumbent effigy (what an absorbing work of art that would have been). It was to Cromwell that a payment of twenty marks was made immediately after Wolsey’s death ‘for the King’s tomb’, and he went on liaising with Rovezzano, now back from Florence and doing the same job for the King.25 After both Cromwell and Rovezzano had departed the scene for different reasons, the supervision went to Giovanni Portinari, an Italian engineer who had acquired good English and had been given much employment by Cromwell. The project puttered on indecisively into the 1560s. Time’s whirligig has given Wolsey revenge, since none of the monument was eventually used for Henry VIII. Wolsey’s central black marble casket now houses Lord Nelson in the crypt of St Paul’s, bronze candlesticks from the monument survive at Ghent, and the recent startling recognition of Benedetto Rovezzano’s four beautiful bronze angels also from the tomb, long reused as gatepost finials for a Midlands country house before being saved for the nation, has reminded the world once more of one of the great lost artistic commissions of the Renaissance.26
Cardinal College Oxford was not lost in the end, though its magnificence was curtailed, and it has traded in later years under two successive different names: first King Henry’s College, and then, from the 1540s, Christ Church. We will be encountering it discreetly settling into its new identity over the next decade. Cardinal College Ipswich was gone for ever, but Cromwell did not forget it, helping the borough salve the wound of its loss by restoring the already ancient borough grammar school, which the town had been happy enough to see absorbed into the Cardinal’s munificent new foundation. In 1531 Cromwell’s Ipswich agent William Laurence reported on interim arrangements he had overseen with Thomas Rush and Thomas Alvard for paying the school staff, appropriately enough by raiding the offertory box of Wolsey’s pet shrine, Our Lady of Ipswich. Cromwell went on taking a very personal interest in the shrine; his servants kept the key to that box right up to the moment he had the shrine and its wonder-working image destroyed in 1538.27
Matters settled d
own for the rescued borough school. In 1540 the bailiffs of Ipswich could look back with gratitude on Cromwell’s care ‘whereby the common school has been continued and maintained’, now excellently housed in classic Reformation style in the dormitory of the town’s former Dominican friary.28 It may also have been at the fall of Ipswich College that no less a figure than Cromwell’s friend and Wolsey’s servant Sir Humphrey Wingfield, soon to be Speaker of the House of Commons in the Reformation Parliament, began a select little school for favoured bright young men, in his own palatial town house in Ipswich (as we noted, immediately beside the precinct of Cardinal College); it lasted probably for most of the 1530s. His pupils’ destination was now not Cardinal College Oxford, but St John’s College Cambridge.29
There were other reverberations from the College’s fall. Around 1534, Cromwell had to deal with an accusation that its former Dean William Capon had been guilty of major embezzlement of its funds, plate and jewels, said to have been concealed with a servant of his at Ipswich. Since Capon was both a friend and brother to the recently appointed Bishop of Bangor, who had been very helpful with the King’s Great Matter, it is likely that the matter was hushed up; Capon continued in his post as Master of Jesus College Cambridge.30 The sad carcase of St Peter’s Priory and parish church, its eastern parts already demolished, was another problem to solve. Its valuable parish plate was transferred to Cromwell’s staff in London in 1535 on the death of his Ipswich colleague Sir Thomas Rush, and the parishioners had to petition the now Lord Privy Seal in 1538 to get the parish up and running again and their goods restored. They struggled with admirable persistence for another half-century to create a viable parish church out of the surviving fragment with its dominant west tower, and their efforts can still be admired by the Ipswich waterside.31
Through nearly all of 1530, Cromwell was thus servant of both King and Cardinal: acting, though he had no official title, as royal Secretary for Wolsey-Related Affairs. It was a sensible redeployment, parallel to duties assigned to his friend Thomas Alvard in his new charge of the King’s Privy Coffers, a private royal treasury which came to be housed in the Cardinal’s former palace.32 While complex negotiations and decisions on Wolsey’s future proceeded that winter, with Cromwell as the line of communication between King and Cardinal, the new initiatives proceeding at that same time to get opinions from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge on the King’s Great Matter did not involve him at all. In fact right up to the end of 1530, it is difficult to find anything in his papers which concerns any official business but Wolsey.
A few apparent exceptions simply prove the rule. Through the year, Cromwell administered a good deal of royal building work, but the bulk of it concerned upgrading and expanding Wolsey’s gargantuan former York Place into the even more gargantuan new royal palace of Whitehall. All the building drew on large resources of fine stone no doubt intended for Cardinal College Ipswich; so this really fell into the same category of responsibilities.33 One pair of draft receipts for legal documents by royal messengers corrected by Cromwell, from August 1530, looks at first sight as if it might concern general royal business, so great is the number of leading men and lawyers named in them; but in fact this is precisely about the unravelling of Wolsey’s estates, listing those commissioned by the King to inquire into them county by county.34 George Cavendish, with his acute nose for the dynamics of Tudor Court politics, noted that Cromwell’s duties during 1530 were the real foundation of his future success: by his diplomatic attention to satisfying the greed of those battening on Wolsey’s estates, while constantly consulting with the Cardinal himself to keep the damage within bounds, ‘now began matters to work to bring Master Cromwell into estimation in such sort as was afterwards much to his increase of dignity.’35
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There was one serious possible obstruction to that ‘increase of dignity’: Anne Boleyn. We have excavated the views of those who did most to smooth Cromwell’s path into the King’s service. What was his own attitude to the character who had triggered the momentous events now preoccupying everyone at Court? In view of what was to happen in the next few years, and granted their shared enthusiasm for evangelical reform in religion, it has been natural to assume over the centuries that Cromwell and Anne were close allies. Such was the assumption of Anne’s masterly modern biographer Eric Ives, following many commentators at the time from Ambassador Chapuys outwards, who loathed what Anne and Cromwell jointly represented in destroying the old Church.36 In fact, however, Cromwell shows no sign of being Anne’s enthusiastic partisan, in marked contrast to Thomas Cranmer, who was always grateful that his road into royal service had been paved by the Boleyns. Cromwell’s surprisingly cool relationship with Cranmer’s evangelical friend Bishop Thomas Goodricke may have arisen out of Goodricke’s strong connection with the Boleyns.37
It is true that Cromwell behaved with decency to Anne’s father in his miserable years of eclipse after her execution, but he had nothing to fear from the Earl of Wiltshire by then, and was subject in addition to much prompting from the kindly Cranmer. The evidence Ives marshals to suggest a more than formal nexus between Anne and Cromwell is surprisingly thin, and much of it ambiguous at best: for instance, Cromwell did indeed become High Steward of her lands, but at twenty pounds a year his fee for this fairly routine and nominal honour was not over-generous, and in any case he had to pay substantial cash to obtain it.38 He seems to have kept his financial affairs carefully separate from the Queen’s, unlike Cranmer, who was still considerably in debt to her at her fall.39
Anne’s direct favours to Cromwell are certainly difficult to identify, and there are downright disfavours: for instance, her unreceptiveness to the overtures of his old servant Stephen Vaughan, who put forward his wife as her prospective silkwoman.40 Particularly galling would have been Anne’s failure to forward the marriage of Cromwell’s favourite nephew Richard Williams alias Cromwell to the widowed daughter-in-law of Sir William Courtenay of Powderham. Courtenay was a Devon magnate with whom Cromwell had an especially warm friendship and apparently some already existing marital relationship; he was one of very few among Cromwell’s correspondents who habitually signed off his letters as ‘your brother’. He was very receptive to Cromwell’s overtures for this match, but said that since the young lady was the Queen’s close relative Anne would have ultimate veto on it. The marriage did not happen. Richard transferred his marital plans more successfully to the stepdaughter of Sir Thomas Denys, another great man of Devon, who was close to Courtenay and also happened to be an old servant of Wolsey.41
Very few letters from Anne survive in Cromwell’s archive, mostly formal pieces of administration. The sole example soaked in the sort of evangelical jargon they both liked is Anne’s rather peremptory command to Cromwell to help an evangelical client of hers in Antwerp, Richard Harman. It manages to refer to ‘the late Cardinal’ in a rather pointed manner as being responsible for Harman’s troubles, and certainly does not bother with that customary politesse ‘whose soul God pardon’.42 Ives suggested that Anne ‘normally communicated by messenger’, but an argument from silence always has its risks. There is actually a remarkable contrast between this paucity of letters between Anne Boleyn and Cromwell and his considerable and increasingly warm and personal correspondence with another great lady, Princess Mary, to which we will return; there are friendly letters to Cromwell from her mother Queen Katherine as well.43
It is not surprising that any hostility between Anne and Cromwell did not receive publicity. Clashes were kept carefully out of sight until the final crisis of 1536, after which time it was in the interest of Protestant historians, particularly their doyen John Foxe, to smooth over this problematic relationship between the two heroes of the early Protestant Reformation. It is telling to see how few links Foxe makes between their two stories, which his Acts and Monuments narrates in growing and loving detail.44 One domestic issue does obliquely surface from Cromwell’s increasing interf
erence in monastic affairs in summer 1533: an abbatial election for the great Benedictine house of Malmesbury. This contested election saw confident moves to secure the election of the abbey’s ‘cosiner’ (domestic bursar), strongly backed by Anne’s Vice-Chamberlain Sir Edward Baynton, but Cromwell’s nominee won, after considerable trouble. Anne’s own name did not appear in any of the extensive correspondence – the sort of silence that obscures the real situation.45
More fundamental, and more widely attested in the dispatches of the imperial ambassador Chapuys and in other sources, were the opposed alignments of Anne and Cromwell in England’s balancing act between western Europe’s real great powers, France and the Habsburg dominions. Anne, given her intimate knowledge of the French Court from her early years, was consistent in her enthusiasm for alliance with France, subject to her customary outbursts of bad temper. Cromwell was equally influenced as royal minister by his long-standing happy contacts in Antwerp and the imperial Low Countries towards alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor. This tension on one of the foremost issues of English policy became acute in 1535–6.46
Many were drawn into supporting King Henry’s annulment campaign through natural loyalty to the monarch as well his undoubted personal charisma. They included notables of conservative temperament in religion, from Thomas Duke of Norfolk, George Earl of Shrewsbury and Reginald Pole through to Bishop Stephen Gardiner and indeed nearly all the English episcopate. Cromwell’s equally conservative associates at Court would not regard Katherine as their enemy – far from it – and would realize that both the Cardinal and his servant were doing the bidding of the King, not of Anne Boleyn. That is easy to ignore, since over the next few years Cromwell on his own initiative turned busily to destroying the religious world which Mary and Katherine came to symbolize. The Queen and Princess were nevertheless casualties of political rather than religious logic, and during the 1530s Mary was not the Catholic rallying-point she eventually became. The King’s wilfulness and disregard for decent conduct towards his first wife opened up a chasm amid the kingdom’s traditionalist-minded leaders, with Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More ranged against the much larger number prepared, however reluctantly, to overlook the lack of decency.