Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  He started by dictating to his clerk three pages of reassuring news about the legal status of Wolsey’s archiepiscopal estates and the future of the Colleges, together with an update on various other legal business; all straightforward, if tiresome and partly unresolved. But then things became more difficult, and he started busily correcting the draft. There was unwelcome advice to convey. ‘Sir, I assure Your Grace that ye be much bound to our Lord God that in such wise hath suffered you to attain the good minds and hearts of the people in the whole country there, the report whereof in the Court and elsewhere in these parts is and hath been to your great good,’ ran the first version that the clerk took down. Cromwell looked at it, and felt that it was too sunny, because it was going to have to lead into a warning. Corrections (which I have italicized) made it more pointed:

  Sir, I assure Your Grace that ye be much bound to our Lord God that in such wise hath suffered you so to behave and order yourself in those parts to attain the good minds and hearts of the people there, the report whereof in the Court and elsewhere in these parts is and hath been to the acquiring and augmenting the good opinions of many persons towards Your Grace . . .

  Now there was something really difficult to convey, which in the first draft ran, ‘Notwithstanding your good, virtuous and charitable demeaning and using yourself there, I assure Your Grace you have enemies which do and will not let [hesitate] to interpret all your doings not in the best part, alleging that your only desires are continually building.’ It needed to be less blunt, so:

  Notwithstanding your good, virtuous and charitable demeaning and using yourself in those parts is not by your enemies interpreted after the best fashion, yet always follow and persevere ye attemperately in such things as (your worldly affections set apart) shall seem to stand best with the pleasure of God and the King. Sir, some there be that doth allege that Your Grace doth keep too great a house and family and that ye are continually building . . .

  and so ‘eftsoons’ (that is, once more – not the first time he had tried to get this message across) Cromwell launched into a further much corrected set of second and third thoughts, advising the Cardinal with increasing emphasis ‘to refrain yourself for a season from all manner buildings more than necessity requireth’. After some thanks for sending a gift of two horses south, the usual address, date and sign-off followed.72 Then Cromwell thought better of finishing up, crossed them out, dismissed his clerk and continued for another two and a half pages in his own hand: one of the longest surviving examples we possess. First came some even more straightforward moralizing worthy of Stephen Vaughan, once more seeking the best and kindest phrases to add to the text as he wrote:

  I do reckon Your Grace right happy that ye be now at liberty to serve God and to learn to experiment how ye shall banish and exile the vain desires of this unstable world, which undoubtedly doth nothing else but allure every person therein. And specially such as Our Lord hath most endued with his gifts, to desire the affections of their mind to be satisfied . . . Wherefore in my opinion, Your Grace being as ye are, I suppose ye would not be as ye were, to win a hundred times as much as ye were possessed of.

  Now the agonized drafting and redrafting was over, and the text of the extended letter flowed smoothly to its end. There followed a solid dose of international news – the first time in any surviving correspondence between them that such matters were discussed – and apologies for not coming up to Southwell to see the Cardinal in person; even the bearer could be ill spared in London, ‘but only that I perceived by your letters that ye much desired to be put in quietation’.

  No one reading the original of this letter can think of Cromwell simply as a heartless bureaucrat. The repeated tinkering with the sections he knew would wound Wolsey the most reveal a man trying to speak truth to fading power. Wolsey must be made to realize that the glory days were gone, and that there were worse fates than being Archbishop of York. If only he had listened; but it was probably already too late. By October, the evidence of his treasonous dealings was beginning to emerge at Court. Anne eventually succeeded in badgering her indecisive royal lover to take action.73 Wolsey was arrested on 1 November, a week before his long-postponed enthronement: in all his years as Archbishop, he never made it to his own cathedral city.

  Once more, the correspondence between Cromwell and Wolsey during October has no hint of all this intrigue. It is preoccupied with a different sort of tension: the Cardinal’s continuing suspicion that his servant had not pulled his weight in saving his Colleges and other possessions – completely wide of the mark – followed by emotional declarations of his trust when challenged.74 Cromwell’s last surviving letter to Wolsey, written only ten days before the arrest, seems entirely innocent of any coming crisis; it not only conveyed important snippets of political and international news, but also looked forward to a bounteous future by commending various individuals to Wolsey’s powers of patronage in the archdiocese: Cromwell’s importunate clerical kinsman Henry Carbot, Wolsey’s own servant Nicholas Gifford (‘though young and somewhat wild, he is disposed to truth, honesty and hardiness’) and ‘my scholars in Cambridge’, by whom Cromwell probably meant young Christopher Wellifed and Nicholas Sadler, then studying with his son at Pembroke Hall.75

  Within a month of the Cardinal’s arrest, he was dead, felled by some acute digestive illness on 29 November, while staying at Leicester Abbey on his melancholy way south. There he was buried, and it is unlikely that Cromwell was able to attend what would have been a quiet funeral. Wolsey’s death at Leicester may have saved him from becoming the first victim of political execution in an increasingly bloodsoaked decade. If Cavendish is to be believed (and he usually is), the Cardinal had won real popularity, or at least widespread pity, during his months in the North, and that would not have been to his advantage at Court. Wolsey’s fall left Cromwell desperately vulnerable, regardless of what he had actually known about the plotting. After all, he was a great friend of Dr Augustine, who was unquestionably entangled in the Cardinal’s promiscuous intrigues; Augustine was arrested along with his master, unceremoniously called ‘traitor’ by Sir Walter Walsh the King’s officer and ignominiously ridden to London with his feet tied under his horse’s belly.76

  Their joint asset in what happened next was the government’s extreme embarrassment that Wolsey had (to a degree now probably irrecoverable) been in communication with the French. Henry and his advisers did not want to create too much fuss in protest, which would alienate their most important potential ally against any action the Emperor might take to support his aunt Katherine. Official reaction during November was to undertake a good deal of spin-doctoring around the events before issuing an economical public version of the truth, casting blame for Wolsey’s misdemeanours on to the Pope and emphasizing that no blame attached to the French ambassador. One direct beneficiary of this policy was Dr Augustine himself. Far from ending up in a traitor’s dungeon, he was now relaunched as a roving agent abroad for Anne Boleyn’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Soon he was acting in a similar capacity for a newly promoted Thomas Cromwell.77

  Cromwell also escaped danger, maybe benefiting from the same official embarrassment. The story is told by Chapuys, as part of the well-informed and not unsympathetic mini-biography which the ambassador supplied five years later to Chancellor Granvelle in Brussels, a regular confidant:

  At the said Cardinal’s fall he was the only person who acquitted himself well towards him; and on the Cardinal’s death, since Master Wallop (at present ambassador at the Court of France), pursued and threatened him in the worst possible manner, [Cromwell] saw no other refuge or remedy than to resort to the King. He did so much by entreaties and gifts that he gained a royal audience, at which he must have promised to make him the richest King that England had ever seen – and spoke so well and eloquently that the King from that moment made him of his Council, without consulting anyone else, and did not reveal this to any of his folk for four months.78

&
nbsp; It is the precision of the account which impresses. Chapuys distinguishes this occasion after Wolsey’s death in late 1530 from whatever had happened at the Cardinal’s initial fall, a year before, and he makes no claim to know what was said at the meeting, beyond a sarcastic comment about it – that’s what Cromwell must have said, he quipped. ‘Four months’ sounds implausibly specific, until one realizes that what Chapuys is conveying (or what has been conveyed to him) is that Cromwell was not given the outward position of a councillor until after the imminent next session of Parliament. That ended in the fourth month after Cromwell’s interview with the King in early December 1530. A councillor would have stood out in a Commons session because of his distinctive clothing in red with gold trimmings, or the Tudor colours of green and white. Moreover, a councillor would sit in the front benches, unlike a ‘back-bencher’ such as a burgess for Taunton, which is what Cromwell remained while Parliament sat.79 This gives confidence in the rest of what Chapuys said.

  Sir John Wallop is an interesting enemy for Cromwell to have acquired. He was another unusual English cosmopolitan like Russell or Cromwell himself, and spent most of his life abroad on military or diplomatic missions.80 At this stage, he had long-standing ties with the Duke of Norfolk’s circle, and his wife was in Anne Boleyn’s service. Though he had his own strong doubts about the King’s annulment project, he was as hostile to Wolsey’s servant as one would expect someone with those connections to have been. Later, in the clarified polarization at the end of the 1530s, Wallop’s religious conservatism ranged him among the group which brought Cromwell down in 1540; it is unlikely he forgot this moment at the end of 1530 when he might just have nipped Cromwell’s career in the bud.

  The year ended as it began, in a productive interview with the King. Thomas Cromwell’s service to the Cardinal was done. His seven years in Wolsey’s employ had pulled him out of the ranks of London merchants and small-time lawyers to the point where this last summer the Cardinal came to call the Putney boy his ‘special friend’.81 Through 1530, the King watched Cromwell’s work with evident approval, as George Cavendish noted: ‘having a great occasion of access to the King for the disposition of divers lands, whereof he had the order and governance . . . he grew continually into the King’s favour.’82 As usual, Cavendish’s reliability can be triangulated from elsewhere. Cromwell’s Court patron Sir John Russell reassured him that June from Hampton Court: ‘After your departure from the King, His Grace had very good communication of you, which I shall advertise you at our next meeting.’83 The fruits of this approval were enough to counter Wallop’s malice.

  Cromwell’s preoccupation with saving Wolsey from himself and doing what he could to save Wolsey’s plans for immortality had begun to constrain his further rise in the realm. Two of those problems were given decisive solutions by the King’s fixed determination to obliterate Cardinal College Ipswich and his ruthless commandeering of Wolsey’s tomb. That left substantial unfinished business in the triple shape of Thomas Winter, Cardinal College Oxford and the cannibalization of Wolsey’s building projects. Yet those leftovers from the past now took their place in the in-tray of a new-minted councillor among a great deal else of much deeper importance and long-term significance. King Henry, on one of those personal and uncounselled impulses which were the wild card of politics in his reign, had abruptly thrown the tireless solver of Wolsey’s problems into the centre of royal policy. There was much to solve. In the last month or so of 1530, Cromwell moved to tackle these new challenges with an energy and speed that launched a decade of revolution.

  PART TWO

  New Wine

  Forsake not an old friend, for the new shall not be like him. A new friend is new wine: let him be old, and thou shalt drink him with pleasure.

  Ecclesiasticus 9.10, in the translation of Miles Coverdale, 1535

  Ye say, it is new learning. Now I tell you it is the old learning. Yea, ye say, it is old heresy new scoured. Nay, I tell you, it is old truth, long rusted with your canker, and now new made bright and scoured.

  Bishop Hugh Latimer, sermon 5 November 1536

  6

  Council and Parliament: 1531

  As Chapuys has told us, at the beginning of 1531 Cromwell became a royal councillor, beginning open-ended responsibilities which never ceased expanding until the moment of his arrest in 1540. Even when his new status began to emerge from secrecy, as he gained the right to don a councillor’s royal livery after the end of the Parliamentary session in March, the title of Councillor was a rather amorphous honour, which it could quite naturally remain, given that at the time the royal Council was about as amorphous a body as one could imagine.1 As late as July 1531, Henry VIII merely called Cromwell ‘our trusty and well-beloved servant’ in a document relating to the former Cardinal College Oxford, and definite references by other people to him as Councillor only multiply from December.2 Yet that spring of 1531 some people around the Court were in the know. One was his friend the merchant John Creke, desperate to find employment in royal service after bankruptcy: some time in April (around four months after the event, just as Chapuys suggested), Creke ingratiatingly addressed a letter to Cromwell as ‘of the King’s Council’.

  Creke’s plight is the historian’s good fortune, as it provides perspective on Cromwell’s place in politics at this vital moment in his rise to power. We first encountered John Creke back in 1522 on business in Bilbao (see above, this page, this page), and most of his mercantile career had been spent in trade with Spain. By winter 1531 his business affairs and demands from his creditors had plunged him into such financial disaster that nothing short of flight to sanctuary in Westminster seemed a way out, as he lamented to Cromwell (Creke was clearly well aware that he would then find Cromwell occupied in royal or Parliamentary business at Westminster).3 Grasping at his special expertise in all things Spanish as a marketable asset, Creke now turned to his Spanish friends in London to get himself a place in the service of Katherine of Aragon, and around Easter it looked as if he had succeeded.4 Then politics intervened, as he dolefully told Cromwell:

  By the labour of Sir John Russell unto my Lord Mountjoy [Katherine’s Chamberlain], and also the Queen’s almoner and the Queen’s receiver, [it] was appointed amongst them that I should have been admitted her gentleman usher now at this feast of Easter past [9 April 1531], as they made promise unto Sir John Russell, where upon the following of the matter, Her Grace hath made answer that she will take no servants till such time as she may be more in quietness than now she is.5

  It was only because of this gently regal rebuff that Creke turned to Cromwell (in this letter which first addressed him as ‘Master Cromwell one of the King’s Council’) ‘to accept and take me into anything in your service or office . . . also if at your Mastership’s hand conveniently you at this present cannot help me then, if it please you . . . to prefer me to Mr Treasurer’s service’. He wrote instead of coming to see him, ‘for the great business that your Mastership have’, but once more begged for a meeting at Westminster the following day.

  What a snapshot of Court politics this provides! We hear two familiar names in Cromwell’s circle: Sir John Russell and Sir William Fitzwilliam (Treasurer of the royal Household and Creke’s third possible saviour). Creke, who clearly knew a good cross-section of people at Court and understood at least the outward balance of forces there, still regarded Queen Katherine as a player in the game that spring: her household, so far intact, was surely his best route out of his troubles. The Queen was more cautious about her future than her household officers had been in appointing him Gentleman Usher, though she still put a brave face on matters. Only after that door had closed did Creke consider Cromwell amid his busyness at Westminster. Cromwell was now several steps further up the Court ladder than in 1530, but there was some way to go before Creke judged him a better career prospect than Queen Katherine.

  For the moment, the dominant figures among the King’s advisers were those wh
o had rejoiced in Wolsey’s fall: Anne Boleyn’s father the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle the Duke of Norfolk and Principal Secretary Gardiner. The previous year Gardiner had been equipped with a fine Middlesex house at Hanworth on long lease from the royal estate, and by the end of 1531 he was Wolsey’s successor as Bishop of Winchester.6 Yet, although there were marked limits on Cromwell’s position, the range of activities reflected in his surviving papers soon expanded out of all recognition. Much of what he did was in close concert with the regime’s current leading figure the Duke of Norfolk, for instance their joint adjudication of a coastal trade dispute in Wales and the West Country or, in July, Cromwell’s preparation of an important proclamation regulating the export of coin and bullion.7

  Cromwell’s old expertise in Italian was useful in extending his joint work with Norfolk into foreign affairs, particularly since his Italian friend Dr Augustine, deftly avoiding disaster after the Wolsey debacle, was gathering intelligence abroad and reported back to both of them – that was no secret, for on one occasion, in June 1531, Augustine referred the Duke to the contents of a letter which he had just written to Cromwell. Pier-Francesco de’ Bardi, an Italian friend and neighbour from Austin Friars (whom we have met before and will meet again), was part of the same circle of correspondence, passing on Augustine’s letters to Cromwell and on at least one occasion obligingly translating the Italian text of Augustine’s rather tiring small italic hand into Latin.8