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Cromwell’s smooth and untrumpeted move into a position of real power began at the end of summer. On 10 November 1531, the outgoing ambassador of the Venetian Republic, Lodovico Falier, arrived back home after a several weeks’ journey across Europe. He sat down to write a full description of that remote kingdom of England after nearly three years’ service, for the benefit of the Venetian Senate. It was a perceptive, sympathetic and generally well-informed account of some length. Towards the end, he listed the members of what he regarded as the King’s inner Council at the time he left England in September.9 He named eight – the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earl of Wiltshire, Treasurer Fitzwilliam, two veteran Household officers George Earl of Shrewsbury (Lord Steward) and Sir Henry Guildford (Comptroller), and finally Secretary Gardiner, but nestling amid these predictable names, without any mention of a particular office, was Thomas Cromwell.10 It is interesting that the first mention of Cromwell as within the charmed circle of power came from an Italian; Falier may well have thought that the name would ring certain bells in Venice.
The list was in reality shorter than it looks. The Earls of Shrewsbury were a perennial honorific presence on royal councils throughout the sixteenth century, but that was thanks mostly to their rolling acres in the north Midlands, and although the elderly fourth Earl was destined to play a crucial role in blunting the force of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, he was not a decisive presence at Court. Sir Henry Guildford was now compromised by his deep dislike of Anne Boleyn (like so many of Cromwell’s friends) and by ill-health which would kill him in less than a year. Cromwell’s new prominence among the remaining half-dozen must have been very recent. So far no one has identified any official document which calls Cromwell a royal councillor before September, in a memorandum from the King himself: a recital of Council business for Cromwell to prepare before Michaelmas Term began, including bills to be presented for a third session of the current Parliament planned for October. Henry ordered him to confer with royal lawyers on the Council over the entire gamut of domestic concerns, from royal exchanges of lands and debts through customs business and various Parliamentary bills.11
The inclusion of the bills is especially interesting. It is likely that after his vigorous performance in the previous sessions of Parliament, Cromwell owed his new position to the prospect of a Parliamentary recall, although the session was suddenly postponed to January 1532. Most bills mentioned were routine, but they included two measures of current political importance. One was the confiscation of goods of ‘certain spiritual persons holding promotion and resident without the King’s licence in the Court of Rome’. The main target here was Cardinal Campeggio, a belated subject of Henry’s revenge for the Blackfriars debacle two summers before; the King had just stripped him of his title of Cardinal-Protector of England and he might well next lose his diocese of Salisbury.12 The other was a measure with a dark significance for events over the next four years: ‘The bill of Augmentation of Treasons to be made and engrossed against Parliament, with a clause about protection’. In the end this did not emerge as a piece of legislation until 1534.
The background to Cromwell’s rise in 1531 was a significant change in the direction of royal policy and diplomacy in the King’s Great Matter. English policy still seemed confused, because the King’s strategy proceeded on two different tracks, one international and one internal to the realm. Cromwell’s roles in the twin campaigns are best pursued separately. Henry continued in his efforts to persuade the rest of the world that he was morally in the right. His ultimate failure was to Thomas Cromwell’s long-term advantage. While Henry was pursuing his aims mainly overseas, using a mixture of theological argument and diplomacy, the new Councillor could offer nothing obvious or exceptional: he had neither training in theology nor experience as an international diplomat. Indeed, as will become apparent, what interventions the King allowed him to make proved as fruitless as everybody else’s.
During the previous year, embassies abroad had cost a lot and produced nothing. Their futility had been underlined in autumn 1530 by the revelation of Cardinal Wolsey’s potentially treacherous contacts with the same foreign powers the King was trying to cultivate. Theologians and ambassadors had done their best – alternately bullying and wheedling the Roman Curia, then jostling for friendship from the Emperor and the King of France. They invested inordinate time in seeking out top names in the great universities of Europe for endorsements of Henry’s by no means contemptible theological case, encouraging their scholarship with cash sweeteners. This approach to overseas universities had been the policy suggested by Thomas Cranmer to Secretary Gardiner back in summer 1529, and although it proved vital in launching Cranmer’s long career in public life, in reality it was a dead end in solving the Great Matter. No one could know this at the beginning of 1531, but it became increasingly obvious over the year. In those next few months, Cromwell finally came into his own.
The last months of 1530 saw the royal campaign abroad widen to include the various evangelical reformers of mainland Europe. No doubt frustration with the Catholic great powers and anger at Wolsey’s clandestine diplomacy played their part in this; but, more hopefully for Henry’s quest, for the first time a potentially powerful alternative political grouping was emerging in Germany, as various ‘Protestant’ princes and free cities of the Empire agreed to form a security alliance against any aggression from their overlord Charles V, secured by their combined military strength. Discussions successfully culminated in agreement in February 1531 at the small town of Schmalkalden, in the forests of Thuringia; hence the resulting coalition was known as the Schmalkaldic League.
The League remained a highly significant player in international politics through the remainder of Thomas Cromwell’s career and beyond, up to a crushing military defeat at the hands of Charles V in 1547. Naturally it was a constant point of reference for those in English politics like Cromwell who wished to pull the kingdom into the orbit of the Reformation – but the League also came to fascinate King Henry, as his ecclesiastical adventures forced the King to rethink what Catholic Christianity might be, and to seek inspiration beyond his own bundle of increasingly contradictory theological opinions.13 In 1531, therefore, English strategy went into reverse. In Rome, rather than the papal bureaucracy drawing out proceedings in the annulment business, the King’s representatives were now told to hold up any further action while Henry looked elsewhere, and, as we have seen, during the summer the King openly humiliated Cardinal Campeggio; he had decided there was no point in pretending to be conciliatory.14
In August 1531, Henry sent a mission to Germany led by Stephen Gardiner’s servant William Paget to discuss current manoeuvres within the Empire to weaken Habsburg power. Princes as varied in religion as the Protestant Elector of Saxony and the Catholic Duke of Bavaria were trying to revoke the Imperial Diet’s election of Charles’s brother Ferdinand as ‘King of the Romans’, heir-presumptive to the Empire.15 Even though the English embassy and reciprocal missions from Germany involved both Catholic and Protestant rulers, there was something new, with major future implications: England’s international diplomacy sought to embrace Rome’s open enemies in the King’s search for support in his marital troubles. Discussions even included the unpromising Martin Luther and his colleagues in Wittenberg and, more hopefully, reached out to the powerful and non-Lutheran evangelical city-states of Strassburg, Basel and Zürich, far south of Saxony.
Evangelicals were all greatly excited by Henry’s overtures, and no fewer than five missions arrived in England in 1531 to explore possibilities.16 On behalf of the Lutherans came feelers from the Schmalkaldic League even before the Schmalkalden agreement had been finalized in February, while at the end of the year the renegade English Austin Friar Robert Barnes appeared, armed with letters from Luther himself and from the leading prince of the League, Philipp of Hessen. He also brought a spare wardrobe of secular clothes which soon replaced h
is increasingly incongruous friar’s habit.17 Between these visits, the genial scholar of Greek Simon Grynaeus – friend not merely of Strassburg’s chief pastor Martin Bucer, but also of the great Erasmus – arrived from Basel, sending his servants on further visits once he had left. Thomas Cranmer, returning from his mission to Italy in autumn 1530, was a particularly important go-between for the Court with this variety of envoys, the first officially received visitors from Europe’s Reformations. He much impressed Grynaeus with his closeness to the King, and established a lasting friendship.18
Cranmer had probably not met any senior representative of continental evangelical Reformers before Grynaeus, and the same is probably true of Thomas Cromwell. It may only have been now, amid their frequent contacts at Court, that Cromwell and Cranmer turned their previous business contacts into the beginnings of friendship and close co-operation that fully blossomed after their joint elevation to high office in 1533. Cranmer’s public career started almost as late as Cromwell’s, and he was only slightly younger, born in 1489. His early life had lacked the colour of the Putney boy’s adventures: this son of minor Nottinghamshire gentry spent a quarter-century in Cambridge University, the only unusual feature being an early marriage which ended with his wife’s death in childbirth. That tragedy made possible his ordination to the priesthood, and a blamelessly useful scholarly career followed at Jesus College Cambridge.
Cranmer’s life was transformed when in 1529 Stephen Gardiner, then a Cambridge colleague and friend, and much more used to the wider world, interested the Boleyns in him, as a man whose solid learning could promote the theology supporting the King’s Great Matter. Cranmer suggested to Gardiner that universities across Europe could be systematically canvassed for favourable opinions; any new idea was worth trying at a desperate stage of the saga. Abruptly Cranmer left Cambridge behind for greater promotions, and blossomed amid the splendour of the royal Court. He was sent off abroad on missions which helped him catch up with Cromwell’s old familiarity with the wider European world. The two men so newly prominent in the King’s service in 1531 were renewing an acquaintance made at least as early as 1528, when William Capon, Master of Cranmer’s Cambridge college, had been so briefly promoted to Cardinal College Ipswich.
I have argued elsewhere that it was in 1531 that Cranmer’s religious conservatism began shifting to the evangelical convictions of his later career; it was also the moment when Cromwell’s actions unmistakably moved back to the evangelical patterns we discerned in the 1520s.19 This was a decisive year in forcing people to make choices in an increasingly obvious religious division, whatever they thought about the King’s annulment plans – Stephen Gardiner, Thomas More and Reginald Pole would opt for the other side of the traditionalist/evangelical divide, though no one could ever accuse King Henry VIII of making the same sort of clear-cut decision.
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The continuing royal effort to win support across the Channel produced two important printed Latin statements of the King’s case – that they were in Latin shows they were intended for international consumption, though they would also have had uses in Oxford and Cambridge and among English churchmen. They were presented so as to appeal across Europe’s developing religious chasm. The judgements of universities gathered with such labour by Cranmer and his colleagues in 1530 were published in Latin in April 1531, but the Academiarum Censurae was a curious portmanteau work of two unequal halves. Despite the book’s title, the ‘judgements’ were in fact a rather brief overture to the revised version of an entirely different, much longer document: a formal compilation of Henry’s arguments in canon law for his annulment in 1529. This had already met its match in Cardinal Campeggio’s duplicity when the King’s lawyers presented it as the royal case at the Blackfriars trial, but it may subsequently have been hawked round the universities in the campaign for opinions, and now it was published for the international audience in a slightly more aggressive form.20
The Censurae is almost deliberately dull in order to establish the respectability of Henry’s case. Rather more digestible was a much shorter tract, also at this stage in the learned language of Latin, entitled Disputatio inter clericum et militem (‘A disputation between a cleric and a knight’). It had a long and peculiar back-story: a thirteenth-century French dialogue resurrected a century later by Lollards and turned into English. Now this new Latin version appeared, partly based on recent German editions, but also with new amplifications designed to point up its message and bolster it with scriptural texts. Its ancient message – clerical privilege must be curbed and royal power asserted – when suitably modernized, was as useful to Henry VIII as it had been to King Philippe le Bel of France in the 1290s, and its origins outside the realm of England might suggest to overseas readers that King Henry’s grievances were not merely a piece of local selfishness. Chapuys, writing to the Emperor on 24 June 1531, noted its appearance in print, commenting sourly that it managed to combine being weak and colourless with offensively violent language against the Pope.21 The Disputatio ran to two Latin editions. It was considered successful enough to merit an English translation a couple of years later, which again did well enough for a second edition.22
It is possible that we can link the publication of the Disputatio to Cromwell. On 26 January 1531 Stephen Vaughan wrote from Bergen op Zoom to Henry VIII. Apprehensive as to whether he was striking the right note to that unpredictable reader, he sent the letter first to his patron Cromwell with a covering letter asking him to vet it.23 Vaughan mentioned that their mutual friend William Lock, prominent evangelical among London merchants, ‘will bring you the Dialogues of Ockham which I gave him, in his male [that is, pack] within four days next’. This was the follow-up to a letter of mid-December 1530 in which Vaughan had apologized that ‘Your books I labour to come by, but they will not as yet be had, but I will sure have them and send them in all haste possible.’24
The dialogic work Vaughan sent in January may well have been the late medieval printed version of the Disputatio, which probably because of its anti-papal content was then generally but mistakenly thought to be by William of Ockham, fourteenth-century Franciscan scourge of aberrant popes. The Disputatio text published in England during 1531 reflected both the edition likely to be available from booksellers in the Low Countries and the 150-year-old Lollard English translation of the original text. Even if Vaughan’s book was one of certain other texts genuinely by Ockham and entitled ‘dialogues’, they too were employed in Henry VIII’s construction of a case to defy Rome, and ended up in the King’s library, covered in annotations added by his researchers.25
This letter of Vaughan’s to Cromwell and Henry VIII is part of a correspondence between Vaughan and his old master attesting that Cromwell had been brought into the campaign for the royal annulment in the crucial last two months of 1530, just as Wolsey’s career was ending. As Henry extended his charm offensive to the evangelical powers of northern Europe, the obvious intermediaries were English evangelicals who had fled from the country in the anti-Lutheran crackdown instituted by the English Church authorities from 1526, particularly if Henry could satisfy himself that their flight did not indicate irretrievable heresy. Most prominent among these exiles were William Tyndale and Robert Barnes, but there were also lesser figures like Miles Coverdale, George Joye and John Frith, all associates of Tyndale in clandestine English religious printing in the Low Countries.
All these men were already known to Cromwell, at the very least across a crowded room, and most of them in more familiar terms than that, as we have already observed. Tyndale may have put in a brief stint as a stipendiary priest at Boston parish church in 1521; Barnes had been an odd sort of prisoner next to Cromwell’s house at Austin Friars in 1527–8; Coverdale was Cromwell’s friend and correspondent.26 Joye had been extensively examined both by Wolsey and by Cromwell’s colleagues among his household officers; Frith was one of the evangelical recruits from Cambridge to Cardinal College Oxford,
and had been the bearer of at least one message to Cromwell in 1526.27 Out of those colleagues in exile, Tyndale was the King’s first choice for attempted seduction, since his writings had already attracted favourable royal comment, thanks to Anne Boleyn.
While Wolsey made his miserable way south in November 1530, Henry was preparing overtures to secure Tyndale’s return to England, believing he could be used as a propagandist in the Great Matter. On 1 December 1530, six days after arriving in Antwerp (ostensibly on legal business for the Merchant Venturers), Vaughan had written to Cromwell, apologizing that so far ‘I have not greatly learned any assured knowledge concerning such matters as pleased your Mastership somewhat before my leave taken of you to common me of [that is, share with me].’ He did not wish ‘hastily to enterprise my intended purpose, lest thereby my policy might or should be in any wise prevented’, but wanted to make sure that at the appropriate moment ‘upon mine advertisement to you thereof, I may be provided for their safe-conducts’.28
All this is obviously phrased with great caution, but Vaughan’s subsequent letter to the King on 26 January made it clear that Tyndale was the principal person being sought and promised safe passage, together with ‘another’, still nameless, who was in fact John Frith. Negotiations continued while Tyndale prepared the publication of his answer to the violent literary attack on him by Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, whom the King had chosen to replace Wolsey. Henry, by then at odds with More over the Aragon annulment, was interested to see what the Chancellor’s opponent might say, until he read it in April 1531 and found it deeply unacceptable in its evangelical theology and forthright tone; Tyndale never chose to modify his message simply to please King Henry. Cromwell was then put to work to halt the courtship of Tyndale, which he did in a tone of severity designed to rein in Vaughan’s evident enthusiasm for the task.
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