Thomas Cromwell
Page 20
This letter to Vaughan ventriloquizing the King survives in a secretary’s draft, much corrected and recorrected by Cromwell himself. In form, it is reminiscent of his letter of advice to Wolsey in the previous August, as an equally rare specimen from his out-tray. Just as with that much corrected draft, its freakish survival suggests it was retained in the King’s archive to show what Cromwell had been made to say: severe and schoolmasterly criticism of the errant Bible translator. In fact it sounds distinctly as if Cromwell had done the redrafting in the King’s presence: ‘his Highness nothing liked the said book, being filled with seditious, slanderous lies and fantastical opinions.’29 Certainly when Vaughan replied to the King on 20 May, he gingerly referred to the letter as ‘certain instructions sent to me from my master Master Cromwell at the commandment of your Majesty’.30
Despite his obsequious words to his sovereign, Vaughan was not happy. He tried to make the best of things by commending a new work of Luther’s and assuring the King that he would continue with the royal instructions to negotiate with John Frith. Nor did he leave the subject of Tyndale alone in his letters to his patron, constantly praising the translator’s writings. By the autumn it was Robert Barnes whom Vaughan had moved to championing, on the eve of Barnes’s mission to England. He repeatedly asked Cromwell to forward to the King a presentation copy of Barnes’s major theological statement, his Supplication, a plea to Henry to embrace reformation of the Church. Cromwell’s delay in doing so is eloquent.31
The whole year-long episode tells us much about both the King’s international strategy and Cromwell’s place in it. The Pope, Emperor and King of France had all failed Henry, so he turned to representatives of Europe’s burgeoning Reformations and their English allies in exile to see what he might get from them. In the end, these discussions were as futile as all efforts in Rome, and the moment the theology of English evangelicals displeased his Majesty, he dropped them. As German and Swiss evangelicals steadily lost their faith in Henry’s arguments for annulment, their hard-headed suggestion that he might solve his troubles by taking two wives like an Old Testament patriarch horrified that prudish monarch. Possibilities were exhausted by the end of 1531, the ignominious departure of Barnes from England in January 1532 forming the coda.32
Books feature a good deal in this saga. Cromwell loved books, and was regularly using contacts abroad to explore book outlets better stocked than those in provincial little England. Books were also one of his few obvious bonds with his King (apart from his sheer usefulness and competence), since he was still far from the social level where hunting alongside the King or displays of horsemanship in the tournament would be decorous or even conceivable. Henry, when not showing off his masculinity in sport and open-air pursuits, was similarly an addict of books, even though he often got other people to read them for him. The large accumulations of them in his various palaces were one of the most genuinely individual features among his displays of monarchical conspicuous expenditure. He spent laborious but clearly enjoyable hours annotating his collection, usually with some particular political or theological purpose in mind.33
Following Anne Boleyn’s initial success in introducing King Henry to Tyndale’s writings with The Obedience of a Christian Man three years earlier, it looks as if Cromwell and his evangelical sympathizers tried the same book-trick in 1531, but failed. Maybe he lacked the charismatic intervention of Anne, who had undoubtedly seeded the royal library with evangelical literature from mainland Europe, besides having her own discriminating private collection, particularly of French works.34 Given his reaction to Tyndale and Barnes, it is unsurprising that Henry resisted one further literary overture at this time. Pier-Francesco de’ Bardi, Cromwell’s neighbour at Austin Friars, tried without success to interest the King in the visionary eloquence of the great Florentine reformer and martyr of the 1490s, Girolamo Savonarola. Bardi presented Henry with books from his own library, at least one covered in his own enthusiastic marginalia; they were probably New Year’s gifts to the King in the same season that Barnes’s mission failed so spectacularly. Bardi’s agent in conveying the unappreciated present is likely to have been the King’s servant whom he knew so well in the precinct of the Austin Friars.35
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At this point Cromwell had no room for manoeuvre in the King’s international transactions. He was a newly arrived and marginal royal councillor, no more than an agent, and his job was to make sure his over-enthusiastic evangelical assistant Vaughan remembered that. It should have been a lesson for the future: foreign policy was always going to be the King’s prerogative. But Cromwell had no more intention of remaining passive there than in any other aspect of government. These events were an apprenticeship in deploying his considerable first-hand knowledge of mainland Europe to compensate for his lack of experience in formal diplomacy.
One straw in the wind for Cromwell’s later adventuring in foreign alliances came in a small act of bureaucracy on 18 July 1531. On that day Henry VIII, holidaying at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey after his final furtive departure from Queen Katherine, signed a little clutch of documents, probably with Thomas Cromwell in personal attendance; one was that warrant to ‘our trusty and well-beloved servant’ on Cardinal College business which we have already encountered (see above, this page), but another was a grant of ‘denization’ (a Tudor version of permanent resident status) to a certain ‘Christopher Montaborino’, native of the Prince-Bishopric of Cologne in the Holy Roman Empire. The grant hung around in Cromwell’s office throughout the summer, till Lord Chancellor More was prevailed on to finalize it at his home in Chelsea on 4 October.36 This Christopher Mont or Mundt had on his own testimony been in service for England since 1527, suggesting either that Cromwell had met him around Wolsey’s household or that Dr Augustine had drawn attention to him again while intelligence-gathering in 1531; it is even possible that an acquaintance with Mont stretched back to Cromwell’s commercial days in Antwerp.
Mont was destined to be of major significance in English diplomacy in central Europe. As Cromwell furthered talks with the Schmalkaldic League through the 1530s, he was a member of all the English embassies – no fewer than seven – pursuing the negotiations. This was a congenial task, since Mont was an early and enthusiastic convert to Protestantism – drawn to its non-Lutheran (‘Reformed’), variety, being particularly friendly with Heinrich Bullinger of Zürich and Martin Bucer of Strassburg. He was also that rare creature in sixteenth-century Europe, a thoroughgoing Anglophile who took the trouble to learn English so fluently that it occasionally distorted his German in letter-writing.37 With extraordinary fidelity to his adopted country, throughout his long life he carried on being useful to successive English Protestant regimes (Mary’s government would have nothing to do with him) right up to his death in 1572.
Maybe this enthusiasm came from warm memories of Thomas Cromwell, for whom Mont did so much; in 1533, writing with money and encouragement for royal errands in Germany, Cromwell called him ‘Fellow Christopher’.38 By then he was a familiar figure in Cromwell’s household when in England: Stephen Vaughan, who had just accompanied him on the first of those embassies to the League, was now commissioned to buy yet more books in Antwerp, and reminded Cromwell of a clutch of German chronicles Mont had been busy translating into English at Austin Friars earlier in the year.39 Appropriately, back in Germany that same month, Mont sent Cromwell a silver pen and inkhorn set.40 He remained the epitome of ‘Our Man in the Empire’: busy, cultured, competent and anonymous, utterly reliable.
That royal signature at Chertsey thus cast a shadow across the future, but the fact remained that during the year 1531 diplomacy achieved little in any direction. For the moment, Cromwell found himself playing a much more productive part in the other strand of the King’s policy: painfully slowly securing annulment of the marriage to Katherine by means which could be contained within the realm and could thus bypass the unhelpful bureaucracy in Rome. This was at the he
art of the project Cromwell spearheaded in the next three years, resulting in a realignment of the kingdom of England in Western Christendom which has never been permanently reversed. Parliament was his forum, and the key to his new success.
When the English government published the Censurae in spring 1531, that weighty work represented the international aspect of the royal propaganda team’s work begun in 1530. The other parallel enterprise was a compilation of historical texts found both abroad and in ancient manuscripts in English libraries, whose object was to prove the proposition that kings of England had always exercised supreme jurisdiction in their realms. If this was the case, any competition from other jurisdictions was an offence to God. England was an ‘empire’, which in the political jargon of the period meant a polity with no superior under God – in present circumstances, that would exclude the Bishop of Rome as an intermediary between Heaven and Westminster. Already in early autumn 1530, the King and his ministers were increasingly using this term ‘empire’, with its corollary that the King’s Great Matter could be decided within the realm of England.
The work was never published, nor was meant to be in this form. Its original full compilation remains in a manuscript now in the British Library, on which is scrawled the name by which it has become known, the Collectanea satis copiosa (‘Sufficiently abundant compilation’). It was the foundation for one of the most famous preambles to Parliamentary Reformation legislation written by Cromwell, the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533: ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire.’ Never mind that the prize exhibits of these ‘histories and chronicles’ were the twelfth-century Welsh lies of Geoffrey of Monmouth about King Arthur, augmented with various other mendacious specimens of medieval insular self-congratulation. The King, the main intended audience, perused and annotated the Collectanea with evident delight.41
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The programme expressed in the Collectanea produced a new wave of political action from early October 1530.42 That was when Henry consulted senior lawyers and clergy on the question whether Parliament might have enough power to grant him his annulment without any external reference: to his fury, a majority said that it did not. There was still a formidable group both at Court and in the wider political realm of England prepared to support Queen Katherine; they included the inconveniently thoughtful Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, presiding over Parliamentary sessions by virtue of his office. Because of such obstructions, there was for the moment no point in calling the session of Parliament planned for October 1530, and the King decided not only to postpone it but to revise and augment the strategy of intimidating leading churchmen which had been building up since the summer.
Beginning in July 1530, Attorney-General Hales was instructed to issue indictments against selected individuals in the Church on praemunire charges of abetting Wolsey’s jurisdiction (one should again remember the unfairness of this attack). The selection was a sample of senior members of the Church hierarchy, bishops including John Fisher, abbots and cathedral dignitaries; it stopped just short of including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who might be too useful to antagonize, and targeted instead a layman who was a senior official in church courts and may already have been working for Archbishop Warham, Anthony Hussey.43 In late October these legal proceedings were abandoned for something much bolder, as Cromwell reported on 21 October in his last surviving letter to Cardinal Wolsey: ‘The Parliament is prorogued until the 6 day of January [1531]. The prelates shall not appear in the Praemunire. There is another way devised in place thereof, as your Grace shall further know.’44 The ‘other way’ was in fact to indict the entire clergy of the English Church on a charge of praemunire. They could be pardoned if they paid a fine for their crime: no less than £100,000, which was about the same as the entire annual income of the Tudor monarchy.45
Such a breathtaking assault on the largest corporate body in the realm apart from the Crown itself could hardly be digested by cumbersome praemunire procedures in royal courts such as had afflicted the smaller group of indicted clerics. The forum to lay the charges and negotiate the massive financial deal that rode on it would have to be those twelve-month-postponed parallel sessions of Parliament: more precisely, the two assemblies of the English clergy that customarily met at the same time as Parliament, the Convocations of the Provinces of Canterbury and York. It is tempting to connect the King’s immense financial demand with Chapuys’s sarcasm that in December 1530 Thomas Cromwell ‘must have promised to make [Henry VIII] the richest King that England had ever seen’ (see above, this page), but to do so would pile our own speculation on the ambassador’s. The change in strategy was so bold and assertive of royal power that its main author can hardly have been other than the greatest ego in the realm, the King himself. Cromwell may well have been one persuasive voice guiding Henry’s choice from among available options to the one he found the most congenial, but his role now was what he did best: turning theory into practice at the King’s bidding, using his genius for improvisation and command of detail to achieve a practical result, out of arguments and research gathered by Henry’s tame Oxbridge academics.
Cromwell could do this in the setting in which he was by now very much at home, Parliament. He exploited what may in autumn 1530 simply have seemed the most obvious means of pursuing a praemunire indictment of the English Church, and turned it into a long-term strategy. After all the hesitations and uncertainties of 1529–30, the year 1531 saw audacious political moves and propaganda which culminated in the revolutionary programme of 1533–4; after much busy planning on Cromwell’s part, Parliament was used to make a final break with the Papacy after nigh on a millennium, and to recognize the King as Supreme Head of the English Church. The message throughout this, gradually crowding out the increasingly unhappy and compromised efforts of English diplomats in Rome, was that England needed no external power to achieve the King’s aim of obeying God’s unalterable law in his marriage. From the beginning Cromwell was actively involved.
The immediate drama in January 1531 occurred not in Parliament itself but in the parallel session of the Convocation of Canterbury, for it was naturally there that the clergy faced the new royal demand for money. They were now far more on the defensive than in autumn 1529, when they had fairly effectively fought off the anti-clerical noise coming from the parallel session of Parliament. Although Convocation ceremonially opened in its normal meeting-place, St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London, after a week of stormy debate, its sessions were moved down to the chapter house of Westminster Abbey. That was just round the cloister walk from the abbey refectory, which had long been the normal meeting-place for the Commons, and a few minutes’ stroll from the Lords’ chamber. Bishop John Fisher revisited his role in the Parliament of 1529 and tried to rally opposition – this time unsuccessfully. On 24 January, three days after moving to Westminster, the clergy agreed to the King’s financial demands in return for their pardon on the praemunire charge.46 They also rather pointedly specified that the grant was in gratitude to the King for defending the Universal Church from its enemies, particularly Lutherans.47
Matters did not stop there. While the members of Convocation tried to make something positive of the situation by asking Henry to affirm clerical privileges and define for future reference what the crime of praemunire actually meant, on 7 February they found themselves confronted with startling new demands relating to royal powers in the Church: that they should recognize the King as ‘protector and supreme head’ of the English Church and clergy. Three days later, on 10 February 1531, ‘Master Cromwell entered and had secret conference’ with Archbishop Warham. That led to an agitated confabulation in which Convocation agreed that Warham should lead a small delegation of bishops to see the King. They found themselves rebuffed and fobbed off with the presiding judges of the common law courts, who were no more helpful.48
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is the first independent evidence of Cromwell performing any public representative function for the King. It was probably the most prominence the new royal Councillor had known in some forty-five years of life so far. A small indication that the scribe of Convocation did not quite know what to make of this new arrival is in his over-promoting description of the interloper as ‘Dominus Cromewell’. That same afternoon, the next royal representative to impose himself on Convocation’s anxious discussions was an undoubted peer of the realm, Anne Boleyn’s brother Lord Rochford.49 The conjunction of Cromwell and Rochford shows that the Boleyns had now decided that Wolsey’s old man of affairs was worth enlisting, or at least that the King had decided this for them.
Convocation members were bewildered by these two unconventional emissaries, and tried once more unsuccessfully to bypass Rochford in dealing with the King. After the stalemate of 10 February, overnight Archbishop Warham arranged to see the King himself, and secured a significant modification to the royal demand: a clause added to the royal proposal on the supremacy explicitly stated that the clergy recognized him as ‘singular protector, one and supreme Lord and supreme head of the English Church and clergy, as far as the law of Christ allows’. This grudging compromise Convocation accepted with an equally grudging silence.50 It was an unsatisfactory tangle for both sides, and the King would have to unpick it at some later stage. At least he had his money.