Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  There can be little doubt that the agent who alerted Ossory to Cromwell’s potential importance was the recently appointed Archbishop of Dublin, John Allen, colleague in Wolsey’s service whom we have met more than once. By the time Allen arrived to take up his new post in autumn 1529, the Cardinal was in deep trouble, but Allen persevered against great odds in the brief Wolsey had given him for reform in the Irish Church and Lordship, thereby incurring hatred from the Fitzgeralds and their allies.69 Thomas Cromwell was Allen’s only route to regaining favour in London against the malice of those who hated Wolsey, while in Ireland Ossory was Allen’s main hope of keeping any sort of authority. Three interests therefore meshed together.

  An Irish hawk arrived at Austin Friars from Kilkenny Castle soon afterwards as a small mark of gratitude for what Cromwell had done so far (had Allen told the Earl how fond his correspondent was of hawking?). It would serve as a gentle prompt for Cromwell to speak to the Earl of Wiltshire, to reinforce Ossory’s urgent pleas not to break their natural alliance by favouring the Fitzgeralds. Ossory enclosed a copy of a memorandum on the state of Ireland as the Earl wanted the English Council to see it (‘Instructions to my good friend Master Thomas Cromwell’), since ‘ye wrote to me that the King’s pleasure was that I should from time to time advertise his Highness of the affairs of this land.’ This was too good an opportunity to miss. The Earl also sent Cromwell a copy of his frankly reproachful letter to Wiltshire; evidently he felt that the new Councillor was sufficiently influential and trustworthy for his purpose. From an English point of view, this was a familiar political alignment: Wolsey’s former friends against the partisans of Anne Boleyn. From an Irish perspective, it would have seemed rather different: Butler versus Fitzgerald.

  These links provided Cromwell with some of the connections he would need, in default of any personal acquaintance with that remote and baffling territory, whose wretchedly difficult communications meant that Westminster politicians made their decisions about it with all the finesse of knitting in boxing-gloves. Cromwell did his best to widen his contacts, aided by the fact that in 1520 Cardinal Wolsey had set up a new ‘Privy Council’ for English government in Dublin; this could act independently of whoever happened to be Lord Deputy at the time, and included experienced and competent administrators drawn from the Anglo-Irish elite. Wolsey’s fall had not affected its work.70 Not long before autumn 1531, for instance, Cromwell did an administrative favour for Thomas Cusack, a lawyer from County Meath with long-standing membership of the Inner Temple in London. Cusack became Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer a couple of years later, by which time he was emerging as one of the leaders among the native ‘Old English’ or Anglo-Irish, seeking a reformed Irish administration under the English Crown.71

  Cromwell quickly learned that it was wise not to become too aligned with any one of the competing factions across the Irish Sea. Ossory’s memorandum took its place among a number of such papers in his files. Much more followed, none of it predictable, as Cromwell began to view the King’s dominions from end to end, Calais to Carlisle, Colchester to Cork. It was a year or two before Ireland came to rip through his careful memoranda of business into an urgent priority, but after that he would never be free of it.

  7

  New Year’s Gifts: 1532

  Cromwell’s new position at the centre of government was not assuming a public face with any speed. It was only at New Year (1 January) 1532, as far as the evidence goes, that he was listed among those favoured enough to buy New Year’s gifts for the King, a ring with a ruby and ‘a box with the images of the French King’s children’ (five of them at the time: a handy number to decorate a box).1 Maybe the presents, duly recorded amid a welter of other delights great and small, acted as a respectful prompt to his sovereign, because a week later Cromwell was reappointed to supervision of Wolsey’s two former College estates.2 This was his first formal office under the Crown, but it was simply the responsibility he had been carrying out anyway over the previous couple of years, by the King’s fiat alone. Apart from the general title of Councillor he had been granted in such a curiously covert manner in December 1530, he still had nothing else.

  It took three gruelling months in Parliament to make a difference. The previous sessions of Parliament and Convocation had been settings for his first appearances on the public political stage, and it was the imminent prospect of a Parliamentary session in October 1531 which provoked the first known official document to acknowledge him as Councillor; his further advancement was a reward for his achievements in the House of Commons in winter and spring 1532. There had been a very last-minute decision in autumn 1531 to postpone Parliament: the Convocation of Canterbury did in fact convene on 16 October, and quickly slipped in some business against an evangelical heretic before being told to observe a prorogation to early November.3 That November meeting was in turn put off to January 1532, waiting on various royal diplomatic moves abroad. Partly the King wanted to see what might come of the ongoing negotiations with various evangelical emissaries from abroad (in the end, nothing). Equally, ever hopeful, he had suddenly made a decision in September to launch a last-ditch embassy to the Low Countries, to persuade Charles V to see what Henry viewed as sense on his Great Matter. It was of course a failure, and the attempt must have been a terrible strain on the chosen English ambassador Sir Thomas Elyot, a friend of Cromwell who was rapidly developing a deep loathing for the annulment proceedings, and who turned to literary satire of some of those involved to cheer himself up.4

  As news began to spread in December 1531 that Parliament really was reconvening, there was one striking difference from the previous session: those summoned were told they would have to refer to Thomas Cromwell if they wanted leave of absence. He was now openly a councillor, not merely a back-bench burgess for Taunton. His friend Christopher Hales consulted him from home in Canterbury on New Year’s Eve, to learn whether Parliament would indeed go ahead in mid-January or once more be deferred. One would have thought that Hales as Attorney-General would have known the answer to that himself, but it is an indication of how indecisive the King was being about this renewed session of a Parliament which was now bordering on the unusual in duration, two years since its first summons.5

  Cromwell had thus become Parliamentary manager. This was not a function with an office attached to it, but for the first time he was given an identifiable role with a public profile. Both Lords spiritual and temporal and members of the House of Commons have left evidence that they regarded him as formal agent for channelling requests for absence to the King and registering them with the Clerk of Parliament; in some cases peers gave him blank proxies so the government could make its own choices for substitutes.6 As so often in his public career, once Cromwell had taken over a piece of administration, he did not let it go, using it to promote both royal control and his own intentions. So in March 1534 Sir Piers Edgecombe, a friend of his as well as a knight of the shire for Cornwall, applied to him (not to Speaker Wingfield, as formally he should have done) for leave to stay away from the Commons, since one of his household in London had measles.7

  There were convenient absences from Parliament and Convocation in this session apart from those succeeding in their excuses to Cromwell. The King’s cousin Reginald Pole was granted permission to leave the country that January: a relief for both him and King Henry, but also a way of ensuring he did not exercise his right as Dean of Exeter Cathedral to speak in Convocation.8 He left England with searing memories of Cromwell’s part in turning his world upside down, and would not return until the kingdom had righted itself, with his cousin Mary Tudor safely on a Catholic English throne, twenty-three years later. Among absent bishops, Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham judged that the winter journey south had too many perils for a man who strongly disapproved of the King’s current policy aims, and he stayed up at Bishop Auckland Castle; after his forceful protest against the royal supremacy in the Convocation of York in May 1531, that may have been with of
ficial encouragement.9 Bishop Fisher of Rochester, who had no such inhibitions of either geography or prudence, was quickly felled by illness, a great advantage for the King.

  And so on 15 January 1532 Parliament opened once more. By the time it was prorogued four months later, Cromwell had been prominent in drafting and seeing through to royal assent a good many pieces of worthy and useful legislation from both government and local interests, ranging from a long-lasting new framework for ‘commissions of sewers’ to administer flood defences and waterways through to a prohibition on selling horses to Scotsmen.10 Yet any management he attempted of the most politically important and contentious proceedings was largely ineffective. In an inept fashion which reeks of King Henry’s high-handedness, the first month was consumed by two bills both calculated to infuriate MPs and peers alike with threats to their purses. The first was a royal demand for a subsidy, on the premise that the King needed to defend his northern frontier against the Scots. The other was a revival of so far abortive legislation on primer seisin (the Crown’s rights over feudal inheritance) which was designed to combat widespread evasion of royal feudal rights through setting up family trusts, ‘feoffees to uses’. Both efforts had to be laid aside. Nor were efforts to rally support for a decision on the annulment within the realm any more successful; drafts of proposals with Cromwell’s and Thomas Audley’s corrections remain from this latest failure.11

  One initiative the government did successfully pursue to the finish was a block (a ‘Conditional Restraint’) on payments to the Pope of ‘annates’, the first year of income sent to Rome by newly appointed bishops and archbishops. Yet, once more, neither House of Parliament was easily led. Opposition in the Lords was reinforced by a formal protest by Archbishop Warham, who until then had been grimly toeing an uncongenial line in relation to the King’s policies, although he discreetly made this gesture in an instrument signed in his own palace across the Thames, rather than in the Lords’ chamber.12* Cromwell wrote tensely to Secretary Gardiner, at that stage prevented by his embassy to France from exercising his episcopal vote in the Lords, ‘this day was read in the Higher House a bill touching the annates of bishoprics, for what end or effect it will succeed, surely I know not.’ His letter obliquely reveals that these two members of the King’s central team of advisers were not exactly operating hand in glove: ‘news from hence I assure you that here be none but such as undoubtedly by a multitude of your friends . . . be to your Lordship already related.’13

  In fact this legislation against annates did pass, with the help of what was then a very recent innovation in Parliamentary procedure. It has become known as a ‘division’, and is the method by which Lords and Commons vote at Westminster right up to the present day: separating out ayes and noes into their respective groups. Until the 1520s, decisions in Parliament were customarily taken by the same ancient procedure which elected knights and burgesses to the Commons: acclamation, or, to put it another way, shouting very loudly. The louder shout won. This procedure worked best when (as in well-regulated committees throughout history) there was already general agreement and the heat had been taken out of the issue in question. In circumstances of bitter disagreement, it became clumsy and contestable. The first recorded instance of a division was in contention over a royal tax demand in the 1523 Parliament, described in such detail by the chronicler Edward Hall that it was clearly a new way of doing things.* It is possible that the King’s advisers had used the division as a way of flushing out and making visible the core of the opposition (in that case, the overwhelming majority of burgesses present in the Commons), and it would have the same usefulness again in 1532 for a new government purpose.14

  Hall had not been an MP in 1523, but his fellow-member of Gray’s Inn Thomas Cromwell had been – possibly one of those obstreperous burgesses. Although Chapuys gave King Henry the credit for thinking up this procedural device in 1532, the ambassador was not aware it had happened before; it looks like an instance of Cromwell seizing on a recent precedent to win back some advantage for a struggling royal administration.15 It worked, just as Henry had eventually haggled his way to a grant of tax in 1523: the measure passed before the end of March. From then on, divisions became increasingly familiar in Parliamentary procedure. That is not surprising, for this division secured something remarkable: it was the first occasion on which Parliament had been asked to declare that it could interfere with a right belonging to the Pope. Despite strenuous opposition – clearly plenty of people could see the implications – the division did its job.

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  In parallel with this move, Cromwell was preparing another Parliamentary statement to push the Church hierarchy even further into a corner and, once more, this was launched in the arena where he had maximum control: the House of Commons. The measure was a Supplication of the House to the King ‘against the Ordinaries’, part of the revived assault on the Western Latin Church within the realm – one cannot of course as yet call it the Church of England. The importance of the Supplication in the religious changes of the next decade cannot be over-estimated. The ‘Ordinaries’ under attack were the bishops and their senior officials, controlling the entire system of Church courts, whose procedures were those of the Western Church’s international system of canon law. Their activities ran in parallel with the business transacted in an intricate variety of temporal law courts which made up the King’s judicial jurisdiction, and which operated England’s unique legal system of royal writ and precedent dating back to the twelfth century – the common law.

  If things were going well, Church courts complemented common law courts. If things were going badly, the two systems became rivals, with little parallel elsewhere in Europe. All medieval legal jurisdictions were liable to clash and try to steal each other’s business, but nowhere else was there a contest of two such giants. English common law was unique because no other kingdom or sizeable principality in Europe had such a long tradition of centralized administration as England. Over four centuries, English monarchs had created royal courts whose practices in turn fostered a brotherhood of lawyers to run them, with their own system of higher education as a complete alternative to Oxford and Cambridge: the Inns of Court in London. Common law thus created a second English learned profession alongside the clergy, boasting its own traditions, training and esprit de corps, a profession which did not exist in such a developed fashion anywhere else in Western Christendom. Cromwell, with his membership of Gray’s Inn, was in a minor way one of these common lawyers, and many others sat in the Commons. Moreover, he and they were only too aware in 1532 that one of the most exalted among their number, Lord Chancellor More, had spent his three years of office aiding and abetting the Church courts in a heightened pursuit of heretics, both persistent Lollards and the new evangelicals.

  As More felt himself increasingly boxed in and at odds with the King’s plans, he turned to waging implacable war on enemies of the Church whom he could crush without inhibition. Gone were the days of Cardinal Wolsey, when no one was burned at the stake for heresy: More had a positive relish for burning heretics. Since 1529, he had been saying so at savage length in print, in flat rejection of Wolsey’s conciliatory line, and although claims by angry Protestants of the next generation that he personally tortured heretics have no evidence to back them up, his words now became Church policy.16 It was bad enough that More was closely involved in justifying the death of the popular preacher and Cambridge don Thomas Bilney at the hands of old Bishop Nix of Norwich. Bilney had been burned at the stake the previous summer, after the last Parliamentary session. The burgesses of Parliament for Norwich (one of whom was of course Cromwell’s friend Reynold Littleprow) were infuriated by Bilney’s execution, which contrasted with his previous lenient treatment by Cardinal Wolsey, and they made it clear in September 1531 that they would raise the matter in the next Parliamentary session. One of the chief agitators testifying to the injustice of Bilney’s death was John Curatt, whom we have met b
efore, facing the wrath of Bishop Nix on behalf of Wolsey, Thomas Winter and Thomas Cromwell.17

  In response, More first set up his own official but highly irregular inquiry as Lord Chancellor into Bilney’s execution, and then he published a thoroughly skewed account of the affair in the course of a major attack on William Tyndale, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer. Senior churchmen took their cue from More’s encouragement to extend persecution. A few days before the 1532 session of Parliament opened, the evangelical Thomas Benet died in flames outside Exeter, and there were more harassments and burnings to come; even while this Parliament was sitting, Cromwell’s friend the charismatic preacher Hugh Latimer ended up in a prison cell at Lambeth Palace on heresy charges levelled in the current meeting of Convocation. In response, therefore, the Supplication became as much an attack on Thomas More as on the traditional Church leadership. It was also the clearest sign yet that Thomas Cromwell was going to fight in the name of the new religion.

  Common law is founded on precedent, and its lawyers are therefore disposed by their professional training to conservatism. By no means all of them would have thought it a bad thing for the Church to pursue heretics (in fact very few people in the sixteenth century, Catholic or Protestant, opposed the principle of burning, just the choice and quantity of those burned). What common lawyers generally did feel, however, was resentment against what they saw as excessive and unreasonable claims by high-flying practitioners of civil and canon law. More was an exception, for his professional instincts were overcome by his strong sense of being caught up in a cosmic battle for the soul of Europe between the Papacy and the forces of Antichrist. English contemporaries of traditionalist religious outlook did not generally follow him. Among Cromwell’s developing clutch of propaganda writers was an elderly common lawyer called Christopher St German, who never showed the slightest warmth towards evangelical reformation, but who in retirement from legal practice spent the 1530s vigorously defending the royal cause against Rome in a stream of anonymous pamphlets, which have only recently gradually been reassembled round his name. St German, who remained obstinately his own man despite initial patronage from Cromwell, did not approve of the manner in which the King eventually proclaimed a divinely granted royal supremacy, but he approved of papal power even less.18