Thomas Cromwell
Page 23
A coalition of interests, therefore, evangelical, legal and royalist, fuelled the Commons’ enthusiasm for attacking the Ordinaries in their Supplication. The perfect man to unite them was the King’s manager in the Commons, Thomas Cromwell, but he had his own preoccupations in doing so, and we should not think that they were a perfect fit with the concerns of his royal employer. Much historians’ ink and ingenuity have been expended on reconstructing the exact sequence of events which led to this measure taking on the importance that it did.19 Suffice it to say that the most likely origin of this Supplication was in draft petitions prepared in the anti-clerical agitation of Parliament in the autumn of 1529, which had gone nowhere at that time apart from adding to the general political noise. Cromwell had probably not been greatly involved (if at all) in producing the drafts, given his likely position in that session (see above, Chapter 4), but he would have been well aware of them, and he gathered some of the material for his own archive – no doubt stored in his ‘law parlour’ at Austin Friars.
Chancellor More had made the issue of the Church courts personal with his championing of persecution, including of evangelicals whom Cromwell would have known well: the Supplication could now be used in remoulded form to bring the defiant Church authorities to heel. The King had gained very little from the modified declaration of the 1531 Convocation that he was Supreme Head of the Church ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’. Convocation’s reopened proceedings in January and February 1532 reveal the churchmen showing an unwonted energy in producing measures of institutional reform, quite independent of anything the King and his chief councillors were planning. They must have been energized by their bruising confrontation with royal power the previous year, quite apart from the growing volume of heretical activity and popular iconoclasm throughout the kingdom.20 No wonder Cromwell became involved in the royal effort to halt this self-assertiveness.
Now the early drafts of the Supplication in Cromwell’s papers ceased to languish as sidelined gestures from radical back-benchers: fresh versions combined previous material with heavy new interventions from himself and no less a figure than the Speaker of the Commons, Thomas Audley, to produce a final text. In mid-March 1532, in a remarkable echo of the agitation for a praemunire pardon for the laity precisely a year before, a deputation led by Audley presented the King with the Supplication. The leading personnel in the room at this second meeting were the same as on that earlier occasion, as everyone would vividly have remembered; the presentation of the Supplication was something of a theatrical revival.
The King’s reaction reflected several conflicting considerations, most of them negative, but some sympathetic. He would remember that, a year before, the previous Commons delegation had in the end forced him to do what they wanted. He was also furious that his new request for subsidy and the legislation on feudal rights had been lost, and he was no more fond of Lollards or evangelical heretics than was Chancellor More. On the other hand, the Supplication clearly attacked More, who had become one of the chief obstacles to royal plans when a Lord Chancellor should have been leading the charge for his Sovereign; it represented further pressure on the Church, whose senior Archbishop had just provoked Henry into rage by open defiance in the Lords’ chamber in a speech on 15 March. The King’s response was as confused as all this might suggest: he said he would not make any decision until he had heard ‘the party that is accused’ – that is, the clergy. Then in a non-sequitur he jumped to a diatribe about the defeat of the primer seisin legislation.21
Tempers did not subside over the Easter recess. There were more harsh words in Parliament about a financial grant, and one West Country burgess called Thomas Temys had the effrontery to seek a new Commons request to the King to take back Queen Katherine. The clergy returned an aggressive answer to the King’s consultation on the Supplication against the Ordinaries, which angered first him then the Commons. There was thus now competition as to whether laity or clergy would infuriate the much tried monarch more. Amid the collapse of government legislative plans and some strikingly frank exchanges between a second Commons delegation and Henry about his marriage in the wake of Temys’s outspokenness, the one constant was the King’s animus against the independence of the Church.22
The sequence of three informal meetings between MPs and King in 1532 is remarkable. Each jolted the chaotic affairs of this Parliament a stage further in the direction of royal supremacy in the Church as a way of solving the King’s Great Matter. The third came on 11 May, and in the meantime Easter had intervened, decisively swinging the balance among the King’s conflicting priorities. He was infuriated at being hectored on two successive Sundays in his own chapel at Greenwich by members of the Palace’s resident community of Observant Franciscan friars, for the most part fierce partisans of his ill-treated wife. Observants belonged to a variety of Franciscan enthusiasm which sought to recapture the early rigour of life among Franciscan friars. The austerity of the Observant Order appealed to many European monarchs, Henry VIII’s predecessors included, hence the presence of Observant friaries alongside the principal royal palaces, a suitable foil for regal magnificence. Unfortunately Observant integrity included fearless commitment to moral stances which King Henry now found disconcerting and hugely inconvenient. Vigorous condemnations to his face of his annulment plans were not what he expected amid holy festivities, and with what was either sublime lack of self-awareness or an impulse to savage satire he wrote to the papal bureaucracy in Rome to demand a commission to try the obstreperous Observants. The Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries suddenly seemed a good deal more congenial.23
Accordingly when Henry met the Commons delegation on 11 May, flanked by eight senior peers, he declared himself outraged that the clergy ‘be but half our subjects, yea and scarce our subjects; for all the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the Pope, clean contrary to the oath that they make to us’. He was conveniently armed with copies of the relevant oaths, which Speaker Audley took back to the Commons and read out, to general sensation.24 What Audley may not have known, and naturally did not retail to MPs, was that these were precisely the oaths which John Foxe records Thomas Cromwell showing to the King at their fateful meeting in the garden at Westminster back in January 1530. Through all the confusion and noise of that Parliamentary spring, Cromwell had managed in the end to keep the focus on the subject of the Supplication and its assault on clerical power, aided by the vigour of senior churchmen’s reaction to the King’s attack.
Another recent archival discovery reveals Cromwell, right on the eve of Parliament in December 1531, trying to manipulate an uncontroversial land transaction in a way that not merely anticipated the struggle of these five strife-ridden months, but was prophetic of a much greater constitutional transformation in 1533–4. Cromwell was organizing a major royal land exchange with the ancient royal abbey of Waltham Holy Cross, part of a number of such exchanges whose confirmation was one of the more constructive aspects of the 1532 Parliament. We will return to this (see below, this page), but what is relevant for the present is that in his draft of the agreement between the Abbot of Waltham and the King, Cromwell personally inserted as an afterthought, into an otherwise routine piece of royal verbiage, one word fraught with significance. To the phrase ‘to the most serene and invincible Prince our Lord Henry the Eighth’ (serenissimo et invictissimo Principi Domino nostro Henrico Octavo), he twice added the word ‘Supereminenti’ before ‘Principi’. This unusual adjective (what exactly did it mean? ‘the Supereminent’? ‘the Overtopping’?) failed to make it into the formal enrolment of the deal on the Close Roll of Chancery; clearly someone had objected to it. That failure was a mark of what an empty concession the Church made on royal supremacy in the 1531 Parliament. Yet in those two carets written in the hand of Thomas Cromwell we see the first gleam of a new round of royal campaigning.25
Breaking the Church’s resistance came to trump even the cause of getting money out of Henry’s subjects. Aba
ndoning the grudging grant of taxation that Parliament offered, on 14 May the King sent down an order proroguing the assembly. While MPs dispersed, no doubt with relief after a prolonged and bruising session, Henry turned his attention to Convocation. A day later, just after Archbishop Warham had read the formal instruments of dissolution, a party of senior royal councillors headed by the Duke of Norfolk abruptly arrived with a paper from the King, which took up an hour of agitated private discussion before the remaining clergy learned of its astonishing contents: a royal demand for an unreserved submission of the Church’s powers to legislate or run its own affairs, and acceptance of a proposed royal commission to revise the whole range of canon law.
The next twenty-four hours were turbulent, but drawing on a rump representation of prelates and maybe no lower clergy at all, the government ended up on 16 May with a document which gave it all it wanted: a complete submission of the Church in the realm to the King, surprisingly couched in English within the usual Latin administrative framing. The royal commissioners receiving this questionable instrument were a curiously assorted bunch, three of whom look like whatever peers could be rounded up in Westminster for the purpose, Lords Abergavenny, Hussey and Mordaunt – but alongside that random trio of noblemen were two old collaborators at Court, Treasurer Fitzwilliam and Thomas Cromwell.26 The submission was too much for Thomas More: he resigned as Lord Chancellor.
Here was a symbolic triumph for Cromwell, after three eventful years steadily advancing in the King’s service. He celebrated that same day by clinching a deal with the London Austin Friars to extend his property-holding further into their premises on a ninety-nine-year lease, the basis for a lavish extension of his house there.27 But it had been a very rough ride, and throughout the session some formidable opposition remained. In the Commons it was led by some politically weighty figures, who by their status as knights of the shire took their places on the benches in uncomfortably close physical proximity to the King’s councillors: notably the senior knight for Warwickshire, Sir George Throckmorton.28 We know of their activities from a detailed confession of Throckmorton, who in renewed political trouble in autumn 1537 was forced to give exact reminiscences as far back as 1532.29
Throckmorton had known Cromwell at least since his Wolsey years, and he came from a family inclined throughout the sixteenth century to express their often sharply contrasting political opinions with pugnacity. His literary style in letters to Cromwell is marked by its brisk straightforwardness, and he was not afraid to strike out on his own line against Crown interests on matters of local administration: all round, not a man to be trifled with.30 He was one of the principals among a group of MPs, mostly knights of the shire, in the habit of dining together at the Queen’s Head Tavern at the Westminster end of Fleet Street: a convenient venue at the city gates, particularly for lawyers getting back from Parliament to the Inns of Court and in urgent need of a drink.31 Repeatedly discussions over supper turned to their unhappiness with royal moves in Parliament, ‘such acts as the Appeals and other’ – by which Throckmorton probably meant either the Supplication against the Ordinaries or the submission of the clergy; he went on in a later part of the confession to link ‘the Act of Appeals’ with the Restraint of Annates, which was indeed part of the royal programme of 1532.32
There was nothing particularly conspiratorial about these knights of the shire, stalwarts of royal government in the localities, meeting in a prominent inn in the middle of the lawyers’ quarter; it was equally natural that Throckmorton’s views brought him to speak to like-minded figures in the Lords led by Sir Thomas More, or in Convocation the prominent conservative London cleric Dr Nicholas Wilson. The convalescent John Fisher was still a member of the Parliament. In their own eyes, they were at this stage a loyal opposition in a grave matter of policy yet to come to a conclusion (Fisher is in a more dubious category, since as the situation worsened some of his communication with Ambassador Chapuys was downright treasonous, ranging as far as encouragement of foreign invasion).33 They enjoyed in Parliament privileges of freedom of speech and from arrest recognized since the fourteenth century, even if the extent of those privileges was vague, like so much else in Tudor political practice.34
Throckmorton nevertheless had no doubts as to who was dominating events in the Commons in 1532: ‘the common house was much advertised [admonished or warned] by [Cromwell] and . . . few men there would displease him.’ When Throckmorton got a chance to speak to the King directly in private, Cromwell was in attendance at the meeting to provide any further required dose of ‘advertising’. This meeting probably occurred during the session itself, since the conversation parallels surprisingly unbuttoned remarks Henry made about his ‘grudge of conscience’ to a Commons delegation after Thomas Temys’s outspokenness on Queen Katherine. If a face-to-face meeting was meant to intimidate Throckmorton, Cromwell and the King had misjudged their man. Sir George recalled that he turned the King’s talk of his conscientious scruples in an even bolder direction than Temys: ‘I feared if ye did marry Queen Anne, your conscience would be more troubled at length, for that it is thought ye have meddled with the mother and the sister.’ Caught badly off guard by this breathtaking directness, the King retorted defensively, ‘Never with the mother,’ while Cromwell lashed out in an effort to save the situation, ‘Nor never with the sister neither, and therefore put that out of your mind.’35
So Henry had admitted adultery (or, in his eyes, fornication) with Mary Boleyn, though not with the Countess of Wiltshire. It was a tribute to a curious honesty in the King’s conscience in sexual matters, as well as to his conscientious acceptance that those called to Parliament had to be recognized as his counsellors, however unwelcome or shocking their counsel. Outsiders beyond Parliament to whom they might then be indiscreet were in a different category, so Throckmorton took more risks in his conversations with other prominent dissidents such as his cousin William Peto, Minister-Provincial of the Franciscan Observants, keeping a gloomy eye on proceedings from a lodging provided by Archbishop Warham at Lambeth Palace just across the Thames from Westminster. Likewise, it was not Sir George but the friend beyond Parliament to whom he recounted the story of Henry’s embarrassing admission, Sir Thomas Dingley, who eventually ended up on the executioner’s block for sexual gossip about his sovereign. Worse still, Dingley had gossiped to foreigners.36
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There could hardly be a more telling symptom of Cromwell’s arrival at the centre of power than his presence at this tense interview, tugging at the King’s sleeve. Henceforward, one significant silence is obvious in his correspondence: virtually no one bothered to put an address on letters to him, because his name would find him more easily than his exact location. Now, at last, came the beginnings of formal royal office. On 12 April 1532, the day when Archbishop Warham bleakly presented the Convocation of Canterbury with the Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries, the King signed a warrant for Cromwell’s appointment as Master of the Jewels, vacant by the death of an old friend of his, Robert Amadas (who, curiously enough, had been named just before him in that list of New Year’s gifts for the King).37 In July came his appointment in a different ancient department of state, Chancery, to an office previously held by another old friend, the late Thomas Hall, one of his Ipswich circle of acquaintance.38 This was the splendidly named Clerkship of the Hanaper – the custodianship of what was indeed once just a wicker travel-hamper, holding a great variety of documents produced by the various secretarial and legal activities of Chancery: charters, formal royal writs and much more.
Both these offices had reasonable fees and perquisites attached, but that was not really the point. What ought also to be considered was a vacant position which Cromwell did not gain, nor probably seek: the Lord Chancellorship of England, the highest legal office in the realm, formerly held by his master Wolsey and just vacated by Thomas More. No one for the moment was granted this, but the Keepership of the Great Seal of the realm, chief r
esponsibility of the Lord Chancellor, was immediately granted on More’s resignation to the Speaker of the Commons, Thomas Audley, who was then upgraded to Chancellor in January 1533.
What was in the minds of Cromwell and the King when these various appointments were made? Cromwell had watched the Cardinal being consumed by his enthusiasm for the Lord Chancellor’s judicial business, spending an inordinate amount of his precious time on it. To land himself with the same burden would be foolish. Audley was more obviously a career lawyer; he was also a friend of Cromwell’s going back at least to common service in the 1523 Parliament, and after that in Wolsey’s household. Cromwell will already have noted his friend’s combination of legal pernicketiness and political pliability: as Speaker of the Commons and knight of the shire for Essex, Audley was a convincing candidate for the post in professional terms, and while he clearly adored the excitement of affixing every fresh seal on every royal instrument, he showed no inclination to build up his own political following.