Fourth and last adjustment: no royal official with pretensions to gentle status could possibly tolerate not being named to that essential organ of local government, the county commission of the peace, which the Crown or its local delegates issued for every shire or county in England. Since the fourteenth century, the justices of the peace (JPs) had taken on more and more local powers: they were ideal agents from the monarchy’s point of view, since apart from a fairly nominal daily payment for turning up at the ‘quarter sessions’ every three months, they cost nothing (most of them got ample reward from the prestige and power the office brought). Better still, they could be dismissed or appointed by the simple means of issuing another royal commission with a new list of names to sit on the county bench of JPs, cancelling out the previous commission. The first round-up of commissions in which Cromwell’s name is known to appear is a book listing them kingdom-wide (a liber pacis) dateable by its content to 1532.59 He was placed in commission only for counties where he had property: Essex, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey (Wales was not within the system at that stage). It was not until after the great traumas of 1536–7, now victorious and his son the King’s brother-in-law, that his name appeared on every commission of the peace issued by the Crown.
This liber pacis from 1532 was Cromwell’s own, for in the list for Surrey, the county of his birth, he has added in his own hand three new names: Thomas Heneage, Sir Anthony Browne and Sir Richard Page. All of them held office at Court, and in a significant faux pas Cromwell inserted these three names in the Surrey list out of their proper order. JPs were named in commission in a strict hierarchical arrangement jealously observed at meetings by all those involved, and royal servants should not have been tacked on the end of the list. Evidently he was still learning about such technicalities.60 Yet he would have been well aware of the precise political significance of adding them to the Surrey bench. Not only were they all former servants of Wolsey, but in the badlands of Surrey’s surprisingly contentious local politics they were ranged alongside Cromwell’s friend Sir William Fitzwilliam against the faction maintained by the Duke of Norfolk. Heneage and Page were resuming careers as Surrey JPs after being dropped at Wolsey’s fall.61 So Cromwell’s entry of them on his liber pacis is a tiny reflection of seismic shifts in national politics at the same time.
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The circumstances of Cromwell’s rise in spring 1532 involved two immediate political casualties, who would now be marked out as his enemies for life, however much public proprieties might be observed: Sir Thomas More and Bishop Stephen Gardiner. More had had enough of trying to reconcile his conscience with public office and, as we have seen, the submission of the clergy to the King provoked his resignation as Lord Chancellor, to be succeeded by Thomas Audley. Erasmus, far away in Freiburg im Breisgau, heard of Lutheran glee in Germany that one of Audley’s first actions as Keeper was to release twenty evangelical heretics whom More had kept in prison; the great humanist did not think it impolitic to repeat this item of news about the changing political atmosphere in England promptly in print.62 From the moment of his resignation, despite his considerable powers of public discretion, More became one of the chief symbols of opposition to the King’s plans for marriage and religion. Consequently not only did Henry turn to hate him as only Henry could, but Thomas Cromwell became the chief agent in his destruction.
Bishop Gardiner did not return to London from his French embassy until 6 March, and he was appalled at how far the attack on the Church had gone in his absence. The presentation of the Supplication against the Ordinaries on 18 March provoked him into preparing a vigorous response, seized on by the beleaguered leadership of Convocation and the basis for their own aggressive reply delivered to King and Commons in late April. Gardiner did not expect the King to be so angry at his part in this, and his subsequent letter to Henry simply made matters worse: brave though it was of him to write at all, his characteristic gambit of wrongfooting his opponents by citing their own works was on this occasion rank idiocy.63 John Foxe immortalized Gardiner as ‘Wily Winchester’, but his wiliness was compromised by an extremely quick temper.64 Throughout his career, he was capable of surprising misjudgements, and this was the worst: his political position under Henry VIII never fully recovered from it.
Gardiner, on the verge of becoming the King’s chief minister, now found even his role as Principal Secretary slipping away, displaced by Cromwell’s increasing significance. He saw his fine new house at Hanworth surrendered to Anne Boleyn, and the Archbishopric of Canterbury which should have been his on the death of William Warham that summer of 1532 went to another. By the second half of 1533, it was clear that the Secretaryship was in fact if not in name in Cromwell’s hands: one of those silent transfers of power to a man without a public face which characterized his first four years in royal service. Already during Gardiner’s prolonged absence abroad on royal diplomatic business, Cromwell had the keeping of the crucial Signet seal which initiated large sections of royal business (it was the King’s personal seal for correspondence, theoretically the signet ring on his finger); his assistant Ralph Sadler had power over the fees which suitors would have to pay for its use.65
Over the next few years, Gardiner lost the services of three talented servants who calculated that he was damaged goods, the same calculation that he had made with Thomas Wolsey; they all ended up in the service of his supplanter, Thomas Cromwell. Last was the talented and politically agile Thomas Wriothesley, so often misleadingly placed among Cromwell’s long-standing servants, the story of whose final move out of Gardiner’s orbit into Cromwell’s must wait for a later crisis at Court at the beginning of 1536.66 Another was William Paget, a political escapologist even shrewder than Wriothesley: both men were high in Gardiner’s affections after being favourite pupils of his at Trinity Hall Cambridge, which makes plain the limits of his wiliness.67
The third ungrateful young object of Gardiner’s esteem is a real surprise: Thomas Cromwell’s own nephew, Richard Cromwell alias Williams, who seems to have entered Gardiner’s service after the death of his former master the Marquess of Dorset in 1530. Richard was with Gardiner on his French mission in winter 1532, acting among other things as a diplomatic courier; in winter 1533 his alert cousin Christopher Wellifed, seeking a way to get a wealthy parish benefice in Gardiner’s gift, commented hungrily to his parents that ‘I hear say my cousin Richard is in great favour with the bishop.’ Within a month, however, that same Richard was described as Thomas Cromwell’s servant by their relative George Lawson.68 Now Richard Cromwell took his place alongside Ralph Sadler as one of Cromwell’s talented young men.
Less immediately obvious casualties of events were the three great Court magnates in the King’s counsels, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and Anne Boleyn’s father the Earl of Wiltshire. Wiltshire was an able diplomat, but diplomats seldom have the qualities for leadership in government, and there was no question that he owed his sudden prominence to his daughter’s increasingly certain marriage to the King. His fortunes rose and fell in relation to hers, and he was no match for the new arrival among royal ministers. One would have expected the two Dukes likewise to have benefited from Wolsey’s final fall in 1529, just as they had done when his power briefly faltered over the Amicable Grant crisis in 1525, yet their ascendancy soon turned out to be fragile.
Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk’s remarkable staying power in the King’s affections relied on his pliable charm and Henry’s warm memories of their common youthful prowess in the tiltyard. Otherwise he lacked the administrative abilities required for celebrations in a brewery, let alone governing a kingdom. Brandon had married the King’s sister Mary after the death of her husband King Louis of France back in 1515: a love match which had been an unpleasant surprise both to Henry and to her French in-laws. Despite royal forgiveness, their marriage remained as much a liability as an asset, particularly since the Dowager Queen Mary rapidly decided she loathed Anne Boleyn. While s
he was about the only person in the realm who could have got away with such open hostility, it meant that Suffolk’s position at Court actually deteriorated after Wolsey’s removal.69
Brandon and Howard did not protect their own interests by effectively combining against any newcomer at the top. They were never particularly warm allies; in fact at the moment of the Duke of Norfolk’s fall from grace in 1546, in an understandably self-pitying though not inaccurate list of all the people who had hated him, Norfolk listed the Duke of Suffolk as leading a trio of noblemen who had encouraged Wolsey to destroy him back in 1515.70 In their own region of East Anglia, the Dukes were competitors for influence, an unequal contest which the Duke of Norfolk generally won.71 That very spring of 1532 a poisonous feud erupted between their followers, connected to the Dowager Queen’s unkind comments on the prospect of a royal Boleyn marriage. This led to a sensational outrage in Westminster itself while Parliament was still sitting, when Suffolk’s tenant and relative Sir William Pennington was murdered by the brothers Richard, Robert and Anthony Southwell, Norfolk gentlemen then in Howard’s affinity. Both Dukes suffered from the public scandal.72
On 20 July 1532, the fallout from that affair provoked further trouble which summed up the now quadrangular relationship. Suffolk wrote plaintively to Cromwell, mildly reproaching him for letting the King know that servants of Norfolk had complained to him about death threats made by Suffolk’s servants. Norfolk and Suffolk had both hoped to keep this from Henry’s ears; they were not pleased at this short-circuiting of their affairs, but neither of them made much of a fuss about it.73 In fact throughout the 1530s Suffolk was very happy to defer to Cromwell’s ability to do him favours; he asked him to be godfather to his son and heir Henry in 1535 (presumably alongside the King), and acquiesced with only minor grumbles in the dramatic and wholesale removal of ducal estates and power from East Anglia up to Lincolnshire from 1537.74 The only time that the Duke of Suffolk showed anything like open defiance of the wishes of the great minister was on a matter of policy towards Lincolnshire in 1536, after he had led the successful neutralization of the rising there, at a moment when Cromwell seemed at his weakest. It was still a very token squeak.75
The Duke of Norfolk was a man of much greater ability than his fellow-magnate: experienced as a diplomat and military commander, with a decent record in that most intractable of Tudor territories, Ireland, and ruthlessly determined to build on his own already exalted position in the realm. His niece Anne Boleyn’s cause looked like an asset in pursuing that aim, but his own uneasy combination of religious traditionalism and brusque contempt for the Church’s power at home and abroad did not produce results for the Great Matter after the fall of Wolsey any more impressive than the Cardinal’s strenuous efforts. During 1532, it became painfully apparent to those close to events that Cromwell’s rise was edging Norfolk aside. It was in May that the late Marquess of Dorset’s brother Lord Leonard Grey, wooing a rich widow, tried to enlist his ‘loving friend and fellow Master Thomas Cromwell’ in getting a supportive letter from the Duke (see above, this page), but in making his request Grey used that phrase now increasingly common in begging letters found in Cromwell’s correspondence, even from members of the nobility: ‘my whole trust next God and the King is in you.’76 By July Dr Augustine, no amateur in reading political atmospheres, was sending Cromwell his letters to the Duke from Regensburg unsealed, so his friend could read them first.77
This shift must have been an unpleasant surprise to Norfolk, who had no previous reason to suppose that a quietly efficient servant of the fallen Cardinal could represent a threat to him. He had, of course, been the royal minister who secured the King’s agreement for Cromwell to make his entry to Parliament in 1529. No one could have infuriated him more as political rival than a nonentity from Putney – apart from a butcher’s son from Ipswich. Norfolk’s aristocratic hauteur was all the more pronounced because of its fragility: for all the Howards’ pretensions, someone as versed in history as Thomas Cromwell could have pointed out that the family’s entry to the peerage had been no more than six decades before, and their ducal title had been granted around the time of Cromwell’s own birth. Howard magnificence was borrowed plumage from their Mowbray predecessors in the Norfolk title, complete with an ancient Norfolk mausoleum in their Cluniac priory of Thetford, a funereal venue which meant a great deal to the Duke.
The next year was to make Norfolk’s decline obvious. By December 1533, Chapuys was describing the Duke to his imperial master as a spent force, who spoke as poisonously of the Pope as he could ‘for fear of losing the small credit he still enjoys, which scarcely goes beyond the limits allowed him by Cromwell, nowadays the man who has most influence with the King, at which, as I hear from all sides, the Duke is very much annoyed, and is seriously contemplating leaving the Court and retiring into private life’.78 That was in fact what he did for the next few years, with the considerable exception of the emergency caused by the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7. The Duke’s full reappearance, replete with a rage seeking satisfaction for years of perceived slights, coincided with the final shaking down of Cromwell’s power in 1540, and time did not mellow his hatred of the fallen minister in later years after the upstart’s death. When he himself was thrown into the Tower of London as a result of his son’s crazy dynastic indiscretions in 1546, he begged to be given at least the same hearing as that ‘false man [Cromwell], and surely I am a true poor gentleman’.79
This was a relationship characterized by an unstable mixture of ducal anxiety and outward friendship. The Duke had all the ability of the professionally insincere to put up an effective act in the role of bluff honest comrade. It is a shame that we cannot certainly date or place in context the most extreme of his falsehoods, when the Duke avowed to Cromwell, in his own distinctive and rather pleasing handwriting,
By my friends I have been advertised that since I saw you last, ye have most lovingly handled me, for the which . . . I assure you in few words you will always find me a faithful friend, grudge who will, the King only reserved, not doubting once to shew the same with effect, though ye shall have little need thereof, as I pray Almighty God ye never have . . .80
Cromwell on his side was always punctilious in maintaining the charade, until the pressure of events impaired his judgement in his last year of life. Nevertheless, he simultaneously kept up a remarkable friendship and correspondence with the Duke of Norfolk’s estranged wife Elizabeth Stafford, daughter to the executed Duke of Buckingham: she and Cromwell stood godparents together to a son of one of Cromwell’s nieces in 1537.81 No one will claim that the Duchess was an easy character, but she had been deeply wronged by her husband: Norfolk was ensconced for the rest of his life with a Lincolnshire gentlewoman called Elizabeth Holland, and would never have dreamed of taking his wife back. For Cromwell to offer her his friendship was a strong statement, and not one of any direct political use. In fact with his usual candidly grim humour, Cromwell more than once in the 1530s said to the Duke, ‘My lord, ye are an happy man that your wife knoweth no hurt by you, for if she did, she would undo you.’82
Norfolk reminisced that at the time of the trial and execution of his wife’s father, the Duke of Buckingham, ‘of all men living he hated me most.’83 There was competition for that honour, and Cromwell was high among the contenders, given the Duke’s enjoyment in destroying his old master the Cardinal. Shared antipathies as much as any political calculation drew Cromwell to Duchess Elizabeth – yet another person who made no secret of the fact that she detested Anne Boleyn.84 The Duchess became, like her much loved brother Henry Lord Stafford, or the mad Lord Dudley’s son Edward, or Wolsey’s Thomas Winter and the mysterious Thomas Minterne, one of Cromwell’s waifs and strays. They were among his old obligations, to be observed without reward, amid all the other business which crowded in upon him, until it was too late to do more.
8
Making a Difference: 1532
A fascination of Cromwell�
��s years in power is deciding what difference he made, after subtracting what would have been the routine aims or achievements of any half-competent minister, and after assessing what is likely to have originated from his royal master – who had a quarter-century’s experience of kingship by the time Cromwell became his chief minister, and was not a fool. Are there political initiatives attributable to his arrival at the centre of government? Straight away, the story of the later 1530s presents itself as the unfolding story of key Parliamentary decisions. We have already noted Cromwell’s ability to seize the moment; nowhere is that more obvious than the use to which the King and his ministers put England’s and Ireland’s legislative assemblies. Henry summoned Parliament in autumn 1529 when Cromwell still had nothing to do with the King’s government; if that had been the only session of what became the ‘Reformation Parliament’, its lack of significant achievement would hardly make it stand out from its predecessors. It did not even destroy Wolsey as some had clearly intended, and Cromwell may have had something to do with that failure – if only as one of the public voices to which the King hearkened as he brooded on the fate of his great minister.
Only after its recall in winter 1531 did this Parliament become remarkable and indeed unprecedented, not merely for the number of times it was summoned again, but for what it actually achieved in legislation. The 1531 session was the first in which Cromwell emerged as a government spokesman, but at that stage he was still one royal minister among several, and there was much disorder and failed business. We will have cause to see what Cromwell did in the later sessions of Parliament once his rivals had fallen away; and later it will become apparent that his use of the King’s other Parliament in Dublin was equally novel and indeed without parallel during the century. The English Parliament could never be taken for granted at any stage while he was a royal minister: frustrating, but maybe also fascinating, for him.
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