Yet Cromwell’s opportunism in using existing situations in and beyond Parliament and bending them to his purposes could have remained a matter of ambition and temperament, rather than shaping distinctive policy agendas which would have taken a different course without him. What remains to demonstrate is that in these years from 1531 up to 1540 one can isolate policy initiatives which seem peculiarly his. In order of importance, from the apparently ridiculous to the sublime, we begin with sewers, pass through public relations and end with the Church.
The word ‘sewer’ has suffered linguistic misfortune since the Tudor age. Then it had a much wider reference, and the ‘commissions of sewers’ given sweeping new statutory powers and structure by the 1532 session of Parliament were vital for proper functioning of transport, inland fisheries, marsh drainage and flood defences. In many ways, the work of these commissions over several centuries from 1532 created the modern geography of rural England: less spectacularly or rapidly than the Industrial Revolution, but cumulatively just as important in effect. The commissions’ membership was not that different from the commissions of the peace, on the good grounds that one needed people with considerable social cachet in outfacing local vested interests in order to destroy weirs and other obstacles to free movement on rivers, or to galvanize local efforts to stand up to coastal erosion.1
This was an issue where one man’s profitable weir or mill-race was an infuriating obstruction to many more people’s community fishing, or the free flow of water to keep river silting at bay, or to boats at a time when water transport was the easiest way to move bulky goods, grain and agricultural produce included. Tudor people were more ready to judge problems in terms of morality than economics. Just like enclosure for sheep-farming, the matter of weirs took on moral dimensions: it demonstrated human greed and selfishness, which threatened to damage a frail social fabric by endangering food supplies. In Tudor society, famine still loomed, with all its capacity to poison human relations and cause very public suffering, let alone riot and rebellion; the moral outrage was not some academic debate. Weirs had been the subject of moral outrage long before Cromwell’s years of power, when he was just a boy living in a Thames-side village (with a father who owned a mill); there was repeated agitation in the Parliaments of Henry VII about them, resulting in one or two pieces of legislation with a local focus and not much effect.2
Cromwell’s own interest in weirs and waterworks dated back at least to his service with Wolsey on monastic suppressions. In administering wide areas of Thames-side marshland which formed the core estates of the dissolved abbey of Lesnes in Kent, he had been caught up in trying to remedy a catastrophic breach of flood defences in winter 1529, causing havoc in the low-lying countryside around; the breach may have resulted from lack of maintenance after that abbey’s suppression in 1525, in which he had been an agent. Everyone right up to the King then tried to wriggle out of financing repairs, so it was several years before the huge costs were sorted. Meanwhile the drowning of land around Lesnes, Erith and Plumstead was so serious that it needed an Act of Parliament in the 1531 session, and Cromwell can probably take credit for steering this Act through to success before the general legislation on sewers the following year.3
Once the Act for commissions of sewers passed in 1532, Cromwell immediately put himself on the commission for the county of Surrey. At that stage he did not have much property in Surrey, but he did have plenty of clamorous relatives and friends there, and maybe a sense of local patriotism. Despite all the burgeoning business of a busy royal minister, this was not a nominal appointment. Sir Nicholas Carew of Beddington was clearly a little surprised in September to find that the writ empowering him to swear commissioners of sewers was also addressed to Cromwell. Carew wondered whether he would be coming in person to the oath-taking at Kingston upon Thames.4 It is not certain that Cromwell made it to Kingston on that occasion, but he did indeed sit on the commission when it met in Southwark, a session which caused much local alarm by its decisions on river obstructions.5 Other letters about the Surrey commission include one from his friend Sir William Fitzwilliam, hoping to see him come down to Kingston, and commenting optimistically in an autograph postscript, ‘There is no man now in our quarter that reasons against it, but every man with it that has either learning or discretion.’ That was a tactful way of saying how unpopular the new legislation on sewers was among landowners generally, and it continued to be well into the seventeenth century. Construed aggressively, as Cromwell intended it to be, its provisions undoubtedly threatened property rights.6
Cromwell’s membership of the commission in Surrey was not just a piece of piety to his native county; it reflected his real ongoing preoccupation with the wider issue of land drainage. That was clear when he took a personal interest in a very different piece of marsh reclamation, in Calais, which many in the town believed threatened the defences of that perennially insecure outpost of the realm. The commissioners to examine the site included himself, and he had a chance to do something about it when he joined the King’s spectacular meeting with the King of France in autumn 1532 (see below, this page); it is piquant to think of him pondering banks and ditches amid the glamorous royal junketings. But then, this was an issue which fascinated King Henry too: another useful bonding opportunity between the two men, without the complications of their different theological outlooks which made questions of religion so tricky. Royal autograph musings as well as Cromwell’s appear on one draft list of members of this Calais commission.7
Cromwell also began following Cardinal Wolsey in curbing sheep-farming enclosure. In 1534 he tried to interest the King as well, seeking his personal backing for legislation in Parliament that spring which would have limited any one person to running a flock of 2,000 sheep and no more. There must already have been signs of opposition in the Commons when he wrote, because it was after the Commons had made their contribution that he begged the King to intervene and urge the Lords to accept the bill. The draft of his letter to Henry survives in his own hand, full of second thoughts as to how best to express his extreme anxiety about the fate of his measure. In the end, in a revealing display of hyperbole, he affirmed that his Majesty would thus ‘do the most profitable and beneficial thing that ever was done to the Common wealth of this your realm, and shall thereby increase such wealth in the same amongst the great number and multitude of your subjects as was never seen in this Realm since Brutus’.8
Landowners in both Houses in March 1534 will have remembered that this was the Cardinal’s man pushing a programme which had already thoroughly infuriated them in previous years, and they combined to wreck Cromwell’s bill. After a great deal of to-and-fro emendment, it emerged toothless and peppered with provisos, and it may have survived on the statute book as an occasionally activated measure only because it had little actual effect. Thereafter, Cromwell kept away from the enclosure issue for some years, and maybe his lack of success there is why he turned to weirs and water engineering. Fifteen-thirty-five saw Henry VIII and Cromwell embarking on further sewer-related adventures, in which both men invested a great deal of time and worry. The most spectacular single project was their effort to build an effective harbour for Dover, England’s principal crossing-point to mainland Europe, a scheme which gobbled up money all through the 1530s and 1540s, only to face repeated disasters. It had to wait for a complete engineering rethink in the reign of Queen Elizabeth before it began working properly: one of the many ways in which the daughter outshone the achievements of the father.9
The Dover project reflected King Henry’s fascination with his navy, but there was more to it than that. In the same year, King and minister launched an even more ambitious nationwide campaign: to use the commissions of sewers to destroy weirs and water-mills on rivers throughout lowland England, with its sluggish if charming water-courses. Their efforts were sparked early in the year with an approach to Master Secretary from the city authorities in Winchester, who succeeded in raising his concern abo
ut the city’s economic plight, pinpointing the worst problem as obstructions to the city’s river navigation down to Southampton.10 Over the next months it became clear that this particular case was not unconnected to Bishop Gardiner’s estate interest in water-mills on the River Itchen, as well as to an episcopal court jurisdiction which the city wished curbed. So in this instance Cromwell could add to his economic concerns and moral indignation the political satisfaction of harassing a rival.11
Nevertheless, the campaign greatly expanded beyond Winchester in late August 1535, with a nationwide launch by royal circular during the King’s western progress (at the end of which King and minister had the chance to see how things were going in Winchester itself).12 One can sense Bishop Roland Lee’s lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting the campaign in his letters to Cromwell, coupled with resigned acceptance that he would have to do his duty on the matter in the west Midlands; for by then Lee was Lord President in the Welsh Marches.13 Weirs form one of the constant worries in the correspondence of Lord and Lady Lisle over a couple of years after 1535, since a weir of Lady Lisle’s at Umberleigh (Devon) was among those coming under threat, in this case from a commissioner who was a particular friend of Cromwell, Sir William Courtenay of Powderham. The Lisles’ energetic and competent servant John Husee briefed them on the inevitability of demolition, given that the King and Cromwell alike were bafflingly pursuing the issue regardless of immediate economic rationales: ‘his Grace is very earnest in it, for he hath lost himself more than 500 marks by the year in such weirs and mills as hath been pulled down. And Mr Secretary is very earnest in the same and will show no favour.’
Gloomily, Husee cited the words of the royal commission, which spelled out the social ills that it sought to combat: ‘All weirs noisome to the passage of ships or boats, to the hurt of passages or ways and causeways shall be pulled down; and those that be occasion of drowning of any lands of pastures . . . and also those that are the destruction of the increase of fish.’ The consequence was that if any weirs could be defined as responsible for such grievances, ‘then is there no redemption but pull them down, although the same weirs have stood since 500 years before the Conquest.’14 The Lisles’ other senior servant Leonard Smyth confirmed the apparent economic irrationality of what was happening: ‘no man within the realm loseth so much therein as doth the King and the Queen, for their weirs (which are in all countries most commonly best) are destroyed.’15
Cromwell assiduously followed up the initial royal order of August 1535 to enforce compliance. It is astonishing to find among his remembrances preparing legislation for the Parliament of February 1536 (alongside the abolition of ecclesiastical sanctuary liberties and ‘a reformation to diminish’ monastic life) ‘An Act that never weir nor water-mill shall hereafter be erected or made within this realm’. This particular Year Zero measure never made it to the statute book.16 The Dissolution of the Weirs has not figured much in accounts of Henry VIII’s reign, but in 1535–7 it must have caused as much alarm and anger among the gentry of lowland England as the simultaneous surveying and dissolution of lesser monasteries, without any compensating thought of possible profit for either themselves or the King. It therefore provides an interesting comparison with the monastic suppressions, because (as King Henry’s puzzled subjects noticed) it did not march in step with his economic interests. Yet it also alerts us to the fact that, when Henry did dissolve monasteries, there was an analogous element of moral reformation in his thoughts, and in those of the Vice-Gerent as well. Cromwell was still alert for rogue water-mills in 1539, and might, had he lived longer, have gone down in history as the Hammer of the Weirs.17
There are signs that in the year before Cromwell’s downfall the Cardinal’s former assistants in his anti-enclosure campaigns were trying to interest him in renewing Wolsey’s crusade against enclosures. Roger Wigston, a prominent Leicester and Coventry merchant, had been one of the most active movers in Wolsey’s campaign against enclosures in the Midlands in the years after 1517, and given that he was inter alia a sheep-farmer himself, his interest in the moral issue clearly overruled his economic self-interest; we may take it that he felt that there was a socially justifiable code for enclosing land, alongside irresponsible and selfish enclosures. He was back on full throttle in summer 1539 in his efforts to enlist Cromwell:
If God send me health, I intend to view the enclosures between this and Michaelmas that be grievously complained upon in the counties of Warwick, Leicester and Northampton, and to certify your Lordship of the actors and offenders with their qualities and quantities of their acts and offences, so that thereupon commissioners may be sent forth to make enquiry of the same according to the law.18
Yet it was not just the Cardinal’s former agents who looked for remedy via Cromwell: Dr John London, who had not been among Wolsey’s devotees and does not generally figure in history as a man with a social conscience, was urging Cromwell to action against Northamptonshire enclosures in January 1539. By that time, a series of accelerating political crises prevented the minister from moving on to this cause, but Wigston and London clearly judged that since the government’s parallel campaign against weirs had finally run out of steam, it was time to revive a different crusade to protect the weak and vulnerable.19
* * *
*
Next in Cromwell’s catalogue of innovation is the development of official printed propaganda in English directed to a domestic reading public, followed by a keen interest in other varieties of mass communication such as public drama. The efforts started in 1531–2. To use the vernacular printing press was to take a leaf out of Sir Thomas More’s book in more senses than one. Apart from his own massive and bitter literary output, the Lord Chancellor had been doing his best to enrol others in his campaign to defend the old Church. The strategy produced an impressive group of publications or republications of devotional works at this time, designed to steady the traditional faith of those unnerved by the evangelical eloquence of the likes of Tyndale.20
Most threateningly for evangelicals, Lord Chancellor More intimidated William Barlow, a cosmopolitan young evangelical scholar and Augustinian canon, into recanting his heresy, and then got him to write a well-informed denunciation of evangelicalism Europe-wide, including vivid personal observations of Germany’s troubles. The book was published in 1531 by More’s nephew and principal publisher as a Dialogue of these Lutheran Factions.21 Notable were dark words which Barlow put in the mouth of his alter ego, the disillusioned returned evangelical traveller: ‘I let pass my Lord Cardinal’s act in pulling down and suppressing of religious places, our Lord assoil his soul. I will wrestle with no souls: he knoweth by this time whether he did good or evil.’22 It was time to meet such printed fire with fire.
One distinctive feature of the Parliamentary session in winter and spring 1531 was a new departure in the King’s Great Matter: the decision to present his case to a wider public. For the international audience, there was the Censurae, published in Latin just after Parliament’s dispersal that spring. We cannot know whether all the various English tracts circulated in Parliament remained in manuscript, or whether some were put into print for convenience of distribution; no printed copies apparently survive. Nevertheless, from this point on, a new feature of the King’s proceedings was a commitment to presenting his case to a native public in the language most of them would find easiest to read. During 1531, Thomas Cranmer was put to the formidable task of making an English translation of the whole of the Latin Censurae, which when it appeared in November was entitled The Determinations of the most famous and most excellent Universities of Italy and France. Cranmer bravely tried to make the Determinations an endurable read, and made some interesting choices of English words, including what may actually have been his own neologisms – ‘context’ was one which we still find useful, though ‘caroginous’ has not found so many admirers for its useful purpose in describing something which seems to be carrion. Cranmer also tweaked the content itself,
reflecting his own developing evangelical agenda. It was perhaps Tudor England’s first work of abstract theology put into print in the vernacular, so to move beyond the Latin of scholarship he was forced into becoming a linguistic pioneer.23
The next step was to publish works which a public literate in English might find more enjoyable to read than the dry arguments of the Censurae. This policy was implemented in 1532, as the new session of Parliament pushed forward the aggression against the Church which had been such a feature of the session in early 1531. The results hardly matched the flood of evangelical propaganda which Martin Luther had unleashed in Wittenberg after 1517, but in the bucolic atmosphere of the English publishing market there was little precedent for Tudor government to seize the initiative in sponsoring such literature for political or religious purposes, particularly for such a radical purpose as this. The one new mind at work on the intractable problem of the Great Matter definitely identifiable at this time was Thomas Cromwell’s.
It may seem a large claim to put Cromwell at the centre of this new departure. After all, Thomas Cranmer was the translator of the Censurae, that first public English expression of the case for the annulment in print. By his later achievement in presiding over the drafting of two successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and 1552, the Archbishop did indeed make an extraordinary and lasting contribution to the development of the English language. Yet throughout Cranmer’s career his undoubtedly exceptional gifts in the vernacular went very specifically into creating formal liturgical prose or works of academic theological argument. His efforts at entering the arena of popular propaganda, such as his answer to the West Country rebels protesting against the new Prayer Book in 1549, are not distinguished, and his version of the Censurae, despite its linguistic interest, is not out of line with that.24
Thomas Cromwell Page 26
