Cranmer was not the man to initiate the first hesitant English imitation of Lutheran Flugschriften. The likelihood is that Cromwell was doing what he did so often in the next few years, nudging the King into an enthusiasm which Henry then made his own. Cromwell was not himself inclined to authorship, but he was a vigorous impresario of many other voices, directing an increasingly formidable output of official propaganda not merely in print, but in the pulpit and popular drama. His hour for such enterprise had come: for, as we have seen, by the end of 1531 the King was allowing him the power to shape official policy: an opportunity through which he shaped a near-decade of English politics, and much more beyond.
Certainly the mood quickened in 1532, perhaps as Cromwell was better placed to defy disapproval from conservatives like the Duke of Norfolk, and while More’s oppositional literary production continued its relentless forward march to provide an incentive. Probably during the Parliamentary session of winter and spring 1532, an elderly burgess of Parliament for Dorchester called Jasper Fyllol published a racy pamphlet attacking in unashamed evangelical terms clerical arrogance and greed: Against the Possessions of the Clergy. Fyllol went so far as to say it was against divine law for clerics to possess landed property, a proposition of John Wyclif’s condemned by a General Council of the Church more than a century before.25 The sentiment matches very well the Lollard petition and its contemporary update which we have already contemplated as circulating in the 1532 Parliament.
Fyllol followed this up in 1533 with an anonymous second effort in the same style, Enormities used by the Clergy, which has the distinction of including the first description of Bishop Fisher infuriating Parliament by his speech in autumn 1529 (see above, this page). Fyllol would have been an eye-witness to that, and he may also quote his own Parliamentary speech commending the 1532 Supplication against the Ordinaries, which would be a rare survival of what was said in an early Tudor Parliament. He certainly takes the highly risky step of ventriloquizing a biting address to the clergy by King Henry himself. Fyllol’s subsequent career does not suggest self-destructive lunacy, but it does involve important service to Thomas Cromwell (see below, this page). The pamphlets were published by a printer who can be found a little later enjoying Cromwell’s patronage, and who in this venture might have needed the minister’s reassurance that he would not suffer bad consequences. Fyllol’s own spirited if unsuccessful attempt at the end of 1532 to get a lucrative office in the London Customs service by alleging corruption among the existing officers lodged itself in Cromwell’s archive. It thus seems likely that these fiery tracts had Cromwell’s encouragement within the bounds of deniability. Notably, despite their radical content, they never appeared on the frequent official lists of banned literature.26
Much more openly associated with the King was the appearance in September 1532 of a rather well-written tract called A Glass of the Truth, a dialogue between a lawyer and a divine, which did better with the English public than the Determinations, and was widely supposed to have been written by the King himself.27 It was a selection from what could have been very dry material in that research-mine of historical sources, the Collectanea satis copiosa, but its inclusion of some discussion of the late Prince Arthur’s sexual exploits probably helped to boost sales: no worries in 1532 about sparing Queen Katherine’s feelings. Two years further on, in 1534, the likely principal editor of the Collectanea satis copiosa, Edward Foxe, further cannibalized the manuscript compilation for his magisterial De vera differentia. That was a much more substantial Latin (and therefore international) defence of what was by then the established royal supremacy in the Church, but in 1532 the Glass was addressed to a popular English audience, and got it, running to three editions in Henry’s reign.
There is indeed direct evidence that Henry took a keen interest in the writing of the Glass, but as with all Henry’s literary compositions someone else did the donkey-work. Correspondence in September 1532 puts Cromwell himself in the editorial seat, fielding nervous attempts of colleagues to get round the King’s possessive refusal to consider revisions of the text as it was about to be published.28 There was a particular reason for publishing it then: the Glass was the first of a pair of publications calculated to make the best of October’s meeting of the Kings of England and France at Calais to discuss Henry’s imminent Boleyn marriage (see below, this page). This summit was not guaranteed to please the English public, tutored to see the French as their hereditary enemies, nor those politicians who for perhaps more sophisticated reasons preferred an English alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor. The meeting needed presentation.
In late summer 1532, the Glass was translated into French by Cromwell’s old friend and his son’s former tutor John Palsgrave. That was published at much the same time as the English version, no doubt for distribution during the Calais festivities. The royal ambassador in Italy, Nicholas Hawkins (another Putney boy, nephew of Bishop West of Ely), attempted a Latin translation that same autumn on Henry VIII’s instructions, but he was clearly worried that the work was too racy and personal to launch on an international audience, and nothing came of that idea.29 What did immediately come out for an eager London public – with a speed that must have taken some forethought, before Henry’s return to England – was a slim but action-packed description of the meeting of the Kings: The Manner of the Triumph at Calais and Boulogne. Complete with an exciting cover-illustration of the King of France on horseback, it did well enough for a second edition with added lists of French notables to drool over. It was published by one of London’s most committed evangelical printers, a protégé of Cromwell, John Gough, in partnership with the veteran printer Wynkyn de Worde. The pamphlet was a departure from Gough’s normal religious fare; maybe he was the only printer available to do a rush job.
Naturally the content did not reveal those connections, which would have been beside the point, and it diplomatically made much of the Duke of Norfolk’s part in the Calais proceedings, while failing to mention Master Cromwell. Yet the text did contain an interesting little piece of political spin: the description of the chief dance drew attention to ‘my Lady Mary’ without further identification, in a fashion which would have led casual readers to think that Princess Mary was present, which emphatically she was not. The Mary who was dancing was Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, who did not inspire the public affection enjoyed by her namesake. Forming a pair with the Glass, this instant-news pamphlet is a remarkable piece of government public relations in print.30 From then on, the outpouring of print in the interests of both Henry’s plans and Cromwell’s own religious agenda seemed unstoppable until the royal minister’s fall. We will find him extending this engagement with the public to the stage, previously so much the property of traditional religion (see below, this page).
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Cromwell’s third major preoccupation from late 1531 was one we have come to expect from Thomas Wolsey’s sometime agent: monasteries, including a small and tentative but unmistakable trial of further dissolutions. This was part of a wider programme of interfering in the internal affairs of the English Church. The extensive intervention in monastic life which he now resumed is the most striking example of the way in which between 1530 and 1534 he was given a great many responsibilities without any formal royal title. What Cromwell did in Church affairs in 1532 has such important implications for the remainder of his career that it is worth examining in detail, sending us on journeys the length and breadth of Henry VIII’s kingdom. Master Cromwell himself will not be coming with us, for he is too busy now with undertakings for his Majesty in London and Westminster, but his friends and servants will be our companions, as they ride out to do his and the King’s bidding.
The variety of ecclesiastical business on which the royal minister now launched himself reproduces fairly completely what he would do with explicit formal powers after 1534 as Vicar-General and Vice-Gerent in Spirituals. The work seems to have started suddenly in December 1531 and
thereafter remained constant and frequent. It morphed seamlessly out of all he had done in the previous year to expand the royal estate for new royal palaces, particularly transforming York Place into Whitehall and expanding north of Westminster, with land purchases and exchanges, the latter mostly with religious foundations. From then on, his activity showed all the signs of the later omnivorousness of the Vice-Gerency: thus on 30 December 1532 Sir Edward Guildford wrote from Kent protesting at Cromwell’s order to the trustees of a local chantry to dismiss its priest and replace him with someone whom Sir Edward considered thoroughly unsatisfactory. They would have to talk about it when he came up for the next session of Parliament, he said crossly. Why, he might have asked, would Cromwell the Clerk of the Hanaper and Master of the Jewels have become involved in such a trivial ecclesiastical matter?31
Guildford and Cromwell were friends, and Guildford a familiar figure at Court, but it is remarkable that the wider general public were also already aware of the minister’s interest in Church affairs. Moreover, the public knew him as the enemy of the traditional Church hierarchy, and that general impression gave a fine opportunity to three West Country wideboys to exploit the naivety of an aged priest in the Blackdown Hills entangled in a local dispute. In late September 1532, they rode up from the Somerset Levels to stage a mock-arrest of the priest, claiming a ‘special commandment’ from Cromwell to bring him before the royal Council. Their demands for money were accompanied by blood-curdling threats: ‘if he knew how sore Master Cromwell was against priests, and how grievously he handled them, he would rather spend all the goods he had than come before him, for he [Cromwell] was a man without any conscience against priests.’ It was the following January before the poor cleric got the chance to complain against the unscrupulous trio, and the minister thus slandered filed this sad tale in his papers.32
Cromwell’s current interference in Church affairs was led by his relations with monasteries, just as in the open evolution of the Vice-Gerency a couple of years later. First, in December 1531 and the beginning of 1532 came his steering of major exchanges of property between the Crown and three royal monasteries around London, Waltham Holy Cross, Westminster Abbey and the Charterhouse of Sheen: part of a complex set of such transactions, the non-monastic elements of which do not seem to have concerned him nearly so much.33 Draft agreements survive in all three cases, that for Waltham being entirely in Cromwell’s hand, as we have already noted (see above, this page); subsequent negotiations there involved his trusted servant Ralph Sadler. Cromwell seems to have taken over the Westminster agreement at a late stage, since that draft inserts into a long list of legal worthies his own name (as ‘one of the King’s Council’) and that of Attorney-General Hales, a pair who in the other deal with Waltham were actually the original agents.34
Straight away, however, one finds Cromwell doing far more than supervising land transactions and business; there are more than 150 exchanges of letters between him and heads of religious houses between 1532 and 1534.35 Monastic heads regarded him as the best person to write to in time of trouble. So in July 1532 the Abbot of Jervaulx (Yorkshire) wrote to him, despite being ‘unacquainted’, in order to stop the Bishop of London from sending back a runaway monk expelled from Jervaulx some years before.36 Cromwell routinely took the lead in settling the choice of monastic heads all over the country, for all the world as if he were Cardinal Legate like his old master, but now on behalf of the King; actually he was intervening more frequently than Wolsey had ever done. Simply for the year 1532, evidence for his interventions survives from St Bartholomew’s Smithfield in London, Bruton, Montacute and Muchelney (all Somerset), Holm Cultram (Cumberland), Tilty (Essex), Vaudey (Lincolnshire) and St James Northampton, and no doubt these identifiable instances are only a part of the story.37
In the case of Muchelney, the appointment of a new abbot for this ancient Benedictine foundation was of an indecorously young monk in his twenties, and it was effected with substantial money arriving informally in Cromwell’s pocket.38 This was not something that happened much in the later years of his ascendancy. Cromwell was offered many bribes in his career; following up the outcome usually reveals that they were not taken or, if they were, they proved a wasted investment. Acceptance of the Muchelney bribe was perhaps the result of over-excitement at his new power, or perhaps a reflection of the fact that at this early stage of his career in royal service his minor formal office and modest estates meant he was short of money. Already many monasteries, gentry and nobility were setting up a regular fee for him, as one would to a legal consultant, often with a formal grant of nominal office. Presents, of course, were always acceptable. They oiled the wheels of early modern government, particularly if offered with a little self-deprecating joke, such as that of Bishop West of Ely in March 1533, who in regretting that he could not do a requested favour sent Cromwell ‘a poor token of St Audrey’ (founder-saint of his cathedral, from whose proverbially down-market fair our word ‘tawdry’ derives). The present, not tawdry at all, could have been anything from a gold coin to a pie. What is missing in general from the evidence of Cromwell’s finances is the huge bribe. That was not his style.39
Cromwell acted in both monastic and general Church business in concert with his great friend Roland Lee. We have met Lee before: a Northumberland man with a Cambridge doctorate in canon law, Cromwell’s former colleague in dissolutions under Wolsey. Like Cromwell, Lee had been loyal to their old master to the bitter end – one strong element in their enduring friendship – and in the early 1530s Lee’s gruff fondness for the early-teenaged Gregory Cromwell gave him a special place in the proud father’s esteem.40 That avuncular interest, which Lee extended to a variety of his own nephews and nieces, suggests a man whose clerical vocation did not include much sympathy for the cloistered life. Indeed, he was not an especially clerical clergyman (which may have commended him to Cromwell): Archbishop Cranmer distinguished him from various other possible Lees as ‘Dr Lee the lawyer’ when letting Ambassador Hawkins know of new episcopal appointments in December 1533.41 Nor was the civil lawyer an enthusiastic preacher; on one occasion soon after becoming a bishop, Lee approached the task of preaching the royal supremacy with the gingerliness of a man who claimed to have been ‘never hithertofore in pulpit’.42
Lee’s letters to Cromwell sparkle with sharp humour, of which that last claim might be an example. The pair’s informal rapport is perceptible even when Cromwell in his years of greatness, constrained by other demands and pressures, behaved high-handedly towards his old friend (see below, this page). Lee brought an extensive northern gentry cousinage of Lees and others to his partnership with Cromwell, many of whom proved their usefulness in various ways, not least in giving Cromwell lines of communication into a part of the kingdom which he did not know personally. Now in 1531–2 their old co-operation in matters ecclesiastical revived, extending royal control over the Church in England, at the same time as Cromwell pushed forward that programme in Parliament.
The powers which were to become the Vice-Gerency and once had been Wolsey’s as papal legate a latere were not as yet wholly in Cromwell’s hands. There were various English monastic jurisdictions which the Cardinal had been able to override by virtue of his legatine powers, and which on the eve of a major confrontation with the Papacy now needed fresh attention. The Cistercian Order, for example, was part of an international corporation with its mother house in France at Cîteaux, and its current visitor was a Frenchman, the Abbot of Chaalis. Wolsey had substituted a homegrown Cistercian visitor, the Abbot of Waverley, but in April 1532 the King replaced Chaalis with a wider commission of English Cistercian abbots instead. This had happened before, but the royal commission justified it now by saying that it was not convenient to admit a stranger into the realm – a full year before the break with Rome. Despite that provision, the new mood of 1532 was such that Cistercians or their patrons wishing to challenge the abbots in royal commission turned to Cromwell; this happened at Bruerne, Vaudey
and Tilty alike in 1532–3.43 At the same time Roland Lee intervened in a developing crisis at Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire: he was the agent whereby his relative the Earl of Rutland, hereditary patron of Rievaulx, turned to Cromwell to get a judgment of the abbatial commissioners overturned.44
By contrast, the Premonstratensian Order was an exempt jurisdiction which the Crown could not override with the excuse of excluding a stranger from the realm, because very early in Henry VIII’s reign the English Premonstratensians had patriotically secured exemption from their mother house in France and were therefore headed in the realm by the Abbot of Welbeck in Nottinghamshire.45 Nevertheless it was to Cromwell, once more via Roland Lee, that the Master of Christ’s College Cambridge turned about a Premonstratensian abbatial election at Coverham in Yorkshire. He wanted to advance a monk who was probably Roger Horsman, brother of a Fellow of Christ’s by the name of Leonard Horsman (a Yorkshireman and himself already a client of Cromwell). Lee first approached Cromwell about Coverham in late 1531 or 1532. On that occasion, Cromwell was distracted by ‘manifold business’, perhaps diplomatically in order to avoid a face-off with Welbeck, but a little later Roger Horsman duly got his promotion as Abbot of Coverham, for a while, at least.46 Working towards that goal, Lee made a shrewd effort to get his friend’s interest focused back on what he represented as a troubled house, in the course of a long letter to Cromwell on New Year’s Day 1533:
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