Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  There be two things to be remembered: one, the reformation of such enormities; the second, the interest of the King his Highness being founder there, whereby in that religion and Order of the Premonstratenses might as well something grow to the King’s advantage as in other [orders], and that discreet father [the Abbot of Welbeck], as ye know, partly to be let of [prevented from exercising] his lordly jurisdiction.47

  Lee thus alerted his friend to possibilities of neatly combining monastic reform with the clipping of abbatial wings: that was to be the hallmark of Cromwell’s ecclesiastical policy over the next few years.

  Alongside all these transactions, and perhaps concentrating the minds of the various monks involved in them, was what looks remarkably like an opportunistic programme of specimen dissolutions during 1532. This clutch of suppressions followed the profile of Wolsey’s programme: one major monastery, in this case the large and prominent London Augustinian house of Holy Trinity or Christ Church Aldgate. Alongside this equivalent of St Frideswide’s Oxford in Wolsey’s dissolutions came satellite suppression of small houses. In each case, there was a good reason: the houses were in trouble. Christ Church, despite its stately church and honourable position in the city (its Prior was an alderman ex officio), was deep in long-term debt. Its suppression came first and very suddenly in late February 1532, with Drs Roland Lee and John Oliver in charge of proceedings.48

  A mark of the novelty of the action at Christ Church was the government’s uncertainty about how to redeploy its redundant assets. In various suppressions over the previous 150 years, monarchs or churchmen had redeployed the estates and buildings of dissolved monasteries for new uses within the Church system, especially for chantry colleges, mostly at Oxford and Cambridge – Wolsey’s being the last.49 New chantries were not going to be founded now, particularly if Cromwell had anything to do with the disposals. One scheme (clearly mooted just before Christ Church’s surrender, because it involved the then current royal exchange of estates with Waltham Abbey) was to make the priory the basis for a new city hospital. The memorandum survives in Cromwell’s papers, together with a draft bill for the 1532 Parliament, but nothing came of it.50 There was even less substance to a rumour that the troublesome Greenwich Observant Franciscans would be moved to the empty buildings; after their truculent sermonizing to the King at Easter 1532, that was never going to happen.51

  Instead, the outcome at Christ Church anticipated the main programme of monastic suppressions. The beneficiary was a layman, Thomas Audley, gaining some of the income and property appropriate to a Lord Chancellor (a deficiency which sadly did not then cease to occupy his thoughts). Audley was a little uncertain of the proprieties in receiving this bonanza without exact precedent. He suggested to Cromwell that he would keep some liturgical use for the stately church, but that came to nothing after the neighbouring parish of St Katherine Cree refused to move their worship there, worrying about how permanent their title might prove to be. John Stow reminisced with some satisfaction that Audley’s subsequent partial demolition of the church had been badly botched.52 Despite all these as yet unsolved questions, the surrender in late February passed without major incident or protest in London, other than muted expressions of unhappiness such as those of St Katherine’s parishioners. That must have emboldened Cromwell and his team for further efforts.

  Roland Lee had other problems on his mind. Besides an increasingly heavy involvement in the legal side of the King’s Great Matter, he currently led a team with a major ecclesiastical task: supervising on behalf of the King the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, which covered a vast area of the west Midlands and northern Welsh borders. The aged Bishop, Geoffrey Blythe, died some time in late 1531. This initiative is in itself odd, because administration of a vacant diocese was the prerogative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and indeed in the subsequent correspondence within the team we hear a mention of Archbishop Warham’s official stoically carrying on his conventional visitation of Coventry and Lichfield sede vacante alongside Lee’s own activities.53 Lee’s group of royal administrators was appointed (as was admittedly the King’s right) to deal with the Bishop’s ‘temporalities’ – his landed possessions as a subject of the Crown. They interpreted that brief as generously as they could, busying themselves with collecting clerical taxes which the old Bishop had allegedly maladministered, plus investigating his laxity over the treatment of prisoners in the episcopal gaol and irregularities around his will.54 Evidently, as was becoming Cromwell’s custom, they were pushing their luck.

  Even more unusual was the accompanying circumstance that a process for making Roland Lee himself the next Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield began on 24 January 1532, but was not then completed until 1534, after the break with Rome and under a different archbishop, who in the course of his administration of that bizarrely prolonged process explicitly noted that there had been opposition to it.55 What was going on? Lee was actually a natural choice for the diocese: he knew it well, having previously been Chancellor and Vicar-General to the late Bishop Blythe from 1525 to 1528. The stop-start nature of this process suggests that Lee’s appointment was seen as a first attempt to break the power of the old Church hierarchy, but by making its move in January 1532 the Crown had struck too soon. As the tightlipped struggle around his preferment progressed, Lee headed the constitutionally odd royal team in the diocese regardless, and was evidently told to report direct to Cromwell. Their actions blatantly marginalized Warham’s jurisdiction before any formal submission of the clergy had taken place, particularly in one respect: a further monastic dissolution.

  The local team administrator was the Archdeacon of Salop, Richard Strete (who at the outset of their work called Cromwell ‘my good master’). On 6 April 1532 Strete reported to Lee that the Prior of Calwich, a small Augustinian priory in Staffordshire, had just died, leaving only one canon in occupation.56 Strete’s follow-up letter to Cromwell of 26 April reported the house now void and therefore escheated to the Crown (this was stretching a point, given the continuing presence of the surviving canon). The following day he had an indenture drafted, granting Calwich to Ralph Longford, a minor courtier and prominent local gentleman, who claimed to be founder. After reciting Longford’s claim, the deed rather confusingly proclaimed the King’s intention ‘the possession and inheritance to dispose and convert’ (altered from ‘descend and revert’, thus radically changing the direction of the sentence) ‘to other godly and charitable uses and purposes, after his Grace’s intent’. The document was in fact a legal mess, ending up as a lease of Calwich at an economic rent (yet to be decided) to Longford or anyone else whom the King chose. Inept or not, if operative it removed the rights of any monastic founder other than the King.57

  This was a remarkable precedent, but even when the team bothered to set up a formal ‘office’ or inquisition to complete the settlement (a month after they had declared Calwich void and taken an inventory of its possessions), that did not end the problems the little monastery raised.58 Longford, alas, was not the only local man with a keen interest in the Calwich estate, for whatever the priory lacked in spiritual athleticism, its barns were full and its cattle fecund. More than a year later Cromwell was still being dragged into irritable correspondence on competing claims – ‘I well perceive who granteth such men an inch they will take an ell,’ he snapped to Archdeacon Strete.59 And what would happen to the remaining canon? He was still hanging around Calwich when Cromwell wrote that letter to Strete in June 1533, and he must be sent to ‘some good house of that religion being near unto you’. There did not seem much remaining of the King’s ‘godly and charitable uses and purposes’.

  We have generous documentation on the Calwich affair, but only one letter survives to illuminate the obscure end of a little Augustinian priory in north Wales at Beddgelert in the same year. The mechanism for its suppression is not clear, since the local Bishop was still in place in 1532 and so there was no question of diocesan temporalities needing royal s
upervision as there was in Coventry and Lichfield. Beddgelert may simply have ended up with no canons, and thus escheated to the Crown within earshot of the nearby commissioners – maybe via that local boy and common friend of Cromwell and Lee, Master Ellis ap Rhys. News of its fading away reached as far as the household of the teenaged Princess Mary in Kent by 30 November of that year. Her leading servants, Margaret Countess of Salisbury and John Lord Hussey, wrote to Cromwell asking for a lease of the priory for one of the Princess’s footmen, ‘for that ye have the letting thereof’. Both signatories were destined to die on the block for defending the world of monasteries and traditional religion, but the fact that they had no hesitation in approaching Cromwell is another little indication that Mary’s household did not regard him as a hostile force at this stage.60

  The clinching proof of the link between Calwich and Beddgelert is that Cromwell bundled their supervision into one administrative job, which he kept personally under his wing. Many people knew this: so the Anglesey magnate Sir Richard Bulkeley riskily presented him with a fait accompli, sending his brother to occupy the tenancy of Beddgelert, relying on a previous face-to-face promise from Cromwell. This chutzpah unsurprisingly did not produce a long-term lease for the Bulkeleys, because soon Dominican Friar-Provincial John Hilsey was after it, for a Welsh protégé from his order studying at Oxford. Hilsey added diplomatically that Friar Griffith ‘would have made friends to the King’s Grace for the gift of the same, unless I commanded him the contrary, for to avoid and escape your Mastership’s displeasure’.61 It was no doubt with relief that in 1535 Cromwell formally handed over this tedious little task to John Gostwick, a gourmet of financial trivia as well as another former senior servant of Wolsey.62 The fate of Beddgelert remained complicated and bound up in monastic tangles: first the Crown granted it out in January 1536 in a property exchange with a royal monastery, Chertsey Abbey in Surrey, and hence it passed in 1537 to the very last monastery founded in Henry’s England, a new Bisham Abbey just up the Thames, which was actually only Chertsey moved to different buildings. When the refounded Bisham closed after only a year, Beddgelert Priory really was gone, leaving nothing but a modest parish church in a quiet Welsh valley.63

  There is a possibility that a fourth monastery escaped these experiments in dissolution, thanks to some second thoughts from Cromwell: another little Augustinian house, at Hardham in Sussex. Bishop Sherburne of Chichester said gratefully in either late 1532 or 1533 that by Cromwell’s ‘prudent counsel and charitable words, the priory of Hardham (the which was decreed to have been suppressed) standeth and prospereth’.64 This is a piquant compliment, since in 1525 Cromwell had been the means of stopping Bishop Sherburne himself from suppressing the similarly minor Augustinian priory at Shulbrede (see above, this page). Sherburne’s letter is annoyingly difficult to date precisely, with a chance that he was referring to Cromwell securing a reprieve of Hardham under Wolsey. The relationship between Hardham’s survival and Cromwell’s previous defence of Shulbrede Priory is thus difficult to recover, but a later deed preserves intriguing straws in the wind: Hardham really did meet its end in autumn 1534 in a collusive sale to its gentry patron – shades of Calwich – a transaction involving both Cromwell himself with his servants and friends, and some of the erstwhile local friends of Shulbrede. Before that extinction, just as at Shulbrede in 1525, the temporarily reprieved Prior of Hardham had gratefully granted Cromwell an annuity.65

  There are clear common threads in the dissolutions of 1532. All concerned Augustinian houses. A problem for the Austin canons was the very flexibility and brevity of their Rule. What was an asset in the twelfth-century glory-days of their foundations was now their weakness, as an excess of small institutions languished both economically and in spiritual morale. Otherwise, all four cases were notable for the extreme untidiness of what happened to the assets of the unfortunate monasteries, and for the general drift towards their ending up in the hands of laymen. This latter result was a complete innovation in late medieval English monasticism – it had last happened in the Anglo-Saxon period, but it was now to be the dominant motif in King Henry’s dissolutions.

  From the late fifteenth century, a new attitude is perceptible towards struggling monasteries, best exemplified in that unsentimental monarch Henry VII. Between 1494 and 1507, he had likewise dissolved four semi-derelict monasteries for his own benefit, and although some of that benefit was for the wealth of his soul, material wealth also entered into his redeployments, for he extracted a tidy sum in three suppressions from the institutions which received their estates.66 Yet still, the end-result was a redistribution for spiritual and educative purposes, as with Wolsey’s suppressions. Now, in 1532, the rules had not simply broken down: as the untidy outcome of these four suppressions shows, they were being rewritten. Moreover, if monasteries with flourishing farms were to be disposed of on a large scale, and their remaining monks dealt with, there needed to be a system in place, with officials dedicated to handling such minutiae. It would not do to take up Cromwell’s valuable time. All this was a lesson learned. The consequence, in 1536, was the Court of Augmentations.

  It is not a new idea that the dissolutions of 1532 were a test of public reaction. That shrewd commentator Thomas Fuller, looking back in the 1650s to the end of Christ Church Aldgate, noted wryly that ‘Some conjecture this was King Henry’s design . . . to make a discovery in people’s affections, how they resented the same. He dispatched this convent first . . . and if he had found the people much startled thereat, he could quickly knock off, retrench his resolutions, and (dexterous to decline envy for himself) handsomely cast the same on his instruments employed therein.’67 That nicely nails King Henry’s devious sense of self-preservation. Moreover, it is possible to see in the manner of these dissolutions a debate which resumed three years later, when the royal Councillors began considering really ambitious plans for resuming Wolsey’s cull of small monasteries. Among the family papers of Cromwell’s Kentish Protestant friends the Wyatts there survives a fragmentary reminiscence in a late Tudor account of the Reformation which is in other respects independently well informed. Its story is that when the question of a major programme of dissolutions came up (from the context, in early 1536), Cromwell counselled caution on the King and his Council, with good reason:

  For when the late Cardinal Wolsey had obtained your Majesty’s favour and licence of the Bishop of Rome to dissolve certain monasteries for the building of his Colleges at Oxford and Ipswich, yet the same (were it never so gently done and circumspectly used and that by one and one) was not done without some disquiet, as everybody knoweth. Wherefore mine advice is that it should be done by little and little, not suddenly by Parliament. And I doubt not but seeing how horrible this kind of religion [that is, the monastic life] is and how odious to the wiser sort of people, they may be easily persuaded to leave their [monastic] cowls and to render their possessions to your Majesty, by whose progenitors they were first erected.68

  The writer then claims that Lord Chancellor Audley and his colleague the ambitious lawyer and civil servant Richard Rich prevailed against this advice, successfully arguing for a Parliamentary Act to dissolve the lesser monasteries and the erection of a Court of Augmentations to administer their wealth. Considering the vigorous Protestant partisanship throughout this manuscript, its story here is so out of line with the general Elizabethan exaltation of Cromwell as scourge of the monasteries that it deserves to be taken seriously. It fits exactly Cromwell’s cautious mode of procedure in 1532. The leading role of Richard Rich corresponds to a remark of the French ambassador at the moment of Cromwell’s fall in 1540, that Rich ‘was first deviser of the casting down of abbeys and all that was newly done in the Church, so that he devised and Cromwell lent his authority’.69

  In this policy discussion Cromwell was, as the anonymous writer pointed out, speaking from experience, including his uncomfortable time as scapegoat for popular fury against monastic dissolutions in autumn 1529. In 15
32, amid his discreet suppressions, there had been the prudent snub to Audley by the parish of St Katherine Cree, and a rumble of discontented talk. That summer of 1532, for instance, Cromwell and his old London friend Alderman John Allen investigated a claim that on 24 July the Prior of the London Crutched Friars said to his guests in expansive mood over dinner ‘that a certain religious man should come unto him who privily should say that the King’s highness was determined to put down certain religious houses; adding these words, “that if he so did, whereas tofore he was called Defensor Fidei, he should be called Destructor Fidei”’.70 This reflected what was actually going on that year, and was the precursor of much bilious comment to come. Cromwell would remember the Crutched Friars when urging caution in the policy debates of 1535. The anonymous narrator tells us that ‘the rest of the Council, making the King believe he should at all times be able to repress easily all insolency and fury of the people, agreed it should be done by Act of Parliament.’ Yet ‘that [which] he [Cromwell] feared after came to pass’: namely the Pilgrimage of Grace.

  There is a festive tailpiece to all this monastic adventuring in 1532. Our journey now leads us to Cambridge and then to Norfolk. Among the slew of exchanges of land confirmed by Act of Parliament in 1532 consolidating Henry’s royal estates around London was one between the Crown and Christ’s College Cambridge: the Act recited a grant by the King on 2 January 1532, in return for the College’s manor of Roydon in Essex, of yet another small Augustinian priory, Bromehill up in Norfolk Breckland.71 It was then some three years since Stephen Gardiner, Roland Lee, Thomas Rush and Thomas Cromwell had wound up the affairs of Bromehill Priory for Cardinal Wolsey; so the tale links those earlier dissolutions to the fresh crop in 1532.72

  The deal is interesting in a number of ways: first, it was the only one of the whole batch of exchanges from this time to involve an Oxbridge college. Second, the newly arrived Master of the College, Henry Lockwood, was not very happy about it, and sounds at odds with his own Fellows on the subject, describing it plaintively to Cromwell in the middle of its passage through Parliament as ‘their busy exchange of lands’. The fact that one of Lockwood’s most senior and distinguished Fellows, Robert Gunthorpe, had long been Rector of the two churches in Weeting, the parish in which Bromehill lies, probably tells us all we need to know about that.73 More interesting still are the intimate links between Cromwell and Christ’s College at that moment. In 1534, the ever-lugubrious Lockwood reminded Cromwell that ‘I was one of the first suitors to you after you were put in authority under the King’s Grace.’ If he had thought further about it, this was perhaps not the most tactful thing to say to a patron, but for us it at least suggests a first contact in summer 1531, as the College’s land exchange was taking shape.74