Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  The volume’s contents have one remarkable feature: an almost total absence of the Archbishop’s letters to Cromwell. Of Cranmer’s 111 outgoing letters, only one in the main period of the collection is addressed to the royal minister, and this in a period during which we actually possess no fewer than seventeen original letters from the Archbishop to Cromwell in the State Papers, surviving from what was obviously an intense correspondence. Of those seventeen, on three separate occasions Cranmer wrote twice to Cromwell on the same day.19 There is only one plausible explanation for this absence: a second letter-book contained Cranmer’s letters to Cromwell, probably supplemented by the Archbishop’s letters to the King. After three letters to King Henry, the existing book has fifteen blank pages (in which St George wrote his notes), as if an early decision was made not to carry on entering such material, but thereafter to put them elsewhere. Another strong indication is that at folio 47 the clerk has written out a complete address for a letter to Cromwell, and then nothing further, as if he then realized he had inadvertently picked up the wrong letter-book, and so moved to enter his copy in the other one. Alas, Cranmer’s second volume joined so many of his papers in oblivion.20

  A pair of ultimately incompatible ideals united Cranmer and Cromwell: loyalty to the King and the furthering of evangelical reformation. In view of Henry’s capricious approach to theology and frequent religious traditionalism, this was never going to be an easy combination to manage. On the second matter, Cranmer could always write in an unbuttoned fashion to his colleague about promoting godliness and the Gospel, but there was a marked difference between them. Cranmer was totally unwavering in his enthusiasm for the cause. For him, the recent convert, the world divided into strivers after truth and deluded or depraved followers of Antichrist, although his gentle and thoughtful disposition meant he could always hope for the deluded to be persuaded to follow the path of righteousness (he was a predestinarian, and believed God would guide those whom he had decreed for salvation). The Archbishop’s household and the clergy associated with it were consistently aggressive in their evangelicalism; each promotion of Cranmer’s clients was a little pinprick against false teaching in the Tudor Church, and there was no comfort for those of traditional religious outlook from him.

  Cromwell was both more flexible and more ruthless than Cranmer. It was all very well for a priest and a former Cambridge don to enjoy his ideological purity; the politician was managing a far more complex job, doing the dirty political work he was sparing Cranmer. The Archbishop only really learned the art of political survival when he had to, after Cromwell had been brought to the scaffold. In subsequent crises he did acquire a hard-headed toughness in public life which met its match only in the wholly unexpected national reversal of direction on Edward VI’s death. In tussling with the growing pile of business on his desk, Cromwell had much to weigh up and balance beyond the concern of his high-minded colleague.

  Cromwell’s picaresque life and clubbability brought him plenty of traditionalist-minded friends. There were not only folk from Putney days, up the social scale as far as Bishop West of Ely, but a throng of convivial relationships acquired in his peripatetic service under Wolsey. It was in fact this latter group who provided the main supporters for his entrance into the King’s service. Only a fool would have abandoned such good friends now, and it is arguable that only a knave betrays friendships solely to promote an idea. In any case, Cromwell’s theological radicalism perhaps already not only outstripped that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but also outran what would ever be possible to change in Henry’s realm, even with the extraordinary powers over the Church that the royal Councillor was now steadily acquiring.21

  One personal clash in Cromwell’s circle is especially revelatory of his multiple loyalties in his years of power: an astonishing outburst of pique from his old servant and friend Stephen Vaughan over the nomination of Cromwell’s other great friend, Roland Lee, to be Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Vaughan was not himself immune to the pull of family over conviction: he was very fond of his wife’s brother, the talented priest-musician John Gwynedd, whose traditionalist outlook must have been apparent to him, but whom he consistently commended to Cromwell for promotion.22 Despite this, his attack on Roland Lee, written from Antwerp on 1 November 1533, by which time Lee’s prospective advancement was public knowledge, is an extreme example of Vaughan’s lack of proportion, and of a propensity for self-righteous ranting which in the end curtailed his own career.23

  Vaughan appended his philippic against Lee to a plea to be recalled from a long and unrewarding tour of diplomatic duty in the Low Countries; a lesser man would have realized this was not an ideal combination. ‘That which follows is superfluous, though my mind is such as condescendeth not to silence,’ he began ominously:

  You have lately holpen an earthly beast, a mole, and an enemy to all godly learning, into the office of his damnation: a Papist, an idolater, and a fleshly priest unto a Bishop of Chester.* Remember God in all your facts [deeds], let no affections of persons lead you to condescend or work so evil a deed. You cannot undo that you have done . . . Who knoweth more of the Bishops’ iniquity than you? Who knoweth more of their tyranny, falsehood and untruth against God, prince and man than you? And should you help [‘in this time specially’, Vaughan added as an afterthought] to increase the number of wicked men where there is a lack and so great a need of good and virtuous men? Be you sorry for it, and help him with your good counsel, for I am more sorry for this deed done by you than for all the things that ever I knew you do.

  ‘I write not for any malice to the man whom you have so holpen, but rather to show you my judgement therein,’ Vaughan continued – the cry of the passive-aggressive in every age – and after much moralizing on true friendship he rounded off with ‘fare you well with long continuance and increase of all your godly enterprises.’ The parting barb was in the ‘godly’, and his ‘mole’ insult is a striking image for Lee’s traditionalist blindness in religion.

  What jealous incomprehension of a rival friendship resounds through this diatribe! It would not be the last time he exploded in indignation against his patron, and one has to admire his courage, when more and more of the pile in Cromwell’s in-tray resounded with sycophancy. Vaughan’s next letter from the Low Countries three weeks later was notably and uncharacteristically brief, after receiving a letter from Cromwell as usual now lost, but which we may suppose told him in no uncertain terms to mind his own business.24 It was hardly surprising that Cromwell ignored Vaughan’s ill-natured eloquence, not least given the obvious rapport between Roland Lee and Gregory Cromwell. Yet it is also a tribute to the minister’s forbearance that after this he went on using Vaughan on the same sort of diplomatic and general tasks as before, and even put him in the way of minor promotions.

  We glimpse here the awkward faultline separating Cromwell’s gentry or clerical friends of Wolsey days from his older circle of godly mercantile Londoners like Vaughan. Archbishop Cranmer did not face similar divided loyalties as he joyfully exploited his new resources and promoted his own godly Cambridge friends to infuse the archiepiscopal machine of the Province of Canterbury with evangelical purpose. Nevertheless, the rapport between minister and Archbishop did begin to draw together the various evangelical circles. Not completely: as we have seen, Cromwell’s reconciliation with Anne Boleyn’s evangelical clientage did not extend to Thomas Goodricke (even though Cranmer consecrated Goodricke and Lee as bishops on the same day, 19 April 1534), nor did it include Anne’s almoner John Skip.25 Other evangelicals benefiting from Anne’s favour probably had pre-existing and separate acquaintance with Cromwell from Cambridge. The most important was Hugh Latimer, whose frequent letters to Cromwell throughout the 1530s were enlivened with the same sort of savage and informal wit as Roland Lee’s, albeit with a swaggering godliness. Latimer and Lee had a rather similar hand, rapid and semi-italic, which seems to have been common among academics arriving in the universities around
the turn of the century. Both clearly enjoyed dispensing with a secretary when writing to Cromwell.

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  Now Parliament must meet again, to make its contribution to the matrimonial jigsaw. As in 1531, foreign affairs caused its prorogation through autumn 1532 – in this latter case, the King’s absence in Calais. Before leaving London for that diplomatic fiesta, Henry decided on a further date of 4 February 1533, which as Lord Keeper Audley observed to Cromwell in October 1532 was ‘a very good time, for it is about the midst of Hilary Term, and the days then shall wax somewhat fair again’ (a saving on morning candles, in other words).26 Audley finally got his eagerly anticipated promotion to Lord Chancellor a week before Parliament reconvened. This had consequences: now he presided over the Lords rather than the Commons, in place of Sir Thomas More.

  Audley’s substitute as Speaker of the Commons was Humphrey Wingfield, an appointment reeking of Cromwell’s contrivance, since Wingfield was a friend from Ipswich days and former senior legal consultant for Wolsey.27 Cromwell, Audley and Wingfield were tasked with passing legislation to give Archbishop-elect Cranmer powers to declare the Aragon marriage null. The vehicle of this final solution of Henry’s obsession was an Act ‘in Restraint of Appeals’ to any jurisdiction beyond the realm, taking the sting out of Queen Katherine’s appeal to the Pope. But before that measure was launched on Parliament there were other matters to attend to.

  Cromwell made meticulous preparations for what past experience suggested would be an extremely testing session. One apparent innovation had lasting significance: a regular system of what were later called by-elections, to replace MPs who could no longer sit (usually because they were dead). Accordingly, in summer 1532 Cromwell got the Clerk of the Crown to give him an annotated list of current membership. He then handed over the list not to a member of Lord Keeper Audley’s staff, which would have been the correct procedure for such a piece of paper, but to a Crown official with whom he was developing a fruitful administrative relationship: Thomas Wriothesley, Clerk of the Signet. Wriothesley drew up a list of seats to be filled, and so they were, in time for the new session of Parliament in February 1533. One of these new MPs was Cromwell’s friend Thomas Alvard, left high and dry when spurned by the electors of Orford back in 1529. Cromwell went on attending to such vacancies: one of his memoranda in October 1533 preparatory to yet another session of this Parliament was ‘The new election of such burgesses, knights, and citizens as are lacking in Parliament’. The practice of choosing replacement MPs through by-elections became one grievance raised in the northerners’ Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, though one feels that as a cause of major national rebellion it was a bit of a makeweight.28

  Such by-elections were a necessary innovation in a Parliament which eventually sat over an extraordinary and unprecedented seven years. Yet this apparently minor piece of administrative creativity was also the outward sign of the momentous decision of the 1530s. In these years there was so much business of national importance and controversial character being transacted that it would have been foolish to impose it on the kingdom by royal fiat. Rather, it demanded the appearance of consensus, even initiative, from the highest assembly of the realm. As a result of this need, it was during the 1530s that the assembly of ‘commons’ became a ‘House’ with a status equal at least in terms of function to the Lords, and most legislation was introduced in the Commons. Soon afterwards in 1548 it acquired its own permanent chamber in the Palace of Westminster.29 Official propaganda and public pronouncements put out through these years fully exploited this rhetoric of consensus in a variety of ways, emphasizing the active role of Parliament in a manner with little precedent.

  The customary form of opening for a Parliamentary statute was some variation on ‘Be it enacted by the King our Sovereign Lord and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in this present Parliament assembled and by authority of the same, that . . .’. Several of the most important statutes of the early 1530s changed this formula, to suggest an approach by subjects to the sovereign; that was the form of ‘English Bills’ initiating a lawsuit in Chancery or in the prerogative courts such as Star Chamber and Requests, on which the form of privately introduced bills in Parliament was traditionally based. It may not be coincidental that these were the courts Cromwell had known best as a practising lawyer. So the first Act of Succession in 1534 (which we will scrutinize later) took the form of a petition to the King from ‘your most humble and obedient subjects the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in this present Parliament assembled’. They demanded action ‘to foresee and provide for the perfect surety of both you and your most lawful succession and heirs . . .’. Similarly, some of the most important royal proclamations of this period studiously linked themselves to previous Parliamentary action. So the proclamation depriving Queen Katherine of her royal style on 5 July 1533 referred back to legislation by the ‘common assent’ of the recent Parliament and the two Convocations. The King, in this constructed pageant, was a wise and thoughtful ruler, listening to the worries and fears of his subjects and giving them judicious remedy.30

  This intensive use of Parliament in the 1530s, a crucial moment in its consolidation and growth when many other such assemblies in Europe were atrophying, had implications not merely for the religious future of Tudor England, but for the shape of national history thereafter. When, over the next 400 years, other European commonwealths evolved into something like nations, it was usually through an exercise of will by monarchs who felt little need of their medieval representative assemblies. Cromwell the Parliamentary veteran is the most likely candidate for having promoted Parliament in the kingdom of England at this moment. It is much less likely that his plans encompassed later centuries, and there was another immediate negative consequence. If the official theory of the 1530s ran that the realm was united with one voice as expressed in Parliament, once this expression had been made anyone dissenting was not a true subject, or churchman, lord, knight or burgess. The fate of such individuals could be dire. If Cromwell crafted the rhetoric, he was also put in charge of enforcing the consequences.

  Given the stormy atmosphere of the 1532 Parliament, there is no doubt that Cromwell would have done his best to influence in a useful direction the choices of replacement MPs for the new Parliamentary session, though the ability of the Crown to achieve perfect obedience was strictly limited. The Lords too were augmented with compliant votes. The Abbot of Burton-on-Trent was summoned for the first time in Burton Abbey’s history, but then he was Thomas Cranmer’s good friend William Benson alias Boston, already involved in the preparations for annulment legislation, and in any case about to be rewarded with promotion to Westminster Abbey. Benson did not actually actually sit in the Lords as Abbot of Westminster till the following session of Parliament a year later, so this summons was anticipating that promotion, with Cromwell’s usual creative distortion of precedent. The King also used his latitude in summoning to the Lords to bring in three eldest sons of noblemen (Lord Rochford most senior among them) plus one young peer lately a concern of Cromwell’s during his wardship, Lord Monteagle, who was retrieved from his home in the North despite a previous dispensation not to attend.31

  Then there was the crucial bill itself. The future Act in Restraint of Appeals took a great deal of drafting and redrafting, which may have started even before the King left for Calais in autumn 1532: eight full drafts and four fragments survive in the State Papers, littered with corrections, mostly Cromwell’s but including contributions from Henry himself.32 Its predecessor was a rather less ambitious bill drafted by Thomas Audley which simply dealt with ‘the King’s matter’, narrating the trouble that he had been put to, providing for the two English archbishops to decide the matter and enjoining the realm to ignore any sanctions imposed on it by Rome. This was scrapped, and the earliest version of the eventual legislation substituted, which sidestepped the immediate issue of Henry’s case and turned negative defiance towards
a positive general statement of why the Papacy was irrelevant to any such case. It achieved the remarkable feat of not mentioning either Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn, or marriage to either of them.33

  That first draft already contained the resonant opening preamble already quoted on England’s status as an empire, proved by ‘sundry old authentic histories and chronicles’, but also had a great deal more abuse of the Pope than was thought politic in the final version. Not only might that have offended some members of Parliament to no good purpose, but it was unwise when simultaneously seeking the papal bureaucracy’s co-operation with the legal formalities to get Cranmer his Archbishopric. In fact in the end the papal nuncio was invited to Parliament’s opening ceremony on 4 February, which might have been intended to suggest to the gullible that the Papacy did not disapprove of the forthcoming Boleyn marriage.34 Nevertheless, one of Cromwell’s subsequent corrections which did last into the text of the Act was his alteration of ‘the See Apostolic’ to ‘the See of Rome’; this was a hint much taken up in Protestant England when the Pope was commonly (and, it has to be said, accurately) called ‘the Bishop of Rome’. Contrariwise, in the drafts Cromwell repeatedly and in the end successfully removed references which the King liked (and kept putting back) to the proposition that all jurisdiction in English law was ‘derived and depended of the imperial Crown of this realm’. That might be a clear expression of the proposition behind this legislation, but it was a real hostage to fortune in the rough and tumble of Parliamentary debates, and best left out.35