Thomas Cromwell
Page 31
Dogged opposition continued in and out of Parliament, and the finished version of the bill was only introduced into Parliament as late as 14 March, the beginning of some fraught weeks. Cranmer, now armed with those very expensive papal bulls, was meanwhile consecrated Archbishop in St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster on 30 March. The ceremony did credit to no one present, being conducted under papal authority which at several stages in the proceedings Cranmer formally rejected if it clashed with his duty to God and the King. On 1 April the new Primate of All England took his place in the chair across the road in Convocation, a week before a not overwhelming majority in the clerical assembly agreed to accept the King’s dismissive view of a papal dispensation to marry one’s deceased brother’s wife.36
Parliamentary bills were customarily drafted in double space for emendation. On this page of a draft of the Act in Restraint of Appeals, King Henry himself inserts ‘and off and frome the sayd imperiall crowne and non otherwyse’ into the text of the bill.
Cromwell’s emendments on the penultimate draft of the Act show him underlining for removal various phrases, including ‘deryved and dependeth frome and of the same Imperiall Crowne’, and producing a more concise text. The King’s emendments did not survive into the final Act.
Then finally a hardly altered bill became the Act in Restraint of Appeals that first week in April. Rome had lost its role as ultimate court of spiritual appeal in the realm. Katherine was henceforth to be styled the Princess Dowager, and her daughter the Lady Mary, while her most prominent champion in the capital, Bishop Fisher, was put under house arrest in the care of Bishop Gardiner. No public announcement was made about when the King’s latest wedding had taken place. On Holy Saturday, 12 April, the Queen of England processing in regal finery at Court to the Vigil Mass of Easter was Anne Boleyn.37 On Easter Day Prior George Browne, Cromwell’s landlord at Austin Friars, used his festal sermon or liturgical bidding of the bedes to pray for Anne as Queen, at which a large section of the congregation marched out in protest, provoking Henry to fury and prohibition of any further such demonstrations in the City. It was his second Easter in a row soured by public criticism of his marriage plans.38
In the flurry of events still necessary to get to the finishing line, Cranmer now had the starring public role, with Cromwell barely visible, though one can glimpse some frenetic scrambling in the background.39 In the very delicate business of the Primate’s letter summoning the newly minted Supreme Head of the Church to an ecclesiastical court hearing, to end the public scandal of his supposed Aragon marriage, there is no manuscript trace of Cromwell intervening.40 Likewise, trusting to the competence of Cranmer and archiepiscopal staff, he did not attend the hearing of the royal case during May at Dunstable Priory, relying on reports via the ecclesiastical lawyer Thomas Bedell, whom the King had poached from senior office in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s administration immediately after Warham’s death. Bedell was now a loyal satellite of Cromwell, and later became his chaplain.41 While Cranmer was busy at Dunstable, the assent of the Northern Convocation in York needed to be secured. Cromwell entrusted this task to Roland Lee, a sensible choice in view of Lee’s northern links and the likely awkwardness of some of the northern senior clergy. Lee did his job with his usual brusque efficiency, against some initially formidable opposition.42
In the middle of all this delegation is a fascinating glimpse of what made Cromwell so adept at negotiating the opening years of his rise to power. At the height of his busyness, he took an evening off to throw a cheerful supper-party for the Duke of Norfolk’s sister Anne Dowager Countess of Oxford. Dr Lee, a close neighbour of hers in north-west Essex, and a man who knew how to have a good time, warned him of that redoubtable lady’s imminent descent on the capital for coronation duties: ‘I am always bold of you for remembrance of your lovers and mine . . . my good Lady of Oxford . . . comes to the Court upon Sunday, and intends to be merry with you Monday or Tuesday [28 or 29 April 1533] at supper, only to be merry and give you thanks of your goodness; praying you for my sake, the rather so accept her. She is a woman of high wit, and loving to her friends.’ Cromwell had a way with dowagers, as we have already seen. Lady Oxford was lavish in her thanks afterwards for ‘your great cheer, and also for your kindness to me showed’ – he would go on doing her favours.43
The last tessera was placed into the mosaic in a very discreet ceremony at Lambeth Palace, which symbolized the new partnership of Cranmer and Cromwell in achieving the long-sought aim. At Dunstable on 23 May, Cranmer had delivered his sentence on the invalidity of the King’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. On Wednesday 28 May, now back at Lambeth, the very day before the coronation festivities began, he complemented that decision by declaring valid the previous royal wedding to Anne.44 This took place ‘in a certain well-known high gallery in the manor of Lambeth’, in the presence of only five witnesses and a notary public, Thomas Argall, whom his master Thomas Bedell had already assured Cromwell was ultra-reliable.45 The witnesses besides Cromwell himself look like two paired teams: for Cromwell (and the King) there were the ever-faithful Thomas Alvard and Roland Lee’s younger cousin and fellow-civil lawyer Dr Thomas Lee, while on Cranmer’s side there were the Treasurer of his household John Goodricke and his Steward Henry Stockheath.
One can almost hear the exhalation of relief as the last seal went on that document, while over the river City aldermen and civil servants fretted over dress rehearsals, favoured schoolchildren repeated their lines, gunners checked that their weapons would not prove lethal and tavern-keepers drafted in extra staff for the morrow. Some clerk of Chancery then sat out the Friday drawing up a formal inspection of the paperwork, while Londoners slept off their celebrations of Thursday’s deafening river pageant, and Henry and his new wife busied themselves in further ceremonial in the Tower. Further cogs in the medieval machine of Chancery creaked into motion on 4 and 6 June to cap the formality of record, while the capital sorted out its impressions of a weekend filled with spectacle, alcohol and vast outpourings of money.
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The efforts leading to these culminating events of 29 May to 1 June 1533 had brought down Cardinal Wolsey and radically changed the direction of Cromwell’s life, to say little of other lives already remade or ruined, with many more to come. The centrepiece was a coronation, not a wedding, for, as the discreet meeting at Lambeth legally confirmed, the wedding had already happened; maybe in reality twice. In fact, this was the only solo coronation to be held for any of the six ladies who married King Henry VIII (Katherine of Aragon had been crowned alongside him), and as such it was a symptom of the constant over-assertion which characterized the establishment of the Boleyn marriage. Cromwell was its behind-the-scenes impresario, however little official position he could claim in the public face of it: there was not even a knighthood for him in the various knightings held during the festival. Once more, this reflected his very partial visibility in government over the previous three years. His friend at Court Sir Anthony Browne nevertheless testified to his role when replying in June from embassy in Paris to a ‘kind loving letter’ from Cromwell: the success of proceedings ‘was not a little to your praise in my mind, for I am sure that there was none that had the pain and travail that you had, and I think no man has deserved more thanks than you have, which is not a little comfort to your friends’.46
Just as in the Calais festivities, a commemorative printed souvenir of the events spelled out the meaning of the pageantry, complete with pictorial cover. Once more John Gough took on the job in partnership with Wynkyn de Worde: The noble triumphant Coronation of Queen Anne, Wife unto the most noble King Henry VIII.47 Cromwell, with his usual eye for creative talent, employed the historian John Leland and the rackety Oxford don Nicholas Udall to produce a script for the civic festivities, in Latin and English. There was also some French verse to reinforce the point made at Calais that the King of France supported the match, and a number
of the French ambassador’s staff were given a prominent place in the procession in Westminster Abbey.
The other dominant note in the imagery of the pageants and ceremonies intended to calm public worries or resentments was traditional piety: all the more reason to keep Cromwell’s name out of proceedings. It was important not to present the Boleyn marriage as in any way disruptive of the faith which still commanded the allegiance of the overwhelming majority in the kingdom. A shame, therefore, that the new Queen was not called Mary, but much use was made of the name Anne, that saint being mother of Our Lady among others, and grandmother of Jesus: the pageant en route at Leadenhall was a tableau of St Anne presiding over the extended Holy Family. They appeared without Jesus and Joseph, whose presence might have been a devotional step too far, given that the spectacle included mechanical devices in which an angel crowned Anne Boleyn’s heraldic falcon; by implication, her expected child would step into the vacant role of England’s Messiah.
To the disappointment of those looking for God’s judgement on wickedness, the weather was perfect. Cranmer did all that could be demanded of an archbishop, and Anne showed extraordinary stamina over the ceremonial marathon, no doubt energized by the fulfilment of all her plans. So much in these events was not quite what it claimed. The Queen’s prolonged feast in Westminster Hall would have offered plenty of quiet amusement for Cromwell, the ultimate insider to events. In the middle of Henry III’s long stone-trestled royal table on the dais, suitably cushioned on its medieval throne, sat a new queen in a not particularly concealed advanced state of pregnancy, while to focus the occasion on her alone her one seated companion at the great table (at slightly less than shouting distance) was an archbishop who (as she may or may not have known) was somebody else’s lawfully wedded husband, despite his metropolitanate in the Western Church. The Dowager Countess of Oxford was standing beside the Queen’s chair, one of a pair of senior noblewomen equipped with cloths ready to conceal and receive royal expectoration or the like during the meal; she was certainly earning Cromwell’s private supper beforehand. By convention the King watched the whole event from an elevated royal box. (See Plate 17.)
Cromwell was surely hovering there in the background. He could look on in satisfaction, as one of the most lavish spectacles ever staged in Tudor England wooed the public mood over four days from sullen compliance or angry denunciation towards excited fascination. His jealous eye on proceedings did not prevent him being alert to satellite events. The canons of King Henry’s College Oxford were unpleasantly surprised to find the minister’s habitual attention to their affairs extended to a sharp reprimand for absence from their duties at Whitsuntide, when of course they should have been praying for the new Queen in their College chapel, in parallel to events in the capital. Instead, most of them had taken a jaunt up to London to enjoy the coronation jamboree. They excused their frivolity to their benefactor and protector with a masterpiece of academic unctuousness: ‘our joy was so great to see the effect of the truth for the which we had so earnestly laboured, and of long time so heartily desired, that it was a marvel that any one of us all could and did refrain himself from the sight of the same.’48 One can imagine Cromwell’s enjoyment of this self-serving pomposity.
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As we noted in Chapter 7, on the very night that Anne was first paraded around Court as Henry’s Queen, 12 April or Easter Even, Cromwell had been conceded one more small promotion in his snail-pace progress to outward signs of his already formidable power under the King, by being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer.49 This office, unlike the Clerkship of the Hanaper or the Mastership of the Jewels, has in more recent constructions of the government of this realm got ideas above its Tudor station. In 1533, it was nothing like as important an office of state as nowadays: the Chancellor had rather ill-defined duties, but that lack of definition was among the post’s advantages, which could bend it to Cromwell’s purposes. He made this clear only a couple of months after gaining the office, when he observed expansively to Edward Lee Archbishop of York that he would be perfectly entitled without further ado to discharge Lee from payment of clerical taxation owing from Wolsey’s time, ‘having a room of authority in the said Exchequer’.50 The neatness of his acquiring his new office in the second of the two ancient departments of government, a counterpart to his Clerkship of the Hanaper in Chancery, looks more than coincidence.
Unlike Hall of the Hanaper or Amadas of the Jewels, the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer was not some obscure working civil servant but a peer of the realm: the distinguished diplomat and literary translator John Bourchier Lord Berners, late Deputy of Calais. Just as with Cromwell’s previous two acquisitions of office, he knew his predecessor well, for instance in amicable business correspondence when Berners had needed an approach to Wolsey back in 1529.51 Given Berners’s other occupations, it is unlikely that he paid much attention to the Chancellorship beyond collecting his fee, but Cromwell did. He took an interest in acquiring documents giving him some idea of the Exchequer’s history and functioning: all part of his self-education in royal government. He also immediately acted on his position by sitting in the Exchequer Court, as demonstrated by his order to the barons (judges) of the Exchequer in June 1533 not to pursue Archbishop Lee over that clerical taxation. As usual, once appointed he never relinquished his grip on the office, and as late as 1540 he sat in the Exchequer from time to time in a judicial capacity. An Elizabethan reminiscence has preserved the equally typical circumstance that, when doing so, he displaced the accustomed formal order of seating, parking himself next to the Lord Treasurer (who happened to be the Duke of Norfolk): a usurpation of status gratefully continued by some later chancellors.52
In immediate practical terms the Chancellorship brought Cromwell one chore, but in the longer term one highly important opportunity for patronage. The chore was to collect the fines or hear excuses from a wide range of gentlemen and esquires who had to their dismay been confronted with a demand to come to Queen Anne’s coronation and be knighted, or face a fine. In fact it may have been to undertake this imminent task that Cromwell was given the Chancellorship as the most immediately vacant office in the Exchequer. Knighthood was of course an honour, but came with the expectation of much ill-rewarded public service, and many were genuinely unable to contemplate such a lifetime’s financial burden. In any case, this was in reality a windfall tax on the moderately well-off, with the actual knighting as the alternative. The protests of those claiming they should not have to pay the fine because their income fell below the forty-pound-a-year income threshold for knighting, plus wheedling letters from their friends, built up to a considerable correspondence, which in itself gave Cromwell the chance to dole out favours right across the realm.53
Among those letters of concerned friends was the first surviving direct letter to him from the King’s daughter Mary, now seventeen years old. The very day before the coronation festivities began, 28 May 1533, Mary wrote from what was by now gilded custody in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s vast palace at Otford, addressing her note to ‘Mr Cromwell’ (no more, no less). This was early in what turned into a long and intense correspondence, but it was not the start, for she did not address Cromwell ‘as unacquainted’ in what was an informal note. She begged him to excuse the aged father of one of her servants from appearing to receive knighthood, ‘as I am advertised that all such men shall first resort unto you to know the King my father’s further pleasure therein’. She could not bring herself to mention what the occasion of Mr Wilbraham’s knighting might be, and she carefully and spiritedly superscribed her secretary’s text ‘Mary Princess’. Yet, as before in the matter of Beddgelert Priory, we get the sense she expected a fair deal.54
The longer-term attraction of the Chancellorship was that its occupant’s place among the judges of the Exchequer Court gave him a say in nominations each November of the shortlist of three possible candidates for each county sheriff, to serve from spring the com
ing year. Cromwell had been alerted to this possibility in November 1532, when Lord Keeper Audley went out of his way to describe how the system worked, and sent him a full list of that year’s names. Sheriffs did their ancient formal accounting in the Exchequer, so it was natural that choosing them should be associated with it. Come the following February or March, as Audley explained (Cromwell was learning a lot about government in 1532), the King would in a picturesque piece of ancient ceremonial take a silver bodkin and prick through the parchment beside one of the three names, guided no doubt in his choice by a good deal of informal discussion. Then the new Sheriff’s year would begin.55
The November shortlisting in the Exchequer was therefore an important moment in government: a chance to wield influence and bestow favours throughout the realm. Some people were just as anxious to avoid being Sheriff as others were anxious not to be knights, for it was a year of burdensome office and much expense not reimbursed. Some by contrast wanted the Shrievalty very much, for it offered all sorts of opportunities to exercise power: harassing neighbours and favouring friends, influencing lawsuits and, in Parliamentary election years, swaying the choice of representatives in the Commons. Shrieval business came to Cromwell very quickly; during the bustle of the coronation itself, the current Sheriff of Cornwall buttonholed him in his capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer to obtain licence not to appear in the Exchequer Court to account in the following Michaelmas Term.56 From then on, begging letters about the Shrievalty were another common item in Cromwell’s in-tray, a further useful opportunity to intervene in local government, complementing his scrutiny of commissions of the peace through the Hanaper.