Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Lord Berners’s death also left vacant his more important office, the Deputyship of Calais. His successor, appointed on 23 March 1533, three weeks before Cromwell’s own promotion, was Arthur Plantagenet Viscount Lisle, an illegitimate son of King Edward IV and therefore by way of being the King’s uncle. It is a tribute to Lisle’s likeable nature and evident lack of political ambition that the King never for one moment seems to have applied his normal dynastic fears to his relative; when Lisle did eventually suffer the catastrophe of arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, it was on other grounds. His appointment to this crucial post on England’s frontiers was the first made in one of the Tudors’ regional governorships during Cromwell’s years of power, and although it looks more like a personal decision of the King’s, it will not have displeased him. Until religious disputes drove them apart and ranged Lisle among Cromwell’s opponents in his final struggles, the Lisles regarded the great minister as a reliable if often frustrating source of favour and support in their frequent legal troubles, not least because Cromwell’s entanglement with the upper gentry of Kent gave him a hold over their troublesome relatives, Edward Seymour and John Dudley.

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  The coronation represented a real moment of achievement, but no one could suppose that the consequences had ceased to ripple outwards. The Emperor Charles was determined to see Queen Katherine and her daughter Mary properly treated, and Chapuys pressed Henry’s Council hard on this. He was surprised at how warmly Cromwell spoke of Katherine, but that was in accord with the official line that she was Princess Dowager and should be given all possible respect as such.57 Beyond those already formidable worries were incalculable consequences if the Pope excommunicated the King for all he had done in the previous few years: at worst, foreign invasion or internal rebellion, or both. Such nightmares must be countered with the most ambitious programme possible of intellectual and diplomatic warfare, though it is unlikely that the King’s advisers as yet saw quite where that might take them.

  The new phase of the campaign had various elements. One was to go even further in building up a case from history to show that Henry enjoyed an imperial jurisdiction by right, which inexplicably his predecessors had long neglected. The Collectanea satis copiosa had been a start, but who knew what else was sitting in monastic libraries in the kingdom and beyond? So, soon after the city pageants had been dismantled, Cromwell’s deviser of elegant verse for the coronation, John Leland, already marked out as a precocious investigator of antiquity, was dispatched to travel the length and breadth of the kingdom looking for further manuscripts, armed with a royal commission to secure entry to ancient abbeys, priories and friaries. Thus began Leland’s marvellous investigative journeys across Tudor England which have left us so much, but which in their antiquarian excitements, overwhelming possibilities and distressing witnesses of destruction eventually robbed him of his sanity.58

  All through the monastic visitations and subsequent dissolutions, Cromwell’s agents remained alert for relevant historical manuscripts. Some of his men, like the scholarly Welshman John ap Rhys of Brecon (who in 1534 married a niece of Cromwell’s), had their own antiquarian interests. The King’s library, as well as Archbishop Cranmer’s, was regularly enlarged with monastic literary spoils.59 At the same time that Leland set out on his journeys, a very different historian of England, the Italian Polydore Vergil, obtained royal permission to leave his Archdeaconry of Wells Cathedral to travel abroad in some style, overseeing the first printed version of his long-awaited Anglica historia in Basel. He had outraged patriotic historians such as Leland by his scepticism about Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stories of King Arthur, which lay behind the Act in Restraint of Appeals, but he was still a highly respected historian of international standing. Evidently someone at Court felt his decades of historical writings might be helpful, even if he did take a different line to most of those researching for the King. That person was probably not Cromwell, who would be well aware of how much Vergil had always hated Cardinal Wolsey. This was one Italian with whom he did not have a rapport.60

  A month after the coronation Cromwell was among those witnessing yet another legal transaction, vital but for the moment top secret: a record at Greenwich Palace on 29 June 1533 of the King’s appeal to a future General Council of the Church, in case he was excommunicated by ‘our most holy Lord the present Pope’ (sanctissimus Dominus noster Papa modernus) over his repudiation of Katherine of Aragon. This might seem simply a wise precaution, and indeed far away in Rome a fortnight later the Pope did provisionally excommunicate Henry. But it was far more than that; such appeals to a General Council had been formally forbidden by Pope Pius II in 1460, and the courtesy of the address belied the revolutionary nature of the action. In this respect at least, Henry was imitating the man he detested, Martin Luther, whose own appeal to a General Council in 1518 had been a sensational escalation of his quarrel with Rome. It was a mark of the ambiguity in all the King’s proceedings in religion from now on: were they part of the continent-wide Reformation or not? Cromwell would use his developing power to provide one set of possible answers to this never-resolved question.

  Once more the small group witnessing the King’s declaration were headed by an archbishop: this time, however, not Cranmer but his northern colleague and Wolsey’s successor as Archbishop of York, Edward Lee.61 Lee, a veteran diplomat, was no relation to the various northern Lees captained by Roland Lee, and unlike Roland his religious traditionalism was not offset in Cromwell’s eyes by close past links to Wolsey, or by his protracted and rather silly academic feud with Desiderius Erasmus. In fact Lee was a long-standing protégé of Bishop Fisher, who had done his best to mediate fairly between his two friends in Lee’s squabble with the great European humanist.62 He had been made Archbishop of York in late summer 1531, when Cromwell did not have enough influence in government to point the King in another direction. Stephen Gardiner became Bishop of Winchester at the same time, and these appointments have the fingerprints of the Duke of Norfolk on them. Throughout the 1530s, Lee’s continuing presence as Archbishop of York was an irritation to both Cromwell and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer. His obstructive fussiness was reminiscent of Thomas Audley’s, but mitigated by his desperate sense of his own vulnerability and his anxiety to please.*

  Lee was not quick to help in passing royal legislation in the 1533 Parliament, in sharp contrast to Cranmer. It is likely he was called back south now specifically to bind him into the King’s ongoing campaign by his presence at this declaration; Cranmer could easily have been called up from his palace at Croydon, where he had been spending the previous week, to play the same role.63 Archbishop Lee travelled down to London after he had finished presiding over the troublesome Convocation of York in mid-May. A fortnight before witnessing the King’s appeal at Greenwich, he certified his Convocation’s acceptance of the King’s annulment from a relative’s country house outside Southwark (the archbishops had of course just lost their grand Westminster house of York Place to the King, so he had no official London base of his own).64 We have already glimpsed Cromwell doing Lee a favour over his back-taxes in the Exchequer during these weeks in London (see above, this page), and that looks like a reward for good behaviour.

  Bishop Tunstall of Durham was also pursued for his signature endorsing the two formal copies of this appeal at Greenwich. He had initially been extremely reluctant to attend the Northern Convocation at all, and when he did comply with the royal order he caused enough obstruction at its meetings to win admiring comment from Chapuys, before Roland Lee managed to browbeat a majority of the clergy present into accepting the King’s demands. Tunstall’s signature on the appeal, like Lee’s, was a sign that for the time being the leading traditionalists had struggled with their conscientious dilemma between loyalty to King Henry and resistance to a cruel marital injustice and the break with Rome, to the point of compliance with the royal demands. It looks like part of the same set of deals that in
mid-June Bishop Fisher was set at liberty to return to his diocese; Chapuys specifically recorded that this gesture of goodwill to the grand old man of the episcopal bench was thanks to Cromwell’s intercession with the King.65 The mood the government were trying to set was that all reason for conflict was past; all was now agreed. That would lead up to a happy event both tailpiece and finale to the great celebrations of the coronation.

  The way of nature postponed this resolution for a couple of months: the birth of an heir to the King and Queen, on 7 September 1533.* Henry would naturally have preferred a boy to have been born, since that quest lay at the heart of his proceedings over the previous six years. He had prepared elaborate celebrations for such an eventuality, but at least a healthy girl delivered without fuss was a good sign for Anne’s presumed future pregnancies. A splendid christening for Princess Elizabeth a few days later took place in the church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich, a setting both logical as it was in effect Greenwich Palace’s Chapel Royal and also a deliberate put-down to the recalcitrant majority in the community there. The emphasis among participants was to unite two contending groups in the nobility: partisans of Queen Katherine and Princess Mary – the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter, Lord Hussey, the Duke of Suffolk – with the aristocrats who had supported Boleyn throughout her struggle to power – Wiltshire and Norfolk, and a generous showing of Howards. Once more Cromwell played no ceremonial part in proceedings, being just an observer alongside his courtier friends William Paulet and William Fitzwilliam. His low official profile continued, even while fading stars of the Howard interest paraded in the limelight around the Duke of Norfolk’s niece Anne and her baby.66

  The fragile show of goodwill at the christening, a public unanimity which the government pursued with increasing ruthlessness, belied the fact that a hard-core opposition had not been at all cowed by the success of the King’s plans. Queen Katherine was not going to co-operate with the fiction of unity, and her old allies among the royal convents of Franciscan Observants were prominent in keeping her in touch with sympathizers abroad, led by their former Provincial William Peto, who left England around the end of 1532 to orchestrate opposition from the Low Countries. Another source of worry for the government was increasingly political stridency from a visionary nun of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, who turned her visions into denunciations of the Boleyn marriage and linked her sabotage of royal hopes with the efforts of the Observants. This combination promised a nightmare of internal sedition and external intervention.

  During summer 1533 Cromwell was already directing efforts to confront these menaces, making full reports to the King. According to his Franciscan Observant informant John Laurence, two Observant friars had arrived from abroad, collecting texts on the Great Matter to fuel Peto’s continuing propaganda campaign against it.67 Two other Observants from the Greenwich community had been covertly visiting Queen Katherine in the household assigned to her as Princess Dowager at Wolsey’s old Hertfordshire retreat of The More; Cromwell had them arrested near by at Ware.68 Of the Greenwich friars, Cromwell commented, ‘It is undoubted that they have intended and would confess some great matter, if they might be examined as they ought to be, that is to say, by pains.’ In other words: torture. So far, the greatest human casualties in the King’s Great Matter had been Katherine of Aragon’s wrecked marriage and the associated misery of her daughter Mary. Now the tally of suffering rippling out from King Henry’s determination rolled on through a decade and more into imprisonment, terror and death for scores of others. The agent over the next seven years, whatever his own private inclinations, was necessarily the minister whom Chapuys described as now really in charge of government, transacting all matters in the realm.69

  PART THREE

  Touching Pitch

  Whoso toucheth pitch, shall be [de]filed withal, and he that is familiar with the proud, shall clothe himself with pride.

  Ecclesiasticus 13.1, in the translation of Miles Coverdale, 1535

  More threateneth them which enterprise difficult and urgent matters than those which only seeketh easy and light matters.

  Stephen Vaughan to Thomas Cromwell, 3 February 1530

  10

  Treason in Prospect: 1533–1534

  Fifteen-twenty-five was a tense year in Kent, disrupted by Cardinal Wolsey’s monastic dissolutions and by the ultimately successful resistance to his attempts at innovative taxation. At Eastertide, a young woman of the county, Elizabeth Barton, began having a series of divine visions, enlivened by violent fits at least temporarily cured by visiting a local shrine of Our Lady at Court-at-Street. Such spiritual demonstrations were not uncommon in early Tudor England. Archbishop Warham, the chief local magnate disapproving of both of Wolsey’s initiatives, and lord of the parish where Barton was a domestic servant, took a special interest in her, and in the course of time she was installed as a nun in a small convent at Canterbury. Enclosure did not curb her public pronouncements and prophecies. As with the very similar activities of the daughter of Sir Roger Wentworth at Ipswich a decade before (which may indeed have inspired Barton to imitation), her public renown was much boosted by retelling her wondrous doings in both manuscript and print.1

  The difference between Wentworth’s demonstrations at Ipswich and Barton’s was that after the initial drama the Maid of Kent persisted in mediating divine messages. As soon as the King’s marital troubles became public knowledge in 1528, she turned to fierce and apocalyptic criticisms of his relationship with Anne Boleyn. She could rely on the stream of visitors to Canterbury, many delighted to add a living saint to the experience of pilgrimage. In addition, for a nun, she got out and about rather a lot. Beyond her first patron Archbishop Warham, she visited the great Bishop Fisher in Rochester; as early as 1528 she interviewed Cardinal Wolsey on Warham’s recommendation; and on at least two occasions she reached to the very pinnacle of power, the King himself. Her clerical supporters fanned out across the country, and included Observant Franciscans, dangerously integrating her campaign of opposition into their own. Her monastic backers at Canterbury Cathedral translated her words into Latin, so papal diplomats could bear them back to Rome. She mightily impressed the papal auditor Silvestro Dario, on annulment business in England in 1529, and may have been the cause of his turning against the King’s case thereafter.2

  This was an astonishing use of the cultural niche which Barton occupied as divinely inspired innocent: she is reported as making prophecies of destruction to the King’s face which far exceeded the reported words for which the Duke of Buckingham had been executed a decade before. Meanwhile, her tally of interviews included at least two partisans of Katherine of Aragon who had been choreographed into the show of unity at Elizabeth’s christening in September 1533: John Lord Hussey and the Marchioness of Exeter. Sir Thomas More carefully avoided an interview with her for some years, but after Anne’s coronation he agreed to meet her at Syon Abbey, one of that complex of royal monastic foundations surrounding King’s Henry’s birthplace at Richmond Palace. That same summer Barton’s supporters brought out a new pamphlet containing her latest angry denunciations in an edition of 700; the printer was arrested and cross-examined, and not one copy now survives. This comprehensive and effective censorship of the printing press was without English precedent, and a tribute to Cromwell’s efficiency.3

  Barton was probably doomed from the moment she claimed to have been supernaturally uprooted in autumn 1532 from Canterbury and flown over to Calais in the wake of the King and his Court (she would have heard the noise of his progress past her nunnery on the Dover road). After she had soared in spirit across the Channel, she landed in the midst of a royal mass in Calais, where an angel presented her with the consecrated wafer the priest was about to elevate before King Henry. This theft by teleportation, in the presence of Anne Boleyn herself, directly denied the King’s divinely conferred authority to rule. The government must recover from its previous dithering in face of her charisma: Barton could not b
e allowed to persist in sabotaging reunion in the political nation. In the same week in late July 1533 that Cromwell was contemplating torture for dissident Observants, on the King’s orders Archbishop Cranmer began decisive action against the Maid. Newly arrived in his palace at Otford (recently vacated by Princess Mary), he summoned Barton in company with her Prioress for the first interview of many she was to undergo that summer.4

  Cromwell prepared the interrogatories Cranmer used with the Maid as he would with so many suspected traitors over the next seven years. The technique was sophisticated: as Chapuys noted for Charles V after the interrogations had achieved their desired result, Cromwell and his team consistently treated her comme une grosse dame, as if she were a great lady.5 We might compare the process to a decompression chamber, steadily extracting her extraordinary charisma to create a new and unfamiliar atmosphere. At first the Archbishop played the role which came naturally to him, that of gently probing scholar; he even licensed the Maid to refuel herself spiritually with an Assumptiontide visit to the Marian shrine at Court-at-Street which had launched her public career. It was a sign that the King’s party were confident they had her where they wanted.

  After Cromwell’s return from the King’s progress into Surrey, interviews resumed in London. Cromwell and Cranmer were joined there by Hugh Latimer, a remarkable turnaround in Latimer’s fortunes little more than a year since he was Archbishop Warham’s prisoner at Lambeth Palace accused of heresy. The presence of the unashamedly evangelical Latimer on the team was a sign the regime was now going for the only option possible in the face of Barton’s inspired utterances. If her revelations did not come from God, they must be the work of the Devil, who had bent her human weakness to increasingly diabolical purposes, with the aid of malicious papist clergy. The new strategy was also a testimony to the waning influence on the King of instinctive traditionalists captained by the Duke of Norfolk; one did not have to be an evangelical to sneer at the Maid’s revelations, but it certainly helped. Faced with sudden cold scepticism, Barton’s self-belief totally crumbled; she confessed that after her initial manifestations her campaign had indeed been orchestrated by treacherous clergy of Kent.