Thomas Cromwell
Page 34
On 7 and 9 February the Lords considered Philips’s petition outlining his grievances against Stokesley and eventually sent it back to the Commons, saying it was beneath the dignity of the peers to consider. No doubt the cheerleaders against it were Stokesley himself and Gardiner, who were among the few bishops actually present in the House. Stokesley is named in the Lords’ Journal leading a further rejection of Commons complaints on 2 March. The Commons were so enraged by this rebuff that they arranged another of their occasional conferences with the King at Whitehall Palace on 5 March to discuss ‘reformation of the acts made by the Spirituality in the Convocation against His Grace and his subjects’.29 This resulted in an Act setting up a royal commission for reform of canon law in England: potentially a revolutionary outcome of the developing royal supremacy.
But now an opposite cause was making its way through Parliamentary business, with the capacity to embarrass and divide conservatives: the bill of attainder against Elizabeth Barton and her associates. Attainder by Parliamentary Act was a convenient way of avoiding any formal trial in the law courts, but its finality made it a dangerously drastic procedure. Four days after the Lords’ rejection of the Philips bill, they found themselves having to ask the King whether he really wanted Sir Thomas More and others called before them to answer charges which would result in their inclusion in the attainder. The King’s rage against his former friend had got to the point where the first draft of the bill included More along with Bishop Fisher and one of Fisher’s chaplains. In the end More’s name was omitted, but not Fisher’s; he was forced to pay a substantial (though not crushing) fine to avoid penalties.
At the end of March a new heresy bill emerged from the Commons. At this point, proceedings became unusual: the Lords did not deign to give any readings to the Commons bill, but instead passed it to Lord Chancellor Audley. On 28 March (a rare day on which Archbishop Cranmer was not present), they gave three rapid readings to a bill of their own devising, which looks as if it considerably defanged the Commons initiative; the final copy of this bill unusually contains several alterations which must reflect a rough ride right up to the end, and it only cleared the Commons for royal assent on the very last day of the session. It still abolished the main heresy statute which since 1401 had been the means of killing Lollards and, in the past few years, evangelicals as well. Significant is its only specific provision defining heresy, or rather not defining it, by making clear that speaking against the ‘pretended power of the Bishop of Rome’ was not heretical.
These paired conflicts illustrate the dynamic of the murderous confrontations through the 1530s. Two causes could incite the King to destructive fury. On the one hand was heresy, particularly anything looking like an attack on the doctrine of the real presence in the eucharist (the trigger-word was ‘sacramentarianism’). On the other was treason, including anything which Henry might decide was a threat to the succession of his rightful heirs. The normal logic was that evangelicals were vulnerable to accusations of heresy, usually as ‘sacramentaries’; it was generally traditionalists who laid themselves open to treason charges, and so the delicate art of persuading the King to homicidal sadism demanded opposite strategies for those seeking to destroy their enemies. The traditionalists still pressed forward with their attack as Parliament ended.
Some time in late 1533 or early 1534, Thomas More’s usual publication outlet headed by his nephew William Rastell printed a long letter from Bishop Gardiner’s nephew and confidential servant Germain Gardiner, ostentatiously dated from the Bishop’s palace at Esher on 1 August 1533.30 Any alert reader could identify Germain’s unnamed correspondent as the diplomat, Boleyn client and champion of the King’s Great Matter Edward Foxe, apparently away from London and therefore needing to be filled in on what had happened.31* The work is hardly a letter, more a carefully composed tract of forty-two folios incorporating verbatim documents and records of conversations, and it will have been worked up a good deal in the six months or so before publication. Principally it tried to justify a parallel act of persecution to Philips’s: the burning on 4 July 1533 of an evangelical associate of William Tyndale’s, John Frith, who had like Philips been imprisoned in the Tower. The tract makes much of Bishop Gardiner’s part in Frith’s trial, and his elaborate efforts to persuade the condemned man back to orthodoxy. The Philips case is mentioned as if in an afterthought at folio 14, since his examination by the same team on 26 June 1533 had taken place a week after Frith’s; of his case, Germain observed, ‘I shall not need to write unto you, for there be other enough which both can and I am sure would.’
More continued to influence persecution of heretics even after resigning as Lord Chancellor, via such kindred spirits as the Duke of Norfolk and Bishops Gardiner and Stokesley; this is witnessed in a narrative petition from yet another of his victims, an evangelical called John Field.32 A Commons initiative which threw a bad light on another example of co-operation between Stokesley and More could not have displeased Cromwell or Cranmer. Putting all this evidence together, it is possible to suggest a place for Cromwell in Parliament’s proceedings on Philips and heresy. A measure against the heresy laws based on the Philips case survived the Lords’ contemptuous dismissal of the Commons petitions and the peers’ subsequent sabotage of the more general Commons bill on heresy. That indicates dogged persistence in those backing it, and official encouragement. Philips himself subsequently found paid employment in the Tower of London which had once imprisoned him. In that capacity he made himself useful to Cromwell in managing the imprisonment of the aristocratic prisoners in the purge of 1538; he even converted one of them, Sir Nicholas Carew, to reading the English Bible, for which Stokesley had indicted Philips himself six years earlier.33
Germain Gardiner’s elaborate account of Frith’s destruction, published at the close of this Parliamentary session, drew attention to a spectacular case of heresy which the previous year had severely embarrassed both Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer and threatened King Henry’s trust in them. Their names are resoundingly absent from his very circumstantial narrative, even though Cranmer had conducted careful examinations of Frith before the final trial, in which Cromwell had also been involved. Frith’s interrogation in June 1533 preceded by only a month Cranmer’s and Cromwell’s opening assault on the Maid of Kent’s psychological defences. Their credibility in the Maid’s case was threatened by associating them with Frith, and Cranmer did his very best to distance himself from Frith’s radical views on the nature of the eucharist, always the theological topic most calculated to arouse King Henry to destructive anger.34 Germain’s coy passing reference to the Philips case was an unsubtle effort to tar Philips with the same brush as Frith. Coming from More’s tame press, this tract was a last-ditch attempt to rally religious traditionalists divided by the Great Matter to a greater common cause; but other events in Parliament meant the effort was too late.*
The buggery statute and the confrontation over heresy were subplots of the larger drama played out in the first session of 1534. Anne might already be Queen and her daughter a princess, but the King now demanded that the whole realm should add a guarantee of this royal succession. On 7 March Parliament passed with only minor emendments a bill defining Katherine of Aragon’s status as Princess Dowager, widow of Prince Arthur – a measure which gave extra weight to the royal proclamation saying the same thing eight months before. The major companion of the Act on Katherine, culmination of the Parliamentary session with only ten days to go before closure, was a bill ‘for the establishment of the King’s Succession’ in the Boleyn marriage. It had major and lasting political implications, since it laid down penalties for opposing that marriage and succession, and began widening treason in significant ways beyond definitions standard since Parliamentary legislation enacted as long ago as 1352.
This move did not leap straight out of the minds of government drafters in 1534. Drafts and discussions about new treason legislation dated at least back to late 1530, a year or so
before Cromwell became a significant player in the King’s Council. Subjects proposed for fresh treasons at that time, such as holding one of the King’s castles against him or illegally fleeing the realm, concerned neither succession nor royal supremacy; indeed those first drafts may have been aimed at dealing with Wolsey’s treasonable activities and were therefore put aside when his death by natural causes pre-empted any punishment at the King’s hands. Then, amid the bundle of matters which the King ordered Cromwell to push forward in late summer 1531 was ‘the bill of Augmentation of Treasons’, ready for one of those autumn sessions of Parliament which never happened.35
We can glimpse Cromwell through his handwriting on drafts, tinkering with and steadily expanding and refining this legislation all through 1532, as confrontation with Rome became ever more serious, and the Boleyn marriage project marched inexorably towards Anne’s coronation. The Parliament of 1533 had to clear the ground for those events; in its two sessions the 1534 Parliament provided the means. Thus, at a late stage of drafting, the bill so long in formation turned into an Act concerning the Boleyn succession, and acquired the preamble turning it into an expression of concern from the King’s loyal subjects – Ambassador Chapuys later entertained himself before the royal Council in ridiculing this rhetorical device.36 The drafts reveal how many anxious hands other than Cromwell’s contributed to getting the legislation and its criminal penalties for the realm’s most serious temporal crime into a form likely to be acceptable to Parliament. Not only was the range of activities defined as treason much expanded, but crucially the ‘overt deed’ of treason at the heart of the 1352 legislation was now more closely defined to include opposition ‘by writing or imprinting’.
Technological advance – the rise of printing – demanded this expansion from the fourteenth-century statute. It was a logical but radical consequence of the years after 1529, when William Tyndale and Thomas More began their literary duel, turning the nation’s divisions into polemical printed text, and from 1531, when Cromwell started marshalling the printing press for government propaganda purposes. Any work challenging that official message now made its author liable to suffer the new penalties for treason. Treason by words had always been one of possible grounds for conviction, but the evidence was often too vague to satisfy lawyerly precision. Accordingly, and rather adroitly, the royal Council agreed before presenting the bill to Parliament that oral treason would now be covered in the Act of Succession by a lesser though very serious offence in existing law, misprision of treason. This covered oral attacks on the Boleyn marriage and refusal to swear an oath upholding the succession. Those convicted of misprision were still liable to imprisonment at pleasure and loss of all possessions.
This legislation hardly concerned Elizabeth Barton. Any action against her under its provisions would have been awkwardly retrospective, but in any case she could have been charged only with misprision: she had committed no treason in writing, for others had written down and printed her words. Was King Henry himself guilty of abetting misprision by listening to her treasonous words in their interviews prophesying his doom, and then doing nothing about it? It was best to play safe and simply enact her legal destruction by a separate Parliamentary attainder, together with whichever of her supporters the King wished to see die immediately. She was hanged and beheaded (at least not burned at the stake) at Tyburn on 20 April, along with five of her clerical promoters from Canterbury and the Greenwich Observant Friary. She gained an unenviable distinction as the only woman in English history to have her severed head placed among those spiked on London Bridge. Her fate may have been a useful spur to those administering and taking the oath to the succession nationwide, a hugely ambitious plan to secure explicit consent to the Boleyn succession from the people of England as a whole.37 The Act of Succession was a programme for combating not Barton’s past crimes but current or future acts of wickedness which the campaign of oath-taking might soon reveal.
As that initiative was in preparation, further humiliation came for the clergy. The day after the Lords and Commons had stood down on 30 March, the Convocation of Canterbury was recalled and forced to vote on a motion that ‘the Bishop of Rome has no greater jurisdiction given him by God in holy scripture in this realm of England than has any other foreign bishop.’ The main reason for delay in calling Convocation is manifest: now that Parliament had safely voted through the Act of Succession and its penalties for treason by words, any discussion of the papal supremacy would be hobbled by the possibility of infringing the provisions of the new Act. Accordingly, a large majority assented. This was followed by a round-up of signatures from senior clergy not present, then fanning out to hundreds if not thousands of England’s churchmen both regular and secular over the next few months. If that were not enough, also beginning in April was the separate campaign of oath-taking, in which clergy and laity alike were made to sign up to the provisions of the Act of Succession itself. These were operations as vast as collecting the names of taxpayers or adult males fit to serve the King in war, and no doubt they drew on the same methods of local compilation.38
Once more, the successful conclusion of a Parliamentary session offered the King a chance to reward Cromwell with further outward confirmation of his real power. Probably this April he became royal Principal Secretary in place of Stephen Gardiner. This was as definitive a confirmation of Cromwell’s central place in the King’s counsels as circumstances, and maybe Anne Boleyn, would allow. It had clear implications for the balance of forces between traditionalists and evangelicals around the King. The outcome of the Barton affair had been catastrophic for conservatives. The balance of death would now shift from evangelical heretics to conservative traitors.
Gardiner inadvertently made the transfer of office easier by his recent conduct. Remarkably, there is no record of his contributions to business in either Lords or Convocation, even though on his return from France in late January he was almost as regular an attender in the Lords as Cranmer. His lack of diplomatic success in France that autumn would be reason enough for his demotion, but maybe presence did not make Henry’s heart grow fonder. In any case, Lord Lisle’s alert agents in London reported first on 6 April that ‘my Lord of Winchester is gone to his diocese of Winchester, and not to return back again till the King’s Grace send for him,’ and then on 15 April that ‘My Lord of Winchester is out of the Secretaryship and resteth in Master Cromwell.’39 The second of these informants, Sir Thomas Palmer, was brother to one of Cromwell’s servants, and the precision of Palmer’s observation is confirmed by the fact that the first surviving signet warrant to be signed by Cromwell as Secretary is dated that very day, 15 April. In fact Cromwell had been usurping Gardiner’s signature on such warrants on a regular basis in the Bishop’s absence through the previous autumn.40
Cromwell is therefore irredeemably associated with the campaign of official cruelty that followed. Nevertheless, one can see him doing his best to rein it in while conscientiously doing the King’s ruthless will, being as candid a friend as he dared with the most prominent victims, Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, in their long-postponed showdown with the King. He engaged in lengthy and testy correspondence with the ailing Fisher throughout the winter during the Bishop’s absence from the Lords. The one surviving letter of Cromwell’s, maybe from halfway through the Parliamentary sitting and in draft seven pages in length, was schoolmasterly in tone about the Bishop’s contacts with the Maid, and tartly remarked how seriously Fisher had taken ‘the matter whereupon she made her false prophecies, to which matter ye were so affected (as ye be noted to be on all matters which ye enter once into) that nothing could come amiss that made for that purpose’. That was nothing less than the truth.41
Archbishop Cranmer, given personal responsibility for collecting signatures from More and Fisher to the Act of Succession, suggested to Cromwell and the King a number of ways in which they might accept some compromise, and thus give good example to Katherine and Mary. But the twelve month
s during which Henry sought to enfold the ex-Chancellor and Bishop into his show of unity were past. Cromwell’s letter to the Archbishop conveying his consultation with the King on Cranmer’s suggestion reveals him in his own hand toughening up the initial draft dictated to his clerk. He struck out an emollient final phrase asking Cranmer to use his ‘approved wisdom and dexterity’ to get a full oath, and bluntly spelled out that the King ‘specially trusteth that ye will in no wise suppose, attempt or move him [Henry] to the contrary, for his Grace supposeth that that manner of swearing, if it shall be suffered might be an utter destruction to his whole cause, and also to the effect of the law made for the same’.42
At More’s final examination at Lambeth Palace on 13 April leading up to the offer of compromise, Cromwell was equally vehement, as he saw the chance of agreement slipping away for ever. He was desperate to bring the former Lord Chancellor back from the brink. More recalled him swearing a great oath ‘that he had liever [rather] that his own only son’ (‘which is of truth a goodly young gentleman, and shall I trust come to much worship’, More added) ‘had lost his head than that I should thus have refused the oath. For surely the King’s Highness would now conceive a great suspicion against me, and think that the matter of the nun of Canterbury was all contrived by my drift [encouragement].’43 Cromwell could only remind More of the obvious: old friendship counted for nothing against the minister’s loyalty to the King, and his awareness of how difficult it could be to head off Henry’s destructive whims – particularly if, as More’s well-informed son-in-law and biographer William Roper later claimed, Queen Anne was nerving Henry against compromise ‘by her importunate clamour’.44