Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  So More and Fisher went to the Tower, and over their remaining year of life the King’s harshness towards them only increased. Cromwell went on trying to talk them round, and mutual respect continued, at least from More: writing from the Tower, he went out of his way to praise Cromwell’s prudent handling of the Elizabeth Barton affair (this was the prospective martyr’s only letter written in prison which his hagiographer Roper did not choose to reproduce in 1556).45 Cromwell’s patient efforts extended to others, notably the most respected community of monks in the City of London, the Carthusians by Smithfield. They were not treated like the Franciscan Observants, whose whole order was dissolved because of their connection with the Maid, and to whom both Cromwell and Cranmer increasingly displayed blanket hostility. Some English Carthusian communities consistently remained loyal to Henry’s schism, notably Hinton Charterhouse in Somerset under its much respected Prior Dr Edmund Horde, and Cromwell clearly hoped that this could be made more general.46

  The regime treated the London Charterhouse much as it did the aristocratic ladies and retired Oxbridge dons of the Bridgettine house at Syon, that is with reasoned argument as well as occasional coercion. In both cases Cromwell was prepared to argue face to face, as with Thomas More and Bishop Fisher. At the beginning of 1534, about the time he began tense conversations with More and Fisher about their relationship to the Maid’s campaigns, he resolved ‘To go to the Charterhouse myself’ to interview the community.47 The first serious open clash of the London Carthusians with royal policy came in April, when like the rest of the King’s subjects they were faced with the oath to the Act of Succession. The confrontation was untidy: Prior John Houghton and his Proctor (assistant) Humphrey Middlemore were the driving force behind the community’s refusal and spent a short time in the Tower of London alongside Fisher and More. They agreed to give way; but not all their brethren followed suit, even after repeated efforts to persuade them.

  At this stage the Carthusians were still trying to avoid extending the confrontation more widely to the royal supremacy. Yet that issue could not long be avoided. Cromwell visited the Charterhouse in person several times during 1534, trying to get them to take the oaths, and probing ways of exploiting the tensions which affect any intensely devout enclosed community. On one occasion in June 1534, he interviewed a dissident Carthusian of the house called Thomas Salter, who united his personal clashes with his superiors to the royal cause.48 In August Cromwell’s trusted old servant John Whalley was at the Charterhouse and passed on to his master a letter from Salter full of usefully negative reports about life under the current Carthusian leadership and the widespread failure of morale in Carthusian houses in mainland Europe. Whalley additionally sent over a batch of Charterhouse apples for Cromwell’s pleasure; they had a special reputation in the City.49

  The regime did score significant successes, permanently reeling in prominent conservatives from pursuing further opposition. Bishop Fisher, stricken with what looked to Roland Lee like terminal illness when the two of them spoke, was past caring what the King thought, but not his fellow-bishops Gardiner, Tunstall and Edward Lee.50 On the day the Maid and her associates died, 20 April, it was common knowledge in London that these three bishops had been sent for from their dioceses. John Husee told Lord Lisle that ‘some thinketh they shall to the Tower’ (he was too discreet to point out they would be joining Fisher and More there).51 Ever since Gardiner migrated to the King’s service, he had been torn between ambition and principled anger at attacks on ecclesiastical power, but his loss of the Secretaryship to Cromwell and exile to his diocese in April 1534 were far too reminiscent of what had happened to his old master Wolsey. From now on up to his royal master’s death, Gardiner devoted his considerable talents to making the royal supremacy work in the interests of traditional Catholicism.

  Likewise Edward Lee was not going to cause any further open trouble. Cuthbert Tunstall had been much more straightforwardly part of the opposition to the annulment and break with Rome than either Gardiner or Lee, and he might well have become entangled with the Maid had he not been so far away in the north. We can gauge how closely he was associated with More and Fisher from a later report to Cromwell, who in late 1539 was building up evidence against Tunstall in a further round of political crisis. The deponent testified that Burton, one of the Bishop’s servants, was in London ‘when the bishop of Rochester [Fisher] and Thomas More were dangered’ – this must have been in mid-April just before their examination and then imprisonment in the Tower, ‘and the said More asked Burton, “Will not thy master come to us [and] be as we are?” And he said he could not tell. Then said More, “If he do, no force, for if he live he may do more good than to die with us.”’52

  In the light of the debacle around the Maid, the King was understandably paranoid about Bishop Tunstall’s intentions, and just as the Bishop was travelling south in late April he ordered Cromwell to organize a raid on Tunstall’s chief houses in his diocese, ransacking his private papers for incriminating evidence. It was the first occasion on which Cromwell used as his personal agent a servant later very busy in his monastic affairs, Dr John ap Rhys. Ap Rhys acted as secretary to the northern magnates authorized to undertake the search; he took care to append a postscript to their report, in their names, commending his own diligence.53 The commissioners found little, attributing their failure to Tunstall’s foresight in removing dangerous papers, but the intimidating effect of their ostentatiously disruptive action was more than enough for Cromwell’s purposes. Just as with Gardiner and Lee, it permanently ended the Prince-Bishop’s efforts at opposition. By 19 May Chapuys was reporting to the Emperor that he had listened with disgust to Bishop Tunstall commending the Act of Succession, which the ambassador linked directly to the raids in County Durham. It was also the memory in Tunstall’s own household that this was a turning-point in his allegiance.54

  Henry showed his confidence in Lee’s and Tunstall’s acquiescence by immediately ordering them to join a high-powered commission alongside the newly consecrated Bishop Roland Lee, Almoner Edward Foxe and the lawyer Thomas Bedell; their Mission Impossible up in Huntingdonshire was to persuade Katherine of Aragon to accept the reality of the new shape of politics. Tunstall went out of his way to tell her (and the King, who would be reading his report) that he had changed his mind about the validity of her case. The fact that Katherine was rather splendidly contemptuous of the whole delegation and its purpose was almost less important than the fact that the only two bishops of the Northern Province who mattered had irrevocably demonstrated their subservience to the King and his plans for the future of the realm.55

  With all official pretence of allegiance to Rome now gone, it was the moment to fill some of those episcopal vacancies pending for some time, without any more scrabbling around for papal approval. Accordingly Cranmer took time off in the middle of the April campaign for oaths, the day before the execution of the Maid of Kent, to perform the first consecrations of bishops in his archiepiscopate. They were a trio recently helpful in the King’s Great Matter: Thomas Goodricke for Ely; John Capon alias Salcott for Bangor; and at long last, after no less than three years of frustrating delay, Roland Lee for Coventry and Lichfield. Goodricke and Salcott were straightforward Boleyn protégés, but the real prize for Cromwell was landing his old friend Lee in the vast west Midlands diocese. When their mutual friend Lancelot Collins, Treasurer of York, first heard of the prospective appointment six months earlier, he had written cheerfully to Cromwell, ‘If it be, as I hear say, that my own good friend Mr Dr Lee by your help shall be Bishop of Chester, I am thereof glad, for then I reckon you bishop there yourself.’56

  Lee was indeed Cromwell’s first protégé on the episcopal bench. The new Bishop gratefully doled out the usual crop of favours: a bailiwick of a chief episcopal manor for Ralph Sadler, and a prebend in Lichfield Cathedral for Christopher Wellifed, Master Secretary’s omnivorous clerical nephew and schoolmate of Gregory Cromwell – this latter only t
wo days after Lee’s consecration.57 But the Bishop of Chester’s promotion was even more important because he was already chosen as next President of the Council in the Marches of Wales, which enjoyed sweeping powers either side of the Welsh border, and jurisdiction formal and informal in the rest of the Principality as well. From 1525 to 1533 its status was as governing Council for Princess Mary; up to the annulment crisis she was resident in the Marches, with her own stately little Court in the Council’s capital Ludlow Castle, and another bishop was President of her Council, John Veysey of Exeter. Veysey was not the most energetic of administrators and, particularly as Katherine and her daughter had been eclipsed, good order in Wales rapidly deteriorated.

  Cromwell, with his own particular Welsh preoccupations, was eager to solve this vexation: he noted in a remembrance of May 1533 the need for ‘the establishing of a Council in the Marches of Wales’, since Mary’s demotion from being Princess of Wales meant that her Council had lost its authority. Again a couple of months later, he fretted ‘in whose name the council in Wales shall direct their letters and process from henceforwards?’58 Veysey must go: Lee was the ideal replacement. He knew what Border country was like from childhood, though it had been a different border, and it so happened he was personally linked to two of Veysey’s predecessors as Lord President in the Marches: Bishop William Smyth of Lincoln who had ordained him, and Bishop Blythe who had made him Chancellor of Coventry and Lichfield.59 Lee could be confident that he was leaving the work of his diocese in trustworthy hands, since the team of reliable administrative colleagues led by Archdeacon Richard Strete which Cromwell constituted in 1531 was still in place. That meant the Bishop could concentrate on the Presidency of the Council and the strenuous business of imposing the rule of law on Wales.

  The Lord President threw himself with relish into his new post. While still engaged in persuading the London and Sheen Carthusians, Syon and the Observant convents to take the oath of succession, he briskly forwarded to Cromwell a list of local magnates whom he would like to have placed in commission with him.60 When Lee set out for the west Midlands at the beginning of July, he travelled with a very important young guest: Gregory Cromwell. No more bucolic frolicking in East Anglian parsonages and converted priories for Gregory: this was a new stage in his education, appropriate to the son of the leading royal minister. Ludlow Castle effectively showcased a royal Court, without the dangers of the real thing.

  Fourteen-year-old Gregory had the rest of the summer and autumn to watch and learn under the benevolent but unsparing eye of his honorary uncle Roland: ‘Ye shall not need to care for him in his order,’ the Bishop promised Cromwell. Gregory’s long-suffering tutor Henry Dowes was probably trying to accentuate the positive when he listed the shower of hunting invitations from local magnates that the boy had received: it ‘cannot be but greatly to his breaking, and profit in good manners, to see the fashions of such men of worship’.61 The tutor’s equine use of ‘breaking’ suggests an excess of high spirits in his young charge; Dowes refrained from commenting that being lionized by the Staffordshire gentry was unlikely to curb them. When Bishop Lee sent Cromwell’s ‘treasure’ back to London with evident regret just after the Christmas celebrations, his affectionate end-of-term report also suggests that Gregory was physically small for his age (as do Gregory’s later portrait miniatures): ‘although nature worketh not in bodily strength, yet it surmounteth in good, gentle and virtuous conditions, which I pray God to continue.’62

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  Around the time Gregory was having his bags packed for Ludlow, Cromwell received an alarming letter from Ireland. Quite when it was sent and when it arrived are both alas uncertain. That was one of the big problems with Ireland, for even letters containing news of emergencies might sometimes take three weeks or a month to reach the English capital. This letter probably left its sender in early July. The writer was Robert Cowley, a senior Anglo-Irish lawyer, breaking the news that the Earl of Kildare’s son Lord Thomas Fitzgerald (titular Lord Offaly, but known to posterity as ‘Silken Thomas’) along with members of the great Geraldine family affinity had ‘committed infinite murders, burnings and robbings in the English Pale abouts the city of Dublin, specially the King’s lands and possessions’. Worse still, they were proclaiming that they were ‘of the Pope’s sect and band, and him they will serve against the King and all his partakers, saying further that the King is accursed, and as many as take his part and shall be openly accursed’.63

  Cowley, a veteran critic of the Geraldines, did not hold back his frustration and fury. ‘It had been good that the said Earl’s heir had been still kept in England. I am sure your wisdom gave no advice to send him home and whosoever counselled the King’s Grace thereto was far overseen [utterly crazy].’ What had happened in the Pale was treason: Cowley, not immune from pomposity, called Offaly’s outrages ‘seditious and proditorious’. The news became worse again: on 27 July Cromwell’s friend and colleague John Allen Archbishop of Dublin fell into the hands of Silken Thomas while trying to flee the country, and Offaly had him murdered along with some of his companions. This atrocity took place amid confused scenes which the Fitzgeralds later tried to present (particularly to the Pope) as an unfortunate accident, but it was noticeable that the survivors were a couple of the Archbishop’s senior attendants who happened to have the cash for ransom.64

  As Cowley made clear, all this was a disaster long in the making, which Cromwell might have averted had he not been so occupied on other matters. It is worth tracing how the explosion had built up. We have noticed Cromwell establishing friendly relations with Cowley’s patron Piers Butler Earl of Ossory, sworn foe of the Geraldines, back in autumn 1531 (see above, this page). At that stage, the Earl of Kildare could still exploit his rival contacts with the Duke of Norfolk and Anne Boleyn, and in July 1532 he got himself reappointed as Deputy of Ireland, after six years out of office. Cromwell’s own steady cultivation of other informants in Irish administration reinforced his opinion that this was a bad idea, and in September 1533 the Earl was summoned to the English Court. Not surprisingly suspicious, and moreover seriously ill from a gunshot wound, he procrastinated, but eventually arrived in February 1534, with Offaly appointed as his lieutenant back home. As Cowley noted in fury, the government had missed the chance to keep Silken Thomas in England the previous year.

  Kildare’s status during his English stay remained uncomfortably ill-defined. While he fretted at Court through winter and spring 1534, Cromwell took time off from many other worries to produce careful and comprehensive plans for a complete overhaul of government in the historically Anglo-Norman parts of the island: Ordinances for Ireland. Their contents were not particularly novel among English efforts to govern the normally ungovernable island: not so much an Irish ‘Revolution in Government’ as a proposed restoration of an idealized version of the past. The main novelty was that, with his usual perception of the usefulness of the new medium, Cromwell had copies printed; that made them far less easy to consign to forgetfulness in the back of a chest in Dublin than previous efforts. Drawing on memoranda from trustworthy Anglo-Irishmen who knew the situation at first hand, Cromwell proposed a thoroughgoing assault on the usurpation of royal power by the Anglo-Norman nobility, the re-establishment of English-ruled territory to the maximum it had achieved in the fourteenth century and the setting up within it of an English style of local government (rather optimistically, this envisaged English-style compliant noblemen and conscientious gentry to do the necessary work). If these innovations really did take root, then the medieval central institutions of government in Dublin might be made to work much as they did in contemporary England.65

  However unrealistically ambitious all this was, it was clear that within this scheme there was no place for the overweening power of the Earl of Kildare, whatever place a cowed Fitzgerald interest might thereafter play alongside other nobility. By May Kildare had lost the Deputyship to an ally of Cromwell’s and of the Butle
rs, Sir William Skeffington, a military man from Leicestershire with long experience of Ireland including a spell as Deputy, plus a healthy detestation of the Geraldines. But Skeffington, increasingly handicapped by ill-health, fatally delayed his return from London.66 Offaly was furious at the snub to Fitzgerald honour in Skeffington supplanting his father, and there were parallel sinister events at the English Court: the arrest of another magnate from the Tudor borders, William Lord Dacre of Gilsland, and the abrupt summoning to London and intimidation of Bishop Tunstall of Durham. To treat thus the great men of northern England suggested an equal menace for Geraldines.67

  Offaly’s growing displays of defiance in Dublin precipitated his father’s arrest in London on 29 June, and the Earl’s ill-health led to his death in the Tower a couple of months later, with no direct involvement in swelling Irish unrest.68 Thanks to Offaly, unrest had become island-wide rebellion, with a particularly dangerous twist. Cowley’s summer report to Cromwell made it clear that Offaly was already expressing strident defiance of royal religious policy; he had vigorous backing among senior clergy in the Anglophone parts of the island, from Meath to Armagh. They were not just angry locals from the Geraldine affinity, but included a brand-new arrival in Ireland as Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin, Dr John Travers, an Oxford academic prominent enough to have been University Preacher the year before he set out for his new office. In other words, Travers knew exactly what Thomas Cromwell was up to back in England. Several of his fellow-dissidents in the Irish Church had plenty of Oxford links from their days studying there. This group were as dangerously motivated as the admirers of the Maid of Kent, but additionally had an army at their backs.69*