Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  In the wider world, the Holy Roman Emperor’s advisers showed a lively interest in Irish developments. The old alliance between England and Empire had been severely strained first by King Henry’s despicable treatment of Katherine of Aragon, and then by his flirtation with Protestant reformers. Habsburg diplomats had started taking notice of Ireland in 1528 when the King’s plans for the Aragon annulment became apparent, but Chapuys became freshly alert to Irish trouble as the Boleyn marriage took shape in spring 1533. That summer Thomas Batcock, a merchant in Spain and an old informant of Cardinal Wolsey’s, approached the new chief minister to warn him that Spanish Court gossip had the Emperor planning to ‘set the Scots and Irishmen against us, with a great number of Spaniards. All shall be as pleaseth God.’70 The Mayor of Waterford wrote drawing Cromwell’s attention to the ongoing reality of these plans just as Silken Thomas’s rebellion broke out.71

  In fact Charles V never committed substantial resources to helping the Irish rebels beyond some arms shipments to another Anglo-Norman magnate in alliance with Offaly, Thomas Fitzthomas Earl of Desmond. That hardly mattered: the Irish noblemen’s offer to transfer their allegiance from the Tudor Crown to the Habsburgs, and their open proclamation of loyalty to the Pope, were important assets for the Emperor, won at remarkably little expense. The modest imperial investment was an exact equivalent of what the English were doing against Habsburg interests in Germany and the Baltic (see below, this page), but much more cost-effective. Members of the Irish nobility withdrawing their allegiance from the English Crown had no precedent.

  The possible consequences deeply alarmed King Henry and his ministers, though in public and in documents which might become public they played down their fears, for obvious reasons. Chapuys reported to the Emperor with frank Schadenfreude Cromwell’s fury as ever more dire reports poured in from Ireland in August; Master Secretary had the cleric who brought the news of Archbishop Allen’s murder detained, accusing him of treason for stirring alarm in England by leaving Ireland so hastily.72 It was plain that Sir William Skeffington must make a reality of the Deputyship to which he had been appointed in the spring, and return to face the spreading insurrection. Skeffington set out at the end of July with the makings of a hastily assembled expeditionary force, but he delayed in Chester and Holyhead for weeks before crossing the Irish Sea, suffering from his recurrent illness, and reluctant to leave before even more reluctant English levies trickled in to give him the semblance of a convincing army.73

  Attending Skeffington and doing his best to chivvy him on to Ireland was another Leicestershire man, Cromwell’s servant William Brabazon, accompanied by a more junior Cromwell household colleague also from the Midlands, Thomas Agard. Brabazon was a key and long-standing member of Cromwell’s personal administrative team, and sacrificing him was a major statement of intent: clearly he and Agard were to be the Secretary’s eyes and ears in Ireland. Appointed Under-Treasurer of the Irish Exchequer on 26 August, Brabazon was one of the few Englishmen whom Cromwell sent to Ireland on a permanent basis, and he stayed long after his patron’s fall. On his death on campaign in Ulster in 1552 after a long and successful career in Irish government, he was commemorated with a handsome tomb and monument in St Catherine’s parish church in Dublin.74 Appropriately, these were remarkably modish, among the first examples of Renaissance art in the island; they symbolized a new era for Ireland, though not exactly a new dawn. Skeffington’s reappointment as Deputy had marked the end of centuries in which Anglo-Norman noblemen had effectively kept Ireland in their own hands, and inaugurated an almost unbroken period of government by Englishmen which only drew to its messy conclusion in 1921.

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  Not surprisingly after the Irish catastrophe, the already vindictive atmosphere in English politics grew ever more poisoned, and over the next few years the fear of treason produced ever more murderous results. Right away, furious recriminations flew around, exposing strains normally discreetly veiled. Chapuys continued to derive much amusement from them, particularly the chasm which opened up between Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk, resulting in the Duke retreating from Court once more. Furious rows at the Council board included an incident around the beginning of September 1534, concerning the King’s illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond, that the ambassador rightly found very interesting:

  I am told that among other accusations which Cromwell brought on that occasion against the Duke [of Norfolk], one was that he was more the cause of the present disaster than anyone else, inasmuch as he had wanted to keep the Duke of Richmond near him and his daughter, [Richmond’s] wife; and that, had he consented to allow him to go to Ireland eight months ago, as he had been advised, none of this would have happened.75

  Henry Fitzroy, the King’s illegitimate son by a Staffordshire gentlewoman called Elizabeth Blount, was a dynastic asset whose value waxed and waned in relation to the prospect of the King acquiring a more satisfactory male heir. The King was proud of him while he was his only son, and brought him up in appropriate splendour. At six he was created Duke of Richmond and Somerset; in June 1529, aged ten, he was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (thus all the Irish Deputies we have met were Deputies to him). His godfather Cardinal Wolsey also sent him to Yorkshire with his own regional council to match Princess Mary’s position in Wales. Thereafter, Richmond’s advancing years made him more credible as a governing figurehead, as well as a political asset to be fought over; at Wolsey’s fall he was one of the prizes available for distribution. The Duke of Norfolk as part of his triumph over Wolsey did his best to annex the boy, no doubt in co-operation with Anne Boleyn, leading in stages to the fourteen-year-old Richmond marrying Norfolk’s daughter Mary in November 1533.

  That curiously delayed event showed bad timing, as it coincided with Norfolk’s rout in national politics. His grip on the teenager began almost immediately to be contested, and his refusal to allow Richmond to be sent to Ireland that winter was clearly part of the struggle. Instead, at the end of May 1534 the little Duke was separated from his father-in-law to live on his estates at Canford on the Dorset coast, arriving to the sort of local excitement and acclaim which was to greet his slightly younger contemporary Gregory Cromwell in the Marches a month or two later. It is interesting that the Duke’s ‘Governor’ George Cotton immediately wrote to Cromwell to let him know how successful the welcome in the West Country had been, going out of his way to thank the Secretary for his long-term ‘manifold goodness’.76

  Just as indicative was a letter from Richmond himself to Cromwell a week later, about the appointment of a West Country abbot. It was part of a correspondence that summer in which the boy carefully showed Master Secretary how conscientiously he was playing the role of a local magnate. He also displayed a teenage enthusiasm for accompanying the King on a proposed visit to France which others of more mature years were doing their best to avoid; this letter in his own hand is rather touching in its eager adolescent awkwardness.77 Ireland would have given Richmond a larger-scale apprenticeship in government than Dorset offered, and his presence there would have allowed Cromwell to populate the Irish administration with more allies alongside Brabazon and Agard. Thanks to Norfolk’s stubbornness in February 1534, that plan was now impossible.

  There were, nevertheless, compensations. Norfolk’s effective disgrace left a much less contested space in government, the last convulsion of a sequence of events in which Cromwell’s rivals had conveniently suffered falls from power or complete eclipses, not least thanks to treason in prospect. Five years before, Cromwell had set off from Wolsey at Esher ‘to make or mar’ in the 1529 Parliament. Now Bishop Gardiner was licking his wounds in that same episcopal palace, Thomas More had exchanged the Lord Chancellor’s seat for a cell in the Tower and the conservative bishops who had sneered at Cromwell’s master that autumn were humbled. Out of his ill-wishers, there remained Anne Boleyn to deal with, and she would have done well to understand what one of Cromwell’s West Country
friends and former colleagues under the Cardinal said to him appreciatively that summer of 1534: ‘I do well perceive, as ye have often times said to me, that although ye were slow, ye be sure at length.’78 Above them all was one neither slow nor sure: the never-predictable King Henry. Where would the royal whim next take Master Secretary?

  11

  Spirituals: 1534–1535

  In 1534 the first substantial signs appeared of Cromwell grafting his own evangelical religious enthusiasm on to Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Over the previous three years, his undoubted relish for curbing the independent power of the Church had matched the King’s own fury at leading churchmen’s opposition to the Aragon annulment. Yet nothing Cromwell had accomplished for his master so far in government policy moved beyond that particular agenda, towards the Reformations across the water. To go further was a delicate task, given that Henry VIII detested most of what developing Protestantism stood for. Nevertheless, with the destruction of the Maid and her allies, closely followed by the shock of an Irish rebellion driven by an increasingly open papalist rhetoric, he was emboldened in efforts to move the King’s various inconsistent religious agendas towards his own, and in Archbishop Cranmer he had a sympathetic collaborator. The often rash ways in which Cromwell pursued his plans over the next few years are some of the best proofs that he was more than a politician shaped by cynical ambition.

  The first signs of his efforts to promote evangelical reformation in England were initiatives in foreign policy, the area in which he was least experienced or competent. In reaching out to evangelicals overseas, he had been forced to embrace King Henry’s emphatic snub to the exiled William Tyndale in 1531, and none of the government’s other tentative approaches abroad that year had come to anything. The year 1533 saw the King sending embassies to both Catholic and Protestant rulers in the Empire; although they were led by Cromwell’s evangelical agent Stephen Vaughan and the resident diplomat Christopher Mont, it was clear that religion mattered far less to Henry than the task of outflanking or harassing Charles V and finding backing for his marriage to Anne Boleyn. The missions proved even more humiliatingly fruitless than two years before; yet Cromwell did not give up. He put intensive drafting work into fresh memoranda for the King in December 1533, concentrating on embassies to German princes who explicitly rejected papal authority.1

  When at the end of January 1534 a trio of English ambassadors set off to various parts of Germany and to the King of Poland, they were once more associates of Cromwell and Cranmer: Dr Thomas Lee, William Paget (freshly acquired as Cromwell’s client from the fading Bishop Gardiner) and Cranmer’s friend Archdeacon Nicholas Heath. They were all equipped with generous cash on a royal warrant channelled to them via the Master of the Jewels.2 Given their official status, there was a curious slant to the message when in May Heath and his companions presented themselves to the Diet (assembly) of the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant states in Nuremberg, soliciting a return official embassy from the League to England. The records of the Diet noted that the ambassadors’ arrival was ‘counselled and set up through a few of the most distinguished people of the realm, though not endorsed by the King’.3

  The memorandum comments further on this group (its members unnamed), their purpose and the likely benefit of a Protestant embassy to England. ‘The English councillors and distinguished people who favour the Gospel and have requested such an embassy will have greater cause to prompt the King, so that through this means, which the Almighty in His grace has now miraculously set forth, the Gospel may be brought to England, and from a persecutor [Henry] will become a lover of the Word of God.’ More followed in the same vein, from which it is evident that while the English missions to mainland Europe had many purposes in King Henry’s mind, this was not one of them. The feelers to Nuremberg were an embassy within an embassy, and no one other than Cromwell would have had the chutzpah to try something like this. Maybe the King knew about the wooing of the League, and allowed it to go forward, subject to deniability. Maybe he did not.

  The leaders of the Schmalkaldic Diet were clearly interested in the English approach, given the care with which they considered and minuted it, but they were also hard-headed politicians who recognized a dubious prospect when they saw one. Why waste money and energy on an embassy which might face a direct snub from the King of England? The timing of the English embassies that winter and spring could not have been worse: Germany was far more interested in the evangelical states’ military action to claw back from the Habsburgs the territory of the exiled Duke of Württemberg, and by a political meltdown in the kingdom of Denmark, likewise potentially involving Habsburg power. Henry did in fact back the winners in the short, sharp Württemberg campaign, though his contribution was at one remove: he agreed to divert to the cause the current instalments of a substantial pension France had been paying England for decades, in view of the common interest of England, France and the Schmalkaldic League in harassing the Emperor. At least that promised a little English goodwill stored up for the future with the League.4

  The first apparently productive Protestant contacts with England this year came not from the League but from the Hanseatic cities of Lübeck and Hamburg to the north, where Thomas Lee followed up a royal mission he had undertaken the previous year. The two great trading ports were strongly opposed to the Emperor and the Pope, saw England as a valuable ally, were prepared to declare their firm conviction that the Aragon annulment was good and godly, and sensationally declared that if Henry backed their plan to invade Denmark and oust its present monarch they would offer him the vacant Danish throne. Henry always showed a touching confidence in other people’s admiration of his abilities as a ruler, and the prospect of anyone in mainland Europe expressing unalloyed support for his marital troubles was additionally thrilling. As far as Cromwell and Cranmer were concerned, Lübeck and Hamburg were as attractive a prospect as the Schmalkaldic League, being good Protestants as well as major trading partners with England on the North Sea and Baltic coasts.5

  Accordingly, in mid-June 1534, two stylish Hanseatic diplomatic delegations arrived in England to a warm welcome at Court. They were followed a few weeks later by their leader, delayed through illness: Johannes Aepinus (Johann Huck before Latinizing himself), Superintendent – effectively evangelical Bishop – of the Church of Hamburg. His appearance was a new and exotic experience for the English: Aepinus was a theological heavyweight among German Protestant clergy, and so an inspiration to still tentative and thinly spread evangelical imitators in the infant Church of England. Chapuys, bewildered by this diplomatic initiative, but correctly assuming it was not good news for the Emperor, reported a lavish banquet for the Hanseatics thrown by Cranmer at Lambeth Palace, with a significant guest-list: the newly consecrated Bishops Salcott and Goodricke, Edward Foxe and inevitably Cromwell. It was not surprising that apparently ‘the conversation turned principally on several articles of the Lutheran sect, such as the authority of the Pope and other matters, on which these people wished to have the opinion and advice of the Lubeckian doctors, and find the best means of persuading the English to such a radical change in religious matters.’6

  The home team at Cranmer’s dinner-table sounds remarkably like ‘the English councillors and distinguished people who favour the Gospel’ in the Schmalkaldic minute at Nuremberg. Yet the relationship never crystallized: futility and cross-purposes stumbled on in dismal succession, doing the godly cause no favours. The English had no real grasp of the intricacies of Baltic politics, and the internal affairs of both Hamburg and Lübeck were chaotic. The regime in Lübeck might be godly, but it had come to power through insurrection, boasting a populist agenda which would have appalled King Henry if he had experienced it at first hand, and which infuriated the rest of the Hanseatic League. Blatant piracy by Lübecker shipping against Habsburg vessels right down as far as the Channel seriously embarrassed the English authorities in their dealings with the Habsburg Low Countries, a far more important comme
rcial partner for England than Lübeck.7 By autumn 1534, having reversed alliances in the Danish dynastic struggles, Lübeck was brazenly backtracking on the thought of promoting Henry to the Danish crown, though the King blindly persisted in thinking he could benefit from intervening in Denmark.8 This irresponsible English diplomatic adventuring left the Schmalkaldic League deeply unimpressed, and offset goodwill gained through Henry’s financial contribution to the Württemberg campaign. It was a miracle that any further negotiations with Germany took place the following year: really a tribute to the narrowness of King Henry’s international options, thanks to his own domestic and external follies.

  In England itself, the evangelical cause was marked by equal confusion. Over the next year the regime discovered that even if the existing structures of the Provinces of Canterbury and York might now be described in official documents with a new phrase, ‘the Church of England’, that left a great many questions unanswered about the new Church. This was embarrassingly revealed by Archbishop Cranmer’s launch in May 1534 of a metropolitical visitation for his own Province, patently aimed at laying his clergy open for whatever measures of reformation the King would allow him.9 Cranmer had already dealt with his own diocese of Canterbury in 1533; that was the easy part. Now he launched the wider programme on the most obvious starting-point, the diocese of London, and extended it outwards month by month, evidently intending to cover the whole of the Southern Province during the next twelve months or so.