Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  One problem with the newly established Faculty Office, up and running only a fortnight after the end of the first 1534 Parliamentary session, was its dependence on a highly clumsy dual system of authorizing more expensive dispensations: there was to be a clerk in Chancery looking after them in tandem with the Lambeth Palace administration. The clumsiness no doubt reflected the government’s uncomfortable awareness that, even if Cranmer’s ancient title was ‘Primate of All England’, his actual powers over the Province of York were non-existent, and just as diaphanous for Ireland. In a similar fashion, an Act for the Submission of the Clergy, passed in the same Parliamentary session, had replaced appeals to the Pope with a structure of appeals in Chancery – thus currently to the incumbent Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley.

  If the system thus created was clunky, it had the additional drawback that it allowed no formal place for Thomas Cromwell, despite the fact that he had been playing an all-pervasive part in ecclesiastical administration since the beginning of 1532, without any office to justify it. Even a teenage apprentice in government like the Duke of Richmond knew that. When he wrote to Cromwell on 11 June 1534, Richmond asked him to allow a free election of a new abbot to the Dorset Cistercian house of Bindon, ‘as the King’s Highness hath (as I think) constituted and authorised you that ye by your wisdom and discretion shall take an order and direction in all such causes’.30 Audley’s continuance as one half of the new duo of Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor was unavoidable, in view of his clear competence at his job and constant usefulness in drafting vital government legislation. In any case, if he had been shouldered aside to provide Cromwell with the leading legal office in the realm, even a worm as pliable as Audley might have turned.

  Accordingly, and probably with this matter of ecclesiastical jurisdiction mainly in mind, on 8 October 1534 Cromwell gained another promotion in Chancery: the office of Master of the Rolls.31 He elbowed aside a colleague in his anxiety to acquire it: on 31 May 1534 his old colleague in Wolsey’s service and in the annulment proceedings, the ecclesiastical lawyer Dr John Tregonwell, wrote to him anxiously checking that Cromwell’s long-standing promise of the Mastership of the Rolls on the likely vacation by its present holder Dr John Taylor would be fulfilled.32 Tregonwell’s qualifications made him an obvious choice for the office, but Taylor survived till October without apparently resigning. By then, Cromwell had changed his mind and took it himself, thus as it turned out permanently transferring the Mastership of the Rolls from the domain of Chancery-trained clerics to lay common lawyers. On a lesser scale, this was as symbolic a moment as the re-creation for a layman of Wolsey’s legatine powers.

  Theoretically Cromwell thus became Audley’s deputy in Chancery, but this meant that he did not need to be dragged into the everyday litigation business afflicting his superior, even though it gave him a major place in England’s legal hierarchy. From then on until an even greater promotion in 1536, it was as Master of the Rolls that contemporaries generally addressed letters to him. The Mastership was a rich source of fees and perquisites, in an average year a very handsome 300 pounds-plus, and brought a further exceptional benefit: The Rolls, the Master’s stately and venerable house in Chancery Lane, worth having for its geographical position alone. This new base put Cromwell at a much more convenient distance from the Court and Parliament in Westminster – right on the western edge of the City, unlike Austin Friars up in the far north-east. He moved in straight away.33

  What The Rolls would save Cromwell in time and decorum is apparent from a cheerful passing comment by his friend Attorney-General Christopher Hales in a business note of 1533: Hales needed to consult him, but could not leave his own legal chambers, so ‘if it may please you to put your mule out of her direct way of Westminster towards Gray’s Inn, I will be at your commandment.’34 This gives us a vivid glimpse of Master Secretary trotting through the City crowds on his endless journeys from Austin Friars, down Cheapside and Ludgate Hill to the Strand and onwards west. His steadily increasing dignity must be spared such commuting. In a serious health crisis in March and April 1535, decorum worked the other way, for Cromwell fell very ill with a fever at The Rolls, confined to the house for around a month. Towards the end of it the King took the most unusual step of visiting him in person, dining and transacting a little formal business. It was an unusual sign of Henry’s personal concern, because unlike Wolsey Cromwell was normally only with the King for business discussions; their relationship did not normally have the trappings of easy friendship. Queen Anne did not accompany the monarch on this errand of mercy.35

  The Rolls was thus a house fit for a King. Austin Friars remained Cromwell’s more domestic retreat, and he went on adding to its splendour, but The Rolls housed much of his archive – alongside the repository of official Chancery records, another convenience. He even had his own handsome private chapel next door (not that such amenities seemed particularly to concern him).* In fact Cromwell liked the house so much that he did not release it to the Master of the Rolls who succeeded him in July 1536: coincidentally Attorney-General Hales. Hales does not seem to have kicked up a fuss about this while Cromwell lived, despite the house specifically forming part of his grant of office. He was remembered rather sadly as dining habitually at an inn in Chancery Lane, and ‘during his time at the Rolls to have kept very small house or none at all’.36 This was as much an example of Cromwell’s high-handedness as taking the Mastership in the first place.

  Through the year, conversations continued about staging an alternative to the unfolding fiasco of Cranmer’s archiepiscopal visitation: a royal visitation of Church institutions across the realm.37 The plans got steadily more ambitious, as we can see from fortunately dateable drafts of measures setting it up. The first draft, from summer or early autumn 1534, envisaged a team of three visitors-general, unnamed, merely to make tours of inspection of exempt religious houses – in other words, monasteries and colleges previously answering only to the Pope and so outside the powers of visitation of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Their work would parallel the commission on the friaries already falteringly under way.38 Next came a much broader draft commission for the visitation of any ecclesiastical institution, which internal evidence dates between 17 November and 19 December 1534.

  This expanded plan arose directly from the recent passage of the Act of Supremacy. For the first time it used the unfamiliar Latin word ‘vicegerentes’ – in the plural, since three commissioners were to exercise those powers. This time they were named: Cromwell, John Tregonwell and their old collaborator on the annulment campaign Thomas Bedell. But that document was busily corrected, and in the alterations Cromwell emerged as sole Vice-Gerent (poor Tregonwell, disappointed once more). He was also styled Vicar-General – the difference between the two titles was never clear, but a Vicar-General at least sounded like a familiar official in a diocesan hierarchy.39 This revision formed the basis of the royal warrant waved benevolently on through the system by a variety of Cromwell’s own administrative personae, finally arriving in Chancery on 21 January 1535.40 The grant was closely followed by a procession of declarations from the bishops, starting with Cranmer on 10 February, proclaiming their loyalty to the Crown and to no external authority.41

  That was not the end of the story. The warrant setting up the Vice-Gerency was limited in focus to the staging of a nationwide royal visitation, which sounds like a one-off, time-limited event. Cromwell did not even begin making any moves till the following summer – rather later in the Province of York, after facing down legal quibbles from Archbishop Lee. Meanwhile, he set up an administration on the basis of his new title, but his officers waited till 18 September 1535 to suspend the administrative powers of all bishops (including the archbishops), soon after Cranmer’s metropolitical visitation had been finally put out of its misery by formal termination on 1 August. Over the next few months it became clear that the mass suspension was made so that Cromwell could selectively restore powers to the e
piscopate as he thought fit.42

  A fresh stage of his grab for power in the Church began in January 1536, with the setting up of a vice-gerential court to process the most high-value wills (and thus take especially lucrative business from archbishops and bishops alike). All this open-ended exercise of the royal supremacy was on the basis of a visitation which was never actually brought to a formal end during Cromwell’s lifetime; he used his powers, for instance, to visit the vacant diocese of Hereford as late as 1539.43 In fact, if Cromwell had formally ended his visitation, it is a moot point whether the Vice-Gerency would legally have continued to exist. It is all a perfect example of his genius for improvisatory administration with amoeba-like properties of expansion.

  Amid these manoeuvres, it comes as no surprise that when the Act for First Fruits and Tenths was passed by the autumn 1534 session of Parliament the administration of these new taxes was placed firmly in the hands of the Lord Chancellor and Master of the Rolls. In practice, Audley played no significant part, and Cromwell appointed as Treasurer and General Receiver for the money another of his former close colleagues under Wolsey, John Gostwick, already in charge of a portmanteau of royal revenues at his master’s disposal (Calwich and Beddgelert priories had come under Gostwick’s wing at this time). It was a conveniently personal arrangement; while Cromwell lived, Gostwick was not allowed a formal department or ‘court’ to support his administration of First Fruits and Tenths, even though he also undertook a vast swathe of other financial business which the royal minister had previously found time to consider in person. Instead Gostwick got an extremely generous salary – paid initially without any formal warrant.44

  Financial supervision of churchmen meshed very nicely with the jurisdictional powers which Cromwell increasingly enjoyed through the Vice-Gerency. Characteristically, as in earlier years with his first arrival on the commissions of sewers and of the peace, he had himself placed on regional commissions for assessing the new clerical taxes in those areas most directly his concern: Kent, Middlesex and Surrey, together with the city of Bristol, which had shrewdly chosen him as Recorder the previous year. He went so far as to send in his own auditors to deal with three wealthy religious institutions in Surrey, perhaps in order to see how the new system was working at first hand.45 Inevitably, his personal involvement quickly ceased, and the commissioners busily worked in the localities with no more central consultation than necessary.

  The commissioners were authorized to begin work in January 1535. The scale of their labours, whose results largely survive, was deeply impressive. They recorded for the first time since Domesday Book (and in far more detail) what financial assets belonged to the Church: the Valor ecclesiasticus, which in its early nineteenth-century edition runs to six volumes. The work was done by a mixture of local gentry and diocesan financial officials, reinforced with some civil servants from Westminster, and although assessments erred somewhat towards generosity, particularly for secular clergy, the records have been shown to be broadly realistic. The initial requirement of completing the work by 30 May was ridiculously optimistic, but virtually all was done in nine months from issuing the commissions, plus inevitable corrections to come: a staggering achievement given the administrative conditions of the time. The King now knew how much the Church might have to offer him in terms of assets and estates, and where it all was.46

  One final component of Cromwell’s intimidating clutch of powers was his supervision of England’s two universities, where an increasing proportion of its clergy did their final training, alongside a growing section of the English gentry. By now he had a decade’s worth of close personal relations with both Oxford and Cambridge, and had chosen Cambridge for the education of little Gregory and cousins. His saving of Cardinal College Oxford under a different name (albeit for the moment with lessened ambitions) ensured him a golden reputation and continued direct involvement there. Somehow by 1534 he had also wrested the Visitorship of New College from its customary holder as Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, and arbitrated in a major College row between the Warden and evangelically inclined Fellows. Surprisingly, he did not show especial favour to the evangelicals, partly because Warden John London was good at trimming his own traditionalist instincts and had been very helpful in annulment business. London, close friend for decades with another protagonist of the annulment on Cromwell’s staff Thomas Bedell (lately Fellow of New College), went on to become one of Cromwell’s chief roving assistants.47

  Cromwell’s wider interference at Oxford remained to some extent hobbled by the obstinate persistence of John Longland Bishop of Lincoln as Chancellor of the University. Longland was a religious conservative who, like Warden London, had banked a generous deposit of goodwill with the King through long-standing support for the Aragon annulment. He was thereafter equally adroit in rarely stepping too far out of line, so Cromwell never displaced him at Oxford, despite occasional clashes between their respective religious clients. Nevertheless it was principally Cromwell to whom University and town authorities looked when locked in a prolonged struggle about their respective jurisdictions; he might be seen as more of an honest broker between the two sides than Longland.48 Subsequent correspondence shows that he was never a blind partisan of the University in disputes which frequently descended into violence.

  In 1533 the alert University authorities in Cambridge also began recognizing their need to honour Cromwell’s new power by granting him a modest annual fee. In 1534 they could do better, thanks to the death of their High Steward, Lord Mountjoy; Cromwell duly took that office deferentially proffered to him.49 Mountjoy, until recently veteran Chamberlain to Queen Katherine, was by the time of his death the symbol of a previous age. So too was the then University Chancellor, no less a figure than Bishop John Fisher: a colossus in Cambridge affairs since the early years of the century, and particularly associated with St John’s College, founded at his urging by Henry VIII’s grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort.

  It was sadly symptomatic of Fisher’s changed circumstances that on 3 October 1534 he announced (or was ventriloquized from his cell in the Tower as announcing) that he was nominating deputies to adjudicate in Cambridge’s own row between town and gown, over jurisdiction at the mammoth annual Stourbridge Fair. Fisher’s nominees were mainly Cambridge academic notables, but also included Queen Anne’s almoner Nicholas Shaxton, her cousin Dr William Butts and Cromwell’s man Dr Thomas Lee.50 The last stage in this transfer across generations and allegiances awaited Fisher’s judicial murder in June 1535. A little over two months afterwards, the University was still locked in battle with the town, sometimes literally, and that was no time to be sentimental (it rarely is with academic administrators). So, just before the next round of town/gown hostilities at the Fair in September, Cromwell was gratified to hear that he had been elected Chancellor of Cambridge. It was the culmination of a year in which power in the Church under the Supreme Head decisively shifted from a variety of clergy to a single layman.51

  12

  Deaths for Religion: 1535

  English relations with Rome had entered a curious twilight zone. There was still a resident royal ambassador there: the now veteran diplomat Gregorio Casali, doing his charming best to hold on to some sort of normality against overwhelming odds. In the wake of his English colleagues’ diplomatic debacle at Marseille before the Pope and French King, Casali travelled to England and stayed for no less than six months in the first half of 1534, both in order to defend his own efforts in a thankless embassy and to embed himself and his family anew in England’s alternative diplomacy. He had to do some quick footwork, since his relations with men of influence in England were some years out of date: Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk had previously figured most highly among his correspondents, and he needed to adjust to new realities.

  Casali did his best to interest Cromwell in expanding the range of his European missions to Venice and to János Szapolyai, pretender to the Hungarian throne. This might produce
a grand if ramshackle alliance with the French against the Habsburgs, but far-off central European powers and potentates were hardly major players for the English, and it was a mark of English diplomatic desperation that Casali was taken at all seriously in these schemes.1 Cromwell’s investment in them was modest, and no more came of them than from the simultaneous English missions to the Schmalkaldic and Hanseatic Leagues. The final disaster came in spring 1535, when Henry’s designated envoy to the Hungarian pretender, Gregorio’s brother Giambattista Casali, was recognized and imprisoned by Habsburg officials in Dalmatia. As Chapuys observed to the Emperor with grim realism, ‘Had the King of the Romans ordered [Giambattista] to be hanged, [Cromwell] would not have cared a fig for it.’2

  On returning to Rome in July 1534, Gregorio Casali briefly became important once more, as a new pope was soon to be chosen. The death of the much harassed Clement VII in September caused rejoicing at the English Court (and alas also among the faithful in the Eternal City). Chapuys disgustedly reproduced more callous remarks: Cromwell could not ‘refrain from saying in public, to anyone he meets, that “at last that great devil was dead”, and it seems as if he was sorry not to be able to give that Pope a worse title’.3 With the conclave for a successor opening on 11 October, events of the last few years did not inhibit the King of England from sending his envoy the customary blank letters of credence for lobbying the cardinals during the election: a diplomatic place-holder which will have cut little ice with anyone. The English were lucky that the candidacy of Cromwell’s nominal former employer Cardinal Campeggio, a serious early contender, soon languished, for he was furious at being deprived of the See of Salisbury, as well as personally loathing Casali. The successful candidate, Alessandro Farnese, now Pope Paul III, did not have any such baggage. This at least meant that Casali could play for time to postpone further announcement of the King’s excommunication.4