Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  The Bible translator was nevertheless a marked man, already having more than once earned King Henry’s displeasure through his obstinately principled refusal to conform to royal wishes. In time of trouble he could expect little sympathy from the King. His downfall came through the plotting of a shady young English gentleman of Dorset called Henry Phelips, who was no doubt able to gain Tyndale’s confidence because of his links to Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell had done various favours for Phelips’s father Richard at least since his days with Wolsey, particularly in strenuous efforts to get Henry’s brother Thomas out of serious legal trouble in the West Country during 1534.36 Henry repaid this goodwill by treachery. He obtained a ‘commission’ to arrest Tyndale and also the passing English envoy Robert Barnes, who he would have known was a protégé of Cromwell’s, together with Cromwell’s old acquaintance George Joye, another Antwerp resident; in the event he managed to entrap only Tyndale, probably on 24 April 1535.37 While it is not clear to whom Phelips owed his authorization, strong suspicion fell on Bishop Stokesley of London, who loathed ‘the arch-heretic’ and had clashed with Tyndale’s brother Edward over diocesan estates in Gloucestershire.38

  Cromwell would have heard the news of Tyndale’s arrest in the week that the Carthusian monks were executed. He could do nothing to influence Tyndale’s fate, given King Henry’s continuing coldness towards the translator and England’s current lack of diplomatic clout with the Emperor; it is easy to imagine his frustration and fury, all the worse for the dangers of expressing his feelings openly. It would have made it easier to see Fisher and More die that summer. In September 1535 he sent two letters ‘devised [that is, carefully drafted] for Tyndale’ to his most influential contacts in the Low Countries, the Lord of Bergen op Zoom and the Archbishop of Palermo, via Stephen Vaughan and associated evangelical English merchants. Their answers were courteous but non-committal, hardly surprisingly when the memories of the executions in the Tower were still raw, and when everyone knew that the English were launching their biggest mission yet to the Emperor’s turbulent princes of the Empire.39 Tyndale lingered for more than a year in prison, like Fisher before him. In September 1536, imploring God to open the King of England’s eyes, he was strangled by the Brussels executioner and his corpse burned. Cromwell did not forget Phelips’s part in his death, nor Stokesley’s likely role in the background.

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  The most exotic of slaughters, and most nightmarish in the various European religious atrocities of 1535, occurred in the city of Münster in north-west Germany. In February 1534, growing crowds of ‘Anabaptists’ from all over northern Europe hijacked the city’s initially Lutheran rejection of its Prince-Bishop and set up their own apocalyptic kingdom as a beacon for the whole continent. ‘Anabaptist’ is a catch-all and abusive term for a great variety of sixteenth-century Europe’s radical adventures in Christian belief beyond the rebellions of Martin Luther or Huldrych Zwingli. Such radicals made many individual theological choices in pushing the logic of Luther’s remoulding of tradition. Their widespread affirmation of baptizing only adults into Christian community was just one of these decisions, but it earned them that general label as ‘rebaptizers’, Anabaptists. They would themselves have regarded this Greek sneer as a canard, since in their eyes baptism done to infants was not true baptism at all. In the early 1530s, some radicals turned to contemplating violence against all powers in contemporary society, not merely the old Church authorities. It would hasten the return of Christ to perfect all things in the Last Days of the world. This was an idea to appal any evangelical who felt it perfectly possible to live out godly reformation in obedience to the existing powers ordained to rule by God.

  This truly revolutionary mood crystallized in the northern Low Countries. Cromwell was kept well informed about the build-up of trouble by his old mercantile friends there, principally John Hacket in Brussels. At first, in March 1534, Hacket exploited reports of increasing disorder caused by ‘these new sects of rebaptisement’ to slap down snide comments from Habsburg courtiers about English popular unrest, but as the situation deteriorated, and as the English realized how it was linked to growing turmoil in Münster, Schadenfreude dropped away and real alarm took over.40 The long siege of Münster by a joint expeditionary force of Protestants and Catholics had not yet reached its appalling conclusion in starvation, betrayal and execution when in spring 1535 the English authorities realized that they also had Anabaptists in their midst.

  These were no mere strays in the immigrant diaspora of south-east England, but part of a targeted international mission spreading out from Münster to bring on the Last Days of the world. If Cromwell had but known it, one of those coming to England was Gerrit Geyle, one of nine people in a room in Amsterdam in December 1533 who witnessed Jan Matthys launch his prophetic mission from God before gathering followers to march on Münster, the first leader of its revolution.41 Yet maybe Master Secretary did indeed learn of this catalytic moment in Amsterdam, because Geyle was one of those burned in a short, sharp English campaign against Anabaptists in spring 1535. A royal proclamation in March ordered them all to leave the realm; both Cromwell and Cranmer were involved in the examinations of those who did not.42 After a dark note in Cromwell’s ‘remembrances’ to ask ‘what the King will do with the Anabaptists’, up to twenty-five were burned at the stake in London and neighbouring towns in May – one of the most spectacular co-ordinated burnings of heretics in England in the whole century, outclassing any single set-piece of Queen Mary’s reign twenty years later. Both the King and Cromwell took especial care to let Chapuys know about this, and they sent those professedly penitent back to the Habsburg authorities in the Low Countries. Even Bishop Fisher in his cell pricked up his ears at the news.43

  The Anabaptists were a nightmare for Master Secretary and Archbishop Cranmer in more than one way. First was the fear familiar from present-day neuroses about terrorism that this was only the start: when Münster was finally taken in June and its Anabaptist defenders butchered, another of Cromwell’s informants in Antwerp told him that many survivors were fleeing to England.44 An English-language pamphlet about the reign of ‘Jan of Leyden’ in Münster, printed probably in Antwerp soon after the city’s fall, was colourful and exciting, but did not especially condemn the insurrectionists; it might give the English ideas.45 Henry’s autos-da-fé of 1535 did not end Anabaptist activities in England, nor break their links with regrouped radicals in the Low Countries in the wake of Münster. Even when Protestantism triumphed in England under Edward VI, Elizabeth and James I, the Protestant authorities went on burning radicals at the stake. It has often and plausibly been suggested that one of the most lasting achievements of the Vice-Gerency, certainly one which has left Cromwell’s memory golden with historians, is a direct result of official fears of Anabaptism: his order in his vice-gerential injunctions of autumn 1538 that every parish in the kingdom must keep a register of marriages, christenings and burials. Keeping a full record of babies christened could make each parish aware of those who were not, and the authorities could act accordingly.

  An equal anxiety for Cromwell and his evangelical allies was how to separate their own religious agenda from Jan of Leyden in the mind of King Henry. It was embarrassing when Anabaptists died at the stake in May 1535 displaying similar heroic fervour to ‘mainstream’ martyrs with evangelical views like Cromwell’s and Cranmer’s own. Seventy years later that perceptive Jesuit polemicist Robert Parsons gleefully highlighted this worry: he recalled a troubled comment to one of King Henry’s courtiers by an evangelically inclined gentlewoman, who in 1535 had watched Anabaptists burn at Smithfield, ‘singing, and chanting scriptures, as I began to think with myself, whether their device was not of some value or no’.46 Cromwell’s own occasional printer the evangelical John Gough was among Londoners picked up for examination, for printing ‘the Confession of the City of Geneva’.47 The Protestant Reformation in a city about to welcome John Calvin might seem remote fr
om Münster, but who was to say in 1535? What, indeed, of populist ferment in the city of Lübeck, Henry VIII’s difficult ally?

  The austere reformer John Calvin shared Cromwell’s concern not to be linked with Münster’s other John, of Leyden. The Preface in the first version of his master-work of systematic theology, the Institutes, has a dedication to his sovereign King François of France, dated less than two months after the fall of Münster in 1535. Calvin kept this dedicatory text in all later versions of this eventual best-seller, long after the King was dead. Why retain this passionate appeal to a monarch who was one of the greatest disappointments among many for sixteenth-century reformers? Because Calvin needed to emphasize that he and his fellow-evangelicals in France were peaceful and law-abiding, really the King’s best and most truly Catholic subjects, rather than the self-styled Catholics who persecuted them. One might say that the whole of Calvin’s later theological development was shaped by his obsessive need to show he was not John of Leyden. In 1553 he too burned an ‘Anabaptist’, the maverick theologian Michael Servetus.48

  Calvin’s Preface was an embarrassed comment not simply on Münster but on evangelical excesses in France. In October 1534, just as François was pulling together plans for a reunion of Europe’s divided Christianity through talks with the German Protestants, the French King was appalled to find printed attacks on the mass posted in prominent public settings, and on the door to his own private apartments too. In his fury, he endorsed the most severe round of persecution of evangelicals that France had known, and ostentatiously reaffirmed his traditional Catholic loyalty.49 Those heretics burning in France were part of the wider context for the deaths of More and Fisher; like Tyndale’s arrest, they showed that evangelicals were menaced from both ends of the ideological spectrum, radical and papal.

  In fact Cranmer and Cromwell could rhetorically link Anabaptist radicals with the monks of the London Charterhouse; they were both ‘sects’. This might also have a useful appeal to King Henry. By now he had become fond of seeing himself as holding the middle way in religion; it was his sacred duty to punish extremes, up to and including executions.50 As ‘sects’, both papist religious orders and radicals cut themselves off from the Church’s mainstream life. Tyndale had pioneered the application of such terms to orders of monks and friars, ‘as one holdeth of Francis, another of Dominic’.51 It was easy to extend the same rebuke to radicals. By their actions both extremes had ‘divided, rent and torn in pieces the quiet unity and friendly concord of the holy religion’, Archbishop Cranmer’s chaplain Thomas Becon proclaimed in a remarkable recasting of early Reformation history; he was writing in 1550, by which time English monks had been dispersed and Protestant magistrates were themselves burning Anabaptists.52 In a sermon of the same period Hugh Latimer condemned monks and Anabaptists alike because neither could ‘abide the company of men’; they shunned ordinary society, forgetting the ‘commandment of love and charity’.53 By this logic, religious persecution of Carthusians and radicals redressed the balance of Christian love: a conclusion which that strident evangelical preacher fully endorsed.

  In 1535, in an indirect piece of luck for Cromwell, King François reined in his revenge on French religious dissidence enough to resume negotiations with the Schmalkaldic League, in pursuit of his long feud with the Emperor. That spring he even began serious attempts to persuade Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague in Wittenberg, to come to Paris. King Henry was stirred to jealousy, fearing agreement between the German Protestants and France which would exclude him. He had other worries too. Having made such a fuss appealing to a General Council in the business of his marriage in 1533–4, he was now terrified that the Pope would call his bluff and summon just such a Council backed by the Catholic powers of Europe. It would be worth the King’s while to reach out to resist a papally convened Council. Cromwell therefore had an excellent opportunity to put past disappointments behind him and revive his overtures to the Schmalkaldic League.54

  This was a dramatic turnaround from the very recent English failures to engage successfully with German Protestantism. Preparations reached their height in summer 1535, just as Henry was making himself a pariah in Catholic Europe by executing Fisher and More. As we have seen, Cromwell’s allies and sympathizers had led previous embassies to Protestant Germany, but this year he scored a notable coup by persuading the King to appoint two new envoys even more unequivocally evangelical: his friend the ex-friar Robert Barnes and the Cambridge don Dr Simon Haynes, who had just become Vicar of Stepney, the parish where Cromwell’s country home was situated. Barnes was a particularly significant choice, since he knew Wittenberg well and was the most obvious card-carrying Lutheran among English evangelicals; in March 1535 Cromwell had persuaded the King to send him on an urgent mission to Wittenberg to talk about the Boleyn marriage.55 No one was better placed to argue Philip Melanchthon out of going to Paris. Yet the choice of Dr Haynes is remarkable too, because (as he admitted) he had no experience of diplomatic missions. Cromwell must have convinced the King that this evangelical enthusiast would have credit with Melanchthon. If Barnes failed to work his magic in Germany and the great German reformer did reach Paris, Haynes’s brief was to warn him against the wiles of the French, and pass on official English propaganda in print and manuscript.56

  Melanchthon was Cromwell’s trump card throughout these negotiations. Despite being Luther’s right-hand man, he seemed immune from Henry’s hatred of Luther himself: the King respected his formidable reputation as a humanist scholar which outweighed that unfortunate connection, and the renewed English embassy to Germany was the first of Henry’s attempts at a charm offensive on Wittenberg’s Professor of Greek for a personal meeting in England. The planning was very careful on both sides. In August 1535, before the main English mission set off, the King received the first dedication of a major Protestant book not penned by one of his own subjects. It was no less a work than a new edition of Melanchthon’s theological textbook which was already shaping theological thought in the infant Lutheran Churches, his Loci communes.

  The author was well briefed, doubtless by Robert Barnes during his lightning visit to Wittenberg in March. In the dedicatory Preface, appropriately and flatteringly larded with Greek, alongside pointed condemnations of both Anabaptists and ‘the dreams of monks’, Melanchthon declared that he had been told ‘you are admirably learned as well in theology as in the rest of philosophy, and especially in that most exquisite of studies, the contemplation of movements and workings of the heavens.’57 This last thought was especially deft, in view of the King’s fascination with astronomical instruments, and perhaps Nikolaus Kratzer, the ingenious German in royal service who made them, had prompted Barnes. A monarch who in past years had consumed Erasmus’s flattery would be delighted with this endorsement of his abilities.

  The main text was calculated to draw Henry into a more positive assessment of German theology. Melanchthon’s revision of his book in 1535 proved to be the decisive version in future Lutheranism. He had done more than write a flowery new preface; he had shifted his theological analysis in the fashion best calculated to please the King, who had always found the starkness of Luther’s formulation of justification by faith unacceptable. Melanchthon meticulously constructed a niche for good works in assisting the process of salvation, to the frank alarm of some Lutheran colleagues.58 Lutherans in fact took decades to decide among themselves what they thought of this move, but in the short term it further eased Henry’s fears of conversations with German Protestants. In September Archbishop Cranmer introduced the Scots theologian Alexander Alesius to the King, as envoy from Melanchthon; Alesius proffered the dedication copy of the Loci communes. Henry sent off a handsome reward of 300 crowns to Wittenberg with his thanks, referring Melanchthon further to a letter from ‘our most faithful and confidential Principal Secretary, Thomas Cromwell’. No Protestant theologian had previously been honoured thus.59

  This royal letter of 1 October left England in Al
esius’s baggage a week or two before the most high-powered English embassy yet to the Schmalkaldics, led by Edward Foxe, now Bishop of Hereford, with Nicholas Heath in his wake. Barnes, back in Germany since July, now served as the essential link with the Germans, whom he knew better than any other Englishman. Foxe’s promotion to the episcopate signalled how far Henry VIII was prepared to identify his Church with the Protestant Churches of Germany. The royal instructions to the ambassadors even gave space to the line to take if Henry was invited to join the Schmalkaldic League: cautious but not negative. This was a great advance on the previous year’s plausibly deniable overture to the Diet of Nuremberg.60 Cromwell’s skills in international diplomacy were maturing: so far, everything fitted perfectly into his diplomatic jigsaw in 1535, and we will watch the consequences of these manoeuvres unfolding the following year. They did so amid a startling reversal of English politics: an equal culmination of Cromwell’s aims and hopes, to which we must now turn.

  13

  Progresses and Scrutinies: 1535–1536

  In June 1535, Ambassador Chapuys told the Emperor of an encounter that had left him puzzled:

  Cromwell said lately to me that were the Lady [Anne Boleyn] to know on what familiar terms he and I are, she would surely try to cause us both some trouble, and that only three days ago they spoke angrily together, the Lady telling him, among other things, that she would like to see his head off his shoulders. ‘But’, added Cromwell, ‘I have so much confidence in my master, that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.’ I cannot tell whether this is an invention of Cromwell, in order to raise the value of what he has to offer. All I can say is that everyone here considers him Anne’s right hand, as I myself told him some time ago.1