Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Despite such eddies of relationship as his tolerance of Cotes’s unmistakable religious conservatism, it is striking how Cromwell’s promotion of the royal supremacy in these Gloucestershire monastic encounters was so openly linked to his evangelical programme. His conversations with John Placet criticizing the monastic vocation inspired the monk to write a treatise commending the supremacy, which he sent on to the Vice-Gerent after the progress. The same thing happened following Cromwell’s visit to the Cistercian Kingswood Abbey, 40 miles south of Winchcombe. Prior Thomas Redinge wrote to him afterwards in markedly evangelical terms, looking back to Cromwell’s ‘charitable and divine words’ to him at Kingswood, which likewise prompted Redinge to write a tract on the supremacy. When the abbey was dissolved in 1538, one of its monks, possibly the same person under a different surname, was acting as a roving evangelical preacher.31

  The visitation was still taking shape as the summer went on. The disadvantage for Cromwell of the King being close at hand was that his Majesty might be seized by one of his periodic fits of interest in what was going on. At the beginning of August, the King became irritably aware that proposed general injunctions for the visitors to enforce had not yet been issued, contrary to traditional good practice in episcopal visitations. He scolded Cromwell for the negligence, who in turn scolded his visitors; a defensive letter from Richard Leighton ill-conceals irritation and anxiety. Leighton realized the serious implications for his master of the King’s displeasure; ‘rather I may be buried quick [alive] than to be the occasion why the King’s Highness should diminish any part of the affiance, confidence or the expectation of your assured and proved mind towards His Grace.’ Leighton rushed back to the Court at Berkeley Castle from Cirencester Abbey, to help in a major drafting of injunctions ‘which should stand for ever’, for use in all houses to be visited.32

  In regulations for monasteries drafted by the vice-gerential scribe Robert Warmington, Cromwell tries to create a sensible regulation for the presence of women in monasteries: to the provision that they be ‘utterly excludid’, he adds in his own hand ‘onles they ffyrst optayne lycens of the Kynges Highnes or his Vysytor’. His alteration disappears in the published version.

  A draft of these injunctions survives maybe from that very day at Berkeley: a fair copy with some practical tinkerings in Cromwell’s own hand, none of which was in the end used. One of his emendations modifies the ban on boys in the company of monks (a measure which would bear considerable fruit as the visitors decided to look for sexual scandal) by proposing an exception for boys serving at mass. Equally sensible, and yet not taken up, was a provision for a licensing system for women visiting monasteries. Finally Cromwell tried to remove an order for monks to say a daily mass for the souls of the monastic founder, converting it instead into a simple provision for prayers for the King and his wife. The King must have decided that this undermining of intercessory masses was too radical a move, and the visitors did not enforce it.33

  Altogether the King’s sudden enthusiasm for radical monastic austerity was not helpful, suggesting a delight in ordering reforms without thinking through the consequences, characteristic of the man. The blanket order excluding women from male religious communities was all very well, but alongside its laudable aim of excluding ladies of lurid reputation, it omitted any consideration of the eminently respectable elderly folk who had made formal arrangements for a devout retirement alongside communities of their choice. It was particularly embarrassing when the ban affected a towering authority-figure among Cromwell’s gentry friends in Kent, Jane (or Joan) the widow of Sir Richard Guildford. She had been tutor to a succession of royal children down to Princess Mary – an elderly matriarch of such intimidating piety and social connection that she was reverently known at Court as ‘Mother Guildford’. What would happen to her dignified residence at Bristol’s Hospital of the Gaunts? Lady Guildford’s coldly correct letter to Cromwell must have made him squirm; it was addressed pointedly not from the Gaunts but from a Gloucestershire manor of her stepson Sir Nicholas Poyntz, who had recently hosted the King in exceptional style at Acton Court. This dowager would need an exceptional application of charm.34 By January 1536, the visitors were quietly making exceptions to that particular rule, and thereafter for all practical purposes it lapsed.

  But that was not all. One brief and novel order, ‘that no monk or brother of this monastery by any means go forth of the precinct of the same’, caused immediate problems and then months of appalled reaction from monastic heads. What would the prohibition mean when communities needed to collect their rents that Michaelmas, let alone any more general business? The immediate result was a vicious row between Dr Leighton and Dr Thomas Lee. Leighton the priest applied the orders flexibly; Lee the lawyer applied them strictly; John ap Rhys the nephew-by-marriage implicitly criticized Lee to their master. Even when Cromwell made it clear that flexibility was permitted, Lee remained obstinate, strengthened by his jealousy of Leighton’s seniority.35 Matters descended into farce at Bruton Abbey in Somerset when, on 23 August, Lee directly contradicted Leighton’s recent permission to the Abbot to leave the precinct, and then wrote in fury to the Vice-Gerent denouncing his colleague. He claimed that his own interpretation of the injunctions did ‘nothing but upon the King’s pleasure and yours’.36 It was a personality clash reminiscent of the spat the previous autumn between the commissioners Friars Browne and Hilsey. Both rows were a result of entering uncharted waters in jurisdiction, with insufficient guidelines or precedents.

  This explosive situation sent Cromwell haring down 40 miles from Court in south Gloucestershire to stay with Lord Chief Justice Fitzjames at Redlynch, a mile or so from Bruton.37 Headmasterly rebukes could be delivered there in the presence of the kingdom’s most senior common lawyer, though a later reminiscence shows that Lee got off lightly, and Cromwell did not pay much attention to the Abbot of Bruton’s complaint about his officer’s high-handedness.38 An unsuccessful day’s hunting in Lord Daubeney’s park at Wincanton (a few miles south) cannot greatly have enhanced the expedition.39 Cromwell’s temper was not improved when he rejoined the Court in its next location in Wiltshire to discover that in his absence the King had rifled through his postbag and opened a whining letter from Stephen Vaughan complaining about money: a revealing glimpse of how monarch and minister related.40 Gradually, messily, the situation on monastic enclosure resolved itself. A stream of begging letters from heads of house to the Vice-Gerent offered useful multiple opportunities to be gracious to them, and from 1536, the order was quietly put aside unless it was politic not to, until the time when there were no more enclosures to observe.

  * * *

  *

  Cromwell’s return to Court took him to Bromham Hall, home of the Queen’s Chamberlain Sir Edward Baynton, but within a day or two everyone had moved on to another great Wiltshire house, Wolf Hall: home to Sir John Seymour and to his unmarried eldest daughter Jane, a junior lady-in-waiting of the Queen. Master Secretary wrote from there on 4 September; the Court, including Queen Anne, stayed there for a week.41 Wolf Hall is now a name shrieking hindsight; Anne Boleyn’s biographer Eric Ives was wise in his caution against such assumptions. Jane had in fact been an inconspicuous presence at Court under the eyes of Henry VIII since the days of Katherine of Aragon. Rather more significant was the public affirmation that this visit gave to her brother Edward, who was in any case at that stage more prominent at Court than Jane, an Esquire of the Body who had accompanied the royal couple to Calais on their crucial visit of 1532.42 Edward Seymour soon emerged as a key player in Cromwell’s story. They had known one another for a long while: Seymour had been in Wolsey’s household in his youth alongside John Dudley, that other rising courtier in Cromwell’s circle who in King Edward’s reign would become fatefully tangled in Seymour’s career.43

  Cromwell would not habitually have moved in the smart circles of Seymour and Dudley while in service to the Cardinal, but in 1530, as part of the clear-
up of Wolsey’s financial affairs, he had supervised a Yorkshire estate transaction involving Edward and Sir Anthony Ughtred, who was by then husband to Gregory Cromwell’s future wife Elizabeth Seymour, Edward’s sister.44 Once he was in power under the King, he met Seymour and Dudley on much more equal terms. By the end of 1533 Arthur Lord Lisle, newly appointed Deputy of Calais, was soliciting Cromwell for help in what became an immensely complicated lawsuit about inheritance in Somerset, with Seymour and Dudley on the one side and Lord and Lady Lisle on the other. Lisle was confident that Dudley would co-operate ‘the rather . . . if it would please you to move it to him’.45 Cromwell proved an honest broker between the Lisles and their opponents; if anything he favoured Lord Lisle in what was not a strong legal position against some considerable aggression from Seymour. When Seymour and Cromwell met again at Wolf Hall in September 1535, the long-drawn-out negotiations and Seymour’s reluctant acceptance of Cromwell’s judgement were quite a recent memory.46

  For the time being, there was no pressing circumstance to alter that relationship dramatically. The royal marriage seemed as secure as it had ever been, with numerous reports of how ‘merry’ Henry and Anne had been during the latter stages of their travels.47 Anne’s discovery at some stage in October that she was once more pregnant testified that all was well in the royal bed, and offered a sign of hope for her future. Yet all this was dependent on their relationship remaining strong, in the face of continuing sullen resentment of the Queen and sympathy for her stepdaughter among the London public. Sometimes that old loyalty was openly expressed: a public demonstration in favour of the Lady Mary in late summer involved no lesser figures than Anne’s own aunt Lady William Howard and her sister-in-law, Jane Lady Rochford. They spent some time in the Tower as a rebuke for this extraordinary indiscretion; but that would not be the last of Lady Rochford in the affairs of Queen Anne.48

  The summer progress reached Winchester in mid-September, for its most prolonged and magnificent phase; the Court paused in its wanderings for more than a fortnight before further travels west and south. Cranmer took over the diocesan Bishop’s cathedral to consecrate three bishops of unambiguously evangelical reputation: Hugh Latimer, Edward Foxe and Fisher’s successor Friar John Hilsey. That signalled a shift in power on the episcopal bench, but it was also just one of several snubs at Winchester to its Bishop, Stephen Gardiner. Gardiner had made a reasonably successful bid for rehabilitation after previous indiscretions through loyalist publications: a vindication of Fisher’s execution and a major work of propaganda for the royal supremacy, De vera obedientia. Nevertheless, during the Winchester visit Thomas Starkey presented the King with the manuscript of another major vernacular publication of conservative-flavoured loyalism, which would remind Henry that others could deliver a similar product.49

  It is as if the King decided to test Gardiner’s loyalty to the hilt during his visit. Chapuys, ever alert to significant details, noted that Henry ordered an inventory of Winchester Cathedral’s treasures to be made, appropriating some of the most remarkable items, and also seized from the Bishop ‘certain [water-]mills to give them away to the community, and thereby gain the people’s favour’.50 This was an acute pairing of observations. We have seen how both King and minister personally cherished this cause of river navigation in general and the Winchester case in particular. Just as some of Cromwell’s actions in Cotswold abbeys were a dramatic demonstration of his visitatorial powers over monasteries, this was a set-piece in the launch of the national campaign against weirs, besides being a personal blow to Gardiner’s prestige.

  One of Lord Lisle’s servants anxiously reported the minister’s vehemence in the case: ‘there is commandment that the sea shall have his course to Winchester, and that the mills shall be stopped along upon the river; for I heard Master Secretary speak in the premises to Thomas Fisher of Woodnyll, commanding him not to speak against the said water course.’51 The same vehemence jumps out of Cromwell’s sharp comment to Bishop Gardiner himself in a private postscript in response to Gardiner’s protest about the demolition of one of the episcopal mills: ‘I doubt not but your Lordship, knowing what good is like to ensure to the commonwealth by the pulling up of the said mill, will be as glad thereof as I have been, for that only respect, to further the doing of it.’ A personal moral crusade meshed conveniently with harassing his political rival.52

  At the same time an important series of conversations took place both at Winchester and at Gardiner’s country home of Bishop’s Waltham, involving the King, the Vice-Gerent, Leighton, Lee and ap Rhys, about the visitation’s further direction. The most formal business was to suspend the powers of all bishops while the visitation continued, an explicit acknowledgement that there was more than visitation of monasteries going on. That was accompanied by preparations for a proper vice-gerential court for Cromwell to take over major business from the episcopate. Soon afterwards, late in October, Dr Tregonwell took on a new title while moving round his circuit in the West Country: ‘general visitor . . . throughout the dioceses of Salisbury, Bath and Wells and Exeter’ – in other words, visitor to any ecclesiastical establishment he or Cromwell pleased, not just monasteries and nunneries.53

  Yet monasteries were still the visitation’s central concern. We know of two dissident monks visiting Cromwell at Bishop’s Waltham, from the two monastic communities which personally concerned him most: Winchcombe Abbey and the London Charterhouse. From Winchcombe came John Placet; from the Charterhouse, Andrew Borde, who appropriately after his recent travels brought as a present his manuscript gazetteer of all Europe (Cromwell amid his busyness alas irretrievably mislaid it). Their appearances came alongside important supplements to the agenda for the visitors, not to the advantage of monasteries. First, the commissioners were told to gather up papistical writings: soon after John Placet had spoken with the Vice-Gerent at Waltham, we can find him helpfully sending down just such a batch to save the visitors going back to his monastery.54 More significantly for future events, the visitors were now first enjoined to inquire more broadly about cases of ‘sodomy’ and ‘incontinence’, to include voluntariae pollutiones: masturbation.

  There was no precedent in canon law or visitatorial practice for such a systematic inquiry on this embarrassing subject. That stately royal foundation of Chertsey Abbey, so often host to the King on his holidays, has the dubious distinction of being the first foundation to make an affirmative response to the question, around 26 or 27 September 1535. This was occasioned by a visit from Dr Lee, who gratuitously pointed out to his master that he was superseding an earlier verdict by Bishop Gardiner and Sir William Paulet that all was well in the house.55 Thereafter, Dr Leighton’s Act Book (now lost, but preserved in summary form in a later publication of that prurient Protestant Bishop John Bale) was suddenly full of sexual misdemeanour, previously no more than a gentle trickle of cases.

  From now on the visitation began collecting scandal with the aim of discrediting the monastic life in the eyes of the English public. We cannot know for certain whose idea this was, but it does suggest the fussy prudishness of Henry VIII, wedded to a new determination to close as many monasteries as he could get away with.56 A clutch of evidence points to new directions in royal policy on monasteries coming out of the consultations at Winchester and Bishop’s Waltham. Chapuys, whom someone was clearly briefing about the English Court’s travels, noted that in Cromwell’s close personal visitation of the monasteries alongside the progress ‘it is certain that both brothers and nuns are given to understand that it is in their interest to leave their houses, inasmuch as a reformation of all religious congregations is shortly intended, so very rigorous and exceptional that probably all will have to go – which is what this King is trying to bring about in every possible way, so he may have better occasion to seize the whole of Church property without provoking discontent and murmurs among his subjects.’57

  Almost at a tangent from the main work of monasteries was the inclusion in visitation
of those other great religious corporations, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.58 Here the relationship of visitor and visited was very different: the visitors themselves included a good number of Oxbridge dons, and all were veterans of university study. Cromwell’s own intimate relationship to both universities, and his intense interest in their studies, is clear. At Cambridge, as newly elected Chancellor of the University, he was in the curious position of both insider and outsider as visitor. It was a role which emphasized the revolutionary character of what he had initiated: this was the first time secular government had intruded on the internal affairs of Oxford and Cambridge, an interference that has never thereafter ceased.

  The orders imposed by the visitors did much to revolutionize teaching in both universities. They banned lecture courses based on the great medieval textbooks of theology and biblical commentary, emphasized direct engagement with the biblical text, strengthened the teaching of Greek (hardly studied at all in medieval Oxbridge) and even specified Luther’s colleague and Henry VIII’s new friend Philip Melanchthon as one of the authorities for instruction. Most radical of all was the complete abolition of the teaching of canon law, the basis of organization in the Western Church for four centuries. That could be regarded either as King Henry’s act of spite against the Papacy or as the logical outcome of the assertion in the Act in Restraint of Appeals that this realm was an ‘Empire’.