Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Since the Church’s law remained in place as a living system, operated in the network of English Church courts, the ending of canon law teaching resulted in an absurd situation: senior canon lawyers could learn their principles only by studying the parallel system of Roman law called civil law still taught in the universities. If they wanted to go further into the study of their own practice, they had to go abroad to papist Europe to study: principally to the University of Padua, which in good Venetian spirit tolerated a certain amount of religious deviance in the interest of good international relations and solid financial gain.59 Other parts of Oxbridge’s curriculum revolution were finessed, as is the way of universities. Curriculum reform proved less radical than the external reformers wished: Peter Lombard’s great medieval textbook the Sentences remained much studied in both universities for decades. It would be pleasing to believe that intellectual curiosity proved a healthy brake on official diktat.

  During the autumn Cromwell continued to make up visitation policy on the hoof, and his visitors were sometimes slow to catch up with the latest alteration. By mid-October, perhaps prompted by the discovery of Wolsey’s twenty-three-year-old daughter among the nuns of Shaftesbury Abbey, he had thought better of the visitation requirement for monks and nuns younger than twenty-four to leave their communities. John ap Rhys wrote a harassed letter to him on 22 October about the changed requirement. Cromwell, never tolerant of recalcitrance, had been constrained to repeat (‘eftsoons’) an order to the visitors not to expel anyone over twenty, and ‘it shall be followed as far as it may lie in me; but many there be already dismissed in places where we have been above the age, and whether ye would have any restraint again made of them, let your Mastership see.’60

  One could describe this change as responsiveness to reality; Cromwell was becoming aware that the cohort of twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds was more reluctant to quit monastic life than he had expected, quite apart from one distressed young nun at Shaftesbury. A further development was an order to the visitors to inquire into the history of monastic founders, to see which houses were royal foundations and might therefore be more easily commandeered. This was encouraged by a memorandum from some government lawyer suggesting that merely by examining royal foundations and seizing the property of those in breach of the founder’s regulations (no doubt that would turn out to be all of them) the King would regain £40,000 of revenue every year.61 The proposal was nevertheless at this stage absurdly impractical. As so often in schemes around attacks on church wealth, it represented a possible direction of travel, to be taken in the right political circumstances.

  Yet the inquiry had another dimension. Among all noblemen who could count themselves heirs to pious Anglo-Norman monastic founders, the greatest tally of ancient titles was clutched by the Duke of Norfolk, who was smarting from his political marginalization, and never neglectful of his own profit. Cromwell soon became aware that Norfolk had launched a private enterprise of dissolution in his own heartland that autumn, closing down a sequence of small East Anglian family monasteries associated with his predecessors. The complaisant monks of his dynastic mausoleum Thetford Priory leased him their cell at Wangford; Cistercian Sibton sold itself outright to him; at the end of November, so did the nuns of Bungay beside his ancient castle – ‘before it was suppressed, I showed the King and Mr Secretary that the nuns would not abide in the house,’ the Duke blandly reminisced soon afterwards, while pointing out that he had also told the King of a similar disinclination to remain among the debt-ridden canons of Woodbridge, prior to a private suppression.62

  Where the Duke led the way, other East Anglian gentry enthusiastically followed: William Woodhouse at Ingham, John Derick at Marham nunnery. It was enough to make many other little houses convert as much of their assets into ready cash as they could.63 This flow of private asset-stripping must be stopped, and surrenders at least regularized; yet in autumn 1535 there was no legal way of actually preventing them. It was not surprising that in this deteriorating situation Cromwell resumed the policy of individual monastic dissolutions in the Crown’s interest which he had tried out in 1532. The new closures had the same justification, failure in finance, which at that earlier juncture had been the pretext for the closure of Christ Church Aldgate. In a series of seven royal dissolutions from November 1535 to February 1536, almost identical wording was used in the deeds of surrender, despite the fact that in some cases there really was lurid sexual scandal which might have provided good reason for suppression.64

  The last two in the sequence, Bilsington Priory in Kent and Tilty Abbey in Essex, both eventually surrendered on the same day, 28 February 1536, despite being around 90 miles apart across the Thames. Both these monasteries were linked to Cromwell via his web of Kentish gentry friendships, centred on Margaret Wotton, widow of his former employer Thomas Marquess of Dorset. We have met both houses before (see above, this page). Bilsington was spared dissolution by Wolsey in 1525, no doubt through its connections to Dorset’s brother-in-law Sir Henry Guildford and Cromwell’s friend Anthony St Leger; St Leger leased it after its present dissolution. Tilty Abbey contained the retirement home of the widowed Marchioness. Its closure was arranged in person by her old servant, Thomas Cromwell’s nephew Richard; his friend and contemporary Ralph Sadler had boyhood memories from his father’s Stewardship for the Greys at Tilty. The rather unusual paperwork around the surrender manages to omit any mention of the Marchioness’s stately mansion in the abbey precinct, which continued to be occupied by her family well into the Elizabethan age. Still odder was the agreement that for the time being the Abbot of Tilty and his seven monks should remain in their communal life along with their staff, until the King told them to go. Perhaps the Marchioness saw them as agreeable adjuncts to her retirement.65*

  While nothing at this stage suggests a general plan to end monasticism, the visitation’s work up to the beginning of Parliament consistently reveals the intention of thinning out the ranks in the regular life, using criteria of misdemeanour, youth or repudiation of a false vocation. The terms of the visitors’ injunctions resulted in far more dismissals from the monastic life than historians have previously realized: perhaps 1,700 monks out of a total of around 9,000, mainly relying on the provisions for dismissing those younger than twenty-four.66 During winter 1536, the commissioners made elaborate plans to transfer monks and nuns wishing to remain in religion, but they were taken aback by the administrative load created by the unexpectedly large numbers, particularly in the North.67 Nevertheless the sequence of ad hoc but sequenced dissolutions in autumn and winter 1535/6 strongly suggests that, on the very eve of the first Parliament of 1536 which enacted the first general measure of dissolution, no definite decision had been taken on how to proceed.

  That likelihood is further reinforced by the behaviour of Drs Leighton and Lee in their visitation of monasteries in the Northern Province in winter 1536. They were arbitrary and bullying enough to provoke much of the anger which exploded later in the year, but some of their bullying, such as Leighton’s considerable and unsuccessful efforts to secure the suppression of Marrick Priory in February 1536, would clearly have been unnecessary if there had been a plan prepared for the general legislation put through Parliament a month or so later. Altogether, the conduct of the visitation as late as that winter gives backing to the story we have already encountered: that in discussions in the royal Council at this time Cromwell championed a continuing programme of piecemeal closures, such as those he had supervised since his days with Wolsey, and once more between November 1535 and February 1536, and that he was then defeated by a combination of Lord Chancellor Audley and Richard Rich. Instead, Audley’s and Rich’s proposal for systematic legislation to close lesser monasteries on the basis of annual income followed in the coming Parliament.68

  * * *

  *

  Before that resolution, the configuration of power at Court was convulsed by successive deaths, though these were accidents of nature rather
than the murderous design of the previous spring and summer’s run of executions. The first might seem to lessen the King and Queen’s difficulties; this is certainly how Henry viewed the news of the passing of Katherine of Aragon on 7 January 1536. His unconcealed rejoicing and that of Queen Anne, accompanied by her family’s hopes that the Lady Mary would be next, are not endearing.69 Cromwell’s feelings may have been more ambiguous. The huge relief of the situation was that Katherine’s death diminished the obstacles to his preferred alliance overseas with the Emperor rather than the King of France; it also left Mary as a political and diplomatic wild-card. Given that virtually no one in mainland Europe had ever been persuaded by King Henry’s case for his annulment, the departure of Katherine was one small step to removing that embarrassment from current diplomatic considerations. As Bishop Gardiner piously put it in a memorandum to Cromwell soon afterwards, ‘God hath given sentence . . . by the death of the Dowager.’70

  Cromwell, as he emphasized to the grief-stricken Chapuys, did his best to make the ceremonies around the ex-Queen’s funeral in Peterborough Abbey as dignified as befitted the widow of the King’s elder brother, and the preparations included a hearse with appropriate tapers in St Paul’s Cathedral as an accompanying tribute in the capital. Workmen began to put it up, but, as Chapuys observed, the plans were then abruptly halted. This was thanks to a fit of royal spite. Ralph Sadler, as usual acting as Cromwell’s go-between with the King when Cromwell could not do business in person, wrote from Greenwich Palace reporting his fruitless interview with the King about this. Henry’s wayward mood that day was only partly assuaged by Sadler’s presentation of Cromwell’s diversionary novelty gift of an ingenious lock. Henry dismissed the hearse plans regardless: ‘surely it should be to his Grace more charge than is either requisite or needful.’

  Sadler did his best to change the royal mind, in the interests of decency. He pointed out that this honour had recently been given at St Paul’s to the King’s sister Mary, widow of Louis XII of France, but that was a bad misstep, producing the snarl ‘that she was a Queen’; enough was already being spent on Katherine’s funeral, Henry commented sourly.71 In fact the ceremonies leading Katherine’s coffin from Kimbolton to Peterborough were miserable, despite dutiful magnificence and the presence of noble ladies who had been Katherine’s partisans. Chapuys refused to travel up to the Fens, given that he could not recognize Katherine’s style as Dowager Princess in the ritual. The preacher was the wildly inappropriate John Hilsey of Rochester, chosen expressly to repeat a message of the royal supremacy over the royal corpse, before an audience all well aware that his predecessor at Rochester had been John Fisher. There was no chance of Katherine’s aged Spanish confessor George de Athequa, still nominally Bishop of Llandaff, occupying the pulpit that day.72

  In this moment of Anne’s heartless rejoicing, a second death cheated her of further triumph; in fact, there were no more triumphs for her. Energized by the lifting of Katherine’s shadow, the King had plunged gleefully into the sporting pastimes of his vigorous young manhood, and resumed jousting. As is the way for middle-aged men in denial about the passage of time, disaster followed: a very serious fall in full armour in the tiltyard. He lay unconscious for two hours. Five days later on 29 January, badly affected by shock at the accident, the Queen miscarried another child, after something like three or four months of pregnancy. Malicious later Catholic commentary produced a story of a malformed foetus; there is no good contemporary warrant for this, despite the gullibility of some modern historians, and actually not much more certainty that the child was male.73

  It was disaster enough for Anne that her pregnancy had once more resulted in miscarriage, just as her late predecessor had been so regularly afflicted. The King’s chance of acquiring a legitimate male heir receded still further. At the very moment when Katherine was no longer around to infuriate him into supporting his true wife Anne, here was a source of dark thoughts as to why all his efforts to regularize his marital life had not after all met with the Deity’s approval. Chapuys was happy to record the King’s unfeeling expressions of self-pity: ‘he had been seduced and forced into this marriage through spells and charms . . . God had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children.’ Worse still for Anne, Chapuys heard of the increasing royal interest in Jane Seymour.74 Another lady was also bound to benefit in status: the Lady Mary. Behind the infant Princess Elizabeth, she and the slightly younger Duke of Richmond came suddenly into clearer focus as possible heirs to the throne on the brink of adulthood. Both now enjoyed fitful displays of affection and attention from the King.

  All this was significant material for Cromwell to weigh up, particularly as Anne’s many conservative enemies began considering their options. Later depositions (taken in an entirely different political crisis) reveal that in February 1536 he made quiet feelers to the Lady Mary about securing a deal in which she could become heir apparent in return for acceptance of her present status. This was the deal Cromwell went on to secure from her the following summer. Mary’s historical legacy is fatally prone to hindsight. We have to remember that in winter 1536 she was a very young woman, just twenty, and was not yet the symbol of religious intransigence, triumph and tragedy, that she undoubtedly later became. Granted, she was Katherine of Aragon’s daughter, but she was also simply not Anne Boleyn. That would override any other consideration as various leading courtiers and politicians, Cromwell included, decided what their approach to her would be.

  Cromwell’s February negotiations with Mary took place in co-operation with Sir Nicholas Carew, a courtier who had always loathed Anne but had been protected from the consequences of that by his friendship with the King. Carew was another Surrey man, in fact knight of the shire in Parliament alongside Cromwell’s old friend Sir William Fitzwilliam. What happened is described in a deposition from an anonymous former servant of Katherine of Aragon, who also seems to have been in Cromwell’s service, or at least suborned by him. Events are dateable to February by the mention of Mary being moved to Hunsdon:

  about the time that the King’s council had sent to her to Hunsdon, [Carew] sent for me to his chamber at Westminster, bidding me welcome, saying that the cause he sent for me was for that he did know I did give my heart and service to her for her mother’s sake; and he showed me a letter of his own hand to her, wherein he besought her for the love of God (and so in likewise did all her friends here) desire her to follow the King’s desire, and they were sure that his Majesty was minded at that Parliament to make her heir apparent till God should send his Majesty other issue. At which time I made answer, I durst not, except I did know my Lord’s [Thomas Cromwell’s] pleasure, then being Secretary; who [that is, Carew] bade me not fear, for he would show him his-self, saying that he was sure Master Secretary would give a hundred pounds that she would consent. And so thereupon I went with his letter to her Grace, who showed me that her Grace had received the same day a letter from his [Carew’s] wife by her servant; and the same day Tomyou, servant to the said Master Secretary, being there with her Grace, unto whom I showed the cause of my coming. And that night [Tomyou] and I came to London about midnight.75

  The fact that these talks involved Cromwell’s senior servant, Richard Tomyou, shows the seriousness of the overture. Tomyou was a highly appropriate choice to speak to Mary. The surname Tomyou is so odd that his father may have been Italian, but in any case he was one of the smart Italianate young men who (like his friend Richard Morison) had enjoyed Wolsey’s patronage, probably with the thought that they could be useful in educating Thomas Winter. Cromwell’s financial colleague in the Cardinal’s desperate last months, Tomyou was subsequently placed as Clerk Controller first to Katherine of Aragon and then in late 1533 to Lady Mary – surely on the recommendation of Master Secretary.76 Apart from now being Cromwell’s own Clerk Controller, Tomyou went on (once a revolution had occurred) to marry a lady-in-waiting to Sir Nicholas Carew’s erstwhile protégée Queen Jane Seymour; later, in 1
538, the Lady Mary was giving Tomyou presents which indicated he still had at least an honorary position among her servants.77 Given the collaboration of Carew and his friends with Cromwell to secure Mary’s future in the succession, a formidable tangle of roots was now burrowing under Queen Anne’s endangered position.

  As if that were not enough, Cromwell heard a story with the potential to overturn all the political changes of the previous seven or eight years. It is preserved in a remarkably circumstantial reminiscence addressed in 1559 to Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the newly enthroned Queen Elizabeth, by that self-renamed wanderer Alexander Alesius, writing from abroad to tell Elizabeth what he knew of her mother’s downfall back in 1536.78 For some of those events Alesius had been a privileged insider/outsider: a pioneer among the procession of sententious Scotsmen explaining the English to themselves over the centuries. The reader may recall that he had arrived in England in September 1535, bearing the presentation copy of Philip Melanchthon’s Loci communes for the King (see above, this page). Alesius actually claimed responsibility for the book’s dedication to Henry, but that probably usurps credit from Robert Barnes in his mission to Melanchthon that spring.

  In all Alesius’s narratives in print and manuscript spread over three decades, after discounting his assumption that the history of early Tudor England revolved round himself, he proves a reliable witness to events in which he was involved, wherever they can be cross-referenced. There is a scrupulosity in his writing despite his self-importance; for instance, in his letter to Queen Elizabeth, he makes it clear that he and her mother never met personally despite his visits to the English Court, so his esteem for Anne was based solely on her reputation and the major role she had played in furthering evangelical religion, for instance in the promotion of bishops like Cranmer and Latimer. His witness to the tangled events of that spring has not been taken seriously enough.79 From autumn 1535 he was first the guest of Cranmer and Cromwell in London, a useful cog in their plans for an international Protestant alliance, and then a lecturer in Cambridge at royal expense (in fact the precursor of the later Regius professors), still visiting the capital on occasion, as he did at the time of Anne’s arrest.80 He was therefore well placed to observe events at Court, and even to understand them. His message is that, from the beginning, Cromwell took the initiative in Queen Anne’s downfall.