Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Mary’s gratitude to Cromwell for her decision was profound, but so was his to her, and he expressed it in a remarkable way: commissioning a commemorative gold medal, edition of one, specifically for presentation to her. Such personalized medals were still exotic in Tudor England, a culture on the fringes of European sophistication, but they had been regular objects of display in Renaissance Italy since the late fifteenth century. This was another tribute to Cromwell’s Italian taste, which he repeated for himself or his son a couple of years later (see Plate 7). If this specimen was as handsome and modish as that portrait medallion, it is unsurprising that King Henry seized on it and insisted on presenting it to his daughter as if it were his idea; Cromwell was forced to substitute another gift. Equally predictably, the medal no longer exists, but Chapuys had the chance to take a detailed description of it: relief portraits of Henry and Jane on one side and of Mary on the other, with a poem on the subject of humility surrounding her image. The verses went so far as to include the resonant words ‘respexit humilitatem’ from the Magnificat, the song in which another Mary, God’s own mother, praised divine regard for her lowliness – but this second Mary’s obedience was also an example of how to obey parents and country alike.23

  Historians have concentrated on the undoubted humiliation of Mary’s submission, so soon after losing the mother who had been denied her presence even at the deathbed. Understandably that has obscured Cromwell’s major role in sustaining her in this crisis against real danger stemming from her father’s anger; he remained a resource of support for her. Cromwell had ‘never refused to further my continual suits to you’, she testified to him in December 1536; ‘you were always a mean’ to arrange her allowance that year of forty pounds a quarter from the King, which significantly was first paid the previous winter, during those early stirrings against Anne Boleyn.24 The following summer Elizabeth Duchess of Norfolk, never one to hold her tongue and a good friend to Mary, praised Cromwell because ‘I hear say how good you were to the lady Mary, the King’s daughter, in her great trouble.’25 Mary now became an honoured presence at the Seymour Court; her excellent relations with Cromwell continued.

  Such was the intensity in the relationship between Mary and Cromwell set up in this traumatic struggle of May and June that a rumour was born that they might marry. It worried some of her household, who deputed her mother’s former doctor to warn Chapuys that Henry might ‘farm her out’ to Cromwell. The ambassador, having observed the past weeks of intense drama so closely, dismissed this as fantasy, ‘which I cannot in any wise believe; if the King were indeed to have wished for it, Cromwell would not hear of it’.26 Cromwell was indeed assigned a role of public gallantry for her at Court, so on 22 February 1537 his account-books reveal him dispatching Wriothesley to Mary with the handsome present of fifteen pounds ‘because my Lord was her Valentine’. Given that Cromwell was now around fifty-two and she was twenty-one, this was a symbolic courtship, more the attention of a second father-figure. The message was reinforced that same day at the christening of Lord and Lady Beauchamp’s first-born child. The baby’s aunt Queen Jane stood as godparent alongside the Lady Mary and Master Secretary himself – yet another touching scene of family reconciliation, this time in company with the man who had arranged it all.27 Soon thereafter came another happy christening to bind them together (see below, this page).

  Stories of Cromwell’s marital intentions did not go away, resurfacing in particular around the months of his fall in 1540. It is not entirely implausible that this was in his portfolio of possible outcomes, given the astonishing further ascent which we will trace, but if so it was one of the most dangerous thoughts he ever entertained. There were more immediate rewards for securing Mary’s submission. After years of anomaly between his real power and its lack of outward expression, he now gained a peerage and one of the highest secular offices in the land, that of Lord Privy Seal, then the third-ranking office of state after the Lord Chancellor and Lord Treasurer, with control over a crucial stage in the procession of documents for sealing after the initial royal signature on any grant or decision. Possession of the privy seal forged yet another link in Cromwell’s increasingly comprehensive chain of control of access to the King for anyone seeking action or favours. This promotion came immediately after he had placed Ralph Sadler in the King’s Privy Chamber, where Sadler could look after the informal first stages of these processes – tactfully finding the right moment when the King was disposed to scrawl his signatures (‘signs manual’) on papers before they moved on through the system.28

  In obvious symbolism, Cromwell replaced in office Anne Boleyn’s father the Earl of Wiltshire, who was now ‘clear dispatched from the Court’, as Richard Sparkford told John Scudamore in his round-up of news on 30 June 1536. Cromwell’s appointment as Lord Privy Seal was first announced that day, and came as a considerable surprise, as the gossip had been that Lord Beauchamp had won this crucial post. Sparkford actually said in the body of his letter, ‘as it is thought, my Lord Beauchamp the Queen’s brother should be Lord Privy Seal’, and recorded Cromwell’s capture of the office only in a postscript. Evidently there was a last-minute tussle about it lasting some days, with victory to Cromwell, which Chapuys considered was his reward for clinching the Lady Mary’s submission eight days before.29

  The drama of Cromwell’s promotion can be savoured in Richard Sparkford’s letter of 30 June, because just as he was addressing his missive for dispatch, he had to scribble his hasty postscript updating it on three vital matters. News had just reached him that his master the Bishop of Hereford had finally docked in London after the nine-month mission in Germany; then ‘this day, the Privy Seal was given to Master Secretary, and he continue Secretary also’, with all the consequent shuffling of offices below that to prominent lawyers, whose names Sparkford excitedly listed.30 Cromwell’s peerage was agreed before the end of Parliament, but he postponed his actual entry into the Lords to the ceremonies of the last day, 18 July, because the Commons still needed his management while he could hold his seat as an MP. The new Speaker Richard Rich could not be trusted to dominate the chamber; he was a surprising choice, given an evident unpopularity which meant that unusually it took two days to get his appointment through at the outset of the session. Rich’s arrogant use of his Chancellorship of the Court of Augmentations was no doubt a major factor in infuriating landed gentry seeking their share of the monastic lands bonanza.31

  The grant of Cromwell’s barony was actually finalized on 9 July. He was accompanied in elevation by John Bourchier Lord Fitzwarren, who advanced to the Earldom of Bath. This honour for one described by a well-informed commentator a couple of years later as ‘old and foolish’* might seem an odd coupling with a peerage for the new Lord Privy Seal, until one notes that Fitzwarren was uncle to Beauchamp’s formidable second wife Anne.32 Fitzwarren’s earldom was a statement about Beauchamp’s and Cromwell’s political harmony, nine days after Master Secretary had edged past him to become Lord Privy Seal. Then as just the final curlicue on Cromwell’s triumph: ‘at the breaking up of the Parliament’, in other words at the same time as his peerage grant took effect, he gained a knighthood, the normal prelude to a peerage and the normal accompaniment of a newly conferred barony, but an honour that had strangely eluded him in the Boleyn years.33

  When we first met young Thomas Cromwell in Putney, we noted the significance of the peerage title he gained in July 1536: Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon.34 It was a deliberate blow against the snobbery sparked by the rise of any low-born minister in the Tudor age, and was backed up with a princely grant of the appropriate estate: the ancient lordship of Wimbledon formerly belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury which included in its rolling acres the hamlet of Putney. Cromwell gained this by a Parliamentary statute in this session, ratifying an unmistakably unequal three-way property transaction between himself, the King and Archbishop Cranmer. It is worth considering the processes described in this Act in some detail, because they tell
us a great deal about the realignments of summer 1536.35

  The business began in the previous Parliament in winter and spring 1536, when an Act recognized an exchange of lands between the King and Cranmer centring on the Archbishop surrendering Wimbledon, in return for Henry granting him the Abbey of St Radegund’s Bradsole just outside Dover. This was a royal foundation earmarked for dissolution (in fact the Act wrongly said that it had already been dissolved, on 1 February). At that stage this arrangement bore no obvious relation to Cromwell; it was among a number of exchanges then enacted, resembling the group of such transactions between the monarchy and corporate bodies in 1531–2, likewise ratified in Parliament (see above, Chapter 8). There was nothing especially rapacious about these, apart from the common factor of convenience for the Crown’s consolidation of landholdings, especially near royal palaces. The lordship of Wimbledon, lying along the Thames, was a perfect example.

  By contrast, the new Act in the summer session completely remodelled the deal between Cranmer and the King. Although Henry kept his title to Wimbledon, he was at pains to say that his previous choice of St Radegund’s was not a fair exchange for it, ‘his Highness not willing that the same Archbishop or his successors should have or sustain any loss, detriment or hindrance in that behalf’. So instead the King offered as a replacement for St Radegund’s Abbey the small priory of St Gregory in Canterbury (even though neither house was yet dissolved). This royal pretext was flimsy, and grew flimsier still when the Act incorporated Cranmer’s sale of a desirable part of the St Gregory’s property to the new Master of the Rolls, Christopher Hales.* That looks like a sweetener to Hales for the fact that (as we have seen) he was not destined to enjoy the Master’s fine house in Chancery Lane, despite having just succeeded to the Mastership after Cromwell, and having been specifically promised it in his grant of office.36

  Meanwhile the Act went on to divest Cranmer of a further property in Sussex, and then conferred the whole ensemble on Cromwell. Completely changing tack, it then threw into his grant some of the most desirable Norfolk properties lately owned by the Bishop of Norwich, principally the ancient episcopal manor of North Elmham. This royal gift to Cromwell, made on 12 June actually during the Parliamentary session, has significant political resonances in itself.37 Six months previously the King had taken the opportunity offered by the death of old Bishop Nix to acquire the entire Norwich episcopal estates for himself, in a land exchange of startling boldness. The new Bishop was William Rugge alias Repps, Abbot of St Benet’s Hulme in Norfolk Broadland, and for some years a client of Cromwell’s. In return for surrendering diocesan lands he had never occupied, on promise of promotion, Repps was allowed to keep his abbatial title and the reasonably ample estates of his Benedictine monastery for himself and his episcopal successors. In future, these lands would be the sole support for the bishops of Norwich, who lost for ever a body of lands whose nucleus had belonged to bishops in East Anglia well before there had been any kingdom of England.38

  Cromwell probably steamrollered the diocesan deal through in order to stop the Duke of Norfolk getting his hands on large quantities of East Anglian episcopal land to add to the Duke’s recent digestion of local monasteries. A bundle of evidence around Bishop Nix’s death cumulatively reveals a local move in concert with Cromwell to stop the Duke taking advantage of Nix’s chaotic last weeks at his palace at Hoxne and their even more chaotic aftermath. Cromwell’s friend of Wolsey days Sir Thomas Rush headed the move to enlist him in this noble cause, when Norfolk sent his agents over to Hoxne in a bid to take over Nix’s affairs and put a stop to the dying Bishop’s last campaign of charitable giving: ‘If my lord of Norwich were at liberty to use his goods at his pleasure you would have much honour by it – either by the King’s Highness or by you,’ Rush pleaded. There was great drama when the Bishop died, as Nix’s senior chaplain Richard Redman galloped from Suffolk to London to secure Cromwell’s support. Nix’s principal servants did indeed win his sympathy, with long-term benefits for their futures in the diocese. The exchange with Abbot Repps followed from this.39

  Repps was the most astute of choices as bishop. The Duke of Norfolk could hardly object to the new Bishop’s considerable distinction as a conservative theologian (he had a Cambridge DD), and Repps showed himself eager to please the Howard interest alongside careful expressions of obligation to Master Secretary. None of this would have stopped the Duke feeling a sense of defeat when seeing his chief political rival luxuriating in the gift of North Elmham. It may be significant that Cromwell chose to send his son to Norfolk this year, after Gregory had spent summer 1535 with his Williams relatives in Oxfordshire.40 During his travels round Norfolk, the young man cannot have failed to inspect Elmham, which lies just 13 miles north of Woodrising, home of his principal host Richard Southwell. The stylish little episcopal castle there would make an ideal capital mansion for Gregory, but it lay in the heart of the Duke of Norfolk’s country.

  Before the spectacular grants of summer 1536, Cromwell’s build-up of landed estates outside London and its suburbs was not impressive. Apart from bits and pieces across the south-east, his single most resonant territory remained his Welsh lordship of Rhymney, acquired as long ago as 1532. Now he really did possess estates worthy of a nobleman. At the heart of his new lordship by the Thames was the splendid former archiepiscopal house of Mortlake, which straight away that July he proceeded to develop with relish and bagfuls of cash, as the memory of his recent comparable efforts at Hackney faded.41 Mortlake had the huge advantage over Hackney of being a stone’s throw from the Thames, and within an easy ride or barge-trip of Hampton Court, 7 miles upstream. Richmond Palace, if Henry ever chose to reactivate it as his residence (and he did at a crucial juncture this year), was even closer; in the other direction, Westminster was about the same distance as Hampton. Mortlake and the lordship of Wimbledon provided a whole new dimension to Cromwell’s power.

  It is of course an irony that Cranmer, the champion of evangelical reformation, should be the first victim among incumbent bishops of what over the next two decades became an accelerating royal policy of stripping the episcopate of much of its prime estates. Asset-stripping was probably not the intention when the exchange was first arranged between Cranmer and the King in the winter of 1536. Whatever the smooth talk in the later Parliamentary enactment, St Gregory’s Canterbury was not such a good deal as St Radegund’s Dover, described that spring by Cromwell’s servant John Whalley (who knew about such things) as ‘one of the properest houses and the most commodious pieces of ground in Kent’.42

  It is likely that Cranmer’s treatment in the summer statute was a form of punishment for speaking up for Anne Boleyn, or more generally for his symbolic role as ‘her’ bishop, in which case he and his advisers would have regarded his compliance as acres well spent in return for survival. He lost much more than Wimbledon in subsequent years of exchange, though he did devise some evasive action (including protection for that hard-won compensation, St Gregory’s Priory) through obstructive long leases, such as one of sixty years to Cromwell’s servant Henry Polstead, another outlying Sussex property. At least things got better for the Archbishop under Edward VI, when many of his colleagues went on experiencing serious losses of estates.43

  After all the political adjustment wrapped up in Cromwell’s peerage, promotion in office and grant of lands, two additional blows of fate dealt him another political bonus and brought further misery to the Duke of Norfolk, with hardly any effort on his own part. First came a massive indiscretion by the Duke’s younger half-brother Lord Thomas Howard, who pursued the possibility of marrying the King’s Scottish-born niece Lady Margaret Douglas – a twenty-one-year-old loose cannon in the realm and, as daughter of Henry’s sister Margaret, then senior ranking royal female of the Tudor dynasty, given that her cousins Mary and Elizabeth both now counted as illegitimate. Howard and Douglas were arrested, and on the morning of Parliament’s dissolution on 18 July one of the very last pieces of le
gislation (introduced with extreme haste and several additions on the text of the final version) provided for Lord Thomas’s execution. Its preamble outdid in bitterness any public condemnation since Elizabeth Barton, denouncing the wickedness of Howard’s marriage proposal cynically made ‘lately within the King’s own mansion place at Westminster . . . his Majesty there being for the affairs of his Parliament’. It declared as high treason any attempt to marry one of the royal family without royal assent under the Great Seal. Lord Thomas never left the Tower of London before a fatal illness; Lady Margaret, after piteous appeals to Cromwell, graduated from the Tower to Syon nunnery, and thence to an adventurous career which culminated rather better than one might expect, as grandmother to King James VI and I.44

  One reason for the King’s extreme of fury at the Douglas/Howard affair was his consciousness that he was about to lose his only acknowledged son: Henry Fitzroy Duke of Richmond died on 22 July after contracting a lung infection. The death of a teenager, particularly one by all accounts possessed of charm and perhaps even talent, would be a tragedy in any circumstances. His father was fond of him, and his contemporary Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, the Duke of Norfolk’s son and heir, was utterly devastated: according to Norfolk, not the most empathetic of men, Surrey was an emotional and physical wreck for months afterwards ‘for thought of [grief for] my Lord of Richmond’.45 Yet there was no escaping the calculations to follow Richmond’s passing. As we have observed, the young Duke was always an asset requiring custodianship, with something of a tussle between Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk after Wolsey’s fall (see above, Chapter 10). Even though Norfolk had gained the prizes of Richmond’s marriage to his daughter and the boy’s intense friendship with his son, Cromwell had lately been making ground, particularly when Richmond was removed out of Norfolk’s orbit to Dorset and the Court.