Thomas Cromwell
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We have met Horsman before, when some three or four years previously Dr Roland Lee had lobbied Cromwell to get him appointed Abbot of Coverham; the connection was through Horsman’s brother Leonard, Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge.23 Horsman was quickly replaced as Abbot of Coverham by Christopher Rokeby, whom it is tempting to link to his namesake James. On Horsman’s resignation the abbey evidently appointed him to its living at Sedbergh, but his recent death left Sedbergh vacant. When Coverham Abbey surrendered to James Rokeby and William Blythman, the Crown gained the right to present a successor parson for Sedbergh, which the King duly exercised far away in Windsor on 1 October, blissfully oblivious to all that was happening in Dent.
Horsman’s old link to Lee and Cromwell – and beyond them, to Christ’s College Cambridge and to Mistress Margery Horsman at Court – seems too much of a coincidence amid all this trouble. We should not think of Dentdale and its vicinity as some benighted region, cut off from events in the south: Sedbergh boasted a school then only ten years old, with strong links to St John’s College Cambridge, a college currently very angry about the fate of its late benefactor and virtual founder, Cardinal John Fisher.* Maybe, ironically, the rebels’ idea of oath-taking came from the royal campaigns for oaths to the royal succession and supremacy which were such prominent features of recent years, thanks to Thomas Cromwell.24 As that shout of Crumming menace to poor frightened Breyar in Dent showed, there was a hesitation in the insurgents’ attitude to the Crown which in the end proved fatal: they knew they hated Cromwell, but could they effectively distinguish his wickedness from the actions of his royal master? Was it possible to ‘new crown’ Henry VIII with a new set of policies?
Seventy miles across the north Pennines, at Hexham, came an exactly contemporary outburst of resistance to the government’s plans, and once more the main target was James Rokeby. He was one of four dissolution commissioners who found themselves repelled from Hexham Priory on 28 September. This was no token resistance, for according to the alarming report brought to the commissioners while still on the road to Hexham, it included guns and artillery as well as an angry crowd. The Austin canons there were well equipped for such eventualities, being the last significant English monastic presence before the Scottish border, and they faced up to the commissioners just as they had done over centuries to a Scots raid – with the additional intimidation, they claimed, of a royal letter under the Great Seal for their exemption from suppression, despite their coming within the terms of the Act: probably the fruit of Archbishop Lee’s intervention with Cromwell immediately after the spring Parliament.25
Nonplussed, the commissioners slunk away to Corbridge, 5 miles closer to the safety of Newcastle, leaving the canons in triumphant battle array on Hexham Green. The rapid unfolding of events elsewhere meant that no further official action took place against the priory until the following February (shades of Studley Priory). The canons were no doubt well aware, despite waving their exemption at the commissioners from their battlements, that Cromwell had already designated their house for a grant to Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland’s favourite servant, Sir Reynold Carnaby. Sir Reynold had only recently completed a very satisfactory deal with Cromwell, selling him family lands in Kent. The Carnaby family straight away sent down an indignant report about the Hexham outrages to the Earl and Sir Reynold in London, alongside the commissioners’ own memorandum to Cromwell. Rokeby, Carnaby, even Percy himself: here were yet more examples of northerners doing southerners’ bidding, and now getting their just deserts.26
Effectively the government had now lost control of two widely separated regions of northern uplands, but so far these unprecedented expressions of defiance had not resulted in the insurgents moving beyond their home bases – yet, crucially, neither had anyone in authority tried to restore order, as they had done so quickly in Craven the previous year. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen next. On Sunday 1 October came the events which began unravelling royal power across half England, not just north of the Humber but right into the English lowlands. The spark was in the Wolds of Lincolnshire, within the octave of Michaelmas – the time expected for the return of the detested John Freeman and his agents of monastic destruction and maybe more destruction still. That Sunday Thomas Kendall, Vicar of Louth, mounted the pulpit in the town’s magnificent church to preach an excitable sermon in tune with the general mood, amid seething local rumours of confiscation of church goods: the universal Church, as well as his own church, was in danger. As the town’s prized silver crosses were solemnly processed in the liturgy, a prosperous yeoman of Louth prophesied that he and his fellows should never have the chance to follow the crosses again.27
Affronted faith combined with fierce local pride amid the splendour of Michaelmas devotion and festival excitement. A crowd gathered in front of the rood screen after evensong, and relieved the churchwardens of their keys to the church treasury, entrusting them to a Louth shoemaker named Nicholas Melton. Shoemakers both in sixteenth-century Europe and later had a recurrent tendency to adventurous thoughts and radical talk, and Melton was the perfect exemplar; his name resounded through subsequent events as ‘Captain Cobbler’.28 What would the crowd do with their righteous indignation? They turned on the local incarnations of Thomas Cromwell. First was John Heneage, brother to Cromwell’s friend and colleague, the newly promoted courtier Thomas Heneage; he was in town to take oaths of a very different sort to those of Dent in the annual Michaelmas election of new town officers.29
In doing so, Heneage was acting in his capacity as Steward of the Bishop of Lincoln, John Longland, Lord of the Manor of Louth. As a cleric of unmistakably traditionalist outlook, Longland might seem an unlikely pairing with Cromwell as the symbol of obnoxious religious change, but the very nature of the Bishop’s jurisdiction in Louth invited local resentment. Borough manors dominated by great churchmen rarely had an easy relationship with their clerical overlords. If they had become prosperous boroughs on their own account, they sought rights and freedoms unimagined in the remote ages when episcopal lordship was first imposed; but clerical lordship never died. That structural problem fatally entwined Longland’s evident unpopularity in Louth with Thomas Cromwell’s. It did not help that, in the Lincolnshire section of Longland’s vast diocese stretching from the Humber to the Thames, the Bishop was largely an absentee magnate: born at Henley-on-Thames and an Oxford man (currently University Chancellor), he divided his time between London and his fine house at Wooburn in Buckinghamshire. More immediately pertinent in 1536, Longland was widely perceived to be the chief fomenter of Henry VIII’s moral scruples about his marriage with Katherine of Aragon.30
Heneage was thus the unwitting focus of a great many resentments both traditional and contemporary. Far from administering oaths himself, on Monday 2 October he was manhandled into the parish church and sworn to be true ‘to God, the King and the commonalty’ – the first of a series of notables forcibly sworn over the next few months. Heneage insisted he would find out the truth of proposals for church confiscation from the King himself, a plausible promise given his brother’s position in the Privy Chamber, and he was allowed to ride south to the Court. Simultaneously, the mob rounded up in the marketplace a servant of the Bishop’s Chancellor, in town for Michaelmas episcopal business, and ceremonially burned his administrative papers. For centuries such action had symbolized defiance of clerical power, though the most famous recent example, Martin Luther burning the Pope’s bull in 1520, would not have commended itself to Louth folk. Around them, crowds swelled with excited and vengeful recruits from the surrounding country.31
The next move was unequivocally aimed at Cromwell and his employees. Alone among Lincolnshire monasteries recently suppressed and despoiled, the little Cistercian nunnery of Legbourne, 4 miles out of Louth, was actually Cromwell’s own rented property. Why he decided to invest in this small convent is a mystery: it was far from his other estates, and he had shown no previous interest in acquiring mon
astic lands. Nevertheless his Augmentations lease of 7 August sits in the Court’s books flanked by leases to his nephew Richard of two priories in Huntingdonshire, and former monastic rectories in Lincolnshire to none other than Mr John Heneage.32 There must have been an historic connection of Legbourne to one of Cromwell’s properties elsewhere to explain this otherwise apparently random acquisition. That is suggested by a letter of the previous spring from the Prioress, Jane Missenden, one of a local gentry family: she begged him (in vain) to get her house exempted from the suppression legislation, ‘as God has endowed you with the just title of founder of the priory of Legbourne’.33
The new landlord’s servants were enjoying lunch in the former nunnery on 2 October when a crowd from Louth arrived. John Milsent (Cromwell’s household receiver) and John Bellow were carried off to Louth and another servant, George Parker, was rounded up en route. Many wanted to hang them or stab them to death, but more moderate counsels led to Bellow and Milsent sitting in the stocks in Louth market-place before being thrown in gaol.34 In their place, the insurgents installed a nun back at Legbourne, and at the recently surrendered Louth Park Abbey, a nearby male Cistercian counterpart to Legbourne, the monks were put in possession once more. These were the first restorations of recently suppressed monastic houses, in a pattern which characterized the northern stirs everywhere.35 Later in this insurgency, associates of Cromwell or the equally obnoxious Archbishop Cranmer continued to be victimized: the Lincolnshire homes of John Freeman and Cranmer’s friend John Tamworth were among the few the rebels chose systematically to wreck.36
When first reports of the Louth stirs reached Windsor, the most vivid and horrifying early information came via a report from Christopher Ayscough, royal Gentleman Usher and Lincolnshire man (brother of the future Protestant martyr Anne Ayscough) who had been sent up to reconnoitre. Amid generally accurate intelligence, he reported that Milsent had been hanged and Bellow baited to death with dogs.37 This was all the more plausible because a day or two later exactly parallel outrages really did occur at Horncastle, a small episcopal market town very like Louth (though here its absentee landlord was the Bishop of Carlisle). A Horncastle mob beat to death Bishop Longland’s Chancellor John Rayne, and hanged an unfortunate memorably called George Wolsey, surely not coincidentally an old servant of the Cardinal.38
The fake news of Milsent’s and Bellow’s atrocious deaths quickly spread in London, and was in fact relayed to Brussels in an otherwise strikingly well-informed report by Chapuys’s nephew, who added the significant detail that the hanged man was cook to Dr Thomas Lee.39 In fact both Milsent and Bellow survived their ordeal, despite a fortnight’s imprisonment, as did George Parker, who was at large and doing the bidding of royal commanders against the insurgents within a week of the Louth insurrection.40 That drawing back from the most extreme militance was a mark of how the very large armed gatherings mustered in Lincolnshire were fairly quickly contained. Yet it remained alarming that in the first week of their action the insurgents had a very precise shopping-list of leading figures whom they wished rounded up and delivered to them or banished the realm, nearly all identifiable evangelicals: Bishops Cranmer, Hilsey and Latimer; other bishops including Lincoln and Ely; Cromwell, Rich and Master of the Rolls Christopher Hales. No more than the men of Dentdale were the leaders in the Lincolnshire stirs political innocents abroad; one did not have to be a gentleman or nobleman to show political sophistication in Tudor England.41
The King reacted to the first reports from Lincolnshire with incandescent rage and a thirst for revenge. Yet he recovered fast from initial panic, and made an adroit choice of commander in the Duke of Suffolk for a substantial military force, hastily gathered from those regions the regime calculated would remain loyal, in southern and eastern England. Brandon may not have been especially bright, but he was as physically imposing as the King himself, genuinely experienced in real warfare in France as well as tournaments, and possessing a unique asset in the situation. While Bishop Longland was reckoned in popular memory as a key player in the betrayal of Queen Katherine of Aragon, it would also be remembered that the Duke’s first wife (King Henry’s sister Mary) was among Katherine’s greatest defenders, and his remarkably young current wife was daughter to a former Spanish attendant of Katherine’s, María de Salinas. Truth be told, María, Dowager Lady Willoughby, was not a popular landlord in Lincolnshire and faced trouble on her estates during the rising. Nevertheless, unlike his present mother-in-law, the Duke had the advantage of landed prospects in the county without (as yet) the actual possession of estates to compromise his popular reputation.42
There was no question of Thomas Cromwell getting anywhere near confrontations with the rebels. It would have been the height of folly to inflame their passions still further, quite apart from his indispensable role in shuttling between Windsor Castle and London, busily drafting statements and letters for the King to send out to insurgents and loyalists alike, and frantically scrabbling to finance this totally unexpected and deeply expensive eventuality.43 Cranmer was sent off into virtual invisibility in deepest Kent to keep an eye on any local trouble, not an especially demanding task in that region, while Bishops Foxe and Sampson remained at Court and active on the Council: they were probably considered more politically capable figures than him, and certainly less provocative, considering the obvious hatred most northerners felt for the Archbishop.44
The silence of another bishop throughout the autumn crisis is notable, and rather puzzling. Not a single definitely dateable letter from Roland Lee survives from the Welsh Marches amid the heap of strategic correspondence between Cromwell and provincial commanders confronting the Pilgrims. Maybe they were weeded out later for some political reason around Cromwell’s fall, or perhaps he simply got on with his job at Ludlow with his usual brusque efficiency; in one of his later letters he referred back to a particular set of arrangements he made to recruit 500 men while raising forces against the insurgents back in 1536.45 His next unquestionably dateable letter is from 15 January 1537, when he wrote from Wigmore Castle to reassure Cromwell about the lack of Welsh reaction to renewed stirrings in the North: ‘to my knowledge, little amongst them [is] conceived of the matters in England, forasmuch as their language doth not agree to the advancement thereof.’46
Cromwell himself made no effort to hide his considerable contribution to military efforts confronting first the Lincolnshire insurgents and then the northern Pilgrims. Gregory Cromwell was still far too young to become involved, and remained out of harm’s way in East Anglia, but Gregory’s honorary elder brother Richard Cromwell alias Williams was plunged into the affair straight away, according to the circumstantial account of Chapuys’s nephew. As soon as the King heard of the Louth outrages, on 4 October, ‘he summoned the gentlemen then at London to go thither under the command of Richard Cromwell, and ordered the mayor of London to supply them with horses,’ on the pretext of welcoming the Habsburg military commander the Count of Nassau on a visit to the City.47 Chapuys himself reported further developments to Charles V: Richard moved on 7 October to take from the Tower of London ‘a quantity of ammunition, as well as arrows and other weapons of war’, while Uncle Thomas’s new building works at Mortlake and in London supplied sixty or seventy craftsmen.48
Soon Richard was riding north with his uncle’s allocation of 100 cavalry, and energetically recruiting further forces from the Fens just south of Lincolnshire, which had become his home country over the previous few years. Among his tasks was to liaise with the Lord Privy Seal’s victimized servants, including John Freeman, spoiling for vengeance after the sacking of his house, and a dazed John Milsent. By 2 November Richard was confident enough of Lincolnshire’s security to send back John Bellow to sort out the situation at Legbourne Priory.49 From his stream of urgent and informative letters back to Cromwell, one gets the feeling that the young man was having the time of his life, despite appropriate remarks asking his uncle to calm his wife’s anxieties. He won avun
cular praise from the senior commanders in Lincolnshire for his energy and efficiency, particularly from Cromwell’s friends Sir William Fitzwilliam and Sir John Russell.50
Richard’s troop was only half the Lord Privy Seal’s contribution to the war effort. Cromwell sent off a second detachment of 200 under a former senior servant of the late Duke of Richmond, Sir Richard Cotton (Richard’s brother Sir George, also previously in Richmond’s service, joined Richard Cromwell’s troop). Cotton was deputed to round up Cromwell’s dispersed servants in eastern England, as well as commanding domestic staff from the Cromwell household; he weeded them down to the best 160 (including, he apologetically admitted, one of Cromwell’s cooks), and detailed the arrangements he made to keep them smart, well paid and in high morale. He tactfully made it clear that this would be effort and money well spent, since this second Cromwell troop was to serve with Thomas Duke of Norfolk. The symbolism of the Cotton brothers leading the Cromwell contingent into possible battle would not be lost on Richmond’s late father-in-law, after the painful events that summer.51
There was a political minefield to negotiate here. The Duke of Norfolk showed unfeeling glee on first hearing of the crisis in Lincolnshire. The news came at the nadir of his fortunes after the hammer-blows of the summer. As the Bishop of Carlisle commented to Chapuys in the first week of the crisis, Norfolk was convinced that ‘it will work the ruin and destruction of his competitor and enemy, Cromwell, on whom he puts all the blame for these events, and whose head it’s said the insurgents demand.’52 It was a shattering blow, therefore, though one the Duke ought to have predicted, when his long-standing rival Suffolk gained command of the army for Lincolnshire, while Norfolk was fobbed off with the undemanding duty of guarding East Anglia. He was, after all, hereditary Earl Marshal, who might expect the senior command by ancient right. ‘God give me grace honestly to die shortly and not to live with this shame. My Lords of Oxford and Sussex might have stayed [kept peace in] this country as well as I,’ he stormed to Cromwell and Council colleagues on his eastward journey on 8 October, alongside an even more emotional lament to the King from ‘your foolish old servant’ – both written in his own hand.53