Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Given that explicit support, the sting was removed from the later passage about the naming and proving of ‘certain of our Council’. That was nevertheless retained unaltered.

  The newly endorsed councillors are therefore given carefully bounded treatment, but at least Cromwell, Cranmer and Audley now had the King’s explicit backing. This represents a crucial shift of atmosphere in Court politics during that first week of November. By 11 November Gervase Clifton, a young Nottinghamshire gentleman serving in the royal army at Nottingham, had reported back to the Earl of Derby’s servant Richard Banks news of how the royal negotiations with Ellerker and Bowes had concluded – both Clifton and Banks had known Cromwell since the days when he was much involved in the affairs of Wolsey’s wards, of whom Clifton had been one. The King insisted just as in his draft reply that he would ‘be at his liberty and to choose his Council at his pleasure’, but now there was a difference: ‘he will not forego my Lord of the Privy Seal for no man living.’78 Late in November, relying on his London informants, Aske had told Lord Darcy gloomily, ‘The King lieth at Richmond, and Cromwell only the ruler about him.’ Richmond was a significantly unusual choice of retreat from Windsor for the King: not a palace where he had spent much time since boyhood, and needing significant repair in 1536. It was, however, very near Mortlake – and invariably the secret of winning King Henry’s favour was to contrive to remain as close to him as possible.79

  After a terrifying moment of peril, Cromwell was safe. The royal armies were still dangerously weak in relation to the thousands of insurgents across a swathe of the North, and the appearance of concession and conciliation must continue, particularly in religion; hence the retention of that passage in the printed text suggesting that the King would listen to complaints against his ministers. Yet that did not stop the reviser of the King’s original draft adding a page and a half in print vigorously defending the suppression of monasteries, with detailed and accurate historical examples right back to Edward III, taking in on the way ‘the Cardinal of York’ and his suppressions ‘for a College in Oxford’. Such a positive mention of Wolsey, possibly the first in a government publication since his fall, reeks of Cromwell’s editorial hand.80

  At this moment of balance, it was especially important to rein in aggressive evangelicals in southern England. Some of them were taking their lead from a high-profile and confrontational sermon at Paul’s Cross preached by Bishop Hugh Latimer on 5 November. Latimer exploited the epistle text of the day from Ephesians (about putting on ‘the whole armour of God’) to create an extended military metaphor of evangelical faith as weaponry. He scathingly attacked the northerners, added ominous remarks about some of his episcopal colleagues unnamed, and vigorously rejected the common characterization of evangelical religion as ‘the New Learning’. As was not unusual, Latimer was pleased with his own performance, but it is not difficult to see how it would enrage traditionalists.81 A week later, a prominent evangelical London merchant, Robert Packington, was sensationally murdered with a handgun on a city street. There followed the arrest and imprisonment of a series of leading ‘heretical’ preachers, including Robert Barnes, who had preached with fury at Packington’s funeral.

  The round-up might seem at first sight illogical, but it is likely that it was a decision by Cromwell, both as a gesture to please conservatives and as protective custody for his protégés. It was he who had commissioned Latimer to preach in his absence, and the Bishop’s rather defensive account of his peroration suggests that the Lord Privy Seal was not pleased with the result. That move was followed on 19 November by a royal circular to the bishops ordering them to implement the Ten Articles agreed by Convocation in the summer, and to crack down on radical preaching and the like.82 All this action represented a concerted orchestration of soothing conservatism, which continued as negotiations moved to what seemed to most of the Pilgrims to be a satisfactory conclusion in the first week of December, including a general pardon, the prospect of a Parliament summoned to York, all suppressed monasteries restored and a freeze on further monastic dissolutions. With a settlement agreed, the King finally moved to spend Christmas at Greenwich Palace on 22 December. He took advantage of the blockage of the Thames by ice to travel from Whitehall not by barge but on horseback in procession through Westminster and the City, all the way down to a river crossing in the East End.83

  This last-minute royal public outing was turned into a massive display of traditionalist festivity and loyalty: ‘the streets richly behanged with rich gold and arras; the four Orders of friars standing in Fleet Street in copes of gold with crosses and candlesticks and censers’, and so on through City streets: Bishop of London and abbots and cathedral choir and two priests from every City church, gildsmen, noise, triumphal cheers. Unrecorded by Charles Wriothesley who chronicled all this was my Lord Privy Seal sitting in his house at The Rolls, within earshot just off Fleet Street, checking amid much correspondence that all was going to plan. The perfect culmination to restoring harmony in the realm, friars and abbots and all, it was virtually the last time such a scene could have taken place in Henry’s capital, though no one could know that at the time. One reassuring letter Cromwell wrote from The Rolls that same festive 22 December went to the Abbot of Kirkstead in Lincolnshire, which the Abbot received with joy, grateful that he was ‘having pity and charity upon me’; his monks had turned up with their staff at the Louth demonstrations in October, so he had need to worry. He was hanged in March 1537.84

  The government had made an apparently almost complete surrender to the Pilgrims’ demands. Yet the Pilgrims’ delight in their victory was utterly misplaced. The fatal fact remained: Cromwell was still in place. Both King and minister were furious at what they had been made to agree, and were just waiting for a chance to overturn it. Both were good at keeping their counsel; and what better time could there be to show spurious goodwill than at Christmas? An extraordinary royal house-party ensued. Aske was invited to lead a delegation of northern gentry to spend Christmas with the Court at Greenwich, under safe conduct until Twelfth Night. Such an extravagant gesture must have helped to quell his doubts. He spent part of the festivities writing his own account of the Pilgrimage, at the King’s request.85 The Duke of Norfolk was also there, but it is doubtful whether Cromwell spent much time in the presence of either adversary. His son Gregory arrived back to spend Christmas with him after an East Anglian stay of nearly nine months, their longest separation ever. Richard Southwell seemed to regret the youth’s departure from Woodrising.86

  Aske duly left Greenwich in secrecy on Twelfth Night and hastened back to Yorkshire, and Norfolk rode away for some well-earned rest at Kenninghall Lodge, preparatory to resuming what turned out to be a prolonged lieutenancy in the North. Cromwell was not at Greenwich to see them off. He was in his own house at The Rolls, sorting out the government’s financial woes, and firing off menacing letters to begin examinations of suspects. It must have been a particular satisfaction to open a letter of 4 January from the Coventry Carthusians, nervously letting him know they had unwittingly been harbouring none other than the fugitive Vicar of Louth, Thomas Kendall, who in his militant sermon after Michaelmas had triggered the whole conflagration.87 Kendall was hanged on 29 March 1537, by which time many others were sharing his fate, enemies of the regime and of the Lord Privy Seal.

  The Pilgrimage was a watershed in Tudor England and in Cromwell’s career. It so nearly succeeded, and so nearly destroyed him, revealing a stark and much simpler new configuration of politics. No longer did Anne Boleyn’s existence complicate England’s ideological divide, yoking together those of otherwise disparate views who supported or detested her. The injustices done to Queen Katherine and Princess Mary became far more obviously a cause allied to traditional religion, and the golden memory of Cardinal Wolsey ebbed in its capacity to bind Cromwell to those of very different religious outlook. Former friends and allies, even courtiers who had helped him enter the King’s service like William Fi
tzwilliam and William Paulet, now became much more ambiguous in their relationship to him – even, perhaps, opponents. He would not have forgotten their inclusion in that poisonous royal draft of early November. That was a future problem. In the meantime, many more than Thomas Kendall faced retribution.

  17

  The Reckoning: 1537

  The formal position at the beginning of 1537 was that the Pilgrims had secured everything they wanted – short of the removal of Thomas Cromwell. One permanent change in Henry’s government was the definition of a small set of councillors around the King as his ‘Privy Council’. This was not a new term: it had often been used over the previous decade, either to distinguish those councillors meeting at Westminster from those named to the Council in the Marches of Wales, the Council in the North or other subsidiary conciliar bodies, or as a shorthand description for councillors attendant on the King for a particular purpose. So Cromwell was addressed on letters in summer 1532 as ‘of the King’s Privy Council’ while he was one of the group intensively working on the all-important agreement with France. The usage from 1537 was new, implying a set number of people specifically named to that position, no more than twenty or so. The phrase continued into the early Stuart age to describe the main body for executive government, and still remains fossilized in the British governmental system.1

  Geoffrey Elton saw this change as part of Thomas Cromwell’s ‘Revolution in Government’, formalizing executive power and taking it ‘out of Court’. That puts the matter the wrong way round. Until the fall of Anne Boleyn in 1536, Cromwell thrived on indeterminacy in government, which allowed full rein to his improvisatory skill. After that, his own position crystallized much more clearly into office and formal honour, and the Pilgrimage was at least in part an expression of fury at that development. The crisis in royal government which followed nearly destroyed him in early November. The King, in the printed Answer to the Pilgrims, publicly used that phrase ‘Privy Council’, implying that the whole Council had recommended Cromwell to the monarch as suitable for office.2 That made him one Councillor among several. He thus paid a price for survival: this newly formalized body sat not as a vehicle for his power, but to check it. The Privy Council’s further formalization, with its own clerk and minute-book, occurred immediately on his fall in 1540: a move designed to prevent any fresh Thomas Cromwell from emerging to usurp the power now distributed among Henry VIII’s closest advisers.3

  From now on, Cromwell became far more single-minded in pursuing evangelical reformation. He would still have to step very carefully, for he was conscious of many enemies. His new caution may explain why his protégé printer William Marshall, arrested in the little conservative purge of November 1536, never rejoined Cromwell’s stable of radical publishers.4 Monks, friars and traditional-minded nobility had all revealed themselves as seeking Cromwell’s destruction. At the beginning of 1537 he did not yet have the sheaves of depositions which he and his assistants extracted from the frightened men rounded up during the spring, but he knew enough already, from all that had happened.

  Henry Clifford Earl of Cumberland, not the greatest of intellects but impeccably loyal to the Crown throughout the crisis, put it clearly (though tactlessly) on 12 January 1537 in making excuses to Cromwell for not sending any letters to him during the Pilgrimage: ‘the commons in every quarter throughout this country are so wilfully minded against you, in case any man should have chanced to have been taken therewith, he had [would have] died without help; and as yet they continue in the same fury against you, so that in case any man speak of you, he is despised of all the country.’5 Cromwell would therefore have no compunction in encouraging an already vengeful King to deceit and savagery. The policy was laid out in a memorandum of mid-December (maybe from Cromwell himself): divide the gentry from the commons, and bombard the North with preaching on national unity and the sinfulness of rebellion, while quietly preparing institutions of government in the hands of proven loyalists, led by the Duke of Norfolk.6 The rebels were given a comprehensive pardon as part of the settlement, but that only applied to their actions up to the moment of the pardon, and if anything else should happen, punishment could begin.

  Something else did happen: a rising in the East Riding of Yorkshire as early as the second week of January 1537. Among several bills of complaint by then circulating, one document best expresses the swiftly rising tide of suspicion and disillusionment among the common people, and it may have served as their main manifesto. Twenty days had passed since the agreement, the deadline for summoning a Parliament at York, and still no sign of an assembly, it noted. ‘Cromwell and other evil counsellors should have been banished the Court, and they are now in higher favour than ever they were before.’ Worse still, the paper now ranged ‘Captain’ Aske among the traitors: in the south, he ‘had great rewards given to betray the commoners; and since that he came home, they [the government] have made Hull against the commons ready to receive ships by the sea to destroy all the North parts. Wherefore now is the time to arise.’7

  With Aske discredited among many former Pilgrims, and gentry and nobility reasserting their normal loyalty to the Court, the gentry leader to whom the renewed rebels now turned was a rather strange figure: Sir Francis Bigod. With a surname redolent of twelfth-century Norman nobility and ancient estates in Yorkshire, he was a convincing local man, but in every other respect a bizarre choice, long an active evangelical client of Cromwell. Strangest of all, Bigod had published a substantial tract (probably in 1535), explaining why the widespread impropriation of parish revenues by monasteries was a thoroughly bad thing. Yet after he had been captured by the Pilgrims in October while trying to flee to London, he proved their most successful brand plucked from the fire of Thomas Cromwell, and had thrown himself into the work of dismantling all that Cromwell meant in the North. Struggling inside a troubled personality were two conflicting identities, and loyalty to his local roots won out.

  Bigod was partner in rebellion with a yeoman from the Beverley area, John Hallom, who had been unhappy about the December agreement from the beginning. Hallom seems to have been entirely traditional in his religious outlook, petitioning the Pilgrim leadership in late November to ensure punishment for Cromwell, Cranmer, Audley, Latimer and the usual evangelical suspects.8 Two causes seem to have united their contrasting outlooks. The first was Bigod’s personal exploration of his evangelical faith, which made him decide that the royal supremacy was wicked. The second was their common resentment of Cromwell’s nominees for head of Watton and Guisborough Priories, respectively Holgate and Pursglove; Aske, conscientiously offended by the illegality of deposing this pair during the Pilgrimage, restored them both to office. It is difficult to decide whether Hallom or Bigod was the leading spirit in rebellion, but the most recent historians of these events are inclined to credit Hallom, which would make more sense than looking to a confused and idealistic gentleman, whatever his charisma. Bigod’s decisive contribution was to turn his literary talents to rousing new circulars, oaths and proclamations, and to persuade the commons of the East Riding that great multitudes waited once again in the North and West for a call to rebellion.

  It was all in vain. An attempt to take Hull on 16 January showed the weakness of the commons, now enjoying minimal co-operation from any gentry or nobility. Hallom was captured and executed by the end of the month. Bigod had reached Cumberland by the time he was seized by government forces on 10 February. His flight to the north-west reflected the fact that disturbances rumbled on there, a pale reflection of his fantasies of renewed rebellion, with barns being raided, enclosures cast down and traditional liturgical observances turned into studied acts of rebellion. Dentdale, where the very first stirs had begun in September 1536, was one of the main centres supplying men and leadership for the last major clash with loyalist forces outside Carlisle, a week after Bigod’s capture. Before his execution, his curiously tangled relationship with Cromwell was illustrated in a long letter to the Lord Privy Seal
. This confessed his part in the risings, but ended with a plea for favour for his evangelical preacher-protégé William Jerome, the ex-monk of Canterbury. Cromwell listened: at the end of May he instructed his servant and Rector at Stepney, Richard Leighton (so hated by the Pilgrims), to present Jerome as Vicar of Stepney, after the renegade monk had been equipped with a dispensation from monastic life in order to take up the post. Only five days later Bigod was executed. One hopes he knew about this gesture of grace.9

  February and March were mostly occupied with mopping-up operations, but fresh small-scale resistance still flared, each incident an excuse for more government retribution. The most serious was actually a gentry conspiracy by Sir John Bulmer and his common law wife Margaret Cheyney intended to raise Ryedale and areas beyond, but by now arrests, trials and the beginning of executions were sapping any enthusiasm among the commons who had sustained the stirs over six months. This last effort produced the most horrible of all the deaths in the long programme of punishment after the Pilgrimage: on 25 May Margaret was burned at the stake in Smithfield, the fate reserved not just for heretics but for female traitors. Only a year before Anne Boleyn had likewise been threatened with burning for her supposed treason, to the alarm of some judges. This time, no dissent was expressed.10

  Among those examined, tried and executed were some very senior political figures, now firmly defined as traitors and treated accordingly. One was John Lord Hussey, whose main crime was to dither and, as a nobleman of Lincolnshire, not to show himself strong enough to lead the county’s trouble-makers away from full-scale revolt. Nevertheless, there was more: Hussey had drifted into the group of traditional-minded noblemen (still represented as far into King Henry’s personal circle as Lord Montague and the Marquess of Exeter) who habitually offloaded their anger at Cromwell’s religious policy on to Ambassador Chapuys. In 1534 Hussey even went so far as to seek Charles V’s intervention in England on behalf of the true faith. Cromwell must have known enough about such mutterings to decide that Hussey must have an exemplary if mercifully swift death. There is rich irony here, because Lord Hussey was not some scion of ancient nobility resentful of parvenus, a Percy or a Dacre, but one of the last survivors of the clique of ambitious and efficient ‘new men’ in government, a collective Thomas Cromwell avant la lettre who had been the focus of so much public anger in Henry VII’s regime.11