Thomas Cromwell
Page 56
Then came Thomas Lord Darcy of Templehurst, degraded from the Order of the Garter on conviction by his peers and eventually executed on 30 June 1537. It was said later that Cromwell had promised the Lords at Darcy’s trial ‘that he would do that was in him that the said Lord Darcy should neither lose life nor goods’, but matters turned out differently, despite the rather nebulous character of the evidence against the accused.12 In the judgement of the most authoritative recent student of Darcy’s behaviour, he ‘neither planned nor encouraged the rebellion of October 1536. But he was guilty of flirting with rebellion.’13 He had not exploited his capacity to raise a defensive army against the Pilgrims and, knowing his military weakness, had surrendered Pontefract Castle to the rebels, providing them with their most imposing stronghold and place of assembly. Even more than Hussey, Darcy had made a heavy investment both financially and emotionally in traditional religion. He hated the ‘New Learning’ and, like Hussey, talked treasonably to Chapuys about Scottish or imperial invasion. A short deposition from a Yorkshire chantry priest during the trial recorded in Cromwell’s own hand provided some of the most damning evidence: it included Darcy’s wistful remark on first hearing of the Lincolnshire rising, ‘If they had done this three years ago, it had been a much better world than it now is.’14
Yet others with similar black marks came through the scrutinies of spring 1537 and survived. There was certainly no witch-hunt against Darcy’s family, as we will see from the cordial relations of his second son Sir Arthur Darcy with Thomas Cromwell (see below, this page). Something more about Darcy may have decided his fate; something that would have given the Lord Privy Seal particular satisfaction. The evidence was supplied (ironically in the circumstances) by the Duke of Norfolk, who in late April reported to Cromwell his discovery of a cache of papers from 1528–9 in Darcy’s extensive archive. They related to his plans with other noblemen (Norfolk himself included) to destroy Cardinal Wolsey; the documents included a mass of detailed charges in Darcy’s own hand against Wolsey, for extravagance, vainglory and government mismanagement.15 Not many people, least of all Thomas Howard, would have taken much interest in this material, for it was hardly relevant to the current charges, and indeed after Wolsey’s fall it could hardly be regarded as treasonous. Yet one person that spring took a very great interest. As charges against Darcy were framed, clerks catalogued his actions and his archive. In the margins, Cromwell carefully annotated items which could be used against him because they postdated the December pardon.
In a memorandum in Cromwell’s hand of ‘Articles agenst Lord Darcy’, he adds two items kept separate at the foot, since they do not relate to the Pilgrimage of Grace: ‘It’m For the gunpowder to burne my Lorde Cardinall’ and ‘It’m Richardson and Mason saithe that Lorde Darcy d’d off theym’.
One version of these listings opened with a memorandum by Cromwell’s servant Richard Pollard which had no immediate relevance, since it consisted of two notes relating to Wolsey: ‘First, the destruction of the Cardinal in the Chancery. Item, the book that the lord Darcy made against the Cardinal.’16 As if that were not enough raking over of old coals, there survives a further memorandum of ‘Articles against Lord Darcy’, on a scrap of paper in Cromwell’s own most scrawling hand. It is a brief classification of the evidence, noting the most damning items, such as supplying Pontefract Castle and counselling Aske. In an afterthought below, Cromwell made two extraordinary notes: ‘Item For the gunpowder to burn my Lord Cardinal. Item Richardson and Mason saith that Lord Darcy delivered of them.’17 This could not be more startling. It suggests a northern nobleman of the Pilgrimage of Grace anticipating Guy Fawkes, another unsuccessful Roman Catholic conspirator. Did Cromwell really believe that Darcy’s plotting back in 1529 included this precocious plan for terrorist action? Yes or no, in the course of a year, he had achieved a double act of revenge against the Cardinal’s two most implacable though contrasting enemies. First was Anne Boleyn; now came Thomas Darcy.
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After the Pilgrimage, religion could make old friendships grow cold: at Court, no one was more identified with the evangelical cause than Cromwell. An embarrassing episode exposed this reality from an unexpected direction. In summer 1537, while Lord Darcy was still in the Tower of London awaiting execution, Cromwell made final arrangements to send a team of four English commissioners into Ireland to assess the military and political situation and make recommendations for the future. Over the last few years, Ireland and its problems had cost the English government terrifying sums of money, perhaps £46,000 in three years; the King demanded action on the ruinous price of his Lordship.18 That would have been reason enough for the commission, but correspondence from the Irish Council alarmingly revealed the factional divisions in Dublin government, and the depressing reality that since becoming Lord Deputy Lord Leonard Grey had only made matters worse.
Grey was drawn into Irish factionalism. He was partisan against the great Butler clan, and favoured what remained of the lately rebellious Geraldine affinity; beyond that, he governed in an autocratic and arbitrary fashion. Yet there might be faults on all sides. Cromwell tended not to believe everything the Dublin Council told him. He consistently drew on multiple reports from the island and, where he judged necessary, made appointments without consulting them. Much to their fury, he treated them as a subsidiary English provincial council, like the Council in the Marches of Wales or the Council of Calais. That in itself was a new balance between Westminster and Dublin; consistent with that shift in power, while the English commissioners were in Ireland, from September 1537 to April 1538, they effectively superseded Lord Leonard’s authority.19
The commission has its own significance. It was Cromwell’s greatest intervention in Irish government reform: it established a more regular system of English garrisons, reflecting his belief that the English Lordship in Ireland could be treated like a giant version of Calais. It produced many more direct links between Irish notables and the Lord Privy Seal, and thoroughly equipped one of its members, Sir Anthony St Leger, for his later service as Lord Deputy. The commission’s work additionally has a precious archival value, for its secretary compiled a little letter-book of Cromwell’s early letters to the commissioners, useful not only for what they say but also for pinning down his whereabouts in summer and early autumn 1537. The book may owe its existence to an embarrassment: more than a month after setting out from Court, the commissioners had to confess that while Cromwell was firing off multiple letters to them they were still at Holyhead on Anglesey, kicking their heels waiting for the right wind to take them to Dublin. After that, a letter-book would be a help in making sure all his demands were met.20
Even more unfortunately, one of the commissioners went severely off the rails, in the process furnishing some revealing and unkind glimpses of the atmosphere around the King in the first half of 1537, and of Thomas Cromwell’s position in particular. Ireland had this disorienting effect on some Englishmen: it must have been exhilaration at arriving in an exotic society where nevertheless a great many people spoke English, no doubt linked to being hospitably plied with unfamiliar forms of alcohol. Cromwell’s financial servant William Body suffered the same experience in 1536, on an earlier fact-finding tour which had also brought out the worst in him.21 In this case, the victim of Ireland Syndrome was George Paulet, brother to Sir William, now Treasurer of the Household. Very soon after arriving, George began showing off to his new Irish friends with astonishing indiscretions.
News of Paulet’s words got back to Cromwell before the commissioners returned, maybe around Christmas 1537; the two Kentish men among the four commissioners, Sir Anthony St Leger and Sir Thomas Moyle, discreetly took a lead in gathering up accusations for him. St Leger and Moyle liaised with Cromwell’s Anglo-Irish confidant Robert Cowley, who in a letter written before the commissioners had even set out for home namechecked as witnesses other people Cromwell considered reliable in Ireland: William Brabazon
and John Allen the Irish Master of the Rolls.22 Cowley, ‘fearing that by secret malicious practice, the King’s Majesty (as God forbid) should be misinformed upon your Lordship, if others would be timorous to advertise your Lordship of the truth’, provided specimens of malice from the man he discreetly described as ‘the person’: ‘there was no lord or gentleman in England that loved or favoured your Lordship because your Lordship was so great a taker of money, for your Lordship would do or speak for no man, but all for money.’ That was standard abuse which Cromwell would have heard before, and he could smile at the assertion that he had sent a Welshman to St Patrick’s Purgatory in Ulster to inquire about dangerous prophecies. Cowley had no need to repeat the worst; that was waiting in the depositions St Leger had gathered.
The depositions show that Paulet quickly decided to break ranks with his fellow-commissioners in their capacity as neutral external observers. He threw in his lot with the Fitzgerald faction, furious at what they saw as Cromwell’s partisanship for the Butlers. As had already become apparent, such Geraldine supporters had the sympathy of Lord Leonard Grey. Paulet spoke dismissively of the commission itself as a device of Cromwell’s: he ‘and his fellows were sent hither in commission but for a flim-flam to stop the imagination of the King and his Council’, in other words, to put them off from making their own decision.23 All Paulet’s negative remarks about Cromwell, with his Geraldine audience in mind, emphasized Cromwell’s shaky position at Court in the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He said to Chief Justice Aylmer, ‘The lord Privy Seal drew every day towards his death, and that he escaped very hardly at the last insurrection.’24 Master of the Rolls Allen enlarged on this in his report of Paulet’s words:
I would not be in his case for all that ever he hath, for the King beknaveth him twice a week, and sometime knocketh him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pummelled about the head and shaken up, as it were a dog, he will come out into the great chamber, shaking of the bush [head] with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost. I (saith he [Paulet]) standing at the lower end of the chamber perceive these matters well enough, and laugh at his fashion and ruff [pride], and then my brother [William Paulet] and my lord Admiral [Sir William Fitzwilliam] must drive a mean to reconcile him to the King again.25
Perhaps of all the things Paulet said, this naming of names was the most damaging, both for Cromwell’s prestige in Ireland and for his vulnerability at Court in early 1537. Chief Justice Aylmer heard him tell a similar tale to Lord Leonard, with one more significant character added: on Paulet’s return to England, ‘he would laugh at this gear [talk] with my lord of Norfolk, Master Treasurer [William Paulet], and my lord Admiral when they were secretly together,’ and ‘would hit [deal a blow to] my Lord [Butler] and me [Aylmer], and that none of us would know from whence it came, by secret information to the King’.26 So here, at least in Paulet’s account, was a line-up of conservative-minded courtiers ready to mock Cromwell’s turbulent relationship with King Henry and damage his Irish allies. Two were his early friends and supporters, though another, the Duke, had never been one.
What were the implications of this in Court politics? In normal circumstances, leading courtiers like William Paulet or Admiral Fitzwilliam would heal breaches between monarch and minister, who everyone knew were both men quick to lose their temper. The convention in such contests was for the King always to win, as Cromwell well understood: hence the rueful smirk as he came into the great chamber ‘shaking of the bush’. A royal slap accepted was a strategic withdrawal, before further efforts to get his way: his accustomed ‘tempering’ of the King to which Ralph Sadler referred in autumn 1536 over the fate of the London Charterhouse. There were occasions in the next few years, however, when mediators held back from smoothing over conflict. Cromwell must now anticipate that possibility, reinforcing the stark message of his near-fall in November 1536. Not surprisingly, George Paulet paid for his astonishing indiscretions after his return home with a spell in the Tower of London, and he needed every ounce of credibility his brother possessed to resume any sort of career thereafter. His evident closeness to Lord Leonard Grey while in Ireland also permanently damaged Cromwell’s trust in the Lord Deputy, for all his family ties.27
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While the Duke of Norfolk and his assistants cleared up remnants of the renewed risings in the North in February 1537, Cromwell made it clear that the autumn’s brief cosmetic show of reconciliation with traditional religion was over. In the privacy of diplomacy, he brutally rejected fresh overtures from Reginald Pole in December 1536. Pole used as intermediary his servant Michael Throckmorton, younger brother to that abrasive friend of Cromwell’s Sir George Throckmorton. Michael might seem a good choice, since he was one of the cultured young Englishmen who had spent years in Italy, on warm terms with such Anglo-Italian clients of Cromwell as Thomas Starkey and Richard Morison, as well as a familiar figure to Cromwell himself. Nevertheless Pole’s initiative could not have been worse timed, as King Henry prepared to betray his promises to the northern Pilgrims.
The chances of Michael Throckmorton’s success were not improved when he fell seriously ill near Calais just before New Year 1537; that delayed his meeting with Cromwell at the point when Henry VIII took the measure of Robert Aske at Greenwich, and the English Court regained its self-confidence.28 Yet, in any case, Pole’s utter lack of political sense made a constructive outcome impossible. One can imagine Cromwell’s satirical reaction to Pole’s follow-up proposal that ‘if he [Cromwell] can obtain [royal consent] (my Lord himself being so pleased), I think he [Pole] would be most best content to speak with him of any other’ in person – but in Flanders. This was less than six months after the death of William Tyndale at the hands of the imperial authorities in Flanders, trapped by men not a million miles from Pole’s own circle of acquaintance. The offer came alongside Throckmorton’s own awkward admission that he had returned to Rome in mid-February to find his master ‘in a foul array and very strange apparel’: his way of conveying the news that Pole was now a cardinal and the Pope’s legate to England.29
Small hope, then, of a courteous exchange of views in Brussels. Quite the reverse: Cromwell and Henry regarded the offer of a meeting as nothing less than a trap (probably rightly), and promptly set up their own. As Pole arrived in Flanders in his official capacity as legate to England, they sought to arrange for him to be kidnapped and brought to England. The agents were Cromwell’s closest friends over there: in Calais the Knight Porter Sir Thomas Palmer, and in Brussels the permanent English representative John Hutton. As Hutton probed Pole’s movements and contacts, he realized that among his servants was the man who had betrayed William Tyndale to the authorities, Cromwell’s former protégé Henry Phelips, who was now hand in glove with Michael Throckmorton.30 Far from being an honest broker or even double agent, Throckmorton was Pole’s man through and through. When Michael wrote again from Rome on 20 August 1537, acknowledging the hopelessness of the prospect that Cromwell might come to Flanders, Cromwell’s reply was five sides of concentrated fury at the betrayal of personal friendship. It is not often that we have the chance of hearing my Lord Privy Seal at full throttle, a privilege best enjoyed at a safe chronological distance.31
Addressing Throckmorton throughout as ‘Michael’, Cromwell stormed, ‘if you were either natural towards your country, or your family, you would not thus shame all your kin. I pray God they bide but the shame of it’: those difficult but fundamentally loyal Throckmortons of Coughton Court. ‘This am I sure of, though they by and by suffer no loss of goods, yet the least suspicion shall be enough to undo the greatest of them’ – the greatest of them, of course, being Sir George. ‘Wherefore if ye will yet turn to your country, and shew yourself sorry for that ye foolishly have done, I dare assure you ye shall find the King’s Highness much more ready to seek commendation of clemency than of justice, at your faults.’ As for the Cardinal, ‘Pity it is that the folly of one
brain-sick Poole, or, to say better, of one witless fool, should be the ruin of so great a family.’ Cromwell was in a good position to make those words prophetic. He made no bones about spelling out the King’s inclination towards his former remittance-man: ‘There may be found ways enough in Italy to rid a traitorous subject. Surely let him not think but where justice can take no place by process of law at home, some times she may be enforced to seek new means abroad.’ These were two Anglo-Italians in correspondence: the implications could hardly be clearer.
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Cromwell also renewed his pressure on the London Charterhouse; brutal threats once more became action, but he also made a genuine effort to reconcile to Henry’s Church and Reformation a monastery in whose fate he was strikingly invested. Few matters have damaged his reputation as much as the Charterhouse. In April 1536 he had reinstated a monk to head the community in place of his lay commissioners; William Trafford remained in place unhappily heading the house while further dire fates befell his more consistently defiant brethren. Exiled members of the Charterhouse, Dom John Rochester and Dom James Walworth, were executed in the North on 11 May 1537. They had been removed from London to Hull soon after Trafford’s arrival, and in the wake of the Pilgrimage they were caught up in the Duke of Norfolk’s ruthless crackdown on those he defined as traitors: ‘Two more wilful religious men in manner unlearned I think never suffered,’ Howard observed to the King.32 Their examination seems to have prompted a fresh and final attempt to get their mother house to conform. On 18 May 1537 Cromwell’s vice-gerential commissioners Thomas Bedell (by now a veteran in visits to the Charterhouse) and Richard Gwent confronted the community with a demand for acceptance of the King as Supreme Head of the Church in England. Twenty agreed, ten refused.33