Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Obviously the name of King Henry’s bête noire could not be mentioned in the new complete work, so it appeared under the name of the non-existent ‘Thomas Matthew’, and so is known to posterity as the ‘Matthew Bible’.55 (See Plate 37.) Cromwell had undoubtedly been preparing the ground for the King to accept this and give it a royal licence, because when on 4 August Cranmer wrote to him asking him to show Henry a copy for approval, only a few days passed before assent came through to authorize it for general sale. Henry was in cheerful mood, with his Queen’s pregnancy reaching its end. The authorization of the Matthew Bible remains one of Thomas Cromwell’s greatest achievements in sneaking evangelical reformation past the King. A translation largely created by the man in whose destruction Henry had connived was now to be placed in every significant church in the realm. It has remained the basis of every English biblical translation until modern times. Around nine-tenths of the New Testament text in the King James Bible of 1611 was in fact produced by Tyndale just under a century earlier.56 That same year, 1537, saw the publication by James Nicholson in Southwark of a second edition of Coverdale’s previous translation: the first Bible in English wholly to be printed in England.

  An English Bible was essential to instruct the kingdom in reformation, but in this year we also begin to find definite evidence of Cromwell extending the effort beyond printing press and pulpit to the medium of drama. Now he had a peerage, it was seemly for him to spend money on a group of players; that was one sign of a great household. Apart from the King himself, such ancient noble families as the Percys, Howards, de Veres and Staffords all sustained players at some stage in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.57 Cromwell’s patronage was distinctive in concentrating on plays which were evangelical propaganda, with one principal writer and impresario, carefully selected for obvious talent. He could have chosen others. At some point early in 1537, an east Suffolk parson by the name of Thomas Wylley wrote to him, seeking protection from the malice of local traditionalist clergy and listing the titles of plays he had written since the early 1530s: they were suitably anti-papal in theme, but also touched on sensitive subjects such as the eucharist and purgatory.58

  Since Wylley does not appear again in his correspondence, this seems to have been an offer Lord Cromwell felt able to refuse, but at just the same time a much more promising playwright appeared from exactly the same area: John Bale, a former senior Carmelite who had quit the order for the secular priesthood, after transitioning from an extrovert Carmelite piety to an even more extrovert evangelicalism. He got into trouble in Suffolk for similar reasons to Wylley, but had useful support after arrest and detention at Greenwich Palace around Christmastide 1536 on charges of preaching heresy: on the one hand from the evangelical circle in east Suffolk around Thomas Lord Wentworth – reputedly a great influence in Bale’s conversion – and, more unexpectedly, from John Leland, through their common interest in history. It was Leland who, despite his conservative religious opinions, appealed directly to Cromwell to get Bale released ‘in the name of good letters and charity’.59

  Bale was not a new name to the Lord Privy Seal in 1537. While still a professed Carmelite and Prior of the Doncaster Whitefriars in 1534, he had run into trouble with Archbishop Lee and Bishop Stokesley for his evangelical sermons, but Cromwell repeatedly made sure that he suffered no ill consequences, for the sake of the plays he was writing.60 Now this second round of favour rapidly unfolded into a specialized ministry of drama under Cromwell’s patronage. Bale wrote about two dozen polemical evangelical plays in the 1530s, though only five have survived, all associated with his burst of creative activity inspired by Cromwell’s aggressive promotion of reformation in 1537–8. Bale toured them across the country with a company of actors, Lord Cromwell’s Players; the first reference to them performing occurs at King’s College Cambridge on 8 September 1537, where the Provost was that establishment evangelical Bishop Foxe of Hereford. Over the next year, the company can be found presenting its material in widely dispersed and not automatically sympathetic centres: Shrewsbury, Leicester, the Guildhall of Cambridge, New College Oxford and Thetford Priory.61 It is a pity that we do not know whether Lord Chancellor Audley’s players, recorded in Cromwell’s accounts as performing before him in London during Christmas 1537 and in January 1538, delivered the same sort of message.62

  Cromwell’s players may link to efforts to neutralize the effect of the Pilgrimage of Grace by strenuous preaching of obedience to the Crown. The Leicester visit, for instance, may have coincided either with a preaching visit from Bishop John Hilsey in Rogation Week (early May) 1537 or with Dr Thomas Lee’s vice-gerential visit that August; both men were obvious symbols of Cromwell’s new dispensation. One can imagine Dr John London, Warden of New College, eagerly agreeing to any enterprise of his patron Cromwell, but the Howard family monastery at Thetford is a more surprising venue, and the players seem to have gone there a second time before its suppression. If the plays performed there were the trilogy opening with The Chief Promises of God, then the structure of this first play around the great ‘O’ Antiphons in the liturgy of Advent suggests a date at the end of autumn. Autumn 1537, as we will see, was the moment when the Duke of Norfolk and Cromwell were at their most co-operative – and co-operation centred on closing Thetford’s Cluniac sister houses at Lewes and Castle Acre (see below, Chapter 18).

  For Thetford Priory, the message might be especially pointed. In Act 5, Bale riskily deploys a parallel common at the time between Henry VIII and King David, turning in this instance to explicit reference to David’s notorious adulterous sin. ‘Of late days, thou hast misused Bathsheba,’ God consequently admonishes the now repentant King:

  Thou shalt not die, David, for this iniquity,

  For thy repentance; but thy son by Bathsheba

  Shall die, forasmuch as my name is blasphemed

  Among my enemies, and thou the worse esteemed.

  Lying entombed in Thetford Priory church for a twelvemonth was the prime example of a royal ‘son by Bathsheba’, Henry Fitzroy Duke of Richmond. Could Bale’s actors really have said these explosive lines at Thetford? Or might he have explained that it all really referred to the King’s unfortunate entanglement ‘of late days’ with the wrong woman, Anne Boleyn, and her miscarriage of January 1536?

  Equally pointed, unambiguous and topical in any setting in 1537 are references to the recent events of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the next play of this trilogy: John Baptist’s Preaching in the Wilderness. Bale contrasts Christ humbly accepting his baptism at John’s hands with rebel arrogance: ‘Where the froward sects continually rebel / Ye shall see Christ here submit himself to baptism.’ When Christ appears on stage, he has majesty enough, styling himself ‘the great grand captain’, with the sacrament of baptism as the ‘livery token’ of his followers. No audience could fail to think of Captain Aske, or the badge of the Five Wounds of Christ which had been adopted Pilgrims as their ‘token’. There was no place for monasticism in this new army of the Saviour, as the final monologue of the play in Bale’s own persona made clear:

  Give ear unto Christ, let men’s vain fantasies go,

  As the Father bade by his most high commandment;

  Hear neither Francis, Benedict nor Bruno [the Carthusian founder],

  Albert [the Carmelite] nor Dominic, for they new rulers [rules?] invent.

  Cromwell’s players continued with their evangelical adventures in his service up to his fall, in some very carefully targeted performances, which lends plausibility to the notion that they would indeed have dared to present this trilogy when visiting Thetford. One of their most significant later shows was staged in Canterbury on 8 September 1538, amid a triumphal display of the Reformation at its most destructive, when King Henry himself visited the city. Their play ‘before my Lord’ (Cromwell himself) took advantage of the royal trumpets and ‘loud pipes’ being on hand, and was staged during an entertainment at Sir Christopher Hales�
�s grand house in the Canterbury suburb of Hackington. This was a fitting setting, as Hales acquired it in 1532–3 from Archdeacon William Warham, an absentee cleric rather reminiscent of Thomas Winter, in one of the earliest outright lay spoliations of church property in England, just after William’s uncle Archbishop Warham had died.63

  This first week of September brought massive change to Canterbury around the destruction of St Thomas Becket’s shrine in the Cathedral. Who can doubt that the play on this occasion was Bale’s On the Treasons of Becket? Moreover, another play of Bale’s which includes a celebration of destroying shrines can be dated exactly to this period. This is his Three Laws of Nature, Moses and Christ, corrupted by the Sodomites – the latter theme a major preoccupation for Bale.64 The text of Three Laws includes a remarkable East Anglian in-joke about the Trinitarian Norfolk priory of Ingham, irregularly dissolved in 1536, which could not have had currency more than a year or two later, but in a speech from Infidelitas, one of the villains, the play also has direct references to East Anglian shrines closed in autumn 1538:

  It was a good world, when we had such wholesome stories

  Preached in our church, on Sundays and other feryes

  [feria or ordinary weekdays].

  With us was it merry,

  When we went to Bury,

  And to Our Lady of Grace,

  To the Blood of Hailes,

  Where no good cheer fails,

  And other holy place.65

  Given its East Anglian allusions – Bury, Ipswich, Ingham – this play was probably designed for Ipswich in the throes of the evangelical takeover of the town that autumn, in the wake of Cromwell’s burning of Ipswich’s wonder-working image of Our Lady of Grace in his bonfire of images at Chelsea at the beginning of September – St Edmund’s shrine at Bury had come down earlier in the year.66 And so the campaign of agitprop drama continued. Cranmer had Bale’s players back at his Kentish palace of Ford over the Christmas season of 1538/9, performing at least one other play, King John: a radical re-presentation of that previously reviled foe of Pope Innocent III, now turned into an evangelical hero. The performance provoked much local interest and alcohol-fuelled seasonal ill-will.67 Bale operated at the outer limit of what was possible in Henry VIII’s Church of England. When Cromwell fell, he fled the country, until more promising times dawned under Edward VI.

  Cromwell’s Vice-Gerency always operated on a tricky line between lay and clerical status, given the exalted claims of the Supreme Headship which it reflected. A most surprising overstepping of the line occurred on 1 October 1537, when Cromwell became Dean of Wells Cathedral, by royal appointment. There was little or no English precedent for a layman taking such an office. Admittedly the lately deceased Richard Wolman, his immediate predecessor (an old colleague in Wolsey’s service ultra-loyal to the King throughout all his twists and turns), was one of the greatest pluralists of his age among the English clergy, but he was still a cleric. Cromwell’s appointment was a remarkable departure, based no doubt on some antiquarian on his staff pointing out that there was no need for a cathedral dean to be a priest. The Latin word for ‘dean’ was decanus, which simply meant head of a church. Surely the Vice-Gerent’s already sweeping powers could embrace that idea? In any case, handsome revenues and perquisites were attached, and the Deanery gave useful control over an important West Country institution.

  The complaisant Bishop Clerk of Bath and Wells could see the advantages in having such a protector, particularly since the protector was never likely to be uncomfortably near to hand. The cathedral Chapter also fulsomely expressed its pleasure.68 Cromwell coupled his new office with requiring Bishop Clerk to grant him the presentation to a cathedral prebend once occupied by Thomas Winter, culled from the young man in the drastic slimming down of Wolsey’s prodigal provision for his future. It had passed to Cromwell’s own senior ecclesiastical agent Thomas Bedell, now deceased, a clutch of ecclesiastical delights available from his own formidable pluralism. The Dean-elect of Wells proceeded to grant the right of presentation to the prebend jointly to his servants Thomas Wriothesley and Dr William Petre; one William Wriothesley duly appeared in the prebendal stall in succession to that evocative pair of previous occupants.69

  Cromwell’s tenure as Dean of Wells set a precedent for several such appointments of laymen as cathedral deans in the Tudor age: they were generally civil lawyers, such as the celebrated Crown servant and intellectual Sir Thomas Smith, who graced the Deanery of Carlisle Cathedral with his absence for much of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Through this opportunistic acquisitiveness at Wells, the Vice-Gerent may unwittingly have saved cathedrals from their logical extinction in a Reformed Protestant Church, by providing them with a number of powerful lay protectors in their most vulnerable decades. That had remarkable consequences for the future course and theological complexion of the Church of England, since cathedrals brought to a Reformed Church an entirely alien flavour of ceremony and the beauty of holiness.70 Such a long-drawn-out example of the law of unintended consequences would no doubt have surprised Cromwell. As he rejoiced in his Deanery in autumn 1537, he had far greater and far more immediate causes for celebration. He had survived some extraordinarily dangerous times over eighteen months, and had pulled off a coup which few could equal.

  18

  The King’s Uncle? 1537–1538

  In the fraught period after Anne Boleyn’s death, religious divisions increasingly mapped themselves on to family alliances. That accelerated in summer 1537 around a dynastic marriage that has been seriously underplayed in previous accounts of events: Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory, now around seventeen and ready for adulthood after his long and careful education, married Elizabeth Seymour, the King’s sister-in-law. This signalled the construction of a Seymour/Cromwell bloc which, but for the premature death of Queen Jane Seymour, might have carried all before it and radically reshaped the last years of King Henry’s reign. As it was, the results were dramatic enough, both immediately and in the long term.

  As Cromwell moved close to the Seymours, with political results satisfactory for everyone concerned, Elizabeth Seymour, younger sister of Jane, emerged as significant. Probably in 1530 she became second wife to a rather older Yorkshire gentleman, Sir Anthony Ughtred, while in her early teens.1 Such unions were not uncommon in the higher reaches of English society, though convention would dictate a decorous interval before the pair cohabited. In 1533 or even early 1534 they had a son, Henry, and then came a girl, Margery, not yet born when Ughtred died in 1534.2 Cromwell was involved on Wolsey’s behalf in the Ughtreds’ chaotic family affairs and became particularly friendly with Sir Anthony, who by 1530 or so was paying him a handsome yearly fee.3 From 1532 Sir Anthony was Captain of the island of Jersey. When he wrote to Cromwell excusing the fee’s late payment the following year, they also had a professional relationship: Cromwell in his characteristically amorphous duties of those years was responsible for repairs to Mont Orgueil, the Captain’s residence on Jersey. Sir Anthony promised his friend a fine consignment of French wine.4

  It was therefore no surprise when the now-widowed though still teenaged Lady Ughtred approached the Lord Privy Seal in March 1537, asking for the lease of some abbey in Yorkshire, from a list of possibles (some not yet suppressed, but worth trying anyway) which she thoughtfully enclosed. By now, she had returned from Jersey to the North; her daughter Margery was being schooled in a little Yorkshire nunnery, Wilberfoss.5 Elizabeth’s letter was a frank appeal for substantial help, on the basis of close acquaintance:

  My Lord, insomuch as my husband (whose soul God pardon) did bear ever unto your Lordship both his heart and service next under the King’s Grace, I am therefore the more bolder to write and sue . . . besides that I do put mine only trust in your Lordship . . . and intend not to sue to none other . . . Further at my last being at the Court I desired your Lordship that I might be so bold as to be a suitor to you, at which time your Lordship gave unto me
a very good answer . . . I was in Master Ughtred’s days in a poor house of mine own, and ever since have been driven to be a sojourner, because my living is not able to welcome my friends, which for my husband’s sake and mine own would sometime come and see me. Wherefore if it please your Lordship now to help me, so that I might be able to keep some poor port after my degree in mine own house, now being a poor woman alone, I were the most bound to you that any living woman might be, and more with a little help now, than if ye advised me to be bound to thing of a thousand marks a year.

  Lady Ughtred ended by referring Cromwell to her friend Sir Arthur Darcy, a close colleague of her husband while they were respectively Captains of Guernsey and Jersey. She evidently regarded Arthur as an acceptable emissary to the Lord Privy Seal, despite the fact that he was younger son to the now imprisoned Thomas Lord Darcy of Templehurst. Equally, the doomed Sir Francis Bigod was a close relative of her late husband’s family, and mentioned them casually in a letter to Cromwell not long before Elizabeth wrote.6

  Lady Ughtred (as she continued to be known until her second husband Gregory was made a peer – before that, formally she outranked him) comes across in this and her other correspondence as already capable, businesslike and ready to seize the moment when needed. Her neat and confident signature in a masculine ‘secretary-hand’, not the usual female sprawling italic, is symptomatic. Now was the time for Elizabeth to put out feelers for a replacement husband, with a decent period of mourning for Sir Anthony out of the way, and the inconveniences of the Pilgrimage of Grace dealt with. Evidently Cromwell saw ideal consort material in her, quite apart from the fact that she was the Queen’s sister. Less than a fortnight after Lady Ughtred’s letter, Bishop Roland Lee fell foul of the Lord Privy Seal’s alliance with the Seymours. Lee was appalled to learn from Cromwell that the King wanted the fine London residence of the Bishops of Chester in exchange for Edward Lord Beauchamp’s house on the Thames at Kew, so that Beauchamp could have the London house on the Strand as his base near Whitehall.7 Kew was actually not such a bad compensation, placing the Bishop in the middle of the upper-river royal palaces, but it robbed Lee and his successors of a very convenient headquarters for Parliamentary sessions, a sine qua non for the English episcopate, and he felt deeply betrayed by his friend.