Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Next day Lee’s senior adviser John Packington (brother of the lately assassinated evangelical merchant Robert) wrote discreetly behind his master’s back to Cromwell, alarmed by the Bishop’s evident depression during Easter festivities at Wigmore Castle and pointing out how much his performance in Wales had outshone any predecessor in the post. Surely, suggested Packington, he deserved a proper equivalence of exchange beyond the Kew house. Cromwell did make himself a ‘remembrance’ about extra dissolved monastic property, which Lee rather belatedly received, ‘and to thank him for granting his house for Lord Beauchamp’, but a month after the initial bombshell Lee continued reproachful just the respectable side of resentment: ‘although I am not so able to do your Lordship pleasure as the Lord Beauchamp, yet I bear your Lordship as good a heart to my little power, and more than that, ye cannot have.’ It took some time before the old friendship settled down again; and today we may hear the Bishop’s ghostly sigh as we pass the grand entrance to Somerset House on the Strand where his lost mansion stood.8

  Meanwhile, Lady Ughtred, launched on a trip south to join the Seymours, was having a good time playing the marriage market and enjoying a newfound influence in Court circles. Sir Arthur Darcy flirtatiously wrote to her from Yorkshire on 15 June, in what some might consider over-sprightly vein, seeing that his father was in the Tower of London awaiting degrading from the Garter and execution. He offered his friend a handsome present of money and a ‘fair bed’ (a topical present) if she could secure a Yorkshire monastic lease for him from Augmentations: ‘if ye speak but a word to the King, ye may have it.’ He also teased her about her marital quest – ‘sure it is, as I said: that some Southern lord shall make you forget the North’ – and suggested that John de Vere, fifteenth Earl of Oxford (elderly, no doubt massively dull and a widower for the last decade), might be the lucky man: ‘I heard say that ye should have your train borne at [Castle] Hedingham; my Lord of Oxford can tell you whose castle it is.’9

  It is difficult to sift the layers of Sir Arthur’s levity, yet he and his correspondent would be perfectly well aware that the de Veres’ Norman blood of the deepest azure was polar opposite in hue to that of England’s most recent addition to the baronage. A sequence of payments for Lord Cromwell’s summer excursion on 24 and 25 June, little more than a week after Darcy wrote from Yorkshire, tells its own story: a barge-trip between London and Mortlake, a reward to Lord Beauchamp’s servant for a present of artichokes, rewards to other members of the Beauchamp household at Twickenham – and ‘to Lady Ughtred’s servants there’, forty shillings. Soon the secret was out: on 17 July 1537, John Husee told his master in Calais, ‘The saying is that my lord Privy Seal’s son and heir shall shortly marry my Lady Ughtred, my lord Beauchamp’s sister.’10

  Husee was showing his usual discretion in thus describing the eligible young widow. Even a man as slow on the uptake as Lord Lisle would have realized that Elizabeth Seymour had a far more important pair of relationships, as Jane Seymour’s sister and the King’s sister-in-law. That would make Gregory Cromwell the King’s brother-in-law by marriage, and Gregory’s father would be in some sense the King’s uncle. Genealogists may baulk at such a description, and in a strict sense they would be right, but in the murderous genealogy of the previous century, and in King Henry’s brooding in the watches of the night, it will not have escaped royal notice that the most convincing of the generally unconvincing hereditary claims of the Tudors to the throne of England was the marriage of a king’s widow to her Steward, the Welshman Owain ap Maredudd ap Tewdwr: Henry VIII’s great-grandfather. It was an explosive thought, and one which would occur not just to the King, but to every meticulous scrutineer of family trees among the English nobility.

  From having been a child bride previously, Elizabeth Seymour was at the time of her second marriage a year or two older than her new husband: around twenty, perhaps. She was by now possessed of considerable personal presence (see Plate 27). A remarkable letter of hers to her father-in-law survives in her own characterful hand; it may date from this summer or possibly from another, slightly later juncture in her marriage, which we will consider in due course.11 Amid many respectful compliments, ‘because I would make unto you some direct answer’, Lady Ughtred is indeed direct in saying that for the time being, despite Cromwell’s kindness in giving her the ‘co-use of your own houses as others’, his ‘liberal token’ and her pleasure that he is ‘contented’ with her, she is ‘very loth to change the place where I now am’. She wishes for the time being to go on lodging with her brother Edward, though she is considering a lodging a quarter-mile away from one of Cromwell’s houses. There is some stately skirmishing going on in this letter, but one gets the impression that Cromwell would consider the young lady who signed herself ‘your humble daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Ughtred’ a duellist worthy of his steel.

  Elizabeth and Gregory went on to have a large family who carried on the Cromwell family name into the baronage for another century and a half. Their first child (a son and heir, loyally named Henry, her second son of that name) was christened just seven months after their marriage, which suggests some enthusiastic anticipation by the young couple.12 Later letters to her from her formerly wild young spouse suggest real affection. It may have been for the wedding that Thomas Cromwell commissioned a portrait miniature of his son as a present for his wife, though its natural pairing is another Holbein miniature, of the Lord Privy Seal himself. Put side by side, the pride of the father in his son is palpable (see Plates 24–5). The boy has the same looks, the same long turned-up nose and a slightly odd, hooded cast to the eyes, though it all looks rather more appealing in a teenager. One would not expect this vigorously individual depiction to be an accident; the same cast to the eyes is there in a second miniature of Gregory which Holbein created in 1543: now approaching his mid-twenties, but again a rather informal, intimate image. This was perhaps again created for his wife, in a marriage which had survived more than one severe trial.

  The wedding required careful public handling, and it may be no coincidence that one of the periodic sparse patches in the Cromwell archive is precisely from these summer months of 1537, suggesting archival weeding in the Seymour interest during the crisis of 1540. The marriage took place with the minimum of public fuss – though, again, the ever-alert Husee reported it to both his master and his mistress on the day, 3 August. This time Husee dared to point out that the bride was the Queen’s sister.13 The venue was 9 miles from London, at Cromwell’s country house at Mortlake, a hasty journey for the Lord Privy Seal from accompanying the King on his summer progress further west in Surrey, at Sunninghill and Guildford. Richard Cromwell handed over fifty pounds to Gregory as a present from his father, then the Lord Privy Seal himself distributed generous gifts of cash round the household.14

  Apart from any political discretion about the wedding, the plague was currently raging in London, and every public ceremony was low key. A rural location like Mortlake would not only alleviate the wedding party’s anxieties, but soothe the King’s perennial obsession with outsiders bringing infection to the Court, an anxiety heightened at the time by the Queen’s advanced pregnancy. It was frustrating for a prominent conservative clergyman, Nicholas Wilson. He desperately wanted to buttonhole Cromwell at Mortlake on business, but was stuck in London and therefore under suspicion of taint; on the very day of the wedding he pleaded by letter with Thomas Wriothesley (acting as gate-keeper) to allow him in. Wilson was probably disappointed, given that after only forty-eight hours Cromwell hastened to return to Court at Windsor, leaving the newly-weds to adjust to married life.15

  Cromwell’s rapid return to Windsor after the wedding had a particular and pressing purpose. The choreography of these events demanded some enhancement of his own status, if his son’s marriage to Elizabeth Seymour was not to seem even more incongruous than it actually was. Accordingly, his appointment at Windsor Castle on 5 August was with the Chapter of the Order of the Garter, who in a rather
summary assembly of a mere five knights before the King in the royal closet were tasked with finding a replacement for the recently executed Thomas Lord Darcy. They presented Henry with a substantial long-list of candidates with votes in various combinations, from which the King without much show of deliberation chose Cromwell, leaving a further place vacant for the Prince he was sure was soon to appear. The Lord Privy Seal ‘being immediately summoned, fell down before the Sovereign, giving with all the eloquence he was master of (and certainly he was master of the best)’ a suitably modest speech of acceptance.16

  After that there were opportunities for some family time with his son and daughter-in-law, and with Richard Cromwell too, still acting in his discreet elder-brother role for the young couple. The addresses of Cromwell’s letters and his accounts reveal him back at Mortlake at the beginning of September, then for a substantial stay in early October, by which juncture he would have known he was to become a grandfather for the first time.17 His close current links to the Seymours come across vividly in a warm letter from Lord Beauchamp on 2 September, writing from Wolf Hall; amid commendations to his sister and her husband, Seymour hoped God would soon send him a nephew.18 The letter is no mere piece of formal diplomacy, because various names in the Wolf Hall hunting-party (the incompetence of whose hounds and hawks Beauchamp jokingly deplored) were the sort of friends of Cromwell who stayed under the political radar, people with whom he could relax – including a Wiltshire gentleman called Thomas Edgar. ‘Monsieur’ Edgar, who benefited from a string of small favours from Cromwell, appears in his correspondence only sporadically, but usually with some joke or frivolity attached to him, and in the public mind Edgar was sufficiently distinguished for foul language that in 1540 Robert Barnes devoted some finger-wagging admonition to him in his final remarks before being burned at the stake.19

  Cromwell’s new status was publicly emphasized by a further development of his heraldry; he had already shown himself alert to the messages which heraldry presented, and if he needed any prompting, then his new chief of staff Thomas Wriothesley was son and grandson of two Garter Kings of Arms. His old coat in 1532 defiantly proclaimed his loyalty to Cardinal Wolsey: the new coat, which he was discussing with the present Garter King Christopher Barker during July, additionally trumpeted his closeness to the Seymours.20 The whole achievement now became a quarterly coat, so its new component in second and third quarters appeared as if they were the coat of a spouse, which in a sense they were. But primarily this was what is known as an augmentation of honour, even while also reflecting Gregory’s marriage to a Seymour.

  The new quartering may look fairly straightforward, but is actually unusual in heraldic terms, being based on a sixfold division. Within the six compartments, fleurs de lys alternate with pelicans, doing what pelicans do in heraldry, which is to peck their breasts to bring forth blood for their young, in the manner of Christ shedding his blood for humanity.21 ‘Pelicans in their piety’ were by then a symbol of evangelical commitment among members of the Tudor elite inclined that way: in the same years, Archbishop Cranmer changed the three cranes on his family coat of arms to three pelicans.22 So on two successive occasions Cromwell had nailed his colours to the mast in a very literal sense: first for Wolsey and second for Reformation, both now displayed side by side.

  But why the sixfold arrangement, and why the fleur de lys? All becomes clear in the arcane technicalities of heraldry, when these new arms are viewed beside another augmentation of honour granted the year before, for the arms of Edward Seymour when he was made a viscount after his sister’s marriage to the King: a quartering of or on a pile gules between six fleurs de lys azure, three leopards of the field. That is remarkably similar to the new second and third quarters in the Cromwell arms: it exhibits the same unusual threefold structure, same metal and colours, fleurs de lys and a feral creature. In Cromwell’s case, the creature was not a leopard (too royal and therefore risky, given Henry VIII’s paranoia), but a bird: the pelican carried an evangelical message, yet it could also echo the main motif of the original Seymour family coat, birds’ wings conjoined.23

  The full ceremony of entering Cromwell into his stall at St George’s Chapel Windsor under a banner of this new design took place at the end of August. By then Henry was off elsewhere enjoying himself. The King rather pointedly deputed his presiding role to the (no doubt not entirely delighted) Marquess of Exeter. Another Knight who might have felt something of a pang was the Earl of Wiltshire, absent down in Kent at Hever Castle, from whom Cromwell hastily borrowed his best collar of St George for the ceremony: a former royal father-in-law obliging a new royal uncle by marriage.24 Maybe Viscount Beauchamp would not have been pleased at the false rumour reaching John Husee that he was likewise to be installed as Knight that day; but evidently, as became apparent, he had traded that possibility for a future earldom. One Knight of the Garter did not deign to travel to Windsor for the occasion from his East Anglian home, but instead grimly set out back to his lieutenancy in the North: Thomas Duke of Norfolk.25

  On 20 July Dr Richard Corwen, Archdeacon of Oxford, up at Sheriff Hutton Castle, the Duke’s Yorkshire headquarters, sent Cromwell some extended memoranda about the last days of Robert Aske before his execution at York. Corwen, a veteran Oxford don and canon of the royal chapel at Westminster, had been chosen as a safe pair of hands to minister to the condemned rebel’s last spiritual needs; he included a great deal of useful information from Aske, which he punctiliously noted was part of their general conversation and not gleaned in the confessional. One was Aske’s opinion that Cromwell ‘did not bear so great favour to my lord of Norfolk as he [the Duke] thought he did’, ‘which thing’, commented Corwen tactfully, ‘I have kept secret from my said lord of Norfolk’.26 In this, as in much else, Aske was a shrewd judge of atmospheres. In all the very extensive correspondence between Cromwell and the Duke in spring and summer 1537 about affairs in the North, on the Duke’s side full of extravagant affirmations of friendship and general indebtedness to the minister, there is not the slightest hint that Cromwell told him anything of his son’s marriage plans. They would have been of some interest to the Duke even if Gregory had not been happily hunting his deer the previous summer.

  Thus when Norfolk arrived for a much sought and long-postponed visit to Court at Grafton Regis on 15 August, it may have been the first time he heard the news of the wedding celebration by the Thames twelve days before, or that the Lord Privy Seal had joined him in the Order of the Garter. If he needed telling on either count, Cromwell was on hand on his arrival.27 Norfolk had certainly not included any congratulations to the happy young couple in his series of testy letters early in the month, complaining in increasingly emotional terms about being kept away from the King on progress, and culminating in a postscript in his own hand to Cromwell on 8 August: ‘I pray you think that the loss of one of my fingers should not be so much to my sorrow, as to be in fear not to see my master at this time.’28 Given all he had done for the government in the North over the previous months, he had a legitimate grievance.

  It is not unlikely that the Duke used his precious few days of access to the King at Grafton and Ampthill to make it clear that there needed to be some political rebalancing. Now tectonic plates did indeed move in the political configuration of the kingdom, the chief of which was a bold but sensible scheme which ended up more or less satisfying everybody. It involved shifting the power base of Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk almost totally away from the county which gave him his title and into Lincolnshire, where he had in the end distinguished himself pacifying the rising of autumn 1536, and where his fourth wife’s ancestral Willoughby estates lay. This would remove the long-standing friction between Brandon and Howard in East Anglia which in the recent past had even led to murder (by Richard Southwell, no less). This left the Duke of Norfolk unrivalled regional magnate in Norfolk and Suffolk, while providing a second impressive ducal presence in an area which, the events of 1536 showed, sorely needed it. O
f the two dukes, it was always going to be Brandon who would be the more amenable to such treatment.29

  The transfer actually began in spring 1537: in April the King told Suffolk to move his household to a still unstable Lincolnshire, rather as Norfolk was acting as lieutenant in the North. As an incentive, he gave him the splendid castle at Tattershall for a headquarters. Suffolk was perfectly willing to go, though he pointed out that such a complex move needed time, and illness in the family further complicated matters. Yet at this stage there seems no sense of a long-term strategic aim. At the end of May, Cromwell asked him his own opinion as to whether staying in Suffolk ‘should do more good than [his] being in Lincolnshire’. Moreover, the Duke went on accumulating gains of estates from dissolved Suffolk monasteries into 1537, in fact doing rather better out of them than the Duke of Norfolk.30

  The agenda changed and widened that summer. Suffolk’s estate officials launched all sorts of legal moves to safeguard his long-term interests, totting up his historic assets and enhancing the income of his East Anglian estates, with a forthcoming great exchange in mind. This was a huge operation. Intricate haggling between King and Duke began producing concrete proposals only in spring 1538, and the ‘Last Agreement’ was completed on 30 September that year, though the mechanics ground on into 1540. In the place of his accumulation of East Anglian properties, many of them ancient possessions of the Suffolk title from older families before his own recent elevation, Charles Brandon gained an impressive array of Lincolnshire estates and great houses, sprinkled through his new home county from the Humber down to Rutland and the borders of the Wash. A duke had been moved like a chess-piece across the expanses of lowland England.31