Thomas Cromwell
Page 60
There was an important corollary of this new understanding. Given that the Duke of Suffolk was no longer to complicate the East Anglian political scene with his presence, that must also apply to Cromwell’s own son and heir, the newly married Gregory. If Cromwell had gained the major episcopal estate of North Elmham in 1536 with the intention of placing Gregory’s capital mansion there, that must not now happen. It was very much in the Duke of Norfolk’s interest to suggest a good alternative. Accordingly, instead of North Elmham, by an intricate agreement worked out during autumn 1537, Gregory would be installed nearly 200 miles to the south, in deepest Sussex. This change of direction was all the more striking because the developing Cromwell dynasty had neither existing estates nor historic connections with the area. The place chosen was the stately Cluniac priory of Lewes, which if Cluniac monasteries were not all constituted priories of their mother house in France, would amply have justified the name of abbey alongside the greatest Benedictine houses. It was the senior Cluniac house in England, delectably situated in a river valley and spreading comfortably out below the town which clambered up the hillside above, crowned with an ancient castle.32
The idea of Lewes may have appealed to Cromwell all the more because living 5 miles from the town was his sometime benefactor Sir John Gage of Firle, still a good friend despite their considerable religious differences. Sir John might be a useful grandfatherly influence on his excitable offspring, a good successor to Roland Lee. Yet that was not the prime reason for the new focus on Lewes Priory. Its founder by succession from eleventh-century Warenne Earls of Surrey was none other than Thomas Duke of Norfolk. Lewes offered a very suitable case for dissolution, since it was pleasantly remote from his main territorial concern (his interest in the dramatic but now fairly useless castle above the town was blunted by a complicated part-inheritance). The Duke had already brought the priory to Cromwell’s attention in 1534, though with precisely the opposite intent: at his request, Cromwell had met with Prior Peterson during a visit to London and ordered him to avoid any grants of Lewes demesne lands to predators. In the meantime matters had moved on considerably, including an extremely negative result at Richard Leighton’s vice-gerential inspection.33
Lewes Priory was handily linked to a subsidiary Cluniac house which, by contrast, interested the Duke very much, and which he proceeded to obtain for himself as a virtual gift from the King: Castle Acre in Norfolk. The fact of that royal gift would in itself be a sure sign that Castle Acre was part of a wider deal. The Duke of Norfolk’s own letter to Cromwell of 4 November 1537 from Hampton Court described with considerable satisfaction how the King was ‘content to give us Lewes, if we might bring the bargain to pass, saying and rehearsing further concerning your service done to him, no less than I said to you in your garden’. Cromwell was to get two parts and the Duke the third – that is, Castle Acre.34 In summer 1538 Cromwell acquired a licence from the Crown to sell North Elmham to the Duke to round off the whole transaction. Yet by that time Norfolk had thought better of it; he had viewed the estate in the spring and thought the woods and park ‘nothing of such goodness and value as I weened they had be’. The Elmham property stayed with the Cromwells, and in Queen Elizabeth’s reign it did become their family home.35
This intricate deal had other elements. Another royal gift brought Cromwell his first outright possession of a monastery, also in Sussex: Augustinian Michelham, a lesser house than Lewes.36 Sixty miles west along the south coast, at the same time as matters moved forward at Lewes, Cromwell’s principal secretary Thomas Wriothesley was set up with a third royal gift: a substantial monastery for his capital mansion, Premonstratensian Titchfield Abbey, just outside Southampton.37 Wriothesley’s servant John White spelled out the significance of Titchfield’s part in the great plan, with unctuous gratitude to both God and his master, when congratulating the latter on the happy final result of the rather protracted process:
All we your ministers and servants and a great multitude of loving hearts were on St. Stephen’s day last past [26 December 1537] merry, thanks be first therefore given to Our Lord, and secondly to you, whom I trust He hath chosen specially to rule in this my native country, which is in these parts both barren of good rulers, and the rulers barren of the faithful and loving hearts of the people.
What White meant was that the newly created mansion was usefully located to skew power structures in Hampshire away from the control of Wriothesley’s former master Bishop Gardiner; Wriothesley had the opportunity to demonstrate the potential of his new position in contests for county elections to Parliament in 1539. Together with Lewes, Titchfield gave Cromwell the prospect of two reliable centres of power in southern counties.38
The tangle of arrangements uniting East Anglia and Sussex was personified in the last Abbot of Titchfield, John Simpson alias Salisbury: a very recent import from Norfolk. He was a former monk of Bury St Edmunds and although involved in the scandalous outbreak of evangelicalism in Oxford in 1528, became Prior of the Norfolk Benedictine house of Horsham St Faith (an appointment courtesy of Cromwell).39 Despite being a Benedictine, he managed at the same time to be Prior of the small Premonstratensian Sussex house of Durtford, and with both Horsham and Durtford dissolved in 1536 he continued this versatility to move to the Premonstratensian house at Titchfield. Salisbury was flexible in geographical terms as well, remaining suffragan Bishop of Thetford in Norwich diocese during his brief tenure of Titchfield, before surrendering the house on 28 December 1537. Soon the Bishop nimbly leaped in a different ecclesiastical direction, first as prebendary and then as long-serving Dean of the newly secularized foundation of Norwich Cathedral (to name but his principal preferments – in Elizabeth’s reign, he ended up as Bishop of Sodor and Man, which diocese he is unlikely to have visited).
Simpson’s counterpart at Lewes, Prior Robert Peterson, was confronted with the prospect of dissolution in early November 1537. His contacts with Cromwell had been numerous. Not only was his brother, the evangelical London merchant William Peterson, one of the favoured travellers to Zürich at this time (see above, Chapter 15), but in April 1537 Sir John Gage drew Prior Peterson to Cromwell’s attention, as an expert on the Lord Privy Seal’s own pet enthusiasms, land reclamation and coastal defence, a matter of direct relevance in that part of Sussex. The Prior, who was on the commission of sewers for Sussex, even travelled to Flanders to see how things were done there.40 Rather remarkably and probably not coincidentally, Peterson became a prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral in the same month Sir John wrote to Cromwell, despite still being a Cluniac monk; a fortnight before surrendering the priory, he added a prebend of St Paul’s Cathedral. Certainly the second promotion looks like a sweetener. His horizons already stretched well beyond the precincts of Lewes.41
Also striking in the Lewes business is the extreme haste with which Cromwell completed the deal. It was a slightly unorthodox transaction, involving simultaneous surrender of a substantial and far-distant cell at Castle Acre which would in other circumstances have been itself a major monastic dissolution. He and the Duke of Norfolk were nervous about getting it right. The negotiators rather rashly tried to make their deal absolutely foolproof by adding to its other elements a legal fiction used in the Court of Common Pleas to secure land transfers, known as levying a fine: a common law conveyance from monastic head to the Crown. Lord Chancellor Audley, punctilious to a fault in matters of common law, pointed out to Cromwell the problems of legal logic in such a process as it related to Titchfield, but thereafter the levying of a fine was repeatedly used in monastic surrenders. Consequently, one of the elements in the Parliamentary legislation of 1539, tidying up what by then had become an avalanche of dissolutions, was to give full statutory backing to this shaky procedure.42
Still it needed the personal touch. The Duke of Norfolk rode down himself from Court to Reigate in Surrey to meet Cromwell’s senior officials and make sure all passed smoothly. It was the day after Jane Seymour’s funeral, so the Duke ha
d to get permission from the King for his journey; moving things along was important enough to risk proprieties. Richard Cromwell, whom Cromwell had put in charge of the whole Lewes venture, went with him.43 The Prior of Lewes did indeed make things awkward, playing off the two sides against each other, and then there was the business of getting the whole community to co-operate. To still some objections it was decided that the deed of surrender should not include a grovelling preamble confessing the sins of Lewes Priory, even though such preamble admissions were common in earlier surrenders and would be used a great deal the following year in the surrender of friaries. At Lewes, there might have been material enough for confession, to judge from earlier reports.44
Apart from sparing the community’s blushes, the surrender was clinched by throwing money at the problem. Cromwell made an unprecedented offer of permanent pensions for all the monks unless they were granted or obtained preferment in the Church of equivalent value, plus a gratuity, plus a year’s wages for the staff. Wriothesley immediately copied the pattern at Titchfield in December and January, as did that other beneficiary of the great rebalancing of 1537–8, Charles Duke of Suffolk, at Revesby.45 This provided the model followed by all surrenders of co-operative monasteries thereafter, though henceforth pension liability fell on the Crown, not on the beneficiaries. This was a move of much general significance; no member of a threatened monastic community need fear a future of poverty out in the world: a great incentive to accept dissolution, especially when the alternative might be death by attainder.46
Gregory Cromwell’s wedding in August 1537 thus had momentous consequences. Immediately, it produced new areas of demarcation in local politics across lowland England, pivoting on deals between Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk, but additionally it created patterns for the remaining monastic dissolutions up to 1540. The aftermath of the Pilgrimage saw the Crown close not only all smaller monasteries reopened by the Lincolnshire rebels and Pilgrims but, additionally, larger houses with heads implicated in the stirs. Whalley, Hexham, Bridlington, Jervaulx, Kirkstead, Barlings were all declared forfeit to the Crown by the attainder of their heads for treason; that followed the provision thoughtfully inserted to this effect in the Treason Act of 1534 (see above, this page). Further suppressions were swelling beyond a trickle, to the extent that Cromwell found himself financially disadvantaged. In the course of his long involvement in monastic affairs, he had accumulated so many grants of fees from monasteries that he now felt their loss. A partial solution emerged only in spring 1538, when he was awarded the Stewardship of all suppressed monasteries north of the Trent, plus a set of named dissolved houses around the kingdom: an office with a handsome fee of £100 per annum.47
As surrenders accumulated, it became clear that a mode of proceeding was necessary for monastic houses outside the scope of the first dissolution Act, and for which there was neither a pretext of treason nor that rationale of debt or misrule first employed at Christ Church Aldgate back in 1532. That is precisely what the closure of Lewes and Titchfield provided: surrender with full compensation for livelihood. Still, even at this late date, there seems no general plan for monastic dissolution, certainly not in the mind of the Duke of Norfolk. He took care to translate with all due reverence the principal relic of Castle Acre Priory, the arm of St Philip, to the Cluniac house of Thetford, which he was encouraging to act as a local hub for conservative forces in East Anglian religion. Various accompanying items of splendour also made the journey south to Thetford from Castle Acre. This was a radical contrast to Cromwell’s and Wriothesley’s treatment of the churches of Lewes and Titchfield, but it was all of a piece with Norfolk’s unsuccessful effort earlier in the year to save the shrine and cult of St John of Bridlington in the former priory church.48
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While Norfolk and Cromwell moved forward on their deal, a royal tragedy intervened, stemming from what had seemed to be triumph. The King’s longed-for legitimate male heir, the central object of so much grief and toil over the previous decade, was born to Queen Jane at Hampton Court, on 12 October 1537. She sent the happy news via one of her gentleman ushers directly to Cromwell, in his capacity as her High Steward (the note was in fact written by Ralph Sadler); he was lodging in St James’s Palace transacting London business as near the City as was safe with the plague still virulent, so he distributed a celebratory twopence each to the poor in the surrounding hamlet.49 Amid nationwide relief at the successful outcome of all the King’s anxieties, this was a great personal moment for him: really the apogee of his career, if he had but known. His son was unchallengeably uncle to a future king, when the greatest magnate in the land, the Duke of Norfolk, could only chalk up being great-uncle to a royal girl now declared illegitimate.
Such realities were glossed over on 15 October at the baby’s christening as Edward, a name whose unfortunate associations with the previous boy-king of that name mislaid in the Tower of London were counter-balanced by martial royal predecessors and by the Queen’s brother. Like Queen Jane’s marriage, this was a time for coming together. There were enough godparents to satisfy every faction: the Duke of Norfolk and Archbishop Cranmer shared the honours at the font, the Lady Mary and the Duke of Suffolk at the confirmation which followed, and in a gesture to another layer of the recent past (possibly at Cranmer’s gentle prompting) the Earl of Wiltshire bore the Archbishop’s confirmation present to the little Prince. The four-year-old Lady Elizabeth had the honour of carrying in her half-brother’s chrisom robe in front of the baby, though to avoid mishaps she was herself carried by Lord Beauchamp and her great-uncle Lord Morley.
Although the Lord Privy Seal was present, he had no ceremonial duties: perhaps it might have seemed provocative. There were reports of earldoms to come in the next few days: John Husee thought that Cromwell would be Kent or Southampton and Sir William Fitzwilliam Warwick. His colleague Thomas Palmer heard Southampton for Fitzwilliam and Salisbury for Lord Beauchamp.50 It would have been remarkable if Edward Seymour had indeed become Earl of Salisbury, because there was currently a countess of that title in her own right: Margaret Pole, mother of the disgraced Cardinal. Maybe Henry did contemplate this massive snub, since the only dark notes of the christening-day concerned the group of notables associated with Pole. Reginald Pole’s elder brother Lord Montague was given a part in the ceremony, but a second brother Sir Geoffrey Pole was not admitted to Court when he appeared, and on the very day of the christening Michael Throckmorton’s brother Sir George was committed to the Tower of London – a fulfilment of that threat in Cromwell’s furious letter to Michael a few weeks before (see above, this page).
In this dire moment, Sir George produced the abject and very informative depositions on his behaviour which have illuminated earlier events. He was saved from the fate increasingly nearing the Pole circle by making some uncharacteristically evangelical noises of enthusiasm in his depositions, affirming how much he had learned from the two books produced under Cromwell’s auspices that summer, the Matthew Bible and the Bishops’ Book. This capitulation was a start. In addition, one of those tipped for honours from the King, Throckmorton’s relative Sir William Parr, may have used his own deposit account of favour with Cromwell (Parr had been a senior servant of the late Duke of Richmond) to steer Sir George back over the next year to a remarkably complete rehabilitation.51
In the wake of the christening, the honours the King actually granted fell short of the suggestions being bandied about in the first euphoria after the Prince’s birth. A pointed little geographical dance with titles was involved. Sir William Fitzwilliam did become Earl of Southampton, which maritime title matched his long-term naval interests as Lord Admiral. Nevertheless, his power-base lay in Surrey, and the new figure actually emerging in the Southampton region at Titchfield Abbey was Cromwell’s lieutenant Thomas Wriothesley (who did gain the title of Southampton a decade later). Lord Beauchamp, who unlike Fitzwilliam actually lived in Hampshire, was advanced at the same time to
an earldom of Hertford even longer in abeyance than his previous viscountcy. The antiquarian revival of this thirteenth-century title for a man who had no connection with Hertfordshire is even odder than his previous Beauchamp viscountcy, and the name may actually have been suggested by the then well-known Hartford Bridge in the Hampshire parish of his home at Elvetham. Both Fitzwilliam and Seymour got some small annual financial support from revenues of the port of Southampton.52
Cromwell in the end received no formal advancement. The new Earl of Hertford was uncle to a future King by blood, not just by marriage like Gregory Cromwell, and Seymour’s promotion balanced Cromwell’s edging ahead of him into the Order of the Garter three months before. Cromwell naturally showed no hint of disappointment; he played a leading role in the creation, ceremonially reading aloud the two patents of earldom in his continuing role as Principal Secretary, with his new best friend the Duke of Norfolk looking on. Nevertheless, in a matter fully under his control as Lord Privy Seal, he was able to advance himself in a significant respect just as if he had obtained some new peerage promotion: his name began appearing on every county commission of the peace in the kingdom. Although he was more than unlikely to appear at quarter sessions in Cumberland, for example, he now had the right to do so if he pleased.