Thomas Cromwell
Page 63
By September, Tunstall was formally installed on the Privy Council, to replace the deceased Bishop Foxe, with opposite partisan effect. It revealed how this new slimmed-down and bounded version of the King’s Council created in 1536 put checks on Cromwell’s freedom of manoeuvre. The promotion reflected the King’s appreciation of Tunstall’s help in dealing with the German delegation. Henry’s disenchantment with them was much encouraged when they committed another faux pas: unwisely prompted by Cromwell, von Boineburg and Burchard wrote directly to the King at the beginning of August, asking him to clarify his position on various specified theological points under dispute. The King relished this sort of theological nitpicking and, as he responded, it was for the most part with Tunstall on hand as theological adviser. The disruptive business at Calais also reached its climax in August. The very fact that the Calais disturbances involved the arrest of opposing clergy highlighted the presence of conflict, which the King abhorred, and which in combination with his irritation at the direct manner of the German delegation easily turned towards sympathy with a conservative set of answers to their theological demands. By the time Henry had returned to London in September, it was clear that there would be no further progress. The Germans, not prepared to prolong the farce, were gone by the early days of October, with nothing achieved.36
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This was a considerable setback for Cromwell’s plans and for the evangelical cause in general. Yet it was only one half of the story of attempted reformation which needs completing before turning to the dynastic drama of autumn 1538. From the beginning of the year, Cromwell moved ever more decisively to knock down two pillars of traditional religious life in England and Wales: one, the friaries, and the other, pilgrimages to shrines and relics. These twin campaigns can be followed through together to the watershed of October 1538. Both treated the supremacy as a weapon of violent reform, purging old superstition. However much Cromwell loved his vice-gerential power, and King Henry relished the wealth gained from these acts of spoliation, there was a moral and theological dimension of which we must not lose sight. It was no coincidence that these campaigns were launched with an affirmation of vernacular Bible-reading. This came in February with a set-piece meeting of as many JPs who could be gathered from across the kingdom to meet the Lord Chancellor and Privy Council in Star Chamber: not a common event. They were told to spell it out to priests and people in their shires that it was now perfectly legal to own an English Bible, and that any clerical accusations of heresy should be filtered through secular legal process in quarter sessions.37
As we have seen, the downfall of shrines began in earnest in 1537, with Cromwell’s confiscation of the Good Rood of Bromholm; yet even after the new round of monastic dissolutions represented by his deal with the Duke of Norfolk over Lewes and Castle Acre, Castle Acre’s arm of St Philip still sat secure in new splendour, cared for by the Cluniac monks of Thetford. Now came much more public noise about a general destruction. It began in earnest on 24 February 1538, when Bishop Hilsey preached before a huge audience at Paul’s Cross denouncing two relics, the Rood of Boxley Abbey (just dissolved) and the Holy Blood of Hailes Abbey. Hilsey ridiculed the Hailes relic even though it was still enshrined in its Gloucestershire monastery, but the Boxley Rood was on hand beside him, for exhibition and then gleeful destruction by his audience.38 The Rood was a twelfth-century wooden crucifix from a period when (for devotional and not fraudulent purposes) some images were provided with moving parts. Hilsey and Cromwell seized on this antiquarian curiosity to highlight the frauds of the old faith, even though the 300-year-old contrivance had no current cult of significance.
It was the perfect launch of a campaign that would occupy the rest of the year. Swiss observers were gleeful at the reports; John Husee warned the Lisles in March about the scale of the campaign in mainland England, and suggested that the chief devotional image of Calais would be next. In deepest Suffolk, a prudent lady making her will in May left money to her parish church to make a picture of the Assumption of Our Lady ‘if images still continue’ – if not, for a font cover.39 This was the moment when Gregory Cromwell reported to his father how the official campaign had sparked private-enterprise iconoclasm in Sussex. After a Sunday evening’s fun in the alehouse, one likely lad said to another, ‘There be many crosses digged up hereabouts, and men say there is much money under Willingdon Cross, which, if thou wilt be ruled by me, we will have.’ The cross duly fell the following Saturday, but, alas for them, no treasure emerged and instead they faced an uncomfortable time before the Sussex bench. Nevertheless, the incident showed that Cromwell’s campaign was achieving what it had set out to do: to rob sacred images of their power to intimidate or inspire.40
The campaign against the friars was launched slightly later, in April 1538, but thereafter was astonishingly complete and rapid. At the beginning of the year the whole tally of friaries created in the kingdom since the early thirteenth century stood intact. Even when the Observant Franciscans were dissolved as an order in 1534 for defying the King, their houses and communities were allowed to stand, transferred to compliant Conventual Franciscans. By the first months of 1539, all friaries had been closed. The speed of their demise (and in the English-speaking Pale of Dublin too) revealed that what had once been their greatest strength was now a fatal weakness: they were reliant on the lay public, in a much more profound way than monasteries or nunneries. Cromwell played on that weakness.41
To understand this paradox of rapid collapse, one should appreciate the difference between monks and friars. Monks predate friars; their name comes for the Greek for ‘single’ or ‘solitary’, not because monks were generally single hermits, but because their communities withdrew from the everyday world to concentrate on prayer. To achieve this, they would expect to be self-supporting, relying on their own landed estates, to minimize contact with disruptive secularity. The movement producing the friars in late twelfth-century Europe represented a criticism of the separateness of the monastic way of life, which many devout folk felt led to laziness and self-indulgence. The orders of friars made sure they would never be led into a life of inappropriately comfortable prosperity by the simple structural device of forbidding their communities to hold property.
This rule was never absolute, and law on property trusts evolved partly to get round it, but in general the principle held: friaries were never great landowners, and generally held no more than their own site and some minor rented property. Despite this, no attempt was made to include them in the Act of 1536 dissolving the lesser monasteries and nunneries, which left them unaffected. Indeed in 1536 the Norfolk monastery of Ingham tried to escape suppression (or at least unwelcome attention to its private deal with a local gentleman) by pretending that its quite rare affiliation to the Trinitarian Order made it a house of friars.42 The consequence of the principle of true poverty was that friars could survive only by begging from the laity; they were ‘mendicants’, from the Latin mendicare, to beg. Since, unlike monks, they needed everyday contact with laypeople or they would perish, they were necessarily out in the world. Laypeople continued funding friars only for benefits in return, principally preaching and hearing confessions, but since such spiritual services brought friars much esteem, friary churches also became greatly in demand for intercessory masses in the purgatory industry.
Friars rapidly became the Western Church’s specialists in preaching, so they needed to be intellectually alert and well informed. Soon they established friaries in university towns to get the best intellectual training they could, and Martin Luther the Austin Friar was only the latest among their academic stars. As a result, many of them followed Luther into that great rebellion of the intellect, the Reformation. Far more friars than monks turned into campaigning Protestant leaders: one might consider the Reformation as a revolution of friars faced with a pastoral crisis. Anguished at how they had collaborated in deceiving the laity, gabbling masses for the dead and doling out cheap f
orgiveness in the confessional, they now determined to make amends by preaching Luther’s message of salvation by God’s grace alone. We have met some English friars who took that route from early in Cromwell’s public career, Miles Coverdale, Robert Barnes and later John Bale, and seen two prominent friars, John Hilsey and George Browne, transmogrify into reforming leaders of the Church under Cromwell’s patronage.
To that list can be added another leading friar, Richard Ingworth, friend to Cromwell at least since becoming Prior of the royal Dominican foundation at King’s Langley in the mid-1520s. Ingworth was associated with Hilsey and Browne in their visitations of friars under Cromwell’s powers (see above, this page), and in December 1537 he followed them into the episcopate, though only as suffragan Bishop of Dover to Archbishop Cranmer. It is likely that all three ceased to believe in their vocation as friars during 1535, when Cromwell was prepared to let them loose on the wider Church as leaders in the name of evangelical reform. That is suggested in Ingworth’s frank and spirited riposte to Cromwell in 1538, referring to his promotion as Bishop the year before: ‘It hath pleased your Lordship to write to me as ye judge that though I have changed my habit, I have not changed my friar’s heart. Good my Lord, judge me not so, for God shall be my judge, my friar’s heart was gone two years before my habit, saving only my living.’43
What was now the point of being a friar? The structure of their orders linked them far more than most monastic orders to the centralizing power of Rome, which had formalized their existence at the height of the Papacy’s medieval self-assertion in the thirteenth century. Their chief offering to the everyday life of the Church, confession and masses for the dead, formed part of the old superstition. Many friars used their talents in preaching and teaching to defend traditional religion, which in Cromwell’s eyes made them worse than useless; they were enemies of the Gospel. The more friars who could be made to see this, the better. We find Cromwell early in 1538 personally doing just that in the prominent London house of the Franciscans: the Warden wrote to him in the course of other important business, in similar terms to Ingworth: ‘Your Lordship spoke to me of changing my coat; of truth, my Lord, I put no confidence in my coat, neither in the colour nor fashion, neither toward life of body nor toward life of my soul, and that shall appear whensoever your Lordship shall command us to change, as ye may when ye will, and we will obey gladly, for we know that it is not against God’s law.’44
On 6 February 1538 the King issued a commission to the newly consecrated Bishop Ingworth to visit all orders of friars under Cromwell’s vice-gerential authority.45 Throughout his subsequent work Ingworth was referred to as the ‘Lord Visitor’: a title partly dependent on his style of address as Bishop, but also with a slightly novel and even secular feel to it, a reminder that this was an enterprise under the Vice-Gerent. Ingworth, perhaps preoccupied with duties for Cranmer, took until the beginning of April to put his commission into effect; his first visit in what turned out to be a destructive mission was a dash into East Anglia. This was prompted by a close ally of Cromwell’s, Thomas Lord Wentworth, a peer with pronounced and articulate evangelical views, who had no doubt heard of the imminence of national visitation. His intervention showed the way to what became a general pattern.
On 1 April Wentworth wrote to Cromwell from his Suffolk home of Nettlestead Hall, outlining the plight of the Franciscans of Ipswich, a friary of exceptional splendour founded by his ancestors. They were ‘in great necessity and poverty, for that the inhabitants within the said town and of the county be not so beneficial in showing their charity towards them as they have been in times past’. The Ipswich Greyfriars in their consequent destitution had sold their possessions just to survive, as their wretched Prior confessed on being summoned to account for himself to his founder at Nettlestead. Wentworth thoroughly approved of this shift in public opinion. As he said at some didactic length, Suffolk’s charity was now directed to more worthy aims: a move which Wentworth himself, now the county’s leading resident magnate after the Duke of Suffolk’s departure, had no doubt encouraged.46 Wentworth ‘called to remembrance’ to the receptive ears of his correspondent that the orders of friars were ‘neither stock nor graft which the Heavenly Father hath planted, but only a spiritual weed planted of that sturdy Nimrod the Bishop of Rome, to rob Christ of his merits’. One sees how this opinionated nobleman might indeed have been the agent of John Bale’s conversion. His mini-sermon had a practical corollary: the friars had sold their house to their founder, and he sought Cromwell’s blessing on this convenient acquisition of what he frankly pointed out could become his own residence in Ipswich. Both men would think of their mutual friend Sir Humphrey Wingfield, with just such a pair of town and country residences in Tacket Street Ipswich and the nearby village of Brantham.
The result was immediate. Bishop Ingworth, who had set out from the London Blackfriars probably towards the Midlands to start on his visitation, was abruptly summoned back to St James’s for a briefing with Cromwell, and then made straight for Ipswich.47 He inventoried the house on Sunday 7 April, in the presence of the two town bailiffs and Cromwell’s local agent William Laurence, together with members of Lord Wentworth’s staff. This was a business of some delicacy, requiring maximum official presence, since another noble personage besides Wentworth was casting a frosty neighbourly eye on proceedings: the widowed Margaret Lady Curzon, whose husband’s very recent tomb stood in Greyfriars church amid a remarkable heritage of aristocratic monuments, and who lived only a street away. Yet it all went off satisfactorily, as Laurence reported with relief to Cromwell: Ingworth showed ‘much discretion, having so busy matters as ever I see man [anyone]’ in the face of havoc and asset-stripping by the friars.48
No one really knew how to achieve the desired result at the Ipswich Greyfriars; there was no precedent to follow. There was no policy of general dissolution at this stage; that was not Cromwell’s message in his briefing to Ingworth at St James’s. Laurence summarized Ingworth’s speech to the friars in their chapter house. The Bishop assured them that ‘he was sent by your Lordship under the King not to dissolve any house or to destroy any house, but to reform; wherefore if that the house hereafter was dissolved, it was through their own negligence and by their own act.’ He would leave them with enough goods to survive ‘till their own fact [deed] put them out’, at which point they should resort to Laurence, ‘and he there delivered letters for each of them to go to another place’ – that is, another Franciscan friary. One of the inventories noted that Laurence had custody of these letters ‘whensoever the friars depart’.49
No deed of surrender survives for Greyfriars, and maybe the friars’ previous sale to Lord Wentworth was silently accepted. Later on in the year, Augmentations officials noted that they had not interfered with the dissolved Greyfriars ‘because of certain commandments given by my Lord Privy Seal, as it is said’.50 Ingworth did not dissolve Ipswich’s other two friaries until the autumn, though in the meantime he seized money the Carmelites had made from a sale of borough tenements and left them only part of the proceeds, in the hands of an Ipswich worthy, to loan to them as needed.51 There were deep personal resonances for Cromwell in this untidy launch of the campaign on friaries at Ipswich: it must have pulled him back to those rain-soaked celebrations in September 1528 when he so lovingly orchestrated the opening of Cardinal College (see above, Chapter 4). Lord Wentworth was guest at the festivities that day, along with Sir Humphrey Wingfield. Guest of honour, however, had been Our Lady of Ipswich, whose shrine still stood in her chapel as Greyfriars tottered into oblivion.
In the same letter detailing Ingworth’s proceedings, Laurence asked his master what to do with the shrine chapel and its priests, and whether he wanted Our Lady’s offertory box emptied (Cromwell’s senior servant John Milsent had the key). The priests had been funded for two decades by the father of the Maid of Ipswich, whose visions of Our Lady had anticipated those of the Maid of Kent; the late Lord Curzon had published a vivi
d eye-witness account of the wonders. Laurence also reminded Cromwell that the parishioners of St Peter’s were still agitating to get back their church and its devotional furnishings from its dereliction after Cardinal College’s closure – the same building hosting the College dedication in 1528.52 After negotiations had sorted out the fate of Greyfriars, Lady Curzon transferred the remains of her late husband to the restored St Peter’s Church, to lie with her under a new tomb made safe from the friary’s dissolution; Lord Curzon, a parishioner, had been one of those concerned to see the church up and running again.53
To remedy the procedural difficulties exposed at Ipswich, the King issued Ingworth with a second mandate at the beginning of May, including explicit mention of his experiences of embezzlement in friaries, and spelling out his powers to seize and inventory their goods.54 That did not end the Bishop’s uncertainties. Writing in late May from a circuit of visitation in the Midlands and West Country, he detailed how he was using his supplementary powers. The picture was of general poverty and desperation: ‘before the year be out, there shall be very few houses able to live, but shall be glad to give up their houses and provide for themselves otherwise.’ In urban and lowland England, the public overwhelmingly hearkened to one message of Henry’s Reformation: they were wasting their money on friars.55
The government encouraged this process not merely through Ingworth’s prodding at demoralized communities, but also with specific moves to cripple the friars’ traditional sources of income and curtail their pastoral activities. Roland Lee commissioned a set of injunctions for his clergy in his diocesan visitation of Coventry and Lichfield in June 1538. One order was that in future the laity were not to go to friaries for their Easter confessions. Lee presented this formerly routine practice as a slight to secular clergy, and moreover a sign that such layfolk must have particularly sleazy sins they wanted hidden from their parish priest. The Bishop would not have thought up this provision for himself; he would have copied it from some general pro-forma for visitation from the vice-gerential office, and he asked Cromwell for his approval of the text of his injunctions before Berthelet printed it.56 Yet there was still no vision of general suppression in Ingworth’s letter of 23 May; ‘very few’ might survive amid what was becoming a general rout, but still some would. It was rather reminiscent of Cromwell’s early advocacy of gradual and selective suppression of monasteries.