Thomas Cromwell
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The Vice-Gerent’s joint campaigns against friars and images were thus well launched by May. They came together even more pointedly than at Ipswich in London on 22 May, in one of the most horrific incidents of the Henrician Reformation: the burning of Friar John Forest for heresy.57 Forest was a former member of the Greenwich Observants, who in early 1538 was living with the London Conventual Franciscans. Up to this time he had publicly accepted the royal supremacy, but his true opinions lay elsewhere. He was arrested (probably on Cromwell’s authority as Vice-Gerent) for encouraging sedition when hearing confessions; one major issue was that he had used the confessional to encourage acceptance of the supremacy while rejecting it in conscience. The heresy charge centred on his affirmation that the Catholic Church was the Roman Church, and that priests in confession might turn the eternal pains of Hell into the time-limited pains of purgatory. In the background was the King’s continuing terror of what might happen at the apparently imminent meeting of the General Council at Mantua; everything Forest had to say on the subject of Church Councils and papal authority over them contributed to his condemnation.
At first Forest recanted, but he was imprisoned in a cell of Newgate gaol with a conservative Carmelite and survivors of the imprisoned London Carthusians. That stiffened his resolve. He thus became a lapsed heretic, condemned for returning to ‘heresies’ that were actually commonplaces of late medieval Western Christianity. Instead of providing government theatre with a recantation at Paul’s Cross, he burned at Smithfield. His cruel fate reflected what King Henry would have liked to have done to Reginald Pole; it was deliberately pitched beyond the normal ghastly drama of heretic-burning. Forest hung in chains roasting over a fire partly fuelled by the chopped-up remains of a particularly aggressive wooden cultic image from north Wales, a warrior-saint called Dderfel Gardarn (‘mighty Dderfel’). At the beginning of April Dr Ellis ap Rhys (for whom Cromwell had engineered appointment as diocesan Commissary in St Asaph), alerted his master to Dderfel’s seditious potential, having witnessed the crowds at a festival for the saint. Cromwell immediately ordered the image to be carted up to London, and it arrived by the end of the month.58
The massive, beast-like wooden setting-block for Dderfel’s image still survives in Llandderfel church, a bleak and direct link to a Tudor atrocity (see Plate 42). The effigy’s public destruction at Smithfield despite outraged Welsh demands for its restoration, even offers of substantial cash, spread an intransigent message of religious change beyond lowland England. Everything about this event could be a lesson for the audience of thousands, led by Cromwell, Cranmer, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earls of Sussex and Hertford, and Bishop, Mayor and Sheriffs of London. Pinned to the scaffold were simple racy verses mocking both image and human victim, composed by William Grey (or Gray), one of Cromwell’s literary clients who appears to have been a recently secularized Dominican friar: they were excerpted from a gleeful ballad Grey published that year celebrating official iconoclasm, in the same knockabout style as Bale’s plays.59
The drama of this occasion included a sermon from England’s star evangelical preacher Hugh Latimer, addressed to Forest before he burned. The main topic was idolatry. This was a preaching opportunity to which Latimer looked forward with more relish than some may consider decent, but he had an excellent record of success in converting friars to the evangelical cause, and this was too good a moment to miss.60 The fiery display following Latimer’s oratory jointly punished idolatry, papistry and Catholic views of penance. Ap Rhys had told Cromwell of the Welsh belief that Dderfel could fetch anyone out of Hell who made him an offering; this paralleled Forest’s exalted view of the efficacy of confession. It also underlined the fate of those exercising casuistry in stating their faith, particularly in taking oaths: Grey’s doggerel included the line ‘Forest the Friar, that obstinate liar’. Confession was a powerful weapon of traditional religion, and confessors must take note of Forest’s fate.
This was calculated educational terrorism, but, compared with Hilsey’s barnstorming performance at Paul’s Cross in February as the Boxley Rood was destroyed, it was not an unqualified success. Some already committed to the evangelical cause did celebrate Forest’s execution: that night a crowd took up the message of iconoclasm by breaking into the parish church of St Margaret Pattens and destroying its rood, a major object of devotion in the City. When outraged City officials rounded up those they could catch, the iconoclasts claimed the Lord Privy Seal’s authorization; their leader was the radical printer John Gough, whom we have seen benefiting from Cromwell’s custom.61 Yet Forest’s death must also have offended many in the vast audience by marginally exceeding the acceptable level of gruesomeness in burning heretics.
Tellingly, Latimer’s sermon that day has not survived, and it was not included in any of the early editions of his pulpit oratory. Even more significantly, the Henrician regime quietly gave up on presenting papalist or traditionalist convictions as a crime of heresy. There was a doctrinal standard under which it could have done so, the Bishops’ Book of the year before, but in the middle of Henry’s omnivorous marital overtures abroad in the shadow of a Franco-Imperial alliance against England, pursuing this line would be very unwise. Any potential bride from European royal houses might theoretically be liable to heresy charges the moment she landed in England, an idea both embarrassing and absurd. Small wonder that Henry himself, and his more straightforwardly Protestant successors, henceforth killed Catholics (when required) not as heretics but as traitors or fomenters of sedition, with a different set of sadistic punishments.
This set of prudential thoughts probably took some time to crystallize, but Cromwell’s evangelical propaganda machine forged ahead. His tame printers John Gough and James Nicholson published a fierce attack on the friars, attributed mendaciously but with imaginative commercial acumen to Geoffrey Chaucer and almost certainly a Lollard tract from his time. The printers used the same Holbein-designed title-page previously used for works by Melanchthon and Tyndale.62 Fifteen-thirty-eight saw Nicholson’s enterprising press produce a surprising novelty: the earliest known English translation of a text by a Zürich theologian, not something for which the King would have shown any enthusiasm. It was a commentary by Heinrich Bullinger on the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, perhaps part of a projected set of companions to Bible-reading of which the publisher then thought better. As yet, there was not enough of an English market for this sort of expository text. Its most prominent theme was appropriate for this year of confrontation and turmoil: how to endure Antichrist’s persecution, Antichrist being the Pope, as Bullinger helpfully pointed out. The tract was spiced up with local colour, in the form of sneers at named English shrines closed by Cromwell that same year.63
Together these two publications emphasized the links between the campaigns against shrines and friars exemplified in Forest’s execution. That June a royal order went out in London that former monks and friars must cease to wear their habits in public. John Foxe preserves a story about the Scottish-born poet-friar Alexander Barclay from a source which could not be more reliable, Cranmer’s publisher the immigrant evangelical Reyner Wolfe, probably an eye-witness. A parallel reference in Charles Wriothesley’s London Chronicle pins the incident precisely to the time of the order against friars. Barclay had been an Observant Franciscan, like Forest. After that he sailed very close to the wind in an itinerant ministry of preaching and counselling on theology, with a conservative agenda. He now had a bruising encounter with the Lord Privy Seal, who happened to be walking through Paul’s Churchyard and spotted Barclay in Reyner Wolfe’s bookshop, still defiantly wearing his habit. ‘“Yea, said [Cromwell], will not that cowl of yours be left off yet? An if I hear by one o’clock that this apparel be not changed, thou shalt be hanged immediately, for example to all other.” And so putting his cowl away, he never durst wear it after.’ Eventually Barclay did became a convinced Protestant, through the rather more gentle persuasion of Archbishop Cranmer.
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While the scales were thus increasingly weighted against the survival of friaries, public uncertainty still remained. Cromwell bypassed Ingworth in dealing with the Oxford and Cambridge friaries, which were in a different category of usefulness, and possibly worth saving. Dr London reported with annoyance that one of his fellow-commissioners at Oxford had returned from the capital in early July saying that ‘the four Orders in Oxford and Cambridge should stand’, and this stiffened the Dominicans against surrender.65 Cromwell’s intentions were more decisively expressed in the case of Queens’ College Cambridge, home to senior evangelicals who knew him well, like Simon Haynes, Thomas Smith and William May. Here the Fellows ignored all the niceties: they simply demanded the Carmelite friary next door, sending an admittedly flowery Latin letter to the Lord Privy Seal on the same day in August that they accepted a private surrender from the Carmelites (the College did not trouble Cromwell with that detail). Remarkably, they got their wish straight away. Smith and a colleague chased Cromwell right down to Petworth in Sussex on the King’s progress, and came away with his personally countersigned royal order to them for a more formal surrender, which they duly executed, for all the world as if they were Bishop Ingworth himself.66
Ingworth was still treating his own commission as a genuine visitation in late July. Amid the general meltdown, he repeatedly left open those friaries in good order, but was at a loss to know how to distribute among them the considerable number of friars from others still wanting to continue in their vocations.67 It was 28 July before he received Cromwell’s evidently testy answer to his report, at last spelling out a revised purpose: a general suppression. Even then, Ingworth punctiliously insisted on doing everything by the book: he must have the right paperwork to give friars a new career as secular priests.68 He continued to deploy the same rhetoric as before. A memorandum of the formula he used survives from his visit to Stafford, with houses of Franciscans (his most troublesome order) and Austin Friars. The Bishop assured the friars that he had no commission for suppression, ‘nor I use no such fashion in any place. I am sent to reform every man to a good order and to give injunctions for preservation of the same.’ On hearing these injunctions, neither community felt motivated to continue. A local gentleman in a consortium who had given a meadow in return for the saying of masses for the dead wanted his land back, since they would no longer take place.69
And so the picking apart of English friaries continued. Ingworth and Dr London led the charge, with occasional help from Bishop Hilsey. On the way, many urban corporations, Ipswich among them, picked up useful buildings for civic purposes, not least through some steady pressure on Cromwell from Dr London. After some characteristically courtly begging letters, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge also benefited. Ingworth’s pleas to Cromwell for capacities for friars to become secular clergy were answered by Cranmer’s Faculty Office in a big round-up on 10 September, a significant incentive to other friars to secure their future by co-operating.70 A notably poignant moment occurred in November 1538, when Bishop Ingworth evicted his Dominican brethren from his own priory of King’s Langley. Thereafter his letters to Cromwell rarely lacked a postscript reminder that he wanted Langley for an episcopal residence, given that he had no other, which heroic persistence eventually produced a formal grant in February 1540.71 By late spring 1539, the friars were dispersed from their houses throughout the kingdom, even in the furthest North. With customary male cowardice, the government took a little longer to evict the aristocratic ladies of the four female convents which followed Franciscan or Dominican Rules.
Those days of September when so many friars were processed by Cranmer’s bureaucracy into the wider Church were also a symbolic moment in a gradual dissolution of the uniquely English Order of the Gilbertines, so carefully spared in the first Dissolution Act of 1536. On 24 September the Master, Robert Holgate, another religious fortified in his evangelical conversion by a mitre, surrendered the nominal head house of Sempringham in Lincolnshire, where St Gilbert had begun the whole enterprise four centuries before. The task might be relatively straightforward, because the whole order was a single corporation headed by Holgate, and it did not require the sort of strenuous tour of visitation made by Ingworth and London for the friars. Nevertheless, in significant contrast to the friars, the Gilbertines were not extinguished in a single operation. It was not until early December 1539, while the very last monasteries went down, that Holgate surrendered his own house of Watton Priory in Yorkshire, long the real chief house of the order. Holgate needed a home base as President of the Council in the North, and he got a life grant of the house (including, very usefully, the Master’s London residence), together with another major Yorkshire Gilbertine priory at Malton, the last to surrender, two days after Watton.72
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September 1538 was a watershed in Cromwell’s dual campaign, for it also saw the climax of his steady assault on cultic images. In the premier league was Our Lady of Walsingham, collected by royal commissioners from Walsingham Priory in mid-July along with her jewellery and taken to Lambeth Palace to impress the German delegates with English commitment to the theological dialogue. Cromwell and Lord Chancellor Audley were among those on hand to receive her on 18 July.73 It was not then clear what would happen to her, but images of the second rank were gathered at the Lord Privy Seal’s home at Austin Friars, stowed among his spare beds, stripped bare of their clothes, candles and prayers. Our Lady of Ipswich was among the first, shipped down along the coast by William Laurence, with Lord Wentworth grimly making sure there was no trouble in the borough. Laurence saw to it that her shrine church was swiftly demolished, and the stone used in repairing his own parish church near by.74 By the beginning of September she had been joined at Austin Friars by St Anne of Buxton, St Modwen from Burton Abbey and, from Basingstoke, an image of the Holy Spirit (whatever that can have been).75
The culmination of all this in September was another ideological public bonfire, this time only of wooden images with no human victim. Our Lady of Walsingham was chief fuel, but alongside her burned the other figures in Cromwell’s collection at Austin Friars and probably some not otherwise recorded. They were taken out to Cromwell’s temporary rural home at Chelsea; the location obliquely spoke of the difficulty of the occasion and perhaps of the ambiguous reception of Friar Forest’s death back in May. Chelsea was near enough London for the interested to congregate, but not so near that casual passers-by could coalesce into hostile demonstrations.76 One hesitates to suggest that a subsidiary consideration may have been to annoy Ambassador Castillon, lodged so close by. At the same time, a further cultic image was solemnly cremated in another place with memories for Cromwell: a rood at Boston, where a Dominican preached to the onlookers justifying its destruction. That event was orchestrated by a former colleague from Cardinal College Ipswich days, the composer John Taverner.77 Cromwell himself was elsewhere, having rejoined the King on his progress in Kent, for the greatest set-piece of all in his campaign: the destruction of St Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, rival to Walsingham in international renown (both were recent victims of Erasmus’s literary satire).
Even before the break with Rome, William Tyndale had warned King Henry that Becket was his enemy. Reading Tyndale’s evangelical refashioning of English history in The Practice of Prelates, the King saw the point.78 Becket’s cult was from the outset an assertion of the Church’s moral and political superiority over the English monarchy. His centuries-old popularity (attested by Thomas Cromwell’s own forename, along with that of a host of other Tudor Englishmen) was firmly rooted in popular belief that he had been killed by Henry II’s henchmen for opposing tyrannical royal taxation: that was a favourite theme of pardoners as they sold their indulgences.79 How many reasons did the latest King Henry and his chief financial genius need for hating the saint’s memory? And what better occasion could there be for humiliating Becket and the pretensions of the traditional Church than the progr
ess of its new Head through Canterbury?
On his visit the King lodged in his most recent royal palace, the lately dissolved abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury’s second grand and ancient monastery. The city was thronged with notables, ranging from Lord Lisle (for once allowed to leave Calais, after many pleas) to Ralph Sadler, plus a generous selection of Cromwell’s servants from Wriothesley downwards. This latter group were busy pulling down Becket’s shrine, before they moved on to Winchester Cathedral to perform a similar service for St Swithin, before Bishop Gardiner returned from his long embassy in France.80 The jewels of Becket’s shrine were naturally cannibalized for the King’s Privy Coffers. Cromwell had at least part of Becket’s bones burned – with the same theological justification as Friar Forest’s fate: defending the heresy of faith in the Papacy. He said as much in a draft pamphlet prepared probably for international use the following year. Though it claimed that the majority of the remains had been ‘put away secretly’ to avoid superstition, the burning was what stuck in the public imagination, as far away as Rome.81 The jollification at Canterbury included John Bale’s latest drama of evangelical triumph, on the subject of Becket’s treasons (see above, Chapter 17).