In one of those coincidences of which 1538 was full, Bale’s play was staged on the Nativity of Our Lady, 8 September, the day Cardinal College Ipswich had been officially launched ten years before. Three days earlier, the Vice-Gerent ‘exhibited’ his latest official injunctions to the Church of England, that word almost certainly meaning that this was the occasion on which he formally presented them to the King. Once more these injunctions included an order for every parish to furnish itself with a Bible (now much more feasible than in 1536, thanks to the Vice-Gerent’s encouragement of Bible printing); there was also the famous requirement for parish registers for baptisms, marriages and funerals. Versions of these injunctions had been circulating since May, as at that time one set was used for visitation by Cranmer’s officials in the vacant diocese of Hereford. September represented a formal relaunch, and added some new items specifically condemning Becket and his cult.82 Back in London, the Mercers’ Chapel dedicated to St Thomas on the site of his childhood home was thoroughly purged of anything to do with its saint, who had unsurprisingly been richly celebrated in the building. The injunctions were clearly hostile to the provision of and attention to images generally; it has been observed that, thereafter, virtually no new images were provided in churches until Queen Mary ordered them again two decades later.83 Altogether in enactment, theatre and action this represented the most forward moment of the Vice-Gerency’s reforming zeal: for once – and for a moment only – it was done with the unambiguous and enthusiastic consent of King Henry himself.
Looking back over these eventful nine months, it is apparent how much they represented a farewell to earlier episodes in Cromwell’s career. One silent farewell was to Thomas Wolsey, when in the last days of August 1538 the abbey of St Mary at Leicester surrendered to Cromwell’s commissioners, his servants John Freeman and Dr Francis Cave. The abbey held the grave of the fallen Cardinal, stricken on his last journey south back in 1530. After that, Cromwell had taken a special interest in the house, usually via his nephew Richard. Its last Abbot, John Bourchier, was his appointment, over which he had taken some trouble in 1534, and in 1540 Bourchier was lined up to be Bishop for a new diocese of Shrewsbury, had it been established.84 When Leicester Abbey closed, it is likely that quiet arrangements ensured a decent reburial for the Cardinal’s corpse, but since everyone involved in the smoothly executed surrender knew each other well, nothing needed to be committed to paper. Dr Cave meaningfully asked the Lord Privy Seal what should be done with the abbey buildings, as yet intact, with the implication that the institution or its church might continue in some way; he remarked that ‘a hundred marks yearly will not sustain the charges in repairing this house if all buildings be let stand.’85
By contrast to the discretion at Leicester, we have viewed rich surviving evidence which recalled Cromwell to his service to the Cardinal at Ipswich. The town of Ipswich was transformed in 1538. Wolsey had intended his native borough to be a showcase of a reformed humanist Catholicism, its wonder-working Marian shrine nestling amid a dozen and more parish churches. Around this ensemble in stately guardianship would stand the three friaries and surviving Augustinian priory, alongside the greatest institution of all, Cardinal College. Instead, thanks to close co-operation between the Lord Privy Seal and Thomas Lord Wentworth, Ipswich became a model borough of the continent-wide Protestant Reformation. Parish church towers still jostled the skyline, but all others were gone, and in the former Dominican friary the town now cherished its restored school alongside a public workhouse and accommodation for the destitute. Wentworth installed Thomas Becon, a future star of Protestant reformation, as priest of Ipswich’s largest parish chantry (founded by Cardinal Wolsey’s rich uncle Edmund Dandy), in anticipation of the Puritan lecturers cherished by the town in later years. Ipswich’s transformation and its notoriously Puritan future paradoxically came courtesy of the man who cherished the Cardinal’s memory most.86
In the middle of this destruction of shrines and friaries in September, in a curious and poignant chance, Cromwell’s turning of the page was symbolized by the death of an elderly grande dame who meant much to him. Jane Vaux, widow of a famous pilgrim to Jerusalem, Sir Richard Guildford, stepmother of Sir Edward and mother of Sir Henry, was ‘Mother Guildford’ to the royal Court, and dowager of all dowagers. We met Lady Guildford in 1535 in some dudgeon about her residence at Bristol’s Gaunts Hospital, and her annoyance with Cromwell may well have been soothed in early 1537 by the lease of a small dissolved Bristol nunnery, over which Cromwell took some considerable trouble for her sake. ‘Clearly I perceive your especial mind towards her,’ said Richard Rich of Augmentations, restraining his irritation, after a second badgering from the Lord Privy Seal on the subject.87 Such profit from the dissolution did not unsettle Lady Guildford’s conservative piety. When not in Bristol, she lodged palatially in the precinct of the London Blackfriars, where long ago the Guildfords’ dear family friend Sir Thomas Brandon had been buried. It was at Blackfriars that she died on 4 September, just as Cromwell’s commissioners set out to do their work at Canterbury.88
Lady Guildford’s executors were Cromwell’s friend (and sometime patron) Sir John Gage and her Anglo-Italian cousin Sir William Penizon. She made the Lord Privy Seal supervisor of her will, to be good lord to them and her household ‘in like manner as he hath been to me in life’. He got a gold and jewelled crucifix for his trouble. In this will, last revised only a week before her death, she left a generous legacy to the London Dominicans to pray for her, and her funeral there was of a traditional splendour which made Penizon a little nervous for the messages it might convey to the general public.89 For Cromwell, that would be a minor concern. All due respect had been paid to a matriarch of Tudor high society who would have expected nothing less. Two months later Blackfriars closed along with all other London friaries, part of a general round of dissolutions that month that at a stroke removed all save one of the capital’s religious houses, including at long last the London Charterhouse. Only St Bartholomew’s Priory in Smithfield, a satellite of the King’s favoured abbey of Waltham, survived, for another year.
Lady Guildford was gone, and with her an era. Others that autumn and winter did not receive such an honourable dispatch. Fifteen-thirty-eight was a turning-point, as more and more of the country’s political elite perfectly prepared to accept King Henry’s new dispensation were nevertheless pushed to the conclusion that Thomas Cromwell was too dangerous to lead it. Those whom they would have considered their inferiors watched the drama with cynical interest. At the beginning of the year, in the course of his ever-vigilant scrutiny of seditious words noted and sent in by conscientious local magistrates, Cromwell read of some smallholders on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens. Wherever truth lay in recollections of relaxed conversations during the harvest of 1536, these words formed a well-observed commentary on the two years since Cromwell had gained his greatest office as Lord Privy Seal. John Raven and William Marshall accused each other of saying ‘Was not my Lord Cardinal a great man, and ruled all the realm as he would? What became of him? Is he not gone? Also Sir Thomas More, High Chancellor of England – did not he in like wise rule all the whole realm? What became of him? Is he not gone?’ Raven then admitted to spelling out the logic of these truths: ‘And now my Lord Privy Seal in like manner ruleth all, and we shall see once the day that he shall have as great a fall as any of them had . . .’90 As Cromwell turned the page, he may have brooded on how many others agreed, particularly among those close to the King.
PART FIVE
Nemesis
Woe be unto them that have lost patience, forsaken the right ways, and are turned back into froward ways. What will they do, when the Lord shall begin to visit them?
Ecclesiasticus 2.14, in the translation of Miles Coverdale, 1535
God preserve you in long life in the finishing of many things well begun, and to the performance of many things yet unperfect.
Hugh Latimer Bishop of Worcester to Cro
mwell, summer 1538
20
Shifting Dynasties: 1538–1539
In July 1538 a monastery was dissolved at Bisham in Berkshire. That might not seem worthy of remark when houses of religion were disappearing all over the realm, but there was one bizarre feature here: the monastery was founded less than a year before, by royal charter, as ‘the King’s monastery of Bisham’, dedicated to the Holy Trinity and conceived as no mean foundation: a Benedictine abbey with a mitred abbot. Only a few months before Abbot Cordrey received his charter in December 1537, he and his monks had possessed a different identity, as the ancient royal foundation of St Peter’s Chertsey, surrendered to the Crown. Now moved up-river to Bisham, Cordrey had not previously enjoyed the privilege of a mitre (which potentially carried with it a seat in the House of Lords). Appropriately for that honour, he was named as a county JP on two successive commissions of the peace in Berkshire, in March and May 1538.1
The puzzle becomes all the more acute on visiting Bisham and viewing the bumpy field beside the Thames where once stood this new abbey and its predecessor on the site, an Augustinian priory dissolved in July 1537. Not a stone remains visible, but what the new occupants from Chertsey would have found on their arrival was a church stuffed full of the tombs of nobility. No more than a few brisk paces away loomed a great mansion, part of which does survive. It was then principal home to Margaret Pole Countess of Salisbury, mother to Henry Pole Lord Montague and his younger brothers Reginald and Geoffrey; the tombs housed their ancestors. What are we to make of all this? Pursuing the story backwards, it is worth noting that Thomas Cromwell knew this stretch of the Thames well: 3 miles away across the river was Little Marlow Priory, where Prioress Vernon had tutored Gregory Cromwell in his childhood.
In April 1535, Cromwell took a decisive interest in a new prior of Bisham in the middle of a disputed election. Against opposition from the Countess of Salisbury, who tried to get the incumbent Prior to stay on, Cromwell’s militantly evangelical protégé William Barlow gained the post; Master Secretary clearly judged that this institution needed his variety of firm leadership.2 Barlow was in fact absentee as diplomat and soon Bishop in Wales, and as Bisham’s commendatory head he surrendered the priory to the Crown.3 Given how obnoxious Barlow would be to the Countess, she may not have mourned his removal, but her thoughts would then turn to how to preserve the family mausoleum. What better device than an elaborate scheme for a new monastery, carefully honouring her royal cousin and the memory of his lately deceased Queen Jane, staffed by a set of monks of impeccable Catholic respectability from Chertsey?
Those were the terms on which the new Bisham Abbey opened, handsomely endowed, in December 1537. Ironically, one of its new possessions was the dissolved priory of Beddgelert in Wales, for which the Countess herself had solicited Cromwell back in 1532, looking for a grant to a servant of the Lady Mary. When the abbey closed six months later, it is clear that Cromwell and his staff had no regrets. Richard Leighton, in charge of the operation, went out of his way to be sarcastic about a community he portrayed as already in dissolution: ‘the monks of small learning and much less discretion’ scrambling over themselves to auction off even their habits, and the Abbot a drunk and ‘a very simple man’. All this despite the fact that someone the previous year had considered Abbot Cordrey worthy of a seat in the House of Lords. Yet Leighton also noted scrupulously for his master that ‘the church we stir not, nor no part thereof.’4 This was in June 1538, but in fact it was soon gone. That autumn, amid a welter of depositions about treason, a suspect canon of Chichester Dr George Crofts deposed that ‘he had heard Sir Geoffrey Pole lament the pulling-down of Bisham, because his kin and ancestors lay there.’ The Countess had deplored it too, although in one of her depositions in the autumn she also admitted that this venture had brought its own doom: she ‘much lamented the living’ of the Chertsey monks ‘which was the cause’ of the new dissolution.5
Altogether the untidy end of Bisham Abbey in July 1538, abruptly terminated after hardly having begun, its mausoleum church demolished in front of the Countess of Salisbury’s windows, looks like a calculated insult to a great noble affinity: the first shot in a conflict breaking into the open during autumn, in which Cromwell encouraged the King to harry and cull the group of Court nobility who had never been reconciled to religious change. Prominent among them were Lord Montague and his cousin the Marquess of Exeter. With Montague’s mother the Countess of Salisbury as their general matriarch, they had long flirted with sedition, back to their interest in the Maid of Kent and through constant private conversations with Ambassador Chapuys about foreign intervention. Worse still, the Countess’s evident closeness to her former charge the Lady Mary fuelled the King’s suspicions that she had stiffened Mary’s obstinacy at various key junctures. After the business had reached its bloody conclusion, Cromwell spelled out that possibility to Chapuys, tartly observing that he and his imperial colleagues must have known of these intrigues, and worse: attempts to marry Mary to the Marquess and sideline Prince Edward.6
Lurking behind all this was the uncomfortable fact that King Henry and his family had a lesser share of historic royal blood than the Courtenays and Poles between them possessed through their Yorkist ancestry. This mattered all the more to King Henry now that his legitimate heir was a robust one-year-old. History has come to call the autumn debacle the Exeter or Montague Conspiracy. How much actual conspiracy was involved is not clear, but the events were not short of the conspiratorial on all sides. On the Exeter group’s most exposed flank were victims already: the Maid herself, More, Fisher, Hussey, Darcy, plus one whom the King would dearly love to become his victim, Reginald Pole. At their other extreme was the ultra-loyalist and amiably harmless Lord Lisle, Deputy of Calais, whose own Plantagenet blood quotient was 50 per cent, but illegitimate. As noted in the previous chapter, Calais provided the first open battleground in summer 1538, but while trouble there rumbled through that summer, Cromwell took advantage of his journeys in southern counties around the royal progress to gather intelligence on the Countess and her circle.
As early as June a group of friends, whose common link was Chichester Cathedral and who included a servant of Cromwell’s, fell out over whether to reveal ‘a great confederacy’ between the Marquess of Exeter, Lord Montague, Lord Sandys and Lord De La Warr, all conservative peers of the region.7 In fact, the vital information came from a different informant, Gervase Tyndale alias Clifton, a client of Cromwell who had been on the staff of Cardinal College Oxford.8 Tyndale was no relation to the Bible translator, but was closely related to the Midlands family of Clifton, sires to more than one Cambridge don and kin to Archbishop Cranmer. He returned from Oxford to the Midlands as schoolmaster of Grantham, one of a select group of activists promoting evangelical reformation in the region and keeping Cromwell informed on dissent.9 By autumn 1537 the Provost of Eton was thanking the Lord Privy Seal for providing Tyndale, ‘your own true scholar and bedeman’, to replace the raffish Nicholas Udall as schoolmaster at the College.10
In some mischance of health the following summer, Tyndale became a patient resident with a doctor called Richard Eyer, on the Hampshire coast at Warblington. This happened to be the second residence of the Countess of Salisbury. It will have been via Bisham and Eton that she and her household knew Tyndale, and she detested his religious opinions, ordering him to leave Warblington in July or August 1538. That ultimatum provoked Tyndale and his host to talk of the general atmosphere of conservative religious dissent in the Salisbury circle, but more specifically about her contacts abroad, up to and including sending letters to Cardinal Pole. These new accusations concerned John Helyar, the Countess’s senior chaplain and parson of Warblington, whom Cromwell had already examined about his travel abroad; Helyar was spending more and more time overseas. On the previous occasion, Reginald’s brother Sir Geoffrey Pole and Sir William Paulet between them ‘made such shift that the matter was cloaked [concealed]’. Tyndale now hurried to
use his various contacts with Cromwell to convey further alarms, including news of renewed correspondence with Helyar from the Countess and Sir Geoffrey. He buttonholed the Lord Privy Seal, then staying with his son at Lewes, but yet again Sir Geoffrey persuaded Cromwell that there was nothing in it. Matters had now arrived into the last days of August.11
This sequence of events sounds all very haphazard and circumstantial, and twice the Poles had exercised their credit with the King to slide the family circle away from trouble. Yet it was part of a gathering storm of little incidents and conflicts all tending in the same direction. The troubles at Calais involving the Lisles were part of that pattern. The result was only accidental in the sense that the fall of Anne Boleyn was accidental; both convulsions were triggered by happenstance, no single incident of which would have proved fatal without the vigilance and helping hand of a man looking out for such matters, waiting for the right moment to persuade the King of their significance.12 There was an odd recruit to the Surrey commission of the peace in summer 1538: Jasper Horsey, a Devon man and servant to the Marquess of Exeter. Horsey became a key witness against the Courtenay/Pole circle, and was later also useful against the collateral victim of these stirs, Sir Nicholas Carew. He was granted some of Carew’s property and what can only be a reward for services rendered: a position as Gentleman Usher of the Chamber, just before 22 February 1539. Horsey looks suspiciously like Cromwell’s agent of investigation within the Courtenay household.13
So matters continued into September 1538. There was talk in Sussex that ‘if my Lady of Salisbury had been a young woman, the King and his Council would have burnt her at their late being in the country’ on the royal progress: that is, she would have suffered the prescribed penalty for female traitors. For a moment in early September Sir Geoffrey seemed safe, but one of his henchmen, Hugh Holland, was taken up to London a bound prisoner for examination.14 Just at this juncture, Richard Cromwell’s father-in-law Sir Thomas Denys arrested a Breton priest down in Devon, after mysterious journeys which had begun in Sussex. The man told wild tales about the Poles and in particular a clandestine visit to England by Cardinal Pole which mostly seem fantasy, but he clearly did know the family.15
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