Nevertheless, the vice-gerential commissioners became part of Ireland’s current political problem. In May they announced they were looking for total suppression of monastic houses in the parts of Ireland under English rule; this caused a storm of indignation and counter-proposals from Lord Leonard and other members of the Irish Council.43 This rift was paired with the patent reality that once more the whole Irish situation was spiralling out of control, descending towards a further outbreak of open war with the Gaelic regions of the island. Fitzgeralds provided a figurehead identity in what was now an unequivocally papalist revolt against all that Cromwell had been sponsoring over the previous half-decade – an even more serious situation than Silken Thomas’s rising in 1534.
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We must leave this developing crisis to unravel a more domestic but still dire contretemps for Thomas Cromwell. While the White Rose trials and executions took their course in autumn 1538, something different and rather strange was happening in Sussex. Events there are shrouded in discretion and dependent on reconstruction from fragments of evidence, crucial parts of which have been in the past misdated. The most important item bears no date at all. It is a letter from Richard Sampson Bishop of Chichester written in his own hand to his ‘loving friend’ Richard Cromwell, the text of which deserves reproducing in full:
Master Cromwell, I commend me heartily unto you. And whereas yesterday, at yours and other my friends’ desires, I was content at your own assignment that the young man should come into the church of Chichester upon a Sunday at the time of high mass, and before the high altar with a low voice to the priest that shall sing mass, say these words: ‘I knowledge myself to have offended Almighty God and the world; I desire mercy of God’; and to have two bushels of wheat ready baken in loaves of half pennies the piece, and cause them to be distributed to poor folks either by his own hand or by some other: the young man hath been with me this morning and scornfully refused this penance. Wherefore I advertise you of it, praying you to weigh it as a matter that toucheth much the honesty of your friend. For surely if there be any business [disturbance] for it, I will advertise the King’s Majesty of the whole. And I doubt not but when my Lord Privy Seal shall hear the truth, he will assist me in it. Thus fare you most heartily well.44
This is a most remarkable missive, far from the normal emollient tone adopted by Bishop Sampson addressing the Cromwell administrative machine. At the end of summer 1538, in his capacity as Dean of St Paul’s, he had complied with orders to dismantle major devotional objects; there followed an abject letter to the Lord Privy Seal affirming his commitment to whatever religious policy the King wanted next, and just before Christmas 1538 he acquiesced without public fuss in the removal of Chichester Cathedral’s splendid shrine to his predecessor St Richard.45 One of his Chichester canons and conservative soulmates, George Crofts, had just been arrested and would be executed for his part in the White Rose affair. Despite all that, this letter to Richard Cromwell is not just self-confident, but bristling with controlled anger. Notable is the curious reversal of the natural order of threat: if necessary, Sampson will tell the King, then (ultimate sanction) he is sure that the Lord Privy Seal will back him up, given all the facts.
The reader will probably have guessed that the recalcitrant young man in the case can only be Gregory Cromwell. That would account for Richard Cromwell’s involvement; he had no natural connection with the diocese of Chichester other than his elder-brother watching brief on his cousin. Given that the eighteen-year-old’s misdemeanour brought him within discipline of the Church courts, it is likely to have been sexual in nature; the only real alternative possibility as a serious offence demanding punishment by the Bishop would be a heresy charge, and nothing in Gregory’s career before or afterwards suggests high-temperature or enthusiastic religion. Whatever it was, was serious enough to shock not merely the Bishop but the county elite and Richard Cromwell, and raise the possibility of further ‘business’ – it was more than what Tudor society regarded as routine sin, such as seducing a servant girl. This affected Gregory’s ‘honesty’, that is, his reputation, and therefore the reputation of the King’s sister-in-law Lady Ughtred. It is tempting to read her very direct undated holograph letter to her father-in-law, refusing to live under his roof and announcing that she would stay with friends near by, in relation to this family crisis (see above, this page).
Sampson offered the most face-saving of deals to Gregory, a murmured penance at a considerable distance from Lewes, amid the comparative privacy and liturgical chanting of the cathedral’s community mass in choir; and still Gregory refused. Though we will probably never know what he did, given the present fragmentary state of Chichester’s diocesan archives, more important is the effect.46 Cromwell decided abruptly to remove his son and family from Sussex altogether, and give them a fresh start. All that urgency in autumn a year before; that lavish expenditure on securing Lewes Priory’s surrender; that massive outpouring of resources on demolition and rebuilding; that setting up of Gregory as local JP: all had been for nothing. The first sign of this humiliating about-turn comes in a letter to Cromwell from Sir John Gage at Firle, down the road from Lewes. Gage wrote on 18 December, which places Bishop Sampson’s letter earlier that month or in November. He observed without further comment that since the writing of his previous letter (so this was quite sudden news) ‘I was informed that your pleasure is to let to farm all your lands now being in your hands at Lewes’; he therefore asked to lease a substantial part of them.47
Over the next few months, tidings spread, though no one thought it a good idea to comment on the cause in writing. It is likely that John Husee would have enlarged on a report to Lord Lisle if speaking face to face when on 5 March 1539 he wrote that ‘Mr Polstead goeth into Sussex to dissolve my Lord’s house at Lewes, and tarrieth out fourteen days.’48 We probably have Polstead’s own report of this expedition in his careful memorandum for Cromwell from Lewes, dated only ‘Friday’ but obviously written in March 1539. It is evident from arrangements Polstead was by then making at Lewes for transferring livestock to a new home that Cromwell began devising a workable second plan for Gregory’s future straight away in December 1538.49 That meant a good deal of frantic improvisation, and keeping options open: it would be unwise to embark on a new permanent arrangement for his wayward son as precipitate as the great scheme of autumn 1537.
We can watch the anxious father considering options. In view of whatever happened at Lewes in November or December, it is interesting to find him on 26 November 1538 reconveying his Norfolk property at North Elmham to Gregory and Elizabeth and their heirs, together with the major lordship of Oakham in Rutland.50 Yet any fresh move to use Elmham would mean renewed confrontation with the Duke of Norfolk, and while Oakham was promisingly remote from London, it was perhaps too much so. Cromwell was also negotiating for a major estate at Painswick in the Cotswolds with the Lisles and the Earls of Hertford and Bridgewater, but that was still enmired in ill-tempered three-way haggling.51 A sensible course would be a holding operation: finding some temporary but dignified home for the young couple at a decent distance from Lewes. An ideal candidate emerged: Leeds Castle in Kent. We have visited Leeds on more than one occasion, most recently in the cheerful company of Rudolph Gwalther during his English tour. It was a Crown property once in the Constableship of Cromwell’s close acquaintances the Guildfords; Gwalther’s visit in 1537 shows that the castle gates still hospitably opened there for a young Swiss evangelical. The then Constable of Leeds in succession to the late Sir Edward Guildford was another local magnate, the courtier Sir Edward Neville, who became unhappily tangled in the White Rose conspiracy and was executed on 9 December 1538.
Now, on cue, on 4 January 1539, none other than Thomas Lord Cromwell himself succeeded the Guildfords and Neville as Constable of Leeds Castle.52 The castle thus lay available for his use, more importantly for occupation by Gregory and Lady Ughtred, who promptly arrived in March.
They would be getting used to the sound of workmen doing hasty refits as background to their married life.53 No doubt Reginald Pole, with his view of Cromwell as the English Machiavelli, would have seen this sequence of events as proof of conspiracy to destroy Neville alongside his own relatives, purely for the sake of Leeds Castle. It looks more like another example of Cromwell’s genius for seizing the main chance. Perhaps as he looked through schedules of the executed man’s estates and offices (which were much solicited by others immediately on Neville’s death), the germ of his idea for Gregory’s new home blossomed.
The Lord Privy Seal had more to add to the scheme, from the same circle of old Kentish acquaintance. Two days before the grant of Leeds Castle, he came to an agreement with Sir John Dudley, heir by marriage of Sir Edward Guildford, to buy the chief family mansion at Halden, 14 miles south of Leeds. This included an impressive array of Guildford estates spilling over from Kent into the Sussex marshes, which the family had turned into richly productive farmland, and to which Dudley had recently gained title after some bruising legal battles. The purchase price was staggering, at least £3,500, which would both transform Dudley’s uncertain fortunes and make Cromwell and his dynasty into the greatest magnates of the area, successor to the Guildfords at their most magnificent.54 All these plans were reflected in Henry Polstead’s report to his master in March on refiguring the Sussex and Kent estates. Cromwell wanted the Lewes livestock driven straightaway to Leeds and Halden, but the season demanded a gradual transfer via an intermediate estate. Gregory’s new symbolic position in Kent was eased by the death precisely at this time, 13 March, of the man who had briefly been the county’s most prominent nobleman, Thomas Boleyn Earl of Wiltshire. Wiltshire would never have tried to rival the Cromwells, even though there were signs he was now regaining a limited amount of royal favour after the catastrophe of his daughter’s execution, but his disappearance from the scene did remove a complication.
The prompt arrival of Gregory and his wife in the splendour of Leeds in March was politically necessary to provide minimum propriety for one of Cromwell’s most audacious moves yet. His nineteen-year-old son, within about a month of taking up residence in Kent, was to sit as one of its pair of knights of the shire in a new session of Parliament. Writs of summons went out on 1 March and Parliament assembled on 28 April – a very narrow window of opportunity. In all Cromwell’s seizing of chances, this was one most at risk of offending convention, though it had a certain dynastic logic. In 1529 the knights for Kent were the half-brothers Edward and Henry Guildford; they both died during the Reformation Parliament, and we know for certain that Sir Edward’s replacement in 1534 was, logically, his son-in-law Sir John Dudley. Given that, it is tempting to suppose that likewise on Henry’s death in 1532 Cromwell took advantage of his rapidly rising career to quit his carpet-bagging Parliamentary borough seat at Taunton for a far more appropriate place as knight of the shire for Kent. As general Parliamentary manager, he would then naturally have sat for Kent in the second Parliament of 1536 as well. One indication that this was the case comes in the rumour recorded by John Husee at the time of Prince Edward’s baptism in 1537, that Cromwell was about to be advanced to the Earldom of Kent: that would be natural promotion for a knight of the shire for that county.55
For the moment all that can only be supposition, but, if it is correct, Gregory’s move to follow his father in Parliament could just about seem respectable, particularly thanks to Leeds Castle and his rolling acres of former Guildford lands. Even so, the stretch was considerable, and the haste in which it was done is revealed by the fact that at no stage in 1539–40 can Gregory be found named to the commission of the peace in Kent. Whatever had happened in Sussex probably made that seem for the moment unwise.56 That indicates hesitation, and the sight of Gregory sitting in the Commons in spring 1539 was the first sign of what became increasingly apparent over the next twelve months. Cromwell was losing his grip on his previous acute sense of what was not just politically possible but also politically wise. It is significant that the most obvious trigger for this corruption of Cromwell’s judgement was dynastic: his fatherly love for the erratic, energetic boy who was his only legitimate heir. Yet the sheer scale of the problems facing any would-be reformer in the Tudor realms and the increasing turmoil of politics would have tested anyone’s powers of management, even someone with Cromwell’s exceptional talent and energy. From now on, events reveal his deteriorating sense of discretion and control.
21
Stumbling Blocks: 1539
Some time around February 1539, amid preparations for a new Parliament, Cromwell commissioned his senior clerk Thomas Derby to draw up a sixteen-page ‘Summary Declaration of the Faith, Uses and Observations in England’. He took great interest in getting its contents right, personally annotating and emending the document, though it was never finished.1 The text, which is written in English, would be appropriate for MPs and peers to read, but matters overtook it, and this is its only surviving version. Probably a final version was intended for translation and distribution in Germany, perhaps particularly in the territories of Cleves, where a new marital possibility was emerging. It is a remarkable insight into Cromwell’s thinking at the end of tumultuous changes in 1538: a forthright and vigorous celebration of England’s religious revolution written by one of the participants, taking the story right back to the destruction of Elizabeth Barton.
The tract celebrated a Church of England orthodox in doctrine, detesting the heresies of Anabaptists (Cromwell prudently added ‘Sacramentaries, and all others’), and rejoicing in dignified liturgy with daily masses (here Cromwell balanced his previous thought by striking out ‘private and public’ from masses – that phrase would not have pleased German Protestants). Cromwellian achievements were trumpeted, with little hint of the trials along the way: an English Bible, the Parliamentary poor law (an interesting inclusion), clipping of clerical wings, a still-projected reform of canon law, superstitious holidays curtailed, indulgences banned, shrines dismantled. The pamphlet celebrated the King’s prudence in executing a variety of traitors, from ‘Thomas More the jester’ and ‘Fisher of Rochester, the [vain]glorious hypocrite’, through to the White Rose group. The Maid of Kent and Becket came in for particularly extended dishonourable mention. All had been done by due legal process, the pamphlet insisted. ‘Who can find in his heart knowing this, to think the same prince that so hath judgments ministered by the law and by ordinary jurisdiction, to be a tyrant? It is plain malice and iniquity so to defame and misreport his noble Grace.’2
A long passage on monastic dissolutions is still notably open-ended. It celebrates all the steps taken in suppressions up to early 1539. Just as in the published version of the King’s answer to the Pilgrims in 1536 (see above, Chapter 16), it compares the similar dissolutions made ‘by the Bishop of Rome’s authority in the Cardinal of York’s time’. Nevertheless the section discussing what would happen next has some curious hesitations. A sentence about ‘religious persons’ which in its original form said that they ‘did almost throughout the realm surrender their houses’ is altered to they ‘have been disposed throughout the realm to surrender their houses’. That change might suggest greater finality, yet the passage continues overleaf after further second thoughts: ‘some other house[s], for respect of the places they stand in, his Grace will not dissolve.’3
This document offers a glimpse of royal policy on the monasteries as it stood in winter 1539. Crucially, even now it did not include total dissolution. The houses still standing untouched were the bedrock of the English monastic system, mostly the greatest Benedictine monasteries of Anglo-Saxon antiquity. Even an evangelical might regard them as ornaments to ‘the places they stand in’. There is good evidence that such houses would have responded quite positively to Cromwell’s injunctions for their good conduct back in 1535. Once the impractical regulations on monastic enclosure were quietly laid aside, it was possible for a conscientious abbot to warm to the V
ice-Gerent’s instructions for scholarship, study, Bible-reading, proper communal life and dignified abbatial hospitality. The model the injunctions reinforced reflected a conscious shift in style in a group of leading Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries which was in progress well before Cromwell came to power.4
These flagships of an ancient monastic tradition were moving of their own accord towards a life more resembling the great chantry colleges of England. Such a policy was precisely what Cardinal Wolsey, ably assisted by Thomas Cromwell, had forwarded in the 1520s with St Frideswide’s Priory Oxford and St Peter’s Priory Ipswich: he had turned them into colleges. One should not be misled by the automatic modern association of the word ‘college’ with higher education: all collegia then were first and foremost corporations of secular (non-monastic) priests, and their primary function was not education but prayer, particularly prayer for the dead – even the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. To turn monasteries into colleges might be regarded as a measure of Catholic reform, but an evangelical reformer could equally well sympathize; secular clergy could pray as well as any monk, and also contribute more to the Church as a whole.
Colleges so far remained untouched by government policy, and for the most part flourished: such institutions as Fotheringhay, St Mary’s Warwick and St George’s Chapel Windsor. They were closer in their life and even architectural layout to the new clutch of Oxbridge colleges of Tudor foundation than they might seem today. Stoke-by-Clare College in Suffolk provided a textbook example of how colleges beyond the universities might continue in a moderate evangelical splendour, combining solemn liturgical observance with preaching and provision for children’s education. A favourite retreat for Cambridge dons, its Master Matthew Parker (an appointee and chaplain of Anne Boleyn) doubled as head of a Cambridge college, Corpus Christi. Parker took the trouble to write new statutes for Stoke when he became Dean in 1535, getting John Cheke to turn them into mellifluous humanist Latin.5
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