Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Cromwell’s own letters survive in unusual quantities for this period, reflecting partly a cache of correspondence with his protégé Thomas Wyatt, who was on various diplomatic missions abroad, and partly his letters to the King, who was away from the capital inspecting coastal defence works. The royal archive would have preserved these latter, which would then have been cherrypicked by the team trawling for evidence to destroy the fallen minister in summer 1540. Among the most important letters to Henry is one of 17 March, running the gamut of current concerns from Ireland, defence and overseas trade restrictions amid international tension to preparations for Parliament.27 In it, Cromwell expansively promised the King that ‘I and other your dedicate councillors be abouts to bring all things so to pass that your Majesty had never more tractable parliament.’ As an example, he told Henry that he had ensured the election to Parliament of the man who was now the most effective international propagandist for the regime, Richard Morison, newly appointed to the Privy Chamber in reward for his efforts so far.28 In Cromwell’s necessary absence in the Lords, Morison would be the best government spokesman ‘to answer and take up such as would crack or face [brag or show off] with literature of learning or by indirected ways, if any such shall be, as I think there shall be few or none’.

  It is worth noting that Cromwell presented the government electioneering as the united work of ministers eager to smooth over possible electoral confrontations: ‘I and other your dedicate councillors’ – regardless (he did not need to add) of any religious differences they might have. To put it another way, from the outset of what turned out to be a highly polarized assembly, Cromwell was not as much in charge as he wished.29 There was a significant amount of careful government pairing of different interests in electing the two knights of the shire for each county, as the election in Kent showed. Gregory Cromwell was elected as knight with another newcomer to Parliament, Sir Thomas Cheyney. As a pillar of local and national government, Cheyney was a much more obvious choice than Gregory: Warden of the Cinque Ports and this same month appointed Treasurer of the royal Household, as well as leading actor in the King’s current obsession, building coastal defences. Cheyney’s appointment as Warden in succession to Lord Rochford immediately after Anne Boleyn’s fall was at the time ascribed to Cromwell’s decision, but much had happened since, and one important fact about Cheyney does not suggest he was at the top of the Lord Privy Seal’s personal list of candidates in 1539: he was a notorious religious conservative who fiercely clashed with that other Kentish power, Archbishop Cranmer.30

  Other results also suggest conscious pairing. In Norfolk, Gregory’s former long-term host Richard Southwell was elected knight alongside the classic Norfolk magnate (naturally therefore a relative and something of a client of Thomas Howard) Sir Edmund Wyndham. Both were presented to the electorate as choices of the King and Cromwell, but a complication arose, annoying and embarrassing both Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk: an unscheduled and typically egotistical candidacy by the Duke’s nephew, Edmund Knyvet, which they combined to see off, having him summoned to Star Chamber to explain himself.31 Sussex saw the election of the ever-reliable but traditionalist Sir John Gage as knight of the shire along with a local evangelical, William Goring of Burton, an old friend of Cromwell, and one of those who had played a useful part in destroying the Courtenay/Pole group.32

  Inevitably untidinesses abounded in a never predictable process. In Hampshire and Surrey, a long letter to Cromwell from William Fitzwilliam Earl of Southampton and the newly created Lord St John (William Paulet) dutifully described a broadly based process of sorting out borough and county seats, amid much other business on the coastal defence scheme; a further letter from Fitzwilliam the week before dealt with Sussex in similar terms.33 The reality was not so simple. Southampton and St John had been Cromwell’s friends, but their religious conservatism (plus the enormous faux pas by Paulet’s brother George in Ireland in 1537) was creating increasing distance in that relationship. They emphasized that they had given Cromwell the lead role in picking suitable candidates, but in Hampshire in particular there was the problem of Bishop Gardiner’s standoff with Thomas Wriothesley. Both Gardiner and Wriothesley were returning from embassies abroad. The Bishop was now in a position to assert himself after his long absence in France; he was still furious with his former servant for his desertion to Cromwell in winter 1536, and the detestation was mutual.

  A much less discreet view of Hampshire proceedings appears in two entertainingly malicious reports about the election from the county Sheriff John Kingsmill, addressed to Wriothesley himself.34 Despite being the returning officer by virtue of his office, Kingsmill was not a neutral party in religious faction: brother-in-law to William Goring and in later decades the foundation of the county’s Protestant ascendancy in Elizabeth’s reign. He sneered at the opposition to Wriothesley’s candidature in Hampshire, fuelled by fury from Gardiner and local clergy at Wriothesley’s destruction of Winchester Cathedral’s shrine of St Swithin while the Bishop had been in France. More generally ‘you are the man that is like to purge the cankered and rusty hearts from their old superstitions.’ Kingsmill described how much Gardiner’s return and the prospect of his influence at Court had heartened local traditionalists; these included not only the elderly Lord Sandys but also William Paulet Lord St John, who back in 1529 had been Cromwell’s benefactor in entering Parliament. Delighted that Wriothesley planned to turn up at quarter sessions, Kingsmill begged him to stay in Hampshire to ‘cause men to be bold in the good opinion wherein they know you bear of the best’ – that is, the cause of evangelical religion.35 Perhaps with the Sheriff’s help, the Hampshire election emerged as a triumph for Cromwell. The King’s intention early in March had been merely to place Wriothesley as burgess for Southampton, but he became knight of the shire along with another of Cromwell’s local servants, Richard Worsley.36 That seemed to bode well for containing any threat from Gardiner and his conservative sympathizers in Parliament.

  In the middle of electioneering, Cromwell’s senior clerk Thomas Soulemont passed on to Secretary Wriothesley the Lord Privy Seal’s confidence that ‘the Parliament will not last long,’ but events derailed his careful planning.37 Cromwell fell ill: he described his affliction in rueful letters of excuse to the King as ague and tertian fever, which in Tudor England probably implies malaria. As early as 4 April, John Husee told his ever-importunate employer in Calais that the Lord Privy Seal had not left his house for two days, and towards the end of the month he was confined to his house in London, unable to talk to the King at Richmond or steer Parliament, which formally opened on 28 April. It was 10 May before he finally risked even the short journey to Westminster.38 In the meantime he did his best, moving closer to Parliament in his old lodgings at St James’s Palace, and carrying on conversations with the German ambassadors when he could. Later he reminisced to the Germans that his illness had given the conservative bishops their chance to mould Parliament’s proceedings.39 Significantly the man chosen as Speaker of the Commons was for the first time since 1529 not a close ally of his: the lawyer Sir Nicholas Hare, a senior servant of the Duke of Norfolk and, unusually for the Speakership, only a burgess and not a knight of the shire.

  Whatever Cromwell meant in his remembrance of March about ‘A device in the Parliament for the unity in religion’, the erratic progress of discussion on six articles of religion in the House of Lords took a very different direction from any intended by him. The Duke of Norfolk introduced it, and Cromwell and Cranmer were increasingly marginalized in its formulation. Its commendations were all traditional: real presence in the eucharist, the acceptability of communicants receiving only bread without wine, compulsory clerical celibacy and perpetuity of monastic vows of celibacy, ‘private’ masses (such as Cromwell’s draft tract had omitted to discuss) and the importance of sacramental confession to a priest. Alongside the Parliamentary debates were meetings of the clergy in St Paul’s Cathedral which extended beyond the Convo
cation of Canterbury’s normal membership to include representatives of the Province of York. If this body had any name at all, it would have been a vice-gerential synod, just as back in 1537, but with events rapidly spiralling out of control Cromwell was not the dominant figure in the assembly’s proceedings. Even the abbots of the remaining great monasteries, not in evidence at all in the previous synod meeting, were active participants, and the synod’s conclusions broadly supported Parliament’s traditionalist line, with very few voices against.

  The Germans watched all this in horror and disbelief. Their last meeting with the King on 26 May involved a ‘hefftige disputation’ (violent row) about clerical marriage, whose prohibition formed part of the Parliamentary bill of the Six Articles. Cromwell’s pleas did not stop them leaving the country on 31 May, bearing letters of complaint from King Henry and of deep regret from the Lord Privy Seal, who assured the Elector of Saxony he would do his best to advance the Gospel.40 All informed analyses of this crisis for Cromwell’s and Cranmer’s programme of evangelical reform have put the spotlight back on King Henry, away from the long Protestant tradition which made Bishop Gardiner the chief villain; that view is reinforced by Henry’s personal confrontation with the Germans.

  As always, Henry decided which voices rang most loudly in his ears at any one time, and at the moment they were those of Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk. What needs explaining is his decision. The main answer lies in the festering crisis in Calais, where religious disagreements and wild public statements from both extremes represented exactly the mix the King hated.41 They centred on arguments about the eucharist. Henry was particularly adamant about real presence – that was why John Lambert had died – and this was actually where the Six Articles had originated, with a draft by Chancellor Audley on the single matter of the eucharist. The articles then expanded, possibly as a result of the King’s anger with the aggressive attitude of the German ambassadors; certainly the other five topics closely echoed the points under contest between the English and the Germans in 1538 and 1539.42

  Cromwell was now deeply involved in a partisan way in these Calais disputes, backing the evangelicals under investigation there with increasing recklessness. A combination of conservative prelates and lay magnates, some former friends of his like Sir Anthony Browne, was now ranged against him. Many of the names also hovered round the partisan correspondence of John Kingsmill about Hampshire and neighbouring counties. Prominent among them was William Lord Sandys, Hampshire man and Lord Chamberlain, but also Captain of Guines Castle in Calais. He would not have forgotten Cromwell’s demand that he surrender the cult-image of the Holy Spirit from his dynastic chapel at Basingstoke the previous September, to add to the destruction of such objects, any more than Gardiner forgot the dismantling of St Swithin’s shrine. The matter of Calais spread across southern England because evangelical networks were both interconnected and increasingly militant. The Calais radical Adam Damplip, for instance, was revealed as a client of Nicholas Shaxton, the notoriously evangelical Bishop of Salisbury, once Anne Boleyn’s protégé, but now dependent on Cromwell. John Goodall, one of Shaxton’s senior servants in Salisbury, a former MP, was arrested earlier that spring for unwise iconoclasm with a sacramentarian character in the Cathedral.43

  Events through June rolled out relentlessly against the evangelical cause. Fresh prisoners arrived in London not merely from Calais but from Bristol and Archbishop Cranmer’s diocese. These even included Thomas Brooke, one of the two MPs elected from Calais, who was brave enough to speak up at length in Parliament against the Six Articles and foolish enough to concentrate on eucharistic presence when he did so, despite Cromwell’s warnings. Bishop Shaxton himself was kept away from Parliament and Convocation in London by order of the Privy Council until the last few days when everything about religion was already decided, although the excuse had been plague.44 Cranmer’s German wife probably left England at this juncture, with one little clause added to Parliament’s prohibition of clerical marriage delaying its deadline, probably designed to let her depart with some dignity. Cranmer’s pioneering clerical marriage is famous, but the most prominent Archbishop in the Irish Church, George Browne of Dublin, was now also secretly a married man, eventually with three children. As the effects of the Six Articles legislation rippled out to Ireland, this handicap dramatically curtailed Browne’s capacity and willingness to push forward a Cromwellian-style Reformation in the island.45

  In this situation, not only Cranmer was in despair. Latimer and Shaxton resigned their dioceses, and suffered house arrest under the care of clerical colleagues. Alexander Alesius, urgently prompted by Cranmer, fled abroad with his wife, his experiences of Henry’s England seared into his memory. ‘Our Lord save you from all the power of your adversaries, Amen,’ Shaxton wrote miserably to the Lord Privy Seal in the first week of July.46 Cromwell did his best to counter-harass conservatives, for instance summoning up the aged and flamboyantly traditional parson of Cold Aston in Wiltshire for interrogation by the Privy Council, but the balance of advantage in such matters was now emphatically with his opponents.47*

  The Act of Six Articles continued to trouble evangelicals up to the early months of Edward VI’s reign, but mitigating factors may have consoled Cromwell and perhaps Cranmer too. First, close scrutiny of its terms would reveal that it did not actually reverse any of the measures of reform they had put in place in the previous few years. On the sixth article, the status of sacramental confession in the life of the Church, Henry exercised the Supreme Head’s prerogative of contrariness to side with the evangelicals, dropping a reference to confession being ‘necessary according to the law of God’. This probably reflected his deep distrust of the power of clergy, which declaring confession to be of divine institution could only enhance. He was also furious with Bishop Tunstall for openly opposing this change in the Lords, and wrote him a long and incandescent letter on the subject: a mark of how much he cared about the issue, for Henry normally loathed putting pen to paper.48

  Cromwell could also be consoled by the number of plans put in place before his illness, which went forward satisfactorily alongside the religious debacle. One was a second Act concerning monastic dissolutions. It did not itself dissolve any monasteries, but was an overdue recognition of doubts which the lawyers had expressed over the hasty surrenders made in the great deal between Cromwell, the Duke of Norfolk and Thomas Wriothesley in autumn 1537. All surrenders falling outside the terms of the 1536 Act were affected by similar doubts and, given how many had now happened, it made perfect sense to declare the King’s unblemished title to the estates he had gained. There was unlikely to be much opposition in Parliament to this: alongside the King and the favoured few who benefited from royal near-gifts, many others who bought or leased estates at commercial prices, plus a host of monks and heads of house who needed their pensions assured, would all hasten to cheer on the legislation.

  Above all, this bill offered no point of principle to which to object. Its deliberately undramatic preamble concentrated on the fact of dissolution without any comment on its rights and wrongs.49 Monasteries continued to stand for nearly a year, and no legislation in the English Reformation ever stated that monasticism in itself was a bad thing. That was helpful in later twists and turns of that strange evolution in Christianity called Anglicanism. Moreover, the Act was paired with a further piece of legislation offering hope for a new future to an elite group of monastic heads of house: a bill passed through both Houses on a single day, 23 May, giving the King authority to establish new bishoprics and therefore cathedrals (which could hardly be other than great monastic churches), plus any collegiate bodies Henry cared to create. Cromwell introduced this measure into the Lords. It reflected plans Cardinal Wolsey had made but never implemented, yet it was also close to the King’s heart. The expansive and visionary preamble promising all sorts of good results from the new foundations (education and biblical lecturing, poor relief and almsgiving) most unusually exists in the
distinctive royal handwriting. Henry took a great personal interest in subsequent discussions on who would be the lucky winners. No numbers or names were specified in the Act, one of the ways in which the future of the monasteries remained open that summer.50

  A further measure passed without trouble was a brief and innocently titled ‘Act for the Placing of the Lords in the Parliament’. For all that this might sound rather technical, it was a major shake-up in the order of precedence for the most powerful men of the realm, a matter of huge importance when political realities were expressed through public ceremony and formal rankings in seating and processions. The remarkable feature of the Act, a true Tudor Revolution in Government, was that offices of state would now automatically modify any other system of noble precedence: even the classic ladder of noble title from baron up to duke, where antiquity of creation decided precedence within every rung. Now, if a royal Chief Secretary were a baron, he was at the head of the barons. Likewise the Lord Chancellor, Lord Treasurer, Lord President of the Council and Lord Privy Seal, if peers, would sit above any duke apart from dukes in the King’s own family. This meant that service to the monarch outfaced any other form of dignity in the realm. Overmighty subjects, particularly those who preened themselves on Plantagenet blood, should take due note, assuming that they had survived recent events to be able to do so.