These provisions of course sent Thomas Cromwell shooting up the scale of precedence from the lowliest baron in the peerage, in more than one respect. The very first clause after the preamble’s opening verbiage spelled out that, because the King had made Thomas Lord Cromwell his Vice-Gerent, that officer and his successors should be placed ‘on the right side of the Parliament-Chamber and upon the same form that the Archbishop of Canterbury sitteth on, and above the same Archbishop and his successors; and shall have voice in every Parliament to assent or dissent as other the Lords of the Parliament’. The other bishops would trail along on the bench in accustomed measure of antiquity, but Cromwell would always outrank them. This was something to savour amid the tactical defeat over the Six Articles. The bill quickly cleared the Lords and Commons. If the Duke of Norfolk had been inclined to any harrumphing, he would quickly realize that the Lord Treasurer in the new system was himself; and at least Cromwell was now sitting on a bench healthily remote from his own.51
The precedence bill gave formal expression to a spectacular event which took place in the middle of its passage on 8 May, but which of course also reflected plans made before Cromwell’s illness. This was the most prominent display in the kingdom-wide bustle around defence, a muster of all military forces of London before the King himself. During a Parliamentary session, it attracted maximum attention and excitement, and was in fact the largest such muster in the entire century. It was orchestrated to show Lord Cromwell’s close collaboration with the City authorities: some might see it rather as expressing his dominance in London. John Husee’s excited report to Lord Lisle emphasized the place of Cromwell and his family: the Lord Privy Seal personally spent nearly £400 on wages, tips and new uniforms in City colours for the day for 1,500 men amid a total of somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000.52
The armed bands all mustered near Richard Cromwell’s home at Stepney, which made for the maximum processional value across the main streets of London to Whitehall, where the King viewed the vast gathering. Richard was prominent among the captains, with Gregory at his side making a ceremonial military reality of his new public role as a knight of the shire. Ralph Sadler headed the troops as they set off, commanding the artillery and guns repeatedly firing off rounds, most spectacularly in front of the King at Westminster. Cromwell dragged himself from his sickbed at St James’s to a ceremonial viewing in the park before the soldiers returned to the City – he was not yet well enough to attend Parliament or even to get as far as Whitehall, but he could hardly miss this triumph. The all-day event defined his place as one of the greatest armed men in the realm.
The equivocal consequences of this Parliament, which did deliver more or less what Cromwell had assured the King it would, were summed up by Henry’s peculiar attempt to put everything right among his principal advisers by abruptly summoning them all to someone else’s dinner party. Just after Parliament had ended on 28 June, he told Archbishop Cranmer to hold a feast at Lambeth Palace for all members of the House of Lords who were available, headed by Cromwell and the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. It is to be hoped that the Vice-Gerent and Lord Treasurer Norfolk between them ensured that the Archbishop got a royal subvention for this major occasion. It was charged with tension, amid the ongoing investigations into heresy, and as a means of reconciling the principal parties was the reverse of successful. The atmosphere that evening remained vividly with Cranmer’s secretary Ralph Morice, whose reminiscences of it fuelled the narrative of John Foxe in no fewer than three different places in his great book, though omitting a further conversation he thought better than to reproduce.53
First worth noting is this anecdote Foxe chose to ignore, evidently because it would complicate his straightforward narrative of his two Reformation heroes. The secretary overheard an exchange between the Lord Privy Seal and the Archbishop at the table which showed Cromwell at his most unbuttoned. His words combine brutal frankness and rueful envy:
You were born in a happy hour, I suppose . . . for, do or say what you will, the King will always well take it at your hand. And I must needs confess that in some things I have complained of you unto his Majesty, but all in vain, for he will never give credit against you, whatsoever is laid to your charge; but let me or any other of the Council be complained of, his Grace will most seriously chide and fall out with us. And therefore you are most happy, if you can keep you in this estate.
Here, in a moment of startling clarity, we are transported to the heart of early Tudor politics, as the leading men at Court eyed one another and judged the moment to plant a negative thought in the mind of their terrifyingly unpredictable royal master. The remark also parallels that glimpse of Cranmer and Cromwell when they quarrelled over what sort of bride was suitable for the King. They could fight because they were friends, and appreciated each other’s very different temperaments. They had just experienced a grave test that was not yet complete, and might still result in their destruction. Together, they might succeed in their joint project of reformation.
One wonders at what stage in the evening this conversation took place in relation to another, more public confrontation: a venomous row between the Lord Privy Seal and another principal guest. Foxe did not name him, but the content of the exchange shows that it was the Duke of Norfolk. Morice would have known the identity, and so, clearly, did Foxe. He chose to conceal it, a charitable instinct when he published the story in 1570: his former pupil the fourth Duke, Thomas Howard’s grandson, was currently languishing in the Tower of London on treason charges. It would have been tactless to depict the previous Duke in such a direct clash with one of the heroes of Foxe’s Reformation story, particularly because the tale included a reminder of Norfolk’s potential role in a papal election. The Duke seized on the general brief of the evening, which was to comfort the Archbishop and reassure him of the King’s favour, in order to make a malicious comparison with Cardinal Wolsey. Cranmer ‘was much to be preferred for his mild and gentle nature, whereas the Cardinal was a stubborn and a churlish prelate, and one that could never abide any noble man, and that . . . know you well enough, my Lord Cromwell, for he was your master, etc.’ ‘Etc.’ is always the sign in a Tudor text of further offensive material omitted, and there was offence enough already.
The Lord Privy Seal at first controlled his temper, riposting coldly ‘that he could not deny but he was servant sometime to Cardinal Wolsey; neither did repent the same, for he received of him both fee, meat and drink, and other commodities’, but he then made a wounding thrust at the Duke: ‘[Cromwell] was never so far in love with him [Wolsey], as to have waited upon him to Rome, if he had been chosen Pope, as he understood that he [Norfolk] would have done, if the case had so fallen out.’ This was a deadly blow: to Norfolk’s outraged denial, Cromwell furiously shot back in his most combative style, specifying ‘what number of florins he should have received, to be his Admiral [of the Fleet]’ to conduct the Cardinal to Rome. That was a characteristic grasp of detail long squirrelled away in his memory until it proved useful. The Duke, as Earl of Surrey, was indeed Admiral of England at the time of Wolsey’s second unsuccessful bid to be Pope in 1523. Horrified at what was turning into a full-scale shouting-match with dangerous political overtones, Cranmer and other peers intervened to calm things down; ‘yet it might be’, as Foxe or Morice observed, ‘that some bitter root of grudge remained behind, which afterward grew unto him [Cromwell] to some displeasure.’54
Now there was an understatement. The incident stripped bare the reality of a decade of mutual hatred and resentment. We must trace how the grudge festered in the claustrophobia of Court and City, and follow Cromwell to a meeting at the Council board twelve months later.
22
Downfall: 1539–1540
In an absorbing piece of detective work, two bibliographers recently reassessed a unique woodcut in the collections made by Samuel Pepys, now at Magdalene College Cambridge (see Plate 45). They have restored to the record one of the most striking exam
ples of Thomas Cromwell as patron of evangelical publishing, but, more than that, have illuminated England’s political situation in late 1539. The woodcut would be a remarkable specimen in any circumstances, because its vivid picture includes one of the earliest portraits of Martin Luther, still a friar, in mortal combat with the then Pope, Leo X, therefore dateable to 1521. The image is securely attributable to the great Hans Holbein, whom we have so often met in this story, but still more pleasing is the unexpected union of this woodcut from Basel in 1521 with English descriptive verses below, in a single printed composition. Meticulous argument narrows down the production to the second half of 1539 and to the evangelical London publisher John Mayler, the verses probably translated from a German original by the most obvious author of such things at the time, Miles Coverdale. Only Cromwell could have made this publication possible.1
This picture and poetry, binding Luther at his most combative into the developing literature of the English Reformation, is a perfect symbol of the evangelical possibilities that survived the debacle of the Six Articles that summer, and of the continuing future developments in Cromwell’s Reformation. It is surprising how quickly the conservative triumph began to stall.2 Several bishops who would have championed the Six Articles, including the extremely safe choices as successors to Latimer and Shaxton, went off to do their duty in their dioceses, while Cromwell followed the King on a long summer progress into Surrey, back up to Woodstock in Oxfordshire and Henry’s favourite retreats in that area. In August and September he enjoyed more strokes of luck than might have been predicted. First was an instantly failed coup, based on the same pattern of antagonisms we witnessed in the spring’s Parliamentary elections.
A conservative coalition of leading politicians was already in place. They included former friends of Cromwell now deeply alienated by his religious programme and his increasing dominance even in the King’s Privy Chamber. In August, ‘there was great murmuring in the progress time, and saying that the lord Privy Seal should be out of favour.’ Encouraged by this rumour, the Earl of Southampton, Sir William Kingston and Sir Anthony Browne secretly tried to persuade Bishop Tunstall over an intimate supper to make a bid ‘to have had rule and chief saying under the King’s Highness’. Tunstall simply refused to play along; ‘he draweth all towards [wholly joins the party of] my Lord Privy Seal, and will not follow them,’ complained one of his chaplains to a fellow-servant in disappointment at hearing the news.3
Cromwell may not have known of this failed initiative at the time, but simultaneously he scored a notable victory that probably explains Tunstall’s reluctance to lead a coup (quite apart from the Bishop’s rueful memories of King Henry’s stinging letter about the status of sacramental confession during the Six Articles debates). The Lord Privy Seal directly faced off Bishop Gardiner, who levelled accusations of heresy at that storm petrel of Anglo-German relations Robert Barnes. Barnes had been a royal ambassador that spring, and once more Gardiner completely misjudged the effect of outspokenness on the King. After the eclipse of Bishops Latimer and Shaxton, such heresy charges might have seemed a promising line to take; instead, they earned Gardiner expulsion from the Privy Council, at Cromwell’s request. Bishop Sampson of Chichester was ejected at the same time, for reasons unclear to the observer at Court who recorded it, but surely connected to Sampson’s current enthusiasm for backing Lord Lisle in proceeding against heretics in Calais.4
All this was good news for Cromwell. Then came a bonus: the death on 8 September of Bishop Stokesley, leading champion of traditional religion. The diocese of London now lay effectively at the Lord Privy Seal’s disposal, just at his moment of maximum favour. His choice to fill the see was Edmund Bonner, recently Edward Foxe’s successor as Bishop of Hereford, through now on mission in France. Bonner’s qualifications could not be more satisfying: a friend of Cromwell from Wolsey days, he had been a huge help during the efforts to save the Great Bible materials from confiscation by the Parisian Inquisitor-General. He was on excellent terms with everyone in Cromwell’s household from Wriothesley and Richard Cromwell downwards, and, best of all, was a bitter enemy of Stephen Gardiner. The good news reached Bonner on embassy at Compiègne by 1 October; loud were his thanks to the King conveyed via the Lord Privy Seal. Hindsight is a depressing gift; we know that Bonner turned very quickly to alliance with Gardiner and a pronounced and henceforward lifelong religious traditionalism, but that hardly makes sense in relation to what went before in his career. Cromwell cannot have known he was making a serious mistake.5
The developing royal match with Anne of Cleves also seemed very much the right move in autumn 1539. If anything promoted the Lord Privy Seal’s swing back to good fortune, it was the King’s decision to reward his months of advocacy of a Cleves marriage, bringing with it new approaches to the Schmalkaldic League. Henry made those drastic changes to his Privy Council in August just as he received the reply of his ambassador to Cleves, Nicholas Wotton, telling him that Anne of Cleves’s brother the Duke had appointed ambassadors for England to discuss terms. Wotton was as positive about the prospective bride as he could be, also letting his master know that ‘Your Grace’s servant Hans Holbein hath taken the effigies of my Lady Anne and the Lady Amalia, and hath expressed their images very lively.’6 (See Plate 20.) Amalia, then aged twenty-two and youngest of the Cleves sisters, was perhaps considered less eligible than Anne, two years older, so Anne would remain first choice, despite Holbein’s additional effort. As the Cleves delegation moved towards England, so once more did Franz Burchard and colleague from the Elector of Saxony. Both groups arrived in England on 18 September to warm welcomes from suitably distinguished people.
Cromwell met the Saxons on 20 September in frank and expansive mood, and told them the dire consequences for true religion of his illness in the spring. Enemies of the Gospel had their opportunity to try to remove him, together with Chancellor Audley and Cranmer: ‘yet nevertheless, up to now, no implementation [of the Six Articles Act] has taken place, and he is also taking the greatest possible care that the moment will not arrive for this now to happen.’ Cromwell assured them that he was back in charge: the King was not favouring those who had backed the legislation, and ‘some of these have since that time been excluded and discharged from the Privy Council.’7 Even Henry showed himself agreeable when meeting the Germans again, and so matters proceeded for the rest of the month. The marriage treaty was signed on 6 October, and both German delegations set out home, with further large-scale negotiations with the Schmalkaldic League once more a realistic prospect. Cromwell emphasized to the Saxons how important it was for the Cleves marriage to go ahead if the Six Articles were to be repealed. All that remained was for Henry’s fourth attempt at a bride to begin her journey to meet her betrothed.
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The alignment of forces in Cromwell’s favour continued to crystallize in a last tragedy of England’s medieval monasticism: the execution in late autumn of three abbots of great and venerable Benedictine monasteries, Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester.8 Their turnaround in fortunes was remarkable: the Abbots of Reading and Colchester actually attended Parliament in spring and summer. The sudden catastrophe may be explained by their bleak realization that summer that there was no likely future for their houses: that despair led them into varied and unconnected indiscretions, all of which provoked sudden retaliatory action from Cromwell’s agents at a time when he knew that conservative forces were marshalling against him. Was the final flurry of dissolutions from late autumn 1539 a reaction to the discoveries and the consequent executions? It is by no means clear that even Cromwell had any plan to make a clean sweep of all monasteries until that moment. Indeed in one sense, the clean sweep never happened.
The charges against Abbot Cook of Reading in September are particularly mysterious, though he had never been a particular favourite of Cromwell’s evangelical associates. His arrest may be a delayed spasm of the White Rose affair. Abbot Marshall of Colchest
er had a history of deploring the religious changes of the 1530s, and was charged with concealing abbey valuables. Abbot Whiting of Glastonbury was the most spectacular and surprising casualty: aged, much respected and a courteous if not intimate correspondent of Cromwell. In a gesture that would have appealed to Master Secretary’s sense of humour, he chose him to succeed Sir Thomas More as abbey Steward after More’s execution.9 The sudden turnaround in atmosphere at Glastonbury was striking. On 30 June, William Popley, a man in the counsels of both Lord Privy Seal and Lord Lisle, wrote from Court to Calais to soothe a West Country quarrel in which Lisle had taken great offence against Whiting: ‘the man is sage, circumspect, and of good estimation,’ Popley said reassuringly. Lord Stourton wrote much the same to Lady Lisle from the West Country the previous day.10
Mid-September saw a complete change. Richard Leighton, currently engaged in winding up Reading Abbey, had to write to Cromwell with a grovelling apology for praising Whiting to the King back in 1535, when he was vice-gerential visitor to Glastonbury: ‘which now appeareth neither then nor now, to have known God, neither his prince, neither any part of a Christian man his religion’. The new information was revealed by Cromwell’s ‘discreet inquisition’, presumably only in the last few weeks.11 Objects of suspicion piled up to incriminate the Abbot as the visitors searched the vast abbey and its estates: various traditionalist pamphlets and (unsurprisingly) an array of papal documents, but, more materially in every sense, a great deal of concealed plate and money. Dean William Capon had done the same on a smaller scale at the closure of two-year-old Cardinal College Ipswich (see above, this page); one can imagine the feelings of such an eminent figure nearing not only the end of his own life but nigh on a millennium in the life of his house. Capon, Cromwell’s friend and just about on the right side of Henrician politics, survived. Abbot Whiting had the most deliberately humiliating and cruel death on 15 November: hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor on Glastonbury Tor, from where he would have looked down on the beauty of the abbey and its lands stretching to the far horizon.
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