Thomas Cromwell
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Matters around the greater monasteries nationwide were nevertheless still open. That would discourage other senior figures from following this trio into desperate actions as much as the executions themselves. This is particularly noticeable among the reform-minded monasteries of the Cotswolds, with their long-intimate relationship to Cromwell. On 17 August 1539, the Abbot of Winchcombe wrote Cromwell a dignified reply to his ‘most favourable and loving letter’. He was not minded ‘for any preferment or any worldly affection or pleasure’ to surrender the house ‘of my own motion’, yet he would follow whatever was the King’s will and Cromwell’s advice, ‘of whom and by whom I count myself under God and the King to enjoy all that I have’. Their actual will and advice was still to be known, and one possible version of Winchcombe’s future that summer was implicit in the Abbot’s lease of all its demesne lands to Cromwell’s protégé Richard Tracey. Tracey was not sure whether the house would actually decide to surrender.12 In November, with the fate of the three imprisoned abbots under discussion, Cromwell made a note of remembrance for Winchcombe which still gave no indication of suppression, next to a very specific memorandum of the suppression of other great monasteries.
Winchcombe in fact surrendered just before Christmas. Abbot Munslow retreated as prebendary to a neighbouring great Benedictine monastery that made it through to a new cathedral status, St Peter’s Gloucester, with the prospect of a life not too dissimilar from the past.13 That same summer the Abbot and Convent of Evesham, another of the Cotswold elite, likewise still thought it worth writing to Cromwell to propose that their house be added to the list of colleges: Evesham Abbey could be a centre of preaching, of poor relief and of hospitality for Court and nobility.14 Abbot Hawford actually became Dean of Worcester, a ‘New Foundation’ cathedral previously a Benedictine monastic cathedral. All these new cathedrals were styled ‘colleges’, for that was what in constitution they were. Hawford’s other neighbour among the Cotswold abbeys, Stephen Sagar of Hailes, was noted at the dissolution in January 1540 as having kept the abbey in such good order ‘as though he had looked for no alteration of his house’. That was perhaps nothing less than the truth: the same letter of the royal commissioners dealt with the still unresolved question of who would be ‘master’ of the new collegiate cathedral of St Peter’s Gloucester.15
There were thus some stories resolving into continuation, but no one knew what to expect. One confident tale in Bishop Tunstall’s household as late as December 1539 was that Peterborough Abbey was not going to be refounded as a college after all, but would simply be dissolved; the reverse happened. Only a fortnight later, the head of that house made his New Year’s gift to the King, and was already described in the royal inventory as ‘the Warden of the King’s College of Peterborough’; there the cathedral stands to this day.16 Such uncertainties were the inevitable consequence of the lack of specifics in the Parliamentary Act authorizing new bishoprics the previous summer. The last monastic closures took place between January and March 1540. Surreally that same New Year’s gift-list still included gifts from three monastic heads of house – Waltham, Westminster and Christ Church Canterbury – and since two of those institutions survived, it is likely that the Abbot of Waltham expected continuance too; he was, after all, head of one of the most senior royal foundations in the kingdom, and his house was on the more expansive draft lists of new dioceses and cathedrals.17 In the event Waltham was the very last abbey to be suppressed without a successor institution, on 23 March 1540. Still no decision to close all monasteries had ever been made public.
Among the final houses to be closed for good, on 16 February 1540, was Thetford Priory. We have repeatedly visited this Cluniac house, mausoleum of earls and dukes of Norfolk for centuries, for which the Duke had made elaborate proposals in 1538 to survive as a college. Prior Burden was in a panic about dissolution in summer 1539, but was comforted by reassurances from Agnes Dowager Duchess of Norfolk (the Duke’s stepmother), ‘notwithstanding now that greater houses than this is, are suppressed in sundry places’. Then in an urgent letter, ‘now that the common bruit and voice is that none house of religion shall stand’, he appealed to her and the Duke, still hoping the priory could be a college, even if he was not its ‘minister’.18 The pleas were in vain. With surely deliberate delay, the suppression of Thetford was postponed to a few days after the Duke had left England on a brief and hastily organized embassy to France.
After Thetford’s surrender, the Duke maintained the priory church, whose fate was still not clear; he was granted the priory and all its extensive possessions in July 1540, as Cromwell lay in the Tower.19 During the 1540s, he and his stepmother took exceptional measures to preserve the family tombs at Thetford. Most were eventually transported 40 miles away to Framlingham in Suffolk, complete with their occupants, or replaced with brand-new tombs; in Queen Mary’s time in the swansong of his long career, the Duke rebuilt the choir of Framlingham parish church to receive them. That was trouble and effort enough but, even more extraordinarily, a different resting-place awaited not only the Dowager Duchess (as she specified in her will) but also her husband the second Duke, buried magnificently at Thetford in 1524: his coffin travelled from Thetford all the way to an alternative Howard family mausoleum she had provided for herself in the parish church across the road from her home at Lambeth, at the gates of Cranmer’s palace. There they lay amid many children and relatives already commemorated, and graves of relatives continued to accumulate in the Duchess’s Lambeth chapel. This double set of moves was the most extreme example of family relocation of tombs in the whole English monastic dissolution.20
Thetford’s closure in February 1540 and the failure to re-create it as a college, when Burton and Thornton Colleges continued to flourish and Henry’s ‘New Foundation’ cathedrals settled down into a refreshed existence, was a direct blow to the always brittle family pride of Thomas Duke of Norfolk. Whatever nuances there may be in Cromwell’s orchestration of the dissolution of the monasteries, his old enemy would see this as yet another deliberate insult to Howard honour from the Lord Privy Seal. Such injuries were dangerously accumulating, and more arrived in the spring of 1540. This was no time for Cromwell to confront his old enemy so recklessly, for in the same months a royal dynastic catastrophe became painfully apparent, emerging inescapably from Thomas Cromwell’s plans for the future of the realm. Those plans were dependent on successfully directing the King’s affections to Cleves.21
Everyone saw the Cleves marriage as another triumph for Cromwell’s campaign of reformation. Bishop Tunstall’s servants said gloomily that the Lord Privy Seal had contrived to get Henry married to ‘one of his own sort’, adding the unlikely detail that Duchess Anna ‘will not come into England as long as there is one abbey standing’.22 At the same time a message of evangelical triumph was literally being hammered home in a royal palace in the Westminster complex, as craftsmen hastily created a splendid ceiling for the chapel in the subsidiary palace of St James’s, where Cromwell had so frequently lodged in recent years (see Plate 44). With rare and modishly Italian magnificence it still celebrates the forthcoming marriage, amid a riot of Tudor emblems and, for the first time in such a display, even the harp of Ireland, a foretaste of plans for integrating the Lordship further into the King’s control. Three times the fatal conjunction of initials ‘HA’ leaps out of the panels; six times ‘BERG’, five times ‘GULICK [Jülich]’, four times ‘CLEVE’, but also four times there occurs the only specifically religious reference in the whole ceiling design: to the Word of God, ‘VERBUM DEI’. This was the programme for the reign of King Henry and Queen Anne: dynastic splendour and strictly evangelical iconography.23
The flagship dynastic enterprise had an attendant flotilla of purposes. One which Cromwell discreetly launched in December was yet another examination of the affairs and opinions of Bishop Tunstall, who only that summer had seemed so much part of the conservative triumph in Parliament – this while the Bishop was deeply engag
ed in drafting final marriage agreements with the representatives of Cleves.24 Matters went so far as the arrest and interrogation of his brother John Tunstall, parson of the comfortable Yorkshire living of Tanfield, together with several members of the Bishop’s household; events immediately following stopped any further move against Cuthbert Tunstall in its tracks, but the depositions taken have left us much useful information stretching back over a decade.25
At the same time there was discussion of a second German marriage, of the Lady Mary to Philipp, Duke of Bavaria.26 This would be an ideally similar match to the Cleves marriage: the Duke had not formally broken with the Papacy, but he was at odds with his Habsburg overlords. Remarkably, the Duke had journeyed in person with little fanfare to England and was currently in London. Mary seemed happy enough with this prospect, even consenting to meet him on Boxing Day in the garden of the (soon-to-be-former) Abbot of Westminster. On this occasion she went still further by allowing him against all protocol to kiss her – well, he was German, and a prince. ‘Since the death of the late Marquess [of Exeter] no lord of this kingdom has dared to go so far,’ commented Ambassador Marillac, an observation which illuminates both the exalted status of the Courtenays at Court before their fall and the reason why that fall was necessary.27
All remained well while the new royal bride embarked on her long and difficult overland journey from Cleves during autumn 1539. Her reception at Calais at the beginning of December was suitably splendid, and showcased Gregory Cromwell in his first international role, attendant on the principal notable, Lord Admiral Southampton. Ably assisted by his old tutor Henry Dowes, Gregory was assiduous in writing informative and even witty letters about developments, both to his father and to his wife (all sign of trouble there was past, with two sons already in their cradles at Leeds Castle). The welcoming deputation from Dover did suffer an ominous false start: they had to return to port for lack of wind, though at least this first experience of the sea reassured the young man that he was less prone to sea-sickness than his companions, as he reported proudly to his father.28
They had a fortnight to recover before Anna reached Calais. Here, amid the awkwardness of adjusting the social customs of two countries unfamiliar to one another, the Lady insisted on an informal supper, Cleves-style, with the leading men of the Court deputation. Lord Admiral Southampton and Ambassador Wotton reported this with slight discomfort to the King, listing all those at table to cover their backs against criticism: a roll-call of peers and veteran courtier knights, with Master Gregory last of all, ‘and Master [Richard] Morison should have sitten there, but there lacked room.’ Cromwell’s representatives at the festivities were being carefully kept in their place.29
So Anna and her escort finally arrived in Canterbury for Christmas, the Lady gamely bearing up against really vile weather with the aid of huge festivity, gunfire and a shower of presents including fifty gold sovereigns from Cromwell himself, Cranmer acting as postman.30 It was at Rochester on New Year’s Day that King Henry had his first and famously disastrous glimpse of his new bride. Amid many mysteries around that monarch, his taste in beauty is one of the least easy to fathom. The great passion of his life, Anne Boleyn, was not conventionally beautiful. Conversely, nothing in the remaining images of Anne of Cleves hints at anything to inspire such instant repugnance in 1540. Meekness had clearly appealed to Henry in his third effort at matrimony, Gregory Cromwell’s sister-in-law, but this time perhaps there was a lack of vivacity even outwardly perceptible, accentuated by a careful educational programme in dullness at the Court of Cleves.
It was to Sir Anthony Browne that the King first confided his utter dismay. Browne did nothing to contradict his master’s feelings, only worrying that his half-brother Lord Admiral Southampton would be in trouble for singing Anne’s praises from Calais.31 Cromwell was aghast at a grim royal response to his own cheerful enquiry on 2 January, and when he had a chance to take Southampton aside he duly berated him in what the victim indignantly saw as an attempt ‘to turn all the King’s miscontentment upon the shoulders of the said Earl’. It was not wise to have antagonized the Earl of Southampton thus. The leading men at Court subsided into discreet panic, to the accompaniment of outward triumphal celebration. Cromwell organized a 3-mile-long guard of honour of citizens of London on the approach to Greenwich Palace for the prospective bride and groom for 3 January. He controlled his feelings by manic supervision: an unsympathetic Spanish observer thought he ‘looked more like a post-runner than anything else, running up and down with his staff in his hand’, while the King looked openly glum.32
Frantic examination of the marital paperwork revealed no loopholes. Postponements of the wedding ceremony by a day were in vain, though they puzzled and worried the bride-to-be, stranded amid incomprehensible whispers and rather too comprehensible confusion. After some farcical missteps of choreography in which Cromwell nearly had to substitute for the aged Earl of Essex leading the Lady to meet her groom, all was accomplished in the chapel of Greenwich Palace, twenty-four hours late: the gloomiest royal wedding of the Tudor age, followed by the gloomiest wedding night.33 Matters did not improve. What could Cromwell do in these circumstances? This was about the most serious blow to his position that could be imagined, because his own protracted diplomacy had resulted in the King’s sexual humiliation. Over the next few months Cromwell’s delicate enquiries on that subject always yielded similar answers. It became increasingly apparent that the only way out of the situation was a full-scale annulment on grounds of non-consummation. That would inevitably put royal humiliation into the public domain, however discreetly handled.
The Lord Privy Seal would have to exercise immense self-control in the face of a growing wave of quiet Schadenfreude from his enemies among the small group of courtiers who had some idea of what was going on. He was most vulnerable to attack on the matter of religion. He made that clear to the most sympathetic audience he had, the various Schmalkaldic ambassadors, reinforced just then by Ludwig von Baumbach, a Hessian diplomat who joined them to bring worrying information about hostile moves against England by Charles V. Baumbach reported home that Cromwell had observed to them that ‘he sets great store by our opinions concerning matters of the faith, but the world standing as it does now, whatever his lord the King holds, so too will he hold, and die on that account.’34
Emphatically that remark does not mean that Cromwell in his royal service would blindly follow any religious policy the King dictated. He was saying precisely and with bitter realism that at this catastrophic juncture it would be madness to take any further religious initiatives of his own.35 The problem was that, under the pressure of desperate worry, necessary discretion was deserting him. Also part of his thoughts at this tumultuous time was a moment of fury preserved in the Act of Attainder destroying him the following summer, among a number of observations which sound all too like the Lord Privy Seal in a towering rage: ‘If the Lords would handle him so, that he would give them such a breakfast as never was made in England, and that the proudest of them should know’. There need not be a prize for guessing that the person uppermost in his mind was the Duke of Norfolk. This was said, according to the Act, on 31 January 1540.36
This combustible situation simply needed one trigger to set conflict in motion. That was provided by those old enemies Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Dr Robert Barnes. Over the previous year, Barnes was riding high: royal ambassador in Germany, catalyst for Gardiner’s humiliating ejection from the Council in August, with rewards (admittedly small and overdue) in the shape of cathedral prebends from the evangelical bishops.37 Now, from 12 February until Easter, the Bishop turned his wrath on Barnes, who was unwise to react badly to a traditionalist sermon of Gardiner’s. More evangelical preachers were then provoked into pulpit aggression alongside Barnes: William Jerome and Thomas Garrett in particular. They were a resonant pairing, for as Gardiner may have remembered (and may have reminded King Henry) they had preached in the North under the auspices of
that enigmatic Pilgrim of Grace, Sir Francis Bigod. Thanks to Cromwell’s forgiving attitude, they had continued in evangelical prominence thereafter, Jerome as Cromwell’s own Vicar at Stepney, and Garrett as chaplain to the now disgraced Bishop Latimer.
Cromwell realized how vulnerable this made him. He sent his son’s trusted servant Henry Dowes to Stepney to provide a detailed report on Jerome’s recantation sermon ordered by the King (the recantation did not save Jerome from the Tower).38 Simultaneously the King was showing himself aggressively uncompromising to the Schmalkaldic delegation: Henry ‘had been sufficiently advised by his learned men that ours [the German Lutherans] have gone too far with regard to priestly marriage, communion in both kinds and the private mass’.39 There could be no more learned man among the conservative episcopate than Stephen Gardiner, and in March Cromwell even went so far as to stage an extended dinner party in an attempt at fire prevention.40
Yet the minister’s fierce temper could always let him down when trying to relax among his intimates. The Gardiner dinner party and Jerome’s humiliating performance at Stepney just predated a furious outburst on 31 March, when according to the Act of Attainder Cromwell was at Austin Friars and heard that the evangelicals had been committed to the Tower. His shout reversed his words to the Schmalkaldic ambassadors about true religion: ‘If the King would turn from it, yet I would not turn; and if the King did turn, and all his people, I would fight in the field in mine own person, with my sword in my hand, against him and all others.’ There was more in the same vein, and waving of fists ‘as though he had a sword in his hand’; it sounds a perfectly plausible outburst of passion in the privacy of home.41 It was just at the moment Ambassador Marillac heard that in a major shift among the King’s ministers the two bases of Cromwell’s power, the Vice-Gerency and the office of Lord Privy Seal, were to be reassigned to bishops Tunstall and Clerk. The Vice-Gerency looked especially vulnerable.42