Thomas Cromwell
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In an atmosphere of intense political activity, everything was ripe for capture by factional forces as the King, with his own dark personal preoccupations, leaned first one way, then another. The effect of the Barnes/Gardiner conflict shaped royal choices in a new pair of committees to consider doctrine and liturgy in the Church: the majorities on them were conservative, and they quickly occupied themselves with harassing another evangelical cleric whose chaplaincy to the Duke of Suffolk did not protect him from hostile investigation.43 Worse still were the first signs of activity for commissions under the Act of Six Articles, which the previous autumn Cromwell had boasted he had rendered inoperable. Then a new session of the Parliament elected in 1539 opened on 12 April. Although the Commons would be much the same in membership, the Lords had changed in the meantime, and not in Cromwell’s favour. While it had lost without replacement the still substantial number of abbots who attended the previous year, the balance on the bishops’ bench had shifted towards conservatism. Just how much was not yet apparent in the public actions of Bishop Bonner of London and Heath of Rochester (a replacement for the reliable and high-profile evangelical John Hilsey), but the loss of Latimer and Shaxton was obvious.
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The agenda for Parliament was full enough without considering the future of religion. The King still had an urgent need for ready money for his coastal defences, having curiously shied away from fiscal demands on his subjects in the 1539 session, after initial exploratory noises about taxation.44 The arrival of major monastic estates in government hands could do little immediately to solve cashflow, so one of the first pieces of business was to get agreement to new rounds of taxes which required justification as usual in an explanatory preamble. This must conceal one uncomfortable reality whose disclosure would unnecessarily alarm the public: growing rebellion in Ireland across the Gaelic parts of the island was becoming extremely serious, and would need a major military response. Instead, after a couple of major redrafts, the preamble was a ragbag of all the usual suspects in such justificatory flimflam; as in 1534, Cromwell threw in the general idea of gratitude to the King from his taxpayers for all his energy in religion and defence, as well as a list of particular demands, Ireland figuring in a relatively minor capacity.45
The preamble was repeated more stylishly in a major speech prepared by Richard Morison and corrected in precise and rather pedantic detail by Cromwell himself: precisely the sort of task for which Morison was elected the year before, as the minister’s and the government’s mouthpiece in the Commons. It is in fact one of only two full texts of Parliamentary speeches from early Tudor Parliaments, the other being Cromwell’s sceptical speech about a French war back in 1523. In 1540, unlike that earlier effort, the government got everything it wanted in taxation, but at the price of widespread hatred for the man who clinched the grant.46 Writing in the seventeenth century of the first royal closure of monasteries in 1532, Thomas Fuller judged that Henry had tried that out with the intention of hiding behind his minister’s actions should the effort prove unpopular. His contemporary Lord Herbert of Chirbury considered that that same royal instinct was on display in 1540, and that the unpopularity of the taxation was yet another consideration to throw on the scales when Henry allowed Cromwell to be destroyed.47
Besides the tax grant was a huge volume of legislation both public and private: so much that Geoffrey Elton commented it was almost as though Cromwell knew this would be his last Parliament.48 It certainly demonstrated the minister’s frantic energy in trying to cope with the continuing pile of legislative needs built up over three years: the volume of demands itself witnessing how both King and people now saw Parliament as the forum for securing change. Among government bills, the most important concerned land tenure, principally a new right for the King’s subjects to use their wills to make decisions on leaving land to whom they pleased. This was a necessary royal retreat from the great kingdom-wide groundswell of fury against the Statute of Uses of 1536, which, as we observed, swept aside a century and more of legal evasions of feudal inheritance law. The Statute of Wills was a lasting and sensible modification of the King’s reasserted feudal rights, drawing the sting from the previous legislation; the mark of its success was how little it needed supplementing in later centuries.49
All this had to be accomplished alongside Cromwell’s two main challenges: to counter the King’s profound sense of disappointment in his chief minister over the Cleves marriage, and to defeat the build-up of pressure from his enemies. With his eyes placed around Court, he will have been chilled to see signs of the King’s renewed interest in that petite and lively lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne, the Duke of Norfolk’s niece Katherine Howard. The first administrative evidence of this came near the end of April in the most bizarre of personal gifts to Katherine: a grant of goods and chattels confiscated by a Sussex coroner from the homes of two fugitive rural murderers. It suggests the King impulsively seizing on the first bureaucratic instrument on his desk which was convertible to cash; one hopes that he added a bouquet of flowers.50
Such straws in the wind demanded counteraction. One move might seem a rare example of Cromwell ceding power to others. By a warrant personally signed by the King, arrangements were made for him to surrender the office of Principal Secretary, which he had held in title from 1534 and in practice from about two years before that. The office was regranted jointly to a pair of courtiers, but their names reveal that this was a consolidation of his power or an attempt to disguise it, not a concession, because they were his own principal secretary Thomas Wriothesley and his oldest principal servant Ralph Sadler. A mark of their subordinate relationship was a provision for Sadler’s formal seating: when the Lord Privy Seal was dining at Court, Sadler ‘shall accompany him at his table’. The Secretaries’ position in a formal meeting of the Council when it sat judicially in Star Chamber was down below every other office-holder present, although to provide the minimum political clout expected in their position they were granted knighthoods.51
Both new Secretaries were currently MPs, and the warrant appointing them arbitrarily modified the Statute on Precedence of the previous year, which had been designed to accommodate Cromwell’s exalted place as Secretary in the Lords. Now, remarkably, one of the pair would alternate week by week in Lords and Commons during a Parliamentary session. Given that Wriothesley and Sadler were Cromwell’s close associates, this move was designed to strengthen his position in Parliament, and of course it could also be presented as streamlining the King’s business. Later Tudor and Stuart monarchs returned to the arrangement of two Secretaries, with the obvious motive of avoiding dominance by any one single politician.
Nevertheless, Cromwell needed something much more thoroughgoing. In typical style, it came in the form of some wild improvisation, leapfrogging on the back of events that might have stayed unrelated, to ‘make or mar’. Within a fortnight of each other there were the bizarrely coincidental deaths of two elderly Essex noblemen: on 13 March, the Earl of Essex, Henry Bourchier (he broke his neck falling from his horse), then on 21 March, the Earl of Oxford, John de Vere. On consecutive days in April, the Crown united dignities enjoyed by these scions of ancient nobility in the person of Thomas Cromwell. It was a sign of the extraordinary instability of these months, and the way in which the King might reward whom he pleased amid the battle of factions. Cromwell could still win his master’s favour. On the 17th he became sixteenth Earl of Essex (the first Earl was granted the title back in the early twelfth century), with substantial county estates to match. On the 18th, he was granted the fifteenth Earl of Oxford’s title of Lord Great Chamberlain: titular (and, in the right hands, actual) head of the royal Household. The Garter ceremony on 23 April and his creation ceremony two days later emphasized the magnificence of the newly created Earl amid his peers.52
There was a price, and a heavy one. In a move strikingly reminiscent of the surrender of Hackney House in the middle of the Anne Boleyn crisis, C
romwell made a major sale of estates to the Crown, and they were no mean estates: his whole lordship of Wimbledon, with his great house at Mortlake.53 This might be presented as a logical consequence of his elevation to the Earldom of Essex. His barony was as Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon; now that that lesser title was a mere adjunct for his dramatic promotion to one of the oldest earldoms in the realm, Wimbledon became less emblematic. Yet it was still an astonishing sacrifice: sprawling acres that had brought him in triumph home to Putney in 1536 and the mansion on which he had spent so much. In 1539 Cromwell had bought substantial adjacent estates in Dunsford, Wandsworth and Wimbledon from the Duke of Suffolk, evidently intending permanently to extend his property block in this Thames-side corner of Surrey; those new acquisitions went to the King as well.54 The problem was that all these lands neighboured the King’s expanding empire of parks and palaces from Hampton Court through Richmond to his new fantasy palace at Nonsuch, all now forming ‘The Honour of Hampton Court’. After Henry’s death, safe from reprisals the Privy Council frankly noted that this great scheme had been an answer to the King’s increasing ill-health and obesity, to give him easy retreats not involving much travel.55
The other price to pay would be obvious to anyone not so desperate and besieged by the pace of events: his enemies were spurred into risking drastic action. So many of Cromwell’s bravura improvisations over the last twelve months had the corollary of enraging traditionalist nobility, moving them towards the conclusion that he must be stopped. Now his promotions were a wild lunge forward. This dynamic continued into the month of May, as Cromwell showed a new self-confidence in what amounted to a slow-rolling attempted coup against his opponents. It is significant that, just as in spring 1536 at a moment of intense political crisis, the State Papers archive thins out. Various interested parties subsequently saw to the removal of embarrassing evidence, and much of what we know has to come from reports back home of the French ambassador Marillac, absorbed and darkly entertained by the unfolding drama.
And what drama it was. The opening was a great tournament on May Day, long planned to celebrate the Cleves marriage and of course an unavoidable celebration, given that the King had still not fully disclosed his private agonies to anyone. Fifty noblemen and gentry took part, and Cromwell contrived that three of the six ceremonial challengers were his close associates: Sir John Dudley, Sir Thomas Seymour and, a notable public affirmation of the King’s confidence in the Cromwell brand, his own nephew Richard, who was only knighted during the course of proceedings.56* Among other conjunctions produced by this great ceremony and the meeting of Parliament in May, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk were together at Court for the first time in a long while. Quite exceptionally, two lieutenants of the King’s extended dominions were also making their way to London: Lord Leonard Grey from Ireland and Lord Lisle from Calais. Both of them suffered from getting what they wished for, for they had long been agitating to return to Court, confident that they could charm the King in explaining why all was not as it should be in their territories.
The case of Ireland would demand a great deal of charm. The evidence of Grey’s quarrels with the Irish Council stretched back years. Over the previous few months a string of alarming letters from the Lord Privy Seal’s informants in Ireland showed not just how much the military situation was deteriorating, but how Grey was obstructing the efforts of the Earl of Ormond and Archbishop Browne to further Cromwellian-style reformation.57 Cromwell’s promotion of Grey’s candidacy for Lord Deputy back in 1535 had been a bad misjudgement. On 1 April Grey was summoned back from Dublin. He arrived at Westminster surprisingly speedily, only about six weeks later. His position was then unclear; but then so was much else. Parallel royal summonses had gone out to the Earl of Ormond, Chancellor Allen and Vice-Treasurer Brabazon, but they said firmly that the developing crisis prevented them from coming, and interestingly the English government did not press the point. In Lord Leonard’s absence the situation in Ireland was becoming dire, nothing less than a Gaelic insurrection inspired by papalist religious fury.58
Steadily more damning news of Grey’s failure percolated to London. In one especially poisoned bullet of information after he had left, Archbishop Browne reminisced pointedly to Cromwell, ‘I cannot say that his Lordship favoureth that false traitor Reginald Pole, whom in communication between his Lordship and me I called papish cardinal; and he in a great fume called me poll-shorn knave friar; and shortly after that, his Lordship took his journey towards Galway and Limerick, where as it was commonly bruited, the said Cardinal should arrive, leaving there the King’s chief ordnance [artillery].’59 Perhaps this thrust provided the coup de grâce for Grey, though probably thanks to delays in the Irish post his arrest came two days after Cromwell’s own. The official announcement of it would be some comfort to Cromwell’s friends on the Dublin Council, reaching them two days after a previous letter from Westminster bearing news of their ally’s fall.60
Calais, such a running sore in recent English politics, now provided a decisive nudge for Cromwell’s plans: as in Ireland, the toxic name of Pole was the key. The unstable balance of advantage between conservatives and evangelicals tipped over against Lord Deputy Lisle and his household when one of his chaplains, Gregory Botolf, fled to Rome.61 When the news broke in mid-April, it became quickly apparent that several members of the Lisle household had known this was about to happen. This was even more straightforward than Archbishop Browne’s insinuations against Lord Leonard: Rome meant Reginald Pole, and Lisle’s family contacts already leaned so much in that direction. When Lisle obeyed his summons to London, he was full of expectations that his visit would prove much to his advantage, and in fact at first all seemed well; he was present on 23 April at the Garter ceremonies to witness Cromwell’s new triumph, and even sat in sessions of the Lords.
Then on 19 May, while Lord Leonard still tarried uncertainly at Court, Lord Lisle was arrested and interrogated, and Lady Lisle and their children detained in Calais. The rumours of a Pole conspiracy in Calais spread rapidly through London and nearly entangled Cromwell’s old foe Sir John Wallop, then on embassy in France: the Lord Privy Seal sent one of the royal Secretaries to Marillac to seek any news of him from Paris, and Marillac knew perfectly well what that was about. Cromwell’s sudden advantage struck down prominent conservatives previously untouched: Bishop Sampson of Chichester and Dr Nicholas Wilson, both closely linked to the Lisles, were arrested and sent to the Tower. The speed of this is underlined by the fact that the pair had just been marked for episcopal promotions – in fact Sampson was publicly recognized as Bishop-elect of the new diocese of Westminster on the very day of his arrest.62 Ralph Sadler promptly opened discussions with his old master about what to do with Sampson’s goods; the Duke of Suffolk wanted the use of Sampson’s mule.63 Calamity for traditionalists was spreading: a leading city merchant, Richard Farmer, was savagely punished by the Court of King’s Bench for maintaining a papalist chaplain, and two other citizens fled abroad, fearing a similar fate.64
Behind these casualties, a further target was Bishop Tunstall. Cromwell was scrutinizing the body of evidence gathered six months before, which he had been forced to lay aside amid the disaster of Anne of Cleves’s arrival. To emphasize to the public what all these moves meant, Archbishop Cranmer stepped into the pulpit at Paul’s Cross to fill a slot assigned to Sampson before his imprisonment, and the French ambassador heard a message very different from that preached by Stephen Gardiner in Lent. Marillac saw that a final resolution loomed, but he was still baffled as to what it might be. He was now certain that the chief contenders still at large were Cromwell and Gardiner.
The answer came on 10 June: a total reversal of direction. The first week in June, Cromwell was still interrogating Wilson and Sampson, taking his place in Council and Parliament and dealing with routine administration. His last surviving ordinary letter, on 4 June, is addressed appropriately enough to one of his oldest friends, Sir George Lawson, passing on sign
ed royal instructions for financing defensive works at Berwick-upon-Tweed.65 On 6 June he had a difficult and tense meeting with Henry, the King’s misery now all too obvious to those close to him at Court. The King at last made the excruciating admission that he was still impotent with the Queen, and allowed Cromwell to confide in one other royal intimate, Lord Admiral Southampton. Maybe the Earl of Essex actually refused to support an end to the Cleves marriage; one of Archbishop Cranmer’s senior staff had that impression.66 Either that day or the next, Cromwell returned from Court to Austin Friars: the burden was too much for him. In what should have been domestic privacy, he let his chief of staff Thomas Wriothesley into the secret. A couple of conversations followed about what might be done, but Cromwell could say little more than ‘it was a great matter,’ ‘and then brake off from him’.67
Here was a man staring into the abyss, as Wriothesley could see. Maybe it was at this stage that the Secretary made the decision to abandon a loser, just as he had abandoned Gardiner in winter 1536 – in effect, to reverse the decision which he had made then. Maybe his resolution had come earlier, and some at least of the antagonism we have seen between Wriothesley and the Bishop was not all it seemed. Another Bishop, Edmund Bonner, so recently appointed to London, might also have been instrumental in swapping alliances. His friendship with Cromwell went back to the 1520s, but in the past few years he and Wriothesley had become very close in diplomatic service.68 William Palmer, a minor courtier who hated Stephen Gardiner, wrote a venomous poem ventriloquizing the Bishop’s voice in events of the 1530s and 1540s. His verses sketched Cromwell’s downfall as a gradual betrayal; for once it was Cromwell and not Gardiner who misjudged an intimate friend. Here is ‘Gardiner’ speaking with relish of the betrayer: