Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Anthony Anthony said that Cromwell pointedly finished on a prayer ‘for the King’s noble Council; and put off his gown, and the hangman asked forgiveness’. Another version adds a very personal touch directed to Sir Thomas Wyatt, a protégé who may have owed him his life back in 1536: Wyatt was admirably prepared literally to stand by his patron and friend at this last moment. Allowing this courtier and ambassador to be there beside the scaffold may be another sign that the King was treating the death less gracelessly than he had done in early June. ‘He turned him about, and said “Farewell Wyatt”, and “Gentle Wyatt, pray for me”.’92 It was in that respect a suitably stylish end. According to Hall, the executioner needed forgiveness indeed, for he did an unskilful job. The occasionally reliable anonymous Spanish chronicler disagreed in his own eye-witness account, and said the head was off in a stroke.93 Either way, even botched beheadings are soon over.

  23

  Futures

  His body did not have far to travel: buried in the Tower’s chapel of St Peter-in-Chains (ad Vincula). Thanks to his busyness for the King in dissolving religious houses, the doors of Austin Friars church beside his great house were locked, its many monuments gathering dust. There were no friars to give him a kindly grave amid the bones of City merchants and pious gentlefolk, unlike so many earlier traitors. He lay near Anne Boleyn, the woman whose cause had brought him so high, and whose destruction he had choreographed.

  His own death did not end the killing. Two days later a notorious event embodied the King’s idiosyncratic notion of the ‘middle way’. Six priests were executed: three evangelicals for heresy, and three papalist Catholics for treason. They suffered the respective customary punishments: in the former case burning, in the latter hanging, drawing and quartering. Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrett and William Jerome were clearly identified with Cromwell, and their clashes with Gardiner had sparked the six months of violent political turmoil. Barnes, who unlike Cromwell had no family to worry about, gave the sermon of his life, vigorously affirming a clear Lutheran faith to ward off charges of radicalism with which his trio were being smeared. In a rhetorical masterstroke, he capped the assertion of his theological respectability by a plea for marriage to ‘be had in more reverence than it is; and that men, for every light cause invented, cast not off their wives’.

  That was deliciously ad hominem, as was Barnes’s plea that the monastery lands be put to good use. John Foxe recorded a surprising amount of not unsympathetic audience participation in Barnes’s performance. His burning remained a subject of contest between Catholics and Protestants for years, and added lustre to a reputation as a scholarly champion of Reformation which long resonated across Europe, even across the division between Lutheran and Reformed Protestants.1 Barnes’s death nevertheless signalled a significant change in direction for English Protestantism. He had known Martin Luther more intimately than any other Englishman, and represented Luther’s theology more completely than any other English theologian. His death removed a powerful English advocate for the Wittenberg version of the European Reformation, against other Reformations to the south, to which Thomas Cromwell had covertly reached out: Zürich and Geneva. It was the beginning of what has been called ‘the strange death of Lutheran England’.2

  Still the slaughter continued, as Ambassador Marillac noted. On 4 August came ten more executions for treason, one of which was a bastard son of Sir Nicholas Carew, another a Carthusian, and a former monk of Westminster seems to have been among their fellows: a sprinkling of names suggesting traditionalist victims, left over from previous political mayhem, rather than any relentless pursuit of Cromwell’s supporters.3 True, the destroyers of Cromwell now felt free to make prosecutions under the Act of Six Articles. In the diocese of London, Bishop Bonner and a traditionalist Lord Mayor elected in 1539 against the City’s normal reformist preferences instituted extensive action even before Cromwell’s death. In September, ex-Prior Robert Ferrar had to take evasive action in the diocese of York against charges of heresy levelled by a newly emancipated Archbishop Lee.4 Yet the striking feature about the London persecution is how swiftly it was curtailed – the day after Barnes and his fellows had died, and by the King’s command. In the political rather than religious sphere, not a single prominent evangelical politician lost his place at Court.5 After a vicious pamphlet war in bad verse about Cromwell’s religion broke out between Cromwell’s former pamphleteer William Grey and Thomas Smith, a minor gentleman in Court service, the Privy Council intervened to shut them both up.6

  This must reflect a conscious royal decision not to allow the conservative counter-coup to become more than a surgical excision of the Lord Privy Seal. The Privy Council was left balanced between evangelicals and traditionalists; a fortnight after his execution, on 10 August 1540, its proceedings were bureaucratized as they never had been under Cromwell himself, by instituting a minute-book of proceedings with its own clerk. That would give the King a chance to scrutinize their proceedings, if he ever felt they were trying to act beyond his control.7 Rumours that Cuthbert Tunstall would succeed Cromwell as Vice-Gerent in Spirituals proved untrue. No one individual apart from the monarch ever again held the fate of the Church of England in his hands, for no one else ever enjoyed this innovation in English office-holding. Its archive disappeared from sight, remnants resurfacing only in the twentieth century.8 The Vice-Gerency was a Tudor Revolution in Government that never happened.

  By contrast to Cromwell’s own fate, during his last lonely weeks in his cell in the Tower, favour for his friends went on trickling placidly through royal bureaucracy. One as close to him as his nephew Richard was granted a licence to alienate (sell or convey) a Huntingdonshire manor on 23 June, and Richard had a further licence on 28 June, although on this latter occasion he took the sensible precaution of being named Sir Richard Williams, rather than Sir Richard Cromwell alias Williams, as he had been only five days before. The 28th of June was, after all, the day before his uncle’s attainder passed all its stages in Parliament.9

  It was not simply that Norfolk and Gardiner failed to secure a witch-hunt against Cromwellians: Cromwell’s friends and allies moved forward into new positions as crucial as the two vacant lieutenancies in Ireland and Calais. That was settled within a fortnight of Cromwell’s arrest, when Sir Anthony St Leger was given the funds to take him to Dublin as Lord Deputy, an appointment first canvassed in 1538 (to Lord Leonard Grey’s fury); Henry Fitzalan Lord Maltravers set off with appropriate finance for Calais.10 St Leger was simultaneously made Keeper of Leeds Castle, no doubt easing the fears of Gregory Cromwell and his wife about their immediate future. A month later Sir Ralph Sadler was granted the Clerkship of the Hanaper, one of Cromwell’s first formal offices back in 1532, and which he had been clutching jealously ever since.11 Naturally, courtiers once friends but prominent in the betrayal were also involved in this redistribution, the chiefest beneficiary being the Earl of Southampton, who succeeded as Lord Privy Seal. It would be easy to justify the grant of Austin Friars in July to Thomas Wriothesley; he knew the house very well.

  Yet those perquisites of the coup run alongside some rather unlikely pieces of continuity: the King reappointed Cromwell’s leading domestic administrators to their previous jobs. His late controller John Ryther was to be Keeper of Austin Friars and, jointly with his late Steward Henry Polstead, Ryther had oversight of all the attainted Earl’s lands. We know from the minute-books of the Privy Council that one responsibility for Ryther and Polstead was to look after the fallen minister’s archive at Austin Friars while it was further sifted for useful material.12 This is strikingly like a grant nine years before, giving oversight of Cardinal Wolsey’s late lands to the person who knew them best, Thomas Cromwell. Other smooth promotions that same August were of Henry Polstead’s brother Thomas as King’s Attorney of the Court of Wards, and Cromwell’s patronage secretary Anthony Bellasis, stepping over the ashes of Thomas Garrett to become Rector of the plum Worcestershire living of Hartle
bury.13

  This delicate tidying of debris from the Earl of Essex’s fall was an indication that the evangelical revolution had some sort of future, as long as it avoided showing too much open regret for the late minister. In a significant negotiation of the new situation, a further edition of his beloved Great Bible appeared soon after his destruction – with one noticeable alteration. The monumental title-page, as we have seen, originally displayed two cartouches of the arms of Cranmer and Cromwell, identifying their figures distributing Bibles to the kingdom. Now, anticipating modern airbrushing of photos, Cromwell’s arms were simply removed from their cartouche, leaving a blank oval amid the busyness of the design. It was so obvious as to be almost a statement. A further eloquent evangelical adjustment of it can be found in a spectacular Bible designed specifically for the royal library. In 1541 the evangelical printer Anthony Marler secured a publishing coup in persuading King Henry to reissue Cromwell’s order for a Bible in every church, with a very effective additional refinement that parishes would be fined forty shillings for not buying one. To many observers, this was the moment when the order really became effective after half a decade of nationwide procrastinating.14

  Such a success deserved a thank-you present for the King, and in a spectacular and intricate job of printing Marler printed off a special presentation copy of his Bible: three volumes on vellum, no less. He realized that his artist’s embellishment of the pictorial title-page needed some tactful manipulation. Not only did he replace both heraldic cartouches with some innocuous foliage, but he altered the very recognizable clean-shaven figure of Thomas Cromwell receiving the Bible from the King to someone else entirely, sporting a beard. Tatiana String suggests that it may be the bearded John Lord Russell, who from late 1542 held the office of Lord Privy Seal once enjoyed by Thomas Cromwell. In fact, amid the swings of policy that characterized the last years of Henry’s reign, Marler gained no further advantage from the King, but it was a spirited try.15

  Once Cranmer, the Church and Parliament had so speedily delivered the King his marriage annulment, and after Queen Anne had made her happy co-operation clear, Henry’s venom began to evaporate, as he turned from enjoying his latest wedding on 28 July to reports of his late minister’s dignified last performance that day. Behind all the attainder’s bluster about treason and heresy, it was the Cleves marriage that had brought Cromwell down. Appropriately enough, during August 1540, the splendid furniture of his house at Austin Friars was raked through to set up the Lady Anne in comfort in her new country house (Bletchingley, Surrey, available thanks to the recent execution of Sir Nicholas Carew).16

  Comparison with the title-page of the 1541 edition of the Great Bible, where the removal of Cromwell’s arms has left an embarrassing oval blank cartouche in the design, shows how the title-page of Anthony Marler’s presentation copy for Henry VIII has not only filled the blank with foliage but replaced Cromwell with a bearded figure.

  One is tempted to date Henry’s regrets slightly earlier, to a letter from a man who on other occasions profoundly irritated him, Sir John Gostwick. Gostwick had enjoyed friendly relations with Cromwell since Wolsey days, but he was a religious conservative who began harassing evangelicals as early as 1536 and thereafter among those steadily more alienated from the Vice-Gerent’s forward religious policy. On 9 July 1540 Gostwick wrote to the King in his capacity as Treasurer of First Fruits and Tenths, letting him know with smug venom that he had been concealing some funds from these taxes ‘which, if I had declared unto him [Cromwell], he would have caused me to disburse by commandment without warrant, as heretofore I have done’. That would certainly be consistent with Cromwell’s easy-going attitude to authorization in government, but Gostwick no doubt calculated on it reinforcing current accusations in the attainder Act about the fallen minister’s arrogation of royal authority.17

  Now this money needed disbursing, and over four pages Gostwick laid out a frighteningly wide spectrum of payments already made and costs to be met, from naval defences to the royal tomb to repairing fences in Kent. Throughout resounded the deferential but relentless ‘Item, to know your Majesty’s pleasure . . . whereof I must humbly require your Majesty’s warrant . . .’. The King’s fury at Cromwell’s procedural highhandedness may have been somewhat mitigated by the depressing realization that his minister was no longer around to make decisions like that. The next few years proved full of administrative drift in the regime. That reflected a general incoherence of political and religious decision-making in Henry’s government as it lurched between factional conflicts in Privy Council and Privy Chamber.

  As late as May 1546, the King noticed a lamentable laxity in stock-taking of his possessions since Cromwell’s days. Among preparations for other comprehensive measures of inventorying, Master of the Jewels Sir John Williams found himself facing a high-powered commission of Privy Councillors headed by Lord St John, whose warrant coldly noted that no proper survey had been made since the time of the previous holder of Williams’s office: ‘Sir Thomas Lord Cromwell, attainted’.18 More seriously, the 1540s saw a new revenue-raising measure that Cromwell had always kept at bay, with the exception of one desperate expedient in the Lordship of Ireland: a debasement of England’s silver coinage. This accelerated in King Henry’s last years, and continued into the next three reigns, disastrously disrupting the economy. Debasement was a cynical confidence trick against the monarchy’s subjects whenever money returned to the mint for recoinage, and was ultimately deeply damaging to government itself. Although Northumberland’s regime tried to grapple with the problem under King Edward VI, it took some determined work on Queen Elizabeth’s part to make an end of it – one of the achievements of which she was most proud.19

  In the months after Cromwell’s execution, the King’s change of attitude to the treacherous and heretical ‘shearman’ became palpable. It was revealed in November 1540 when he picked Sir Richard Cromwell to be Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire for a second time.20 Henry’s continuing dissatisfaction with the ministers now haplessly coping with his histrionics reached the ears of Marillac, ever alert for English political comedy. He reported in winter 1541 that the King had reproached his Council for Cromwell’s death, ‘saying that, upon the pretexts of trivial faults that he had committed, they had laid several false accusations on him, by which he been made to put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’.21 Self-pity has a talent for rewriting events. Such a mood, acutely observed for the appropriate opportunity, was a perfect matrix into which Lady Ughtred could insert a plea for royal favour for her husband and family, left stranded by the Lord Privy Seal’s fall.

  Elizabeth Seymour always inspires admiration; in 1537 she had likewise shown herself past mistress of timing in her overtures to Cromwell. Her letter in autumn 1540 was carefully judged, tailored in its brevity to Henry’s notoriously short attention-span, as well as handsomely penned by her secretary above her own confident signature.22 After deploring Thomas Cromwell’s ‘heinous trespasses and most grievous offences’, she warmly thanked her royal brother-in-law for extending ‘your benign pity towards my poor husband and me, as the extreme indigence and poverty wherewith my said father-in-law’s most detestable offences hath oppressed us, is thereby right much holpen and relieved’. Once the King was less burdened by his ‘most high and weighty affairs’, she hoped for his ‘accustomed pity and gracious goodness towards my said poor husband and me, who never hath nor (God willing) never shall offend your Majesty’. And Lady Ughtred took the plunge into signing herself ‘Elizabeth Cromwell’.

  It worked. On 5 December the King (during a brief Surrey holiday with his young bride) put his signature to the grant of a new peerage. Gregory Cromwell, not even knighted at the time, was to become Baron Cromwell. Henry was also generous this month to Sir Ralph Sadler and Stephen Vaughan. A fortnight after Gregory’s grant, the Privy Council gathered at Whitehall (instructed that month to do so whenever ‘they had advertisement of the
same from his Highness’) to witness its finalization. The meeting was not recorded in their new minute-book, but would have afforded immense entertainment to the shade of the late Lord Privy Seal. Present as signatories were not merely such old friends as Cranmer, Audley, Suffolk and Sir John Gage, but a number of deserters such as Southampton and St John – and, most deliciously of all, the Duke of Norfolk.23

  The end of Elizabeth Seymour’s letter of autumn 1540, successfully pleading for Henry VIII’s ‘accustomed petie and gracious goodnes towardes my saide pore husbonde and me, who never hath nor Godde willynge never shall offende your Maiestie’. She signs herself ‘Your most bonde woman Elysabeth Cromwell’.

  Unlike his father’s barony in 1536, Gregory’s peerage was not given a location, which probably reflects ongoing discussions about which fragment of his father’s huge accumulation of lands he should have. He already possessed two or three estates in joint tenure with his father. One was the Welsh lordship of Rhymney, the first significant property Thomas had obtained, back in 1532: it took some time to regain a firm hold on Rhymney, but by 1544 it was assured to Gregory at least for life.24 More significant, though perhaps of less sentimental value, were the Norfolk lordship of North Elmham and Rutland lands at Oakham. The Crown also held back from challenging title there, and a couple of months later Baron Cromwell was also granted his father’s recently acquired property of Launde Priory in Leicestershire. This was a monastery that Thomas had known well since at least Wolsey days; its aged Prior had only surrendered after around forty years in post during the final scramble of dissolutions in December 1539. Just before that, Cromwell made a special note among a set of beneficiaries of suppressions, ‘myself for Launde’.25