Thomas Cromwell
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Launde was a sensible choice, a fresh start in a new shire. To move to the former episcopal mansion at North Elmham would have unnecessarily annoyed the Duke of Norfolk, so Gregory and Elizabeth made their home in Leicestershire. Gregory died there in 1551, in the same summer epidemic of sweating sickness which tragically carried off the two Brandon boys of the ducal Suffolk line; he was little more than thirty years old. His grieving widow commissioned a monument in the private chapel they had created from the choir of Launde Priory church, and there it still stands. One of the finest products of England’s Protestant Renaissance, devoid of popish imagery, it centres on a sumptuous display of Gregory’s heraldry. Elizabeth, who herself survived a bout of the illness, placed her initials ES in central position on the tomb, which is probably an eloquent comment on the realities of this eventful marriage. The epitaph could not be simpler, simply reciting Gregory’s name, titles and date of death; strikingly it does not record the name of his father.26 (See Plate 28.)
After all that had happened, Gregory cannot be regarded as a fool for keeping a reasonably low profile in mid-Tudor politics, but he had not been invisible. He took an appropriate part in county government; his uneventful rural life can be glimpsed in surviving letters of his tenants in one Northamptonshire manor. They were the Johnson family, who like himself were more exotic than they seemed: sprung from Dutch roots, with a background in Calais and London commerce, and closely linked to such old Cromwell associates as the Cave family and Sir John Gage.27 Gregory conscientiously attended Parliamentary sessions between 1542 and 1547, though he gave a proxy to his brother-in-law the Earl of Hertford in 1544, when he may have been in poor health – that same year he also asked for an exemption from serving in the King’s French war.28 The fact that Gregory sat for a charmingly informal miniature portrait from Hans Holbein the Younger in 1543 suggests that he was then also no stranger at Court (see Plate 26). It was the high noon of King Henry’s sixth and last attempt at matrimony, with the eirenic if evangelically inclined Katherine Parr. The Parr family had long enjoyed excellent relations with Gregory’s father, while Queen Katherine’s connection to Lord Thomas Seymour is the stuff of romantic fiction.
Suddenly, at Henry VIII’s death, Gregory was especially visible. As the King’s coffin solemnly processed from its lying-in-state at Westminster on 14 February 1547, six noblemen bore the staves of the canopy above it; one was Lord Cromwell. The ceremonies at both the funeral and young King Edward’s coronation were deliberately traditional, to emphasize the unity of the realm in a moment of transition; placing this young peer at the centre was therefore a notable intrusion of a past memory unwelcome to many peers both temporal and spiritual. At his nephew’s coronation a week later, Gregory was one of the leading men of the realm dubbed a knight of the Bath.29 Later, in May 1548, he and his wife were granted a fine new estate in Rutland, much expanding their Midland holdings; nor was this a regrant of any of his father’s confiscated lands – rather it was a former possession of the Bishop of Lincoln.30 True, Gregory was the new King’s uncle and brother-in-law to the new Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, but here is a wider symbolism. Baron Cromwell was unlikely by temperament or inclination to be a high flyer in the Edwardian regime, unlike his exact contemporary Henry Grey Marquess of Dorset and Duke of Suffolk, but he was still a Cromwell.
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What happened in the opening weeks of 1547 was a coup of Cromwellians against Thomas Cromwell’s enemies: a brisk reversal of the debacle of summer 1540. Just as then, they built on the pre-existing whims of Henry VIII, but to opposite effect. Old King Henry retained his wits almost to the last, but terrible health and constant pain in his last months of life magnified the habitually errratic quality of his decision-making and the arbitrary violence of those decisions. Through 1546 they swayed from his final bout of burning evangelicals for sacramentarian heresy, with the possibility that even Queen Katherine might be brought down, to the Earl of Surrey’s sudden arrest in December. Surrey had with increasing recklessness staked his claim to royal blood, and by implication a claim to be Lord Protector for the prospective young King Edward VI. When he was arrested, so was his father the Duke of Norfolk, utterly bewildered by this turn of events. Meanwhile, Bishop Gardiner, with hopeless timing once more refusing a royal demand to exchange some of his episcopal estates, brought his own disgrace; he was removed from the list of councillors to govern the realm in the event of a royal minority.31 Surrey was executed just before the old King’s death; the government then spared Norfolk and Gardiner, though they both spent the whole of Edward’s reign in the Tower.
When Henry died in January 1547, the eclipse of the Howards and Gardiner should still have left a Council carefully balanced according to the King’s wishes, but that did not happen. Already in December the imperial ambassador could see that the coming regime was going to be dominated by Edward Seymour and John Dudley. As the King lay dying, careful adjustments were made to his will, signed with the dry-stamp version of his signature, much used when he was disinclined to sign or incapable of doing so. A new clause allowed one councillor to act alone, so long as he gained permission from the majority of his colleagues. With events having swept aside Gardiner, new recruits to the Council made that possible: Sir William Herbert, Sir Anthony Denny and the Kentish brothers Nicholas and Edward Wotton. Denny was a veteran evangelical in the Privy Chamber; the name of Wotton will by now be familiar from Cromwell days.32 Soon Edward Seymour was recognized as Lord Protector, with a new title: Duke of Somerset. Little more than a fortnight after King Edward’s coronation, the arch-betrayer of 1540, Thomas Wriothesley, lost his current position as Lord Chancellor, on trumped-up charges of misusing his office. He had clearly gained a taste for betrayal, because just a few months before he had been behind Surrey’s arrest too; much good had it done him.33
The realm was in the hands of evangelicals, who with careful pacing over the six years of Edward VI’s reign laid down a religious ‘Revolution in Government’ of unmistakably Reformed Protestant character.34 The young King vigorously backed their aims, with increasing personal intervention. Their chief partner overseas was not now any Lutheran polity: the Schmalkaldic League had in any case been consigned to history by its defeat at the hands of Charles V in 1547. Instead, England looked to that city of Zürich which had first made an unexpected connection to the far-away island thanks to Cranmer and Cromwell. Now the Grey family enthusiastically sustained those old personal links with Heinrich Bullinger and the Reformed Church in the city. Only Edward’s death and the ineptitude of John Dudley and Henry Grey in establishing the royal succession brought this revolution juddering to a halt, with the unexpected success of the Lady Mary in seizing the throne from Queen Jane Grey.
Mary’s death in 1558 brought to the throne the last of Henry’s children, Princess Elizabeth, to re-establish a carefully static version of her half-brother’s dynamic Protestant revolution; in the words of her favourite royal minister Sir Christopher Hatton to a not over-sympathetic House of Commons, the Queen ‘placed her Reformation as upon a square stone, to remain constant’.35 Elizabeth had good reason to detest the nexus of politicians with Cromwell at their centre who had first destroyed her mother and then tried to divert the succession from herself and her half-sister; yet she was irreversibly tied to them in her role as Europe’s leading Protestant monarch; and, like Cromwell, she was a Nicodemite who had kept quiet about her Protestantism in her sister’s return to Roman Catholicism. At least some of the old resentments fell away when she was drawn into an intimate and indeed passionate relationship with John Dudley’s son Robert, but quite apart from his place as favourite and leading Councillor, much else bound her to the Protestant elite of her father’s Court.
Cromwell’s evangelical religion had included a strange sort of Nicodemism, which ran alongside and contributed to the Reformation that he promoted openly and aggressively in the name of Henry VIII during the 1530s: it was hidden in plai
n sight. Its permanent results became apparent only after his death, in the Reformations under Edward VI and Elizabeth.36 These later developments of the English Reformations fulfilled many venerable Lollard hopes, including the destruction of sacred imagery and the promotion of a Reformed sacramental theology which the old King had murderously loathed. Because of this posthumous result, Cromwell’s religious programme must count as the most successful Nicodemite enterprise of the whole Reformation. While the Italian Reform of the Spirituali and their Nicodemite fellow-travellers was in the 1540s and 1550s exposed, crushed and scattered abroad by the Counter-Reformation, to diffuse into central European Reformed Protestantism and into varied Unitarianisms in eastern Europe, Thomas Cromwell’s Nicodemite version of Reformed Protestantism endured. Under the tutelage of his most accomplished imitator, Queen Elizabeth I, it became the Church of England.37
Elizabeth was herself the product par excellence of King Henry’s break with Rome, which break she repeated on her accession, though she and her advisers shrank from the title of ‘Supreme Head’ that Henry and Cromwell had created for the monarch and opted merely for ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England. Many of her leading politicians, particularly the brothers-in-law Sir William Cecil and Sir Nicholas Bacon, saw their careers in government administration begin in the evangelical circles around Cromwell: Nicodemites all. In her first two decades she was also served by that erstwhile friend of Cromwell’s, William Paulet, now formidably old as Marquess of Winchester, but also formidably in charge of her treasure. If the Queen met the wife of Paulet’s son John, then she was face to face with Elizabeth Seymour, who embarked on a third marriage after Gregory Cromwell’s death, and finally lies in the Paulet family vault at Basing in Hampshire. On her coffin, Elizabeth’s Cromwell baronial title trumps both her third marriage and her old customary address as Lady Ughtred.38*
What else endured into Elizabeth’s reign and beyond? By now the reader will have seen Geoffrey Elton’s particular vision of a bureaucratic ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’ dispersed, for all the fruitful consequences of that thesis in historical argument over the last half-century.39 There was revolution enough, in Cromwell’s steady, careful plans to make all the Tudor realms work in the same way, on the model of England, which was a polity with a unique degree of centralization in Europe and, by the standards of the time, exceptionally well run even before Cromwell took over its supervision. Symbolic of his work was the first reliable service of relays of horses for royal messengers ‘riding post’ on certain vital routes, for example to Berwick or Dover from London, inaugurated in 1533.40 The drawing together of the realm was easiest for the little enclave of Calais, and it was hardly Cromwell’s fault if later government incompetence left Queen Elizabeth permanently resentful at her sister’s loss of this last English continental possession. Wales was a larger-scale task, but with due caution its shiring, with local sessions of JPs on something like the English model, was successfully rolled out in the 1540s after the principal author’s death. That system endured into the twentieth century.
There were plenty of incentives for Welsh gentry and higher clergy to feel enthusiastic about the proposed changes. They reinforced existing paths of Welshmen to social advancement, particularly in the Church and the law, affording plenty of access for the talented to the English universities – especially Oxford, where certain colleges had long been hospitable to the Welsh, and one founded in Elizabeth’s reign, Jesus College, became peculiarly their own. We have seen numerous connections between Cromwell’s administrative team and the Welsh: not merely the ambiguous asset to Wales of y Doctor Coch, Ellis ap Rhys, but also his southern namesake John ap Rhys. Sir John went on from the Vice-Gerent’s service to become not only Secretary to the Council in the Marches, but an enthusiastic historian and evangelical author of the first printed book in Welsh, which vigorously defended worship in the Welsh language.41 In an overwhelmingly traditionalist society apparently remote from the sources of early Reformation fervour, there were already enough influential and motivated evangelicals to mould the future of Welsh religious identity into Protestant and not Catholic forms. Cromwell played his part in that.
Ireland was a totally different story. The degree of separation was much greater than between Wales and England: because of the far greater distance not merely between Westminster and Dublin (to say nothing of the distance between Westminster and Galway) but between the two cultures within the island. One was a decayed version of high medieval England; the other was a Gaelic society of much greater antiquity. Their relationship to the English Crown was radically different, both in formal terms and in practice. Cromwell, like his old master Wolsey, chose to see this situation as a problem to be solved: his answer, partly forced on him by events, was an effort to restore old Anglo-Irish institutions to force much more direct English intervention, reviving the Dublin Parliament as instrument for royal policy and imposing an outsider to represent royal power. This policy failed, only partly thanks to the inadequacies of Lord Leonard Grey. By then, Ireland was costing the King a minimum average of around 4,000 pounds a year, when before the interventions of the 1530s it had cost nothing. Now a long-standing stability based on all sorts of informal understandings and local realities had been sacrificed by confrontation with various Irish magnates, principally the Fitzgeralds. There was a fatal conjunction at work, because Cromwell’s interventionist policy also revealed sources of Irish revenue which were incentives to further intervention, only exacerbating the instability.42
Cromwell was not a fool in Ireland any more than elsewhere. He began exploring alternative ways forward by sending the commission of 1537, and its most talented member, his client Sir Anthony St Leger, then pioneered a promising strategy. St Leger came to agreements with three Gaelic lords whose lands bordered territories of the Lordship; they offered to submit wholly to the sovereignty of the Tudor Crown in return for titles of nobility in the English manner, with royal letters patent to establish their hereditary possession of their lands. Alongside that was another constructive suggestion from Bishop Staples of Meath in the course of the commission’s work; Staples was a consistent rival to Archbishop Browne, but, as a Wolsey appointee to the Irish episcopate, someone with his own commitment to change in the island. Staples pointed out that within the Gaelic lordships the Pope was historically considered the ultimate sovereign in the island, with the English Crown deriving its power from papal grant in feudal fashion. Why not simply replace the feudal overtones of the Lordship of Ireland and erect Ireland into a sovereign kingdom whose monarch was Henry VIII? The idea had all the logic (and lack of authentic historical justification) of the English Act in Restraint of Appeals.43
Military crisis in Ireland and growing political crisis in England meant that Cromwell had too much else on his mind to carry this out, but on St Leger’s return as Lord Deputy in 1540 the proposal’s time had come. The kingdom of Ireland was erected, and a policy of ‘surrender and regrant’ rolled out across the Gaelic lordships. During St Leger’s long years as Deputy, this remained the foundation of policy: a characteristic example of a Cromwellian flexibility in policy to meet a particular situation.* In 1542 the Irish Parliament transformed the medieval shire of Meath, for a century and more a mere geographical expression, into two new shires with as close an approximation to the English model as local conditions allowed; this was parallel to what Cromwell had done in Wales from 1536, implemented with a similar caution and attention to local realities.44 St Leger was as averse to conflict as Grey his predecessor had gleefully embraced it: that shaped the religious policies for a new dispensation.
Archbishop Browne, mightily relieved at Grey’s disappearance, was happy to survive in post as a much less confrontational agent of religious change, pushing forward the royal supremacy in what was now the Kingdom of Ireland. This did involve him in one huge personal concession; he did not simply send his wife away, as did Archbishop Cranmer in 1539, but divorced her, with suitable arra
ngements to support her and his children (among other details, she remarried one of his own servants). St Leger carefully held off the King’s attempts to criminalize clerical marriage in Ireland until this was satisfactorily sorted. Thereafter a version of Cromwellian reformation in Ireland proceeded at a far more conservative pace agreed between St Leger and Browne, consonant with what royal government was allowing in England. It also reflected the way that English government learned lessons from the Pilgrimage of Grace, conciliating those in northern England whose goodwill made government in the region easier.45 St Leger’s time as Lord Deputy right up to 1556 represents the most hopeful period in the steadily more dismal story of relations between Tudor government and Ireland, and it should be seen as a working out of the late Lord Privy Seal’s principles of government. Subsequent failures right up to the present day are no more Cromwell’s fault than was the loss of Calais.
If Cromwell lurked behind St Leger, how much greater a shadow over Cromwell was cast by his old master Cardinal Wolsey, whose heraldry he bore. There is much in his career in government which continued Wolsey’s legacy project, even though completion of the Cardinal’s tomb and chantry colleges was no longer possible or perhaps desirable. In the government of England, template for the changes in all the territories we have surveyed, Wolsey set a pace which Cromwell then continued. Wolsey increased the number of JPs in every county; as Lord Chancellor, he turned meetings of the royal Council sitting in Star Chamber at Westminster into a tribunal to control misbehaviour among the justices, and ordered as many as possible to appear annually to renew their oath of loyalty to the Crown. Cromwell kept all this up, and also improved on it in his far greater programme of change. He sent out constant circular letters to the provinces. In an adroit piece of psychology, they bypassed his interest in the printing press and were handwritten to suggest personal attention from the King – both flattering and intimidating.