Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Notably for a supposed agent of bureaucratic revolution, Cromwell did not foster a great network of royal officials, like the 40,000 or 50,000 who came to run the kingdom of France by the early seventeenth century. English government was largely provided for free by local volunteers, which made for a fruitful and complex relationship between provincial and central governors. It was hardly surprising that local magistrates in the 1530s, conscious that Wolsey’s keen gaze was still falling on them in intensified form, hastened to make sure that they knew their duty. A standard guide to the office first published in 1506, the Boke of Justices of the Peas, went through six editions in a decade, and in 1538 came a brand-new competitor in the market, imaginatively entitled the Newe Boke of Justices of the Peas, from the leading lawyer Sir Anthony Fitzherbert.46

  Because of Cromwell’s sensitivity to the grand bargain in Tudor government between monarch and magistrate, he elaborated on Wolsey’s agenda by hugely developing Parliament’s role in both England and Ireland, confirming it as the instrument of government when elsewhere its role was dwindling; woe betide any later English monarch who tried to dispense with it. In fact he extended Parliamentary participation to the vast majority of the Tudors’ possessions, in the course of building a Church independent of Rome and creating new institutions in the realm. The process was never complete, for outlying islands are still excluded. It took till 1673 to bring the episcopal palatinate of County Durham into the House of Commons, but Cromwellian momentum rolled on after his death to bring in the lesser palatinate of Cheshire in 1543 alongside Wales, and the Channel Islands scored a near-miss at the same time.47 It was a back-handed compliment to the dramatic and effective way that Cromwell had enlisted Parliament in the King’s extraordinary (indeed outrageous) enterprises in the early 1530s that among the demands of the Pilgrimage of Grace was the insistence that Parliament be called to the North, with increased representation for the region.

  As Geoffrey Elton observed, Parliament was chief among the King’s ‘points of contact’ with his subjects. The frequent awkwardness and lack of co-operation in Parliamentary proceedings produced ultimate if grudging and ungracious consent. The relative stability of Tudor England was the product of ‘moderate contentment’. The King’s leading men were far more frequently Parliament men from the 1530s – more precisely, they became Commons men, if a peerage did not bar them and provide a seat in the other place. That produced a very different dynamic in the royal Council in the 1530s from the time of Henry VII or indeed the earlier years of Henry VIII, and matters did not change thereafter. From Thomas Cromwell’s time onwards, royal advisers mostly knew what it was to sit through the squabbles, the excitement and the tedium of a Tudor Parliamentary session. Other European rulers would have done well to foster such a political culture.48

  The corollary of this was that not all planned government policy had an easy ride. One of the most fiercely debated aspects of Cromwell’s policy occurred in the 1539 Parliament. After both Houses had accepted the Six Articles, a bill trying to define punishments for the defiance of royal proclamations ran into considerable trouble. The problem was to know how proclamations’ status in law related to Parliamentary enactments: that was one of Cromwell’s first preoccupations when he became a councillor in 1531. What did he intend by introducing this measure? Was it an attempt to introduce Tudor despotism by the back door? If so, the modifications to the eventual statute made by Parliament stymied that possibility. It is far more likely that this was another example of Cromwell’s tidy-mindedness, kicked around in Parliament by critical legal minds including Elizabeth’s future Lord Keeper of the Great Seal Nicholas Bacon, then a young evangelical and in other respects a beneficiary of Cromwell’s interest. Anything stronger would be inconsistent with Cromwell’s awareness that Tudor government was a process of negotiation with an alarmingly large number of interested parties.49

  Some readers may consider that this book underplays the theme of rapacity in Cromwell’s public career, which did witness the single greatest land transfers in this country’s history since the Norman Conquest. I have tried to show that while there was selfish greed enough among the King and his leading councillors, eagerly imitated by the wider group of his subjects who had funds to invest in suddenly available church lands, there was a degree of idealism and reforming enthusiasm in Cromwell’s vision of what it all meant. The balance between idealism and rapacity was easily tipped. Fifteen-forty-eight saw outbursts of popular rage against the governing classes which fully erupted nationwide a year later. They were sparked by the greed of two former servants of Thomas Cromwell, and yet the risings also appealed to the idealism embodied in his own reforms.

  The stirs of 1549 displayed two contrasting rhetorics: traditionalist in the West Country and the Midlands, evangelical in eastern and southern England. Yet both were directed against acquisitive gentry, and had been anticipated the previous year by attacks on two distinctly unlikeable individuals. In the West it was William Body, a former financial official of Cromwell who, despite being a layman, in 1537 acquired the office of Archdeacon of Cornwall from the egregious son of Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Winter, against strong opposition from the diocesan authorities. In 1548 a mob at Helston lynched Body while he was visiting parish churches to carry out Edwardian government orders on destroying ‘superstitious’ images. Trouble simmered through the next year and, when Devon folk rose in fury against the new English Prayer Book at Whitsun 1549, Cornishmen were ready to join them.50

  Anti-enclosure riots in Hertfordshire in 1548 targeted the lord of the manor of Northaw, Sir William Cavendish, current Auditor of the Court of Augmentations, and incidentally ancestor of the present Duke of Devonshire.51 Cavendish was like Body an old servant of Cromwell’s, and has the distinction of writing one of the most nauseatingly sycophantic among hundreds of sycophantic letters Cromwell received in his public career – ‘patron of my poor living, and the rather because all that I have or intend to have, report, doth and always shall sound that it cometh of you’ – this was in fact written at Northaw.52 Cavendish made himself unpopular in the area; in 1548 he obtained a royal commission to enclose very extensive common land there. Large crowds protested against his scheme and devastated his rabbit warrens, allegedly killing nearly 2,000 rabbits and even blowing up the burrows with gunpowder. The protesters claimed that such a far-reaching commission as Cavendish’s had no validity while King Edward was still a minor (the Helston mob’s spokesman said exactly the same about Body’s authority for iconoclasm). According to one prosecution witness, they also anticipated events a year later in setting up a camp on the disputed commons; such actions bequeathed the traumatic events in summer 1549 the name of ‘the camping time’.

  Tudor politicians and administrators certainly remembered Northaw. In 1579 another enclosure riot broke out there, attracting extraordinary worry from the Privy Council and local JPs; two participants were hanged, which had not happened in 1548. Fifteen-forty-eight indeed saw remarkably little retribution, reflecting the uncomfortable fact that both Wolsey and Cromwell had regarded enclosures as all too prone to abuse. Another former protégé of Cromwell’s, an idealistic evangelical government official called John Hales (who held Cromwell’s old office of Clerk of the Hanaper), enlisted Protector Somerset’s enthusiasm in a fresh official campaign to curb the evil, which was an encouragement to ordinary folk to pull down enclosures themselves. This was part of the complex mix of events in 1548–9: a reminiscence of the man who enthusiastically backed King Henry in his hatred of weirs, and who was remembered by many for his goodness to the poor.

  No one will expect a simple legacy from a politician whose brief years of power extended in so many directions and whose energy transformed so much. His own family is complex enough. His grandson Henry Lord Cromwell married Mary Paulet, stepdaughter to Thomas’s daughter-in-law. Henry left little impression on Elizabethan politics apart from sponsoring a government-backed scheme to improve coastal defences in
Norfolk; it was in principle sensible, but he turned it into a project to improve his own shaky finances, thereby infuriating some of the most conscientious county governors in a notoriously contentious shire.53 Henry’s son Edward was one of the rakish young noblemen who drifted into the orbit of Robert Devereux Earl of Essex and shared in Essex’s self-inflicted catastrophe of rebellion against Queen Elizabeth in 1601. In disgrace, with the Launde and Rutland estates gone, Edward relocated to Ireland, following the example of his uncle Henry Ughtred, another disappointment to their complicated family; maybe, if Thomas Cromwell’s father indeed came from Ireland, this was actually a return of the native. The line of the Barons Cromwell lasted a couple of generations, with an extra couple of Irish peerage titles to its credit, but became extinct on the death of Vere Essex Cromwell, Lord Cromwell, fourth Earl of Ardglass, in 1687.54

  Looming inevitably over that unsatisfactory if surprisingly prolonged tale is the name of another Cromwell, who until the last few years was the one whose name most people would first remember: Richard Cromwell alias Williams’s descendant Oliver, Lord Protector of England. It is one of the accidental ironies of history that Richard’s great-grandson removed the head of Lady Margaret Douglas’s great-grandson, whose collateral ancestor performed a similar service for Richard’s uncle. The execution of Charles I in 1649 was as great a national trauma as England’s break with Rome in 1533, though in the end it may have had the unintended effect of curbing this country’s enthusiasm for destroying monarchy. More than a century after Richard Cromwell alias Williams/Williams alias Cromwell made his will as a knight of the realm in 1544, one of his descendants reversed their ambiguity of surname once more.

  Henry Cromwell of Ramsey in Huntingdonshire was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin, and at the Restoration of Charles II he found the name deeply embarrassing, particularly as he continued to sit as knight of the shire for his native county, Oliver’s county, in a dozen years of the Cavalier Parliament. He became Henry Williams. Whatever the sincerity of Henry’s conversion to staunch royalism, that of his poetically inclined wife Mrs Anna Williams can hardly be doubted, for she painstakingly copied prayers for the royal family and verse extolling Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer into her devotional commonplace book. For this couple, it was a relief to become once more Williams, without qualification: posterity for Morgan Williams the Welsh gentleman so long before.55 The rest of the nation did not find it so easy to slough off the memory of two Cromwells: one who came to the executioner’s block at the order of a king of England; the other who repaid the compliment.

  Thomas Cromwell did so much in a decade. He served his king with careful attention to what Henry wanted, and an even more careful attention to insinuating his own plans and hopes into the King’s proceedings. Partly he wanted to forward a religious revolution; partly his aim was more predictably to forward his own family’s dignity in the realm, and his success in that respect was astonishing: the grandson of a Putney brewer married the sister-in-law of a king. It was hardly surprising that some believed him capable of planning a marriage to the King’s daughter Mary; what an alteration that would have made to history! The actual alteration was profound enough: not just the break with Rome which had sprung from King Henry’s ego, but a committed Protestantism for Edwardian and then Elizabethan England – steered by men who had benefited from his patronage and guidance, from noblemen like John Dudley, Edward Seymour and Henry Grey, to civil servants and lawyers as diligent and talented as himself, Elizabeth’s trusted servants Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil. Still part of that political elite until his death full of years and honour in 1587 was Sir Ralph Sadler, now far from boyhood service to a rising London man of affairs, reputedly dying England’s richest commoner, having lately acted as gaoler to a Catholic queen, Mary Queen of Scots.

  Protestant England endured, gradually outstripping the great powers which in the Tudor age had made it seem marginal in Europe. It took a new and steadily more dominant place on the world stage. Even in Anna Williams’s time in the 1650s, it was beginning to assume that role, as Thomas Cromwell’s namesake Oliver won victories in ocean-wide warfare against the popish power of Spain. Lord Protector Oliver had at his disposal the national navy once the pride of old King Henry; Henry had spent so much of his wealth on it, mostly gained lately at the expense of the Church. The kingdom of England restored in 1660 built on Oliver Cromwell’s achievements, in partnership with a now Protestant Scotland. The new alliance, naming itself Great Britain in 1707, implausibly for a small archipelago created a seaborne world empire that rose and fell from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. That imperial story lies behind the formation of another world power whose time may similarly pass, the United States of America. This, and much more, for better or worse, remains the legacy of Thomas Cromwell.

  All transitory things shall fail at the last, and the worker thereof shall go withal. Every chosen work shall be justified, and he that meddleth withal, shall have honour therein.

  Ecclesiasticus 14.19, in the translation of Miles Coverdale, 1535

  1. Putney was still rural in this view of the approach to Putney Church from 1820; the boy Thomas Cromwell would have known the church tower, and possibly the buildings in the foreground.

  2–3. Holbein’s portraits of the veteran bureaucrat Sir Henry Wyatt (left) and of his younger admirer and friend Thomas Cromwell (right) in 1532 adopt the same formula for a busy, preoccupied royal servant, grasping an administrative document.

  4. Thomas Cromwell at the end of his career, with his coat of arms as augmented in 1537; there are several versions of this image, chubbier but in milder mood than in Holbein’s earlier representation.

  5–6. The heraldry of Thomas Cromwell (left) and Thomas Wolsey (right) shows how Cromwell took the chief of Wolsey’s coat and made it the fess in his own achievement.

  7. Cromwell may have commissioned this accomplished silver-gilt medallion to commemorate his first grandson’s birth. The obverse describes him as royal secretary, with the date 1538; the reverse has his augmented arms of 1537 enclosed with the Garter. The coronet is that of an earl rather than a baron, and may have been added in 1540.

  8–9. An heraldic ‘Parliamentary Roll’ of 1539/40 shows the arms of Cromwell as augmented in 1537 (left), delicately struck through at his attainder with the note traditor (traitor). Their similarity in format to the arms of Edward Seymour, augmented in 1536 (right), is striking; both augmentations recorded on the Roll result from marriages of Seymour sisters, to the King and to Gregory Cromwell.

  10. The one still-surviving fragment of Cardinal College Ipswich, possibly its watergate, beside the truncated St Peter’s Church, in 1812.

  11. Thomas Wolsey: a late sixteenth-century Italian version of a contemporary portrait.

  12. An illustrated MS copy of George Cavendish’s biography provides an Elizabethan take on Wolsey, captioned ‘Mi Lorde rides to Westminster Hawle’.

  13. Cromwell’s enemy: Anne Boleyn (c. 1501–36).

  14. Cromwell’s enemy: Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester (1483–1555).

  15. Cromwell’s enemy: Thomas Howard, third Howard Duke of Norfolk (1473–1554).

  16. This well-known portrait by Gerlach Flicke (d. 1558), of Cromwell’s great friend and ally Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, is not as straightforwardly naturalistic as it looks, but a statement of his evangelical and Augustinian theology of grace, commissioned at a moment of evangelical self-confidence in 1545 in Henry VIII’s last troubled years. One of the books lying on the table is Augustine of Hippo’s treatise Of Faith and Works, and recent restoration has revealed three broken panes in the window behind Cranmer. It is likely that they represent the true light of the Holy Trinity breaking through to our impaired vision of grace, which itself might be symbolized by the modish magnificence of the furnishings.

  17. Sketch-plan
for Anne Boleyn’s coronation feast in Westminster Hall, 1 June 1533: Cranmer alone shares her table, while King Henry watches from a ‘closet’ above. From right to left, the lower tables seat the Lord Mayor of London and his brethren; peeresses; Lord Chancellor Audley heading earls and barons; the bishops; ‘barons’ (officials) of the Cinque Ports and Masters in Chancery.

  18. Queen Katherine of Aragon (1485–1536): watercolour miniature on vellum, c. 1525, possibly by Lukas Horenbout.

  19. Queen Jane Seymour (1508/9–37) soon after her marriage, 1536, by Holbein.

  20. Queen Anne of Cleves (1515–57) by Bartolomaeus Bruyn the Elder: this may be the portrait that in 1539 did not satisfy the English ambassadors and led to a royal commission for a replacement by Holbein.