Thomas Cromwell
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21. Queen Katherine Howard (1523–42): few likenesses survived her fall, save this Holbein miniature in two versions.
22. Of the vast Rycote House, Sir John Williams’s Oxfordshire home, where Gregory Cromwell spent a happy summer in 1535, only parts survived demolition late in the eighteenth century.
23. Cromwell spent great sums on Brooke House, Hackney, former London home of the earls of Northumberland, before returning it to Henry VIII in 1536; this is its nineteenth-century state. Its demolition in 1954–5 after Second World War bomb damage was inexplicable official vandalism.
24–5. This recently identified Holbein miniature of Gregory Cromwell (left), now in The Hague, probably commemorated his marriage in 1537. It may have been intended as a pair with that of his proud father (right, shown wearing his Garter collar, granted just after Gregory’s marriage).
26. A second Holbein miniature of Gregory Cromwell, aged twenty-four in 1543, has strayed even further than The Hague, and via Danzig and the Second World War is currently held in Moscow; this photo was taken just before the First World War. Both are evidently informal domestic treasures.
27. There can be little doubt that this Holbein masterpiece, the original in Toledo, depicts Elizabeth Seymour (c. 1518–68; successively Lady Ughtred, Lady Cromwell and Lady Paulet), though it has been much claimed for other sitters. Aged twenty-one, she was then Gregory’s wife, and already a mother three or four times. Her brooch depicts God the Father enthroned, a reasonably safe choice for an evangelical household.
28. Monument to Gregory Lord Cromwell, d. 1551, in the private chapel, formerly the monastic choir, at Launde Abbey, Leicestershire. Erected by his widow Elizabeth Seymour, it is a specimen of the early flowering of Protestant Renaissance architecture associated with the Seymours, and amply deserves Nikolaus Pevsner’s description as ‘one of the purest monuments of the early Renaissance’ in England.
29. Two houses successively chosen by Thomas Cromwell as homes for his son and family. Lewes Priory (Sussex), only partly converted from its monastic glory before Gregory’s hasty move to Leeds. This eighteenth-century view, with town and castle as backdrop, shows desolation even before further ruthless intervention by Victorian railway engineers.
30. Two houses successively chosen by Thomas Cromwell as homes for his son and family: Leeds Castle (Kent), previously home to the Guildfords, much cherished and enhanced in its splendour by later lovers of the Romantic.
31–4. Henry’s courtiers in the 1530s: Holbein studies. (Clockwise from top left) Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503–42), Thomas Wriothesley (1505–50), Nicholas Carew (c. 1496–1539) and Ralph Sadler (1507–87).
35. This version of Holbein’s numerous intimidating images of Henry VIII, now in Rome and the most sumptuous example surviving, is dated by Henry’s age to 1540. It depicts him in the clothes he wore at his wedding to Anne of Cleves, an embarrassment that may account for its early departure from England.
36. Holbein’s title-page for Coverdale’s Bible (1535) features Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church, offering the Bible to his bishops; in the dominant position is God, significantly presented not as an image but as his Hebrew name (the Tetragrammaton).
37. The title-page of the ‘Matthew’ Bible (1537), by an artist now unknown, concentrates on the theological theme of the Fall of Adam and Eve, in apposition with the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
38. The hand-coloured title-page to the Apocrypha in Cromwell’s de-luxe parchment copy of the Great Bible, probably the presentation copy for him from Miles Coverdale and Richard Grafton. Now in the Old Library at St John’s College, Cambridge, it may have descended to the donor Bishop John Williams from Cromwell’s Welsh relatives. At the foot of the title-page, loyal crowds shout in Latin in response to preachers and JPs ‘VIVAT REX’; children at the pulpit and under instruction from their parents do their best with ‘GOD SAVE THE KYNGE/KINGE’. No sound comes from the prison on the right.
39. Catholic martyrdom: the executions in the Tower of London of John Fisher and Thomas More in 1535 and of Margaret Pole Countess of Salisbury in 1541 are here conflated in Richard Verstegan’s Catholic polemic Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum (1587).
40. Protestant martyrdom: the execution of William Tyndale in 1536 in Brussels is here also imaginatively portrayed in the 1563 edition of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Acts and Monuments).
41. Carthusians throughout Europe have not forgotten their brethren’s sufferings in England in the 1530s. In 1617 the Charterhouse in Granada commissioned the talented painter turned Carthusian Juan Sánchez Cotán to reimagine the executions of May 1535 (along with Richard Reynolds of Syon), in rather Spanish terms. The spectators lounging in an upper balcony no doubt include Cromwell.
42. This now rather shapeless beastie seems to be the wooden base-block for the statue of Dderfel Gardarn, astonishingly still surviving in the porch of Llandderfel parish church (Gwynedd), even though Cromwell had the image which stood on it carted off to London in 1538.
43. In this early nineteenth-century image of the martyrdom of John Forest from an angry Catholic polemic against Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the recumbent image of Dderfel Gardarn in the flames looks as human as the friar above.
44. The superb ceiling of the chapel of St James’s Palace is a little-known relic of Henry VIII’s hopes for his Cleves marriage: installed around the beginning of 1540, it is scattered with the royal couple’s monogram HA and the names of the Duke of Cleves’s territories.
45. Magdalene College, Cambridge, possesses an apparently unique copy of a broadside printed in late 1539 by Cromwell’s client John Mayler, first issued possibly in Basel in 1521; the portrait of Martin Luther is one of the earliest known, while Miles Coverdale may have provided the translation of the original German verses below. There is irony in this evangelical depiction of Luther as a friar in 1539, since by then all English friaries had been closed.
Abbreviations and Conventions Used in Bibliography and Notes
In citations of State Papers in the National Archives, I have adopted the numbering stamped in print on the manuscripts by archivists at the old Public Record Office, as opposed to various other systems in pencil or ink which their successors added in attempts to do better. I am aware of the deficiencies of these printed numbers, which do not always cover all the pages in volumes (particularly in the Lisle Letters, TNA, SP 3), but they have been adopted by State Papers Online as the means of citation, and that is how most scholars worldwide will now locate them. I apologize to my colleagues who have used the other notations on the manuscripts, as I have myself in the past. In papers in the British Library, I have adopted the most recent sequence of numbering out of what is sometimes a range of possibilities, as that is generally how SPO cites the documents.
In the Notes, all citations are to page numbers, unless foliation (f.), signature (sig.) or membrane (m.) numbers are specified. Foliation is normally customary though not universal in manuscripts and is noted below, but otherwise pagination should be assumed. To lessen the confusion and ire of others amid all this complication, I have provided the entry numbers in Letters and Papers (also employed by SPO) as a reference guide to material from the State Papers and other primary sources calendared in LP. Where State Papers Online has nodded in its great enterprise, and keyed in the wrong folio reference or omitted it, I have supplied it; where SPO has not provided images, I have cited where possible an edition of the text in print, particularly that prodigious pre-Victorian work of scholarship, State Papers published under the Authority of His Majesty’s Commission. Where applicable, I have generally substituted the reference number of manuscript material edited in the Lisle Letters in place of a Letters and Papers reference, since Miss St Clare Byrne’s editorial comment to that collection is so valuable, as well as
richly enjoyable, and her transcriptions almost always accurate.
Baker
J. H. Baker, The Men of Court 1440 to 1550: a prosopography of the Inns of Court and Chancery and the courts of law (2 vols., Selden Society supplementary series 18, 2012). Where information on lawyers is given without further citation in endnotes, it has been taken from Baker
BL
Manuscripts in the British Library
Bodl.
Oxford, Bodleian Library (some material MS, some printed)
Bradford (ed.), Correspondence of Charles V
W. Bradford (ed.), Correspondence of the emperor Charles V and his ambassadors at the courts of England and France . . . (London, 1850)
Burke, General Armory
B. Burke, The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales . . . (London, 1884)
Chambers (ed.), Faculty Office Registers
D. S. Chambers (ed.), Faculty Office Registers 1534–1549 (Oxford, 1966)
Complete Peerage
G. E. C[okayne], rev. V. Gibbs et al. (eds.), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland . . . Extant, Extinct, or Dormant (13 vols., London, 1910–59)
Cross, Loades and Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors
C. Cross, D. Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988)
CS
Camden Society publications
EETS
Early English Text Society
EHR
English Historical Review
Elton, Studies
G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (4 vols., Cambridge, 1974–92)
Emden, Oxford 1501 to 1540
A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford A.D. 1501 to 1540 (Oxford, 1974)
ERP
A. M. Querini (ed.), Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli . . . Collectio (5 vols., Brescia, 1744–57)
Foxe
Foxe, Acts and Monuments, various editions, specified by date of publication; see also Primary Sources in Print below, and easily available via The Acts and Monuments Online: http://www.johnfoxe.org
Hall
E. Hall, The Triumphant Reigne of Kyng Henry the VIII, ed. C. Whibley (2 vols., London, 1904)
HC 1509–1558
S. T. Bindoff (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509–1558 (3 vols., London, 1982)
HC 1558–1603
P. W. Hasler (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1558–1603 (3 vols., London, 1981)
HJ
Historical Journal
JEH
Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Kaulek (ed.), Correspondance
J. Kaulek (ed.), Correspondance Politique de Mm. de Castillon et de Marillac . . . (Paris, 1885)
Lambeth
London, Lambeth Palace Library MS collections
Le Neve, Fasti
J. Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, revised by various editors (London, 1962–, in progress). Two sequences, arranged by diocese or group of dioceses: 1300–1541 and 1541–1857
Lisle Letters
M. St C. Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters (6 vols., London and Chicago, 1981)
Lords Journals
Journals of the House of Lords, 1509 et seq. (10 vols., London, s.a.)
LP
J. S. Brewer et al. (eds.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47 (21 vols. and 2 appendix vols., London, 1862–1932)
MacCulloch (ed.), Reign of Henry VIII
D. MacCulloch (ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety (Houndmills and London, 1995)
Merriman
R. B. Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (2 vols., 1902, repr. Oxford, 2006)
Muller (ed.), Letters of Gardiner
J. A. Muller (ed.), The Letters of Stephen Gardiner (Cambridge, 1933)
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols., Oxford, 2004) [updated online resource, subscription only]
Pocock
N. Pocock (ed.), Records of the Reformation: the Divorce, 1527–33 (2 vols., Oxford, 1870)
PP
Past & Present
RSTC
A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, rev. W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson and completed by K. F. Pantzer, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (revised edn, 3 vols., London, 1976–91)
Rymer (ed.), Foedera
T. Rymer (ed.), Foedera, conventiones, literae, et cujuscunque generis acta publica . . . (20 vols., London, 1704–35)
SCJ
Sixteenth Century Journal
Smith
D. M. Smith (ed.), The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales III: 1377–1540 (Cambridge, 2008). Where information on monastic heads is given without further citation in endnotes, it has been taken from Smith
SP 1
TNA, SP 1 plus volume and folio number: State Papers Domestic, Henry VIII
SP 3
TNA, SP 3 plus volume and folio number: Lisle correspondence
SP 60
TNA, SP 60 plus volume and folio number: State Papers, Ireland
Spanish Calendar
P. de Gayangos, G. Mattingly, M. A. S. Hume and R. Tyler (eds.), Calendar of State Papers, Spanish (15 vols. in 20, London, 1862–1954). I have made my own adaptation of the translations offered where appropriate
SPO
State Papers Online, 1509–1714: https://www.gale.com/uk/primary-sources/state-papers-online15091714.aspx [subscription only]
State Papers
State Papers published under the Authority of His Majesty’s Commission, King Henry VIII (11 vols., London, 1830–52)
Statutes of the Realm
The Statutes of the Realm printed by Command of his Majesty King George the Third . . . (11 vols., London, 1810–28)
Survey of London
Survey of London, individual volumes by area; a variety of editors
TNA
The National Archives, Public Record Office, Kew, with call number
TRHS
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
TRP
P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds.), Tudor Royal Proclamations (3 vols., New Haven and London, 1964, 1969)
VCH
Victoria County Histories, individual volumes by county; a variety of editors
VE
J. Caley and J. Hunter (eds.), Valor ecclesiasticus temp. Henrici VIII: Auctoritate regia institutus (6 vols., London, 1810–33)
Venetian Calendar
R. Brown, G. Cavendish Bentinck, H. F. Brown and A. B. Hinds (eds.), Calendar of State Papers, Venetian (38 vols. in 40, London, 1864–1947)
Wilkins (ed.), Concilia
D. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (4 vols., London, 1737)