Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  65. LP 4 iii no. 5411.

  66. For Pole’s comments on his position in October, see above, this page; for Foxe reporting similar opinions of him at Court at the beginning of 1530, see below, this page, and see also the comments of Thomas Rush, below, this page.

  67. Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 121–6.

  68. The full document is preserved only in seventeenth-century recensions respectively published by Sir Edward Coke and Lord Herbert of Chirbury: see Herbert, Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, 266–74. Ives, ‘Fall of Wolsey’, 295–8, 307–10, deals with the document; his interpretation of it as the coming together of a ‘grand faction’ (at 312) seems to me over-elaborate, and it is much more straightforward to see its introduction as thanks to a decision of the King, as I argue here.

  69. For the Cardinal’s signature on the petition, see Hall 2, 171, which gives a much abbreviated account of what is nevertheless clearly the same text.

  70. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 274–5; cf. comment in Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 81.

  71. Shele to Cromwell, 27 November [1529], SP 1/68 f. 58, LP 5 no. 551. LP was uncertain how to date this, but it clearly refers to Parliament and none other sat in November before 1534, which is far too late for the address and content. Shele also sent greetings to Mistress Prior and gifts and promises of waterfowl. For Cromwell’s esteem of his ‘clerk’ Shele, who had a small benefice in Essex (R. Newcourt, Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense . . . (2 vols., London, 1708–10), 2, 638, makes him vicar of the marshy parish of Walton to 1546), see John Longland Bishop of Lincoln to Cromwell, SP 1/68 f. 108, LP 5 no. 623, dateable to January 1534 by reference to Longland to Cromwell, dateable as 3 January 1534, SP 1/82 f. 249, LP 7 no. 322, discussing the chantry of Chalgrave of which Shele was thereafter Master.

  72. Herbert, Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, 274.

  73. Wolsey to Cromwell, [17 December 1529], BL MS Cotton Vespasian F/XIII f. 147, LP 4 iii no. 6080. The Duke’s visit to Esher in December will have been that described in detail by Cavendish, and dated as after the publication of the petition: Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 277–85.

  74. LP 4 iii no. 6094. For Winter’s recall, see Chapuys’s report to Charles V, 25 October 1529, Bradford (ed.), Correspondence of Charles V, 291, Spanish Calendar 4 i no. 194.

  75. SP 1/56 ff. 139–41, LP 4 iii no. 6115, probably of December 1529.

  76. Sadler to Cromwell, dated only ‘Thursday’, but December 1529, BL MS Cotton Titus B/I f. 375, LP 4 iii no. 6112.

  77. Bodl. MS Jesus College 74 f. 193r, LP 4 iii no. 6076, at 2714.

  78. Ibid.: extracts of a letter probably of December 1529.

  79. Bodl. MS Jesus College 74 ff. 189r–190r, LP 4 iii no. 5743.

  80. For a representative sample, see William Capon to Cromwell, 29 October [1529], SP 1/55 f. 197, LP 4 iii no. 6034; Capon to Cromwell, 22 November [1529], SP 1/56 ff. 88–9, LP 4 iii no. 6061; parson of Horsmonden to Cromwell, 17 November [1529], SP 1/56 f. 87, LP 4 iii no. 6058.

  81. Rush to Cromwell, 29 December [1529], SP 1/56 f. 124, LP 4 iii no. 6110. Thomas Bonham was Receiver-General of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Audley was the Duchy’s Steward in his native Essex.

  82. Orford is 3 miles from Butley Priory, home of the chronicler whose furious opinion of Wolsey’s dissolution we have already heard.

  83. Cromwell’s accounts, payment for 23 May 1539: LP 14 ii no. 782, at 341.

  84. C. Johnson, ‘The travels and trials of a sixteenth-century Wirral recusant’, Cheshire History 47 (2007–8), 22–33, at 22: a meticulous study which is unnecessarily sceptical about the Cromwell connection.

  85. G. Ormerod, The history of the county palatine and city of Chester . . . (3 vols., London, 1819), 2, 304.

  86. Johnson, ‘The travels and trials of a sixteenth-century Wirral recusant’, which once more is over-cautious, at 26, on identifying Sander. K. R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire (Chetham Society 3rd series 19, 1971), 153, 168, unfortunately gets in a muddle over Christian names, but, apart from that, provides further illumination on the Houghs and their recusant relatives.

  Chapter 5: Serving Two Masters: 1530

  1. Vaughan to Cromwell, 3 February 1530, SP 1/56 f. 227, LP 4 iii no. 6196.

  2. Littleprow to Cromwell, 6 February [1530], SP 1/65 f. 122, LP 5 no. 86. LP misdates this letter to 1531, but Littleprow’s reference to a rumour that Wolsey is dead, ‘which I think is not true’, shows that it must predate the Cardinal’s actual death in November 1530; even Norfolk’s modern reputation would preclude a merchant of Norwich not having heard of that event after three months. Wolsey had indeed been very ill in January 1530. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 83, concurs.

  3. This and what follows are from Foxe 1570, 1386–7. Foxe attributes to Hales the office of Master of the Rolls, which he did not in fact hold till later in the 1530s – parallel with his premature styling of Sir John Russell as Earl of Bedford: one has to remember that these titles are how many of Foxe’s readers would remember and identify these individuals in 1570. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 71–6, is much more sceptical about the idea of a single interview between Cromwell and the King (though he veers in his opinion of Foxe’s reliability).

  4. Hales to Cromwell, 19 July 1536/9, SP 1/152 f. 140, LP 14 i no. 1287.

  5. Hales to Cromwell, 2 December [1526], SP 1/235 f. 181, LP Addenda 1 i no. 494, dateable by reference in London’s Common Council Book to what was clearly a major row about this appointment, copied in SP 1/40 f. 12, LP 4 ii 2639.

  6. Hales to Cromwell, 26 December ?1526, SP 1/235 f. 75, LP Addenda 1 i no. 495.

  7. Hales to Cromwell, 28 December [1533], SP 1/81 f. 29rv, LP 6 no. 1574. Mr Bedell was Thomas Bedell, not yet in Cromwell’s service; many other documents group Hales with Cromwell, Lee and Bedell, who evidently had a lot in common. This and the case of Nicholas Caunton both represent instances of Hales disapproving of Cromwell’s young protégés; he evidently did not suffer fools gladly, as is also apparent from his treatment of his young cousin John Hales: John Hales to Cromwell, late September 1534, SP 1/85 f. 197, LP 7 no. 1210.

  8. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, deals well with both these relationships: see the appropriate index entries.

  9. Chapuys to Charles V, 6 February 1530, Bradford (ed.), Correspondence of Charles V, 308–9, Spanish Calendar 4 i no. 257.

  10. Russell to Cromwell, 1 June [1530], SP 1/57 f. 139, LP 4 iii no. 6420; my italics. For Sandys’s impatience to see this grant completed, see Sandys to Cromwell, 16 June [1530], SP 1/57 f. 160, LP 4 iii no. 6460, and for drafts of it corrected by Cromwell, SP 1/57 ff. 162–4, LP 4 iii no. 6460[2–3].

  11. Respectively the examination of Sir Francis Bryan, mid-June 1536, BL MS Cotton Otho C/X f. 174r, LP 10 no. 1134[4], the deficiencies supplied from Bodl. MS Jesus College 74 f. 249r (my italics); Russell to Lisle, 3 June [1536], SP 3/7 f. 36, Lisle Letters 3 no. 713.

  12. For Gage’s resignation, reported to Cromwell by their mutual friend Sir William Fitzwilliam, 10 August 1533, SP 1/78 f. 104, LP 6 no. 965. For a letter written from the Sheen Charterhouse seeking Cromwell’s help in employing a former servant, John Gage to James Gage, 19 December 1533/5, SP 1/68 f. 90, LP 5 no. 588.

  13. Starkey, ‘Intimacy and innovation’, 108–9, has some brief remarks on these lines.

  14. Foxe 1570, 1387; he adds that this ‘was about the year of our Lord 1530’. For the significance of these oaths in 1532, see below, this page.

  15. See the patent roll entries for January, LP 4 iii no. 6187.

  16. The section on Cromwell’s interview with the King from Apologia Reg. Poli ad Carolum V is ERP 1, 118–21 (sect. xxvii).

  17. J. Edwards, Archbishop Pole (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2014), 25–31.

  18. ERP 1, 123–4 (sect. xxvii): ‘non possum affirmare me expressisse, qui non interf
ui, tamen hoc possum affirmare, nihil in illa oratione positum alicujus momenti, quod non vel ab eodem nuncio eo narrante intellexi, vel ab illis, qui ejus consilii fuerunt participes, sparsim quidem ab illis, et diversis temporibus dicta, quorum ego summam in unum collegi, quae minime ex meo ingenio excogitavi, ut verisimilia, sed ex illorum ore excepi, quae profero ut vera.’

  19. Geoffrey Elton’s repeated assertion against this passage that Pole and Cromwell only ever met once (e.g. Elton, Studies 2, 124, 217) is curious, and seems to rest on his misunderstanding of Pole’s phrase elsewhere that they met ‘semel et iterum’ (ERP 1, 132). Pole actually says that he heard one thing from Cromwell in public (respectable sentiments) and another (discreditable) in private, ‘semel et iterum, nunquam amplius’ – once or twice, never more: a comment on the infrequency of the deplorable sentiment, not of their meetings. On Pole’s time in England through most of 1531 see e.g. Edwards, Archbishop Pole, 40–42.

  20. ERP 1, 121 (sect. xxvii).

  21. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 132–4.

  22. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, ch. 9, ‘The Campaign against the Church’, remains the most concise and convincing account of the development of Henry’s ideas about the royal supremacy. On Cranmer’s promotions in 1530, MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 48–51.

  23. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 295.

  24. Bodl. MS Jesus College 74 f. 192r, and see commentary in Lindley, ‘Playing check-mate with royal majesty?’, 265–7, which includes a fascinating reconstruction of the tomb components (see this page above).

  25. BL MS Additional 20030 f. 48, LP 5 no. 1799: payment in December 1530.

  26. For the happy resolution of the angels’ fate, see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1278468/sculpture-da-rovezzano-benedetto. See also H. M. Colvin (ed.), The History of the King’s Works 3–4: 1485–1660 (London, 1982), 3, 320–22, and on Portinari working for Cromwell on a masque at Court and in demolition at Lewes Priory, see below, this page. For important studies on the tombs of Henry and Wolsey and their Italian connections, see C. M. Sicca and L. A. Waldman (eds.), The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance: art for the early Tudors (New Haven and London, 2012).

  27. William Laurence to Cromwell, 31 May [1531], SP 1/66 f. 21, LP 5 no. 273. One notes also in a list of Cromwell’s archive of summer 1534 a ‘paper of the schoolhouse in Ipswich’: LP 7 no. 923[xii], 343. On the destruction of the shrine, see below, this page.

  28. William Sabine and William Nottingham to Cromwell, 20 March [1540], SP 1/117 f. 65, LP 12 i no. 688 (misdated in LP).

  29. D. MacCulloch (ed.), ‘The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham’, Camden Miscellany 28 (Camden 4th series 29, 1984), 181–300, at 184–8; D. MacCulloch and J. Blatchly, ‘A house fit for a queen: Wingfield House, Tacket Street, Ipswich and its heraldic room’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 38 pt 1 (1993), 13–34.

  30. Petition of Thomas Gyllott, Merchant of the Staple of Calais, to Cromwell, ?1534, SP 1/88 f. 68, LP 7 no. 1639.

  31. The inventories of church goods, misdated in LP, are SP 1/47 f. 256r, f. 258r, LP 4 ii no. 4229[2, 3], and the petition is SP 1/240 f. 261, LP Addenda 1 i no. 1171, misdated by LP but dateable by a note of the parishioners’ concern to retrieve the goods in William Laurence to Cromwell, ?8 April 1538, SP 1/242 f. 3, LP Addenda 1 ii no. 1312. Cromwell had by 1538 returned the church ‘stuff’ to Roger Austen, the Duke of Norfolk’s park keeper at Earl Soham: for Austen at Soham, see TNA, SC 6 H VIII 6305. For its arrival in Cromwell’s custody from Rush, see the identical list in Thomas Thacker to Cromwell, 11 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 129, LP 9 no. 340. For Robert Lord Curzon’s previous worries about the reconstruction of St Peter’s parish and church, see Curzon to Cromwell, 20 December [1532], SP 1/72 f. 145, LP 5 no. 1650, and for the very informative later churchwardens’ accounts, 1563–1664, BL MS Additional 25344.

  32. Starkey, ‘Intimacy and innovation’, 96–7.

  33. SP 1/65 ff. 262–7, LP 5 no. 260; SP 1/65 f. 268, LP 5 no. 261: all documents corrected by Cromwell or in his hand, one of which at least is probably from May 1531. For details of the King’s ambitious plans to expand Whitehall and other palaces at this time, see S. Thurley, Houses of Power: the places that shaped the Tudor world (London, 2017), especially 120–48.

  34. SP 1/58 f. 19, LP 4 iii no. 6598. Ward, ‘Origins of Thomas Cromwell’s public career’, 229–31, provides excellent commentary on this.

  35. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 297.

  36. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 207–9 and 396 n. 19.

  37. On Cranmer and the Boleyns, MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 47–8, 54, 82–3, 93, 157–9. On Goodricke and the Boleyns, ibid., 47; Richard List to Anne Boleyn, 4 February 1533, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 31, LP 6 no. 115 (using Goodricke as a go-between); S. Gunn, ‘The structures of politics in early Tudor England’, TRHS 6th series 5 (1995), 59–90, at 74; and cf. above, this page.

  38. The exact sum that Cromwell paid is unknown, but one payment was part of a sum of £99 15s which he made in 1535 also for a lease at Waltham from another lessor and for wine and robes: account of his receiver Henry Polstead, LP 9 no. 478, 157.

  39. £400 in fact at her death: SP 1/103 f. 318r, LP 10 no. 912.

  40. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 210.

  41. On the marriage proposal, William Courtenay to Cromwell, 15 July 1533, SP 1/77 f. 211, LP 6 no. 837. So far, I have not been able to track down a marital alliance involving Courtenay and Cromwell.

  42. Anne Boleyn to Cromwell, May 1534/5, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/V f. 350, LP 7 no. 664. Anne was right about Harman and Wolsey: Brown, ‘Wolsey and ecclesiastical order’, 236–7. One letter to Cromwell has been seen as relating to service he did for Anne Boleyn as Steward on her Welsh estates: William Brabazon and Hugh Whalley to Cromwell, 26 March [1532], SP 1/74 f. 196, LP 6 no. 200. In fact ‘My Lady’ mentioned in it is Lady Katherine Howard, widow of Rhys ap Gruffydd, who was executed in December 1531, as is apparent from two letters misdated by LP: Brabazon to Cromwell, 1 March [1532], SP 1/53 f. 129, LP 4 iii no. 5399, and Cromwell to Brabazon and Whalley, 3 April [1532], SP 1/103 f. 85, LP 10 no. 617[i] (the last misdating has affected Merriman 2 no. 141).

  43. These points are well made in Schofield, Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell, ch. 7.

  44. That can be painfully demonstrated by reading the various sixteenth-century editions of that great work, but is also apparent from silence if one reads T. S. Freeman, ‘Research, rumour and propaganda: Anne Boleyn in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, HJ 38 (1995), 797–819. The only subtraction to make from his authoritative account is his acceptance as evidence of the spurious material in [J. P. Collier, forger], ‘Transcript of an original manuscript, containing a memorial from George Constantyne to Thomas Lord Cromwell’, ‘ed.’ T. Amyot, Archaeologia 23 (1831), 50–78.

  45. The election is well described in M. Heale, The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford, 2016), 287–8.

  46. See below, Chapter 14, and Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 202–4, 294–5.

  47. One of those who do doubt is Prof. George Bernard; but I judge his various attempts to prove his case, notably G. W. Bernard, ‘Anne Boleyn’s religion’, HJ 36 (1993), 1–20, to have been effectively answered by the various writings of E. W. Ives, lastly and concisely in Ives, ‘Anne Boleyn on trial again’, JEH 62 (2011), 763–77. The knockout blow is in any case the evidence of Anne’s evangelical library presented in J. P. Carley, ‘“Her moost lovyng and fryndely brother sendeth gretyng”: Anne Boleyn’s manuscripts and their sources’, in M. P. Brown and S. McKendrick (eds.), Illuminating the Book: makers and interpreters (London, 1998), 261–80.

  48. R. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden and the English Reformation (London, 2002), 93, comes to the same conclusion.

  49. On the move, Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Sing
er, 288–99 (see his specific assertion that the move to Richmond was without the Council’s knowledge and ‘through the special motion of Master Cromwell’: 293); Ives, ‘Fall of Wolsey’, 313. Simon Thurley elucidates the complex relationship between Henry’s and Wolsey’s occupation of Hampton Court and Richmond in the late 1520s in ‘The domestic building works of Cardinal Wolsey’, 90–91.

  50. Wolsey to Cromwell, first week of February, BL MS Cotton Appendix XLVIII f. 22, LP 4 iii no. 6249. Full text in State Papers 1, 361.

  51. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 299, 303–4.

  52. LP 4 iii, nos. 6213, 6220. For the negotiations, see especially Wolsey to Cromwell, late January/beginning of February 1530, BL MS Cotton Appendix XLVIII f. 20, LP 4 iii no. 6226. Full text in State Papers 1, 361: Wolsey urged Cromwell to speak directly with the King, but we cannot know that he did.

  53. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 294–5.

  54. Cavendish is a meticulous and reliable witness on Wolsey’s movements from now on, and will not further be referenced: Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 307–404.

  55. SP 1/57 ff. 38–42, LP 4 iii no. 6294[1–5], drafts where the crossings-out of ‘Councillor’ are consistent. See also a finished specimen dated 28 March 1530, BL MS Cotton Caligula B/VII f. 162, LP 4 iii no. 6295; this would have come back into the archive when Dacre’s papers were seized in 1534. For Wolsey’s request to Cromwell for these letters of recommendation, Bodl. MS Jesus College 74 f. 193r, LP 4 iii no. 6076, at 2714. Wolsey had also lost the title of ‘Councillor’ in a royal privy seal of 29 March addressed to him, concerning his relinquishing of control in the diocese of Winchester: BL MS Cotton Titus B/I f. 61, LP 4 iii no. 6298. In a final irony, the King was then lodging at Wolsey’s favourite Hertfordshire retreat of The More.

  56. Gage to Cromwell, 13 April 1530, SP 1/57 f. 67, LP 4 iii no. 6335. Gage ended by hoping to see Cromwell at Court at Windsor ‘these Easter holidays’.

  57. D. M. Loades (ed.), The Papers of George Wyatt Esquire . . . (Camden 4th series 5, 1968), 152–3. This intriguing account of the English Reformation from c. 1600, not apparently authored by Wyatt himself, is notable for its original perspectives and circumstantial detail, though alas is incomplete and damaged.