Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  45. R. W. Hoyle, ‘War and public finance’, in MacCulloch (ed.), Reign of Henry VIII, 75–99, at 77.

  46. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 109–11; the proceedings of this 1531 session of Convocation are fairly fully recorded in an eighteenth-century transcript, Lambeth MS 751, 55–75, with some small lacunae provided in Wilkins (ed.), Concilia 3, 724–6. On the Commons meeting in the refectory, see Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 189–91.

  47. Two addresses by Convocation to Henry VIII, TNA, E 135/8/36 (4 March 1531) and E 135/8/37 (22 March 1531, reciting the previous instrument and specifying that the grant was made on 24 January).

  48. Lambeth MS 751, 59, 61–2. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 114, says that Warham and his delegation were referred to some councillors, but this is incorrect; it was not surprising that the King should send them to the judges who had overseen the earlier praemunire indictments.

  49. Lambeth MS 751, 61: ‘Dominus Cromewell intravit et habuit secretam communicationem cum Reverendissimo’; Rochford appears at Lambeth MS 751, 62.

  50. Lambeth MS 751, 63–4: ‘Ecclesiae et cleri Anglicani, cuius singularem protectorem, unicum et supremum dominum, et quantum per Christi legem licet etiam supremum caput ipsius . . .’.

  51. S. W. Haas, ‘Martin Luther’s “Divine Right” kingship and the royal supremacy: two tracts from the 1531 Parliament and Convocation of the Clergy’, JEH 31 (1980), 317–25.

  52. Quoted. in ibid., 322.

  53. ‘The cause of the vexation of Roger Dycker, prisoner in the Marshalsea’: SP 1/68 f. 109, LP 5 no. 628; since LP’s misreading of ‘Kyrkhollam’, the place has consistently been mistakenly styled Kirk Holland, which does not exist. For Cromwell’s relationship with the Babingtons and Meverells, see above, this page.

  54. Steven Haas, in making a decent enough case for those two examples of manuscript tracts coming from this 1531 Parliament, pointed to other documents surviving in the State Papers that might also belong to the campaign: Haas, ‘Martin Luther’s “Divine Right” Kingship and the royal supremacy’, 320n.

  55. Hoyle, ‘Origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, 284–5, and especially 303: he cites Berkeley Castle, Select Roll 153, and prints the text of the second petition, ibid., 302–5. The bulk of the Lollard text from one of the more or less contemporary copies is provided in A. R. Myers (ed.), English Historical Documents 1327–1485 (London, 1996), 668–70. Hoyle attributed this to the earlier Parliamentary session of 1529, but it actually sits rather better either amid the King’s menacing demands for an unprecedented sum of money from an unnerved Church hierarchy in winter 1531 or in the following Parliament of 1532.

  56. SP 1/56 f. 13r, LP 4 iii no. 6043[3]; for comment on this list (before the discovery of the Berkeley Castle documents) likewise suggesting a redating to 1531, see Elton, Reform and Renewal, 92.

  57. Pace Hoyle, there is nothing specifically to tie down this list of bills to the 1529 session of the Reformation Parliament, where the Church hierarchy put up a fairly effective resistance to any moves to curb its power and privilege; there is a much more natural home for the list, including the paired petitions, amid the fierce assault to which Convocation succumbed in 1531. There is some overlap between the bills listed in the memorandum of lost bills and Cromwell’s list from September 1531 of bills being proposed for an autumn session of Parliament: for instance on primer seisin, pluralities and export of unwrought cloth (cf. SP 1/56 f. 13, LP 4 iii no. 6043[3] and BL MS Cotton Titus B/I f. 486, LP 5 no. 394), and the list of lost bills included the thorny question of uses and recoveries, which remained unresolved in the spring 1531 Parliament after some bitter arguments.

  58. Hall 2, 184–5; Chapuys to Charles V, 2 April 1531, LP 5 no. 171, at 83; this was not published in the Spanish Calendar.

  59. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 128–30.

  60. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia 3, 745–6. Tunstall’s protestation was subsequently cut out of his own register but by oversight remained in that of York, as in Wilkins’s transcript: see the account of these events, slightly misdated, in the deposition of Christopher Chaitor, 16 December 1539, SP 1/155 f. 155v, LP 14 ii no. 750. For Henry’s reply, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/VI f. 220, LP 5 Appendix 9, and on its dating to 1531, see A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York 1509–1558 (2nd edn, London, 1982), 158, though he is there too sanguine about the pliability of the Northern Convocation. Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 161, and Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 157n, have been misled by misdating in LP into thinking that there is direct evidence of Cromwell participating in management of this session of the York Convocation: unfortunately the two letters of Dean Brian Higdon they cite are from 1533.

  61. Chapuys to Charles V, 2 April 1531, LP 5 no. 171, at 85; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 129–30.

  62. Chapuys to Charles V, 17 July 1531, Spanish Calendar 4 ii no. 765.

  63. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 146–7, and on the private letters, the anonymous reminiscence of one of Katherine’s old servants, possible Anthony Roke (see below, this page, n. 75), SP 1/142 ff. 201v–202r, LP 14 i no. 190.

  64. SP 1/141 f. 125rv, LP 13 ii no. 1223, in a fair formal hand, likely to be the secretary of the unnamed author. Elton, Reform and Renewal, 26–8, does a good deal of the work on elucidating this text; his suggested identification of its author is fully justified, but he gets some of the dating wrong. The text is misdated in LP; it is likely to date to autumn 1536 as it talks of Cranmer’s servant Robert Wakefield as alive (he died no later than October 1537), but was written after Cromwell had gained his peerage; it calls on Robert Barnes to confirm ‘what he hath heard of my doctrine and communication in Wales this last summer’, and whereas Barnes was in London through the summer of 1537, in 1536 he was in hiding in an unspecified place (Martin Luther to Nicholas Hausmann, LP 11 no. 475). Among Oliver’s many preferments, he was parson of Ross-on-Wye and at least by the end of the decade a canon and bursal prebendary of St David’s (Emden, Oxford 1501 to 1540, 425); the latter may suggest common patronage to Oliver and Barnes from William Barlow, Bishop there from June 1536.

  65. LP 5 no. 306[2, 5]. LP 13 ii no. 1223 misreads ‘law parlour’ as ‘low parlour’, but the text is quite clear. The reference to ‘your old house at the Austin Friars’ distinguishes it from the new house created by Cromwell’s massive building programme there in 1535. For Oliver as royal chaplain on 24 February 1532, when he took the surrender of Christ Church Aldgate with Roland Lee, see Rymer (ed.), Foedera 14, 411–12, and for an interesting glimpse of Oliver’s rapport and colleagueship with Lee soon after that, Oliver to John Scudamore, 7 March [1532], BL Add. 11042 f. 66.

  66. I have argued that consideration of the royal supremacy was what first brought Thomas Cranmer to the Reformation, at about the same time: MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 59–60.

  67. On Walter Cromwell’s possible Irish ancestry, see above, this page. For a fine overview of Irish government in this period and Cromwell’s relationship to it, see S. G. Ellis, ‘Thomas Cromwell and Ireland, 1532–1540’, HJ 23 (1980), 497–519.

  68. Piers Earl of Ossory to Cromwell, 2 January 1532, Lambeth MS 616 f. 46, printed in State Papers 2, 153–5. For the accompanying memorandum referred to below, Lambeth MS 616 f. 47, printed in State Papers 2, 156–8, and the copy of Ossory’s letter to Wiltshire is Lambeth MS 616 f. 48. All these are calendared at LP 5 no. 688[i–iii].

  69. Murray, ‘Archbishop Alen, Tudor Reform and the Kildare Rebellion’, especially 14, and B. Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 91.

  70. S. G. Ellis, Reform and Revival: English government in Ireland 1470–1534 (Royal Historical Society Studies in History 47, 1986), 31–48.

  71. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 92 (citing TNA, E 36/139, 17, briefly mentioned at LP 7 no. 923[iv], 340); Bradshaw’s comment on Ossory’s letter, ibid., 92–
4, is very perceptive. On Cusack, see also ODNB, s.v. Cusack, Thomas, and Ellis, Reform and Revival, 223.

  Chapter 7: New Year’s Gifts: 1532

  1. LP 5 no. 686, 329. Cromwell had plenty of ruby rings to choose from – rubies seem to have been a favourite of his: SP 1/42 f. 112r, LP 4 ii no. 3197.

  2. 9 January 1532: SP 1/69 f. 9, LP 5 no. 701. Cromwell’s job informally extended to anything which might be considered part of Wolsey’s former possessions, and was no sinecure: for the King’s outburst of bad-tempered suspicion about revenues from The More which only a personal interview with Cromwell could be expected to allay, see Thomas Heritage to Sir John Russell, 30 April [1532], SP 1/69 f. 266, LP 5 no. 976.

  3. Lambeth MS 751, 75. The heretic was the lately dead William Tracey, friend of William Tyndale, whose will became a cause célèbre – J. Craig and C. Litzenberger, ‘Wills as religious propaganda: the testament of William Tracy’, JEH 44 (1993), 415–31 – and whose equally evangelical son Richard became a client of Cromwell’s.

  4. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 79–82; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 131; A. Fox, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot and the humanist dilemma’, in Fox and Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age, 52–75.

  5. Christopher Hales to Cromwell, 31 December 1531, SP 1/68 f. 105, LP 5 no. 620. Hales wrote ‘if he hear’ when he clearly meant ‘if ye hear’ about the meeting of Parliament.

  6. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 132, rounds up some of those asking for absence, and one can add to that list the Abbot of Abingdon, who was first off the mark in early December (William Button to Cromwell, 9 December 1531, SP 1/68 f. 79, LP 5 no. 571).

  7. Edgecombe to Cromwell, 23 March [1534], SP 1/83 f. 8, LP 7 no. 365; Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 253, though Hawkyard there confuses Piers with his son Richard.

  8. Edwards, Archbishop Pole, 42–3.

  9. Above, this page.

  10. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 153–6.

  11. Ibid., 133–5. On the rocky ride for primer seisin legislation, see E. W. Ives, ‘The genesis of the Statute of Uses’, EHR 82 (1967), 673–97, and see below, this page, this page

  12. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia 3, 746 (now BL MS Additional 48012 ff. 57v–58): 24 February 1532. The minutes of Convocation noted that the Archbishop did not attend that day, and the Abbot of Westminster presided in his place: Lambeth MS 751, 79.

  13. Cromwell to Gardiner, late February 1532, SP 1/69 f. 40, LP 5 no. 723.

  14. Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 331–5.

  15. Spanish Calendar 4 ii no. 926, and for discussion of this phase of the 1532 Parliament, see Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 135–8.

  16. For a brilliant summary of this question, J. Guy, Thomas More: a very brief history (London, 2017), 32–8, 53–5, and for perceptive if perhaps indulgent analysis of More’s dark mood in this period, E. Duffy, Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the conversion of England (London, 2017), chs. 1–3, and C. D’Alton, ‘Charity or fire? The argument of Thomas More’s 1529 Dyaloge’, SCJ 33 (2002), 51–70.

  17. On all this, see Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 164–71. On Curatt, above, this page.

  18. J. Guy, Christopher St German on Chancery and Statute (Selden Society supplementary series 6, 1985); R. Rex, ‘New additions on Christopher St German: law, politics and propaganda in the 1530s’, JEH 59 (2008), 281–300.

  19. The most recent survey of the bewilderingly technical debate, G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English Church (New Haven and London, 2005), 58–61, has much to commend it, apart from its culminating intention of reducing Cromwell’s part in contemporary events, based on an unreasonably selective reading of evidence.

  20. H. A. Kelly, ‘The submission of the clergy’, TRHS 5th series 15 (1965), 97–119, at 98–102.

  21. Hall 2, 202–5; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 138–46.

  22. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 147–8.

  23. Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 192–3.

  24. Hall 2, 209–11.

  25. Alsop, ‘Cromwell and the Church in 1531: the case of Waltham Abbey’; the Close Roll enrolment is TNA, C 54/400, m. 24.

  26. The proceedings are recorded in Lambeth MS 751, 91–3. Various copies and drafts of the submission are rounded up in LP 5 no. 1023, and the English text without the witnesses is printed in Pocock 2, 257–8, where doubts are expressed about the source of the extended text in Wilkins (ed.), Concilia 3, 754–5, relating it to what is now BL MS Additional 48012 ff. 63v–64r. Kelly, ‘Submission of the clergy’, remains the best overview of this crucial session of Convocation and its culmination.

  27. TNA, SP 2/L ff. 183–8, LP 5 no. 1028.

  28. Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 205, is a useful counterweight to dismissive assessments of these magnates.

  29. SP 1/125 ff. 200–206, LP 12 ii no. 952: the source of what follows. A fair copy made from Throckmorton’s own challenging handwriting is SP 1/125 ff. 207–10, LP 12 ii no. 952[2]. The confession’s date is slightly later than that given by LP or elsewhere, since Sir George wishes a long life to the King and Prince Edward but does not mention Queen Jane Seymour, who died on 24 October 1537. The text is conveniently presented in Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 207–12. The events described in it map well on to the 1532 Parliament, though Throckmorton puts them at ‘six or seven years past’ and in his reminiscence of his meeting with Friar Peto he speaks of ‘a little before the beginning’ of Parliament, when he means a little before the end: cf. Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 210; SP 1/125 f. 204v.

  30. P. Marshall, ‘Crisis of allegiance: George Throckmorton and Henry Tudor’, in Marshall and G. Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society: the Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to emancipation (Farnham, 2009), 31–67, is an excellent overview of Throckmorton and the material dealt with here; for a wider view of the family in the period, see P. Marshall, Faith and Identity in a Warwickshire Family: the Throckmortons and the Reformation (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 49, 2010).

  31. The connection to Fleet Street is made in two other confessions from 1537 of Throckmorton and Sir William Essex (SP 1/113 f. 60v, LP 11 no. 1406, and cf. LP 11 no. 1405) which reveal them as still in the habit of taking supper at the Queen’s Head in 1536. It was ‘betwixt the Temple Gates’, and Throckmorton and Essex were members of the Middle and Inner Temple respectively. Similarly to 1532, on that occasion their private conversation on delicate matters was after supper, ‘every man departed’.

  32. The text at that point appears anachronistically to continue to the Act of Supremacy of 1534, but it should probably better be repunctuated and so read ‘and had much communication as well of the Act of Appeals as of that of Annates, and of the supremacy and authority that Our Lord gave to Peter above the other disciples’; thus there is no anachronism. Cf. Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 211; SP 1/125 f. 205r.

  33. See Chapuys’s report of a conversation with Fisher about invasion backing rebellion: Chapuys to Charles V, 10 October 1533, Spanish Calendar 4 ii no. 1133, at 821.

  34. Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 233–46.

  35. It is necessary to understand that this text was composed in 1537, which is why Throckmorton then referred properly to ‘Queen Anne’. He would not have done so at the time of the original version of his retort to the King, when she was still merely Mistress Boleyn.

  36. Dingley’s execution was postponed until 1539, but should be associated with this episode. Bernard, King’s Reformation, 211–12, tries to argue that Throckmorton was merely boasting to Dingley that he said these words to the King, and that he was ‘pretending’ to have done so. There is nothing in the text of the confession to justify this. Throckmorton expresses remorse for having rehearsed the conversation to Dingley, a bad faux pas since Dingley was not an MP, then goes on to say that he repeated it
to Sir Thomas Englefield (Justice of the Common Pleas) and Sir William Barrington, who were indeed in the Lords and Commons respectively. Marshall, ‘Crisis of allegiance’, 41–2, concurs in my judgement on other grounds.

  37. LP 5 no. 978[13]; the process was completed on 14 April.

  38. LP 5 no. 1207[36]. There were several Thomas Halls in government circles at the time.

  39. Chapuys to Charles V, 10 and 18 May 1533, Spanish Calendar 4 ii nos. 1072, 1073, at 669, 677.

  40. J. Guy, Henry VIII: the quest for fame (London, 2014), 28, 44, and see G. Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. F. Whigham and W. A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY, 2007), 374.

  41. For further discussion of this duty, which was probably attached to his new post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, see below, this page.

  42. On all this see Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 98–112, 139–57, and Starkey, ‘Intimacy and innovation’, 94–9. The Mastership of the Wards, another office which he was strongly rumoured in autumn 1532 to be obtaining, and which has often been ascribed to him, in fact stayed with his friend and benefactor Sir William Paulet and another trusted associate, Sir Thomas Englefield: Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 428–30.

  43. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 112 n. 2; for a representative whinge from Tuke to Cromwell, 22 May 1537, SP 60/4 f. 77, LP 12 i no. 1297. For the Master’s base in the Tower, see Thurley, Houses of Power, 128–9.

  44. LP 5 no. 1799 is the summary of a 92-page vellum book recording the royal jewels and plate handed over to Cromwell on coming into office, 2 June 1532, including much obviously from Wolsey.

  45. C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester and New York, 1978), 84–5.

  46. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 148–9, 155. For Sir John Gostwick’s attempt of July 1540 to intensify Henry VIII’s anger about Cromwell’s casualness in warranty, see below, this page.

  47. Cf. e.g. SP 1/70 ff. 100–103, LP 5 no. 1086: an agreement of 11 June 1532 between Cromwell as Master of the Jewels and the royal Master Carpenter for works at the Tower of London.