Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  49. John Whalley to Cromwell, 7 August [1534], SP 1/92 f. 63, LP 8 no. 601. LP places this in late April 1535, but there is no good reason to accept this, and the reference to apples suggests the first of the crop in late summer. It is dated merely ‘Friday’, which is also the day of Salter’s letter of 7 August 1534.

  50. Roland Lee to Cromwell, dateable to just before 17 April 1534, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/VI f. 160, LP 7 no. 498.

  51. Husee to Lisle, 20 April [1534], SP 3/5 f. 130, Lisle Letters 2 no. 171.

  52. Deposition of Christopher Chaitor, from internal evidence c. 16 December 1539, SP 1/155 f. 155v, and cf. the deposition of . . . Cray, f. 163r, both LP 14 ii no. 750.

  53. Earls of Westmorland and Cumberland and Sir Thomas Clifford to Cromwell, 2 May [1534], SP 1/70 ff. 4–5, LP 5 no. 986; the letter and postscript are in the hand of ap Rhys, who made his own report to Cromwell the same day, SP 1/70 ff. 6–7, LP 5 no. 987. LP misdated these letters to 1532.

  54. Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 58, at 157–8; deposition of Christopher Chaitor, SP 1/155 f. 155v, and of . . . Cray, f. 163r, both LP 14 ii no. 750.

  55. Edward Lee and Cuthbert Tunstall to Henry VIII, 21 May [1534], SP 1/84 ff. 59–61, LP 7 no. 695. Tunstall went on to prove the truth of More’s shrewd observation that in surviving ‘he may do more good than to die with us’: on his part in sabotaging negotiations with the Lutheran ambassadors in 1538, see below, this page.

  56. Lancelot Collins to Cromwell, 6 October 1533, SP 1/79 f. 145, LP 6 no. 1226.

  57. The draft undated grant of the Stewardship and Keepership of Brewood, Staffordshire, remains in Cromwell’s papers: TNA, SP 2/P f. 148, LP 7 no. 416[2]; the Prebend for Wellifed was Curborough.

  58. Cromwell’s remembrances, beginning of May 1533, SP 1/75 f. 171v, LP 6 no. 386[ii], and early July 1533, SP 1/77 f. 95, LP 6 no. 727.

  59. C. A. J. Skeel, The Council in the Marches of Wales: a study in local government during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (London, 1904), 59.

  60. Roland Lee to Cromwell, early May 1534, SP 1/84 f. 100, LP 7 no. 758; Lee and Thomas Bedell to Cromwell, 7 May 1534, SP 1/83 f. 228, LP 7 no. 622.

  61. Roland Lee to Cromwell, 3 July [1534], SP 1/85 f. 22, LP 7 no. 940; Lee wrote to Cromwell the very day he arrived at Beaudesert Castle. Henry Dowes to Cromwell, SP 1/85 f. 44, LP 7 no. 967.

  62. Roland Lee to Cromwell, 27 December [1534], SP 1/87 f. 129, LP 7 no. 1576.

  63. Robert Cowley to Cromwell, ?July 1534, SP 60/2 f. 48, LP 7 no. 915, State Papers 2, 197–8; this must predate his knowledge of Archbishop Allen’s murder on 27 July, and although it has a contemporary filing endorsement for June, that seems a little too early. For Cowley’s hostility to the Geraldines, see Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 77.

  64. Hugh Halgrave, Registrar to Archbishop Allen, to Thomas Allen, 8 November [1534], SP 60/2 f. 62, LP 7 no. 1404. Halgrave confirms the ransom story previously reported by Chapuys to the Emperor on 11 August 1534: Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 84, at 244. A remarkably efficient summary of Cromwell’s six months of anxieties and preoccupations from the beginning of Parliament to this moment of crisis was provided for Lady Lisle by the family servant Thomas Warley on 13 August 1534, by way of excuse for not getting results that the Lisles wanted: SP 3/14 f. 52, Lisle Letters 2 no. 245.

  65. This account draws on Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 98–104, 120–21; see also sensible remarks in Ellis, ‘Thomas Cromwell and Ireland, 1532–1540’, 503.

  66. The date of Skeffington’s appointment is uncertain, but can be placed in late May by his letter to Cromwell about offices in his gift, 24 May 1534, SP 60/2 f. 40, LP 7 no. 705. The letter also shows that the Earl of Ossory, bane of the Fitzgeralds, was hand in glove with Skeffington, and in London at the time of his appointment; they wished to confer with Cromwell at Court. See also Ellis, ‘Thomas Cromwell and Ireland, 1532–1540’, 501–2.

  67. On Tunstall, see above, this page. A convincing reconstruction of these links between the situations in northern England and in Ireland is S. G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the making of the British state (Oxford, 1995), 174–8; Ellis points out the very different outcomes of the northern arrests of 1534.

  68. Where not otherwise referenced, this and following paragraphs are based on the excellent summary account in M. Ó Siochrú, ‘Foreign involvement in the revolt of Silken Thomas, 1534–5’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 96C (1996), 49–66.

  69. Emden, Oxford 1501 to 1540, 575; on clergy involvement in Silken Thomas’s rebellion, see J. Murray, Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland: clerical resistance and political conflict in the diocese of Dublin, 1534–1590 (Cambridge, 2009), 84–8, though he may underestimate the amount of subsequent cover-up of clerical activism.

  70. Thomas Batcock to William Pratt, a London merchant, 13 July 1533, BL MS Cotton Vespasian C/VII f. 42, LP 6 no. 821.

  71. William Wise Mayor of Waterford to Cromwell, 12 July [1534], BL MS Cotton Titus B/XI/2 f. 359, LP 6 no. 815. Ó Siochrú, ‘Foreign involvement in the revolt of Silken Thomas’, 54, draws attention to the misdating of this letter in LP.

  72. Chapuys to Charles V, 11 August 1534: Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 84, at 243–4. Chapuys was probably wrong in calling this cleric a bishop, as he appears to be Richard Rawson, Archdeacon of Essex, to judge by a letter of his brother John Rawson, Commendator of Kilmainham, to Henry VIII, 7 August 1534, LP 7 no. 1045, State Papers 2, 201. They had left via Waterford, knowing of the Mayor’s previous report to Cromwell.

  73. From a variety of depressing correspondence about Skeffington’s faltering efforts to reach Ireland, see John Allen to Cromwell, 24 September [1534], SP 60/2 f. 59, LP 7 no. 1186.

  74. On Brabazon, see ODNB. For Brabazon and Skeffington, see letter cited in previous note; for his first appointment as Under-Treasurer, Ellis, Reform and Revival, 222, and for Cromwell’s ease with using Anglo-Irishmen in government rather than Englishmen, Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 98–9, 144–5. For Brabazon’s monument (both it and the church have disappeared), A. L. Harris, ‘Tombs of the New English in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Dublin’, Church Monuments 11 (1996), 25–41, at 29.

  75. Chapuys to Charles V, 10 September 1534, Spanish Calender 5 i no. 87, at 254: ‘Quil estoit plus de la dite royne que autre pour austant quil avoit voulu tenir le duc de Richemont aupres de luy et de sa fille, sa femme, et que sil eust voulu laisse[r] aller au dit Yrlande sont passez huit mois, comme auoit este advise, ces choses ne fussent survenues.’

  76. George Cotton to Cromwell, 2 June [1534], SP 1/84 f. 108, LP 7 no. 772. For George’s closeness to Cromwell during the Pilgrimage of Grace, together with his brother Richard Cotton, see below, this page.

  77. Richmond to Cromwell, 11 June [1534], SP 1/84f. 162, LP 7 no. 821; 13 June [1534], SP 1/84 f. 169, LP 7 no. 831; his holograph letter about the Calais visit is 30 June [1534], SP 1/85 f. 5, LP 7 no. 904. For contrasting reluctance to go to France, see John Lord Mordaunt to Cromwell, 26 June [1534], SP 1/84 f. 212, LP 7 no. 884.

  78. Sir Thomas Arundell of Dorset to Cromwell, 12 June [1534], SP 1/76 f. 196, LP 6 no. 629. LP acknowledged the incorrect date of this to 1533 in Corrigenda, and by giving it a place-holder at LP 7 no. 825.

  Chapter 11: Spirituals: 1534–1535

  1. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden and the English Reformation, 14–20.

  2. Warrant under the signet, 31 January 1534, SP 1/82 f. 128, LP 7 no. 137[1]; see also the remembrance in his hand to secure these payments and their passports, BL MS Cotton Titus B/I f. 430, LP 7 no. 52.

  3. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden and the English Reformation, 20: ‘durch etliche furtreffliche des reichs Engellandt rethen und ingesessen, doch unvermerckt des kunigs’; my italics. I have modified Dr McEntegart’s translation at this point, and in what follows, ibid., 21–5. Heath can be identified
as being at Nuremberg by his earlier letter to Cromwell, 31 March [1534], BL MS Cotton Vitellius B/XXI f. 103, LP 7 no. 395.

  4. On the pension and its current diversion, D. Potter, ‘Foreign policy’, in MacCulloch (ed.), Reign of Henry VIII, 101–33, at 125–6, and McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden and the English Reformation, 24–5. Cromwell strongly denied that Henry had contributed any money for the Duke of Württemberg’s restoration, while actually virtually admitting the transaction: Chapuys to Charles V, 5 May 1535, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 157, at 458.

  5. On this, see additionally to McEntegart, N. S. Tjernagel, Henry VIII and the Lutherans: a study in Anglo-Lutheran relations from 1521 to 1547 (St Louis, MO, 1965), 128–34.

  6. Chapuys to Charles V, 16 July 1534, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 71, at 206. Chapuys speaks of only two of the bishops ‘created by this new Pope’ (Cranmer), and of course Roland Lee was by now in the west Midlands.

  7. Amid copious papers relating to Lübeck’s piracy, see in particular Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Guildford to Cromwell, 22 August 1533, SP 1/78 f. 144, LP 6 no. 1013; Chapuys to Charles V, 9 December 1533, Spanish Calendar 4 ii no. 1158, at 877–8; petition of Thomas Browne to Cromwell about stolen goods, summer 1534, SP 1/85 f. 16, LP 7 no. 918.

  8. Jürgen Wullenweber Burgomeister of Lübeck to Cromwell, 17 October 1534, SP 1/86 ff. 59–60, LP 7 no. 1272; for background, see Tjernagel, Henry VIII and the Lutherans, 131–4.

  9. On what follows, where not otherwise referenced, see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 123–35.

  10. For their commissioning via Cranmer, see Chapuys to Charles V, 22 April 1534, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 46, at 31. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 281, notes the rediscovery of the visitation articles they used: London Metropolitan Archives, MS CLC/270/MS01231 ff. 1–2.

  11. On these events, see M. C. Skeeters, Community and Clergy: Bristol and the Reformation, c. 1530–c. 1570 (Oxford, 1993), 34–46, and see also the commendation of him by Michael Drum, referring to Oxford preaching probably in Lent 1533, Michael Drum to William Marshall, 9 March ?1534, SP 1/82 f. 239, LP 7 no. 308.

  12. George Browne to Cromwell, ?1533, SP 1/246 ff. 105–6, LP Addenda 1 ii, Appendix no. 5. This has the distinction of being the very last item in LP.

  13. Gabriel Peacock, Warden of Southampton Observants, to Cromwell, 16 July [1534], SP 1/85 f. 50, LP 7 no. 982: for Ingworth’s assistant role, Thomas Bedell to Cromwell, 15 September [1545], SP 1/96 f. 161, LP 9 no. 373.

  14. Browne to Cromwell, 6 July [1534], SP 1/85 f. 35, LP 7 no. 953.

  15. Hilsey to Cromwell, 16 October [1534], SP 1/86 f. 53v, LP 7 no. 1265; my italics.

  16. On what follows, where not otherwise referenced, see Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 201–15.

  17. Elton (ed.), Tudor Constitution, 364–5. The bill was accompanied by Cranmer’s declaration to Convocation on 11 November that he was to be called Metropolitan, not Legatus natus – the official end to that embarrassment: Lambeth MS 751, 106.

  18. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 190–91.

  19. Hoyle, ‘Origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, 291–4, is a useful discussion of these proposals.

  20. Elton (ed.), Tudor Constitution, 53–6. M. Jurkowski, ‘The history of clerical taxation in England and Wales, 1173–1663: the findings of the E 179 project’, JEH 67 (2016), 53–81, provides an essential overview on the sources, and the immediate impact is excellently analysed by P. R. N. Carter, ‘The fiscal Reformation: clerical taxation and opposition in Henrician England’, in B. Kümin (ed.), Reformations Old and New: essays on the socio-economic impact of religious change, c. 1470–1630 (Aldershot, 1996), 92–105.

  21. Hitchcock (ed.), Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, 78.

  22. On this, see Elton, ‘Law of treason in the early Reformation’, 227–36.

  23. Deposition of Bishop John Fisher, 12 June 1535, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/VI f. 165, LP 8 no. 858. Misprision of treason did not disappear entirely as an indictable offence: see Baker, Oxford History of the Laws of England 6, 589–90.

  24. Hoyle, ‘Origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, 290–91, commenting on a ‘remembrance’ of mid- to late October 1533, BL MS Cotton Titus B/I f. 150, LP 6 no. 1381[3]: ‘Item an Act that any bishop, dean, abbot, abbess or any other head or ruler of any body politic within this realm or the King’s dominions commit or do any of high treason, and be thereof convict, that then they shall forfeit all the lands and tenements temporal to the King’s Highness, which they had in the right of their churches, dignities or houses, and the King’s Highness to have those to dispose for defence of his realm.’

  25. For that Observant house on Guernsey, see Chambers (ed.), Faculty Office Registers, 197.

  26. An early example is John Burton Abbot of Osney to Cromwell, 15 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 163, LP 9 no. 375. For examples from two sequential days interestingly far apart in location, which suggests some general order, see Thomas Chard Abbot of Forde to Cromwell, 11 December [1535], SP 1/99 f. 115, LP 9 no. 948, and Richard Leighton from Syon Abbey to Cromwell, 12 December [1535], BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 152, LP 9 no. 954.

  27. Even more vanishingly elusive was the effort of one clerk who, in the course of a grant with an exceptionally long-winded preamble of titles for both King and Cromwell, added the third flourish ‘Officiarius Principalis’: SP 1/102 ff. 51–7, LP 10 no. 328, possibly of October 1535. Officials principal were, like vicars-general, familiar figures in diocesan administration, and it may have simply been a clerk of St Paul’s Cathedral running on autopilot who created this office for the Vice-Gerent, rather than one of Cromwell’s own staff in his new court. The document gave Cromwell’s colleague at Court Richard Sampson custodianship of the mentally disturbed Dean, Richard Pace, and his cathedral responsibilities and estates.

  28. On the setting up of the Vice-Gerency where not otherwise referenced below, see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 122–3, 129–35, and now the important discussions in P. D. Clarke, ‘Canterbury as the New Rome: dispensations and Henry VIII’s Reformation’, JEH 64 (2013), 20–44, and Clarke in Clarke and Questier (eds.), Camden Miscellany XXXVI: papal authority and the limits of the law in Tudor England.

  29. John Grenville to Lord Lisle, 20 March [1534], SP 3/3 f. 136, Lisle Letters 2 no. 147.

  30. Richmond to Cromwell, 11 June [1534], SP 1/84 f. 162, LP 7 no. 821. We have already noted above (this page) that Cromwell had taken it upon himself to appoint a master-general for the Dominicans in 1533 or 1534.

  31. For a good discussion of the Mastership, Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 127–33.

  32. John Tregonwell to Cromwell, 31 May [1534], SP 1/84 f. 91, LP 7 no. 743.

  33. See his letter addressed from The Rolls on 17 October [1534], LP 7 no. 1271, Merriman 1 no. 83, 389.

  34. Christopher Hales to Cromwell, 20 May [1533], SP 1/76 f. 70, LP 6 no. 514.

  35. Cromwell’s illness at The Rolls from around 21 March to 24 April 1535 is best summarized in John Husee to Lord Lisle, SP 3/5 f. 48, Lisle Letters 2 no. 373. Henry visited him on 7 April: Husee to Lord Lisle, SP 3/5 f. 44, Lisle Letters 2 no. 365, and for specimens of their business discussions on that day, Sir Thomas Audley to Henry VIII, BL MS Cotton Titus B/XI/2 f. 367, LP 8 no. 519, and Chapuys to Charles V, 17 April 1535, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 150, at 438.

  36. G. W. Sanders (ed.), Orders of the High Court of Chancery . . . (2 vols., London, 1845), 1, 17–18: a memorandum by ‘old Mr Valence’ from the 1590s, BL MS Lansdowne 163 f. 95. It continues to a peculiar anecdote about Hales which must originally have been thought a humorous parallel to these circumstances: ‘He resting at the side bar at Westminster after the Lord Audley Lord Chancellor had gone up to sit, and being sent to that that was not his place sedente Curia, answered that he wist well enough where his place was.’ As late as 10 August 1539 Cromwell’s servant Henry Polstead was writing to his master from his office in The
Rolls, SP 1/153 f. 13, LP 14 ii no. 29. There is no record of Cromwell leaving the property after that. For Hales’s grant of office on 10 July 1536, ‘with custody of the house or hospital of Converts’, see LP 11 no. 202[17].

  37. For what follows, unless separately referenced, see F. D. Logan, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the Vicegerency in Spirituals: a revisitation’, EHR 103 (1988), 658–67.

  38. Dr David Skinner has kindly let me know of the evidence in the accounts of Fotheringhay College, Northamptonshire Record Office MS 4.xviii.6, that Cranmer visited in person and had to admit defeat over Fotheringhay’s exempt jurisdiction in September 1534. This might have been one material incentive for the first draft commission.

  39. The documents are respectively TNA, E 36/116 ff. 12–117, and TNA, SP 2/R ff. 2A–4, LP 8 no. 73.

  40. TNA, C 82/692, LP 8 no. 75[1].

  41. There is a round-up of these in LP 8 no. 190.

  42. On the end of Cranmer’s visitation, Richard Leighton to Cromwell, late June 1535, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 56, LP 8 no. 955. On the inhibition and the workings of the vice-gerential office, see some notes from its lost archive in A. Harmer [H. Wharton], A Specimen of some errors and defects in the History of the Reformation of the Church of England wrote by Gilbert Burnet, D.D., now Lord Bishop of Sarum (1693, Wing W1569), 52–3, and BL MS Additional 48022 ff. 84r, 90r, 92r, 98v; cf. also M. Bowker, The Henrician Reformation: the diocese of Lincoln under John Longland 1521–1547 (Cambridge, 1981), 77–8.

  43. See the letter to Cromwell from Thomas Evans, who seems to have acted as a local representative of the Vice-Gerency in the West Country, 15 April [1539], SP 1/150 f. 129, LP 14 i no. 774. Hereford was effectively vacant from May 1538 to October 1539. This crucial evidence of Cromwell’s continual activation of the vice-gerential visitation does not seem to have been generally noticed before.

  44. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 133, 190–201. If anything demonstrates that the Eltonian ‘Revolution in Government’ was based on a false premise, it is the administration of First Fruits and Tenths.