Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  11. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 416; Shaw’s work on the visitation has been extraordinarily illuminating.

  12. On Holgate and the Gilbertine immunity from visitation, see John Tregonwell to Cromwell, 27 September [1535], SP 1/97 f. 28, LP 9 no. 457, but see also an infringement by Thomas Lee at the very small Gilbertine house of Fordham (Cambridgeshire), Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 116, and an equally small house at Mattersey (Nottinghamshire), at 222. For the exception from suppression, see Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 400–401.

  13. On Lee, see above, this page; on the visitation of even Welbeck itself, see Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 202. A stand-off between Welbeck and the visitors about the election of a new abbot for the Premonstratensian house of West Dereham (Norfolk) in autumn 1535 inevitably ended in Cromwell making the nomination: the final pieces of correspondence in this long-running story are Thomas Lee and John ap Rhys to Cromwell, 11 November 1535, SP 1/99 f. 34, LP 9 no. 808, and Margery Horsman to Cromwell, 18 November [1535], SP 1/87 f. 35, LP 7 no. 1446, misdated in LP.

  14. On this campaign, see Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 217–20, and A. de Mézerac-Zanetti, ‘Reforming the liturgy under Henry VIII: the instructions of John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells (PRO, SP6/3, fos 42r–44v)’, JEH 64 (2013), 96–111.

  15. John London to Thomas Bedell, 3 August 1537, SP 1/123 f. 188, LP 12 ii no. 427, looking back on Cromwell’s visit, which took place on 18 September 1535: see Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 89. On Wolsey’s textbook, see above, this page.

  16. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 140.

  17. Gregory Cromwell to Thomas Cromwell, 17 and 25 October [1533], SP 1/68 f. 22, LP 5 no. 479, and SP 1/68 f. 32, LP 5 no. 496, both misdated by LP, written from Toppesfield, Beconsaw’s benefice.

  18. Roland Lee to Cromwell, 18 November [1535], SP 1/87 f. 32, LP 7 no. 1443, misdated in LP but subsequently corrected.

  19. Richard Tomyou to Cromwell, 23 September 1535, SP 1/96 f. 201, LP 9 no. 415.

  20. A. Freeman, ‘To guard his words’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 December 2007, 13–14. Henry’s own copy survives: Carley, Libraries of Henry VIII, 95 (Westminster H2 no. 446).

  21. Chapuys to Charles V, 10 August 1535, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 193, at 529.

  22. M. Dowling (ed.), ‘William Latymer’s Chronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, Camden Miscellany 30 (Camden 4th series 39, 1990), 23–65, at 60–61. Latymer was nevertheless mistaken in saying that the relic was destroyed at this time; see discussion in Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 264–5.

  23. Stephen Sagar alias Whalley Abbot of Hailes to Cromwell, 28 January [1536], SP 1/101 f. 161, LP 10 no. 192. On the chaplaincy, see Cromwell’s remembrance of c. May 1537, SP 1/120 f. 257, LP 12 i no. 1323, and NB Bishop Latimer’s disapproval of the promotion, Latimer to Cromwell, [21 July 1537], SP 1/123 f. 33, LP 12 ii no. 295.

  24. See a reference to a letter of his dated from Winchcombe on 9 August, Sir George Throckmorton to Cromwell, 30 September [1535], SP 1/97 f. 55, LP 9 no. 488.

  25. SP 1/54 f. 240v, LP 4 iii no. 5772. The bequest is in a mixed list of senior servants and friends, and probably does not relate directly to this John Horwood but to the Putney lawyer of the same name, since the monk had been serving Winchcombe’s neighbouring church of Gretton since Abbot Kidderminster’s time: cf. his petition probably of 1535, SP 1/100 f. 86, LP 9 no. 1145, and John Placet to Cromwell, probably September 1535, SP 1/96 f. 116, LP 9 no. 322. Note Placet’s reminiscence of a papalist text on absolution which had brought Kidderminster ‘in great scrupulosity, almost in desperation’ – a reminiscence worthy of Luther – Placet to Cromwell, ?October 1535, SP 1/98 f. 131, LP 9 no. 723. A William Horwood was third Prior at the suppression in 1539: LP 14 ii no. 728.

  26. John Placet to Cromwell, September 1535, SP 1/96 f. 116, LP 9 no. 322, and 9 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 115, LP 9 no. 321; Placet to Cromwell, ?October 1535, SP 1/98 f. 131, LP 9 no. 723.

  27. For Cromwell’s promoting (in the end successfully) a property lease for Richard Tracey from Tewkesbury Abbey, see Henry Beeley Abbot of Tewkesbury to Cromwell, 16 February [1533], SP 1/74 f. 160, LP 6 no. 161. For the presence in Cromwell’s papers of a copy of William Tracey’s ‘heretical’ will and Archbishop Warham’s warrant for the exhumation of his body for burning, listed in ‘A declaration of “escriptes and writings” in my master’s [Cromwell’s] custody, which came into his possession from Mich. 21 [1529], to Mich. 23 Hen. VIII. [1531]’, LP 7 no. 923, 341, 352.

  28. Anthony Saunders to Cromwell, 2 November 1535, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 60, LP 9 no. 747, and 3 February probably 1536, SP 1/89 f. 123, LP 8 no. 171; on Saunders and Cotes, see also Emden, Oxford 1501 to 1540, 506, 140.

  29. For Cromwell’s favouring of Cotes to be Master of Balliol over the strong objections of Bishop Longland, see Longland to Anthony Bellasis, early November 1539, SP 1/154 f. 111, LP 14 ii no. 477; Owen Oglethorpe to Cromwell, 11 November 1539, SP 1/154 f. 121, LP 14 ii no. 498; Cromwell to Fellows of Balliol, 22 November 1539, Merriman 2 no. 325, 240, in which Cromwell calls Cotes his ‘friend’.

  30. Memorandum of Cotes taking the oath, 2 September 1535, SP 1/96 f. 59, LP 9 no. 251 (Magdalen paid his travel expenses: F. D. Logan, ‘The first royal visitation of the English universities, 1535’, EHR 106 (1991), 861–88, at 875n), and cf. Stephen Sagar alias Whalley Abbot of Hailes to Cromwell, 31 August [1535], SP 1/88 f. 155, LP 7 Appendix no. 35, misdated in LP. Latimer to Cromwell, ?autumn 1535, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/V f. 393, LP 9 no. 1118.

  31. Thomas Redinge Prior of Kingswood to Cromwell, 21 January 1536, SP 1/89 f. 48, LP 8 no. 79 (misdated to 1535 in LP); Cromwell to Richard Rich, 23 May [1538], LP 13 i no. 1051, Merriman 2 no. 264, 143. The preacher ‘Thomas Lacock’ mentioned in the second letter does not figure in the monks of the house listed at suppression in the same month, Chambers (ed.), Faculty Office Registers, 131, so may be the same as Redinge listed (though misspelled) there.

  32. Richard Leighton to Cromwell, [11 August 1535], SP 1/94 f. 182, LP 8 no. 1127; Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 37, was the first to correct the misdating of this important letter.

  33. SP 6/6 ff. 6–11 at ff. 7v, 9r, 10v, LP 8 no. 76[3]; Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 288, identifies the main hand of this document as that of the vice-gerential scribe Robert Warmington. For excellent analysis of the evolution and implementation of the visitation injunctions, see Shaw at 279–327.

  34. Jane Lady Guildford to Cromwell, 6 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 83, LP 9 no. 289, written from the Poyntz manor of Hill in Gloucestershire; for the Master of the Gaunts’ letter to Cromwell the following day, having received the injunctions, SP 1/96 f. 86, LP 9 no. 296.

  35. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 319.

  36. SP 1/95 f. 147, LP 9 no. 159: a note of proceedings in the chapter house of Bruton, 23 August 1535 (misdated as September in the text); Thomas Lee to Cromwell, 24 August [1535], SP 1/95 f. 155, LP 9 no. 167.

  37. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 82 n. 39 acutely recognized that the draft letter to Exeter Cathedral Chapter of 27 August and dated from Redlynch, SP 1/95 f. 179, LP 9 no. 191, was not from Fitzjames but from Cromwell. To that can be added a reminiscence of Cromwell’s Somerset friend Sir Nicholas Wadham of the ‘merry word’ Cromwell spoke to him over dinner with Fitzjames at Redlynch: Wadham to Cromwell, 21 October [1535], SP 1/98 f. 45, LP 9 no. 655. See also Shaw’s useful comment, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 83–4, on Cromwell’s likely personal involvement with dispensation at Sherborne at this time, and its wider implications.

  38. See the letter of John ap Rhys to Cromwell, 16 October 1535, SP 1/98 f. 16, LP 9 no. 622.

  39. Henry Lord Daubeney, 9 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 109, LP 9 no. 316: an apology for the lack of game at Marsh Park on Cromwell’s visit. Nor was Cromwell able to get the Parkership of Marsh which he asked for from Daubeney, whom one can see casting round desper
ately for some consolation prize.

  40. Cromwell to Stephen Vaughan, [31 August 1535], LP 10 no. 376, Merriman 2 no. 177; a bad-tempered and frank scolding from minister and King misdated by LP and Merriman, but placeable here by context and by the reference to it by date and content in John Williamson to Cromwell, 3 September 1535, SP 1/96 f. 65, LP 9 no. 259. A more polite letter on the same subject from Cromwell to Vaughan, c. 2–4 September 1535, SP 1/102 f. 115, LP 10 no. 377, is clearly intended for others to read besides its putatively chastened immediate recipient.

  41. Cromwell to the Abbess of Wilton, 4 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 70, LP 9 no. 271.

  42. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 291–2.

  43. I. W. Archer, S. Adams, G. W. Bernard, M. Greengrass, P. E. J. Hammond and F. Kisby (eds.), Religion, Politics and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (CS 5th series 22, 2003), 123.

  44. SP 1/47 f. 259v, LP 4 iii no. 4229; SP 1/50 f. 120v, LP 4 iii no. 4794[3]. These transactions, although here listed in the same documents as Wolsey’s monastic dissolutions, did not result from dissolutions, as Barrett L. Beer assumed in his ODNB entry on Edward Seymour, but represent an earlier and problematic land purchase of Wolsey’s from the Ughtreds, in which Cromwell had been involved from the outset in March 1524. There is a very large cache of papers relating to the Ughtred transactions in Cromwell’s papers, SP 1/31 ff. 58–92, LP 4 i no. 388, together with SP 1/31 ff. 3–4, LP 4 i no. 294, which is a draft in his hand; see above, this page and n. 5.

  45. Lord Lisle to Cromwell, 21 December [1533], SP 1/81 f. 13, LP 6 no. 1550. Lisle Letters 1, 665–8, introduces this tangled affair.

  46. From a long correspondence which can conveniently be followed in Lisle Letters, the agreement is finally celebrated in Leonard Smyth (now Cromwell’s servant and formerly Lord Lisle’s) to Lord Lisle, 31 March [1535], SP 3/7 f. 168, Lisle Letters 2 no. 359.

  47. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 293.

  48. Ibid., 291–4.

  49. T. Starkey, Exhortation to the people, instructynge theym to vnitie and obedience . . . (London, 1536, RSTC 23236); for the Winchester presentation, see ibid., preface to the King, sig. A3v.

  50. Chapuys to Charles V, 25 September 1535, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 205, at 542. The inventory, specifically delivered to Cromwell, is Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 149 f. 355, LP 9 no. 1171[1], printed in J. Strype, Memorials . . . of . . . Thomas Cranmer . . . , ed. P. E. Barnes (2 vols., London, 1853), 2, 271–5. It duly includes two staffs of ‘unicorn’s horn’ also mentioned by Chapuys, which took the King’s fancy and which he appropriated.

  51. Richard Towrys to Lord Lisle, 28 September [1535], SP 3/2 f. 149, Lisle Letters 2 no. 454. For further general action on Hampshire weirs, see Sir Anthony Windsor to Lord Lisle, 9 October [1535], SP 3/8 f. 115, Lisle Letters 2 no. 459, and for a reminiscence of Cromwell personally viewing a major weir near Southampton during the 1535 progress, Henry Huttoft to Cromwell, 30 January [1537], SP 1/128 f. 143, LP 13 i no. 177, misdated in LP.

  52. Cromwell to Gardiner, 4 February [1536], Merriman 2 no. 137, LP 10 no. 255.

  53. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 141: the earliest example of such a title he has found is at Wells Cathedral on 25 October 1535.

  54. Placet to Cromwell, ?October 1535, SP 1/98 f. 131, LP 9 no. 723. For Borde at Bishop’s Waltham, see Andrew Borde to Cromwell, 1 April [1536], SP 1/103 f. 61, LP 10 no. 605; A. Borde, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge . . . (London, 1555, RSTC 3383), sig. E1v: rather coyly (writing in 1542 and dedicating his present work to Princess Mary) Borde says of his gazetteer ‘one Thomas Cromwell had it of me, and because he had many matters off to dispatch for all England, my book was lost.’

  55. Thomas Lee to Cromwell, 29 September 1535, SP 1/97 f. 47, LP 9 no. 472, together with a copy of his report on Chertsey, SP 1/97 f. 48, LP 9 no. 472[2].

  56. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 329–41.

  57. Chapuys to Charles V, 25 September 1535, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 205, at 541–2.

  58. For what follows, see the excellent account in Logan, ‘First royal visitation of the English universities’.

  59. J. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge, 1998), 39–72.

  60. John ap Rhys to Cromwell, 22 October [1535], SP 1/98 f. 48, LP 9 no. 661. On Wolsey’s daughter, see above, this page.

  61. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 370–79; this document, undated, but almost certainly of this period rather than the dating of February 1536 in LP, is SP 1/101 f. 197, LP 10 no. 242. The November 1535 dating is reinforced by Thomas Lee’s recommendation of his friend Dr John Rokeby to Cromwell for employment, ‘whether it be in examination of the foundations of religious houses or otherwise’: Thomas Lee to Cromwell, 4 November [1535], SP 1/98 f. 173, LP 9 no. 762.

  62. Memorandum from the Duke of Norfolk on Bungay and Woodbridge, early 1536, SP 1/104 f. 226, LP 10 no. 1236. On Sibton and Wangford, MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors, 66.

  63. On Ingham, cf. e.g. Richard Wharton to Cromwell, 7 November [1535], BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 147, LP 9 no. 785. On the others, Richard Southwell and Robert Hogan to Cromwell, 27 March 1536, SP 1/103 ff. 28–9, LP 10 no. 563.

  64. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 124, 202, 238, 376; the houses were Dover, Langdon, Folkestone, Bilsington, Hornby, Tilty and Marton. A list of these houses with valuations contains two other names, Thurgarton and Horsham St Faith, which were spared for the time being: SP 1/239 f. 281, LP Addenda 1 i no. 1038. Hornby’s surrender likewise did not take effect at this time, as it turned out to be a cell of Croxton Kerrial Abbey. In all these three cases of survival, the heads of house had personal links to Cromwell which they must have exploited.

  65. The chief papers concerning this interestingly individual transaction can be found in TNA, E 322/243 (which gives the date 28 February 1535); SP 1/102 ff. 135–8, LP 10 no. 408 (Richard Cromwell’s indenture with the Abbot, 3 March 1535). The expenses to the commissioners dissolving the two houses were substantial, 22s 7d to Thomas Parry at Bilsington and £4 8s 4d to Richard Cromwell at Tilty: SP 1/106 f. 67r, LP 11 no. 381.

  66. Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 316.

  67. Ibid., 402–4.

  68. Loades (ed.), Papers of George Wyatt, 159; see above, this page. For Dr Shaw’s convincing conclusions on these matters, see Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 408–22.

  69. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 295–6.

  70. Muller (ed.), Letters of Gardiner, 75, LP 10 no. 256.

  71. Ralph Sadler to Cromwell, 11 January 1536, SP 1/101 f. 50, LP 10 no. 76; my italics. Chapuys to Charles V, 21 January 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 9; he picked up the fact that work on the hearse had been stopped.

  72. On de Athequa’s position, see Elton, Policy and Police, 244n.

  73. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 296–8.

  74. Chapuys to Charles V, 29 January 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 13, at 28; same to same, 17 February 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 21, at 39–40; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 149.

  75. A deposition ‘touching Sir Nicholas Carew’ of early 1539, SP 1/142 f. 202rv, LP 14 i no. 190; lacunae in the damaged MS efficiently supplied by LP, which also suggests from the hand that the deponent is Anthony Roke, later a servant of Thomas Wriothesley. Tempting though it is to make that connection, the secretary hand is too commonplace to be certain.

  76. On Tomyou with Cromwell in Wolsey’s crisis in 1530, see ‘The answer of Mr [Thomas] Cade and Richard Tomyou to Master Cromwell upon a bill of Richard Basden’, SP 1/56 f. 217r, LP 4 iii no. 6186[2]; Wolsey also granted Tomyou a prebend in Southwell Minster in 1530, rather as Morison received a pension from Worksop Priory. On Tomyou’s appointment first to Katherine of Aragon and then to Mary, see Duke of Suffolk and others to Norfolk and to Cromwell, 19 December [1533], SP 1/81 ff. 1, 3, LP 6 nos. 1542, 1543; on a compliment
and greetings to him from Morison in Venice, Richard Morison to Thomas Starkey, probably late 1535, BL MS Cotton Nero B/VI f. 160, LP 10 no. 320.

  77. For a very personal and anguished letter from the future Mistress Tomyou at Court to Cromwell, asking him to intervene with her unsympathetic father over the marriage, May ?1537, see SP 1/127 f. 186, LP 12 ii Appendix no. 26 (written in fact by her husband-to-be). For Mary’s gifts to Tomyou and his wife, cf. e.g. F. Madden (ed.), Privy purse expenses of the Princess Mary . . . (London, 1831), 52.

  78. Alexander Alesius to Elizabeth I, 1 September 1559, TNA, SP 70/7 ff. 3–13, Calendar of State Papers Foreign . . . Elizabeth [I], 1: 1558–59, no. 1303. Where not otherwise indicated, what follows here about this particular story is at ff. 6r–7r.

  79. TNA, SP 70/7 ff. 7r, 11r, Calendar of State Papers Foreign . . . Elizabeth [I], 1: 1558–59, no. 1303, 527, 532. Even Eric Ives is dismissive: Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 329.

  80. On Alesius in Cambridge, see R. Rex, ‘The early impact of Reformation theology at Cambridge University, 1521–1547’, Reformation & Renaissance Review 2 (Dec. 1999), 38–71, at 64–7.

  81. The myth has been charmingly embellished by Hilary Mantel in the figure of ‘Call-me-Risley’. Letters and Papers started the error by attributing a great many of Cromwell’s early papers to Wriothesley’s hand, but it is not especially distinctive and in any case easily confused with that of Stephen Vaughan, who certainly was Cromwell’s servant in the 1520s. The one letter from Cromwell definitely in Wriothesley’s hand, apparently from 1530, has been conclusively redirected to 1538 in Ward, ‘Origins of Thomas Cromwell’s public career’, 219–20: Cromwell to [Edward Lee Archbishop of York], 5 May [1538], SP 1/57 f. 87, LP 4 iii no. 6368.

  82. The proof that Wriothesley was not in Cromwell’s service early on comes in a letter to Wriothesley from Cromwell’s old servant William Brabazon, writing from Ireland on 29 April [1537]: SP 60/4 f. 70, LP 12 i no. 1067. Brabazon thanks Wriothesley for his kindness ‘always shewed unto me as unacquainted, desiring you of your continuance [my italics]’. As far as the early 1530s are concerned, Wriothesley was away in diplomatic service in 1533; Brabazon left for Ireland in 1534. Thus they had had virtually no chance to know each other face to face. Ellis ap Rhys also addressed Wriothesley ‘as unacquainted’ on 28 April 1538, so Wriothesley had clearly not had an entrée into the Wolsey circle in earlier years: TNA, SP 7/1 f. 1, LP 13 i no. 864.