Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  83. John Husee to [Lord Lisle], 21 August [1537], SP 3/5 f. 61, Lisle Letters 4 no. 1001, 378.

  84. See e.g. Cromwell to Stephen Gardiner, 25/26 February 1536, Merriman 2 no. 139, from BL MS Additional 25114 f. 249 (not included in LP). Chapuys to Charles V, 24 February 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 29, at 56.

  85. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, ch. 8.

  86. TNA, SP 70/7 f. 6v: ‘dissimulata ira vocat ad se Crumwellum, Vrotesleum, et quosdam alios, quos fama est odisse Reginam; quia graviter eos reprehenderat, iisque comminata fuerat, se indicaturam Regi, quod praetextu Evangelii atque Relligionis sua commoda quaererent, haberent omnia venalia, et acceptis muneribus conferrent beneficia Ecclesiastica indignis, hostibus verae Doctrinae.’

  87. Margery Horsman to Cromwell, 18 November [1535], SP 1/87 f. 35, LP 7 no. 1446, misdated by LP but securely in 1535 by its mention of the new Prior of Premonstratensian West Dereham. On the Horsmans, Christ’s College and another Premonstratensian house, Coverham Abbey, see above, this page, this page, and below, this page, this page. Ives came to the same conclusion about her importance: Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 332.

  88. TNA, SP 70/7 f. 6v: ‘Affirmant etiam Regem odire Reginam, propterea, quae haeredem regni ex ea non sustulisset, nec speraret quidem.’

  89. Chapuys to Charles V, 19 May 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 55, at 123: ‘si bien me souvenoye de ce que mavoit dit la veille sainct Mathias, il mavoit tacitement assez declaire et pronosticque ce quen adviendroit.’

  90. Chapuys to Charles V, 24 February 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 29, at 58. A mangled phrase in a note of Chapuys to Granvelle of 2 May also relates to this incident in which ‘“nen pour riens” told him . . . and Cromwell since, that he hath done and would do marvels’: LP 10 no. 783.

  91. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 302.

  92. For the beginning and end of Gregory’s longest childhood or teenage venture from home, see Richard Southwell to Cromwell, 20 March and 23 December 1536: BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 274, LP 10 no. 507, and SP 1/113 f. 22, LP 11 no. 1356.

  93. Henry Dowes to Cromwell, 30 April 1536, SP 1/92 f. 104, LP 8 no. 618 (there misdated to 1535).

  94. For Gregory’s stay with John Williams at Rycote House in summer and autumn 1535, see his letters of 24 September [1535] and 25 November [1535]: SP 1/96 f. 209, LP 9 no. 422, and BL MS Cotton Titus B/I f. 357, LP 7 no. 1473 (misdated in LP); for the lovelorn letter from Rycote of one of his friends Thomas Farmer to Cromwell, 31 August [1535], SP 1/85 f. 133, LP 7 no. 1106 (misdated in LP). Farmer seems to have been a musician: see John Williamson to Cromwell, 23 October [1532], SP 1/71 f. 139, LP 5 no. 1464. He was still being lovelorn for a different lady to Cromwell in 1539: Farmer to [Cromwell], ?mid-September 1539, SP 1/153 f. 108, LP 14 ii no. 197. Gregory returned to Rycote with his tutor Henry Dowes for an extended working holiday from January to March 1537: Cromwell’s accounts, LP 14 ii no. 782, at 328–9.

  Chapter 14: Surrenders and the Scaffold: 1536

  1. Where not otherwise referenced below on this Parliament, see Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 224–48.

  2. Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 337–8; Cromwell actually obtained this grant in September 1535 in anticipation of the autumn session which was then postponed to February 1536.

  3. Henry VIII to the bishops, 7 January [1536], SP 1/101 f. 28, LP 10 no. 45, with an earlier variant draft in SP 6/2 f. 101, LP 7 no. 750 (misdated in LP); Cromwell to the bishops, 7 January [1536], BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 8, LP 10 no. 46. Elton, Policy and Police, 244–6, decisively resolves long doubts about the dating of the documents concerned; contrast Merriman 2 no. 236.

  4. SP 6/1 ff. 115–20, LP 10 no. 246[16]; excellent discussion of the document in Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 362–9.

  5. Loades (ed.), Papers of George Wyatt, 159, and on the Charterhouse instructions, see above, this page.

  6. Chapuys to Charles V, 1 April 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 43, at 83–4.

  7. William Popley to Lord Lisle, 22 February [1536], SP 3/6 f. 144, LP 10 no. 339 (curiously not transcribed in full in Lisle Letters).

  8. Sir Richard Whethill to Lord Lisle, 3 March [1536], SP 3/8 f. 77, Lisle Letters 3 no. 446; William Popley to Lord Lisle, 9 March [1536], SP 1/102 f. 177, Lisle Letters 3 no. 650.

  9. £200 is the same as 300 marks, the sum that Whethill and Popley had mentioned. For discussion of the Act, Shaw, ‘Compendium Compertorum’, 386–406.

  10. Ibid., 394.

  11. Loades (ed.), Papers of George Wyatt, 159–60. The appointments of Rich and Pope were already known in political circles in London by 28 March: Thomas Warley to Lady Lisle, SP 3/14 f. 47, Lisle Letters 4 no. 668. For discussion of the Court, see Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 203–19, although Elton was characteristically insistent on the primacy of Cromwell’s role in its creation. In particular (at 214) he wrongly cast doubt on the idea that Pope had primarily been Audley’s servant. Several letters between 1533 and 1536 place Pope in the household of Audley (‘my Lord’) at Christ Church Aldgate: cf. e.g. Pope to Cromwell, end of January 1533, SP 1/82 f. 150, LP 7 no. 180; ?1536, SP 1/100 ff. 92–3, LP 9 no. 1148.

  12. Rich to Cromwell, 26 July [1538], SP 1/134 f. 248, LP 13 i no. 1465. For representative specimens of fury at Rich’s high-handedness, John Husee to Lord Lisle, 6 September [1536], SP 3/4 f. 149, Lisle Letters 3 no. 765; 1 September [1537], SP 1/124 f. 157, Lisle Letters 4 no. 1004.

  13. Sir William Courtenay to Cromwell, 14 October ?1533, SP 1/79 f. 177, LP 6 no. 1286.

  14. See the appointments in LP 13 i no. 1520[II], 572–3, i.e. TNA, E 315/232, ff. 1v–7v.

  15. BL MS Royal 18 CVI, not calendared in LP, but well discussed in G. R. Elton, ‘An early Tudor poor law’, in Elton, Studies 2, 137–54.

  16. Elton, Reform and Renewal, 123–7, with as the centrepiece of its discussion the report of Thomas Dorset to burgesses of Plymouth on 13 March 1536, a letter which probably ended up in Cromwell’s papers via its recipient, his client James Horswell, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 131, LP 10 no. 462.

  17. For an excellent and comprehensive discussion of the background, see Baker, Oxford History of the Laws of England 6, 653–86, from which the account below is taken unless otherwise referenced, but for the Crown’s campaign against uses in the 1530s, see also Ives, ‘Genesis of the Statute of Uses’, and discussion in Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 235–8. For the controversial future of the Act, see Holmes, ‘G. R. Elton as a legal historian’, 274–8.

  18. LP 8 no. 962[22]: a conveyance of 25 June 1536 which actually concerned a ward of Cromwell’s, Thomas Rotherham junior, whose father had agreed that he should marry Cromwell’s niece – see their draft agreement in 1533, TNA, SP 2/O ff. 119–31, LP 6 no. 1625[5].

  19. Thomas Fiennes ninth Lord Dacre had a bad track record on violent game-poaching, which led to his execution in 1541, but which meanwhile resulted in an apologetic letter about an earlier incident to Cromwell, 4 December 1537, SP 1/127 f. 1, LP 12 ii no. 1169. Cromwell thereafter took the precaution of becoming Master of Dacre’s game – Dacre to Cromwell, 25 January 1538, SP 1/128 f. 120, LP 13 i no. 143.

  20. The relevant background documentation on the Calais commission is efficiently marshalled in Nichols (ed.), Chronicle of Calais, 98–135. C. S. L. Davies, ‘Tournai and the English Crown, 1513–1519’, HJ 41 (1998), 1–26, gives good reasons for rebutting the idea that Tournai had previously had Parliamentary representation when in English hands to provide a precedent.

  21. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 209–11.

  22. Roland Lee to Cromwell, 20 February [1536], SP 1/102 ff. 58–9, LP 10 no. 330.

  23. Roland Lee to Cromwell, 12 March [1536], SP 1/102 f. 178, LP 10 no. 453.

  24. Roland Lee to Cromwell, 29 April [1536], SP 1/103 f. 191, LP 10 no. 754.

  25. P. Roberts, ‘Wales and England after the Tudor “union”: Cro
wn, Principality and Parliament, 1543–1624’, in Cross, Loades and Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors, 111–38, at 112–13.

  26. SP 60/2 f. 83rv, LP 7 no. 1211: memorandum in a clerk’s hand with many corrections by Cromwell, redated to autumn 1535 by Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 106–7.

  27. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 146–7.

  28. Ibid., 147–9.

  29. Complete Peerage 6, 79. A good overview of Lord Leonard’s career is by M. A. Lyons in ODNB, s.v. Grey, Leonard.

  30. For a querulous memorandum (of late 1539 or early 1540) to Cromwell from Lord Leonard about this and other matters needing correction, SP 60/7 f. 168, LP 14 ii no. 795; for the whole sad story, B. Bradshaw, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1974), 66–7.

  31. William Brabazon to Cromwell, 17 May [1536], Lambeth MS 616 f. 44, State Papers 2, 315. Cromwell’s slightly embarrassed reply to Brabazon about the Succession Act, saying that if not fully completed in its various stages, ‘it must be stayed till further knowledge of the King’s pleasure’, is SP 60/3 ff. 73–4, LP 10 no. 1051.

  32. Bradshaw, Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII, 47–65.

  33. LP 10 no. 597[47 i and ii].

  34. George Browne to Cromwell, 19 July [1536], SP 60/3 f. 112, LP 11 no. 120.

  35. For an excellent account of what follows, and crisp rebuttals of alternative interpretations, including those of George Bernard, see Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 282–3, 306–12. It will be evident that Ives and I differ on Cromwell’s intentions for monastic dissolution at this stage, given my use above of the evidence about the dissolution legislation provided by Dr Shaw, but in other respects our analyses of Skip’s role in the crisis concur: see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 155–6.

  36. See verses composed by Dr John Pickering, 1536/7, SP 1/118 ff. 292v–293r, LP 12 i no. 1021[5]; for Cranmer’s chaplain Thomas Wakefield in the late 1530s, Carley, ‘Religious controversy and marginalia’, 244, Appendix no. 38, and, for a later sixteenth-century use, Chauncy, Historia aliquot martyrum Anglorum, 60. Bishop Aylmer in 1559 interestingly reapplied it to Wolsey ‘and his company’, in the course of an historical reflection on Anne which contrived not to mention Cromwell by name: Dowling (ed.), ‘William Latymer’s Chronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, 42.

  37. Dowling (ed.), ‘William Latymer’s Chronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, 57–9; on the degrees, see below, this page.

  38. Cranmer to Cromwell, 22 April [1536], SP 1/103 f. 151, LP 10 no. 705.

  39. Chapuys to Charles V, 1 April 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 43, at 80–81, 84–5, and cf. Chapuys to Charles V, 5 June 1535, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 170, at 484.

  40. Chapuys to Charles V, 21 April 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 43a. Good background comment in Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 312–15.

  41. Chapuys to Charles V, 21 April 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 43a, at 97–8.

  42. Chapuys to Charles V, 6 June 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 61.

  43. Chapuys to Granvelle, 21 April 1536, LP 10 no. 700.

  44. In what follows on Anne’s fall and death, Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 319–37, is a generally reliable guide, though it will be apparent that we disagree in that I see Cromwell as in charge of proceedings from February onwards. Where I take a different line on other matters, I justify it in citations. I am convinced that at all points one must subtract the evidence supposedly provided by George Constantine, since his so-called ‘memorial’ of 1539 is one of the cleverest forgeries of that Victorian master-forger John Payne Collier, despite not being detected in A. Freeman and J. Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: scholarship and forgery in the nineteenth century (2 vols., New Haven and London, 2004). So one must disregard in this and in all else [Collier, forger], ‘Transcript of an original manuscript, containing a memorial from George Constantyne to Thomas Lord Cromwell’, ‘ed.’ Amyot.

  45. George Lord Rochford to Lord Lisle, 17 April [1536], SP 3/7 f. 6, Lisle Letters 3 no. 677.

  46. J. Anstis (ed.), The register of the most noble Order of the Garter . . . usually called the Black Book . . . (2 vols., London, 1724), 2, 398. Chapuys to Charles V, 29 April 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 47, at 106. For details on Carew against Anne, see S. Lehmberg in ODNB, s.v. Carew, Nicholas.

  47. LP 13 i no. 1520[II], 572–3, i.e. TNA, E 315/232, ff. 1v–8r.

  48. LP 10 no. 848[i and vi].

  49. Thomas Warley to Lord Lisle, 28 April [1536], SP 3/8 f. 65, Lisle Letters 3 no. 686; John Husee to Lord Lisle, 28 April [1536], SP 3/4 f. 47, Lisle Letters 3 no. 685.

  50. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne (eds.), Correspondence of Matthew Parker, D.D. . . . (Parker Society, 1853), 59.

  51. Chapuys to Charles V, 29 April 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 47, at 106; Chapuys to Granvelle, 29 April 1536, LP 10 no. 753, not included in the Spanish Calendar.

  52. LP 10 no. 736. The writs included those to Lord Lisle and the mayor and burgesses of Calais to elect two representatives there.

  53. Thomas Warley to Lord Lisle, 28 April [1536], SP 3/8 f. 65, Lisle Letters 3 no. 686.

  54. Deposition of Robert Hobbes Abbot of Woburn, May 1538, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 109v, LP 13 i no. 981[2].

  55. TNA, SP 70/7 f. 7r, Calendar of State Papers Foreign . . . Elizabeth [I], 1: 1558–59, no. 1303, 527.

  56. Thomas Warley to Lord Lisle, 2 May [1536], SP 3/14 f. 54, Lisle Letters 3 no. 690.

  57. Cromwell to Gardiner, 30 April 1536, LP 10 no. 761, Merriman 2 no. 146.

  58. Hall 2, 268.

  59. The time of Anne’s arrival is provided by Anthony Anthony, an eye-witness at the Tower, in a transcript in the Bodleian copy of Herbert, Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, Bodl. Folio ∇ 624, facing 385.

  60. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 157–8.

  61. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, 145–6, 163–4, 280–81.

  62. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 338–40.

  63. Ibid., 340–42.

  64. TNA, SP 70/7 ff. 9v–10r, Calendar of State Papers Foreign . . . Elizabeth [I], 1: 1558–59, no. 1303, at 530–31.

  65. Kelly, Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII, 250–59; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 158–9.

  66. Chapuys to Granvelle, 29 April 1536, LP 10 no. 753.

  67. See above, this page. The grant is LP 9 no. 504[12], 24 September 1535, made from Audley’s Essex home at Old Ford, so the decision would have been taken in the weeks before at Court in Winchester. Appended to it is a note of the personal surrender of the grant on 1 May 28 Henry VIII. On the house, see Colvin (ed.), History of the King’s Works 4, 124–5; for a representative sample of Cromwell’s spending on it and intentions for it, John Williamson to Cromwell, 3 September [1535] and 11 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 65, LP 9 no. 259, and SP 1/96 f. 128, LP 9 no. 339; Richard Tomyou to [Cromwell], 23 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 201, LP 9 no. 415.

  68. Chapuys to Charles V, 21 April 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 43a, at 86.

  69. For a convincing rehearsal of the background, R. W. Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy, sixth Earl of Northumberland, and the fall of the House of Percy, 1527–1537’, in G. W. Bernard (ed.), The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992), 180–211.

  70. Earl of Northumberland to Cromwell, 13 May [1536], BL MS Cotton Otho C/X f. 221, LP 10 no. 864.

  71. Anstis (ed.), Register of the most noble Order of the Garter, 2, 398–402.

  72. Earl of Northumberland to Cromwell, 16 May [1537], SP 1/120 f. 99, LP 12 i no. 1211; Northumberland to Cromwell, 3 June [1537], SP 1/121 ff. 27–8, LP 12 ii no. 19; Richard Leighton to Cromwell, 29 June [1537], SP 1/121 ff. 187–8, LP 12 ii no. 165.

  73. Miss St Clare Byrne meticulously if inconclusively marshalled the evidence: Lisle Letters 3, 378–84.

  74. Chapuys to Charles V, 6 June 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 61, at
138: ‘sur ce me loua grandement le sens, esperit, et cueur de la dicte concubine et de son frere.’

  Chapter 15: Summer Opportunities: 1536

  1. Chapuys to Charles V, 6 June 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 61, at 158.

  2. Sir John Russell to Lord Lisle, 3 June [1536], SP 3/7 f. 36, Lisle Letters 3 no. 713; see above, this page.

  3. Chapuys to Charles V, 19 May 1536, Spanish Calendar 5 ii no. 55, at 124.

  4. Joyce Bickley, late Prioress of Catesby, to Cromwell, end of June 1536, SP 1/102 f. 120, LP 10 no. 383. This is misdated by LP to February 1536 and therefore credited to Anne Boleyn, but there had been no moves against Catesby in her time, and the letter follows neatly on from Cromwell’s commissioners to Cromwell, 12 May [1536], BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 241, LP 10 no. 858, and the commissioner (and Cromwell’s servant) George Gifford to Cromwell, 19 June [1536] and 27 June [1536], BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 249, LP 10 no. 1166; SP 1/104 f. 210, LP 10 no. 1215.

  5. Unknown correspondent to Cardinal du Bellay, 1536, LP 11 no. 860; Ridolfo Pio Bishop of Faenza (papal nuncio in France) to Ambrogio de’ Recalcatia (papal secretary), 4 December 1536, LP 11 no. 1250.

  6. Ralph Sadler to Cromwell, 27 September [1536], SP 1/106 f. 217, LP 11 no. 501.

  7. Joyce Bickley, late Prioress of Catesby, to Cromwell, end of June 1536, SP 1/102 f. 120, LP 10 no. 383, and on the Charterhouse, see above, this page.

  8. Wriothesley’s Chronicle 1, 47–8; Wriothesley did not mention Cromwell in his detailed list of those present.