Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  83. Wriothesley’s Chronicle 1, 59–60.

  84. Richard Harrison Abbot of Kirkstead to Cromwell, 29 January [1537], SP 1/115 f. 125, LP 12 i no. 278.

  85. Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, 368–9. For the King’s movements at this time, see Sir William Paulet to Cromwell, [13 December 1536], SP 1/112 f. 177, LP 11 no. 1291: Henry was due to move to Whitehall on 19 December and to Greenwich on 21 December. Wriothesley’s Chronicle 1, 59, shows that he kept more or less to this timetable.

  86. Richard Southwell to Cromwell, 23 December 1536, SP 1/113 f. 22, LP 11 no. 1356.

  87. John Husee to Lord Lisle, 5 January 1537, SP 1/114 f. 22, Lisle Letters 4 no. 910, and for a distinctly nervous reply from the Earl of Oxford on 6 January 1537 to a request from Cromwell in regard to a volubly seditious northerner, SP 1/114 f. 24, LP 12 i no. 27. The Charterhouse next Coventry to Cromwell (‘in haste’!), 4 January [1537], SP 1/114 f. 17, LP 12 i no. 19.

  Chapter 17: The Reckoning: 1537

  1. Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester to Cromwell, c. 21 August 1532, SP 1/70 f. 205, LP 5 no. 1245; John Godsalve to Cromwell, a covering note just after previous, SP 1/70 f. 127, LP 5 no. 1118.

  2. [Henry VIII], Ansvvere made by the Kynges Hyghnes to the Petitions of the Rebelles in Yorkeshire, sig. A4v, and see above, Chapter 16.

  3. For sensible comment on these long-controverted matters, see J. Guy, ‘The Privy Council: revolution or evolution?’, in Coleman and Starkey (eds.), Revolution Reassessed, 59–86.

  4. W. Underwood, ‘Thomas Cromwell and William Marshall’s Protestant books’, HJ 47 (2004), 517–39, at 534–5.

  5. Henry Earl of Cumberland to Cromwell, 12 January [1537], SP 1/114 f. 77, LP 12 i no. 72. Anthony Budgegood in his account of leading English nobility, end of 1538, LP 13 ii no. 732, described Cumberland as ‘of good power, without discretion or conduct’, and for another lukewarm opinion of his abilities, Duke of Norfolk to Cromwell, 12 April [1537], SP 1/118 f. 155, LP 12 i no. 919.

  6. Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, 365–7.

  7. SP 1/114 f. 167, LP 12 i no. 138: well discussed in Bush and Bownes, Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace, 47, 151–4, who cogently argue for a date of 8–12 January 1537.

  8. R. W. Hoyle, ‘Thomas Master’s narrative of the Pilgrimage of Grace’, Northern History 21 (1985), 53–79, at 73. For what follows, see Bush and Bownes, Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace, 31–56.

  9. Sir Francis Bigod to [Cromwell], ?late February 1537, SP 1/116 f. 164v, LP 12 i no. 533; for Jerome’s dispensation to hold a benefice with change of habit on 20 May 1537, Chambers (ed.), Faculty Office Registers, 98, and his presentation to Stepney by Leighton on 29 May, G. Hennessy, Novum Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense . . . (London, 1898), 411. Cranmer went on to present Jerome to an additional benefice in Kent on 16 December 1538 after the deprivation of the conservative Thomas Goldwell: Lambeth Palace, Cranmer’s Register f. 366r.

  10. Baker, Oxford History of the Laws of England 6, 588.

  11. Gunn, ‘Peers, commons and gentry in the Lincolnshire Revolt of 1536’, 71–7, and Gunn, Henry VII’s New Men, passim.

  12. Deposition of George Croft, 12 November 1538, quoting a reminiscence of Lord De La Warr, who had been one of the peers at the trial: SP 1/138 f. 175, LP 13 ii no. 803.

  13. Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, 415, and see also 44, 68–70.

  14. Deposition of John Richardson, chantry priest of Haddlesey (near Templehurst), 14 May 1537, SP 1/120 f. 83rv, LP 12 i no. 1200.

  15. For the discovery, made by Dr Thomas Magnus, see Duke of Norfolk to Cromwell, 29 April [1537], SP 1/119 f. 53, LP 12 i no. 1064. The documents themselves from 1529 are SP 1/54 ff. 202–10, LP 4 iii no. 5749[1, 2]. See above, this page.

  16. LP 12 i no. 848. For overlapping material but concentrating on events after the pardon and without any reference to Wolsey, see SP 1/118 f. 14, LP 12 i no. 847.

  17. SP 1/118 f. 43, LP 12 i no. 850. I offer my best attempt at reconstructing the exceptionally scribbled final sentence, which partly repeats an erased line above (‘Item Richardson and Mason saith’): my reading of ‘delivered’ is the most tentative, reading two squiggles which could be double a or double d, as the common abbreviation for that word. Everything else in that sentence is certain. Richardson and Mason must be local informants, but they do not seem to feature elsewhere in evidence about the Pilgrimage.

  18. Ellis, ‘Thomas Cromwell and Ireland, 1532–1540’, 510.

  19. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 119–20, 141–5.

  20. The admission comes in the commissioners’ letter to Cromwell, 2 September [1537], SP 60/5 ff. 13–14, LP 12 ii no. 631; the letter-book is SP 60/5 ff. 1–5, LP 12 ii no. 389.

  21. For the depressing details on Body, damning even if only 50 per cent true, Lord Leonard Grey to Cromwell, 24 November [1536], SP 60/3 f. 187, LP 11 no. 1157, and for the Irish background to his mission, Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 113.

  22. Robert Cowley to Cromwell, 9 March [1538], SP 60/6 ff. 46–7, LP 13 i no. 470.

  23. Deposition of John Allen, February/March 1538, SP 60/6 f. 49v, LP 13 i no. 471[2]. This whole bundle of depositions is interestingly annotated ‘he is gone’, suggesting that Cowley and his colleagues waited for the departure of the commissioners before sending it.

  24. Deposition of Sir Gerald Aylmer, February/March 1538, SP 60/6 f. 51r, LP 13 i no. 471[3].

  25. Deposition of Allen, February/March 1538, SP 60/6 f. 49r, LP 13 i no. 471[2].

  26. Deposition of Aylmer, February/March 1538, SP 60/6 f. 51r, LP 13 i no. 471[3].

  27. This is apparent in the fugitive Anthony Budgegood’s attempt to provide a testimonial for them both to Cromwell, 26 September 1538, SP 1/137 f. 30, LP 13 ii no. 433. For William Paulet’s holograph plea to Cromwell to show his brother mercy ‘as you do to all others offending you’, see Paulet to Cromwell, [14 May 1538], SP 1/132 f. 90, LP 13 i no. 999.

  28. The central pieces of correspondence on Throckmorton’s mission are Cromwell to the English ambassadors in France, 24 December [1536], BL MS Additional 25114 f. 237, LP 11 no. 1363, and Michael Throckmorton to Cromwell, 29 December [1536], SP 1/240 f. 242, LP Addenda 1 i no. 1156.

  29. Michael Throckmorton to Richard Morison, ?15 February 1537, SP 1/116 f. 38v, LP 12 i no. 430 (this letter was presented in 1859 to the then Public Record Office by the notorious forger John Payne Collier, but comparison with other letters of Throckmorton confirms its authenticity). For Throckmorton’s follow-up letter to Cromwell on 20 August 1537, acknowledging the hopelessness of the idea of Cromwell coming to Flanders, see BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/VI ff. 386–8, LP 12 ii no. 552.

  30. John Hutton to Cromwell, 26 May [1537], SP 1/120 ff. 205–7, LP 12 i no. 1293. The background to all this is meticulously set out in Lisle Letters 4, 220–25.

  31. Michael Throckmorton to Cromwell, 20 August 1537, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/VI ff. 386–8, LP 12 ii no. 552; Cromwell to Throckmorton, late September 1537, SP 1/125 f. 71, LP 12 ii no. 795: an office copy in Stephen Vaughan’s hand, perhaps for Hutton’s benefit.

  32. Privy Council to Duke of Norfolk, 7 April [1537], BL MS Harley 6989 f. 69v, LP 12 i no. 846; Duke of Norfolk to Henry VIII, 10 May [1537], SP 1/120 f. 26, LP 12 i no. 1172.

  33. Rymer (ed.), Foedera 14, 588–9, LP 12 i no. 1232; SP 1/120 f. 140, LP 12 i no. 1233. The vice-gerential commission of 6 May 1537 to Thomas Bedell and Richard Gwent is BL MS Additional 48022 f. 95r.

  34. Thomas Bedell to [Cromwell], 14 June [1537], BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 256, LP 12 ii no. 91.

  35. John Husee to Lord Lisle, 29 June [1537], SP 3/5 f. 26, Lisle Letters 4 no. 973.

  36. Hugh Latimer to Cromwell, 18 May [1538], SP 1/132 f. 106, LP 13 i no. 1024.

  37. Chauncy, Historia aliquot martyrum Anglorum, 117: ‘admodum aegre tulit, duriusque vexaturum se eos, si vixissent, cum magno juramento affirmabat.’ Chau
ncy says nothing about death by starvation, but ‘propter squalorem et foetorem carceris moriebantur’: in other words, disease.

  38. J. Clark (ed.), The Various Versions of the Historia aliquot martyrum anglorum maxime octodecim Cartusianorum . . . (Analecta Cartusiana 86, 3 vols., Salzburg, 2006), 1, 11. For the surrender on 10 June 1537, see LP 12 ii no. 64.

  39. For notes on these, with Cromwell and Richard Cromwell taking particular advantage of the trees and herbs, see the accounts from 24 November 1538 onwards, SP 1/139 ff. 148–9, LP 13 ii no. 903.

  40. See Holmes, ‘The last Tudor Great Councils’, 10–16, and on Wolsey’s legatine synod, Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, 267–75.

  41. For what follows on the vice-gerential synod where not otherwise referenced, see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 185–96.

  42. A. Alane [Alesius], Of the auctorite of the word of God agaynst the bisshop of London . . . (?Leipzig, ?1538, RSTC 292), especially sigs. A5–B8; there were later English printings at Strassburg. The work did indeed appear in an expanded version in Latin in 1542, with a formal preface to the Duke dated 1540: A. Alesius, De Authoritate Verbi Dei . . . contra Episcopum Lundensem (Strassburg, 1542). There are anomalies in his account. Although he definitely states that the meeting took place in 1537 (by German and not English reckoning, therefore including February 1537 New Style), he speaks at Of the auctorite sig. B3r of Bishop Foxe as ‘then new come out of Germany’ (De Authoritate 26 is not quite so specific: ‘nuperrime ex obita in Germaniam legatione redierat’), which might relate this whole incident to summer 1536, and therefore to some informal meeting while Parliament and Convocation were sitting. He also makes Cromwell refer in his speech more than once to an agreement ‘by the consent of you and his whole Parliament’ (sigs. A5v–A6r). Yet Alesius’s reference to the summer 1536 Ten Articles as having previously forced him to leave Cambridge in protest means that the whole incident must have taken place in 1537.

  43. This was said to be ‘in the Parliament House’ – in the longer Latin version Alesius is more explicit in calling this a ‘sacrum senatum, qui Westmonasterii convenerat’ (‘holy assembly which [Cromwell] had convened at Westminster’): Alesius, De Authoritate Verbi Dei, 18.

  44. Alane [Alesius], Of the auctorite of the word of God, sig. A5rv.

  45. ?A. Alesius, A treatise concernynge Generall Councilles, the Byshoppes of Rome and the Clergy . . . (London, 1538, RSTC 24237); MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 193–4.

  46. The Institution of a Christen man, conteynynge the Exposytion . . . of the commune Crede, of the seuen Sacramentes, of the .x. Commandementes . . . (London, 1537, RSTC 5164). For extended discussion, see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 191–3, 204–7.

  47. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 206–12.

  48. Of the many works of Margaret Aston which have illuminated this question, the latest and most definitive is Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2016), especially 552–9, but see also Aston, England’s Iconoclasts I: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988), ch. 7.

  49. Institution of a Christen man, ff. 56v–58v. On Gwalther, see above, this page.

  50. Lease on 20 February, TNA, E 315/232 f. 45, LP 13 i no. 1520[ii], 574.

  51. Richard Southwell to Cromwell, 2 and 26 February 1537, SP 1/115 f. 171, LP 12 i no. 317, and SP 1/116 f. 126, LP 12 i no. 512.

  52. Institution of a Christen man, f. 57v.

  53. See Norfolk to Henry VIII, 10 May [1537], SP 1/120 f. 26, LP 12 i no. 1172, and his memorandum on Bridlington, 18 May 1537, SP 1/120 f. 235, LP 12 i no. 1307[2]; Cromwell’s reply to him on 22 May [1537] outlining the King’s response is SP 1/120 f. 165, LP 12 i no. 1257.

  54. On this and what follows, see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 196–7.

  55. For the slightly complex but convincing elucidation of this name, see N. Tyacke, ‘Introduction’, in Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998), 1–32, at 7–8, 28.

  56. D. Daniell, William Tyndale: a biography (New Haven and London, 1994), 1.

  57. A careful study is S. R. Westfall, Patrons and Performance: early Tudor household revels (Oxford, 1990), with a useful though not exhaustive list of patrons, Appendix D. She is however misled by the then current state of scholarship on John Bale to suppose that he received patronage from the fifteenth Earl of Oxford (d. 1540): see ibid., 118–19. This is intrinsically unlikely because there is no interval in Bale’s career in the 1530s when the Earl could have provided such patronage. Bale himself speaks of patronage only from a John de Vere, Earl of Oxford; it is far more likely to be the sixteenth Earl, who succeeded just when Bale needed a new patron in 1540, who aroused Bishop Gardiner’s ire through his players disrupting the mourning for Henry VIII in 1547 and who initially supported Queen Jane Grey against Queen Mary. The length of Bale’s exile abroad in the 1540s is not at all certain, but Oxford may have eased his return to England and provided employment before he took up a clerical post in Hampshire thanks to Bishop Ponet in 1551.

  58. Thos. Wylley Vicar of Yoxford to Cromwell, ?February 1537, SP 1/116 f. 157, LP 12 i no. 529. On 23 October 1544, still Vicar of Yoxford, he was dispensed to hold a second benefice (Chambers (ed.), Faculty Office Registers, 246), and is surely the Thomas Wyllye MA who became Vicar of Henlow that year on 25 November, though bizarrely he was then described as chaplain to Bishop Bonner and was presented on a grant from the late Llanthony Abbey.

  59. John Leland to Cromwell, 25 January [1537], SP 1/115 f. 61, LP 12 i no. 230; for Bale’s friendly letter of 1536 from Ipswich to Leland about antiquities, see Bodl. MS Jesus 74 f. 198v, printed in Leland, Itinerary of John Leland, ed. Toulmin Smith, 1, xi. On Bale in his Suffolk context, see MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors, 143, 159–60.

  60. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants, 140–43.

  61. On this and what follows, S. B. House, ‘Cromwell’s message to the regulars: the biblical trilogy of John Bale, 1537’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme new series 15 (1991), 123–38. I find this a more convincing analysis of the trilogy than E. Gerhardt, ‘John Bale’s adaptation of parish- and civic-drama’s playing practices’, Reformation 19 (2014), 6–20, though Gerhardt is correct in pointing out that a later performance of it was staged by Bale in Kilkenny in 1553. The original context is clearly in 1537.

  62. LP 14 ii no. 782, at 333–4.

  63. For payments for the play, 8 September 1538, LP 14 ii no. 782, at 337, and further discussion of the context, MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 226–8. On Hales’s precocious acquisition, see Hales to Cromwell, late summer 1532, SP 1/82 f. 7, LP 7 no. 8; same to same, 29 September [1532], SP 1/71 f. 56, LP 5 no. 1354; same to same, ‘Wednesday in Pentecost week’ [4 June 1533], SP 1/92 f. 156, LP 8 no. 732 (wildly misdated by LP but redateable by its reference to the Duke of Norfolk’s embassy to France). D. J. Shaw, ‘Books belonging to William Warham, Archdeacon of Canterbury, C. 1504–1532’, in D. E. Rhodes (ed.), Bookbindings & Other Bibliophily: essays in honour of Anthony Hobson (Verona, 1994), 277–86, at 277, cites a pedigree making the Archdeacon a son of the Archbishop’s brother Nicholas. We have discussed this amicably, and I am still struck by the peculiarity of the Archdeacon’s career, which might suggest that he was the Archbishop’s illegitimate son.

  64. J. Bale, A comedy concernynge thre lawes, of Nature[,] Moses, & Christ, corrupted by the sodomytes. Pharysees and Papystes (Wesel, ?1547, RSTC 1287). The colophon at sig. G4r says explicitly that the play was ‘compyled by Johan Bale. Anno M.D.XXXVIII, and lately inprented per Nicolaum Bamburgensem’, implying a caesura between composition and publication. The date of publication at Wesel is not at all certain, but it is likely to have been 1547, like Bale’s other surviving plays. In the patently topically adjusted material at the end, the reader is exhorted at sig. G1r to ‘praye for quene Kateryne [Parr], and the noble lorde protectour’, which puts it in the time frame 1547–8.

  65. Bale, Thre lawes, sig. C4r. The referenc
e to Hailes is the non-East Anglian exception proving the rule, since Hailes Abbey possessed the parish church of Haughley in Suffolk, with a subsidiary relic of the Holy Cross housed there and an object of pilgrimage. This particular scene assumes inter alia that the London Minoresses is as yet undissolved, which would have been the case in 1538, there is a sneering reference at sig. C3v to the consecration commemoration of the friary at Southampton, presumably the Austin Friars house dissolved on 6 October 1538 (LP 13 ii no. 545), and the whole ambience of the play is of a half-reformed Church appropriate to that era. The reference to ‘Yngham Trynyte’ is at sig. D2r.

  66. On Ipswich, see below, this page, and for further context, Blatchly and MacCulloch, Miracles in Lady Lane, 53–6.

  67. For depositions on this of early January 1539, SP 1/142 f. 33, LP 14 i no. 47.

  68. John Clerk Bishop of Bath and Wells to Cromwell, BL MS Harley 283 f. 158, LP 12 ii no. 753; Canons Residentiary of Wells to Cromwell, 28 September [1537], SP 1/125 f. 50, LP 12 ii no. 768.

  69. On the prebend of Litton, see John Clerk Bishop of Bath and Wells to Cromwell, 13 September [1537], SP 1/124 f. 215, LP 12 ii no. 683, and Le Neve, Fasti 1300–1541: Bath and Wells, 55–6; Fasti 1541–1857: Bath and Wells, 72. William Wriothesley was deprived under Mary, presumably as married, by 22 May 1554.

  70. For summary discussion of lay deans and their significance in preserving cathedrals, anticipating a major theme in many of my writings, see D. MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England 1547–1603 (2nd edn, Houndmills, 2001), 79–80.

  Chapter 18: The King’s Uncle? 1537–1538

  1. The marriage had taken place by 16 January 1531, when they were jointly granted lands involved in the family transactions with Wolsey: LP 5 no. 80[14].

  2. For Henry’s career, see HC 1558–1603 3, 539–40.

  3. See the note of it among many other patents in Cromwell’s papers of 1532, LP 5 no. 1285, p. 557, and above, this page, this page.