Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII

by Loades, David

  The session had not been a rich one in legislative terms, and no doubt Wolsey would have written similarly if he had been so inclined, but it would be wrong to read into this humorous letter any deep disillusionment with Parliament as an institution. Rather it expresses a measure of frustration with this particular session, which the cardinal, who was also Lord Chancellor, had managed with such apparent incompetence. That may, however, have been planned by Wolsey, who had no opinion of parliaments, and avoided them whenever possible. By demonstrating the futility of such meetings, which became mere talking shops that did nothing to alleviate the king’s poverty, he was no doubt hoping to convince the king that further sessions would be a waste of time, and indeed as long as his influence prevailed Parliament was not called again.11 Cromwell, however, learned much about its potential power in his weeks as a burgess. It had the ability to frustrate or implement the king’s policies, and it discussed every subject under the sun. Although it had a defined professional competence, the constraints upon it were self-imposed and the result of tradition rather than law. With proper management those limitations could be transcended. It only needed a minister with the right skills and the king’s backing to turn Parliament into an effective instrument of the royal will, and that he was to remember in due course.

  Meanwhile, he turned back to his legal practice, and to his regular activities on Wolsey’s behalf. It is often difficult to determine which was which. In January 1523 he had been given authority, with others, to call in the cardinal’s debts, a position of household responsibility, whereas in May he was asked by John Robinson of Boston to get Robert Pynson to print a large number of letters and briefs ‘for which he will send’, which seems to have nothing to do with Wolsey or his service.12 At the same time his admission to Gray’s Inn must have owed something to his position with the cardinal, and may have been the result of prompting by his employer, because he entered as a qualified lawyer, which he surely was not unless his years of experience were taken in lieu. It is difficult to be sure. In December 1523 he was making presentments before the alderman of Breadstreet ward in the City of London concerning nuisances about St Mildred’s church, and in November he was appealed to by Henry Wykys, his brother-in-law, for assistance in selling a house in Chertsy. In November also he was in correspondence with Sir Peter Vavasour concerning the cheating ways of one Wim Bank, who was withholding his rents in the Low Countries. Vavasour was promising to come to London to consult him.13 All this would seem to belong to his private business, but the Bill which he drafted on behalf of John Palsgrave, one of Wolsey’s clerks, for a Chancery suit in which Palsgrave was suing the executors of one Henry Wilcocks for the moiety of a benefice in Leicestershire, or the licence to a Hanseatic merchant to pass into France in pursuit of Hanseatic goods seized there, must be activities undertaken on the cardinal’s behalf. The latter was an extraordinary concession in view of the state of war between the countries at the time.14 Also as a result of his service to Wolsey he was instructed to set up an investigation into a dispute within the family of the Earl of Oxford concerning inheritance; and he received a petition addressed to him as ‘councillor to the Lord Legate’ from Edward Smything requesting the recovery of some cloths painted by Smything which had been, he alleged, wrongfully detained. In December 1524 he dealt with a case of breach of covenant in Yorkshire, and in May 1525 drafted a lease of some church lands in York, while in June he received a letter from one Cowper requesting his aid in providing a relative to a benefice.15 These are just a few examples of what was obviously an intensely busy life, but one which enabled Cromwell to prosper. In July 1526 George Monoux, an alderman of London, promised him 20 marks (£13 6s 8d) for the successful outcome of a suit which he had in hand, and in June 1527 a detailed inventory of Cromwell’s house shows him to have been well set up with the goods of this world.16

  The evidence for his use of this prosperity is conflicting. One Lawrence Giles wrote to him in fulsome terms, professing his inability ever to repay his generosity and observing that God helps those who help the poor, but his correspondence with John Checkyng, his son’s tutor in Cambridge, is more equivocal. Checkyng, who was a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke Hall, took on his son Gregory, then aged about twelve, and Gregory’s cousin Christopher Wellyfed, at some time in 1527. Christopher was obviously a bright boy, and Checkyng’s reports on him were favourable from the start. Gregory, however, was a different matter, being slow and somewhat obstinate. His tutor tried at first to blame the poor teaching he had hitherto received from John Palsgrave, and made the best of his progress thereafter, bearing in mind that his own reputation as a tutor was at stake.17 However it did not really work, and the best that could be said for Gregory was that he was diligent, which meant that relations with his father became increasingly strained. Checkyng was obviously providing board and lodging for the boys as well as teaching, and found it very difficult to persuade Cromwell to pay the bills. In June 1528 he acknowledged receipt of £6 13s 4d, but it was not enough to cover his expenses. He was, he professed, in debt and did not know which way to turn for cash. It particularly riled him that Wolsey’s prosperous servant was not even willing to pay for the bedding which Christopher had accidentally destroyed by setting fire to it when dozing over a lit candle.18 Eventually, in July 1529, Cromwell threatened to take the boys away, whether, as he alleged, because he was disappointed with their progress, or possibly because he had become wearied by Checkyng’s constant calls for money. The tutor said that he would be relieved by this development, ‘because they had been no profit to him’, but hastened to deny responsibility for their lack of progress. Gregory, although not bright, was well seen in the classical authors, and Christopher had done excellently. He had been, he added, responsible for the education of six scholars who had subsequently become Fellows of Colleges, so there was nothing wrong with his track record.19 Altogether the experience was an unfortunate one, which does not reflect much credit on either party. We do not know whether Checkyng’s constant requests for money were justified or not, but Cromwell was clearly much less than generous in his treatment of the tutor. Nor did he make any gift to Pembroke Hall, which would have been expected of a wealthy man in the circumstances. Gregory’s letters to his father confirm Checkyng’s diagnosis. They show a rather stupid lad, anxious to make a good impression by appearing hard-working but only really enthused by the day’s hunting, to which they had been treated by a local landowner and of which he reported that they saw ‘such game and pleasure as I never saw in my life’.20 Such an experience was clearly worth many hours of Cicero or Tacitus, and his tutor’s frustration is understandable. Cromwell got the message, unpalatable though it must have been, and did not join his son with him in reversion in any of the innumerable offices which he subsequently held. Since such an arrangement was common, almost customary, he cannot have had any illusions about his son’s capacity for business, although he did make a courtier of him subsequently, so he was not completely stupid.

  As far as we can tell, and in spite of his gift for languages, Wolsey did not use Cromwell in any of his complex foreign negotiations, and with one possible exception he did not travel abroad in his master’s service.21 However, the interpretation of this is more likely to have been positive than negative; the cardinal wanted to keep him close at hand because his legal and administrative skills were in such constant demand. Nor did he use him much in his political manoeuvrings at the court, or take any trouble to introduce him to that environment. Instead he delegated much of the routine work of providing for his educational foundations at Oxford and Ipswich to the man who can probably be described most accurately as a secretary. This led to an immense amount of work, because it involved the dissolution of nearly thirty small religious houses, the disposal of their property, the renegotiation of their leases and other land arrangements, the transfer of their properties to the new foundations and the establishment of those colleges.22 There was, or was intended to be, no religious significance attached to those
houses selected for closure. Each was dissolved on the grounds of its lack of viability, either in numbers or resources. Because Wolsey was the Cardinal Legate, he had the authority to do this, and to redistribute the lands of the houses so dissolved. There was no question of the secularisation of such property, because the colleges were ecclesiastical foundations, and those monks and nuns who wished to remain in their habits were transferred to other foundations. Nor was there any suggestion of Lutheran sympathies on Wolsey’s part, because he maintained his campaign against heresy, burning Lutheran books and interrogating those suspected of such views.23 Nevertheless the complaints against his actions were numerous and vociferous, coming both from the gentry and the commons. Travellers had been provided with free hospitality at such monasteries, and they were notoriously lax landlords, which meant that many of the protests came from those who found themselves having to renegotiate their leases with the much tougher Thomas Cromwell, which usually meant enhanced rents, and the more rigorous exaction of other dues. Such objections were even transmitted to the court by aristocratic enemies of Wolsey and in 1527 the cardinal was warned that ‘the king and noblemen speak things incredible of the acts of Mr Alyn and Mr Cromwell’; although if this was intended to damage either the legate or his agents, it appears to have failed at this juncture.24 Cromwell was also accused of taking bribes in his capacity as land agent, and this seems to have been justified up to a point, because he certainly accepted payments from some heads of houses, either to secure generous pensions for themselves or to fix leases of former abbey properties for their friends or kindred. A few houses were inspected but allowed to stand, and the suspicion is that financial inducements were offered in such cases. All this is difficult to prove because the line between a legitimate fee and a bribe was (and is) hard to define, and Cromwell undoubtedly took payments for the work which he undertook, sometimes from his clients – or victims – as well as from his employer. Such payments look suspicious, but it is by no means certain that they were improper at the time, and the accusations of bribery rest largely on the hostile testimony of Reginald Pole. Pole undoubtedly knew Cromwell and his work at first hand, but he wrote his account some years later, when Thomas had done far more to earn his animosity.25

  On 5 January 1525 Thomas Cromwell and John Smyth were appointed attorneys for the new foundation of Cardinal College in Oxford, documents were drawn up in anticipation of its establishment, and in February a list was compiled of the twenty-one religious houses that either had been or were about to be dissolved to provide the funding.26 At the same time Sir William Gascoigne, William Burbank and Thomas Cromwell were commissioned to survey the lands and possessions of half a dozen of them, including Medmenham and Wallingford, and Cromwell and Smyth were given the additional responsibility of acting as attorneys for four others which had obviously been dissolved already. It was not until 13 July that Wolsey was licensed to establish his new foundation ‘on the site of dissolved priory of St Frideswide’, and he made his foundation grant of property a week later, on 21 July.27 At some time between then and 10 February 1526 John Higden was appointed dean of the new college, because on that day Cromwell and Smyth were also named as attorneys for an additional grant made by Wolsey to Higden in that capacity. The chronology of the dissolutions that made these grants possible is not very clear, but most of them seem to have taken place in 1525 and 1526 and Cromwell was present at the majority of them, representing the Lord Legate, who was otherwise engaged. It is perhaps not surprising that the odium attached to these moves should have stuck to him rather than to his master. He was described at one point as the ‘most hated man in England’, and his friend Stephen Vaughn expressed concern for his personal safety. Indeed there seems to have been an obscure plot aimed at his life in 1527, but the details are vague and there is no suggestion that such threats put him off in any way at all.28 He seems rather to have relished the work, which involved surveying and estimating the value of the property of the dissolved houses, making careful inventories, and disposing of their moveable goods, which consisted mostly of altar furnishings, bells and household implements. The latter were sold and a careful record kept of the moneys accruing, while lands were for the most part leased out for enhanced rents, over which Cromwell proved himself to be a tough negotiator. All this work required a detailed knowledge of the law, particularly as it related to real estate, and this he possessed in full measure. The indications are that this work was far more arduous than Wolsey, with his rather grand view of the situation, ever realised, but his agent was supremely diligent and effective. It is perhaps not surprising that in April 1527 Henry Lacy should write to Cromwell congratulating him on his promotion through the cardinal’s favour, and addressing him as a member of Wolsey’s council.29 Lacy was well informed about such matters, so it is likely that this elevation in status had occurred recently.

  Cromwell’s involvement with Cardinal College did not, however, end once the grants of property had been made, because he appears to have been both Receiver General and site manager for the new foundation. The first valor of the lands of Cardinal College was drawn up by him on 30 September 1526, at the beginning of the accounting period which was to run from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, and showed a yearly revenue of £2,051 9s 4d. However, the building work at the college had hardly commenced at that time, and on 31 December Cromwell reported that the money so far dispensed on that work came to £4,684 17s 7d, so he was obviously being allocated funds from elsewhere in Wolsey’s enormous resources.30 Just what was counted as the income of the foundation is not entirely clear from the surviving documents, because at Michaelmas 1527 Cromwell accounted for a gross income of £4,096 1s 5d, which had apparently accrued over the previous year, and this does not match either of the accounts previously submitted. To make the confusion worse, on 19 December 1527 the Receiver General returned another set of ‘the expenses of Cardinal College’, covering the period since 16 January 1525, and showing income of £9,828 11s 4d, and expenditure of £8,882 3s 4d. Whether this covers ordinary as well as extraordinary income is not clear, but it does appear that Wolsey’s brainchild was costing him about £4,000 a year, of which half was covered by the landed endowment which had been transferred from the dissolved monasteries.31 By this time, however, the college was up and running because on 31 October 1527 Cromwell submitted a claim for his expenses, which included the cost of bringing a number of scholars from Cambridge, whence they had been tempted by generous offers, as well as for time spent on Wolsey’s other foundation at Ipswich, and a trip to York.32 In April 1528 the cardinal was apparently considering adding to the endowment of his Oxford foundation, for in a report on the 2nd of that month, in addition to praising the work being done on the college and the excellence of its chapel establishment, Cromwell said that he had been to Wallingford in Oxfordshire ‘about the dissolution of that house’, and had sent the evidences to John Higden, the dean of the college. Rather belatedly, on 12 June 1528, Pope Clement VII issued a Bull in confirmation of the new foundation. Apart from tidying up the legal side in Chancery, the work of foundation was then complete, and although building work was still proceeding,33 Cromwell was able to turn his attention to other aspects of the cardinal’s service. A final valor of the college lands, taken on 29 September 1528, showed an income of £2,263 15s 1d for the previous year, so Wolsey had added rather more than £200 to the endowment of 1526, although whether that came from Wallingford is not known.

  Cromwell’s involvement with the cardinal’s other foundation at Ipswich appears to have been less formal, and more in the way of general oversight. In September 1528 William Capon, the dean of the college, wrote to Wolsey with a general progress report, and noted that Mr Cromwell had been there for several days. He was not altogether happy with the building work, and suspected that the masons were not being paid enough to guarantee their diligence, but there is no suggestion that this was Cromwell’s fault. On 20 December he wrote again, with a more positive report of progress of the building, an
d the news that, in spite of being incomplete, the college was up and running.34 This had no doubt been helped by the transfer to the college of the lands of St Peter’s manor in Ipswich, which had happened in that same month. No accounts survive for the work on the Ipswich college, but Cromwell did report to Gardiner in January 1529 that there had been a flood in the nearby marshes, and that he had been exceptionally busy with the legal aspects of the foundation, which indicates the nature of his oversight.35 William Capon wrote to him in April 1529 that the Bishop of Norwich was being difficult over the dissolution of Broomshill and Rowburgh, minor houses over which he claimed jurisdiction, and whose resources had also been allocated to the college. This perhaps suggests the nature of the legal difficulties with which Cromwell was wrestling. He was also responsible for the flood defence works, and later claimed the credit for paying the workmen enough to ensure that they stuck to their job, and thus prevented a much worse disaster than that which had actually occurred. By far the larger part of Cromwell’s correspondence during the years 1525–29 relates either to the dissolution of the religious houses or to the foundations for which their resources were destined. However, his more general business was not neglected. He was written to on a number of occasions by his friends in Boston, usually asking for favours but in suitably amicable terms.36 His accounts also show that he was continuing to lend money, and in February 1529 he noted that £2,116 3s 2d had been due to him over the ten years previous, of which £542 0s 10d was owed on obligations ‘whereof the date has expired’. Interestingly only £170 of this large sum had been entered into on the cardinal’s behalf, and these were mostly very small sums, where Cromwell had obviously paid bills as they arose.37 He also received petitions from clergy in search of benefices, from noble patrons (including one from Anne Boleyn in favour of a servant of hers), and news from his friends in the Netherlands and in Spain. The latter were now usually addressed to him as ‘Councillor to my Lord’s Grace’, and it is clear that by 1528 at the latest he was very close to Wolsey, which was to be a circumstance of great importance in the crisis which was now looming. Among those drafting documents on his behalf, running errands and generally acting as his agents occur the names of Thomas Wriothesley, William Brabazon and Ralph Sadler, who were clearly his most trusted servants, and whose fortunes were tied to his in the great move which was impending by the summer of 1529.