They were treading a tightrope, because when Vaughn ventured to send a copy of a part of Tyndale’s Answer to More to the king on 18 April, with a commendation of the author as a loyal subject, he provoked what must have been a completely unexpected rebuke from Cromwell. It seems that the latter was instructed by Henry to reply on his behalf, and the surviving draft of the letter bears much evidence of revision. It is an inconsistent document including many harsh words against Tyndale, but ending with a postscript in which Cromwell urges his agent to carry on as before!22 It is perhaps not unreasonable to suppose that the postscript was added after Henry had vetted the main letter. Anyway there was no royal rebuke for Cromwell, and no recall for Stephen Vaughn. On 20 May the latter, quite unabashed, was telling the king that Tyndale earnestly wanted a reconciliation, and was longing for the day when Henry would authorise an English translation of the Scriptures.23 Either he had missed the point of the letter he had earlier received, or Henry had changed his mind about the validity of his mission. That this may have been the case is indicated by Vaughn’s next letter to Cromwell, dated 19 June, with which he enclosed an unnamed book of Luther’s, which would have been a rash thing to have done had not some word of the king’s shift of position reached him. However he hesitated to send a copy of Melanchthon’s treatise on the Augsburg Confession to Henry, in case it should fall into unfriendly hands, and in that he was undoubtedly wise. Tyndale, Vaughn went on to explain, had now completed his translation of Jonah, and encouraged George Joye, another evangelical exile, to translate the prophecies of Isaiah. Both these works had been printed in Antwerp, and would appear in England in due course. He sent this letter in two copies,24 presumably fearing interception, and that was a wise precaution, because Henry’s attitude appears to have been completely schizophrenic. On the one hand he was allowing John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, and Sir Thomas More to wage a fierce war on heretics, and on the other encouraging Vaughn and Cromwell in their dealings with Continental Lutherans and their fellow travellers. Thomas Bilney went to the stake in August 1531, and Richard Bayfield in November, which could not have happened without the king’s permission. On 3 December another proclamation denounced Tyndale as a spreader of seditious heresy, and at the same time More was trying to extract from George Constantine relevant details of his dealings with Vaughn, who was understandably apprehensive.25 Nevertheless on 14 November he wrote again (in two copies) to Cromwell, enclosing a copy of Robert Barnes’s Supplication unto King Henry VIII, and urging that he present it to the king and commend its author. Since Barnes had fled from England two years earlier, and made his way to Wittenburg, where he became a pupil of Luther, this might seem an exceptionally rash course to have advocated, and we do not know whether Cromwell followed up his suggestion.26 Probably not in view of the fate of Richard Bayfield at about that time. In a letter dated 6 December he urged Vaughn to be extra careful and watchful, in order not to give More any pretext to move against him; Vaughn replied a few days later, declaring that he was neither a Lutheran nor a ‘Tyndalian’. This profession may have been honest in terms of his doctrinal allegiance, but scarcely explained his dealings with the reformers, and may well have been inserted for the benefit of the king, to whom it was clearly intended to be shown.27 Henry may even have been convinced, because Vaughn was able to continue his search for Lutheran books on Cromwell’s behalf, and the latter was able early in 1532 to secure a safe conduct for Barnes to come to England. Unlike Tyndale, Barnes was willing to take that risk, and even had a private audience with the king. Although his supplication was offensive to the monarch in the sense that it advocated justification by faith alone, it also explained a number of Lutheran tenets in terms which were acceptable to Henry, and contained a fulsome declaration of loyalty to his sovereign.28 The king would have been looking for some endorsement of his position on his marriage, and over that it is likely that Barnes was non-committal, because rather to everyone’s surprise, Luther himself had emerged as a strong supporter of Catherine, brushing aside Henry’s Levitical arguments as irrelevant. He recognised the king’s need for a male heir, and advocated bigamy as a solution to the problem. Henry was unimpressed, but he did not abandon his cautious interest in the Lutheran alliance, nor take any action against Barnes, Vaughn or Cromwell.
It is possible that this mild response was due to the latter’s increasing influence in the king’s counsels, because there is some evidence to suggest that Henry was beginning to perceive his dispute with the Pope as a jurisdictional issue only, which did not impinge upon the Catholicity of his faith.29 This was Cromwell’s view throughout, and his interest in Lutheran works was focused mainly on the German’s quarrel with the Church as an institution, rather than on debates about justification or the Eucharist. In his daily dealings with the king, he would have been very careful to stress this distinction, which increased the former’s confidence in him at no cost to his own conscience. It is not, therefore, particularly surprising that an attack should have been launched in Parliament against the clergy, while the fires of Smithfield were still consuming heretics. This took the form of the Supplication against the Ordinaries, which was introduced into the Commons towards the end of February 1532.30 This may have been designed to take the place of whatever the Duke of Norfolk had been hoping to produce from a meeting held on 14 February. At that meeting he had urged that matrimonial jurisdiction belonged to the king ‘who is emperor in his kingdom’, and not to the Pope. However the House was clearly not yet ready for so radical a notion, and nothing resulted. Instead the Commons turned back to what they understood and appreciated better – bashing the churchmen. The first draft of this document was produced in house, and it is not known by whom, but its consistency with what was shortly to become government policy make it likely that the councillors in the Commons played a leading part.31 The supplication was redrafted several times, and the penultimate version is in the hand of Sir Thomas Audley, which makes it clear that by then it had become an official measure. As such, it was part of a two-pronged attack upon the Church, the other prong being the threat to papal revenues which eventually emerged as the Act in Conditional Restraint of Annates. The draft of this Bill is partly in Thomas Cromwell’s hand, and that points to the strategist who was behind these congruent measures. It is indeed possible that the first draft of the supplication dates from the session of 1529, when such matters were very much in the minds of members. It was not introduced in that session, but an awareness of its existence might well have prompted Cromwell or Audley to seize on it as being relevant to the business of 1532, and might also account for the fact that it was rewritten. Cromwell revised the first part of the document completely, removing a reference to the role of the bishops in Parliament, so that it became a direct attack upon the legislative functions of convocation, where laws were made ‘without your royal assent or knowledge, or the assent or consent of any of your lay subjects’.32 The revised supplication went on to complain about the ‘light and frivolous’ causes for which laymen were summoned before the spiritual courts, and particularly of the ex officio procedure and the use of false witnesses. The complaints went on to cover the use of excommunication for ‘small and light’ causes, the excessive fees charged by the spiritual courts, and nepotism and simony in the conferring of benefices.33 The evidence suggests that this supplication was deliberately revived in 1532 as a part of a strategy of applying pressure to the English Church to make it more willing to do the king’s bidding over his marriage. It did not become an Act, but was nevertheless submitted to Henry, who passed it to convocation for their comments. The result was a resounding defence of clerical privileges, penned by Stephen Gardiner, the newly appointed Bishop of Winchester, and the king was not pleased, passing it back to the House of Commons with the message that it would ‘smally content’ them. This proved to be an understatement. The Parliament pressed its attack through a statute providing for the diversion of annates from the Pope to the Crown, and made it clear that Henry had accepted
their supplication, and would act upon it. Gardiner, who was the king’s secretary, and who had misjudged the situation completely, hastily penned a treatise on True Obedience in order to redeem his career, and the convocation surrendered their legislative independence to the king.34 This last was what mattered, and, on receiving the news, Sir Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor, recognising the defeat of his own campaign, which had been waged in alliance with the Church. By astute parliamentary management, Cromwell had won the first round in his battle for the king’s mind. Henry had battered the clergy into submission, and it now remained to see what use he would make of his victory.
On 16 May 1532 the Submission of the Clergy, which embodied complete surrender on the question of jurisdictional independence, was offered to the king at Westminster. An interesting group of councillors was present on that occasion: George, Lord Abergavenny; John, Lord Hussey; John, Lord Mordaunt; Sir William Fitzwilliam; and Thomas Cromwell. None of these was a senior councillor, and Cromwell’s closeness to the king can be deduced rather than proved. He had only just become an office holder, having been appointed Master of the King’s Jewels on 14 April, but the others were all household officers, and with the exception of Hussey were to be associated with Cromwell over the next few years.35 Archbishop Warham had been opposed to the surrender, but had lacked the resolution to withstand it. He was a long-standing royal servant and had no wish to be seen as resisting the king’s wishes on so important a matter. What he might have done about implementing the new powers which he had been given by implication we do not know, because he died on 22 August, and that left the way open for Henry to proceed to the next stage of his plan. Cromwell could not have anticipated Warham’s death, but it came very opportunely for the campaign which he had been discreetly waging for the last two years, to persuade the king to act unilaterally.36 The Church as an institution would no longer oppose him, and now he had the opportunity to appoint a compliant archbishop. At the same time, and with the same ultimate objective in view, Henry pursued his plan for a face-to-face meeting with Francis I. Whatever course of action he followed in order to rid himself of Catherine, it was bound to be opposed by the Emperor, and Francis, who was constantly at odds with Charles, even when not actually at war with him, was naturally looked on as an ally. The King of France appreciated this point perfectly, and wished to take advantage of it to seal his friendship with Henry, whose position athwart the Emperor’s lines of communication between Spain and the Low Countries was potentially of great value to him. After considerable negotiation a meeting was therefore arranged to take place at Calais in October 1532.37 Anne Boleyn was to accompany her lover, and in order to give her a suitable dignity for the occasion, he created her Marquis of Pembroke on 1 September. Whether he had any other plans for her at this stage is not clear. There was speculation that they might marry in Calais, and they may in fact have done so, but if so, then it was kept very secret.38 Francis proved affable, but his queen refused to receive her on the grounds of her ambiguous status, which suggests that even the most private of assurances that she was actually married to Henry was not forthcoming. Nevertheless the king seems to have convinced her, and himself, that a way out of his matrimonial difficulties had now been found. Thomas Cromwell, who was by this time a member of the inner ring of the council, accompanied him to Calais and persuaded him to proceed from words to actions. At some point in late November or early December the couple slept together for the first time. Their decision to do so was no doubt aided by the fact that they were weatherbound in Calais, but it still represented a decisive change in their relationship, thanks to the opportune death of Warham, and Cromwell (if he knew about it) was no doubt suitably gratified.39
It had taken time to induce Henry to move from the brave words of 1530 to the resolute action of November 1532, and this change has been attributed to the influence of Thomas Cromwell. It was probably at the end of 1531 that Cromwell had advanced from being a Councillor at Large to membership of the inner ring, and the Supplication against the Ordinaries was his first major service to the Crown. There is no doubt that he was responsible for converting the Commons draft of 1529 into the supplication as that was presented to the king, or that it was a cautious but deliberate step on the road that he had mapped out. How completely Henry understood this at that time we do not know, but it is never safe to underestimate the king’s intelligence, and it is quite possible that he had grasped the fact that he was heading for a breach with the papacy. His mindset, however, was entirely traditional, and his arguments with the Curia had so far been conducted in terms of precedent and history, so it is likely to have been no easy task to persuade him to so radical a course.40 Anne had been urging unilateral action since at least 1529, so that when the king eventually came round to the same point of view, her consent was natural. Should she become pregnant, Henry would now have no option but to marry her and declare (by whatever means) his existing union to be null and void. In view of Clement’s attitude, a formal breach with Rome would then become inevitable. In late January or early February her condition was established, and the fuse which led to the Act in Restraint of Appeals was lit. An unreliable tradition maintains that they were married on 25 January, but that may well have been the date upon which her pregnancy was discovered.41 Meanwhile it was essential that the jurisdictional structure necessary for such a sequence of events should be completed by the appointment of an acquiescent archbishop. Henry had already renounced any claim to exercise spiritual jurisdiction in his own person, so the settlement of his marriage would be a matter for the archbishop’s court, and he had to be sure that the archbishop would be willing to do his bidding. His choice fell on Thomas Cranmer, the Archdeacon of Taunton; not the most obvious choice, but one who had the essential qualification. Cranmer was wholeheartedly and honestly the king’s man over his ‘divorce’ issue. He had been a member of that group which had produced the Collectanea satis copiosa in 1530, and the idea of consulting the European universities had been his.42 He had also written a tract, now lost, on the divorce issue, and had lodged with the Earl of Wiltshire (Anne Boleyn’s father) while he wrote it. In the autumn of 1532 he had been sent off on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor, to whom he was introduced as the king’s ‘new theologian’, and it was during that mission that he was recalled to be the next archbishop. Cranmer was appalled by the summons. Not only did he have no episcopal experience, but he had recently married, his bride being the niece of the Lutheran divine Andreas Osiander. Marriage was forbidden to priests, let alone to an archbishop, and the appointment would mean at least many years of secrecy.43 It is to be hoped that he consulted Margaret, because the sacrifice would be mainly hers, but there could really be no hope of avoiding it and remaining the king’s good subject. So in mid-January he returned to take up the unwelcome office, and Henry applied to Rome for his pallium. In spite of his marriage, he was not a Lutheran, and his doctrinal and ecclesiastical positions were very close to those of the king. In short he was an ideal man for the job, and returned to a situation in which his first task would be to declare the king’s marriage to Catherine to be null and void, and to confirm the nuptial which had already taken place between Henry and Anne. In spite of being aware of Cranmer’s antecedents, Clement made no difficulties about granting the pallium, and he was consecrated on 30 March 1533.44 It was therefore as a papally confirmed archbishop that he prepared to ignore the Pope’s prohibition and to pronounce on Henry’s first marriage. We do not know what Cromwell’s reaction to this appointment may have been, but he certainly knew Cranmer and knew the way that he was thinking. It is just possible that he may have suggested him to the king, because he understood the importance of the office, and indeed had set up the task which Cranmer inherited. It is hard to believe that he was not delighted.
While Thomas Cranmer awaited his consecration, Parliament had taken the essential step to make his decision final in English law; it enacted the Restraint of Appeals. This measure, which was introduced into
the Commons on 14 March, was based upon the position already conceded that the king was the fountainhead of all jurisdiction, spiritual as well as temporal. However it went further and prohibited all appeals to the papacy, on the ground that the English Church was sufficient to fulfil the offices of the spirituality ‘without the intermeddling of any exterior person or persons’. Spiritual jurisdiction descended from the king or from his Imperial crown, God having given to him authority to render justice in all manner of causes arising within the realm.45 The king was no ‘exterior person’ as far as the Church of England was concerned; he was its Supreme Head, the implication being that all Christian princes should exercise similar control. The draft of this Act was amended a number of times, both by Cromwell and the king, with the intention of making it as little contentious as possible, because the government really needed a swift and sure resolution of the king’s matrimonial problems. Apart from the thumping theoretical assertion in the preamble about the realm of England being an empire, Cromwell made sure that the Act was strictly practical, concentrating on the costs and delays of the present system. The complaints in the Act are strictly confined to the political interference of Rome within the realm, and the remedies proposed are similarly political.46 The implication is that this new law is only an extension and revision of the statutes already in place, and that an Act of Parliament could modify the canon law and provide protection against spiritual censures. The Act develops the Royal Supremacy, and places the king at the head of the spiritual jurisdiction. It also, however, indicates that the law necessary to make that jurisdiction effective is a matter for Parliament, which is thus built into the Supremacy in a most fundamental way. All use of the papal authority becomes a usurpation, and the habits of many generations are thus dismissed as fraudulent. On account, however, of the way in which these measures were wrapped up in talk of precedent and ‘ancient chronicles’, the Bill appeared less revolutionary than it really was, and it rapidly passed both houses, receiving the royal assent on 7 April.47 Thanks to Cromwell’s skilful manipulation of the text, Henry now had his law in place, and in the following month Cranmer’s court at Dunstable pronounced his marriage to Catherine null and void, and his marriage to Anne good, in open defiance of the papal prohibition, which was now irrelevant.
Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII Page 6