Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII

by Loades, David

  By this time there is no doubt, not only that Cromwell was a senior councillor and a member of the inner ring, but that it was he who was guiding Henry’s most sensitive policies. His fingerprints are all over the Annates Act, and the plans for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, which took place on 1 June. The ceremonial was not his responsibility, but he did succeed in persuading most of the senior nobility to attend a function which they regarded with distaste. The Duke of Suffolk, for example, functioned as High Constable for the day, in spite of being well known for his opposition to the marriage.48 His duchess, Mary, the king’s sister, did not attend, but she was laying sick at Bradgate and died shortly after. Even Cromwell, however, could not conjure a display of enthusiasm out of the citizens of London, and in spite of Anne’s studied affability, caps remained on heads and few voices cried out ‘God save her’. The king pretended not to notice, but the message would not have been lost on Cromwell, who knew that it would fall to him to implement what was clearly an unpopular policy. The next stage of this was to persuade Catherine to accept her demotion to Princess Dowager of Wales, which the logic of her divorce required. A few days later she was visited at Ampthill by a delegation of councillors, armed with cogent arguments. Cromwell was not among them, but he had drawn up the articles, and it was to him that the browbeaten delegation reported on their return. He cannot have expected any other outcome, and is alleged to have commented wryly that God had done her a disservice in not making her a man, because her courage surpassed that of all the heroes of history and legend.49 Henry, however, was neither impressed nor amused. He had Catherine moved to Buckden in Cambridgeshire, and reduced her household as a penalty for her intransigence. Shortly after, on 11 July, Pope Clement finally got around to condemning Henry for his abandonment of Catherine and his relationship with Anne, giving him until September to return to his lawful wife.50 The king, however, had burned his boats, and treated the papal sentence with contempt, no doubt to Cromwell’s huge relief because this demonstrated, even more than his marriage had done, Henry’s commitment to the policy which they had thrashed out between them. There could now be no turning back, and the future rested on the child which Anne was carrying. However on 7 September she was delivered of a daughter and there was no option but to try again. In spite of respectful congratulations, Cromwell must have cursed his luck, because it would now be at least another year before dynastic security, which had been his objective from the beginning, could be assured.

  Meanwhile, he was not spending the whole of his energies on the high politics of the realm. His surviving correspondence shows him to have been active in a multitude of ways. In October 1531 for example he drafted a number of letters concerning various aspects of the king’s business, and in 1532, when Gardiner, the king’s secretary, was absent on a diplomatic mission to France, Cromwell seems to have stood in as assistant secretary.51 In January he wrote to the Bishop of Winchester, saying that the king was missing him, and was so pestered with business that he did not know which way to turn. This letter was presumably intended to reassure Gardiner, whose absence from the court was causing him anxieties, and may indicate that Cromwell had been responsible for suggesting him for this mission, since both his going and his coming home were at Henry’s discretion.52 Cromwell also seems to have acquired a reputation as a general ‘Mr Fixit’ about the court. In January 1531 a priest wrote to him, asking for his help over a matter of debt – ‘except only for the help of your mastership, I am utterly undone’ – and in February one Reginald Lytylpace wrote from Norwich, ‘I hear that you are in the king’s service, and in high favour’, which suggests that the said Reginald was a little behind the times. In April Henry Darrell solicited his ‘continued favour’ to his son (who had a place at court with the clerk controller), John Gostwyck (who was not without other contacts at court) besought him to continue his good work in ‘the Welsh matter’, and the Corporation of Salisbury asked for a commission of Gaol Delivery.53 Even the nobility expressed their gratitude to this upstart politician. In July 1531 the Earl of Huntingdon solicited his favour for a servant of his, expressing appreciation for past kindnesses, and in August the Earl of Northumberland thanked him for manifold favours in the process of soliciting his intervention with the king to redress a legal decision which had gone against him.54 We do not know the outcome of either of these letters, but probably their lordships were satisfied with the service that they received.

  Parliament was due to reassemble on 15 January 1532, and the management of the session was clearly in Cromwell’s hands. On 31 December Sir Thomas Denys sent him a Bill to be signed by the king, and begged to be excused attendance on the grounds of a sore leg which prevented him from riding. At about the same time John, Lord Audley, also asked to be excused, and referred his proxy to the king. In the course of so doing he expressed his gratitude to Cromwell for the handling of his debts, and professed himself entirely dependent upon the king’s graciousness.55 Cromwell sat in the Commons and was the brains behind the Annates Act, so these requests suggest that he was responsible for the whole business of the session, and although only the king could grant a right of absence, the petitioners obviously knew who to apply to. Parliament was not, of course, his only concern. He was also considering the state of Ireland, where William Skeffington was acting as deputy for the absent Duke of Richmond. On 2 January 1532 Piers, Earl of Ossory, wrote to him, outlining a situation of which he thought that the king should be aware, and warning him against the pretensions of the Earl of Kildare. Since, however, the feud between the Butlers, of whom Piers was the head, and the FitzGeralds, led by Kildare, was notorious on both sides of the Irish Sea, it is unlikely that Cromwell paid much heed to the warning, because Gerald, the 9th Earl of Kildare, was appointed deputy on 5 July following, an appointment which the council soon had cause to regret.56 Sometimes it is hard to know whether Cromwell’s surviving letters relate to his official position as councillor or to the private legal practice which he carried on at least until the end of 1532. In March, for instance, his old friend John Creke wrote to him asking for a loan of £10 until Michaelmas; and in April the Marchioness of Dorset asked for his help in respect of two benefices in Essex over which she claimed patronage, but which were also claimed by the Bishop of London, which sounds like a plea for legal assistance.57 He also seems to have acted as a financial agent, perhaps in consequence of his moneylending activities. In May 1532 he received an acquittance for £533 6s 8d paid into the king’s coffers, of which £333 6s 8d was in part payment of £2,000 owed to the king by Sir Thomas Seymour, the Mayor of the Staple at Westminster, from which it seems that Cromwell had assumed responsibility for these payments. In June he received a letter from Sir Richard Tempest, reminding him to obtain for his son-in-law Thomas Waterton ‘long days of payment to the merchant for the Lordship of Burne’, which sounds like another financial wangle.58 Sometimes there is no doubt that it is his status as a councillor which is being appealed to, as when Augustine Augustino wrote from abroad with news of the Emperor or the Turk, or Lord Edmund Howard (Catherine’s father) appealed to his ‘faithful friendship’ to promote a suit to the king. Howard was, as he put it, ‘highly kinned’ – he was brother to the Duke of Norfolk – but he could not trust his brother to promote his cause with the effectiveness of his faithful friend.59 This probably says more about Cromwell’s perceived relationship with the king than about his actual relationship with Edmund Howard!

  During 1532 and 1533 he acquired a number of minor but lucrative offices. In January 1532 he was appointed Receiver General of all the lands allocated to the king’s new college in Oxford. This was in effect a continuation of the office which he had held from Wolsey, but it was a new appointment, and probably a recognition of the part which he had played in transferring those revenues when Wolsey’s foundation was taken over. On 14 April he was named to the somewhat more prestigious office of Keeper of the King’s Jewels in succession to Robert Amadas, who had just died. This was hardly a ‘cabinet ranking’
post, but it did involve quite a lot of confidential business, and regular access to the monarch, which Cromwell enjoyed anyway. For the first year he shared this position with Sir John Williams, but did most of the work himself, as his general position dictated.60 In July 1532 he was also appointed Master of the King’s Wards, and this was also a very useful promotion, carrying with it a great deal of royal patronage. Placing the king’s wards was highly responsible work, and given the competition which existed for wardships also carried with it substantial fees and even larger bribes. Cromwell did not deserve his subsequent reputation for rapacity, but there is little doubt that he absorbed significant financial inducements from hopeful applicants, because the right to control a ward’s estates was a highly profitable business. Unlike the ‘tegs’ and ambling nags which were the small change of inducement, these sums do not feature in his correspondence, which is hardly surprising.61 They would have been smuggled through the official accounts of his office. It may have been news of his appointment to this position which caused him to be described by one correspondent as ‘Receiver General of Attainted lands’, an office which is not otherwise known to have existed, and for which no evidence survives of Cromwell in possession. In April 1533 he was named as Chancellor of the Exchequer, which was not then the prestigious position which it subsequently became, but was rather an administrative post of the second rank. What it did give him was an office within the financial establishment, and an opportunity to familiarise himself with its procedures, which was useful in terms of the governmental strategy which was then developing.62 On 8 August 1533 Cromwell became Recorder of Bristol, a position which he would have exercised by deputy, but which provides additional evidence of his desire to keep in touch with the mercantile elite outside London; and on 12 September he became Steward of Westminster Abbey. In view of the subsequent fate of the abbey this has a slightly sinister look about it, but was almost certainly offered by the abbey as a means of having a friend in high places, which was already thought of as desirable given the pressure which the Church was under. All these posts were accepted by Cromwell, and the chances are that he solicited them, at least the ones in the gift of the Crown. By late 1533 he did not hold any major office, either in the administration or the court, but was admirably positioned to assess the needs and assets of government. Whether Henry recognised what he was about is another matter, because the king did not have that kind of imagination, but he did appreciate his skill in handling Parliament, and that was what mattered for the time being. During the summer of 1533 Henry was absorbed by his new wife, Queen Anne, and her forthcoming confinement. Secure, as he thought, in the friendship of France, neither papal nor the Imperial threats impinged upon him.

  Meanwhile what of Cromwell’s own surviving child, his son Gregory? He seems to have remained at Pembroke Hall, although no longer under the tutelage of John Checkyng. On 31 July 1531 a certain John Hunt reported that he was in good health and diligent in his studies, and in October Gregory wrote twice to his father; the first time to confirm Hunt’s tidings, and to say that the same applied to his cousin Wellyfed, and the second to ask for his father’s blessing. This slightly odd request suggests that all was not well in relations between the two at that point, and that perhaps Thomas was inclined to blame his son for his lack of academic progress.63 The fact that his first letter was sent from Tapysfield, the Earl of Oxford’s seat near Castle Hedingham in Essex, and thanks the earl for his ‘good cheer’, may provide sufficient explanation. How long Gregory stayed in Cambridge, and whether he stayed at Pembroke Hall is not altogether clear. On 30 June 1532 one Henry Lokwood wrote to Cromwell from Christ’s College, thanking him for his favours bestowed on the college, and sending commendations to his ‘loving pupil’ Gregory.64 Gregory in any case did not spend all his time in Cambridge, and seems not to have returned to Austin Friars during the vacations. In January 1531 he and his minder, one Nicholas Saddler, were staying with Margaret Vernon, the Prioress of St Helen’s, who dutifully reported to Cromwell that both were in good health and that Saddler was of ‘very good condition’. Mr Copland, she reported, gives them a Latin lesson every morning, and Nicholas made sure that Gregory benefited fully from it. ‘Your son,’ she concluded hopefully, ‘is a very good scholar.’65 Where Margaret Vernon and her establishment fit into the story of Gregory’s education is not very clear, or whether Nicholas Saddler’s attendance was John Hunt’s idea or Thomas Cromwell’s. He was presumably paid, but unlike John Checkyng, did not have to sue for his payments. By 1532 Gregory was between sixteen and nineteen years old, and his formal training would have been coming to an end in any case; he disappears from the records for the next five years, and lived all his life under the shadow of his mighty father, so it is perhaps not very surprising that the story of his life in Cambridge is somewhat shadowy and confused. In spite of some flattering reports, he was clearly not a great scholar, and what impression his time at Pembroke Hall may have left on him is not clear either. He was his only son and heir, but the impression left by the surviving evidence is that Thomas found him a disappointment, an expense and something of a nuisance.

  Nevertheless by the summer of 1533, Cromwell had every reason to be pleased with life. Not only had he earned his king’s gratitude by clearing a path through the legal jungle which had surrounded Henry’s first marriage, he had done so in such a way as to set up a governmental strategy that, by using Parliament, would enable him to establish the Royal Supremacy in an unprecedented form.

  4

  THE ROYAL SUPREMACY, 1533–1536

  Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme Head and King … unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience…

  Act in Restraint of Appeals

  The Royal Supremacy was established in the spring of 1533, by the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, by the verdict of Cranmer’s court in its favour, and by the Act in Restraint of Appeals. There were, however, loopholes in the Act. It did not specifically cover heresy cases, for instance, and it was not clear whether it was retroactive. Catherine’s supporters were therefore able to argue that the statute made no difference to her appeal, which had been launched in 1529, and she herself continued to look to Rome for a judgement in her favour.1 Nevertheless the resort to Parliament was highly significant, because a statute was supposed to be the act of the whole realm, in which the Lords and Commons were involved alongside the king. It also carried the force of law, which a royal edict did not. Traditionally the competence of Parliament extended to ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but not to ‘matters spiritual’. Thus it was able to redefine the rights of sanctuary, which impinged upon the secular jurisdiction, but not those of the doctrine of justification, which did not. The issue between 1529 and 1533 had therefore been in the nature of a boundary dispute. To what extent were the clergy of the realm the king’s subjects, and to what extent the Pope’s? It is not surprising that Henry decided that issue early on, but not clear what it meant in jurisdictional terms beyond the hoary matter of benefit of clergy, which Parliament had been whittling down for many years.2 The Collectanea satis copiosa had been directed to the question of territoriality – whether English cases could be cited outside the realm – and argued that they could not, but did not attempt to define what constituted a spiritual cause. It had been Thomas Cromwell, armed with Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, who had persuaded the king that his matrimonial cause was a jurisdictional matter rather than a spiritual one, and therefore within the competence of Parliament.3 This crucial shift came at some point in 1532, and marks the beginning of Cromwell’s dominance in the king’s counsels. No record tells us when this happened, and it was probably gradual rather than sudden, but it had certainly happened by November, wh
en Henry began to use Anne as his wife, and may well have married her. By January 1533 the Bill in Restraint of Appeals was already in preparation, and Cromwell prepared the draft, because it would be his duty as the chief parliamentary manager to see it safely through. By implication, and in the light of what happened subsequently, it appears a revolutionary measure, but at the time it was quite possible to see it differently. It claimed to be re-establishing an ancient order, validated by ‘sundry old authentic histories and chronicles’, whereby the king had heard ecclesiastical disputes by virtue of his God-given authority as a Christian prince.4 The claims of Rome are of human origin and are thus to be disregarded, and the Pope’s sanctions ignored. This flew in the face of all tradition, but who was to say that its claims were not valid? The failure to mention heresy may well have been deliberate, because it was quite radical enough without that, but nevertheless it passed an anticlerical Parliament within a fortnight, and may well have been seen by many members as no more than an extension of the laws which had already been passed in respect of clerical fees in the session of 1529.5