Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII

by Loades, David

  Cromwell was a practical man, and his letters generally stick to the point. Only occasionally do they indulge in those generalisations which give an insight into his ways of thinking. One example of such occurs in March 1538, when he wrote to the Bishop of Salisbury that his prayer was that ‘God give me no longer life than I shall be glad to use my office in edification and not in destruction’. He never destroyed anything without the intention of putting something better in its place, which is interesting in view of the number of men and institutions which he swept away in the course of his reforming career.7 He is generally reputed to have been a radical, and in so far as he disregarded obstacles in his way, that description is justified, but he was very anxious not to appear radical in his constructive work. Since innovation was a dirty word in the sixteenth century, such caution was fully justified. He preached moderation, especially to the bishops of his own way of thinking, when it came to the enforcement of reforming practices and doctrines. Intensely sensitive to the need for public order, and to the king’s views on that matter, he urged them as far as possible to avoid ‘contention, division and contrariety in opinion in the unlearned multitude’, and to be lenient in their punishment of offenders.8 In the debates surrounding the publication of the Institution of a Christian Man he made much the same point, demanding unity on a basis of moderation, and avoiding such words as ‘papist’ and ‘sacramentary’. This debate apparently took place in an informal gathering of bishops early in 1537, where Cromwell went out of his way to be conciliatory, and of which we owe our knowledge to Alexander Alesius, whose Of the auctorite of the word of god was published in 1540. Cromwell apparently picked up Alesius, who was known to him, on his way to the meeting, to which he introduced him, to the consternation of some of those present. Alesius was a Scot and a known reformer.9 In 1539 Cromwell wished to treat the Calais sacramentaries ‘without rigour or extreme dealing’, not because he sympathised with their point of view, but because their execution would have drawn attention to the disunion which existed in the realm. In that case he was overruled by the king, who saw such people as a dangerous menace, but his preference for relative gentleness is worth noting. He said much the same thing in the House of Lords in 1540, when he again insisted on the need for moderation and unity in religious matters. In all his enforcement policies steady pressure rather than severity of punishment was the key. Like those who set out to suppress heresy, his aim was submission rather than execution, and on the whole, as we shall see, he was successful.10

  He also thought a good deal about the law, which formed an important part of his own professional background. Unlike Wolsey, he had no desire to be a judge, and did not, as far as is known, ever sit in that capacity while he was Master of the Rolls. Nevertheless he cultivated a reputation for judicial fairness in his dealings with offenders, and was careful always to ensure that the formal procedures of the law were observed, telling Fisher, for example, that his private opinions were irrelevant because his case would be decided by the evidence produced in court.11 When his own time came he wrote that ‘the trial of the law only consisteth in honest and probable witness’, a trial which he was to be denied by the process of attainder. Attainder was a method to which he had himself resorted when there was any doubt about the evidence available being sufficient to convince a jury, which was also, in a sense, a gesture of respect towards the common law. Cromwell, therefore, regarded the law with reverence, and the stories of his securing the condemnation of offenders on slender grounds, and of using political power to secure convictions on evidence which should not have stood up in court, are serious misrepresentations of the truth. He was also a common lawyer, and stoutly defended the king’s ordinary courts against the encroachments of both equity and the civil law. About equity he could do little beyond urging potential litigants to think carefully before embarking upon suits in Star Chamber or Requests. The decisions of neither had the finality of King’s Bench or Common Pleas, and this might need to be explained.12 The procedures of both courts were relatively rapid, but their main appeal was that they offered remedies in cases where there was no relevant law, such as slander.13 However, potential cases needed to be scrutinised to make sure that they fell into that category, and it was possibly for that reason that Requests acquired a common lawyer as a part of its permanent staff during his years in power. Requests, like the Admiralty, was otherwise a bastion of the civil lawyers. There was, however, no such thing as a reception of the civil law, and it is by no means clear who would have wanted such a thing. Wolsey, as Chancellor, may have favoured it, but his successors Thomas More and Thomas Audley were both common lawyers by training, and it never advanced much beyond the specialist courts already referred to. Several of the conservative bishops, notably Gardiner and Tunstall, were canon lawyers by background, but neither had much impact on policy in this respect, and Cromwell arranged for the canon law faculties of both universities to be closed down in 1535, as a part of his campaign against popery.14 Several of the Crown’s lesser servants were civilians, but they had no influence on official attitudes, and the stoutest protagonist of reception was Reginald Pole, who was in exile for the whole decade, and in disgrace for most of it. Before he entered the royal service, Cromwell had run a flourishing legal practice, and legal work continued to occupy a significant proportion of his time; he held powers of attorney, and acted for the Crown in cases of debt, and several other types of suit. He was a member of Gray’s Inn, and knew his Bracton well enough to commend him for giving the king the title vicarius Christi.15 There is no proof that he remembered that, according to the same source, rex debet esse sub lege, but he always acted in accordance with that principle. The common law was a remarkably tough code, especially when threatened with the Roman alternative, and much of that toughness it seems to have owed to the leadership of Thomas Cromwell. It was Stephen Gardiner, many years later, who claimed to remember Cromwell quoting to him the civil law precept quad principi placuit, leges habet vigorem in justification of some arbitrary action, but if Gardiner’s memory was accurate it seems likely that the bishop was being twitted with a legal principle far more subversive of the king’s honour than the common law to which he adhered.

  It is an enduring myth that Cromwell rode roughshod over the law in pursuit of those who opposed the king’s policies. Such cases were usually brought to his attention by voluntary information, not infrequently by the personal enemies of the guilty party, and his first reaction was almost invariably to order an investigation. A fairly typical example occurred in Windsor in April 1538, when the parish priest, Richard Lawson, was charged with treasonable words by Robert Guy, a singing man of the college who was obviously sympathetic to reform.16 One afternoon in early April Guy decided to annoy two conservative citizens by quoting the king’s proclamation permitting the eating of white meats during Lent, on the grounds that the prohibition was merely a ‘popish superstition’. It was not to be murmured or grudged at, he added, which produced hasty disclaimers from the two worthy citizens. Warming to his task, Guy then switched his attack to Richard Lawson, accusing him of sexual improprieties in the confessional, and of warning one Agnes Wilson not to eat meat in Lent just because her husband did so, and so consequently urging her to break the king’s proclamation. To Guy this was proof that the priest would not obey the king’s orders and was thus a ‘privy traitor’. He must then have laid his information before a local magistrate, because within two days an investigation was under way.17 Under interrogation Guy accused Lawson of superstitious practices, which the latter denied. However, a couple of months earlier he had warned the priest to be more convincing in his prayers for the queen and the prince, and to declare the king’s title to the people as he was bound to do. Lawson rebuffed him, whereupon he repeated his warning publicly in the presence of the mayor, who had seconded his urgings. The priest then turned surly and declared that he had never received instructions from his bishop about preaching the king’s title, which was almost certainly untrue at this late
date. The results of this examination were then communicated to Cromwell, who effectively ignored them, and nothing further happened.18 Lawson was clearly a malcontent, but Guy was equally clearly a personal enemy and his talk of treason ridiculously exaggerated. Similar dubious denunciations came from all over England. Dr Horde, the prior of the Charterhouse at Henton in Somerset, was reported in May 1533 by a disgruntled inmate of the neighbouring house of Witham, who alleged that he had attacked Queen Anne, and claimed that he would never consent to the king’s second marriage. Cromwell presumably did nothing beyond warning Dr Horde to guard his tongue. and a year later the same informant was telling him that all the Somerset Carthusians were disaffected, and would prefer death to obedience.19 The Prior of Henton, however, was an old friend of the secretary, and in 1535 was able to write gratefully that he was pleased that their goodwill was not ‘utterly extinct’. Although a number of charges were laid against him, including seeing ‘seditious visions’ (whatever they might have been) and running a house full of the disaffected, he survived as prior until 1539 when he reluctantly but peacefully surrendered. As he accepted his pension, he noted that the Lord Privy Seal had always been his ‘especial good lord’, which seems to have been nothing but the truth. Cromwell must have concluded that the charges against Horde arose out of malice on the part of his accusers, although the evidence for that is lacking.20

  It was not always thus, and when a riot broke out at Taunton in April 1536 it was very differently handled. This was provoked by the activities of a purveyance commission, which was buying up grain at a time of dearth. The rioters were gaoled, but an armed demonstration demanded their release, threatening the magistrates. The trouble spread to Frome, where the disaffected were confronted by a local gentleman, Robert Liversiche, who was well supported. Their courage failed them and they laid down their arms without a fight.21 However the threat had appeared to be real, and when Cromwell was informed, on 7 April he wrote ordering them to be dealt with severely. In the king’s name he issued a commission of oyer and terminer, which sat in judgement before the end of the month, and sentenced twelve of them to death. They were executed in three different places over the next couple of weeks. Fifty others were also condemned, but being penitent and not ringleaders they were allowed to buy their pardons; personal recognisances of £20 and £10 in sureties being required from each of them.22 Henry was very pleased with the prompt and severe response to this abortive riot, and in the light of what was to happen at Louth only six months later, one can see why. Cromwell was quite prepared to act ruthlessly, even when political and religious issues were not involved, but he was always concerned to use the due process of the law. At Bristol the situation was different again, because there the troubles were caused almost exclusively by religion and were stirred up by the arrival of Hugh Latimer, the reforming preacher who was favoured by the town authorities. Latimer had already been censured by convocation, but that did not prevent the mayor from appointing him to preach the Lent sermons in 1533. The Bristol conservatives struck back by importing William Hubberdyne, a popular preacher whose appeal rivalled Latimer’s own, and battle royal was joined, setting the town by the ears.23 The chancellor of the diocese then inhibited them both, and informed Cromwell of his action. The latter responded by upholding his ban on Hubberdyne because the conservatives were notorious partisans of Queen Catherine, but ordering that on Latimer to be lifted. The remaining conservatives stepped into Hubberdyne’s shoes, however, and the battle continued. By 5 June the reformers were sufficiently incensed, and sufficiently sure of themselves, to send a complaint to the king’s council, which was promptly referred to Cromwell. According to the protesters, Hubberdyne, before he was inhibited, had said that the Pope was above all kings, and that in matters of the faith he could not err. He had also claimed that the English Bible led men into heresy.24 Although he swiftly presented Cromwell with his side of the case, claiming malice, the secretary was not convinced and on 4 July ordered him to the Tower. On the 10th the mayor wrote to Cromwell, thanking him for the prompt action that he had taken. At the same time the secretary ordered a commission to be appointed to examine the Bristol stirs, and carefully excluded known partisans such as the mayor, who would otherwise have been expected to serve. Instead he chose five local worthies under the chairmanship of the Abbot of St Augustine’s, and they began their work on 6 July.25 In several sessions between 9 and 11 July a large number of witnesses came forward, and although the commissioners’ powers covered both parties, all the testimony was against Hubberdyne, who, it was claimed, had reviled the men of the new learning and stated that to deny the Pope’s authority was heresy. In sending their report to Cromwell, the commissioners admitted that the evidence with which they had been presented was biased, but unless the king provided a remedy, ‘more inconvenience’ was likely to ensue.26 Hubberdyne remained in the Tower, and Latimer, presumably on Cromwell’s orders, ceased to preach in Bristol and went to work under Cranmer’s direct authority in London. The situation in Bristol was pacified, at least for the time being.

  Cromwell was not, therefore, concerned to harry dissidents, even those who mixed a measure of politics with their religious protest, and certainly not those whose zeal for reform outran their discretion. What he was concerned to do was to ensure the preservation of the king’s peace and good order in the realm, and to punish severely those who threatened that peace. This could involve some difficult decisions. Mrs Amadas, for example, the widow of his predecessor as Master of the Jewel House, was something of a wise woman who claimed to have been in the prophesying business for twenty years. In 1533 she declared that her ‘book of prophecy’ had told her that the king was the moldwarp, and that he would be banished from the realm before midsummer.27 Her sayings rambled on obscurely, but ended with some straightforward abuse of Queen Anne and Thomas Cromwell. The latter was called upon to investigate and had her to the Tower for interrogation, but decided that she was mad and took no further action. Given that shortly after Elizabeth Barton was executed for saying much the same thing under the guise of divine revelation, Mrs Amadas could consider herself fortunate, but then the king himself did not become interested in her utterances. A similar case which ended very differently was that of John Dobson, the vicar of Muston in Yorkshire. As a priest he had a certain prestige which made his prophecies the more dangerous, and when he forecast that the king would be driven from the realm and that the Emperor would restore the true faith, he was listened to. ‘When Crumme is brought low, then we shall begin Christ’s Cross row,’ he is alleged to have said, with a clear reference to the secretary.28 Unfortunately for Dobson, he uttered these opinions within the jurisdiction of the Council of the North and in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a time and a place of particular sensitivity. Tunstall reported him to Cromwell, and the latter told him to send the vicar for trial. He was convicted and executed at the Lent Assizes in York in 1538.29 Many other examples of soothsayers and rumourmongers could be cited, but what is clear in every case is that Cromwell took the time and the trouble to examine it carefully, and based his judgement on the best evidence that was available. If he was not satisfied, then he went on investigating until he was, and came to his decision on the basis of the danger which the person or persons represented to the security of the state. In the first instance the information was almost always volunteered; only in a minority of cases did it come from his own servants or from professional informers. The fact that it was often malicious merely made his task more difficult, and led him to seek circumstantial confirmation, but what he never did was to treat accusations as proven without examination, and given the number of denunciations with which he was constrained to deal, that is a great argument for his conscientiousness.

  Cromwell, however, was more than a scrupulous administrator of the law. He was a statesman with a vision of how the kingdom should be run, and this involved defending the king’s honour and interests. In some respects this was relatively simple. He never, for insta
nce, took an initiative in foreign policy without Henry’s express knowledge and support.30 This did not prevent him from having his preferences and there is plenty of evidence that he would sooner have had an Imperial alliance than a French one. He went out of his way to reassure Eustace Chapuys, Charles’s ambassador in England, about the king’s intentions in respect of his daughter, Mary, putting the most favourable gloss on Henry’s frequently unsympathetic actions, and (with Chapuys’s help) rescuing her when the crunch came over her submission to the king’s will in 1536.31 As relations with the Emperor eased after Catherine’s death, he did his best to steer Henry in the direction of an Imperial alliance, but drew back when he encountered the king’s obstinate refusal to go down that road. Henry preferred to see himself in the role of mediator in the perpetual conflict between France and the Empire, and did not want therefore to appear too close to either. While Anne Boleyn was queen, and Catherine was alive, he was inclined to favour France, as the only source of diplomatic support which he was likely to get against the papal/Imperial alliance, but when they were both gone he allowed Cromwell to make overtures to the Imperial camp, and encouraged his amicable relations with Chapuys.32 The ambassador was happy to enjoy such a position, but he never really trusted the secretary, or knew quite what to make of him. His reports are full of their conversations, where apparently confidential information was passed, but Chapuys was never sure that he was not being taken for a ride, particularly where the French were concerned, and he was right to be cautious. This was particularly the case in 1538 and 1539, when Cromwell was urging the king into an alliance with the League of Schmalkalden as an alternative to France, but was trying to stay friendly with the Emperor at the same time. This was a delicate diplomatic juggling act which was never likely to succeed, but it was the king, not Cromwell, who brought that negotiation to an end by refusing the terms which the Germans offered.33 The alliance with Cleves was an alternative, and although the idea for that may have come from Stephen Vaughn via Cromwell, it would be fictitious to claim that Henry was not fully behind it. At the time the king welcomed the initiative, and encouraged it in every way. From 1533 until the early months of 1540, the secretary was the king’s first line of defence in all diplomatic encounters. He guided the council, and frequently interviewed ambassadors ahead of their audiences with the monarch, but it would be a mistake to suppose that he controlled foreign policy. The attempt to intervene in the dispute between Lübeck and the Danes over the Danish succession in 1538 was almost certainly the king’s idea, and threw his relations with the Emperor into confusion for several months as Chapuys tried to work out what he was trying to achieve.34 With Scotland, on the other hand, Cromwell had a freer hand. Henry’s intention was to assert his long-standing claim to feudal suzerainty over the northern kingdom, but there was little opportunity for that as long as James V lived, and he concentrated his efforts on attempting the persuade the Scots to follow his lead against the papacy. That was certainly in accordance with Cromwell’s advice but enjoyed little success, and the day-by-day diplomacy which accompanied those efforts was left largely to the secretary. Cromwell was also responsible for managing the borders. The wardens on the spot reported to him, and badgered him for the money necessary to pay their soldiers.35 With such details Henry had no desire to be concerned.