Returning to Vaughan and Tyndale on the continent, on 18 April 1531 Vaughan wrote to Henry again, enclosing a part of Tyndale’s Answer to More. Vaughan had now met Tyndale, who protested his loyalty to Henry, but was still nervous about returning to England in view of the opposition to him. Vaughan then ventured his own judgement on Tyndale, this time directly to the king, not to Cromwell. ‘I have not communed with a man …’ he begins – but here, mysteriously, the surviving manuscript ends. David Daniell, Tyndale’s recent biographer, rejects as fanciful the suggestion that Henry tore up the letter in anger. Nevertheless, something unusual must have occurred, because Cromwell’s reply in early May is full of harsh words about Tyndale, plus crossings out, underlining and various other alterations before ending on an incongruously calm note with instructions on shipping matters. Then in a supplementary postscript, Cromwell urged Vaughan to carry on as before! Exactly what happened here is a mystery. It may well be that something had displeased Henry, and that Cromwell had succeeded in mollifying the king’s initial anger. Whatever the true facts of the case, there was no royal rebuke for Cromwell and no recall for Vaughan, who replied to the king on 20 May, breezily confident as ever. He assured Henry that Tyndale deeply desired to be reconciled to him, and longed for the king to ‘grant only a bare text of the Scriptures to be put forth among his people’.12
Vaughan’s next letter to Cromwell, on 19 June, shows him forging ahead on a mission somewhat more evangelical in purpose than Henry was likely to have authorised. Vaughan had been trying to obtain a book of Luther’s (no title is given) but only one was available, and that was taken. He had Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession and wished he could send it to Henry, but feared Henry would hand it over to others for an opinion rather than read it himself. Something had happened to make Vaughan anxious to meet Cromwell – I was ‘never more desirous to speak with you than now’. Vaughan had no regrets about sending Tyndale’s Answer to Henry, and he triumphantly announced that Isaiah and Jonah were now translated into English, and it ‘passeth any man’s power to stop them from coming forth’. Tyndale had just completed his translation of Jonah, while Isaiah was the work of George Joye, another evangelical in exile. Both works were printed by Martin de Keyseer of Antwerp.13
At home, meanwhile, Cromwell’s steady rise to political power continued. He was now receiving ‘instructions given by the king’s highness unto his trusty councillor Thomas Cromwell’. These instructions included overseeing legal affairs and formulating drafts for parliament. In Elton’s view, Cromwell had advanced to ‘an executive minister of the second rank’. He was also involved in managing parliamentary affairs, and a further sign of his growing influence is seen in letters from members of parliament to Cromwell excusing themselves or others from attendance. Sir William Stourton of the Commons asked leave for his aging, sick father as well as for himself, a request temptingly accompanied by a gift of a tub of wine. John Tuchet also obtained leave after an approach to Cromwell, while Sir John Fitzjames, chief justice of the King’s Bench, asked to be excused because he had a bad leg. In November that year a report from the Venetian ambassador to his senate on affairs in England included a list of Henry’s councillors, with Cromwell number seven on the list. It was a notable advance compared with the previous year.14
But Cromwell’s political progression ran somewhat uneasily alongside his interest in Luther and Tyndale, because this was not the most opportune time for a career-minded lawyer and politician to be concerning himself with Lutheran heresies. More and John Stokesley, the new bishop of London, were both breathing out threatening and slaughter against Lutherans in England, and More’s anti-heresy measures intensified during the second half of 1531. Thomas Bilney went to the stake in August, Richard Bayfield in November. More was now examining the evangelical George Constantine, demanding to know who in England was helping Tyndale, Joye and others abroad.15
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a note of uncharacteristic concern from the normally unflappable Vaughan is detected in two letters of his to Cromwell dated 14 November. These letters are almost identical. Vaughan was puzzled that Cromwell had not heard from him, for Vaughan had written four times. He had also made contact with Robert Barnes, the former Augustinian Friar who had fled England two years ago and made his way to Wittenberg, where he studied for his doctorate in theology at the university under the tutelage of Luther and Melanchthon. Vaughan had sent a book by Barnes – the Supplication unto King Henry VIII – and another unnamed German work to Cromwell, and was surprised to hear that they had not arrived. How he knew of their non-arrival his letter does not say, but he wondered whether the bearer had been afraid to deliver them. Undaunted, however, Vaughan sent another copy of Barnes’s work – ‘such a piece of work as I yet have not seen one like unto it; I think he shall seal it with his blood’. Vaughan urged Cromwell to commend it and its author to Henry. After some news about the emperor’s movements, Vaughan asked what Constantine had been saying about him to More. Vaughan must have known about recent developments in England, very likely from letters of Cromwell now lost. Vaughan’s jolly confidence was now returning, and he was sure that Constantine could do him no harm, because Henry knew all about, and had even authorised, all his contacts with Tyndale. Fearless as ever, Vaughan promised Cromwell more evangelical books, including Tyndale’s commentary on the first epistle of John. However, he did take the precaution of asking Cromwell to write and confirm that his letters had been safely received.16
Vaughan does not explain why he sent two letters on the same day covering much the same points. He might have been concerned about letters going missing or even being intercepted, which is not surprising. Both Vaughan and Cromwell were living dangerously, because a further proclamation against heretical books, naming Tyndale though not Luther or Melanchthon this time, was issued on 3 December. In letters dated 6 December, Cromwell urged Vaughan to be extra careful and watchful. Vaughan replied quickly. He knew More was on his trail, and that Constantine might wilt under interrogation and implicate Vaughan as a Lutheran. Vaughan now showed a touch of guile with some pious disapproval of heresies, and a protest that he was ‘neither Lutheran nor yet Tyndalin’. In view of what has gone before, and especially what is still to come, these denials are not particularly convincing. It is likely that Vaughan, maybe at Cromwell’s suggestion, had decided to cover his tracks by sending something that could be shown to Henry if necessary, to satisfy him that Vaughan was a loyal servant of the king and acceptably orthodox on religion.17
With Cromwell’s full knowledge and support, Vaughan kept up the search for Lutheran books. At home Cromwell managed to secure a safe pardon for Robert Barnes to return to England. Barnes’s Supplication defended justification by faith and argued for a Bible in English; it answered some of the most common critiques of Lutheranism, and contained a strong declaration of personal loyalty to Henry. Like Tyndale, Barnes soon came under renewed attack from More. Henry, however, was now willing to give Barnes an audience, no doubt hoping that the Lutherans might endorse his cause in his divorce case, as other European universities had done.18
But to the surprise of Henry and many others, Luther turned out to be one of Catherine of Aragon’s most unflinching supporters. In his judgement on Henry’s Great Matter, Luther held that the text from Leviticus – the foundation of Henry’s case for putting Catherine away – merely forbad a man marrying the wife of a brother still alive, so it could not be used against Catherine. Unlike most theologians, Luther was not greatly bothered about the validity of papal dispensations or endless disputes over Leviticus. Far more important in his view were the words of Christ on the subject of marriage – ‘What God has joined, let not man put asunder’. Only if one party had been unfaithful could divorce be permitted. (Matthew 19:6, 9). However, Luther was not unmindful of Henry’s desire for a male heir for the sake of the stability of his realm, so by invoking the precedent set by godly Old Testament kings, he suggested that Henry might take two wives, Anne as we
ll as Catherine. It was not Luther’s intention to re-introduce polygamy into the Church, but he justified it in this special case as the only available solution which would preserve the royal dignity of Catherine and Mary, while also allowing Henry to marry again in the hope of begetting a son to succeed him. It was not an entirely novel idea, because the pope had also mooted it during the lengthy negotiations with Henry’s envoys.19
Henry’s immediate reaction to the advice from Germany is not known. Obviously he did not like it, but it is noteworthy that the king did not summarily abandon his cautious interest in the Lutherans. Neither did he take any action against Barnes, Cromwell or Vaughan. This can be no more than a guess, but Cromwell may have persuaded Henry to keep this idea in his mind, and instead of rejecting it outright as the king might have been inclined to do, treat it as one option available to him. It could at least prove useful during complex negotiations. It would also have greatly flattered Henry to be compared with Old Testament luminaries like David and Solomon.
Nevertheless, other Catholic European universities were much more supportive than Wittenberg, and Luther’s refusal to back Henry’s case was a setback for English evangelicals. During 1531–2, therefore, no scheming politician on the make, concerned only about his own career and well being, would bother to show much interest in Luther. Henry was no evangelical himself, and his Lord Chancellor More, a man substantially senior to Cromwell on Henry’s council, was rampaging violently against Luther’s English admirers. Vaughan, still on the continent, told Cromwell that people with Lutheran views had gone into hiding for fear of being apprehended. In England in January 1532, Thomas Dusgate perished in the flames of Smithfield for his Protestant beliefs. Next month Convocation issued a new list of heretical books, and this time proscribed writers included Luther and Melanchthon as well as Tyndale. In spring James Bainham, John Bent and Thomas Harding were burned to ashes like Hitton and Dusgate before them. Yet it was during these hazardous times for evangelicals that Cromwell received his personal copy of the greatest evangelical work produced thus far, Philip Melanchthon’s Apology of the Augsburg Confession. The sender was not Vaughan or Barnes but Dr Augustine, formerly a physician to Wolsey before turning the king’s evidence against him (see here).20
A letter from Augustine to Cromwell, dated April 1532 from Regensburg, is unfortunately damaged in parts, but it does reveal the crucial information that ‘I gave you the Lutheran Confession with Melanchthon’s Apology’. There then follows a reference to Brussels and John Cochlaeus (dedit tibi monstrandam confessionem Lutheranorum una cum Apologia Melanchthonis de qua jam pridem cum essem Bruxellis tibi scripsi … momenti … libellus (?) a J. Coclaeo in illius confutationem). It is not absolutely clear whether the Apology was sent with this letter or with an earlier one now lost, when Augustine was in Brussels – probably the latter.21
But why should Augustine of all people be sending Cromwell the Apology, and with it a work of Cochlaeus, one of Luther’s most vociferous continental opponents? No explanation is given, so the following section offers a suggested reconstruction of events.
Henry had sent Vaughan to Europe to make limited contact with William Tyndale. Vaughan, however, with Cromwell’s connivance, had gone some way beyond his official remit when he started searching for Lutheran books, including the Augsburg Confession. Subsequent news from England caused Vaughan to worry whether his letters to Cromwell might have been intercepted. Augustine, meanwhile, following Wolsey’s fall, was on the continent in the king’s service. He had spent some time in Brussels, where Vaughan had ample opportunity to meet him. We also recall that it was Cromwell who secured Augustine’s English citizenship, and a grateful Augustine promised he would be obliged to Cromwell for ever (see here). In other words, he owed Cromwell a favour. We know, too, that Augustine continued in the service of Cromwell and the king, sending Cromwell regular reports of diplomatic affairs as well as requests for money. He went to Italy with Cardinal Campeggio in August 1532 and from there to Rome, where he promised Cromwell that ‘I think I may do your cause no small good’ (ubi puto me non parum posse prodesse causae vestrae).22
Putting all these fragmentary strands of evidence together, Augustine would have provided the perfect cover whereby the Apology could be smuggled into England at this testing time. There was no risk that a despatch from one of the king’s official agents, who was not even suspected of being part of the evangelical movement, would be intercepted. Cochlaeus’s book could have been thrown in for the sake of balance, and to defuse any suspicions that Augustine might have had: here was an impeccably orthodox work to answer all this ‘new learning’ from Melanchthon.
There remains, admittedly, some conjecture in this reconstruction. Nor is it the only point arising from Vaughan’s trip to the continent that cannot be answered definitively. It is not clear whether Vaughan, or Cromwell or even someone else first thought of sending the Apology to England. After five hundred years, however, absolute certainty is impossible on a subject that had to be carried out in great secrecy, and it is only due to a stroke of good fortune that any evidence has survived at all. Happily these gaps in the account do not really matter very much. What is important – and this can be said with full confidence – is that by 1531, or, at the very latest early in 1532, the most significant conversion during this period of the English Reformation had taken place. Thomas Cromwell was now a Lutheran. In the anti-Lutheran climate of these times, possession of a work like the Apology is virtually irrefutable evidence. If Cromwell had no spiritual interest in it, what could he have been doing with it, especially when he had acquired it in such a secretive way? A bishop or cleric might be authorised to read heretical material in order to refute it, but Cromwell was not part of the clergy. He was still a civil councillor; he was not Vicegerent yet, and had no official responsibility for church affairs.
Subsequent events confirm this. In January 1532, at Cromwell’s request, Vaughan produced a paper on the English cloth trade and the problems faced by English merchants. It has been suggested that Cromwell was now trying to direct his friend away from forbidden religion and back to safer matters like commerce, but as David Daniell has shown, there could be a connection between evangelical activity and the cloth trade. Since the fifteenth century, trade in books from Europe to England had flourished, and an act of Parliament in 1483 even encouraged the import of books. Antwerp had gradually developed as a printing and commercial centre with agents in England. From the 1520s illegal evangelical works by Luther, Tyndale and others were smuggled into England in bales of cloth, sacks of flour and cargoes of various kinds, and in ever-increasing numbers. A typical print run on the continent would be between 1,000 and 1,500 books, though for Tyndale’s New Testament the number might have been twice this. (Tyndale and his printers must have known that demand in England was high.) So sympathetic contacts in the cloth, wool and other trades – men like Stephen Vaughan for example – were becoming ever more useful in ensuring safe deliveries to England. The authorities were partly aware of what was happening, and under Wolsey, Tunstall and More England witnessed sporadic outbreaks of book burning and Bible burning. Nevertheless, the underground trade thrived. Even before Tyndale’s death in 1536, as many as 16,000 copies of his New Testament had reached England, whose population at the time was approximately two and a half million.23
So Vaughan’s renewed involvement in the cloth trade was not necessarily intended to divert him from the quest for Lutheran works. Nor is it surprising to find Vaughan, a year later, once again writing to Cromwell from the continent about German books that Cromwell had asked for. By this time Christopher Mont, another of Cromwell’s evangelical allies, had begun translating German works in Cromwell’s house. German by birth, Mont had obtained English citizenship, and was now more or less formally in Cromwell’s service. It is rather likely that the books Mont was working on had found their way to England via Antwerp, maybe while Vaughan was stationed there, officially reporting on commercial affairs, but unofficially
using his contacts and influence to smooth the safe passage of evangelical material to England.24
Further evidence of Cromwell’s Lutheran activity in the early 1530s comes from John Oliver, a chaplain to the king who subsequently became a friend of Robert Barnes. Oliver recalled how, around this time, he used to be among the guests at Cromwell’s house, where theology was often discussed. After listening to Cromwell, Oliver went away to consult his Bible and ‘found always the conclusions which you maintained at your board to be consonant with the Holy Word of God’. These evenings in Cromwell’s company prompted Oliver to learn Greek so that he could read his New Testament in the original tongue.25
Another witness is Richard ‘Hylls’, probably Richard Hillis, the merchant, who introduced himself to Cromwell around 1532 as another recent evangelical convert. Hillis also sent Cromwell a short treatise he had written on the epistle of James, and particularly the section describing how Abraham was justified by works (James: 2:20–4). The treatise is now lost, but it must have been written from an evangelical standpoint, because Hillis soon found himself in trouble over it with his employer and the bishop of London, John Stokesley, who had somehow managed to get hold of it. Now out of work, Hillis and his mother both sought Cromwell’s help.26
It is worth lingering for a moment over Hillis and his work on James. Certain passages in this epistle, like ‘faith without works is dead’, appear to deny Luther’s message of justification by faith alone, as Luther’s opponents were not slow to point out (see especially James 2:14–25). Luther’s response was characteristically blunt. He dismissed James as ‘a right strawy epistle’ (ein rechte stroern Epistel), hardly worthy to be compared with the gold and silver works of Paul, John and the other apostles (the analogy is taken from 1 Corinthians 3:12.) Luther agreed with those in the ancient church who questioned whether James rightly belonged in the New Testament canon, as it contained nothing about Christ’s atoning death and resurrection – a point, incidentally, which has never been answered entirely convincingly. Melanchthon, however, saw the epistle in a much more favourable light, and his Apology contains a mini-commentary on it. James, Philip argued, does not contradict the writings of St Paul, on which Luther’s message was chiefly based. In Melanchthon’s view, James would make a good Lutheran because he writes about good works as fruits or products of Christian faith. So when Abraham obeyed God, and when Rahab showed hospitality to the spies of the people of God, they acted as believers already justified by faith; they were not doing good works in order to become justified, as certain medieval interpreters claimed. It would be quite plausible, therefore, if evangelically minded people in England were mulling over these passages in James, and that Melanchthon’s evangelical treatment of the epistle in the Apology helped sway those hitherto not quite ready to embrace justification by faith alone. Certainly Hillis and his anxious mother both knew that, having incurred the wrath of Stokesley, Cromwell was the man to turn to for refuge and help.27
The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell Page 6