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Thomas Cromwell

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by Diarmaid MacCulloch




  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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  Illustration credits appear on these pages.

  9780670025572 (hardcover)

  9780525560296 (ebook)

  Cover design: Elizabeth Yaffe

  Cover art: Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (oil on canvas), Holbein the Younger, Hans (1497/8-1543) (follower of) / Private Collection / Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London / Bridgeman Images

  Version_2

  In Memoriam G. R. Elton

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Journeys

  1. Ruffian

  2. The Return of the Native

  3. In the Cardinal’s Service: 1524–1528

  4. Managing Failure: 1528–1529

  5. Serving two Masters: 1530

  PART TWO

  New Wine

  6. Council and Parliament: 1531

  7. New Year’s Gifts: 1532

  8. Making a Difference: 1532

  9. A Royal Marriage: 1532–1533

  PART THREE

  Touching Pitch

  10. Treason in Prospect: 1533–1534

  11. Spirituals: 1534–1535

  12. Deaths for Religion: 1535

  13. Progresses and Scrutinies: 1535–1536

  14. Surrenders and the Scaffold: 1536

  PART FOUR

  Power and its Reward

  15. Summer Opportunities: 1536

  16. Grace for the Commonwealth: 1536

  17. The Reckoning: 1537

  18. The King’s Uncle? 1537–1538

  19. Cutting Down Trees: 1538

  PART FIVE

  Nemesis

  20. Shifting Dynasties: 1538–1539

  21. Stumbling Blocks: 1539

  22. Downfall: 1539–1540

  23. Futures

  Illustrations

  Abbreviations and Conventions Used in Bibliography and Notes

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Henry VIII’s Deposition on his Marriage with Anne of Cleves. British Library, London, MS Otho, C/X f. 246 LP 15 no. 822[3]. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  2. Confessional letter printed by Richard Pynson for the guild of St Mary, Boston. Derbyshire Record Office, D258/45/36/1

  3. Reconstruction of the ground-plan of Austin Friars at Cromwell’s fall. © Nick Holder

  4. Reconstruction of the street facade of Austin Friars. © Nick Holder

  5. Detail from the “Copperplate” map of London, 1550s, showing Cromwell’s Throgmorton Street house. Alamy

  6. Thomas Cromwell, letter to John Creke, 17 August 1523. The National Archives, Kew, SP 1/28 f.154

  7. Benedetto da Ravezzano, Candle-bearing angels for the tomb of Cardinal Wolsey, later that of Henry VIII, c. 1524-29. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

  8. Phillip Lindley’s Reconstructions of Wolsey’s tomb, side and end elevations. Reproduced by courtesy of Phillip Lindley

  9. Thomas Cromwell, letter to William Cleybroke, late July 1529. © The National Archives, Kew, SP 1/55 f. 19v

  10. Cardinal Wolsey, letter to Thomas Cromwell, 17 December 1529. British Library, London, MS Cotton Vespasian F/XIII f. 147. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  11. Thomas Cromwell, letter to Cardinal Wolsey, 18 August 1530. © The National Archives, Kew, SP 1/57 ff. 270r-73r

  12. Draft Act in Restraint of Appeals, with text insertions by Henry VIII. British Library, London, MS Cleopatra, E. VI f.185. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  13. Penultimate draft of the Act in Restraint of Appeals, with amendments by Thomas Cromwell. © The National Archives, Kew, SP 2/n f. 60r

  14. Draft regulations for monasteries, with insertions in Cromwell’s hand. © The National Archives, Kew, SP 6/6. 7v

  15. Cromwell’s memorandum against Lord Darcy. © The National Archives, Kew, SP 1/118 f. 43 r

  16 (left). Detail from the title-page of The Byble in Englyshe (The Great Bible), 1541. Lambeth Palace Library, Main Collection SR2 E165 (1541)

  17 (right). Detail from the title-page of Henry VIII’s illuminated presentation copy of The Byble in Englyshe (The Great Bible). British Library, London, C.18.d.10. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  18. Elizabeth Cromwell, letter to Henry VIII, [autumn 1540]. British Library, London, MS Cotton Vespasian F/XIII f. 262. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  PLATES

  1. View of the approach to Putney Church, watercolour by an anonymous artist, 1820. Private collection

  2. Sir Henry Wyatt, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Bridgeman Images

  3. Thomas Cromwell, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532–3. © Copyright The Frick Collection

  4. Thomas Cromwell, portrait by English school, late 1530s. Private collection. Christie’s / Bridgeman Images

  5. Coat of arms of Thomas Cromwell, 1st Baron Cromwell, KG/6. Chevron Tango/Wikimedia Commons

  6. Coat of arms of Thomas Wolsey (also the arms of Christ Church College Oxford) Chevron Tango/Wikimedia Commons

  7. Silver-gilt medallion of Cromwell, 1538. © The Trustees of the British Museum, M.6792

  8. The arms of Cromwell as augmented in 1537. College of Arms, MS Num Sch 6/40. Reproduced by permission of the Kings, Heralds and Pursuivants of Arms

  9. The arms of Edward Seymour, augmented in 1536. College of Arms, M. 7 f. 40v. Reproduced by permission of the Kings, Heralds and Pursuivants of Arms

  10. Wolsey’s Gate, Ipswich, Suffolk, 1812, engraving by J. Tyrrell after J. Conder. Reproduced by kind permission of Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich branch, PT242/92

  11. Cardinal Wolsey, portrait by Italian school, c. 1515–20. Private collection. Philip Mould Ltd./Bridgeman Images

  12. Wolsey in procession, from George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, 1578. © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Douce 363, fol. 52v

  13. Anne Boleyn, portrait by English school, c. 1533–6. National Portrait Gallery, London. De Agostini/Bridgeman Images

  14. Portrait of Stephen Gardiner, sixteenth-century English school. Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk. National Trust Photographic Library/Bridgeman Images

  15. Thomas Howard, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1539. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images

  16. Thomas Cranmer, portrait by Gerlach Flicke, 1545–6. © National Portrait Gallery, London

  17. Sketch-plan for Anne Boleyn’s Coronation feast in W
estminster Hall, May 1533. British Library, London, MS Harley 41 f. 12. © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  18. Queen Katherine of Aragon, miniature, possibly by Lukas Horenbout, c. 1525. © National Portrait Gallery, London

  19. Queen Jane Seymour, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Bridgeman Images

  20. Queen Anne of Cleves, portrait by Bartolomaeus Bruyn the Elder, c. 1539. The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford

  21. Queen Katherine Howard, miniature by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1540. The Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018/Bridgeman Images

  22. Rycote House, watercolour by J. B. Malchair, 1773. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford

  23. Brooke House, Hackney, 1853. Victoria & Albert Museum, London

  24. Gregory Cromwell, miniature by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1537. © Royal Collections, the Netherlands.

  25. Thomas Cromwell, miniature by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1537. © National Portrait Gallery, London

  26. Gregory Cromwell, miniature by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1540. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, reproduced in G. Habich, ‘Ein Miniature Bildnis von Hans Holbein in Danzig’, Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst (n.s. xxiv, 1913), 194–6, plate 1. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

  27. Portrait of a lady, probably Elizabeth Seymour, by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1535–40. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1926.57

  28. Monument to Gregory, Lord Cromwell, at Launde Abbey, Leicestershire. By kind courtesy of Launde Abbey

  29. Lewes Priory and Castle, coloured engraving by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, 1737. Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. East Sussex Record Office, H1961.17

  30. Leeds Castle, print published by R. Ackermann, 1828. Getty Images

  31. Thomas Wyatt the elder, portrait by Hans Holbein the younger, c. 1535–7. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018/Bridgeman Images

  32. Thomas Wriothesley, portrait by Hans Holbein the younger, c. 1530s. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / image RMN-GP

  33. Nicholas Carew, portrait by Hans Holbein the younger, 1527. Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Amerbach-Kabinett, Inv. 1662.34

  34. Ralph Sadler, portrait by Hans Holbein the younger, 1535. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018/Bridgeman Images

  35. King Henry VIII, portrait by Hans Holbein the younger, 1540. Palazzo Barberini, Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini, Rome. Bridgeman Images

  36. Title-page for Coverdale’s Bible, 1535. British Library, London, G.12208. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  37. Title-page of the ‘Matthew’ Bible, 1537. British Library, London, C.18.c.5. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  38. Title-page to the Apocrypha in Cromwell’s copy of the Great Bible, 1539. St John’s College Cambridge, Bb.8.30. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge

  39. The executions of John Fisher, Thomas More and Margaret Pole, illustration from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum, 1587. British Library, London. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  40. The execution of William Tyndale, illustration from John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Acts and Monuments), 1563. British Library, London. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

  41. The execution of Carthusians, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, 1617. El Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, Granada. akg-images/Album/Oronoz

  42. Wooden base-block for the statue of Dderfel Gardarn, Llandderfel parish church, Gwynedd. Alamy

  43. The martyrdom of John Forest, engraving, 1823. Alamy

  44. The ceiling of the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, c. 1540. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018

  45. Luther Fighting the Pope, print by Hans Holbein the younger, 1521, English edition printed by John Mayler, 1539. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge, Pepys 1.16-17

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Among many professional debts spread over many years (and I have more to say in the Introduction below and passim about one particular debt), I must mention the generosity of the following fellow-scholars: Caroline Adams, Rod Ambler, Colin Armstrong, Giulia Bartrum, Susan Brigden, Alan Brown, James Carley, Paul Cavill, Margaret Condon, John Cooper, Judith Curthoys, Mark Earngey, Teri Fitzgerald, Andrew Foster, Dorian Gerhold, Jeremy Goldsmith, Steven Gunn, John Guy, Jane Ingle, Henry Jefferies, Anik Laferrière, Rory McEntegart, Hilary Mantel, Martin Murphy, Richard Rex, David Skinner, David Starkey, Thomas Steel, Robert Swanson, Spencer Weinreich, Rowan Williams, Robert Yorke. Some, particularly Colin Armstrong, James Carley, John Cooper, Teri Fitzgerald and Steven Gunn, have heroically read some or all of the draft text, to its great advantage. Besides these, I am grateful to scholars who gave me permission to use unpublished dissertations listed at the end of my Bibliography, and to well-informed friends on Facebook who gave me clues on various queries I posted. In this hugely enjoyable if taxing adventure, Teri Fitzgerald and Hilary Mantel have been particularly stimulating and generous intellectual companions, and it was a pleasure to get to know Ben Miles, who lent to his stage portrayal of Thomas Cromwell a wonderful energy worthy of Till Eulenspiegel. Equally instructive, and equally informative about the complex personality of Master Secretary, was the introspection and unknowability presented by the television performance of Mark Rylance. It was a very kind thought of the late Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, to give me a portrait of Thomas Cromwell to preside over my writing in my study.

  One magnificent project has made my own work not simply easier but possible: the website State Papers Online, 1509–1714, published by Cengage/Gale in collaboration with the National Archives and the British Library. This digital arrangement of hundreds of thousands of documents from the Tudor and Stuart era has involved many of our leading historians in its construction and maintenance. I remember refereeing it enthusiastically when financial backing was being canvassed for its creation, but I had little idea how accurate my words of praise would turn out to be. It is one of the great scholarly achievements of the modern age, and I salute those academics and technicians who steered it to fruition. I have looked at many other primary sources for this book, but State Papers Online has been indispensable. And it is thanks to the magnificent resources and generosity of the University of Oxford and the Bodleian Library under successive Bodley’s Librarians Sarah Thomas and Richard Ovenden that I have been afforded the luxury of digital access to this, and much more.

  Behind that work lies another monument of Victorian and Edwardian scholarship, Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII: a staggering intellectual achievement, whose many editors and researchers I salute with awe and gratitude. Frequently they made mistakes and misdated documents, but they fully acknowledged that this would be the case, and encouraged their readers to do better. It is a pity that subsequent historians have so often ignored their admonition and accepted many suggested dates without the critical eye that they recommended. I would like to couple with my gratitude for their work the products of three modern scholars who single-handed have produced astonishingly useful works of reference with heroism worthy of those great Victorians. I say something of Muriel St Clare Byrne below; Sir John Baker’s The Men of Court and Professor David Smith’s Heads of Religious Houses 1377–1540 are both marvellous gifts to research.

  My colleagues in the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford deserve my warm thanks for their constant forbearance in allowing me to get on with this book rather than asking me to assume more administrative burdens. I am especially grateful to
the Hensley Henson Fund of the Faculty for making a generous contribution to the provision of its illustrations, after a version of part of the text became the University’s Hensley Henson Lectures for 2017–18. As always, I must thank for their patience and encouragement my literary agent Felicity Bryan and my editors Stuart Proffitt and Joy de Menil. Additionally in this enterprise I am hugely grateful to Peter James for his masterly copy-editing, Cecilia Mackay for her zestful picture research and Ben Sinyor, Richard Duguid and Stephen Ryan for general efficiency and unflappability. And Sam Patel knows what I owe him.

  Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Advent 2017

  Thomas Cromwell was a freak in English history, and that, perhaps, is why he has been so disliked: an iron-fisted bureaucrat who crammed into his brief reign the kind of process which in England, we like to maintain, is carried out insensibly, over centuries. He overhauled the machinery of government as it had never been overhauled since the reign of Henry II; and he overhauled it so drastically that much of it was not radically altered till the reign of Victoria. In six hundred years of history he stands out as the most radical of modernisers. Modern history, if it begins anywhere, begins, in England, with him.

  Hugh Trevor-Roper, Historical Essays, 1957

  Introduction

  Thomas Cromwell’s name has happily become much more familiar in the last decade, thanks principally to Hilary Mantel’s inspired novel series beginning with Wolf Hall. To call them ‘historical novels’ does them an injustice; they are novels which happen to be set in the sixteenth century, and with a profound knowledge of how that era functioned. Novels they remain, as Mantel herself has frequently (and with mounting weariness) emphasized to would-be critics. This book is different. It invites you, the reader, to find the true Thomas Cromwell of history, by guiding you through the maze of his surviving papers – and a real maze they are, composed of thousands on thousands of individual documents. The journey is worth making, because this Thomas Cromwell shaped a great revolution in his own country’s affairs, which has in turn shaped much of the modern world, not least that still-Protestant power, the United States of America.

 

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