Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Cromwell may have wished to remain an enigma, yet the main reason that we find him enigmatic is not personal choice, but a particular archival circumstance. His papers were confiscated by the Crown when he was arrested in 1540, and that is why we still have them, divided now between the National Archives (where the Victorians unhelpfully rearranged them from the original bundles) and the British Library, papers filched from the main hoard in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere there is no more than the scattering in the correspondence of others that one would expect of a great man of the realm in the early Tudor age. The confiscation is a stroke of luck for us, albeit not for him at the time. But there is a problem: when sifting through the vast collection (not including his formidable traces in the general administrative papers of Tudor government), one thing becomes obvious. From his muniment room, we have virtually exclusively the in-tray. Where outgoing letters from Cromwell himself survive in this collection, with a little experience one can usually account for their presence: by and large they reappeared at home at times when he was away, and were therefore filed as incoming and not outgoing correspondence, or were returned by some conscientious official, coupled with an answer to questions they contained. Otherwise the pattern, the vast absence, is quite consistent.

  We might come to the casual conclusion that it would be logical for Cromwell’s archive to consist of the letters he received. But this is not how Tudor archives worked. The same febrile atmosphere in spring 1540 that brought Cromwell to the scaffold resulted in a further private archive passing into the hands of the King: that of Arthur Plantagenet Lord Lisle, Deputy of Calais, imprisoned in the Tower of London for reasons which will become apparent in due course. In Lisle’s voluminous papers (superbly published and edited by a single-minded benefactor of Tudor scholarship, Muriel St Clare Byrne, with an endearing partisanship for her subject) we have both in-tray and out-tray. The latter is normally represented by the last draft of the letter before my Lord signed a fair copy for dispatch, often interestingly covered in second thoughts. This is almost universally missing from Cromwell’s papers.

  If so slapdash and unbusinesslike a nobleman as Lord Lisle could adhere to best archival practice of the day (true, he had an excellent staff and a strong-minded, efficient wife), how much more would that be the case with the mastermind of the Tudor Revolution in Government? So meticulous and orderly a mind as Cromwell’s would have made sure that his letters were there, ready for reference in case of need. In fact there is inferential evidence that his archive was organized into categories of in-tray and out-tray, through the survival of a third category of document, his ‘remembrances’, slips of paper providing us with a marvellous if often cryptic guide to his current concerns: we find lists of topics to be dealt with and ticked off as done. A few survive from the 1520s, but once he had gained power under the Crown in the early 1530s, they are there as a regular series, available as needed for reference, and described in the systematic catalogue of his papers made by one of his clerks in 1533 as ‘a bundle of my master’s remembrances etc, signed by the King’. That latter note suggests that, at least at this early date, the remembrances were designed to enable orderly discussion in Cromwell’s meetings with King Henry. In 1536 the brother of one of his employees knew of this collection, asking Cromwell to enter a request ‘in your book of remembrance’ – we should here understand ‘book’ in the Tudor sense of a sheet or two of paper.1

  Such a vast loss of the out-tray can only be the result of deliberate destruction. I hazard that when Cromwell’s household heard of his arrest in June 1540, they began a systematic process of destroying the out-tray of his principal archive, much aided by the fact that two of his own officers were left in charge of it for least another year. Their hope would have been to save their master from destruction, for a man is much more easily convicted by his own writings than by the letters he has received. The royal confiscation team would not initially have noticed the character of the huge quantities of papers deferentially presented for their inspection when they arrived at the door.2 It was a good try, although it did not succeed. The result is that amid the torrent of paperwork through which the conscientious biographer wades to recapture what is left of Thomas Cromwell, the man’s own voice is largely missing. We hear more of it out of Lord Lisle’s papers than in Cromwell’s own.

  Hilary Mantel has sensitively captured this quality in Thomas Cromwell’s archive in her novels: her Cromwell is pre-eminently an observer, even of himself, not ‘I’ but ‘he’. After a day spent with Cromwell’s papers, I have often felt alarmingly like Master Secretary, listening with increasing exhaustion to the cacophony of voices crackling out of the pages, wheedling, complaining, flattering, decorously demanding; bringing news of crisis, catastrophe or sometimes even good fortune. It is thus not surprising that so few of the recent attempts at biography of the man (some opportunistically inspired by Mantel’s success) have succeeded in capturing much of him.

  The man who knew more of Thomas Cromwell than anyone since his execution was the dedicatee of this book, Sir Geoffrey Elton. Elton was not an admirer of the biographical genre, which he regarded as frivolous. He chose to channel his admiration of his hero into meticulous accounts of administrative, governmental and constitutional change (on his first promotion to a chair in Cambridge, he chose the unfashionable title of Professor of English Constitutional History).3 What he could have done is evident from his brilliant if contestable sketch of Cromwell’s final tragedy, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s decline and fall’. Late in his career he bluntly said, in words which instantly recall those deep and almost accented tones, ‘one reason why I haven’t done what I have always been asked to do, which is to write a biography of Cromwell, is that he is not biographable.’4

  It is a mark of Elton’s exceptional quality as a graduate supervisor that he formed historians with the independence of mind to take on their Doktorvater’s work and remould it: to name but a few, John Guy, Virginia Murphy, Graham Nicholson and David Starkey. Occasionally during our private conversations in his last years, he would acknowledge with grace how they had modified the most expansive propositions of his younger days on the role of Thomas Cromwell. There may be more of the same here, and his opinion on biography will be flatly contradicted. It is therefore in conscious tribute to this great historian, patron and friend that I make my own hubristic attempt to fill the gap in biography, though I know his moustache might bristle and his glasses gleam dangerously at some of my conclusions. Many of my endnotes are a ghostly conversation with him, albeit lacking the hospitable single malts which did not lessen my usual state of intimidation in his presence. He taught me to privilege on every occasion the message of primary sources over those who have sought to interpret them, and in this book I have tried to follow his admonition (which I have to say he did not always observe himself).

  Delving into the archives, I have gained a new respect for the very early historians of these events – Alexander Alesius, George Cavendish, John Foxe, Thomas Fuller, Edward Hall, Nicholas Harpsfield, Edward Lord Herbert of Chirbury and assorted Roman Catholic hagiographers. They have often been patronized by later writers, who have not fully understood what they were trying to say. We have to remember that many of them were there. We need to respect their observations, and comprehend their limitations and concerns. I am especially impressed by George Cavendish, pioneer of biography in the English language, and his gentleman-usher’s-eye view of his master Thomas Wolsey.5

  My primary purpose is not to write a history of England in the early sixteenth century, but to place Thomas Cromwell on that stage. The leading actor in the 1530s was not Cromwell but his king, Henry VIII, whose welfare and kaleidoscopic changes of mood would have occupied the thoughts of his minister for much of any day for an entire decade. But still, standing apart from that inescapable presence is my subject. Cromwell had his own preoccupations. Not the least of them was that of any Tudor statesman not a priest (though there were some exceptions
there too, as we will see): securing immortality by fathering a dynasty. We will discover Cromwell’s dynastic ambitions as one leading cause of his fall, though we may also consider his disaster inevitable at the Court of a master who beyond a certain point was almost impossible to serve successfully.

  We will also explore the religious agenda of a statesman who has often been seen as Machiavellian, secular-minded or ‘modern’ (in a sense which now sounds old-fashioned for a twenty-first century depressingly marred by religious fanaticism). I will demonstrate how important Cromwell’s religious agenda was in his political actions, how great a part it played in his destruction and how much can be recovered from his often elaborate efforts to conceal his religious motivation from the imperceptive, both then and now. I will also deliberately give a much more detailed and extensive account than any previous biographer of Cromwell of his life up to 1532–3, when his power suddenly became very great. I have chosen do this partly because there has been so much confusion and misdating of events in the first forty-five years of his life, partly because his sudden rise was so remarkable and puzzled so many observers at the time, and finally because I am convinced that the later stages of any life are usually best understood by what can be gleaned of the earlier. That is not to fall into the trap of trying to turn history into an amateurish form of psychobiography; it’s just common sense.

  I have modernized virtually all quotations, unless original spelling makes some useful particular point, and modernized place-names and surnames. It is always enjoyable to speculate on Tudor pronunciation of surnames, which we occasionally catch fossilized in unexpected places, like the small state of the United States of America known as Delaware, which gives us one venerable title from the Tudor peerage – De La Warr – in phonetic form. In the process, it tells us how to pronounce de la Pole – Dellapool. In a related pronunciation, Henry VIII’s cousin and eventual enemy Cardinal Reginald Pole was ‘one brain-sick Poole, or . . . one witless fool’, as Cromwell himself lets us know in a particularly bitter letter.6 It is often thought that the contemporary spelling of Anne Bullen is an attempt to put down Henry VIII’s second consort by those who hated her, but it probably simply indicates how her surname was pronounced. Many people wrote St Leger at the time as Sellinger, and today most St Clares are written down as Sinclair, though one has to be a resident of these islands to know by oral tradition that St John is Sinjun.

  Thomas Cromwell’s surname was generally spelled Crumwell by his English correspondents, and that must have reflected how they thought the name sounded. It is harder work to pronounce the ‘w’ in his surname after a short ‘u’ sound than with a short ‘o’ sound; try it for yourself. The name was indeed increasingly written as ‘Cromwell’ in official documents, and it is not surprising therefore that non-native speakers, mostly reading rather than hearing the name, did their best with formulations such as ‘Cromuello’. Yet I think that John Buchan was correct in his haunting historical fantasy The Blanket of the Dark (which I commend to the young at heart) in styling him Crummle. The famous insults to him from the great explosion of rebellion in 1536, the Pilgrimage of Grace, really only work with that pronunciation: ‘Crim, Cram and Rich . . .’; ‘we would Crum him and Crum him that he was never so Crumwed.’7 The last word on the subject can go to the King who both made him and destroyed him, writing in the closing days of June 1540 when his hatred and resentment were greatest towards his fallen minister: Henry VIII stripped the Earl of Essex he had created back to his birth surname, and wrote it in his own hand as ‘Cromell’.8

  Some technical details are useful to negotiate the story. Tudor folk, sharing the general illogicality of the human race, made a great celebration of New Year’s Day on 1 January, but the year itself then changed on 25 March. All dates here are cited in New Style, converting the beginning of the year to 1 January without further comment. Then there is the complex question of money, puzzling even to those in the United Kingdom who still use pounds and pence. Tudor currency added to the mix another unit, the shilling, so the pound was not divided as now into a hundred pennies, but into 240 pennies, twelve of which made up a shilling – thus there were twenty shillings in a pound. Multipliers of Tudor money to our economy are difficult to make, for their emphases in purchasing were different, concentrating on clothing and food, and many people survived on their own resources of food and shelter without much input from wages. A contemporary wage-labourer might then earn nine pounds a year; the average gentleman’s yearly income from land was around seventeen pounds, and a knight’s around two hundred pounds. Those are useful measures in putting into perspective Thomas Cromwell’s income in fees, wages or lands, or his land purchases, and the sorts of winnings which King Henry VIII made from Cromwell’s help in dissolving monasteries.

  Draft in Henry VIII’s hand of questions to be put to Cromwell about the Cleves marriage, c. 29/30 June 1540; he heads it ‘Questions to be axid of Thomas Cromell’. This document was in the section of the Cottonian manuscript collection badly damaged by fire at Ashburnham House in 1731.

  PART ONE

  Journeys

  He that forsaketh his father shall come to shame; and he that defieth his mother, is cursed of God.

  Ecclesiasticus 3.16, in the translation of Miles Coverdale, 1535

  Over against Fulham, on the Bank of the River Thames, is situated Putney, a small village, and famous for little, but giving birth to that remarkable instance of the inconstancy of fortune, Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith of this place, raised from the anvil and forge to the most beneficial places, and highest honours in the nation . . .

  John Aubrey, The natural history and antiquities of the county of Surrey, 1718

  1

  Ruffian

  A time there was when a son was born to humble parents in the Surrey village of Putney, a place of little account, at a ferry crossing on the bank of the Thames, 6 miles upstream from the King’s Palace of Westminster. He was a bright boy, so he left this place and had a wild youth, doing shocking things. But he became a man of great account, to make his family proud, and rose very high in the affairs of the realm. His name was Nicholas West, and he became Bishop of Ely.

  Growing up in Putney, Thomas Cromwell would have been familiar with tales of this prodigal son; on the best calculations we can make, and they are not perfect, he was born some quarter of a century after West, around 1485.1 His later career interestingly shadowed that of Bishop West. Nicholas did not rise quite so high as Thomas, but compensated by chalking up a much worse outrage in his youth: a splendidly gossipy seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, records that as a Cambridge undergraduate West burned down the Provost’s Lodging of King’s College.2 That was poor thanks for his parents’ achievement in sending him to a great university. Only the cleverest boys from such a modest background would make it to Oxford or Cambridge, perhaps with backing from some influential local cleric or interested patron. Putney had many possibilities of both, close as it was to the King’s palace at Richmond and to a fine house of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Mortlake.

  The Cromwells and the Wests were classified in fifteenth-century England’s intricately stratified society as yeomen: busy industrious folk who liked to see their promising boys get on in the world, and who valued schooling as the key to advancement. Thomas Cromwell never had the advantage of a university education, but he more than made up for it by efforts of self-help, which remain utterly hidden from us. He was proud of his transformation, and we should take him seriously when he ruefully described his turbulent younger self to later friends such as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer as a ‘ruffian’, in the mould of the young Nicholas West.3 As we will see, he came to understand and practise English law, busy himself in commerce, speak many languages, act like a gentleman and even, in the end, like one of the highest nobles in the land. Like West, he would have started off learning the basics of reading (and, a little later, writing) in some informal school in his or the
next village: perhaps courtesy of some chantry priest at Putney parish church, supplementing his modest income from saying masses for the dead by dinning the ABC and scraps of liturgical Latin into some bored boys, while they sought diversion from waterfront noises off. Then there may have been some instruction in Latin grammar at a local school, but for most of his astonishing accomplishments, Cromwell would be his own tutor. (See Plate 1.)

  A yeoman like Thomas Cromwell’s father Walter found many ways of prospering, aiming to do well enough to break through social barriers to the esteem of being thought a gentleman. As we will see, Walter’s family hovered on that boundary. Any respectable way of making money would do; he had some land to farm around Putney and later in nearby Wandsworth and Roehampton, and he brewed beer on a commercial scale. That meant tavern-keeping near the waterfront, a good living at a time when the Thames was the equivalent of a modern main highway. Walter moved from Putney to Wandsworth around 1501; his property there included a water-mill, which could have been for either grain or cloth-fulling. Later memories were that he was also a blacksmith, and while perfectly possible, the idea may simply have arisen because the Cromwells, like a great many Tudor families humble and landed alike, doubled their distinctive surname with the alias of Smith. English surnames were still not altogether stable in those years, at any social level.4

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  If Putney was a place of little note, the unkind among Europe’s sophisticates might say the same of early Tudor England. It was the largest kingdom in an archipelago of islands on the western margins of the continent, facing the Atlantic. At various times over the previous five centuries, its monarchs had built successive empires that bound it to mainland Europe and episodically embraced the other parts of the archipelago as well. Its distinctive language, English, reflected a history of invasions both inwards and outwards: English was a complex hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Norse, with a strong overlay of Norman-French, and was difficult for outsiders to learn fluently because of its consequent lack of linguistic logic. It was nevertheless spoken widely in the Atlantic archipelago beyond English frontiers. In a northern kingdom ruled by the Stewart dynasty whom English kings never succeeded in permanently defeating, the Stewart monarchs united English-speakers with Gaels in an alliance of the unconquered, who found it useful to share a common identity as ‘Scotland’. It is significant how little Scotland will feature in Thomas Cromwell’s story, even in his years in government.