Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  But there is yet another Italian speciality contemporary with Cromwell’s public career: Nicodemism, that quiet decision to hide one’s religious views and practice amid some degree of conformity to the surrounding official religion (as John Calvin pointed out sarcastically in coining the label, Nicodemus had dared come to see the Saviour only by night).77 The Nicodemites of the Italian Reform demonstrate many features of Thomas Cromwell’s mature religious creed: much that was outward did not reflect that which was inward. Perhaps we are looking at parallel Nicodemite developments in the two settings of Cromwell’s early career, Italy and England, as we have found him in contact with Lollards since at least the mid-1520s. The life and practice of Lollards anticipated Nicodemism, and sustained them through more than a century of persecution, so that some of them held parish office in the Church from which they dissented.78

  A consciously Nicodemite outlook might explain the apparently stark contradiction between Cromwell’s developing evangelicalism and his loyal service to that most grandiose of late medieval English churchmen, Thomas Wolsey. In Italy, such conjunctions were not at all unusual while that paradoxical near-miss, an Italian Reformation, took shape in the 1530s. We have already met one of Cromwell’s Italian friends, Donato Rullo of Venice, who became just such a Nicodemite radical. Rullo was well acquainted with Juan de Valdés, the unmistakably heterodox theologian, and refugee in Italy from the Spanish Inquisition. Valdés was the most distinguished and influential in the radical wing of those labelled ‘Spirituali’, clerics and laypeople of varied theological creativity and Nicodemite tendency who moved happily if discreetly amid the clientage of exalted Italian churchmen such as Gasparo Contarini and Giovanni Morone. Among such clerical magnates in Italy was also eventually numbered Reginald Pole, and he was yet another friend of Donato Rullo.79 These leading clergy, despite their frequently lavish lifestyles, represented hope for a renewed and evangelical Church, patrons to the most adventurous thinkers striving to create a renewed Catholic future.80

  In the England of the 1520s, the best or speediest chance of reform in Church and commonwealth alike was at the hands of a cardinal of the Roman Church: the papal legate, Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey’s general concern for justice and reform was exemplified in his activity as Lord Chancellor and in his galvanizing the King’s Council to act more systematically as a court of law in Star Chamber. He spent a greater fraction of his energy than was politically sensible in prosecuting enclosures of arable land for pasture and extending existing legislation against it. It may now seem surprising that this could be considered a moral issue, but so it was for many people in Tudor England, concerned both for food production and for social justice, protecting the weak against the strong. Enclosures could be seen as disrupting the social fabric: greedy landowners maximized their profits from sheep and cattle by fencing in land for their own purposes when it had previously produced grain under ancient community arrangements. Wolsey’s personal crusade to destroy such enclosures infuriated some of the most powerful people in the land, clerical and lay, and it may have contributed to the enthusiasm which many felt about his fall from the King’s favour in 1529.81

  In the Church, the Cardinal had great plans for reorganization and rationalization of the English diocesan system (not merely for the educational fruits of his monastic suppressions) and for wider intervention and renewal in the orders of monks and friars – all of which made him detested by his colleagues on the episcopal bench. It is remarkable how little support Wolsey had from the English episcopate, and curious how little he was able to put his own men in among them; he had better success in Ireland.82 Relevant to Cromwell’s present and future activities was that in November 1528 the Cardinal secured two papal bulls for a radical renewal of English monastic life by suppressing all religious houses with fewer than six inmates, and uniting to greater houses all communities of fewer than twelve.83 If he had been given the time to do that, the regular life in England would have been revolutionized – and what a feat of administration it would have taken, worthy of Master Cromwell himself.

  Wolsey was consistently easy-going on heresy compared with his English episcopal confrères, never initiating the burning of a heretic. Indeed after Bishop West of Ely had harassed the Cambridge don Hugh Latimer in 1528 for what was already clearly outspoken evangelical preaching, Wolsey examined the offender, and with open contempt for West granted Latimer a preaching licence, which that voluble reformer defiantly continued to use despite conservative harassment after Wolsey’s fall from power. This significant clash over Latimer between Wolsey and a grand old man of the episcopal bench is preserved in a circumstantial reminiscence of Ralph Morice, which John Foxe found so difficult to fit into the architecture of his Reformation history that he decided not to publish it in his grand narrative of a classic Protestant martyr.84 In 1529, Wolsey’s reforming instincts also turned him to unprecedented if soon frustrated efforts at Church reform in the Lordship of Ireland, half a dozen monastic dissolutions included. This was spearheaded by his servant, Cromwell’s friend and colleague in the contemporary English dissolution programme, Dr John Allen, newly arrived as Archbishop of Dublin, assisted by Edward Staples, another of Wolsey’s servants and lately a canon of Cardinal College Oxford. Staples was appointed Bishop of Meath, the most senior diocese in Ireland apart from its four archbishoprics.85 Why should an evangelical not have hopes of all this?

  Yet Wolsey’s handicap as Church reformer, apart from personal self-indulgence far outstripping any other late medieval English cleric, was the vast scope of his duties not simply as papal legate, but also as omnicompetent royal minister and dispenser of justice in Star Chamber. It was just all too much.86 Wolsey also had a personality defect deriving as much from his limited attention-span as from the burdens of his work. His old physician Dr Augustine reminded Cromwell of this after the Cardinal’s death, when trying to wheedle some money out of a now much promoted former colleague: ‘I wish you would always remember what you were so often accustomed to say to me and others, that our right reverend master was so universally detested for nothing but putting things off for so long, and for his many words, empty of deeds.’87 A cheap rhetorical shot amid Augustine’s pleas for cash, but not worth chancing if it had not reflected an old reality. It is clear that for Cromwell frustration long jostled with deep and lasting loyalty in his complex relationship with his master. While learning a great deal by observing Wolsey in government, and drawing on Wolsey’s initiatives and schemes, he did his best not to make the same mistakes, once he had a chance to exploit his own power in the kingdom.

  4

  Managing Failure: 1528–1529

  Ipswich has known many rain-sodden Septembers, but the good folk of that industrious borough have seldom enjoyed as festive a soaking as that on 7–8 September 1528. For one not present, Cardinal Wolsey, this was a milestone in his life, a ceremonial assertion of all he had achieved since he left his birthplace for Oxford. For one actually there – Master Cromwell – it was the fruit of much tedious planning and administration. The events had two foci: first the nascent Cardinal College itself, rapidly appearing out of the redundant buildings of St Peter’s Priory, the smaller of two priories in the borough. The other was the celebrated shrine of Our Lady on the western edge of town, a holy place Wolsey had known since childhood; he had annexed it to his scheme with the same ruthlessness currently transforming St Peter’s into his College of Our Lady.1 The 8th of September was the feast of her Nativity, co-operatively falling at the beginning of a new academic year. This was the inauguration of a chief corporate festival for Cardinal College Ipswich: as it turned out, the perpetual annual celebrations scarcely survived another two years.2

  The Monday vigil processing from the College to Our Lady’s shrine was solemn enough, featuring the borough bailiffs and aldermen with Master Humphrey Wingfield, respected in both borough and county (he had his town house at the far end of the street from St Peter’s Church). Then on the feast-day
itself these worthies were jostled by a much greater crowd from further afield: two dozen other prominent county gentry, heads of religious houses, with representatives of the Bishop of Norwich and of the Duke of Norfolk, plus Cromwell and his clerical colleagues Dr Roland Lee and Dr Stephen Gardiner from the Cardinal’s household. Torrential rain barred a repeat of the previous day’s procession through town, so it had to take place in the former priory church: probably a relief to the guests, with ample compensation from splendid choral music and a lavish dinner to follow. Venison and other game were provided by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and other local magnates.

  It was an auspicious beginning. The newly appointed Dean, William Capon (adding this promising office to his Mastership of Jesus College Cambridge) gave credit where it was due: ‘Master Cromwell did take much pain and labour not only in surveying your Grace’s stuff hither carried safely; but also in preparing and ordering of hangings, benches and other necessaries to the furniture of our Hall.’ That was just the sort of detail in which Cromwell had come to excel as the Cardinal’s legacy project had unfolded over four busy years. The legal niceties for handing over the Ipswich site to Wolsey had been narrowly finished in time, and Cromwell further advanced the programme of monastic dissolutions to complete the joint endowments of the Colleges during his East Anglian visit.3 Back in London, the Italian craftsmen were at this point still taking care to show themselves busy on the Cardinal’s tomb.

  Other members of the cast assembled at Ipswich in September 1528 were deeply significant for Cromwell’s future. Among the guests, Humphrey Wingfield was destined to be Speaker of the House of Commons, probably at Cromwell’s behest, in 1533. Prominent in the home team were Roland Lee and Stephen Gardiner, his colleagues from Wolsey’s staff, who when promoted to bishoprics became respectively his most reliable supporter and most reliable enemy. The senior staff of the College, the Dean and Sub-Dean, both look like Wolsey’s own choices (like the Dean and Sub-Dean of Cardinal College Oxford, John Higden and Thomas Canner). Dean Capon, Wolsey’s almoner, was a safe traditionalist clergyman, through whom, during business for both Cardinal and Jesus Colleges, Cromwell got to know another equally conventionally minded colleague of Capon’s as Fellow of Jesus, Thomas Cranmer.4 Dramatically promoted and with a changed religious outlook, Cranmer played a considerable part in Cromwell’s later adventures.

  We can probably credit Cromwell with the import from Boston to Ipswich of the future evangelical martyr Robert Testwood to be master of the College choristers; almost certainly he also secured Testwood’s next appointment at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, when the need arose.5 The Sub-Dean at Ipswich was consistently referred to in its paperwork as ‘Mr Ellis’ or ‘Ellice’. He has always seemed more elusive than Dean Capon, but the key to identifying him is to realize that he was being addressed by the polite Tudor convention of calling foreigners and Welshmen by their Christian name (presumably because the English scorned any ability to pronounce alien surnames). He was a young Cambridge don called Ellis ap Robert ap Rhys, an identification amusingly though obliquely confirmed by an administrative document generated in 1530 by the collapse of Wolsey’s finances. Various London victuallers were trying to recoup money from the Cardinal’s catering bills, and an internal household memorandum to Cromwell mentions various of Wolsey’s officials answerable for the debts, among whom is twice named ‘Mr Ellis the priest’. Evidently a clerk to whom this round-up was being irritably dictated misheard the name ‘Mr Ellis ap Reece’.6

  Ap Rhys, a talented exponent of civil law and a Cambridge don like Capon, was at the time only in his early twenties. He was son to Wolsey’s chaplain and cross-bearer Robert ap Rhys (clerical celibacy did not greatly figure in the late medieval Welsh Church), and he himself became a chaplain to Wolsey, remaining loyal through the last few difficult months of the Cardinal’s life.7 Affectionately or sarcastically known in his native country as ‘the Red Doctor’ (y Doctor Coch), he later became an enthusiastic if raffish lieutenant of Cromwell’s in promoting monastic dissolutions and Reformation in Wales, and he carried on a colourful career in Welsh administration as late as 1594, always sitting lightly to his clerical orders, despite much continuing involvement in ecclesiastical affairs. We will be meeting him again.8 From such figures who stayed steadfast in Wolsey’s last misfortunes was Cromwell’s circle of particularly trustworthy assistants later constructed.

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  Wolsey must have regretted not savouring this collective act of homage from his native county at first hand, but he was at Court anticipating what appeared to be a still more momentous triumph: a solution to the matter of Anne Boleyn. For a year and more, the Cardinal had been troubled by the sudden emergence of King Henry’s fateful passion for this high-spirited, articulate and fiercely intelligent young lady of the Court: what contemporaries with weary discretion called ‘the King’s Great Matter’. She was the younger daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, a leading Norfolk gentleman knighted in the course of a successful career as a royal diplomat. His service abroad had given Anne exceptional familiarity in childhood and teenage years with Europe’s two greatest Courts, as attendant first on Archduchess Margaret of Austria in Brussels and then on the Queen of France; her French was fluent, her international sophistication rare among English ladies.

  Both contemporary comment and the few depictions of her that have been allowed to survive show that Anne was not beautiful by the conventions of the day. That did not hold her back. When she returned home in 1521, now around twenty years old, she had many eager admirers, right up to Henry Percy, a nobleman of illustrious ancestry, heir to the Northumberland earldom, and the brilliant poet Thomas Wyatt. But they all had to fall away from her when a still more exalted passion became obvious during 1526: the King was smitten, as previously he had been at some length with her elder sister Mary, but this time to much more lasting effect. That year at the Shrovetide jousting (13 February), he took to the lists in a costume conveying the role of a lover in torment: ‘Declare I dare not’ was embroidered on it in French and English.9

  Two factors turned Henry’s amorous playfulness with Anne into a political and theological project to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, his wife of nearly two decades. First were the idiosyncratically pious King’s long-standing doubts about the canonical validity of that marriage; Henry decided that he had breached biblical prohibitions on marrying one’s deceased brother’s wife, sparking the wrath of God. That seemed manifest in his lack of a male heir from all Katherine’s pregnancies. If the King was right in his assessment of God’s law, his marriage had never existed. For the good of his and Katherine’s souls, as well as the kingdom’s future, it must be publicly declared null.* Second, and subsequent to that existential disquiet, came Anne’s unusual and unexpected insistence that she would not share Henry’s bed unless she was his wife. Her charisma and sheer force of personality so captured the King that he accepted this audacious challenge.

  It was the passionate nature of their relationship, so unusual in royal liaisons, that made Henry capable over the next few years of pursuing courses of action which a lesser man would have found too embarrassing or foolish to contemplate, against both common decency and the opposition of some of the most powerful people in the realm. Henry deeply resented such opposition, and was inclined to put the most sinister construction on it. Though he never admitted it for one moment, his father’s claim to rule had been laughably feeble in hereditary terms, and throughout his reign he pursued to the death anyone who challenged his family’s grasp on the crown, either by their actions or by merely existing.

  Henry’s first secret moves to secure a marriage annulment came in April 1527, and royal pressure on a reluctant Pope Clement VII began in the summer of that year.10 The diplomatic and theological obstacles were huge, particularly because the understandably outraged Queen Katherine was aunt to the most powerful man in Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was a good deal ne
arer and more practically menacing to the Pope than King Henry. Once Wolsey had realized that his initial gestures of resistance to the King’s plans were getting nowhere, he could not escape this uncongenial task becoming his main focus as both papal representative in England and royal chief minister.

  Wolsey had built his spectacular career on smoothly and efficiently achieving Henry’s wishes, but the King’s confidence in him had already been severely shaken in 1525 by his humiliating failure to pull off a bold experiment in national taxation without consulting Parliament, the ‘Amicable Grant’. Its innovative nature was uncomfortably advertised by this unprecedented name, and the tax-payers’ reaction had been far from amicable, amounting to a tax strike. The Cardinal could not afford a defeat on an even more serious matter. His aristocratic enemies, who had always resented his power and intimacy with the King, would gleefully aid his destruction.11 They were now encouraged in their malice by a queen-in-waiting, as they had not been in the Amicable Grant fiasco; Anne had decided that Wolsey was deliberately dragging his feet, and she was always quick to divide the world into friends and enemies.