At last in September 1528 a key to unlocking this impasse appeared imminent: the Pope had agreed to send a special representative to England to join Wolsey in deliberating on the annulment. That special legate was Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, Bishop of Salisbury (Thomas Cromwell’s distant employer in his Town Clerkship there), who after a worryingly slow journey from Rome eventually reached London on 9 October, ostentatiously though no doubt accurately complaining about his gout.12 On arrival, Campeggio did not unveil any dramatic initiative to solve the crisis, quite the reverse; but at least he was there, and Henry’s unquenchable belief in the moral rightness of his cause fostered the illusion that something would turn up. Wolsey’s problem remained Anne Boleyn, with her lifelong ability to polarize matters of policy and turn relationships into adversarial contests. She had decided that the Cardinal, and therefore all of his affinity, were her enemies to be destroyed. While Anne busily intrigued against Wolsey alongside courtiers who were her supporters either through family connections or through inclination to evangelical religion or through awareness of her inescapable power at Court, he could still draw on a considerable deposit account in his master’s esteem and trust. All through the first half of 1529, her efforts came to little.13
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Cromwell was for the moment remote from all this; that autumn of 1528 he still busied himself with the suppression of small monasteries to endow Cardinal College Ipswich. Beyond that preoccupation, we can find him involved in letters about overseas shipping needing Wolsey’s signature, maybe because they concerned ships in which his own London merchant friends had an interest. That did not imply he had anything to do with the momentous business of foreign policy at the centre of Wolsey’s concerns.14 Yet, while still nowhere near high politics, his administrative role for Wolsey was widening a little, founded on matters which had already been his concern – chiefly, and of huge significance for the future, matters concerning monasteries, well beyond the programme of dissolutions rolling on into April 1529. He can be found acting as broker in the election of abbots and priors at fairly major houses right across the kingdom. One might expect him to be involved in a matter in the Ipswich area: the choice of Thomas Manning to be Prior of the flourishing Augustinian house of Butley in January 1529. Manning was a friend of his own friends and colleagues in business at Cardinal College Ipswich, Thomas Rush and Rush’s stepson Thomas Alvard; the new Prior’s continuing gratitude and usefulness eventually earned him the suffragan (assistant) Bishopric of Ipswich established in 1536.15
More significantly for the future, Cromwell can also be found intervening in two widely separated unholy rows which do not have such an obvious personal connection. One concerned the expelled Cistercian Abbot Chaffcombe of Bruerne (Oxfordshire), who wrote in March 1529 asking for his help to return from exile with the Cistercians at Rewley beside Oxford; Chaffcombe’s career at Bruerne was prolonged till he was finally removed in 1533. That same summer, the serially troubled suffragan Bishop and commendatory Augustinian Abbot of Wigmore (Herefordshire) appealed for Cromwell’s help in hanging on to his abbey. Bishop Smart proclaimed with the dramatic sincerity in which the disreputable specialize, ‘Friendship in adversity is best proved; you did promise me one good turn – now you may with your worship [that is, given your influence] speak for me . . . Now is the time that you may evermore bind me, good Mr Cromwell; I pray you now to remember me as I shall never forget you.’ Certainly by someone’s means, most likely Cromwell’s, the Bishop graced the Abbot’s lodging at Wigmore for a decade more, until there was no abbey to mismanage.16
Besides this, Cromwell busied himself with tasks in one way or another concerning young men in the Cardinal’s charge. We have already noted two jobs related to sons of magnates. Cromwell acted for the Cardinal following the death in summer 1528 of the immensely wealthy Sir William Compton, which placed his then six-year-old son Peter in wardship. It was at this time also that Cromwell’s signature appears alongside an impressive tally of peers of the realm on what was hoped to be a final agreement in the affairs of Cardinal Wolsey’s erstwhile youthful charge Thomas Lord Monteagle.17 In an area of the kingdom which had so far been beyond his concerns, in 1528 Cromwell took up some financial business in Wolsey’s diocese of Durham as the Cardinal prepared to resign it for the even richer see of Winchester.
This may sound like a non-sequitur, and one might explain the task by the fact that it involved securing a regular supply of coal and lead for Cardinal College Ipswich from the Bishop of Durham’s mining operations. But more was involved: Cardinal (and Bishop) Wolsey had granted these mineral rights to his own illegitimate son Thomas Winter, by a lease Cromwell himself drafted just in time before Wolsey resigned Durham.18 It was one of the first signs of Cromwell’s long-term involvement in another important aspect of Wolsey’s legacy project, on which we have not so far remarked: looking after Winter. To his great credit, Cromwell never relinquished this thankless task after the Cardinal’s death, a mark of his continuing loyalty to his dead master.
Thomas Wolsey, a man whose appetite for enjoyment equalled his appetite for hard work, fathered at least two and maybe three illegitimate children, rather exceptionally for an English bishop in this self-consciously well-regulated region of the Western Church. A daughter was born in 1511, and quietly placed in the great West Country nunnery at Shaftesbury before Cromwell entered the Cardinal’s service. Nevertheless another old servant of Wolsey belatedly brought her to Cromwell’s attention when in 1535 she was caught up in his own bureaucracy as royal Vice-Gerent; she was still just young enough to fall under his new ban on people under twenty-four taking full monastic vows.19 She clearly had no desire to leave Shaftesbury at that time, and it is interesting that this same autumn of 1535 a personal decision of Cromwell lowered the threshold for dismissal to twenty (see below, this page). After that, unnamed for posterity, she disappears from the record.
A hitherto unnoticed but likely third child of Thomas Wolsey is a young man called Thomas Minterne, who in 1529 entered Winchester College (Wolsey having just become Bishop of Winchester) as from the town of Sherborne, aged thirteen, so born around 1516. Minterne is a village 10 miles south of Sherborne, 20 miles from Wolsey’s daughter at Shaftesbury Abbey: a notable Dorset coincidence. From Winchester, Minterne went on inevitably to New College Oxford, and in 1533 (aged seventeen!) became a Fellow, under Cromwell’s complaisant friend Warden John London. His good fortune continued; by 1538 he was receiving five pounds a year as a royal scholar, and was off on foreign travels, writing stylish Latin letters of thanks in a fine mannered hand from Paris and Louvain to his ‘Maecenas’, Thomas Cromwell. A further begging letter to the King after Cromwell’s fall significantly indicates that financial support had now dried up for his travels abroad, but he carried on some sort of clerical career as a canon of Salisbury Cathedral as late as the 1560s, not otherwise troubling the course of history.20
The most compelling argument for Minterne’s paternity is that his career and Cromwell’s part in it are amusingly reminiscent of Wolsey’s undoubted son Thomas Winter, although Winter caused Cromwell much more work than Minterne. Born around 1510, and so the oldest of this trio, Thomas Winter gained an even more lavish education than Thomas Minterne: carefully chaperoned studies at Louvain, Padua and Paris, studies which left him with beautiful italic handwriting, an ability to turn a graceful phrase in humanist Latin and a breathtaking sense of entitlement. The best that one can say about Winter is that looking after him gave gainful employment in pleasant overseas surroundings to various of Wolsey’s protégés and Cromwell’s friends and acquaintances, notably that talented future Cromwellian propagandist Richard Morison, yet another evangelical finding his way on to the strength of Cardinal College Oxford in the 1520s.21
During Winter’s various spells of residence in Italy, he was the unintentionally comic counterpoint to an equally cosseted protégé of Henry VIII, Reginald Pole, though unlike that high-minded
cleric he would never have dreamed of biting the hand that fed him. In fact Winter wandered through the 1530s with the innocence of a Forrest Gump, sustained to the last by income from the Provostship of Beverley Minster which Cromwell saved for him from the stripping away of his other preferments, and whose regular disbursement he pursued with the nearest thing to energy he ever displayed. Cromwell must have blanched to read Winter’s guileless account of his visit to Court while home in England, probably in 1534. The young man remarked sadly that the King did not really seem to be listening to him while he was recounting his Italian adventures, yet Queen Anne Boleyn made some (surprisingly) warm and encouraging remarks to him, asking him to consider her as among the number of his friends.22 By then, Winter certainly needed friends, but his only consistent friendship came from Thomas Cromwell.
While the Cardinal was alive and in the fullness of his power, Winter’s promotion in high Church office passed parody. Particularly offensive East Anglian deployments of the lad in the diocese of Norwich aroused the wrath of the venerable and conscientious Bishop, Richard Nix; Nix was one of that generation of elderly bishops like Audley of Salisbury (see above, this page) who thoroughly disapproved of Wolsey’s general high-handedness, to say nothing of his progeny. Winter was high on Nix’s list of grievances: appointed aged sixteen as Rector of the major benefice of St Matthew’s Ipswich in succession to one of Suffolk’s most respected secular clergy, in order to secure the shrine of Our Lady for Wolsey’s plans for Cardinal College, and, worse still, in the same year becoming Archdeacon of Suffolk. Early in 1529, Winter added the Archdeaconry of Norfolk to his preferments, and this seems to have been the final straw for Nix. The Bishop took out his rage on the Archdeaconry scribe John Curatt for exercising probate jurisdiction on Winter’s behalf, prompting that unfortunate official to write in terror to Cromwell twice in two days. Nix’s own letter to Wolsey a month later in May 1529 was a not altogether coherent balance of abject pleas not to threaten his position combined with truculent demands for justification of the Cardinal’s actions. Over the next few months, pleas disappeared and truculence increased.23
It is likely that already in spring 1529 the Duke of Norfolk was giving malicious hints to his diocesan that Wolsey’s position was increasingly vulnerable to missteps in the royal annulment project. Wolsey’s senior official Dr Stephen Gardiner, now part of a diplomatic mission to Rome to press the King’s case, certainly drew that conclusion. In March 1529, quietly jettisoning his previous vigorous support for Queen Katherine, he prepared to leave Wolsey to whatever fate awaited him. Anne Boleyn warmly received Gardiner’s unctuous overtures. She had spent the previous month or two cementing a covert alliance against Wolsey; she recruited such key figures as her courtier cousin and Gardiner’s diplomatic colleague Sir Francis Bryan, plus the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, heading a coterie of noblemen who had long resented being sidelined by a flamboyant and lowborn priest.24
In the middle of all this, Cromwell witnessed a significant moment of sourness in the otherwise rapid progress of Cardinal College Ipswich. He was at the College when the Duke of Norfolk paid it a visit on 11 April 1529. Norfolk arrived in a fury because he had heard that the small suppressed priory at Felixstowe, of which he counted himself founder, had been dismantled for building materials. It took some work to calm the Duke down and restore his good temper, and for the time being Norfolk said no more about Felixstowe.25 The ambiguity of the encounter is reminiscent of Bishop Nix’s challenge to the Cardinal at the same time. Still there was no outward sign that Wolsey was facing disaster.26 Through that spring and early summer, events swayed uncertainly. Anne, now close at the King’s side, and scheduled to accompany him on the summer progress once the legatine court had completed its work, was preparing the ground for further destructive action against Wolsey, with her group of assorted vengeful noblemen.27 Documents drafted for this purpose by Thomas Lord Darcy of Templehurst sat unused in Darcy’s archive until 1537, when the sight of them (another royal confiscation of treasonous papers) further sweetened Thomas Cromwell’s own taste of revenge on behalf of his old master after the Pilgrimage of Grace (see below, this page).28
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All depended on what the King was sure would be the successful culmination of his long campaign to have himself recognized as unmarried. On 31 May 1529, Campeggio and Wolsey opened the legatine court hearing in the Dominican friary (Blackfriars) in London. Wolsey, desperately juggling this vital task with supervising an important mission to canvass support from King François of France, may at this point have shared the King’s optimism: Campeggio will not have confided to his fellow-judge the fateful instructions from the Pope to make no decision at all. In the end, after two months of legal deliberations at Blackfriars, on 30 July 1529 Cardinal Campeggio delivered the blow. He declared the legatine court adjourned for the summer as if it were sitting in the city of Rome, without any interim conclusion. The delay gave Queen Katherine ample time to lodge an appeal to return the case to Rome, far beyond King Henry’s power to influence the result.
Campeggio had fooled and betrayed both the King and his Cardinal, but Wolsey would feel the worst effects of the Blackfriars debacle. Anne and her allies had among their other preparations drawn up thirty-four charges against Wolsey, designed as a basis for that terrifyingly flexible weapon of destruction in English law, a charge of praemunire: aiding and abetting a foreign jurisdiction in the realm. That jurisdiction was the Pope’s. The Pope’s agent was Wolsey himself – thanks of course to King Henry’s own insistence in getting him appointed as legate a latere eleven years before. Ever since this species of indictment was formulated in a Parliamentary statute of the late fourteenth century, it had been a weapon the English Crown could wield against the Papacy at will, whenever there was some issue of contention. There was thus nothing new about its actual use, but over the next three years, this reassuringly traditional procedure gained a new purpose: not merely to harass a pope in his English jurisdiction, or as instrument of Henry’s anger at Wolsey’s failure, but to destroy papal jurisdiction altogether.
Amid the fury and recrimination following Campeggio’s act of sabotage, Thomas Cromwell was drawn directly into the catastrophe. For the first time he stepped beyond his allotted administrative duties on tomb, colleges, monasteries and young gentlemen. One night, probably around the time that Campeggio torpedoed the Blackfriars court, Cromwell scribbled an urgent note to his colleague in Wolsey’s service Dr William Claybrook, ‘as ever ye intend to do my lord pleasure or service’, to find the registers in the legatine archives concerning the papal grant of Wolsey’s powers, specifically with regard to his powers of dispensation (very relevant to the business at Blackfriars), ‘that they may be shown this night to the King’s attorney, for such causes as I declared to you at my last speaking with you’. This plea is a rare example of one of Cromwell’s own letters, preserved only because it returned to his in-tray. Claybrook wrote an apologetic reply on the back of it, repeating that Wolsey’s registers were in the care of other officials, but promising to do his best and arranging an early rendezvous with him at Blackfriars the following morning.29
Cromwell’s urgent note in late July 1529, begging William Claybrook ‘as ever ye entend to doo my Lord pleasure or s’vyce’ to search the archive for key documents defining Wolsey’s legatine jurisdiction, in the wake of royal rage at the Blackfriars trial.
The exchange is the first extant witness to Cromwell’s errands between Cardinal and royal Court which came to dominate the next year of his life. He dutifully carried on with his normal tasks on Cardinal College estates and building work; they took him in August and September of 1529 back to East Anglia, where he arrived in time to represent the Cardinal’s household at the second (and maybe subdued) College celebrations on the Nativity of Our Lady.30 Yet the new direction is perceptible in a letter to Cromwell from his great friend and colleague Thomas Alvard on 23 September. Alvard meticulously de
scribed their master’s present delicate but by no means hopeless situation as the Cardinal nervously tried to keep close to the King during the royal progress to Grafton. Alvard noted how the Cardinal eagerly and immediately read over a letter of Cromwell’s to him (now of course lost), ‘and so kept [it] always close to himself. [I say this] unto you because I never saw him do the like [before].’31
Wolsey’s relationship with his always efficient and trustworthy servant was taking on a new dimension, reflected in a conversation concerning King Henry’s Great Matter, about which there has been unjustified scepticism.32 It unites two main actors in the tragedy of the 1530s: Reginald Pole and Cromwell. They were then mismatched: Cromwell the busy, unspectacular servant of the Cardinal, and Pole the much promoted, much travelled and favoured protégé of the King (a more talented version of Thomas Winter, indeed). At some time between Pole’s return from Italy and his departure for Paris – in other words, in early autumn 1529, around the time of Alvard’s letter – they had a conversation. Cromwell asked Pole ‘how a councillor of a Prince should conduct himself with that Prince, if at any time the Prince’s inclination turned away from what generally seemed honourable, when he was not actually furnished with any authority in the matter that he sought’.33 Shorn of Pole’s obsessive later quest to see Cromwell as the English Machiavelli, the question makes perfect sense in autumn 1529. Pole does not suggest that Cromwell supplied any answer at this juncture. His question merely echoed Wolsey’s worries, about which they may have frequently mused in their newfound intimacy.
By the end of July, the aristocratic conspirators against Wolsey thought that they had him at their mercy, but the Cardinal diverted the King’s wrath for the time being with lavish quantities of money, to their great disappointment and frustration. Their plans for Wolsey’s arrest, the confiscation of his papers and his indictment on a raft of charges came to nothing.34 Wolsey’s situation took some time to deteriorate during August and September, and when the King turned decisively against him, it was not just because of the huge disappointment of the Blackfriars trial, but also because of a second failure of Wolsey’s policy: the simultaneous negotiations with France yielded no new advantage for the King. That snub from King François, with whom Henry always pursued a thoroughly adolescent rivalry, eroded Henry’s confidence in the Cardinal to the point where by October Anne could push home her advantage.
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