By contrast, the small but growing evangelical group in high politics might seem united behind their revolutionary religious cause, driving towards the Reformation which Martin Luther had sparked in mainland Europe, and seeking to import it to King Henry’s realm. But the greatest hindrance to a coherent evangelical bloc forming in England at the beginning of the 1530s was the fact and the personality of Anne Boleyn. Few will doubt that in religion she was a committed evangelical, a furtherer of the godly cause; the evidence is clear from the late 1520s, when she recommended the writings of William Tyndale to the King, and in her years of power she consistently saw to the promotion of clergy such as Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton who were already marked out as evangelical enemies of the old religion. No traditionalists similarly enjoyed her favour.47
The complication in understanding the relationship of Anne and Cromwell has always been the undoubted fact that together with her brother George, to whom she was very close, she was working in the same religious direction as the royal minister. Yet as far as Cromwell was concerned, the great fact which shaped their relations for the rest of her life, and which makes sense of the events which now played out at Court over more than half a decade, was that she was the person most responsible for destroying his dear master the Cardinal. Equally, for her, he was the Cardinal’s man, promoted to the King’s service by the Cardinal’s friends, and Wolsey’s right-hand man in the months when his fate was still in the balance; that outweighed his undoubted part in clearing her path to the throne. We will see that she was probably responsible for slowing Cromwell’s further progress into royal service rather than furthering it, and his eventual lead in her destruction in 1536 is not surprising (see Chapter 14). Most evangelical leaders abroad, not least Martin Luther, regarded the King’s campaign to marry Anne and discard Katherine as ridiculous, unjust and cruel. Anne’s removal then solved a good deal of the problem for English evangelicals, and very soon after that the shock of conservative fury in the Pilgrimage of Grace suggested some excellent reasons why evangelicals should stand in solidarity to avoid destruction at the hands of traditionalists.48
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For the moment, in winter 1530, the campaign against the Pope was a bipartisan cause, which in most politicians’ minds had not taken on the ideological freight it gained in the next three years. It involved not so much religion as those other great Tudor preoccupations, honour and reputation. The Pope had offended the King’s honour (and by extension God’s) through his delays and subterfuges. Henry never forgot that, and we should take seriously the proposition that many of his ministers felt the same way. Meanwhile the fate of Wolsey was entirely detached from that question, and was as yet not at all finally decided. Cromwell’s successful interview with the King in January 1530 was accompanied by a distinct upturn in the Cardinal’s fortunes, as Henry took pity on the near-fatal illness he was now suffering. A procession of royal physicians was dispatched to help him, including Anne’s cousin Dr William Butts. Even Anne was induced to send him a token to cheer him up, in the form of the little girdle-book of prayers which she habitually wore, a kindness that is unlikely to have been accompanied by much personal warmth.
It was thanks to Cromwell’s mediation, significantly without the advice or even the knowledge of royal councillors, that soon after Candlemas (2 February) the King allowed Wolsey to move to the former royal palace at Richmond, which a few years before he had been given a long-term right to occupy.49 The Cardinal was not expecting this concession any more than the King’s Council, and in haste he expressed his fulsome thanks to his ‘entirely beloved’ servant – ‘I cannot express how greatly your letters have comforted me, being in manner in extreme desperation.’50 In fact, whether out of lack of provision at the Palace itself or from an unwonted political prudence, Wolsey moved only into a comfortable little lodge in Richmond Park, and a month later at the beginning of Lent (2 March) he transferred to the nearby Charterhouse of Sheen, occupying a not especially penitential guest wing built by Dean Colet of St Paul’s some years before.51*
After Cromwell’s no doubt tense negotiations with Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk, Wolsey’s formal pardon followed. It came on 10 February, elaborated by an agreement of 17 February whereby he kept the title of his Bishopric of Winchester and the abbey of St Albans, in return for losing control of their revenues to various interested parties. He was also granted full occupation of his archdiocese of York. It could have been much worse.52 Wolsey’s enemies would find the prospect of his resuming regal splendour and accessibility to the King at Richmond deeply alarming in its promise of a complete comeback. If they had to suffer him being in effect given a chance to launch a second clerical career, it ought to be well away from the River Thames, which provided a royal channel of communication from palace to palace for him to charm Henry further. The answer was to send him to his Archbishopric of York. Cromwell, now with ‘daily access’ to the Duke of Norfolk in his to-and-fro discussions about Wolsey’s pardon, had to convey the Duke’s angry insistence that the Cardinal’s hope of retreating to his other diocese of Winchester would not do.53 After all, Winchester’s territory extended down the Thames as far as London Bridge; in asking for that, Wolsey was being either insincere or totally naive.
The Cardinal delayed his departure north as long as he could, but by Passiontide at the beginning of April he was reluctantly on the road, pausing nearly a fortnight at Peterborough Abbey from Palm Sunday (10 April) through Holy Week.54 Thanks to Cromwell’s soliciting Master Secretary Stephen Gardiner, Wolsey travelled armed with various royal letters of introduction. That to the Abbot of Peterborough simply enjoined a hearty welcome, but those to prominent people in the Province of York were more programmatic, stressing the long absence of a resident archbishop (true; it had been a quarter-century) and ordering them not merely to offer hospitality as Wolsey prepared his own houses but to give him every assistance in his administration. The letters were carefully revised by Cromwell and others to calibrate Wolsey’s currently fragile status, reflecting the worries of his opponents at Court: the crucial point was whether the Cardinal should be described as ‘our right trusty and entirely well-beloved councillor’. In the end he was just ‘our right trusty and entirely well-beloved’ – the loss of the title of Councillor presumably a last-minute victory for his opponents at Court.55
Cromwell never saw his master face to face again. Nevertheless, he played an even more vital part in the Cardinal’s life once Wolsey was in the North, commuting along the Thames between Austin Friars and the Court. His frequent letters were a constant source of news, but also increasingly a voice of sense and realism against what he must soon have realized was the Cardinal’s fatal lack of proportion. The Archbishop of York entered an unfamiliar northern world which far from intimidating him played to his worst instincts of self-aggrandizement and display. News quickly reached Court ‘that he rode in such sumptuous fashion that some men thought he was of as good courage as in times past, and that there was no impediment but lack of authority’. In a now familiar chain of friendship, Vice-Chamberlain Gage abandoned his clerk and took up his pen to write confidentially in his own execrable hand to Cromwell on Wednesday of Holy Week, while Wolsey was still at Peterborough. Gage frankly told him to warn the Cardinal about display, and ‘to have himself in good await what words pass him’, particularly in making promises about payment of debts out of his resources.56
Many such warnings against indiscretion and ostentation would follow, and not just from Cromwell; none was heeded. There may have been calculation in what Wolsey was attempting. To judge not merely from George Cavendish’s admiring account but also from a hostile and well-informed writer of a slightly later generation, the Archbishop of York adopted a new style calculated to build an image as a self-negating, generous Father in God: feasting the nobility and gentry, but also showing himself open to the poor; distributing alms; abandoning his horses to go on f
oot and greet beggars; happy ‘to say Mass many times among the common people’; and ‘whilst he sat at meat . . . well pleased to hear a chapter of the Old or New Testament read’. Here was the image of a prelate to equal any of the great episcopal names of that decade battling to promote Catholic reform, like Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, or Christoph von Utenheim of Basel. Thomas Cromwell the evangelical would approve of the attempt, but he would also have noted that both Briçonnet’s and von Utenheim’s efforts had failed. Our anonymous commentator observed darkly of Wolsey that ‘the more he travelled forward, the more was he cast behind, for albeit he distributed his money very liberally, yet could he get in the south parts little amity.’57
There are signs that Cromwell felt deeply (and understandably) insecure about his own future. Despite his royal service, he had not travelled any further up the social hierarchy, to be styled ‘esquire’ rather than just ‘gentleman’. Thomas Donington, one of Wolsey’s senior chaplains, did address a letter to him as esquire in 1530, but Donington (not a popular man among his fellow-servants or in the North generally) was sending extravagant thanks for favours, and one complimentary swallow does not make a summer, even during August.58 Cromwell’s archive still featured legal business for private clients, which he may have regarded as an insurance policy if all else failed. As the Cardinal’s fortunes finally crashed in the autumn, Cromwell showed a new interest in private commerce overseas, using his old servant Stephen Vaughan as agent in his old haunts in the Low Countries. When Vaughan went over in November 1530, Cromwell asked him ‘what things might be laden unto these parts’, and Vaughan reported back on arriving that widespread flooding had sent grain prices rocketing, so ‘you should no doubt take thereby right good advantage’ by shipments from England.59 Cromwell also made Vaughan try and sell a large consignment of whale oil (‘spermaceti’) which was a commercial flop and an increasingly exasperating liability for the unfortunate agent, until as late as February 1532 Vaughan bluntly told him that it would have to be sold off cheaply.60 By then, it hardly mattered: Cromwell’s upward progress in state affairs seemed unstoppable, and he confined his non-governmental enterprises to such undemanding and politically useful business as wine-importing licences (easy to sublet) and loans of money.61
Amid the remains of correspondence between Cardinal and servant seen and summarized by Thomas Master are two remarkable items. In one letter (which startled Master and remains startling) Cromwell told the Cardinal he had ‘discovered lately some who favour Luther’s sect, and read his books, and Tyndale; the books he hath taken are The Revelation of Antichrist and Supplication of Beggars, pestiferous books, and able if they be scattered among the common people, to destroy the whole obedience and policy of this realm. He exhorts the Cardinal to stay this Doctrine.’ Actually only the first of these items (both published in 1529) was from Tyndale, largely a translation of a text by Luther; the second was by the anti-clerical pamphleteer Simon Fish. It might be tempting to think that Master had misattributed the letter, but a further letter to Wolsey, certainly from Cromwell and firmly dated a month later than Sir John Gage’s cautionary letter, is equally strong. After further warnings about money and verbal indiscretions, Cromwell turned to supplying London news. He told him that the King had summoned bishops and learned men to purge the realm of heretical books, and in reporting what was in fact an inaccurate rumour ‘that Luther is departed this life’ added the emphatic comment ‘I would he had never been born.’62
There are several ways of interpreting these sentiments. Cromwell may have been saying what Henry VIII ordered him to say or what the Cardinal would expect and want to hear. The correspondents would also be aware that the chief champion of Tyndale and Fish close to the King was Wolsey’s nemesis, Anne Boleyn. We should avoid the hindsight that forces all evangelicals in these early confused days of the Reformation into a seamless web of solidarity. Cromwell’s first encounter with the movement which swelled into the Reformation was on his own testimony (transmitted to John Foxe via Ralph Morice) not through Luther but through Erasmus, whom the world had seen bitterly clashing with Luther during the 1520s on the vital theological matter of human free will versus divine determinism. Cromwell remained a strong admirer of Erasmus, promoting translations and publications of his works by the various printers he favoured during his years of power in the 1530s, now unequivocally in the interests of evangelical reformation.63
Even for a reformer who enjoyed sneering at papal power, it was possible to blame Luther for splitting Christendom. Cromwell, writing again to Wolsey on 18 August 1530 and telling him of current affairs in Germany, used the phrase ‘the Lutheran sect’, and in the sixteenth century there were few greater put-downs than the word ‘sect’. If again one argues that this is language tailored to the recipient, it is worth noting that Stephen Vaughan, much less inclined than his old master to dissembling his vigorously evangelical religious opinions, also commonly called Luther’s associates in reports to Cromwell on his foreign travels ‘the Lutheran sect’.64 Moreover, no one scrabbling to do the King’s will as desperately as Cromwell soon was in the annulment business would have any cause to love Luther, who was bitterly opposed to Henry’s repudiation of Queen Katherine. If looking for evangelical soulmates over the water in that cause, it would be to the reformers of Switzerland, who proved much more amenable to Henry VIII’s arguments that he had never so far been married.65 In fact, as we will see, that was exactly the direction in which his eyes turned (see below, Chapter 15).
Putting together various fragments of evidence of the years 1529–30, it is nevertheless possible to suggest that this great crisis of Cromwell’s fortunes did produce a serious jolt to his evangelical convictions, certainly as to how he was prepared to present himself to the world. First, those traditionalist provisions in his will; then his Lady Psalter clutched at Esher; now exclamations against Luther. Add to that, the group of Wolsey’s friends and Anne’s enemies who were happy to promote Cromwell into Henry VIII’s service: no evangelical sympathizers there. There is also the one illegitimate child he is known to have fathered, if we think her birth came at this juncture. Collectively, there is the appearance of a real lurch in his behaviour, resembling nothing else in the record before or after these twelve months, that threatened to bring him down with his old master.
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Wolsey’s ongoing folly was not merely a matter of showing off in the North. About the time he left the Thames valley, he began putting out his own secret diplomatic feelers to Europe’s two most powerful monarchs, King François of France and Charles V, then to King Henry’s spurned Queen Katherine and Pope Clement VII.66 Through the summer, as he brooded in his archiepiscopal country houses at Southwell and Scroby, his efforts redoubled, so that from August onwards he was in obsessively regular contact with Ambassador Chapuys, via his energetic Italian physician Dr Augustine. The Cardinal’s aim now ran directly against Henry’s plans: he tried to encourage the Pope explicitly to forbid the King to continue his liaison with Anne Boleyn. The French ambassador later claimed that the fallen minister hoped thereby to see the country plunged into such political chaos that he would be seen as the natural saviour of the situation, and would return to his old pre-eminence. It seems so crazy that one can only blame his continuing humiliation for his mental unbalance, furthered by the lack of anyone close at hand with the ability to recall him to a sense of proportion.67
The specific nudge into self-destruction for the Cardinal, moving him from vague plotting to something far more treasonous, may have been the news in the summer that the King was intent on dismantling his entire legacy project: tomb and Colleges together. Cardinal College Ipswich had puttered on unhappily through the first half of the year, trying to defend its interests against emboldened and obstreperous tenants and waiting for something to turn up. As we have seen, Cromwell continued to look after its affairs; although his new official dignity meant he was no longer the man to traipse the Ea
st Anglian roads holding manorial courts, he sent down his most trusted servant in financial matters, William Brabazon (Thomas Alvard also did his best for the College). Poor Dean Capon wrote gratefully to his ‘own very singular good lover and friend’ Cromwell on 15 May, ‘you do shew yourself like a faithful friend unto us, which is well proved now in time of adversity.’68 But there were limits to what Cromwell could achieve against the King’s decision. Probably at the beginning of July he broke it to the Cardinal that the Colleges were to be dissolved. Wolsey was distraught. He wrote back (with forgivable hyperbole), ‘I cannot write unto you, for weeping and sorrow,’ while thanking him warmly ‘for such great pains as ye have taken in all my causes’.69
In Cromwell’s long draft letter to Wolsey, 18 August 1530, Cromwell himself here begins to alter his secretary’s text, opening ‘Sir, I assure Your Grace that ye be moch bounde to o’r Lord God that in suche wise hathe suffered you so to behave and order yo’rself in thos p’rtyes to atteyne the good myndes and hertes of the people . . .’ After that, his rewriting is extensive, prolonging the letter beyond its initial ending on the following page.
It is unlikely that Wolsey hastened to reveal to his servant at Court the extent of his self-destructive intrigues with foreign powers. Cromwell did get angry and frustrated with him, but for other reasons: the Cardinal’s bouts of mistrust of him, his continued reckless building plans in the North and the huge expenses accumulating in London in the clearing up of his affairs. Yet the letters contain no hint of warning on this other front, even while the servant passed on news of international affairs.70 Out of all the correspondence, the most revealing of their relationship is the complete draft of a long letter from Cromwell to the Cardinal on 18 August 1530, a highly unusual stray from his lost out-tray archive. Maybe it survived because Cromwell surrendered it to the King for scrutiny at Wolsey’s death, to demonstrate that he was not involved in the Cardinal’s treasonous activities, and so already at the end of 1530 it would become lodged in the royal archive. In any case, it is precious for a rare glimpse it gives of Cromwell’s own thinking through his corrections and afterthoughts.71
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