It might seem unnecessary to ponder the question of the Chancellorship, given that Cromwell was not especially distinguished or senior in legal practice, but in 1532 Henry made a choice of that kind generally reckoned to be bizarre, for his new Archbishop of Canterbury: a Cambridge don with no experience of the wider Church until his very recent transformation into a royal diplomat. The difference was that in that case the promotion of Thomas Cranmer had the enthusiastic backing of Anne Boleyn. Moreover, as we will discover in the next chapter, Cromwell had made a different appropriation of very considerable power during 1532, without any public warrant at all. He had already begun to interfere in the English Church in ways broadly anticipating his formal grant of the titles Vicar-General and Vice-Gerent in Spirituals in 1534–5.
There is a pattern in these non-appointments and relatively minor appointments between 1530 and 1534; witness the furtive way Cromwell became a royal councillor in early 1531. The outward appearance clashed with the reality that he grew ever more important in government through these four years. Even by early 1533 no one under the King could match him, and so Ambassador Chapuys repeatedly affirmed that he was the man enjoying most credit with the King.39 This is all more than an accident; it must represent deliberate choice. But whose? Most obviously, the King’s. There were people at Court who would have been furious at Cromwell’s public promotion to honourable office, and they were headed by Anne Boleyn and her uncle the Duke of Norfolk. Anne in particular was no slouch when it came to the staging of screaming rows.
It took time for Henry, a thorough coward when it came to personal confrontations, to manoeuvre his new minister into an unassailable public role. Most likely Anne could only be persuaded to accept something of the reality of Cromwell’s position with good grace once he had triumphantly steered her through to marriage and coronation.40 It is striking that his next preferment, and that merely the Chancellorship of the Exchequer (not then an exalted office), was finalized on the day the King first showed off Anne as his Queen – Easter Even 1533 – but it is equally remarkable that a month and a half later, when a large number of gentlemen and esquires were granted various ranks of knighthood at her coronation, Thomas Cromwell was not among them. This is all the more surprising because he was actually the man deputed to collect fines from those who refused knighthood at the coronation, and to adjudicate on the excuses people made to avoid accepting that honour. Unlike those shrinking violets, he had no reason to avoid the burdens of knighthood in service to the Crown, obligations he was already far exceeding.41 It looks like a calculated snub. Knighthood and peerage followed for him only after Anne Boleyn’s death.
As for the offices Cromwell did first take in 1532, both were convenient ways to have discreet but paramount control of the King’s informal treasury, the royal Privy Coffers, without involving himself in routine work of the offices, undertaken instead by deputies.42 The Clerk of the Hanaper dealt with a variety of fees due to the Crown for documents drawn up in Chancery, which ran yearly to two or three thousand pounds available for the King’s purse, not to mention a decent if unspectacular income for Cromwell himself as Clerk. Cromwell kept that sizeable sum of royal profit under his own administration for the Privy Coffers. In doing so, in characteristic fashion he cut across what had become the normal route for dealing with profits from the Hanaper, by which they should have passed to Sir Brian Tuke, the Treasurer of the Chamber: a sore trial to that humourlessly acquisitive royal servant, who frequently complained (to Cromwell, among others) of being starved of cash. To add to Tuke’s frustration, the Jewel House built by Henry VII gave the Master of the Jewels a base in the Tower of London, geographically at the polar opposite side of London to Tuke’s headquarters in Westminster – from Cromwell’s point of view, also conveniently near his home base at Austin Friars.43
The Mastership of the Jewels did not have the prestige of fourteenth-century antiquity which the Clerkship of the Hanaper enjoyed, but it presented a more obvious direct route to the King’s presence. The department of the Jewels was not like Chancery, which had become a fossil from the everyday life of early medieval monarchs, turning in function to bureaucracy and litigation. It by contrast remained a very personal Court office in the daily life of King Henry, with a usefully general brief to fetch the King anything he wished to use or gloat over, out of his heap of royal baubles. The Master looked after whatever assets Henry chose to allot him, from the crown of the realm down to a silver-gilt chessboard. It may have been a consideration for Cromwell that a significant part of that store of valuables had very recently been in the possession of Cardinal Wolsey.44 By its nature, much of this treasure could be readily and unobtrusively turned into coin, since all Tudor coinage was to a greater or lesser degree minted from precious metal. It was a logical consequence that Cromwell came to have a good deal to do with the operation of the royal mint (which, hardly coincidentally, had its London base in the Tower), and he made sure that his clients, particularly his trusted evangelical household servant John Whalley, were placed in charge there.45
These two posts, then, provided room for discreet initiative and nformality in passing money on to tasks to which the King’s enthusiasm or attention might be drawn, to the degree which Cromwell thought appropriate. Meanwhile he leaped acrobatically around the paper-and-parchment trail necessary for formal authorization. Geoffrey Elton, rather illogically ifor a proponent of a bureaucratic ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’ which formalized decision-making and removed it from Courtly informality, enjoyed excavating examples of retrospective expedients: ‘Item, to cause warrants to be drawn for such money as is newly laid out by me for the King’ – and better still the memorandum ‘To know what things that I do lack warrant for, and to cause a warrant to be made thereof to sign’. Such warrants were far from trivial. In less than a year from September 1532, Cromwell sent north £20,000 from the Privy Coffers to his friend and former colleague in Wolsey’s service George Lawson. This was the bulk of the money Lawson received during that period for various operations defending the border with Scotland, matters where it was sensible to react quickly and flexibly to sudden emergencies. As Elton noted, none of the warrants Cromwell signed were ‘dormant’; in other words, they were not regularly occurring payments which needed no fresh decision to be triggered. Each represented a tiny fragment of policy.46
Meanwhile, Cromwell carried on supervising various important aspects of the King’s building projects: his years with Wolsey gave him ample preparation for this, and the various royal moneys now under his control could swiftly be transferred to the task, once more without interference from Treasurer Tuke.47 It was a shrewd move to keep buildings as part of his concerns, for building of all sorts, palaces to castles to coastal defences, was among the King’s great enthusiasms, to rival jewels and books. Cromwell knew his man. Enjoyable discussions with Henry about progress on cherished projects were as useful a bonding experience for a rising minister as sifting royal treasure or perusing venerable volumes, though as early as autumn 1533 we find Cromwell contemplating how he might most tactfully suggest to the King a more structured and economical way of exercising the royal passion for building.48 Neither would it harm his own growing domestic building projects in London to have a close working relationship with royal masons and carpenters.
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These formal acquisitions of Court offices demanded a thorough overhaul of Cromwell’s social status, which duly followed in no fewer than four different respects. First adjustment: it must be given substance by appropriate landholding. So far his landed property was insignificant: the episodically expanding footprint of his home in Austin Friars, plus a clutch of run-of-the-mill leases, mostly in the Home Counties. Now on 27 May 1532, between his two grants of office, he gained something very different: the ancient Marcher lordship of Rhymney or Romney in Glamorgan, which was King Henry’s to grant out because after lately belonging to the attainted Duke of Buckingham it became availabl
e for redistribution on the death of Buckingham’s widow in 1530.49 By its nature Rhymney was in a more exalted league than rented farms or parsonages: besides rolling Welsh acres, there were substantial tenants with ancient obligations to bring condemned criminals to the county gallows, and provide furnishings for royal sessions of justice. There was also a good deal of tightening up to do after years of Crown mismanagement of the Dowager Duchess’s assets.50
As Cromwell’s landed estates expanded in a more predictable fashion in south-east England, his active interest in Rhymney seems to have receded, but his general interest in Wales did not. Among his papers is a long memorandum from a servant, Thomas Philips, written in the same month as the Rhymney grant, responding to a query of Cromwell’s about the general state of Wales.* It was a litany of deficiencies, mainly caused by the administrative inadequacies of the Council in the Marches of Wales, then still maintained in the name of Princess Mary. Philips recommended a complete remodelling of the Council: a cause Cromwell duly took up, and turned into major legislation in 1536.51
Second adjustment: etiquette would demand that the holder of a feudal lordship, however minor, must obtain an official grant of a coat of arms from the College of Heralds if he did not have one. Cromwell’s offices at Court in any case made heraldry a practical necessity, for everyday display – so much of Court life depended on purposeful display. The grant was duly made by Cromwell’s friend Thomas Benolt, then Clarenceux King of Arms, and it fits Cromwell’s new position at this moment, though confusingly dated in Benolt’s records (he put it in the 23rd regnal year of Henry VIII, which would just work for the grant of the Mastership of the Jewels in mid-April 1532, but he then added the date 1533, spanning Henry’s 24th and 25th years).52 The crest of Cromwell’s coat consists of a golden demi-lion rampant, holding a gold finger-ring with a ruby stone, which is surely a reference to the Mastership (maybe even specifically to that ruby ring given to the King the previous New Year). Heraldry is seldom without meaning; in the sixteenth century, people would be able to read it as we read road-signs, and from the same prudential motives. So let us follow their example. (See Plate 5.)
The fact that the allusion to jewels is merely in the crest, and not in the body of the coat itself, raises the suspicion that Cromwell had been using that coat of arms before, simply not bothering to get it authorized. That thought is strengthened by the nature of the coat, all of which suggests his life in the later 1520s. Cromwell has chosen three lions rampant, probably from the heraldry of his brother-in-law Morgan Williams (see above, this page), but then he has separated the trio of lions by a radical visual appropriation: he has lowered the chief or (the golden head-band) of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s arms to form a fess or (a golden central band) across the middle of the shield. On Wolsey’s chief and Cromwell’s fess alike are a red rose between two Cornish choughs. The rose is of course a symbol of their common service to King Henry VIII. Choughs (heraldry’s preferred species of crow) are the symbol of Thomas Becket of Canterbury, and therefore of all English Thomases, be they Wolsey or Cromwell – it would take a year or two for an extra layer of irony to appear in that symbol. So this coat was aggressively proclaiming a servant of Thomas Wolsey; maybe Cromwell had adopted it when the Cardinal appointed him to his council in 1527. To retain it in 1532, with the Cardinal’s reputation at its nadir, was an extraordinary and admirably defiant statement, calculated in particular to infuriate that hypersensitive snob Thomas Duke of Norfolk.
Benolt’s stumbling over the dating of the grant in his records does hint at a slightly untidy retrospective legitimization of Cromwell’s arms, also suggested by the puzzling circumstance that at the same time Cromwell appears to have called on another friend, Thomas Audley, to use his newly acquired powers as Keeper of the Great Seal to issue a further royal confirmation of his grant of arms. It would be the first recorded occasion on which this happened, though the Crown was the fount of honour in the kingdom, and direct royal grants of arms did thereafter occur from time to time. A slow progress of a royal patent through the often tortoise-like procedures of Chancery after an initial grant by the heralds might account for Benolt’s double dating of the grant. Proof of this does not survive elsewhere, but a great deal of documentation of Cromwell’s honours (especially his heraldry) was hastily culled in 1540.
The evidence of this grant via Keeper Audley occurs in a letter to Cromwell from his deputy in the Hanaper, John Judd, that same summer of 1532. Judd had been up in Ipswich doing clear-up business for the widow of Cromwell’s predecessor in the Clerkship of the Hanaper, Mistress Cecily Hall, and en route dropped off ‘the patent of arms’ at Audley’s home at Berechurch near Colchester. The trip on to Ipswich prevented Judd from personally supervising Audley when he sealed the royal grant, and his professional pride was hugely wounded when he got back to Berechurch, because he found that Audley’s staff (maybe unfamiliar with this little-used procedure for a grant of arms) had chosen the wrong colour of wax and silk laces for the patent. ‘It is a perpetuity,’ he lamented, and such grants without time-limit demanded the colour green, for which perpetuity Cromwell was after all paying a hefty fee.53
Third adjustment: a Crown official of some status (in fact rather more status than currently met the eye) needed his portrait painted, both to display in his own mansion and also as a model, if his influence and reputation so expanded that people would wish to have copies for their own walls. This portrait seems to have been preserved by the faithful Ralph Sadler, who must have acquired it in the break-up of his old master’s house in 1540: the portrait was sighted in the long gallery of his grandson’s house at Standon in 1623.54 The go-to painter of 1532 was Hans Holbein the Younger, who duly produced the famous image of the Crown official in his black cap and gown, papers and a book as specimens of his administrative duties and library arranged with careful casualness on the table before him (see Plate 3). He is wearing his ring with a heart-shaped turquoise, already noted as ‘upon my master’s finger’ when his inventory was made in 1527, and this may be the turquoise ring he had sent to the Duke of Norfolk during his quest for a Parliamentary seat in 1529: what could be more symbolic of his triumph in reaching his present fortunes?55
The letter lying on the table before the sitter handily dates the portrait to this time even if we had not presumed that new office occasioned it, for it is meticulously (if implausibly from a routine point of view) addressed as from his royal employer, ‘To our trusty and right well beloved Councillor Thomas Cromwell, Master of our Jewel House’. The green cloth which covers the table also shouts his new formal access to the Court: the ‘Board of Green Cloth’ was coming at this time to be the name for the group of royal officers from Treasurer downwards who met to discuss the finances of the royal Household. The Master of the Jewels had no prescribed place among them, but that was hardly relevant to the way in which Cromwell’s duties were now making him indispensable in finding cash for the insatiable demands of royal magnificence and commonplace consumption by thousands of individuals thronging the King’s palaces through the year.
Holbein was a master of a realism which has left us riveting character-sketches of the Tudor Court, but he nevertheless found significantly few imitators in English portraiture over the next century. Cromwell’s portrait may suggest why. No one has ever suggested that it is an endearing picture, and now the watchful, slightly hooded-eyed minister, within a minute of losing his temper, hangs in the Frick Collection in New York, paired with Holbein’s image of bleakly fearless, clear-sighted Thomas More: not to the advantage of the Master of the Jewels. Hilary Mantel has engagingly imagined the reactions at Austin Friars when the painter delivers the result.56
Rather than the Frick’s loaded juxtaposition, it is worth setting Cromwell’s picture alongside that of an older friend and perhaps mentor from his circle of Kentish gentry: the veteran civil servant Sir Henry Wyatt, also in his time Master of the Jewels. Cromwell was one of the executors of Sir Henry’s will in 1
536, and benevolent patron of his problematic if very talented son Thomas. (See Plate 2.) We see the same black cap and befurred gown, the same little folded administrative paper in a tight grasp – above all, the same preoccupied, watchful expression. Both pictures share a visual formula signifying a busy, competent servant of the King, who owed his present fortunes to his prince: in Wyatt’s case, his career had started among a whole set of forensically efficient administrators, some raised by their King from humble backgrounds, who shaped the achievements of Henry VII’s government. Part of what they had achieved was deep unpopularity. Cromwell would be aware of this ambiguous history, but he had also seen Wyatt survive it, to become one of the grand old men of Henry VIII’s government and enjoy a splendid retirement.
Clearly the sitter decided to accept his portrait as representing some truths about himself. It fed into many copies, as well as the negative image of him which prevailed in the Romantic era – yet no unfavourable comment emerges from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and a remarkably faithful and accomplished copy of the Standon portrait was made eighty years after Holbein for the then Lord Cromwell, Gregory’s descendant, which that peer must have considered worth the expense.57 As we will see, Holbein did deliver other less rebarbative images of Cromwell and his family, and other portrait traditions represent different takes on the same physiognomic material. The fact that Cromwell did not consign Holbein’s effort to the furnace, as Lady Churchill did with Graham Sutherland’s hated portrait of Sir Winston, suggests once more his self-confidence and robust temperament, a parallel to the jaunty defiance in his coat of arms. He did not need his collateral descendant Oliver to invent a famous phrase about public representations, ‘warts and all’. By contrast, Sir Thomas More’s noble image in the Frick portrait took quite a lot of adjustment to get right.58
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