Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Straight away Bishop Stokesley of London spotted a fatal flaw in the plan: Cranmer’s own official title, under whose powers he acted, still contained the phrase ‘Legate of the Apostolic See’. Astonishingly, no one had thought to get rid of it. With infuriating punctiliousness, Stokesley and his Cathedral Chapter of St Paul’s (no friends to reformation there) courteously pointed out that to accept the Archbishop’s visitation was to accept this obnoxious papal title and lay themselves open to all the disgrace and horror of praemunire. Over the next months Bishops Longland of Lincoln, Nix of Norwich and lastly Gardiner of Winchester all took their cue from Stokesley, ingeniously ringing the changes on legal obstructions to their metropolitan’s jurisdiction. Looking back over events of the previous five years, they had genuine reason to fear further encounters with the arbitrariness of praemunire charges.

  Cranmer therefore only had a clear run for visitations in the vacant diocese of Worcester and the effectively vacated Rochester (Fisher being in the Tower). He took some care to avoid personal encounters with his episcopal colleagues whenever he launched himself in person on the wider countryside, preaching and doling out injunctions, including orders for far more sermons of biblical exposition, and warnings to the clergy to avoid ostentatious living. He did not reach the further dioceses in the west or any of the four dioceses which covered Wales, perhaps hoping that Bishop Roland Lee would supply the deficit there in due course, and naturally he had no formal powers at all in the Province of York. In the Northern Province his colleague as Archbishop, Edward Lee, was never going to pay sympathetic attention to what Canterbury wanted, and would need constant bullying from Cromwell to forward any measure smacking of evangelical reformation.

  In parallel to this effort came a lesser royal visitation of the various orders of friars in the realm, which would among its other tasks take the friars’ oaths to the supremacy. That was a matter of some importance, since friars were by vocation the chief preachers within the Church and could do much to influence public opinion. How was such a general visitation of the fraternal orders to be achieved, without any good precedent, now the break with Rome had taken effect? It was in practice done by a royal warrant delivered to Archbishop Cranmer in spring 1534, appointing as visitors two leading friars from the Dominicans and Austin Friars, both evangelical in their outlook. Since the pair were personally closer to Cromwell than to Cranmer, there can be little doubt these were appointments which Cromwell arranged. He soon saw to it that their efforts were rewarded with promotion to bishoprics.10 For the Dominicans, there was John Hilsey, who had abandoned his traditionalism during raucous pulpit wars in Bristol in 1533, and now emerged as a strong preacher for evangelical reformation.11 For the Austins, there was none other than Cromwell’s landlord at the London Austin Friars, Prior George Browne. He can previously be glimpsed writing to Cromwell in a note of the early 1530s about a piece of Cambridge preferment, in terms not only evangelical but as hostile to ‘schoolmen’ as the most fashionable humanist could be.12

  Hilsey and Browne ran into difficulties over jurisdiction just as Cranmer did. We have a record of direct defiance from the Warden of the Southampton Observant Franciscans, who with spirited unwisdom appealed straight to Master Secretary against the visitors reciting their commission in his convent. The unwelcome intruder was probably the visitors’ assistant Richard Ingworth, Dominican Prior of King’s Langley and another reliable satrap of Cromwell’s.13 Browne was evidently nervous when he ventured into the Northern Province, and reported with relief to Cromwell when the assembled inmates of the two friaries in Beverley ‘all did agree according to my commission’.14 Alas, the two commissioners themselves eventually fell out; Hilsey was furious when in autumn 1534 the Austin Friar Browne tried to assume jurisdiction over the Dominicans as Master-General, ‘the which your Mastership appointed to me . . . and where that we by the counsel of our whole General Chapter hath made certain assignations, he hath changed and broken them . . . saying that he is our Master-General and that we shall do nothing but under him’.15 It was all becoming extremely messy, and needed a firm referee with clear, unchallengeable authority.

  Unlike the dilemmas posed by England’s international weakness, Cromwell could tackle these domestic headaches with comparative ease in his favourite arena, Parliament. In the first autumn Parliamentary session actually to take place without prorogation since 1529, the main business was to tidy up the weaknesses in legislation about Church and succession exposed by Cranmer’s visitation and the great campaigns of oath-taking.16 An essential first step was an Act of Supremacy, which briskly passed Parliament over the first fortnight; really it said nothing that had not been practice since the spring, but it implicitly saluted the serried ranks of clergy and religious who had taken the oath against papal authority, and it made routine the name that was still an unfamiliar novelty: ‘the Church of England’. It recognized the King as Supreme Head of that Church, enjoying ‘all honours, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities, to the said dignity . . . appertaining’: a round-up to which no single individual had ever previously been entitled, given that the dignity had not existed.17

  This magniloquently comprehensive list was ripe with possibilities, particularly as far as ‘profits and commodities’ were concerned. A further Act ‘for First Fruits and Tenths’ relieved churchmen of wealth many laypeople regarded as surplus, by granting the King a sum equivalent to the first year of a cleric’s income in any newly acquired office, and a tenth of all subsequent income in these offices. ‘First Fruits’ was an innovatively weasel phrase: simply a new description of the tax which in papal times had been called ‘annates’, and which over the previous few years had been regularly denounced in royal propaganda for its burdensomeness. ‘First Fruits’, however, had a good evangelical ring, derived from the Old Testament’s institution of a thank-offering to God of the harvest’s first produce. Cromwell did a lot of the work drafting this bill alongside Chancellor Audley, and was responsible in particular for furnishing it with one of his most elaborate and silkily worded statutory preambles, praising the King, his achievements in bringing his subjects ‘tranquillity, peace, unity, quietness and wealth’ and his ‘excessive and inestimable charges’ in attaining this happy result. Given the current level of awareness of treasonable words, it would have been risky to make any hurtful remarks in Parliament about that encomium. The preamble was thus worth the verbal elaboration, particularly since a more modest measure of royal appropriation of papal revenues, including annates, had actually failed to pass the Lords in the first session of 1534.18

  The present bill’s progress past the bishops and abbots in the Lords was speeded by a number of concessions to current clergy, remitting some of the burdens the King had opportunistically heaped on them during his various campaigns of intimidation, and exempting the poorest from payment. Its provisions were decidedly less radical than proposals to be found in government papers for general confiscation of church lands in return for clergy both monastic and non-monastic receiving fixed stipends: these schemes may have been intended primarily to scare leading clergy into accepting the more moderate package.19 Nevertheless, the legislation permanently increased fiscal exactions on the clergy of the Church of England way above the comparatively minor demands previously made by popes.

  All this was alongside the long-standing ‘occasional’ tax demands from the Church which medieval kings of England had always made. In the 1520s Cardinal Wolsey had much increased these exactions, to general fury from his fellow-clergy – once more, Wolsey can be seen as anticipating measures that Thomas Cromwell then took further. The Convocations of Canterbury and York no longer had any real part in agreeing those rounds of taxation when the demand was made; they were simply to vote them through parallel to any Parliamentary vote of a grant. They must have gasped to find that the new system would begin straight away: New Year’s Day 1535.20

  Further Acts
laid down discipline and punishment for opposition to reformation. One dealt with a serious technical fault in administering the oath of succession nationwide since the earlier session of Parliament. The wording of the oath went beyond that contained in the Act of Succession, as Thomas More damagingly pointed out from his prison cell, particularly in its explicit provision that those sworn should repudiate the power of any ‘foreign authority or potentate’ and any oath previously made to them. Either More or his biographer – the text does not make it plain – saw these additions as an arbitrary decision of Cromwell and Chancellor Audley, which had thus to be remedied in legislation, ‘espying their own oversight in that behalf’.21 The Act retrospectively legalized the wording used throughout the oath-taking campaign; that simple move made the continued imprisonment and eventual conviction of Fisher and More legally easier. More difficult to secure, though a comparatively short and tightly constructed bill, was a much more general Act refining the provisions for treason passed in the spring.22

  The government were painfully aware that the Act of Succession had not provided effective sanctions on indignant comment about either the King’s marriage plans or his confrontation with the Papacy and Church hierarchy. Accordingly they decided radically to narrow the category of misprision of treason, and gave an unenviable promotion to most of the offences which misprision had covered. It now became high treason ‘to wish, will or desire by [spoken] words or in writing’ challenges to the royal succession or supremacy; or to use language about the King such as heretic, tyrant or usurper. The change went down very badly. John Fisher’s brother Robert, one of Rochester’s MPs, told the Bishop that ‘there was much sticking at the same’ in the Commons, and made it clear that the chief worry was still the vagueness of this offence by words.23 Members were fearful of being trapped in frivolous but fatal accusations. Their similar worries in the 1531 Parliament about laypeople not being explicitly exempted from praemunire prosecution had created a real hold-up, on which the Crown had given way rather than imperil its legislative timetable.

  The only way that this opposition could be outfaced was to stress that the treason legislation solely covered ‘maliciously’ speaking on such topics. Surprisingly, this carried the day. Official insistence on the importance of this adverb was so emphatic that common memory (represented not just by Robert Fisher but by another MP who was a client of Cromwell, John Rastell) held that the Commons themselves had insisted on its inclusion, even though ‘maliciously’ already appeared both in the text of the Act of Succession passed in the spring and in official drafts of this Treason Bill prepared before the Parliamentary session. It is difficult to see how there could be any speaking against these high matters not construable as malicious, but somehow the supposed concession quelled further trouble for the time being, and the Treason Bill passed without material change. Even so, it left a bitter taste, and its partial repeal proved an easy way for Edward Seymour Duke of Somerset to gain popularity early in his Protectorate after King Henry’s death.

  For those anxious about arbitrary use of the new legislation, the Act in fact contained a more important statement of precision about proof than the flannel about ‘maliciously’: all those convicted must be ‘lawfully convicted according to the customs and laws of this realm’, which meant the common law of England. However imperfectly that principle might be applied, it was still a principle, and it had not appeared in the legislation of 1352 or thereafter in its application, which had often been by the arbitrary will of the monarch. As ecclesiastical law and privilege retreated in the 1530s, so did the common law expand, and by implication its restraining power on the Crown. This was one of many ways in which Thomas Cromwell’s work on the immediate needs and policies of Henry VIII pushed the future of England’s government and polity in a direction which would not have been apparent to him at the time.

  One other tiny pair of words in the Treason Act shows how alert Cromwell and his drafters were to dangers unfolding around the King from dissident churchmen. It occurs in a saving clause protecting the rights of those who might, though innocent, be deprived of property by a felony committed by a traitor. That might seem generous, but it made an exception for ‘such persons as shall be so convict, and their heirs and successors’. Those last two words are a significant novelty, unprecedented in exceptions for punishment in common law. ‘Heirs’ meant what it said: heirs in families. ‘Successors’ were those in corporations, in particular clergy who held possessions or estates by virtue of their office. They could be clergy like the Maid’s backers who had been parish priests, like Archbishop Warham’s chaplain Henry Gold, Vicar of Hayes, or even the successor of a bishop like John Fisher; but more likely they would be the head of a monastery or friary with predecessors convicted of treason. The phrase had clearly been in Cromwell’s mind for some time, since it reflected a proposal in his remembrances of October 1533, while the Maid of Kent’s destruction was unfolding, for legislation in a future Parliament.24

  Now, therefore, an unfortunate monastery or friary could be permanently forfeit to the Crown, as if it was a piece of property belonging to the family of a traitor. At that juncture, Cromwell would probably be thinking of the head of a Franciscan Observant house. By autumn 1534, the Observant Order in England had disappeared (dissolved that summer, although their friaries had been handed over to other ‘Conventual’ Franciscans rather than suppressed), but the Observants still flourished in vigorous traditionalism in chaotically rebellious Ireland, and as late as autumn 1539 they hung on in one house in the Channel Islands outside Parliament’s jurisdiction.25 In the next few years, the word ‘successors’ would come to have multiple applications for dissolving a much wider range of monasteries.

  The Act of Supremacy was background to the greatest expansion of Cromwell’s power so far: his appointment to perhaps the most important and far-reaching office he ever held, despite his later promotions. In early 1535 the King granted him a peculiar title, which in English usage had no precedent and saw no successors, ‘Vice-Gerent in Spirituals’. Vice-Gerent was simply a translation of the Latin for ‘exercising in place of’ – the exercise in this case being of King Henry’s powers as Supreme Head of the Church.* In terms of jurisdiction, Cromwell’s creation as Vice-Gerent was reliant on that grandiloquent list in the Act of Supremacy, reciting the Supreme Head’s ‘honours, dignities, pre-eminences’ etc. etc. ‘to the said dignity . . . appertaining’. With such a cornucopia of power, Henry could easily farm out some to a subordinate.

  Despite the novelty of the confected name, it did have an exact and recent precedent of which Cromwell was of course aware: the special papal legateship a latere exercised by his old master Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey had been deputy of the Pope in the Tudor realms; Vice-Gerent Cromwell enjoyed the same powers, overriding the two Archbishops in England (and possibly the Archbishops in Ireland too, though like everything in Ireland that was more complicated). When he fully unveiled a bureaucracy for his new office, it was strikingly like Wolsey’s legatine administration, and included some of the same people as its officials. The glaring difference, of course, was that in exercising such powers over the Church Wolsey, like the Pope, was an ordained priest and consecrated bishop, while Cromwell, like the King, was a layman.

  It is one of the amusing symptoms of this that once the Vice-Gerency had been constituted as possibly the most important executive office in the whole Church of England, no one was quite sure about the appropriate form of respectful address for such a beast as a Vice-Gerent. He could hardly be called ‘your Grace’, certainly not ‘your Holiness’. During 1535, someone on his visitatorial team (maybe the expertly oleaginous Dr Richard Leighton) must have intimated to those worried by the problem that an equally novel ‘your Goodness’ might be the solution. The sycophantic among his staff and the Church hierarchy rather self-consciously adopted it, once in a while, before the conferring of a peerage on Cromwell happily enabled them to say ‘your Lordship’.26 One hopes that the
Vice-Gerent was saved by his sense of humour from encouraging its adoption. In fact, usages of the vice-gerential title itself are not that common in addresses on Cromwell’s letters, and generally heralded some administrative or patronage query relating to the Church. Still fewer bothered with the title annexed to it, ‘Vicar-General’.27

  The run-up to creating the Vice-Gerency was complex and crabwise, as was characteristic of Cromwell’s promotions. All those involved were feeling their way through the momentous experiment created by the supremacy legislation. There is also the usual suspicion that its gradual unfolding was designed to neutralize the unfavourable exclamations of Queen Anne.28 The journey began in the early 1534 Parliament, which legislated to replace an important aspect of papal power by setting up a new ‘Faculty Office’ under Archbishop Cranmer. Its job was to issue various dispensations formerly the Vatican’s prerogative: licensing monks and friars to become secular clergy, for instance (that would soon become major business), providing for clergy to be non-resident in one or more of their benefices, or enabling men and women to marry despite infringing the Church’s complicated regulations on prohibited degrees of relationship. Cardinal Wolsey, by virtue of his legatine powers, had very handily provided just such an office, saving those seeking dispensations having to apply to Rome; after his fall, multiple inconveniences piled up, even before the formal break with the Papacy. The passage of the legislation setting up the Faculty Office in spring 1534 marked the moment that the sort of influential laypeople who had always sought dispensations realized the reality of the royal supremacy. Papal authority was definitively at an end, and they must look elsewhere to sort out their problems. ‘After this day, the Bishop of Rome shall have no manner of authority within the realm of England,’ John Grenville wrote to his master Lord Lisle on 20 March 1534.29