Thomas Cromwell
Page 44
Alesius’s tale begins in winter 1536, and although he presents it as a conspiracy against the good name of innocent Queen Anne, sparked by the papist malice of Bishop Gardiner, the story develops so that Cromwell becomes the Queen’s principal nemesis. Stephen Gardiner (by then on embassy to the King of France) wrote from Paris to friends at Court that the French Court was full of rumours after letters had been discovered accusing Anne of adultery. Chief among his correspondents in England was his old servant Thomas Wriothesley, whom Alesius observes Bishop Gardiner had placed at Court to look after his interests (‘ad sua negocia curanda’). Crucially, Wriothesley passed the news to Cromwell. Given that over his career Alesius expressed much gratitude to Cromwell for favour in the later 1530s, it is remarkable that he was prepared to make the Protestant hero an ally of Wily Winchester in these events, particularly when recounting them to the Protestant Queen. Not only does this unexpected narrative texture give his account plausibility, but it corroborates what Cromwell himself later said to Chapuys about how he had engineered Anne Boleyn’s fall.
The detail of Wriothesley’s communicating his news to Cromwell lends the story a further air of authenticity. To appreciate why, it is necessary to clear up a long-standing myth that Wriothesley was very early in Cromwell’s employment, a mistaken notion that has obscured the plausibility of Alesius’s tale.81 Wriothesley was in reality associated with Gardiner and then through him was in royal service, before moving to Cromwell’s clientage now in February 1536.82 Wriothesley’s move thus only followed Gardiner’s departure from England for his French embassy in autumn 1535, an absence prolonged in the end for around three years. This is the real moment at which Wriothesley transferred his allegiance from his old Cambridge tutor to Master Secretary.
By summer 1536 Wriothesley was fully in the employment of the triumphant minister as secretary and gate-keeper to his power. The following year John Husee observed of his present position with Cromwell that ‘The man standeth in place where he can please or displease.’83 It is noticeable that by that time people were in the habit when they wrote to Cromwell of writing a more unbuttoned letter in parallel to Wriothesley, glossing their formal requests and asking for a little boost to what they sought: exactly the same relationship which obtained for those writing to the King when they added a supplementary letter to Cromwell. Wriothesley spent the second half of the 1530s in bitter confrontation with Stephen Gardiner, who naturally felt deeply betrayed after his earlier trust.
Yet for the moment, Cromwell and Gardiner did not necessarily have divergent interests if a rumour came from Paris which might undermine Anne. In fact, beyond personal antipathies to her and to each other, both men were instinctively in favour of alliance with the Empire. This ranged them in this crucial matter of policy against the consistent tendency of Queen Anne and her uncle the Duke of Norfolk to stay close to the French: Anne through her happy memories of more than six teenage years in the household of Queen Claude of France, Norfolk because of a handsome pension paid annually to him by the French King. Cromwell’s correspondence with Gardiner from this period goes out of the way to mend fences with gestures of friendship and confidential gossip, and he even sang Gardiner’s praises to Chapuys, commending his scepticism about French diplomatic overtures to King Henry. The ambassador noted his extraordinary vehemence on the French manoeuvres – ‘in a passion – so much so that he could hardly get his words out’.84
Alesius tells us that between them Cromwell and Wriothesley told the King about the rumours circulating in France; Gardiner from now on ceases to figure in his narrative. The King reacted with an extreme of fury, but throughout his life he was perfectly capable of dissimulating his feelings when necessary. He needed agents to turn the rumours into a case. This was exactly the same procedure he later adopted against Archbishop Cranmer in the conservative vendetta of 1543 which came to be known as the ‘Prebendaries’ Plot’ (in that case, an unsuccessful effort at the victim’s destruction).85 So Henry put Cromwell and Wriothesley secretly to work, alongside certain others (unnamed by Alesius) with a reputation for detesting the Queen. She had, he says, sharply reproved them and threatened to denounce them to the King for serving their own interests under a pretence of evangelical religion, making everything available for sale and being bribed into making unworthy ecclesiastical appointments for enemies of the Gospel.86 This very specific set of charges sounds unmistakably like an unfriendly description of the vice-gerential bureaucracy, particularly the visitation commissioners, and it agrees with evidence of clashes between Cromwell and Anne later in the spring.
Investigations quietly continued. They involved contacts with a number of ladies of the Queen’s bedchamber. It would not be surprising if one of these was Mistress Margery Horsman, who had written to Master Secretary warmly and confident of favours in the preceding autumn, and whose family were precocious evangelicals with links to Cromwell via Christ’s College Cambridge; she seamlessly sailed through the coming revolution into the service of Jane Seymour.87 The message conveyed to the ladies, said Alesius, was that the King now hated the Queen, since she had not provided an heir, and indeed there was no hope that she would.88 That observation dates these proceedings to mid-winter or very early spring 1536, after Anne’s miscarriage of 29 January.
Alesius’s account parallels the evidence already described of Cromwell’s and Carew’s contacts with the Lady Mary in February; and on the day of Queen Anne’s trial in May, Cromwell reminded Chapuys of a significant hint he had made back on St Matthias Eve (that is, 23 February 1536), both about Anne and about a change in Mary’s position: ‘he had implicitly made clear enough and predicted what would follow from it.’89 That reminiscence illuminates what Chapuys noted from that same conversation just after it had taken place: Cromwell had invited him ‘to consider what marvellous things he had achieved ever since he had been in charge of administering the King’s affairs; whereby he seemed to imply that it was in his power to undo part of what he had already done’.90 A fortnight afterwards, at the beginning of March, Edward Seymour was appointed a gentleman of the Privy Chamber: a reminder that there was now a third person in the King’s marriage.91
In mid-March, Cromwell sent his son away from the darkening political atmosphere in the capital, back to scenes of old pleasures in East Anglia. Gregory was hosted at Woodrising in Norfolk, home of Richard Southwell, now a senior servant of Cromwell’s, with the murder of William Pennington in 1532 apparently no black mark against him as mentor of the young. Over the next few months the teenager was fêted by local notables, right up to the Duke of Norfolk himself. Given all that happened that year, it was a prudent decision to leave Gregory in his rural idyll right up to Christmas 1536.92 This was also the last chance to complete his education, as he neared seventeen. His indefatigable tutor Henry Dowes wrote with prim satisfaction from Woodrising, ‘Whereas the last summer was spent in the service of the wild goddess Diana, this shall (I trust) be consecrated to Apollo and the Muses.’93 In other words, during summer 1535, Gregory had enjoyed a thoroughly good time at Rycote House with his relative John Williams, getting to know Oxfordshire society out on the hunting field, just as in the west Midlands with Bishop Lee in 1534. (See Plate 22.) To judge by a lovelorn letter addressed to Master Secretary from Rycote by a slightly older friend of Gregory, desperate for support in wooing a local gentlewoman, the long stay in Oxfordshire had been marked by adolescent emotional drama.94 This year, it was important to cocoon the boy from the not much more sophisticated emotional tangles developing at Court.
Alesius’s story and all that flanks it provide a coherent account of how the terminal crisis in Anne Boleyn’s life began to unfold in winter 1535/6. The story is perfectly consistent with the shape of politics we have uncovered since Cromwell entered the King’s service. Two powerful advocates of evangelical reformation, Cromwell and Anne, had very good reasons for detesting each other dating back to Thomas Wolsey’s humiliation. In this unstable situation
their mutual hatred came to override their joint enthusiasm for promoting a religious revolution, which had held through 1535. During the ‘reign’ of Queen Anne, Thomas Cromwell had quietly accumulated power, yet his place in the King’s counsels remained anomalous: clearly now the leading royal minister, yet without great offices and honours to express that reality – not even a knighthood. He was at last in a position to begin remedying this deficiency.
14
Surrenders and the Scaffold: 1536
While discreet probings continued at Court around Queen Anne, public affairs were taken up with what proved the last meeting of the Parliament begun so long ago. Opening on 4 February 1536, it lasted little more than nine weeks, but was in legislative terms one of the busiest and most productive sessions.1 It passed an exceptional number of private bills, thirty-five in this session (surpassed in the Tudor age only by one Parliament, in Henry VII’s time), plus much government business. This was clearly because Parliament’s work was no longer distorted by the King’s Great Matter and the consequent break with Rome; a logjam was released. Major legislation now passed not just on monasteries but on the nationwide problem of poverty, on land law and inheritance and on a new governing structure for Wales: projects on which Cromwell had expended a good deal of effort and drafting over the last year or two. These were not his only preparations. In a typical example of his acquiring apparently trivial office for a purpose, he obtained a grant from Westminster Abbey of the position of abbey Gate-Keeper, a separate duty beside the far more honourable Stewardship they had already given him. We need not think of Master Secretary brooding like his Holbein portrait from the gatehouse lodge: the point was that the office gave him or nominated underlings free access to the abbey precincts while the House of Commons sat in the refectory, together with the right to exclude on the spur of the moment anyone who might be a political nuisance.2
The first major measure introduced and debated in Parliament concerned yet more steps to curtail the jurisdiction of bishops, including their rights to administer justice in the territory of certain privileged ‘liberties’ which would normally be the prerogative of royal officials; the greatest of these liberties was the Palatine Bishopric of Durham. The Act also revived plans, repeatedly pursued and never completed till the twentieth century, to produce a comprehensive revision of canon law for England. This attack on the Church hierarchy followed closely on a menacing pair of circulars to the bishops in January, both characterizing them in remarkably schoolmasterly terms as negligent and untrustworthy. One letter from the King brusquely ordered them to call in all preaching licences, with a covering letter from Cromwell as Vice-Gerent even more scolding: ‘I write frankly,’ he growled, ‘compelled and enforced thereunto both in respect of my private duty and otherwise for my discharge, forasmuch as it pleaseth his Majesty to use me in the lieu of a councillor; whose office is an eye to the prince.’ There was an illuminating definition of the Vice-Gerency.3
All this was part of general criticism of the institutional Church that winter; yet it concealed much uncertainty among King and Council about turning this into action, particularly on the matter of monasteries. Suspicion of clergy, greed for monastic wealth and genuine desire for a satisfactory measure of reformation contended untidily in this debate. One symptom is a surviving fair-copy draft of a bill on the monasteries; it bears no relation to the end-result in Parliament, and has therefore been neglected and misunderstood. It concentrates on denouncing the promotion of pilgrimages, miraculous images and relics by monks and provides for the ejection of those who did so. Thinning out the ranks of religious was an alternative to systematic suppression of monasteries, a possibility that was not mentioned at all. Instead, the draft spent much time denouncing religious who exploited their ‘pretensed holiness and piety’ and ‘simulate[d] poverty’ to give respectability to popish errors. The implication was that other monks, nuns and friars managed to avoid such pitfalls; it is a programme for a reformed but drastically slimmed-down monastic polity.
It was also a rambling and moralizing document, ineptly trying to straddle the boundaries of common and canon law. That has been taken to suggest it had nothing to do with government plans, but in fact it is in the hand of Robert Warmington, one of the most senior clerks to Cromwell’s visitation commissioners. Not only does it reflect what they had done in selectively dismissing monks and nuns and gathering discreditable data, but it closely echoes wording in some of their injunctions. It highlights the reforming work of the visitation past and future, and places a broad power of dispensation in Cromwell’s hands as Vicar-General. This, therefore, was no mere kite-flying speculation, but an official path not trodden.4 It also dovetails with Cromwell’s preferred plan presented in the Wyatt narrative fragment, in which he not only advocated piecemeal closures but also envisaged conversations in monasteries about ‘how horrible this kind of religion is and how odious to the wiser sort of people’, to persuade them ‘to leave their cowls’. That was exactly the strategy his visitors had been attempting under his instructions at the London Charterhouse.5 Ambassador Chapuys, in a dispatch to the Emperor while Parliament was still sitting, also confirms the Wyatt narrative’s picture of Cromwell thwarted:
I am told, besides, that although Cromwell was at one time the adviser and promoter of the demolition of the English convents and monasteries, yet perceiving the great inconveniences likely to arise from that measure, he has since made attempts to thwart it, but that the King had resolutely declined to make any modification of it whatever, and has even been rather indignant against his Secretary for proposing such a thing.6
The impression of indecision or continuing argument over monasteries is supported by yet another witness who could not have been better informed: William Popley, one of Cromwell’s oldest friends, recently transferred to his service from that of Lord Lisle. He remained a consistent bridge between these two royal servants. Popley wrote to Lisle from The Rolls on 22 February, more than a fortnight after Parliament had opened, to discourage that predatory peer questing after Beaulieu Abbey: ‘I cannot perceive that the same or any like shall be suppressed, nor any of like lands, forasmuch as at the session of this Parliament they ordain statutes and provisions for the maintenance and good order of the clergy, as well religious as secular.’7 Those ‘provisions’ do not suggest any general measure of suppression. Rather, they sound very like the bill against hypocritical monks promoting popish superstition, and if so, that proposal must then still have been in play in Parliament. Members would have registered how much initiative and power it would confer on the Vice-Gerent, and many of them would have felt every incentive to stop it in its tracks.
This may have been the moment when Thomas Audley and Richard Rich outbid their colleague with their preferred strategy, as now events moved quickly in a different direction. By 3 March, the Calais worthy Sir Richard Whethill, over in London monitoring the passage of important legislation for the enclave, had heard ‘that abbeys and priories under three hundred marks by year and having not twelve in convent shall down’. On 9 March, Popley told Lisle the same tale, though he was still uncertain whether legislation would happen. He also referred to the individual surrenders culminating little more than a week earlier at Tilty and Bilsington: ‘divers have forsaken their houses, so that by dissolution thereof and certain sales made by the heads of such houses, the King’s Grace hath obtained divers houses.’ His letter briskly dismissed Lisle’s typically unrealistic further hopes of rich pickings from Glastonbury Abbey: ‘there is no such purpose, not yet any worshipful house.’8
By the end of the month a suppression measure indeed passed Parliament, affecting only smaller monasteries with an annual income of less than £200, as Whethill and Popley had previously heard.9 Its preamble took pains to praise ‘divers great and solemn monasteries, where, thanks be to God, religion is right well kept and observed’, language which was reflected in remarks about ‘worshipful houses’ by the insider commentator Popley
. We need not think that in 1536 suppression of the smaller monasteries was a blind to hide a covert scheme for eventual universal dissolution. The lower limit of twelve in community of which Whethill had learned, with its echo of Christ’s twelve apostles, was that chosen by Wolsey and his staff for their proposed systematic suppressions in 1528, aimed at streamlining English monasticism.
What was genuinely new was that the legislation also addressed the evidence of monastic vice provided by Cromwell’s visitors, specifically employing the term ‘comperts’ which they had used for their summary findings. The evidence of these comperta (records of ‘things discovered’), however much it might be considered muck-raking, did indeed reveal the largest concentration of misdemeanours as being in the smaller monastic houses: ‘the bigger the monastery, the lower the rate of crime’.10 It is also clear that the documentation represented in the comperta, or at least as much as was available that March, did its job in outraging Lords and Commons when presented to them. For those who might feel outrage in general terms, excepting any small monastery that they actually knew at first hand, the legislation artfully made provision for grants of exemption from suppression, which must have satisfied a good many fears. In the largest single exemption thus made, the entire fleet of Gilbertine houses large and small came through unscathed.