Despite the exceptions, the suppression of rather more than 200 monasteries represented a huge administrative task, the scale and detailed slog of which were already made apparent in Cromwell’s specimen dissolutions of 1532. The answer was a further Act of Parliament creating a ‘Court of Augmentations’, a government department whose name perhaps too frankly defined its purpose in dealing with this very considerable new ‘augmentation’ of the King’s income. The obvious implication was that the Crown fully intended to hang on to its new gains. The Court’s first Chancellor was Richard Rich, lending additional plausibility to the assertion by the anonymous historian in the Wyatt papers that Rich and Audley rather than Cromwell bore responsibility for creating it. Audley was Rich’s first patron in government, and Audley’s servant Thomas Pope became Receiver of the new Court as deputy to Rich. The account observes that ‘they placed only their friends and servants to be ministers’ in it.11
The Court modelled itself on the most coherently organized department of land revenue in government, the Duchy of Lancaster, taking detailed advice from Duchy officials on how to set things up. Rich was very familiar with Duchy practice, having been one of its senior officers since 1532. He was perfectly capable of combining liberal doses of sycophancy in letters to Cromwell with a relish for an independent (indeed high-handed) exercise of his new Chancellorship, which earned him a good deal of public ill-will. On occasion, as dissolutions of monasteries expanded beyond those affected by the 1536 legislation, Rich even dared to express annoyance at Cromwell’s suppression commissioners, whom he regarded as obstructing the Augmentations officials under his own control.12
In practice, Cromwell was rarely anything less than helpful to the work of Augmentations. If he had indeed been overruled in Council on the way forward, it was not in his nature to allow pique to stand in the way of acquiring power and influence. Augmentations officials soon included many civil servants close to him or from his household, including his servant Robert Southwell, whom he esteemed enough as early as 1533 to recommend to his Devon friend Sir William Courtenay for a good marriage.13 Others among local Augmentations receivers were Robert’s brother Richard (Gregory’s host in Norfolk) and from the Cromwell payroll William Blythman, John Scudamore, John Freeman and George Gifford.14
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Parliament had much else to consider besides monasteries. One of the most remarkable new measures from the government was a pioneering attempt to deal with Tudor England’s growing problem of poverty and unemployment through comprehensive legislation. It was the first stage in creating a coherent national system of poor relief in subsequent centuries. The statute actually passed was based on a far more ambitious sixty-six-page draft, whose importance was first realized by Geoffrey Elton; it is avowedly intended for this Parliamentary session, dateable to the previous months.15 The form of the draft is unusual, which might make it seem just one of the many utopian schemes of reform from enthusiastic would-be policy-makers that Cromwell gathered in his archives, but there is a strong indication that the minister was closely involved in its creation. Its proposal for a ‘Council to avoid vagabonds’, to supervise the category of able-bodied unemployed in undertaking public works, concentrates on his favourite and then topical preoccupation, river and sea engineering, beginning with the great new harbour works at Dover.
Under the draft scheme (avowedly time-limited in the first instance to 1540, an unusual measure of cautious experiment), administration of poor relief would be paid for by a graded national tax, but there would also be parish collections and encouragement of further parish charity through a poor-box, ‘before [in front of] the sacrament there as nigh as can be reasonably devised’; set-piece homilies would be prepared by the diocesan bishops for their clergy to preach. Such a national poor-box scheme actually became permanent under Edward VI, although the reserved sacrament in its pyx at the high altar was no longer there in churches. Overseers would be appointed in parishes, responsible for both vagabonds and the poor for good reasons unfit to work. There are even suggestions that physicians be appointed and paid to attend to those who would be able to work if given medical attention.
There are two remarkable features of this bill’s history. First is that Cromwell persuaded King Henry himself to come to the Commons to present it and speak in its favour, ‘they to see it for a common wealth to his subjects’: that is, a great public benefit. Second, the Commons were unimpressed by this show of majesty. The government were forced to withdraw the measure and present a more modest proposal. The Act that passed was much less comprehensive, and the proposed Council on vagabondage disappeared; perhaps the Court of Augmentations was enough setting up of new central institutions for Parliament to stomach in one session. Nevertheless the provisions for parish almsgiving and poor-box remained, as did the requirement for local officials to find work for the able-bodied unemployed. The subsequent fate even of this watered-down measure was confused; whatever continuing life it had was merely on the sufferance of a royal proclamation of 1538.
At the end of Elizabeth’s reign a much greater economic crisis than Henrician England ever experienced forced action on Parliament, and thereafter the poor law system glimpsed in 1536 endured till the nineteenth century.16 Like Parliament’s equally firm refusal to be bossed about in curbing agricultural enclosures in March 1534, the stuttering start to poor law legislation underlines the fact that in the 1530s it was perfectly possible for Parliament to show determined and successful opposition to measures proposed by the King’s chief minister, provided they did not focus on the two issues which aroused Henry’s murderous rage: religion and the future of the dynasty. Tudor England was never a simple monarchical tyranny.
The King and his ministers may have been fairly relaxed about the fate of a measure of social engineering because alongside it they appeared to have gained a victory in an important matter of royal revenue that had been vexing the Crown long before Cromwell’s arrival in power.17 The theory of landholding in England was still that of the feudal system, set up to guarantee effective armies at the Crown’s disposal. All land ultimately belonged to the King, and landholders were royal tenants, some directly (‘tenants-in-chief’), and others as tenants of tenants. It was all intended for a military system which had long vanished, but the law had not changed, and the Crown could exploit it. Thanks to the vagaries of landownership since the twelfth century, the category of tenant-in-chief effectively netted in anyone above the level of the humblest village landowners, and some of them too; monarchs therefore had a great deal of room to interfere in their subjects’ estates by primer seisin, the right to step in and meddle in various profitable ways on the death of a landholder.
Late medieval lawyers, happy like lawyers in every age to provide tax-avoidance schemes for those prepared to pay for them, evolved a system of trusts by which legal estate in a property was conveyed to trustees (‘feoffees’). These feoffees held estates for the benefit or ‘use’ of the real owner of the land (who was known in common law French as the cestuy que use); their existence defeated the Crown’s feudal rights. The group of feoffees to uses was renewable and hence as a body the feoffees never died; the beneficiary or cestuy que use avoided all the Crown’s rights of primer seisin. The device of the use was invaluable to stop the Crown getting its hands on a landowner who was a child (and so in ancient feudal theory too young to serve in the King’s army). The monarch could not take advantage of his profitable powers to administer the child’s lands in wardship. Equally important, uses allowed landowners to leave land in their wills to whomever they pleased; feudal law simply forbade bequests of land by will.
The existence of feoffment to uses was infuriating to those acquisitive monarchs Henry VII and Henry VIII, but it took time for the Crown to work out how to defeat the stratagems of the legal profession. We have noticed in passing the sturdy rebuff which Parliament gave to royal efforts to regain its rights on primer seisin in 1529 and 1532 (see a
bove, this page, this page), and after that another way was taken: a specimen court case, attacking family trusts which Lord Dacre of the South had set up before he died in September 1533. In devising this route, someone must have realized that lawyers might be set against lawyers on the issue. Case-law on uses had been developed in the relatively flexible legal culture of the Court of Chancery, whose original speciality as a forum for natural justice against legal rigidity made it the appropriate setting for judgments on disputes about trust. Lawyers practising in the much more formulaic world of common law courts – King’s Bench or Common Pleas – did not share in this lucrative business and might be inclined to cut their Chancery colleagues down to size.
The Crown duly first brought its case against the late Lord Dacre’s trust before Chancery, as was to be expected, but the judges there (who naturally included Lord Chancellor Audley and Master of the Rolls Cromwell) adjourned the matter to be argued before the entire body of common law judges, who assembled in the Court of Exchequer Chamber in Easter Term 1535. The Crown won, albeit narrowly: the Dacre trust was declared fraudulent, by a bare majority of the judges, and that applied to all the thousands of similar family trusts then in operation. The landowners of England (and their lawyers) were aghast. Not surprisingly in the Parliament of spring 1536 they meekly voted through Crown legislation which regularized their trusts but also restored many feudal rights to the King. This Statute of Uses became one of the fundamental pieces of legislation in English land law up till 1925, not least because lawyers now applied their customary evasive genius to further variants on the use, for purposes both admirable and dubious.
The legislation also left massive questions unresolved about how land might be left by will. That issue was prominent among the grievances of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the continuing discontent of England’s nobility and gentry after the Pilgrimage’s defeat led effectively to a capitulation by the Crown on property bequests, by the passage of a further Statute of Wills in the 1540 Parliament (see below, this page). Cromwell should not be given the entire credit, if that is the word, for masterminding this bold but flawed outcome of the uses problem in 1536. In the 1520s, his future colleague Thomas Audley had taken advantage of an autumn reading (lecture) at the Inner Temple to launch a blistering attack on the fraudulent nature of uses in Chancery, a formal diatribe which at that stage doubled as an attack on the then Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey. That particular political clash was long in the past, the passage of events having conferred the Lord Chancellorship on Audley himself, but his guiding hand in this legislation must be a strong possibility.
Nevertheless Audley was working very closely with Cromwell and probably even in cahoots with Lord Dacre’s principal feoffee, the lawyer Thomas Polstead. Once the judgment had been secured, Polstead was subject to an inquisition, apparently initiated by Cromwell himself, indicting him for fraud in drawing up his employer’s conveyances. The sting may have been taken out of this accusation by the fact that Thomas was brother to Cromwell’s principal servant Henry Polstead – they came from a Surrey gentry family – and only a few months after the judgment in Exchequer Chamber Thomas Polstead acted as a feoffee for Cromwell himself in a matter of wardship.18 This reeks of collusion to get the Crown its result, overseen by Cromwell. The Polstead connection may explain why it was Lord Dacre who was singled out; not all legal teams for the nobility would have a weak link like that. It is noticeable that, after all this, Cromwell was extremely protective of the teenage grandson and heir of Lord Dacre, now exposed to the wardship rights of the Crown. The ninth Lord Dacre of the South turned into an extreme example of the minister’s rackety young men, to the point of being executed in 1541 – but he seems to have been fond enough of his near-contemporary Gregory Cromwell to have named his son and heir Gregory in 1539.19*
Finally among other varied Acts passed in this Parliament came a clutch of measures which taken together moved further towards a uniform royal jurisdiction in law and government throughout the mosaic of territories making up the Tudor realms. We have already noted the legislation at the beginning of this session which undermined ecclesiastical liberty jurisdictions; to that was added a comprehensive restructuring of government in the anomalous enclave of Calais. This was the fruit of a great deal of worry and preparation dating back to Wolsey’s time and continued during Cromwell’s visit to Calais with the King in 1532. It culminated in 1535 with a high-powered royal commission of inquiry under Sir William Fitzwilliam; the commissioners were appalled by evidence of local mismanagement. One of the measures of reconstruction brought Calais further into the community of the realm by granting it two MPs in the Westminster Parliament.20
A much larger-scale integration began with a trio of measures for Wales. Its provisions eventually created a single framework of government there, closely resembling that of England, with a new network of shires named after their county towns, justices of the peace meeting in sessions, and MPs in the House of Commons. This much improved on previous legislation on Wales passed in the autumn 1534 session of Parliament, which had been a ragbag of tidying-up measures to enforce justice. No doubt useful, and prepared with the full approval of Bishop Lee after six months of experience in his Presidency of the Marches, they had not seriously altered the existing tangle of Welsh jurisdictions.21 Now that would drastically change, but, like the proposed poor law of this session, the legislation was avowedly experimental, allowing the King to suspend any part of it he saw fit, which in fact he did by proclamation in the national state of disarray in February 1537. Evidently there were some nerves in royal circles about what was being proposed, and no certainty that conditions in Wales would make the scheme practical.
The tentative nature of the statute shiring Wales in 1536 reflects not only the fact that the administrative preparation was sketchy (certainly compared with the mammoth effort put into preparing the Calais legislation) but also the embarrassment that it had not involved any consultation with the chief local actor, Lord President Bishop Lee. Cromwell licensed the unsuspecting Bishop to be absent from this Parliamentary session because of his workload in the borders, so there was nothing that Lee could say until it was too late. Indeed, while Parliament was sitting, the Bishop sent up his own detailed and quite different suggestions for reform to Cromwell, responding to a previous royal request, and he seemed confident that the minister’s ‘politic wisdom’ would see his ideas enacted forthwith.22 The sharp divergence of Parliamentary action on Wales from what the leading actor in Welsh government expected is notably parallel to the indecision and sudden change of direction surrounding Parliamentary proposals on the dissolution of the smaller monasteries.
There may in fact be a direct connection between these two U-turns. It is possible that Lee’s proposals were swept aside, and the bill on Wales drafted in a totally new form, as a result of the decision on a general measure to dissolve the lesser houses. The point is that, thanks to the general poverty of Welsh monasteries, the suppression legislation of 1536 resulted in the vast majority being closed – no fewer than forty-four out of forty-seven. A promise to shire Wales could make the work of closing monasteries easier to enforce there, because it offered a considerable compensating prospect to Welsh gentry, of universal access to English rights and representation. In any case, by the time that Bishop Lee learned what was actually happening in Parliament, it was 12 March, and too late for him to do anything about it. All he could do was express deep disapproval of the whole new scheme. He had no confidence in the Welsh gentry’s ability to act like English justices of the peace, and pointedly reminded Cromwell that his post at Ludlow Castle battling with disorder was only through ‘your means and pleasure’. Lee appended some comments on a Welsh gentleman arsonist, just to underline his sentiments.23
Having once vented his spleen, and perhaps placated by assurances of the avowedly provisional nature of the legislation, the Bishop grudgingly got on with his job. On 29 April (innocent of current turmoil at Court)
he wrote again in reply to a warm letter from Cromwell, reminding him that ‘Your continual favour is to me life and health, next under God and the King my sovereign lord,’ and inviting him to use one of his various houses if the King’s progress went north that summer.24 In the end, Lee survived his friend to die in 1543 still in harness as Lord President; he rested to the last in the Marches, for his stately tomb graced not his cathedral at Lichfield but Shrewsbury’s largest parish church. He clearly enjoyed the strenuous work of the Presidency and his vice-regal status more than the tedious business of being Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, and making further fuss about the shiring of Wales might have brought all that to an end. Ultimately the work of creating the new local institutions necessary for Welsh reorganization was completed only in 1541. The final result was confirmed by a further great statute in 1543, in what was also the first Parliament containing Welsh MPs able to join in the business of voting it through. By then, the likely chief author of the original legislation was unable to savour the outcome.25
The greatest task of all, dwarfing the problems of Wales, was beyond the competence of the Westminster Parliament: what to do about Ireland. There was no question of immediately trying to reduce the island to the sort of uniformity envisaged in the shiring of Wales: its division between ‘Old English’ and Gaelic territories was too profound and the boundaries between them too uncertain to do more than expand Old English jurisdictions back to where they had been when English rule was at its most effective. Before even that could happen came the hard slog of crushing the Kildare rebellion. After a shaky start, the Tudor Crown did not regain the military initiative until spring 1535, and it was early autumn before ‘Silken Thomas’ Fitzgerald finally surrendered.
Thomas Cromwell Page 45