Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Cromwell immediately began to plan for a workable reconstruction of Ireland, embodied in a crisp two-page memorandum.26 Much of it amounted to detailed military provision and a thorough tidying-up of administration, which could be entrusted to the reliable English and Anglo-Irish civil servants he had already identified in Ireland. But two provisions were far-reaching: first, a question about long-term Crown policy in the latest expedition to Ireland. ‘Whether it shall be expedient to begin a conquest or a reformation?’ A conquest would entail ending the historic division of cultural regions, fulfilling ancient English hopes of possessing the whole island and opening the possibility of a shiring as in Wales. Second: ‘[the Dublin] Parliament to be summoned against the octaves of Hilary [20–26 January 1536], and so to be prorogued . . . at the King’s pleasure’.

  The second question in effect answered the first: it was best not to think big for the time being. The Irish Parliament, thus cautiously convened for whenever the military and political situation made a proper meeting feasible, represented only that part of the island historically under Crown control. Yet even to call a new Parliament and to use it as Cromwell now did was an innovation in terms of English government in Ireland. When Parliament eventually met in Dublin on 1 May 1536, its two years of subsequent sessions produced forty-two statutes, virtually all on Cromwell’s initiative, whereas the six previous Irish Parliaments back into the 1490s had managed only twenty-five, discounting routine renewals.27

  One provision in the bundle of proposed legislation Cromwell sent over to Master of the Rolls Allen just after preparing his memorandum was to suspend ‘Poynings’ Law’, the famous provision of a Parliament held in 1494–5 by Lord Deputy Sir Edward Poynings ‘that no Parliament be holden in this land until the Acts be certified into England’. It might seem paradoxical that Cromwell should nullify this measure intended by English administrators to control Irish Parliamentary initiatives, but actually what he was removing was an official power of veto in Westminster which had made it virtually impossible to take any positive action in the assembly. Poynings’ Law would have severely hampered him in producing and then the Dublin Parliament in scrutinizing and making adjustments to the bundle of statutes designed to pull Ireland into conformity with current English government policy: vital matters like the royal supremacy, along with other local recommendations from reliable administrators of the Pale. For decades, Irish government had been in the hands of the Fitzgeralds, with occasional temporary and in the long term ineffectual interventions from Westminster. Now, after vast expenditure of money, effort and human life, the Geraldines had been broken. Westminster could lead in making changes, rather than struggle against autonomous Geraldine power thinly disguised as lieutenancy for the Crown.28

  Who would replace the great Anglo-Norman noblemen? We have seen how from 1532 or so Cromwell was steadily identifying local Old English gentlemen marked by loyalty and competence, and reinforcing them with one or two imported Englishmen he knew well, principally his servants William Brabazon and Thomas Agard. Had he been able to send the Duke of Richmond with a suitable staff in 1534, the process could have continued more smoothly; instead, Sir William Skeffington arrived perforce as military fire-fighter. Skeffington’s death while war was still sputtering on left his office of Deputy vacant, and what seemed like the dream choice to replace him was Cromwell’s friend Lord Leonard Grey, brother of his former employer the late Marquess of Dorset. Already senior military commander in Ireland, Grey knew Ireland well and might be able to build bridges with the discontented, since his sister had married the late Earl of Kildare. In summer 1535 he escorted over to England his nephew by marriage, Silken Thomas, for whatever treatment the King saw fit.

  After Lord Leonard had returned to Ireland, he was kitted out with a brand-new Irish peerage in January 1536; this was unusual for an English governor, but perhaps Cromwell felt that Grey might find it useful to have his own vote in the proposed meeting of the Dublin Parliament. His new title – Viscount Graney – came from a grant of a nunnery and its estates in Kildare territory. In a portent of things to come in Ireland, the nuns of Graney evaded suppression and Grey’s predations for a couple more years; maybe one reason why Lord Leonard virtually never used the title.29 The attempted dissolution of Graney paralleled Cromwell’s piecemeal English dissolutions of that autumn and winter, particularly those for Grey’s own relatives at Bilsington and Tilty. Its suppression would have been a precocious action in England, and was still more so in war-torn County Kildare: the fact that it was bungled was a sign of that perennial English lack of realism about conditions over the Irish Sea.30

  The disadvantages of a lord deputy who was a military man with a short fuse and an affection for his surviving Fitzgerald relatives emerged over the next few years, but for the moment in spring 1536 Lord Leonard presided efficiently over the opening session of the Irish Parliament. Ably assisted by William Brabazon, he processed the government’s first batch of legislation, including the royal supremacy (they were in fact too efficient, since the Dublin legislators dutifully passed an Act for the Boleyn succession, as Brabazon reported to Cromwell on 17 May, in blissful unawareness of recent English events).31 The Deputy’s troubles started with the rejection in September of a watered-down version of the Westminster Parliament’s monastic dissolution bill from the spring; the frustration of his designs on Graney Abbey should have been a warning.

  This government defeat represented not so much devout Catholic resistance to the Reformation (after all, the Dublin Parliament had just passed the royal supremacy) as annoyance among Anglo-Irish gentry that a favoured few benefiting from Cromwell’s alliance with the Earl of Ossory and the Butlers looked set to monopolize sources of power and profit, which was to be expected after the collapse of both Fitzgerald and Boleyn influence. Once members were reassured of open season on monastic property, the suppression legislation passed scarcely amended the following year.32 Yet neither Cromwell nor Henry VIII succeeded in total monastic dissolution in Ireland, despite grievously wounding Irish regular religious life. We will glimpse further examples of Irish ecclesiastical confusion as the next few years unfold.

  Haplessly sucked into the Irish morass was Cromwell’s other choice of senior agent in Ireland: a new archbishop of Dublin to replace his friend John Allen (lately murdered by Geraldines), with a brief to move forward religious reform wherever possible. The lucky winner was his landlord at Austin Friars, Prior-Provincial George Browne. One advantage of sending a friar was that in theory at least he ought to have modest financial expectations, which was just as well, since Cromwell envisaged devoting most of the archiepiscopal revenues to administrative expenses in Ireland. Browne had proved himself as a royal visitor of friaries over the previous two years; this huge leap in promotion might be considered a reward for effort, just as his once uncomfortably yoked colleague John Hilsey was now gracing the diocese of Rochester.

  Hilsey, in what may have been intended as a gesture of reconciliation after their quarrels, was one of the two bishops assisting Archbishop Cranmer at Lambeth in Browne’s consecration for Dublin on 10 March 1536. In a slightly uncomfortable additional ceremony, redolent of loose ends in the royal supremacy (to say nothing of the untidy fit of jurisdictions between England and Ireland), Cranmer invested the new Archbishop with the pallium: this was a garment of both authority and subordination, just as Canterbury himself had received it from the Pope back in 1533.33 Browne took some time to travel to his new charge, perhaps further delayed by the momentous events of the spring and early summer. It was 19 July before he and William Body, another of Cromwell’s trusted servants, arrived in Dublin, ‘in a readiness to execute and follow all your pleasure and commandment according unto the effect of your good counsel’, as he affirmed in a note dashed off straight away to his patron. Browne had absorbed a barrage of advice on Irish politics and reformation from Master Secretary before leaving, which he now did his best to put into action, against daunting odds.
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  On 14 April 1536, as this third component of government reorganization took its shaky course in Ireland, the Westminster Parliament drew to an end. By then alert members would be aware that some very odd things were going on at Court. One of the oddest, which would instantly have told the world of a serious rift between the Queen and Thomas Cromwell, was a technicolor sermon in the Chapel Royal on Passion Sunday, 2 April, preached by Queen Anne’s almoner, John Skip.35 We know in detail what Skip said, because the preacher found himself facing unsympathetic interrogation as events unfolded over the following months. The text alone, John 8.46, ‘Which of you can convict me of sin?’, was a trumpet-call against accusations that most of the world had no idea had been made. To begin with, in a rambling and complex discourse, Skip defined ‘you’ and ‘me’ in relatively innocuous terms: his audience and the clergy of the Church respectively. Yet even that would be enough to make a congregation stir uneasily, given the barrage of attacks on the Church hierarchy Cromwell had been orchestrating both inside and outside Parliament, and the current passage of legislation about the lesser monasteries. What was a known evangelical like Skip up to, taking this rhetorical line?

  Worse followed when the preacher turned to criticizing royal councillors (not specified) ‘for the malice that they bear toward many men or toward one man’, and especially for their attempts at ‘the renovation or alteration of any old or ancient customs or ceremonies’ in religion, and ‘renovations or alterations in civil matters’ as well. What possible instance might he be thinking of? The answer quickly followed: the story of ‘gentle King Ahasuerus’ of Persia, his virtuous wife Esther and the wicked royal councillor Haman, who had planned a massacre of the Jews until Esther interceded for them with the King. Skip subtly altered the story: in the original, Haman offered King Ahasuerus a great sum to finance the massacre, whereas in Skip’s recension he assured the King that this great sum would be raised as a result, intending in reality to end up with the money himself. The massacre clearly equated to the monastic suppressions: in Haman we see personified those false venal evangelicals whom Alesius described as having been denounced by Queen Anne, but more specifically the single persona of Master Secretary Cromwell. In the end, Haman was hanged. It is uncertain whether Skip pioneered the description of Cromwell as Haman the wicked royal councillor, but it quickly became a regular trope about the royal minister, used by the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace and by a host of ill-wishers or moralists thereafter.36

  Skip’s identification of Anne as champion of monasteries against ‘Haman’ reflected her vigorous efforts in these weeks to oppose the programme of suppression which Parliament had just passed. No doubt aware of Cromwell’s discomfiture over that legislation, she was making a bold bid to become herself the champion of a positive and evangelical reform of monastic life. Her erstwhile chaplain William Latimer later reminisced (Alesius-like) to Queen Elizabeth about a preaching campaign which Anne launched in her last month of life. She ordered Bishop Hugh Latimer (no relation) to use his first available sermon before the King to implore him not to persist in ‘the utter subversion of the said houses and to . . . convert them to some better use’. Latimer says the Queen then bullied heads of monastic houses who came to her encouraged by this message into providing money for university scholarships, and it is true that in the later 1530s there was a surge in monks taking university degrees.37 Archbishop Cranmer, out of the loop of Court politics down at his Kentish palace of Knole, was alarmed at the confusing messages he was getting, and wrote to Cromwell to seek a face-to-face clarifying word, as ‘the cause of religion [monasticism] . . . goeth all contrary to mine expectation, if it be as the fame goeth’.38 Anne was bidding to wrest leadership of reformation from its other chief champions, especially Cromwell.

  It was too late. The day before Skip preached, Chapuys wrote excitedly to his master on a variety of developments, one of which (as we noted) was Cromwell’s royal rebuff on monastic legislation; he also relayed his perception that there was a deep rift between Queen and minister. This followed an engrossing conversation with the Secretary. ‘I told him that I had purposedly avoided visiting him many a time for fear of arousing his royal mistress’s suspicions, for the reasons he himself explained to me.’ Chapuys immediately recalled that conversation of June 1535, when Cromwell had said that Anne ‘would like to see his head off his shoulders’. He then proceeded to pass on hugely satisfying information from Anne’s ill-wisher the Marchioness of Exeter, that the King’s dalliance with Jane Seymour had moved to a far more serious level. Taking a leaf out of Anne Boleyn’s book back in the 1520s, that young lady was modesty itself when Henry offered her a rich gift; she vowed that she could not accept it ‘until God might send her some good determination of marriage [quelque bon party de mariage]’.39

  Chapuys commented that Jane had been well briefed. The King, his passion fired by this rectitude, ‘had taken away from Master Cromwell’s apartments in the Palace [of Whitehall] a room, to which he can when he likes have access through certain galleries without being seen, of which room the young lady’s elder brother [Edward] and his wife have already taken possession for the express purpose of her repairing thither’. There is no need to suppose that Cromwell would have felt any inclination to resist this appropriation. Those few days he spent at Wolf Hall in the progress six months before were now bearing fruit. The central issue fatally escalating the long-standing tensions at Court seems to have been foreign policy, in manoeuvres we can follow largely in a monumentally long dispatch of Chapuys on 21 April.40 The prize for both King Henry and the Holy Roman Emperor could not have been higher: a proper alliance after the missteps and bitterness of the last few years, leading if possible to English reconciliation with Rome on some new basis. Part of the prize would also be a decisive rejection of the pragmatic French relationship (with its encouragement of France to pursue reformation) which Henry had forwarded throughout most of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Even Anne and her party, including her brother George Lord Rochford, saw the way the wind was blowing and made the right diplomatic noises about being friendly with the Empire.

  All seemed to be going well until on 18 April, Easter Tuesday, the vital player, the King himself, suddenly behaved with extreme petulance in Chapuys’s presence, rehearsing years of real and imagined slights to his dignity and English interests from the Emperor, all the way back to Charles V’s accession; he blustered that Charles would never have gained his throne without Henry’s help. Cromwell and Audley were appalled and did little to conceal their feelings, on which Cromwell enlarged on the following day when he and Chapuys met to lick their wounds. After they had both sunk into gloom, ‘Cromwell suddenly recovered his spirits, and said that the game was not entirely lost, and that he had still hopes of success.’41 Later, in another very frank conversation with Chapuys when Anne was no more, he represented this as the moment when he ‘set himself to think up and plot out the whole business [il se mist a fantasier et conspirer le dict affaire]’.42 He was going to destroy the Queen.

  The stakes were now very high. The King’s tantrums are amply accounted for by the strain of his multiple deceptions and conflicts of loyalties, while at one stage in this crucial month, as Chapuys confided to his friend Granvelle, Cromwell took to his bed out of sheer anxiety.43 Much that happened is hidden from us, not least because of the unmistakable way in which Cromwell’s in-tray archive thins during the crisis, then resumes its normal amplitude after the Queen’s arrest on 2 May. Someone has evidently weeded out some of the more explosive material, probably at his fall in 1540. What did happen, happened very fast; between the King’s outburst on 18 April and the first arrest on 30 April of a suspect in the scandal around Anne (the musician Mark Smeaton), a mere twelve days went by. Events rushing towards tragedy tangled with an increasingly hollow Court normality.44 The King made plans to visit his cherished harbour works at Dover for the beginning of May; Lord Rochford, in his
capacity as Warden of the Cinque Ports, wrote hastily on 17 April to Lord Lisle asking for help with the arrangements – the last surviving fragment of everyday correspondence from the Queen’s brother.45*

  St George’s Day, 23 April, brought to Greenwich the usual gathering of the Knights of the Garter, arranging their annual feast for the following month. The King did not intend to be at the feast, given his plans to visit Dover, and he nominated in his stead Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland – on the face of it a puzzling choice, given the Earl’s unstable health, both mental and physical. A new knight was to be elected, and there were two possible candidates. One of them was Lord Rochford, but the King chose the other: the undoubtedly dashing and martial Sir Nicholas Carew. Chapuys noted for his master both Rochford’s disappointment and the fact that Carew was Anne’s enemy.46 It will be recalled that back in February Carew had been quietly involved in negotiations with the Lady Mary alongside Cromwell.

  If the crisis was beginning to reveal itself even among public magnificence, much more stirred behind the scenes. A quiet frenzy of bureaucratic activity filled the day after the Garter Ceremony, the most neutral parts being formal appointments which in less crowded hours might have concentrated Anne Boleyn’s fury, in her new capacity as champion of the monasteries: all the senior officers in the new Court of Augmentations. Yet far more devastating was an enrolment that day of unspecified life grants for Jane Seymour to the value of 100 marks derived from lands and annuities.47 That might seem modest enough, but it was coupled with the appointment of two special commissions of oyer and terminer (‘to hear and determine’) for the counties of Middlesex and Kent, consisting of national notables and senior judges. The agenda of these ad hoc commissions, whose purpose was customarily to try the most serious criminal offences, was not stated, and it is unlikely that many of those named to them were immediately told they had been thus singled out for service – least of all Anne Boleyn’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire, listed on the Middlesex commission. Among those listed, one wonders how much the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk knew, but there can be few doubts about the part of Lord Chancellor Audley and Secretary Cromwell.48