Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  As that famous observation indicates, the responsibility for Anne’s destruction remains squarely with Cromwell, as he cheerfully admitted. At least he thought of her as a worthy adversary, as he observed in that remarkably frank debriefing with Chapuys on 24 May: ‘he emphatically praised the sense, wit and courage of the late Concubine, and of her brother.’74 Cromwell did not abandon or betray a partner in reformation. With Anne dead, the Reformation which he sought suddenly became much less complicated, though he would always have to work in a roller-coaster collaboration with the King’s tempestuous emotional appetites. If the royal passions had not veered so decisively towards Jane Seymour that Henry once again broke all decencies, destroying Anne and then immediately marrying a successor, no one could have achieved the result of May 1536. Yet the person who did was Wolsey’s best servant. From the sidelines, other wounded admirers of the Cardinal, including those who had helped to bring Cromwell into the King’s service in 1530, rejoiced at what the architect of Wolsey’s legacy project had achieved. It was a monument for the Cardinal far beyond the skill of Italian craftsmen.

  PART FOUR

  Power and its Reward

  He taketh a burden upon him, that accompanieth a more honourable man than himself. Therefore keep no familiarity with one that is richer than thyself. How agree the kettle and the pot together? For if the one be smitten against the other, it shall be broken.

  Ecclesiasticus 13.2, in the translation of Miles Coverdale, 1535

  Good it is, the obedience and right of the King’s most honourable laws regarded, to have the favour of the commonalty, and not to lose the favour and honour with justice under the King’s highness . . .

  William Maunsell to Cromwell, 27 July 1533

  15

  Summer Opportunities: 1536

  On 30 May 1536, eleven days after Anne Boleyn’s execution, King Henry married Jane Seymour: in his own eyes this was his first proper marriage. The new Queen had an easy task in creating a new atmosphere of unity, after the public confrontations and partisanship which had been the product of Anne Boleyn’s temperament. Chapuys adroitly conferred on Jane at their first interview the title of ‘peacemaker’, which had a fairly obvious diplomatic purpose, but which was seized on with pleasure by the King, a little nervous about how his demure bride might perform in front of the most important foreign envoy in the realm.1 Whatever courtiers thought about the rights and wrongs of destroying the Boleyns, the sense of relief among them after months of storms or brooding atmospheres is palpable. Readers will recall the satisfied comment of Cromwell’s early patron Sir John Russell, now restored to a prominence at Court he felt to be his due after years of political eclipse, that ‘the King hath come out of hell into heaven for the gentleness in this, and the cursedness and unhappiness in the other.’2 For Cromwell and various much tried diplomats sent to lie abroad for their King, there was no further need to pursue the thankless task of getting anyone to agree that repudiating Queen Katherine of Aragon had been a good and godly thing to do: the issue could just be quietly forgotten.

  The new Queen did little to disturb the narrative of peace, after making one or two early efforts to exercise some initiative. As the story reached Chapuys, even before Anne was securely gone, Jane expressed her warm sympathy to King Henry for his eldest daughter Mary, and suggested that she should be replaced ‘in her former position’. The King, incredulous that anyone close to him should express an altruistic opinion, slapped her down, snapping that ‘she ought to be mindful of the welfare and advancement of her own children, if she had any by him.’ Chapuys credited her with a generous-minded and spirited reply.3 In the following month, she was the last port of call in a vigorous campaign to stop the dissolution of the much respected Northamptonshire nunnery of Catesby (Cromwell’s visitors had just given the nuns a star report), but once more Henry was furious at being the subject of a pincer movement by various people lobbying him on Catesby’s behalf, even with the promise of 2,000 marks for him from the Prioress. Soon the convent closed its doors.4 It may have been a reminiscence of this case which fuelled the French rumour-mill later in the year representing Queen Jane as suppliant for monasteries to be spared, with the King brutally ‘reminding her that the last Queen had died in consequence of meddling too much with State affairs’.5

  Thereafter Jane devoted herself more successfully to making sure Henry had a good time, playing havoc with the sleeping patterns of their entourage. At the end of September, Ralph Sadler ruefully penned a weighty report for his old master after a long day coping with the King’s wilfulness, ‘at twelve o’clock of the night, which is our accustomed hour in the Court to go to bed’.6 When early in the New Year the Queen found that she was pregnant, it is likely that matters settled down; a delighted Henry was not going to risk the health of his wife and child. Maybe Jane’s early attempts to assert herself were her own doing, evidence of a generous-hearted but naive spirit. Yet we should remember that observers felt that her much more important initiative, insisting on marriage before sexual congress, was the result of careful tutoring. Both her unsuccessful efforts at intercession with the King would fit well with Thomas Cromwell’s own agendas that summer. He was doing his best to divert the King from picking off virtuous monastic houses, twice making his own pleas to him for Catesby (as Prioress Bickley noted gratefully), and likewise trying to save the London Charterhouse, now that it was firmly under his control.7 As we will see, he was also following up his moves of the previous winter to benefit the Lady Mary.

  In keeping with the current emphasis on reconciliation and unity, the summer saw a doling out of good news in religion to both traditionalists and evangelicals, neither of whom could really have been said to have won when Anne was destroyed. In the middle of the new Parliamentary session, the King and Queen led a solemn procession from Whitehall Palace to Westminster Abbey to the most elaborate possible celebration of Corpus Christi Day (15 June 1536), accompanied by the two archbishops, peers and courtiers.8 Conservatives received the appointments to vacant dioceses, but on the other hand Bishop Latimer was only the most prominent figure among various evangelicals allowed to preach attacks on such aspects of traditional religion as purgatory, pilgrimages and devotion to images – the sorts of issues Cromwell had envisaged making the subject of a campaign in monasteries the previous winter.

  The most striking expression of this mood of concession to old and new alike was the first effort to define what the infant Church of England believed: ten Articles of religion approved by Convocation that summer. Reflecting what was obviously quite a tussle between evangelicals and conservatives in Convocation, they uncomfortably amalgamated material from several months of Bishop Foxe’s gritty theological discussion with Lutherans in Germany, with stout rearguard action from bishops like Cuthbert Tunstall in defence of traditional doctrine. Confession to a priest, for instance, was defended in traditional style, but that sat side by side with a very Lutheran-sounding exposition of justification by faith. Theologically alert commentators spotted the pantomime-horse dual character of the Articles and were displeased from opposing points of view. Alesius, particularly upset, complained bitterly to Johannes Aepinus the Superintendent of Hamburg, and unsuccessfully petitioned Cromwell to let him leave the country.9

  There were of course spoils to be distributed from the wreck of the Boleyn fortunes. A day after the King’s new wedding, George Lord Rochford’s father-in-law, Cromwell’s congenial fellow-bibliophile Lord Morley, was granted the honorific and profitable Stewardship of the large royal lordship of Hatfield Park, just forfeited by Rochford. It was a reward, which clearly did not strike the royal grantee as in poor taste, for a useful contribution made by Morley’s daughter Jane Lady Rochford to the evidence condemning her husband and sister-in-law.10 In fact, after a heart-rending letter to Cromwell from the less-than-grieving widow about her poverty in the wake of her husband’s execution, she succeeded in getting both minister and King to bully the far more
genuinely bereaved Earl of Wiltshire into an arbitrary increase of the dowry agreed on her marriage to his late son.11

  Other rewards were marginally less disreputable. As he was now the Queen’s brother, Edward Seymour needed a boost in status, so within a week of her marriage he became Viscount Beauchamp, a suitably grand title which the heralds managed to resurrect for the King’s consideration from an extinct barony enjoyed by one of his family name nearly two centuries before. Viscounts were at the time decidedly rare sights in the English honours system, though there was a significantly recent precedent in that granted to Lord Leonard Grey in the Irish peerage a few months before.12 For rather more professional services rendered as canon lawyer to facilitate the new marriage, Dean Richard Sampson got a Bishopric, moreover one that was not actually vacant: he supplanted the aged Robert Sherburne at Chichester. Sherburne, in earlier days a model of episcopal energy who had successfully kept Wolsey at bay from his diocese, had long been in Cromwell’s sights for removal. Five days after Anne Boleyn’s arrest, the old Bishop learned of Cromwell’s pleasure that he was acquiescing in these arrangements for his retirement. He was dead within three months, prudently bequeathing Cromwell a gilt cup and ten pounds to leave his executors alone in seeing to his other bequests.13

  Less fortunate than Richard Sampson was his fellow-traditionalist Bishop Gardiner, who benefited less from the Boleyns’ tragedy than he might have expected, particularly given his catalytic role the previous winter. In Cromwell’s letter spelling out for the ambassadors in Paris an official account of Anne’s crimes to pass on to the French Court, he let Gardiner know he was being remitted £200 from two annual pensions from his episcopal estates amounting to £300 which in sunnier times the King had ordered him to pay the late Henry Norris and Lord Rochford. The Bishop would continue to be liable for Norris’s £100, but it was now to be paid to ‘the Vicar of Hell’ – the Court nickname for Sir Francis Bryan. This was evidently Bryan’s reward for whatever transpired in that urgent summons back from Buckinghamshire and for subsequent services. Cromwell relayed the royal message to the Bishop that ‘though it be some charge unto you, his Highness trusteth ye will think it well bestowed.’ If Gardiner had had more sense, he would have taken this broadest of hints in thankfulness for what was after all more than a small mercy. Instead he made a fuss, and went on making his fuss for months: once more, Winchester at his least wily.14

  No obvious bounty at first appeared for the chief architect of the new order. Cromwell’s gratification was a little deferred. The easy part was to make sure he would have reliable subordinates at the heart of the King’s private apartments, so central to the revolution just effected. So his friend and colleague back to Wolsey days Thomas Heneage was promoted within the Privy Chamber in June, replacing the executed Henry Norris as Groom of the Stool, and the faithful Ralph Sadler became a groom of the Privy Chamber in July, formalizing a role he had played for some time as go-between and facilitator of business, whenever monarch and minister were apart.15 Obviously the huge rewards Cromwell was now pursuing needed much preliminary negotiation and planning, but more importantly, before anything was decided, there was a further price: King Henry paid by results.

  One of these results was a successful outcome for Parliament and Convocation, which met on 8 June with remarkable speed, after particular care that nationwide elections effectively renewed membership in the House of Commons. The assembly was an achievement in itself, given that Parliament virtually never met in the agriculturally intensive seasons of summer or early autumn. All the legislative adjustments about succession and treason that one would expect after recent excitements sailed through; apart from the evangelicals grouped around Anne’s clients among the bishops and their correspondents abroad, the Boleyns had had no natural constituency, dependent as they had been on Anne basking in the King’s affections. Parliament also successfully hustled though a large backlog of private business remaining from the spring. The only official measure triggering that now characteristic sign of serious disagreement, a division of the Commons, was further tinkering with ecclesiastical dispensations after the break with Rome. The bill probably caused widespread concern about the status of past papal dispensations affecting marriages, but evidently it was resolved.16

  Yet behind this business so familiar from Cromwell’s Parliamentary management lurked something even more important, and much more dangerous and unpredictable: a binding in of the Lady Mary to the new royal settlement, the task Cromwell had begun while Queen Anne’s position crumbled the previous winter. Throughout the unedifying struggle that followed, Mary saw Cromwell not as her enemy but as a firm source of support in her quest to regain her father’s favour.17 There were four key players: the King, his minister, the Princess without a current title and the imperial ambassador, determined to undo nigh on a decade of accumulating slights and petty cruelties to his protégée. Chapuys did try lobbying the new Viscount Beauchamp, emphasizing that it would be in the Seymour family’s interests to have Mary restored to her proper title, but Beauchamp, while expressing sympathy, was a lightweight compared with Master Secretary.18 Cromwell was his master’s servant, still as firm as he was in February in insisting that any deal with Mary would be on the King’s terms, but he was also as punctilious in informing Chapuys as was consistent with his allegiance. They never worked more closely together than in this anxious spring and summer.

  Cromwell’s early exchanges with Mary, and his sensitive guidance of her responses to her father, contrasted sharply with the bullying from the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Sampson when on 15 June they went to Hunsdon to present the King’s demands: acceptance of her father’s Supreme Headship in the Church of England, and her own illegitimate status. After that wretched confrontation, in which in agony of mind Mary gave no ground, the King angrily prepared legal proceedings which might have led to her death for treason. Maybe there was a good-cop/bad-cop strategy here, but Cromwell made a point of telling Chapuys that he recognized that ‘the almost excessive love and affection’ of Henry’s subjects for Mary had become much more obvious after Anne’s fall. He realized what a catastrophe the execution of the King’s daughter would be for the monarchy, far outclassing the destruction of More and Fisher.19 His own continued position was now entirely dependent on Mary giving way, and his desperation generated his own fury in answering her steadily more emotional pleas.

  Acute tension was undermining Mary’s already fragile health. She surrendered in the end on 22 June, explicitly accepting the demands conveyed by Norfolk and Sampson: a bitter moment, which amply explains some of the bitterness in her later years of power. Many eyes across the nation were trying to penetrate official darkness around these proceedings, and there was general relief when news gradually filtered out that further savagery had been averted. A week later Richard Sparkford, an influential and well-informed clergyman from Hereford diocese who was up in London for Convocation, wrote back home to his good friend John Scudamore that ‘My Lady Mary, as far as I can know, hath submitted herself like a wise and virtuous lady to the King’s pleasure, of the which we may be glad.’ No one now symbolized the world as it had been before 1533 better than Mary, and for conservatives like Sparkford (earlier in his career he had been personal chaplain to Cuthbert Tunstall) her surrender would be a considerable comfort for their consciences, troubled by submissions to the King’s religious adventures over the previous half-decade.20

  On Chapuys’s testimony, Mary herself felt real gratitude to Cromwell for his goodwill towards her, and she expressed it extravagantly: ‘how much I am bound unto you, which hath . . . travailed, when I was almost drowned in folly, to recover me before I sunk and was utterly past recovery.’21 Cromwell himself told the ambassador he was convinced that his own imprisonment loomed. In his fury at his daughter’s intransigence, the King had arrested Cromwell’s friends and probable fellow-conspirators against Anne, Sir Anthony Browne and Sir William Fitzwilliam, who in turn yielded up the name of a
definite fellow-conspirator, Sir Nicholas Carew. Add to that the arrest of Lady Anne Hussey, wife of Mary’s long-standing Chamberlain, and things looked desperate indeed. Knowledge of their plight must have swayed Mary in her decision: she sacrificed her own integrity to save others.

  Mary’s capitulation swiftly brought her reward: the first meeting with her father for five years. On 6 July 1536 she was brought to spend twenty-four hours with him and her new stepmother. The meeting took place in strict secrecy, though Cromwell let Chapuys into his confidence about it the day before. Its setting was that spare royal house at Hackney, so lately Cromwell’s, but then surrendered and left purposeless by the way that the Boleyn annulment had worked out. Hackney was a subtle choice, for after Cromwell’s extensive rebuilding programme, and with its previous history in the Percy family, the house held no distressing memories for any of the royal trio; it proclaimed a new start. So Henry’s family was apparently bound together once more, amid scenes of tearful reconciliation and regret, which must have convinced Mary at least for the moment that she had done the right thing. Her three-year-old half-sister Elizabeth was left behind at the country house at Hunsdon which the two royal daughters currently shared; a Boleyn child was too much of a complication for this event.22