Thomas Cromwell
Page 50
Now the young Duke’s usefulness was ended. That summer Norfolk thus lost two potential routes to royal influence, his niece Queen Anne and his son-in-law, and he also gained a massive liability in the shape of a brother under attainder for treason. By contrast, the stock of Cromwell’s protégée the Lady Mary (who had good reason to detest Norfolk) was considerably improved in the absence of a male child for the King. The Lord Privy Seal wrote Mary what Chapuys felt amounted to a letter of congratulation. The Duchess of Norfolk more than once thereafter praised Cromwell for his goodness to Richmond’s former servants as the ducal household broke up, taking many of them into his own service.46 Cromwell’s kindness was of course another stick with which the Duchess could beat her detested husband, who made his situation still worse by badly mishandling the oversight of Richmond’s corpse from London for burial at Thetford Priory, a last permanent custodianship of the royal child for the Howards. Chapuys reported with unfeeling glee on the ghastly procession of a decaying cadaver enclosed only in straw, trundling in a waggon across the counties to Norfolk for all the world to see, a mere couple of attendants trailing behind it.47*
The King was furious with Norfolk for this hideously public incompetence, which looked remarkably like callousness, never an implausible attitude in connection with Thomas Howard. One does not have to speculate wildly on Cromwell’s feelings as he read the Duke’s mortified letter of excuses and apologies: ‘It is further written to me that a great bruit doth run that I should be in the Tower of London. When I shall deserve to be there, Tottenham shall turn French,’ he wrote, ‘with the hand of him that is full, full, full of choler and agony.’ When this lament was penned on 5 August, none other than Gregory Cromwell was staying with the Duke at Kenninghall, revelling in the delights of its deerpark as part of his nine-month immersion in Norfolk high society.48 In August 1536, Cromwell had Norfolk just where he wanted him; and he had the stately Norfolk manor of North Elmham as well, sitting squarely in the centre of the Duke’s home territory.
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After this run of luck, Cromwell may have felt that the atmosphere of studied religious neutrality in which the King’s marriage to Jane Seymour had opened was ripe for manipulation in the evangelical cause. Two routes for dialogue in the opposite direction, towards Rome, closed down during the summer. The more promising was from Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, previously seen in England in 1529 at the legatine court at Blackfriars. He had been observing recent English turbulence with great interest, and he calculated that his previous role in obstructing the Boleyn marriage might now have a rather different valence. In the intervening years Campeggio had quietly kept open lines of communication to Cromwell. One of his letters survives, thanking the minister for continued benevolence in England and speaking in extravagant terms of the Cardinal’s devotion to King Henry – just about believable when the letter was written in January 1535, after Campeggio’s earlier anger at losing the Bishopric of Salisbury had cooled and before the King got round to executing Fisher and More.49
Accordingly on 6 June 1536, now assured of Anne Boleyn’s fall, Campeggio commissioned his brother Marc’Antonio to plan an expedition to England, armed with letters of introduction to Bishop Tunstall, the Duke of Suffolk and probably a raft of others whom the Cardinal regarded as his English friends; punctiliously he omitted from his signatures any claim to be Bishop of Salisbury. The recovery of his Bishopric was nevertheless one of the items on his brother’s diplomatic shopping-list, plus a courteous suggestion to King Henry that if he needed a cardinal-protector at the proposed forthcoming General Council at Mantua, Campeggio was just the man.50 Matters did not proceed quickly. Campeggio knew the right people to involve, especially that veteran Anglo-Italian Antonio Buonvisi, but by August and September the political situation in England had swayed too much against any conservative encouragement in England to open talks via the Cardinal. Marc’Antonio’s servant Lodovico got as far as a personal interview with Cromwell, but he reported back that Cromwell’s message was more polite than promising. He noted in particular the Duke of Norfolk’s dire situation. Marc’Antonio himself was in England during the autumn, but Cromwell and the King were unlikely to feel any better disposed to reconciliation with Rome during the desperate months facing the Pilgrimage of Grace. It all came to nothing.51
Campeggio’s approach was in any case sabotaged almost before it began by his own colleague in Italy, Reginald Pole. In spring 1536, Pole finally resolved to confront and admonish his royal cousin. He had come a long way from that time in 1529–30 when he was among the English representatives abroad seeking sympathy for Henry’s marital adventures. After leaving England in 1531, he watched developments at home with increasing horror, and during 1535, still in discreet conversation with Cromwell via various agents, principally their mutual client Thomas Starkey, turned his thoughts into a long treatise. It was resonantly entitled Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione (‘To defend the unity of the Church’), known more snappily as De unitate. He sent a copy to Bishop Tunstall, who read it in July 1536 and was appalled at its misjudgement; Starkey shared Tunstall’s dismay.
Pole’s hectoring effusion, including unflattering accounts of the King’s behaviour back to his accession, based on first-hand observation, and clarion-calls for him to return to papal obedience, was the opposite of Campeggio’s emollient overtures. Its contents were, as Pole’s biographer perceptively comments, the sort of unvarnished truths that a conscientious spiritual adviser might present to a penitent in the privacy of confession. The vital difference was that they had already been said in draft to a wider audience than the recipient, and that audience was widening all the time.52 Pole seemed oblivious to this discrepancy. He envisaged his text as addressed to the entire English people; it is understandable that, in his rage after Henry’s atrocities against his relatives in 1538, he allowed his Latin text to appear in print for the whole world to read.
In replying to Pole with what was in itself a considerable treatise, Tunstall did not take any chances. Being down in London for Parliament and Convocation, he made sure that Cromwell had a copy before it was dispatched to Rome, and no doubt Starkey did the same with his own more concise letter of reproach.53 Tunstall emphasized to Pole what a strategic error it was to send such a long document. Henry would inevitably give it to others to read for him, thus spreading the wildly overpersonal comments, which extended in the original in Rome to the King’s former dalliance with Mary Boleyn (it looks as if wiser counsels omitted that particular section from the version sent to England). Possibly Henry only ever saw the summary of the diatribe prepared by Richard Morison, loyally labelled ‘Abbreviations of a certain evil-willed man’, but that would be bad enough.54 The King felt deeply betrayed by Pole’s volte-face. How could he be expected to understand that Pole saw offering the frankest pastoral advice as an act of gratitude for all the previous royal bounty? As for Cromwell, unlikely to share any residual regrets felt by Starkey and Tunstall about the priggish humanist, Hugh Latimer later reminisced, ‘I heard you say once after you had seen that furious invective of Cardinal Pole that you would make him to eat his own heart.’55
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Cromwell had very different plans for the future of English religion. He extended the scope of his Vice-Gerency beyond its first focus on visiting monasteries and corporate bodies into the whole Church. That was starkly emphasized during June by his presence in meetings of the Convocation of Canterbury a couple of miles away in St Paul’s Cathedral.56 His official Dr William Petre claimed a presiding place for him as representative of the Supreme Head of the Church, and Archbishop Cranmer readily granted him an equal seat. Cromwell openly ‘sat divers times in the Convocation house among the bishops, as head over them’.57 He therefore had first-hand observation of how difficult Convocation could be, including on 23 June when clergy of its Lower House (always the likely origin of trouble rather than the bishops) presented a long list of here
tical opinions to be condemned, some of which he undoubtedly held himself, on matters such as the eucharist, devotion to images and justification by faith. He would also note the perennial problem of getting the King’s will approved in the Church of England: whatever one did in the Convocation of Canterbury needed to be echoed in the Convocation of York, smaller to manage but a lot further off, and inclined to belligerent traditionalism. There must be another way.
The beginning of that alternative became apparent after Convocation dispersed in Parliament’s wake. In late July or August, the Vice-Gerent issued on his own authority a set of injunctions for the religious life of the entire kingdom.58 If, as is likely, he notionally issued them on 1 August, he was doing so after conference with Archbishop Cranmer, for that day he addressed a letter from Cranmer’s great Kentish palace at Otford, on his way home from accompanying the King on the postponed visit to the Dover harbour works.59 Cranmer would rejoice in the evangelical tone of the injunctions, and may have made suggestions for content; but the fact remained that this was the first time that a layman had done anything of the sort since Anglo-Saxon kings in very different times. Naturally where it suited the Vice-Gerent they referred back to various ecclesiastical decisions made earlier that summer: so they cited and reinforced Convocation’s abolition of various holy days, and drew on and commended critical discussion of devotion to images and pilgrimages which had formed part of the Ten Articles. Yet they contained much else that was really new.
In autumn 1535, Cromwell’s visitors to the universities brought radical intentions to the reform of higher education: now his injunctions dealt with the other educational extreme, children’s earliest steps in schooling. They enlisted parish clergy in a campaign of sermons and addresses to get families to teach their children the first building-blocks of the Christian faith – Lord’s Prayer, Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments. Clergy must preach over a long period on each clause or article in these texts, having made them available (obviously in English); or ‘shew where printed books containing the same to be sold, to them that can read or will desire the same’. It is true that clergy of the Western Church had been trying to get children to learn the Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Commandments as far back as the reforming Lateran Council in 1215, but the difference here was that secular authority led the campaign, and advocated every possible contemporary method for doing so, including Cromwell’s favourite medium of print. The order was a striking if perhaps premature vision of a kingdom united in basic educational instruction, and the purpose was laid out at some picturesque length: such teaching would combat juvenile idleness which led over time to a depressing list of vices right up to murder, followed by the bitter reproaches of the perpetrators to their thoughtless families who had been slow to bring them up ‘in some good literature, occupation, or mystery’.
This was reminiscent of moves to public instruction which Martin Luther had been encouraging since the mid-1520s, using those same basic Christian texts. The seventh clause of the injunctions was an even more direct affirmation that Cromwell’s Church was embracing evangelical reformation of religion: ‘every parson, or proprietary of any parish church within this realm shall on this the feast of St Peter ad Vincula next coming [1 August 1537] provide a book of the whole Bible, both in Latin, and also in English, and lay the same in the choir for every man that will, to look and read thereon.’60 This was for the moment another expression of future intent. It must have bewildered and worried those parishes which took it seriously, while exciting others – for no such single book existed at the time. It would certainly have been possible to buy a large Latin Vulgate for display, and loyalists might conceivably have searched out King Henry’s brand-new edited-down Vulgate if it had been easily available (see above, this page); but what was this English Bible?
There was indeed no legally permitted English Bible text on the market in August 1536. Cromwell had given clandestine encouragement to the publication the previous October of the first complete English Bible in print, by his old friend the ex-Austin Friar Miles Coverdale. Coverdale’s Bible looked remarkably official with its large format, handsome title-page designed by Hans Holbein the Younger and dedication to the King, and caused quite a stir when copies arrived in London (see Plate 36). With an irony characteristic of Cromwell’s plans, Coverdale’s work was based on the pioneering efforts of William Tyndale, who despite all the Lord Privy Seal’s diplomatic efforts was still lying in prison in the Low Countries, soon to suffer execution, with King Henry’s connivance. The Coverdale edition could not come from the same Antwerp press as Tyndale’s precisely because of the crackdown sparked by his arrest. It had to be printed elsewhere, maybe Cologne, with some batches being given a little finishing under Cromwell’s patronage by an evangelical printer in Southwark, James Nicholson.61 National provision of Bibles unsurprisingly got off to a slow start, though over the next year some sympathetic bishops did repeat this vice-gerential order in their own visitations. Twelve months of patient persuasion by Cromwell and Cranmer elapsed before the King authorized yet another modification of the existing biblical texts for national use.
The King probably never realized that Cromwell was manipulating his power as Supreme Head to promulgate a translation inspired by the man he had grown to hate and whose destruction he had helped to engineer. It is to be hoped that he never saw a meaty little edition of Tyndale’s Parable of the Wicked Mammon, which James Nicholson also daringly issued from his Southwark press in 1536 without any attempt at disguise. Not only did it prioritize on the title-page the theme of justification by faith, a doctrine Henry detested, but it openly proclaimed Tyndale’s name in the author’s preamble to the reader. The title-page block, with a prominent use of the Tudor royal arms, was actually an import, once more a creation of Hans Holbein, previously used by Tyndale’s former publisher in Antwerp for an edition of Melanchthon’s Loci communes.62 Surely none of this was done without Cromwell’s approval; it suggests how much he was testing the boundaries this promising summer.
It is possible Henry did eventually fathom an even more audacious stratagem of Cromwell’s, though he could not possibly have understood its profound effect over time. This moved the course of English religion not merely towards the Protestant Reformation but towards a particular strand within it that the King would unquestionably consider obnoxiously heretical: the newly established Protestant Church in the Swiss city of Zürich. Cromwell did not originate this initiative, which to begin with heavily implicated Archbishop Cranmer, but in his characteristically improvisatory fashion he sustained the enterprise when theological considerations checked Cranmer’s enthusiasm, and did so in ways that have left a permanent mark on the Church of England and its various world offshoots till the present day. Put simply, the move to embrace Zürich turned English Protestantism’s path away from Lutheranism and towards what became the Reformed Protestant family of Churches. This move we can trace back to the year 1536.63
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The first stirrings in the story came from Strassburg and its far-seeing chief pastor, Martin Bucer, keenly interested in the progress of the English mission led by Bishop Foxe to the Schmalkaldic League in 1535–6. Strassburg was not a member of the League, and its Protestantism did not look to Martin Luther and Saxony but south and west, to cities of the Empire and Switzerland taking their cue from a different and indeed rival reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, chief pastor of Protestant Zürich until his death in 1531. There was no escaping the fact that the two Protestant blocs had disagreed very quickly on fundamental issues. Most importantly, Luther, like the Pope and Henry VIII, believed that in the mass bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ (though he disagreed with Pope and King as to how this miracle took place). By contrast, the Swiss and south Germans saw this liturgical drama as ‘the Lord’s Supper’: a memorial of Christ’s great sacrifice on the Cross, mystically symbolized in bread and wine, which nevertheless remained bread and wine still.
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p; The southerners also abhorred idolatry, by which they principally meant sacred images in churches. Luther, after some thought, decided that the issue was unimportant and let most images stand in his church buildings. Even the music of the two groupings differed. To a toleration of traditional Latin church music (and pipe-organs), Luther added his own freshly composed hymns, usually to new tunes. The southerners considered all that on the edge of idolatry – indeed, Zürich abolished all music in churches as potentially idolatrous in distracting worshippers for God, and kept the ban right into the 1590s. Other communities which in general followed Zürich did not take that extreme position, but still allowed congregations only biblical music, by which they principally meant the 150 psalms. Even Luther’s Protestant hymns were beyond the pale.
This formidable chasm among Protestants crystallized by mid-century into two hostile camps with names to identify them: Lutherans and the Reformed – both Protestants, but irredeemably at odds (as, formally, they still are). That was in the future, but the gulf was already wide and Martin Bucer was anxious to bridge it, encouraging a series of discussions which ultimately foundered both on Luther’s unwillingness to see other people’s points of view and Bucer’s inability to think of simply expressed ways of smoothing over theological complexities. Negotiations reached a peak in spring 1536, as was duly noted for Cromwell by William Clifton, a sharp-eyed merchant of some note, and as Customer of London in overall charge of levies on goods in and out of England’s principal port. Clifton was at that stage in Germany, accompanying Ambassador Foxe to the diplomatic meeting which led to Bucer’s best shot at reunion, the document later known as the ‘Wittenberg Concord’.