Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  Clifton enumerated the various principalities and cities involved in the rival theological camps: with a clutch of Cambridge dons in his family and acquaintance, right up to Archbishop Cranmer, he was well qualified to do so. If Cromwell had not appreciated the difference between the two sides before, he certainly did now, as Clifton told him how the cities led by Strassburg and Zürich

  which be of the Evangeli [use the Bible translation] and use the ceremonies and laws of Zwingli, which be contrary to Dr Martin Luther and his law and constitutions, and those that be of his part, as the land of Saxony and Hessen, with divers other great cities and towns, went to assemble and meet together in Eisenach . . . in the land of Thuringia: to make and take a way for both parties how to execute and use their ceremonies in the Church and other constitutions that they have ordained and made, that the common people shall not murmur and grudge their conscience as it [sic] do now, to see one of one part and another of another part, and the one learned man writing against another. Wherefore if their agreement may take effect amongst themselves, I think it will be a godly way and do much good among the common people.64

  Alas, it did not.

  At the same time as Bucer reached out to the Lutherans, he wanted to do as much as possible to bind the enigmatic religious proceedings in England into what was happening in mainland Europe. He wanted the point of view of Strassburg and the Swiss to register in London; it would counteract the Lutherans, who up to now had been the chief focus of interest for English diplomacy, given that their Schmalkaldic League had military clout which might intimidate the Holy Roman Emperor. It was difficult to know what Strassburg had to offer in competition. The city’s general policy throughout the century, an extremely sensible one, was to keep out of other people’s fights.

  Bucer therefore wooed the English in the way he knew best, through books. In the first place in late 1535 he used the unlikely medium of Stephen Gardiner’s exposition of the royal supremacy, De vera obedientia, which he now had newly printed in Strassburg with lavish extra praise not only for that unappreciative prelate but also for Foxe and his colleague in embassy Nicholas Heath – plus Archbishop Cranmer. Bucer and Cranmer had actually been writing in very friendly terms to each other for four years, after contact facilitated by the Basel scholar Simon Grynaeus during his sociable tour of English worthies in 1531. Second gambit in Bucer’s charm offensive was to dedicate a couple of his own books to Cranmer and Foxe in 1536. The books concerned were major works of biblical commentary and eucharistic discussion: this was serious literary diplomacy. If Cromwell needed any prompting to notice Bucer’s compliment, it was provided by the distinguished French evangelical poet Clément Marot, now in exile from France along with John Calvin for his religious radicalism; Marot said that he could arrange similar dedications to Cromwell himself by ‘the learned men there’.65 The Lord Privy Seal had his own, more effective plans.

  Closely following Bucer’s literary diplomacy was the current chief pastor (Antistes) of Zürich, Zwingli’s successor Heinrich Bullinger, a man with as keen a nose for international contacts as Bucer himself. On the face of it, Zürich was even less promising as a continental partner for England than Bucer’s Strassburg. Strassburg was at least an international commercial centre enjoying frequent contacts with London, but there really were no natural links between the valleys of the Thames and the Limmat. The only possible asset was a personal relationship based on religious sympathy. Bullinger persuaded Grynaeus, who had been so helpful to Bucer, to effect an introduction by letter. Out of this a friendship by correspondence blossomed between Bullinger and Cranmer, using evangelical publisher/printers of London and Zürich as unobtrusive envoys in the course of their business in the book trade. Over the next year, the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to Bullinger in remarkably relaxed (even calculatedly indiscreet) style. After this success, Bullinger encouraged the leader of another Swiss Protestant city, Joachim von Watt (‘Vadianus’) in St Gallen, to get in touch with Cranmer and follow Bucer’s example by sending him his own theological writings.

  Most remarkable fruit of all these manoeuvres early in 1536 was a journey by three enthusiastically evangelical young Englishmen, John Butler, Nicholas Partridge and William Woodroffe, to pay a long educational visit to the far-away Swiss city. Some in England would consider the destination suspect, so the public story was that they were off to explore Italy. They arrived in Zürich in August 1536, so probably set out from England in July. A fourth, William Peterson, arrived in September. The visit was a great success; Bullinger took a keen personal interest, helping the young men settle into advanced biblical study in the city.66 It became reciprocal when Bullinger’s eighteen-year-old adopted son Rudolph Gwalther arrived in England in spring 1537, conducted by Partridge and Woodroffe. His two-month stay left Gwalther with golden memories for the rest of his life’s work as one of the leading pastors of Zürich. English Protestantism benefited hugely, particularly when Zürich warmly welcomed Protestant exiles in Mary Tudor’s reign. Gwalther returned to Switzerland in company with Partridge and three more Englishmen, and yet another appeared a few months later. That added to the circus Nicholas Eliot, John Finch, another now nameless and lastly in September 1537 Bartholomew Traheron – in all, eight evangelical English travellers. Some ranged further, reaching St Gallen and Konstanz, and even that turbulent city beyond the Swiss Confederation, Geneva.

  It would be easy to read all this as Archbishop Cranmer’s initiative, and certainly until the summer of 1536 he was chief apparent actor in creating England’s evangelical axis to Strassburg and Zürich. Yet the pioneering student exchange came after that. Ferreting into the origins and connections of the young Englishmen, it is striking how little they linked to Cranmer, and how much to Cromwell. Those with a university connection came from Oxford, not Cambridge; Cranmer’s connections were all the other way. Magdalen College, of which Nicholas Partridge was a Fellow, was prominent in their stories. That has added interest because over previous months Cromwell and his vice-gerential visitors were pulled into internal rows at Magdalen over the search for a new president and allied matters. On 9 September 1535 a group of mostly junior Fellows of Magdalen, Partridge included, clubbed together to write to Cromwell in warm support of the visitors’ orders for a Greek lecture and dismantling of traditional scholastic teaching, expressing themselves in unbuttoned evangelical terms. Two Thomas Marshalls, brother and son of Cromwell’s favoured evangelical printer, William Marshall, were also Magdalen men. The Magdalen squabbles may have been a catalyst to assemble travellers to Switzerland.67

  One Fellow of Merton College Oxford, John Parkhurst, did not make it to Zürich at this time, but he was a linchpin in all this and emphasizes the Cromwell connection. He was one of Zürich’s greatest friends in later years, spending a happy exile there under Mary before becoming first Elizabethan Bishop of Norwich. In the 1530s he was a protégé of Cromwell’s Gloucestershire protégé Richard Tracey, foster-father to the eighth traveller Bartholomew Traheron. Parkhurst was from Guildford, which brings us another link among the Swiss travellers: to Nicholas Eliot, a Student (Fellow) of King Henry’s College Oxford, and the most obviously charismatic among the whole group (alas he died young). Eliot, probably son of the Master at Guildford’s Free School, was in turn a close relative of Cromwell’s employees Thomas and Henry Polstead, the latter of whom was also the subject of an elegant complimentary Latin verse from Parkhurst. Finally in these various Cromwell links, Peterson cannot be traced at Oxford, but unexpectedly he was brother to Robert Peterson, the Prior of Lewes, who was indeed an Oxford man, and whose great monastery as we will see soon became home to Gregory Cromwell.

  Other features stand out among the eight visitors to Zürich. If Cranmer was really their patron, one would expect them to show some interest in clerical careers. One, William Woodroffe, was apparently already a priest, but with a curiously obscure clerical career before the Elizabethan period, including his flight from Oxford Uni
versity at a time of witch-hunts against evangelicals in 1529, leaving behind a cache of books revealing his fascination with Erasmus.68 In contrast to the clerical vocations of their friends in Zürich, as well as in contrast to Cranmer’s clientage, none of the others sought a primarily clerical path into the Church of Henry VIII. This is not surprising, given their pronounced partisanship for Zürich religion (one or two considered even Bucer an unsound compromiser with Lutheranism); the Henrician Church was just too tainted, even when led by Cranmer. Instead, the Lord Privy Seal and his friends directed them into secular paths: a royal bursary to study law for Eliot, direct employment by Cromwell for Traheron, and for Partridge not a clerical title but a lectureship in divinity paid by Cromwell’s client Bishop William Barlow. Eliot acted for a while as tutor in the household of Cromwell’s servant Anthony Aucher, down at Dover. Peterson and Butler simply became merchants, which took them to Strassburg’s newly forming evangelical English community.

  All this fits together, but the most persuasive evidence comes from Rudolph Gwalther’s visit to England in 1537. Being both conscientious and Swiss, he kept a detailed diary of this exciting and exotic trip, complete with accomplished sketch-maps.69 Naturally, he started out via Basel and an interview with Simon Grynaeus. Coming from the Zürich humanist elite, Gwalther also reverenced the brand-new monument of the late Erasmus in the former cathedral, and being of Swiss theological persuasion he showed equal reverence for Luther’s bugbear Andreas Karlstadt, then lecturing in Basel. Further humanist tourism en route involved a friendly meeting in Bruges with Princess Mary’s old tutor Juan Luis Vives, perhaps for a briefing on how a foreigner should behave in England. That was a couple of days before facing the delays and miseries of the Channel, its marine terrors an unfamiliar experience for the Swiss. After a grim Calais–Dover crossing, Gwalther’s idyll began among Partridge’s relatives in Kent, then a sequence of distinguished hosts up to Cranmer at Lambeth: Sir Edward Wotton at Boughton Malherbe (3 miles from the Partridges at Lenham) and in London Wotton’s brother-in-law Lord John Grey. This was the same Lord John Grey who back in 1526 had so singularly saluted Cromwell as his brother, and the common factor here was Margaret Wotton Dowager Marchioness of Dorset, Thomas Cromwell’s former employer.70

  By now it was early March 1537. The sight of the Lady Mary with her father and stepmother at Greenwich Palace provoked Gwalther to edifying reflections on the dangers of courtly life and riches, but he was still young enough to be delighted with Greenwich’s whale skeleton, chaperoned by the genial Clerk of the Royal Kitchen Michael Wentworth, a relative of his companion William Woodroffe (the lions in the Tower of London also entertained him).71 Then at last, on 11 March, it was Oxford, and Magdalen College, where the voyagers were greeted by an enthusiastic party of Oxford dons, six of whom were among the twenty Fellows of Magdalen signing the petition to Cromwell back in September 1535 – seven, counting in Gwalther’s fellow-traveller Partridge. John Parkhurst also came across from Merton to join the fun.72

  Gwalther had many more delights during his tour: Syon Abbey impressed him mightily, and Nicholas Udall the erudite headmaster of Eton seems to have kept his hands to himself. Further warm hospitality from Lord John Grey and Cranmer enlivened the journey back to a much easier Channel crossing from Margate. While in Kent, Gwalther enjoyed an antiquarian tour of Leeds Castle, lately home in succession to Cromwell’s friends Sir Henry and Edward Guildford. Throughout, one senses a friendly absence of the unifying personality behind all this, the Lord Privy Seal. It was natural and politic that Bullinger as chief clergyman of the city of Zürich should make his approaches and sustain open friendship with the chief clergyman of the kingdom of England. Cromwell would have been ill advised to show open involvement. The importance of his keeping out of the limelight in regard to the Swiss exchange was underlined by what happened next.

  Gwalther was guileless courier back to Switzerland of a packet of letters from Cranmer, one appropriately to Bullinger and another to be forwarded to Vadianus in St Gallen. Vadianus would have been disconcerted by the contents: a thank-you note for his present of his theological Aphorisms from 1536, but actually a hatchet-job on their eucharistic theology. Cranmer found Vadianus’s ‘remembrance’ view of the eucharist unacceptable, and said so at length.73 Thus Cranmer, like his royal master (and like Luther), still at this stage vigorously affirmed the real presence in the eucharist against the Swiss and Strassburgers. Not long afterwards, he sent an equally astringent reply to another literary overture, from Bucer’s colleague as Strassburg pastor Wolfgang Capito. This was even more serious, because Capito had dedicated his book to King Henry, and after having it read and analysed for him, the King seized just as sharply as Cranmer on its statements about the eucharist.74 Although Cranmer did not thereafter end contacts with Zürich, he was much more circumspect and deliberately dilatory in letter-writing. It was not until King Henry’s death in 1547 that he felt able to abandon his scholarly caution about the eucharist; the removal of the terrifying charisma of King Henry then allowed him to make the great leap across the theological divide, jettisoning a real-presence theology resembling Luther’s and embracing the symbolist view of the eucharist that Zwingli had pioneered.

  Yet still Zürich was never high among Cranmer’s priorities across the sea, certainly compared with Strassburg.75 In the meantime, the overseas contacts continued without him, and the young men from 1536–8 continued in wanderings and warm correspondence with their friends across the water. The Polsteads sustained their Surrey relatives, and so rather unexpectedly did yet another connection of the Marchioness of Dorset, her son-in-law Henry Fitzalan, then Lord Maltravers before succeeding to his father’s Earldom of Arundel. Fitzalan was thus also part of the Grey circle. He has often been seen as more conservative in religion than was really the case in his early career.76 Finally, in early 1540 Lord Chancellor Audley sounded out Bullinger on a return visit to England by Rudolph Gwalther, perhaps again ventriloquized by Cromwell. From 1538 Audley had been brother-in-law to both Maltravers and Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset.77

  Although Gwalther’s second trip did not materialize (hardly surprisingly in view of events in 1540), in Edward VI’s reign a procession of talented scholars and theologians followed his footsteps from Zürich to Oxford, playing a significant part in counteracting the still powerful conservatism of the University. Their consistent patrons were the Marchioness of Dorset’s son Henry Grey, now Duke of Suffolk, plus his scholarly daughter Lady Jane Grey: both receiving praise from Heinrich Bullinger. We must remember too how the same Kentish gentry cousinage spread outwards to embrace both leaders of Edward VI’s government, Edward Seymour and John Dudley. Once Jane Grey’s coerced venture in queenship was crushed by the Lady Mary’s coup d’état in 1553, Zürich became the most welcoming of hosts for shell-shocked Protestant English refugee scholars, and on return to the England of Elizabeth I they provided most of the first bishops in her restored Protestant Church of England. They fostered decades of close relationships with the Alpine city so far away, and made Queen Elizabeth’s Church resemble Zürich’s Church much more than Geneva’s.

  This has been a complex tale to tease out, founded on sideways glances and glimpses of relationships, yet it is perhaps the most important story in Cromwell’s career. It is dependent on seeing how his early service to the second Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset in the 1520s created links into the Kentish upper gentry and a common disposition not just towards Protestant religion, but to the crystallizing identity of that form of Protestantism later called Reformed. Quietly, with extraordinary discretion, Cromwell put friends and household to support an enterprise of international theological matchmaking with no immediate strategic relevance, and which would have aroused the suspicion and rage of King Henry if he had fully known about it. No cynical, ‘secular-minded’ politician would have taken such risks. Cromwell was deliberately laying foundations for a Protestant future. Many in England in 1536 could already percei
ve at least that broader intention. Their moment was at hand to strike against the heretical minister.

  16

  Grace for the Commonwealth: 1536

  In autumn 1536 rebellions in Lincolnshire and the North nearly brought down the Tudor regime; the rising of northern England is remembered as the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’. Widespread rage at the policies of Thomas Cromwell, indeed his very existence in government, lay at its heart. As we excavate its course, two events need placing in the prehistory. First is the rising that did not happen in summer 1535. Early that June, widespread riots broke out in the Craven region of the Pennines; the rioters cast down fences and field-walls from enclosures to lay them open for common use. The business touched on quarrels among the gentry. One of the most significant local landowners, Sir Marmaduke Tunstall (nephew of Bishop Tunstall), was accused of raising around 200 armed men to intimidate followers of Thomas Stanley Lord Monteagle, in what was no doubt a long-standing feud.

  Though a serious disturbance, this was all still routine stuff. Cromwell had some reliable friends in the right area to tip him off about it, including Dr Thomas Lee’s cousin and godfather Sir James Layburn, a local servant of the Duke of Richmond who owed Master Secretary many favours, so the news reached him by 18 June. He sent a strong circular letter to local JPs (plus one he wrongly thought was a JP, who was nevertheless very willing to help), and they swung into action, holding a prolonged emergency sessions at Craven in which eighty-two people were indicted for riot in three different locations. Some of those convicted were then distributed around various prisons.1

  The justices reported reassuringly if a little ungrammatically as soon as 5 July: ‘as far as we can perceive at this time, all the country is quiet at this present day as ever they were, and the malefactors is sorry for their offences, and as soon as they were sent for in the King’s name and yours, came unto us without denier, and submit themselves unto the King’s Highness to be punished at his pleasure.’2 So everyone in the Pennines behaved according to script: rioters showed their anger and made their point, gentry stepped in armed with menaces including Cromwell’s authority and, once outward peace had been restored, any gentry participation was quietly forgotten, no doubt accompanied by severe words in private. Sir Marmaduke Tunstall had quickly enlisted in the ranks of his fellow-gentry in exercising retribution, as Sir James Layburn reported back to Cromwell, without comment. The prisoners were left to endure what was no doubt a stuffy and unpleasant time in gaol until late August and September 1535, when local magnates all advised Cromwell that they would have learned their lesson and could be released.3 No deaths and, above all, at no stage did anyone mention religion.