Previously, even while gaining a barony, the Vice-Gerency and the third most senior office in the realm as Lord Privy Seal, Cromwell continued to be named only to the counties where he had substantial estates: Essex, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey. When a new commission was issued for Oxfordshire on 28 June 1537 he gained a place on the bench there, once more reflecting a substantial land purchase he was contemplating in that county. Then on 26 October came his first known commission outside lowland England, in Derbyshire.53 The only exceptions to his being named to every commission from that November until his fall were a number of episcopal and monastic liberties with their own commissions of the peace, which is a remarkable example of his legal scrupulosity, considering his consistent drive to get rid of ecclesiastical exempt jurisdictions.54
It was on 24 October that a terrible tragedy overcame the delight of Prince Edward’s birth. The Queen had never properly recovered from childbirth; her sickness increased and suddenly became desperate with the onset of septicaemia; she sank into delirium. At eight that evening the Duke of Norfolk scribbled an urgent note to Cromwell: ‘My good lord, I pray you to be here tomorrow early to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress, there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity, and I fear she shall not be on live [alive] at the time ye shall read this.’55 Queen Jane died at around midnight; she was only twenty-eight. King Henry was devastated; this was one marriage where his love had no time to cool.
Even in death Jane performed her unifying role: at her funeral on 12 November, Lady Mary was the chief mourner. Nevertheless it is notable how well represented in the ceremonies were what one can now call the Cromwell affinity; their principals were, after all, close relatives of the deceased Queen. Among the half-dozen notables bearing banners alongside the heralds in procession were Gregory Cromwell (his first ever public duty), his cousin Richard and Richard’s father-in-law Sir Thomas Denys, together with one of Cromwell’s great supporters in Cornwall, Sir William Godolphin. Lady Ughtred and Richard Cromwell’s wife were among the principal mourners, as was the lady-in-waiting who had married Cromwell’s senior servant Richard Tomyou.56 Formally nothing much had changed. Edward was still heir apparent, the Seymours in the King’s high favour. Their joint interest with the Lord Privy Seal was perhaps greater than ever, for the one great difference in Court politics was that the King was in marital terms a free agent once more.
Once Henry got over his genuine grief at Jane’s death, he would be seeking another wife, to provide him with the spare son he would feel necessary for his fragile and complicated dynastic line. That would interest other members of the English nobility; it certainly interested the Duke of Norfolk, who, in the letter of November telling Cromwell of Henry’s agreement to their bargain over Lewes and Castle Acre, also recounted his talk of succession with the King,
(though peradventure not wisely, yet after mine accustomed manner plainly) exhorting him to take in good part the pleasure of Almighty God in taking out of this transitory life the Queen our late mistress, and recomfort himself with the high treasure sent to him and his realm, that is to say, the Prince, with many other persuasions to advise him to tract no longer time than force should drive him unto, to provide for a new wife, by whom of likelihood more children might be brought forth to our most rejoice and consolation.57
The King would be more suspicious than ever of any nobleman who appeared to threaten the life of his son, even by passively possessing an unhealthily large dose of potential royal blood. In the eternal calculation of factors influencing Henry’s attitude to his nobility, three days before that conversation the Duke of Norfolk was relieved of one past embarrassment of that sort, in the shape of his half-brother Lord Thomas Howard, attainted for his unauthorized marriage to Lady Margaret Douglas. Lord Thomas died still a prisoner in the Tower of London. It was a consortium of Cromwell, Wriothesley and Lord Hertford who diplomatically cited maternal grief to negotiate the King’s consent for Howard’s quiet burial by his mother the Dowager Duchess. She took him up to Thetford Priory, to lie near that other victim of fate, the Duke of Richmond.58
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These various dynastic preoccupations shaped Henry’s actions over the next two years. In the aftermath of Jane’s death, Cromwell stuck as close to Court as he could. Having secured his foothold in St James’s Palace, thanks to the plague’s unusually prolonged virulence, he made little effort to return to The Rolls from this useful entrée to the royal precinct of Whitehall. Many of his surviving letters this autumn are dated from St James’s or the subsidiary royal house in Westminster called The Neat (in what is now Pimlico).* At this time of mourning, we should guard against the temptation to read everything in terms of faction and self-interest. That thoughtful and scholarly prelate Cuthbert Tunstall, writing from York to Cromwell, added to a long business letter a postscript in his own hand, urging comfort for the King: ‘Of his mirth, all our mirth depends, and of his heaviness all our heaviness; wherefore my singular good Lord, show yourself a solicite and diligent servant, as I am sure ye do.’59
Cromwell was exhausted from the strain of autumn events. In mid-December, ‘somewhat acrazed [ill]’, he announced to suitors he was retiring to Mortlake, and for the next week or more would undertake only the King’s business. The unspoken message was that he wanted time with his son and daughter-in law.60 This may explain why they failed to arrive promptly in their new home in Sussex. There was excitement in Lewes at the prospective arrival of the Lord Privy Seal’s son (and probably more so at the prospect of his wife, the King’s sister-in-law). John Milsent, uncomfortably camping out in the vast empty buildings on 12 December, confided his worry about any further delay to Henry Polstead: ‘The people hereabouts are very sorry because that Master Gregory and my Lady do not come down before Christmas; they think that they shall not come at all, and so the house to be broken up here.’ It was encouraging locals to break into the precinct and steal anything they could lay their hands on while Milsent and his three companions were occupied in other parts of the site.61
After New Year, arrangements at Lewes and Titchfield resumed their pace. Wriothesley was quick off the mark beginning the conversion of his abbey, which involved a particularly ruthless conversion of the church into splendid domestic apartments: the ruins of the results can still be viewed. His plans were already advanced around New Year 1538, with neighbours agreeing to buy up materials in the building right down to the gravestones in the floors (John Husee urgently consulted Lord Lisle to see whether he would like the coffin of his first wife removed to the local parish church).62 One senior local conservative cleric, contemplating the resulting havoc in company with a fellow-visitor, Cromwell’s servant Richard Tomyou, expressed his dismay rather ambiguously: ‘it was [would be] a good deed to save the walls of the church there standing to a use, and a piteous sight to see them thrown down where they might stand to a use.’ A thrifty Wriothesley would have agreed.63
Cromwell’s plans at Lewes were even more ruthless: total destruction of the majestic priory church by one of the kingdom’s foremost Italian engineers, Giovanni Portinari, eventually carried out in March. Portinari even proposed speeding up the work with gunpowder, and had on hand some of the most skilled construction workers in London (in other words, the King’s employees).64* That left the residential parts of the monastic complex intact for Gregory and his wife. That month they moved into a property probably already much improved from the half-sacked premises of Christmastide. They left for Sussex soon after the christening of their son Henry on 1 March, probably at Hampton Court. What looks like an associated entertainment, mounted by Lord Cromwell’s players and musicians, was staged for the benefit of King Henry himself: Portinari, a Renaissance Man as well as a demolition man, was in charge of this masque.65 The Lady Mary almost certainly stood godmother at the christening of this loyally named boy; she gave an expensive cup at the christening and the substantial sum of forty shillings to the nurse and mi
dwife, with messages before to the Lord Privy Seal and afterwards to the young couple at Lewes. This fits well with the other evidence of Mary’s warm relations with Cromwell in the mid-1530s.66
On Gregory’s arrival in Sussex, he was straight away put to apprenticeship as a county gentleman. He proudly signed a joint letter with old Sir John Gage on 19 March about examining a rogue ex-monk of Lewes Priory, committing him to Bishop Sampson’s commissary for imprisonment.67 The young man had never been the most prompt of correspondents, but in his first proper private letter home, on 11 April, he explained with a silkiness perhaps borrowed from his tutor Henry Dowes that ‘I have long deferred to write unto you of my state and condition, and how both my wife and I like this country,’ wanting ‘more experience in the same than I could have in a day or twain’s proof’. He professed himself delighted with Lewes, fêted by local nobility and gentry as in his previous rural tours, and ‘as concerning the house and the situation of the same, it doth undoubtedly right much please and content both me and my wife, and is to her so commodious as she thinketh herself to be here right well settled.’68 The letter was in his own neat secretary-hand, a touchingly close if slightly clumsy imitation of Dowes’s. Gregory, very grown up now, even tried an elegant little play on words about the welcome from Sussex society ‘with their presences and also presents’.
Cromwell was preoccupied with the future of his dynasty at least as much as the King was with his. Gregory had reached a milestone in a future so carefully constructed for him: now the young Sussex magnate, fulfilling one main goal in all his father’s striving and scheming over the last decade. Cromwell even arranged a secondary house for him 10 miles to the north of Lewes, Sheffield in the parish of Fletching, apparently part of the estates of that lesser Sussex monastery King Henry had given him at Michelham. This pairing of capital mansion and satellite-house was a classic arrangement for upper county gentry, in imitation of the King’s own more spectacular arrangements west of London. The Lord Privy Seal spent some time at Sheffield himself that summer while the Court was on progress in the area.69
When Gregory wrote his letter from Lewes on 16 April 1538, he was sitting as JP at quarter sessions in the town. He conducted an examination of some malefactors, all on his own. These vandals were being indicted for digging up and casting down a wayside cross, part of a popular craze in the 1530s for seeking hidden treasure in such places.70 Back in London, Gregory’s father was contributing rather more officially to the tally of ecclesiastical demolition in a variety of ways. The keynote of the year 1538 was destruction.
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Cutting Down Trees: 1538
In 1564 a clergyman-doctor and author called William Bulleine published what turned out to be his most popular work, A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence, a medley of moralizing, medical advice and travel fantasy carefully positioned for the Protestant mass market. In one section of the fantasy, the hero conducts his wife round the parlour of an inn ornamented with instructive pictures, sententiously answering her eager questions about their subjects and meaning. After falling for some misogynistic teasing, she admires a particular portrait. ‘Oh wife,’ says her husband, ‘it was the picture or effigium of a nobleman, which in his days served a great King, and was like the cutter down of trees by the ground. But if God had not (upon some secret purpose) prevented his labour in the wood of Antichrist, he would have utterly eradicated all papistry.’ This is the only picture in their exhaustive scrutiny to be identified by name: the margin notes that it is ‘the Lord Cromwell’, who died when Bulleine was in his mid-twenties.1
Religious and political forestry was Cromwell’s business in 1538 more than in any other year of his royal service: all the kingdom’s friaries, many of its monasteries and its principal shrines and their relics tumbled, and in the end one of the greatest noble affinities, including some of the King’s oldest friends, crashed down as well. In this year the Vice-Gerent’s promotion of evangelical reformation in the kingdom reached its height, but he also found frustration in his boldest plan yet to link England to the Protestant Reformations in mainland Europe. It was part of the wider question of foreign policy, and – dangerously as always – it concerned the King’s marriage. Foreign affairs was always a problem for Cromwell, as the King considered this area of government peculiarly his own, with no hint of the formal delegation that the Vice-Gerency represented in religion; Henry had a continuous experience of international diplomacy now stretching back nearly thirty years. At a moment of particular irritation with Cromwell for obstinately persisting with his own line of foreign policy that spring, the King was prepared to say to the French ambassador that the Lord Privy Seal ‘was a good manager, but not fit to meddle in the concerns of kings’.2
Cromwell’s current problem was to turn a vital question away from domestic into foreign policy. Should the King’s new wife be from within the realm or from abroad? Rather remarkably, King Henry allowed this question to be a subject for discussion, at least formally and in his presence: the great civil servant Sir Thomas Smith reminisces that, as a young Fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge, he first came to the attention of Henry VIII when he debated with Sir John Cheke at Court after the death of Queen Jane as to ‘whether his Majesty should wed someone from overseas or one of his own people’.3 One can see the King, with his pretensions as a patron of learning, seeing this as an ideal demonstration of the practical uses of humanist rhetorical skills.
Cromwell himself had no doubts about the answer, as was starkly revealed in a private argument with Cranmer, who took the opposite view.4 The two men’s disagreement nicely demonstrates their different priorities. Cranmer was solicitous for Henry’s personal happiness, as a royal chaplain should be. He said he did not wish to see the King ‘marry without [outside] the realm’. The Archbishop ‘thought it most expedient the King to marry where that he had his fantasy and love, for that would be most comfort for his Grace’. Cromwell snapped back furiously, ‘There was none meet for him within this realm.’ One can see exactly why the Lord Privy Seal should say that: a marital alliance with any noble family of the kingdom, but with the Howards in particular, would suck further value out of his alliance with the Seymours. Cranmer retorted with spirit ‘that it would be very strange to be married with her that he could not talk withal’. Given that he probably had to teach English to his own German wife Margarete back in 1532, he spoke from experience. In the event the supposedly politically naive Cranmer got the King’s psychology right; if only Cromwell had listened to him.
King Henry himself agreed with Cromwell, at least on the general principle. During the next two years of long-distance courting, his clear priority was the overseas option; the question was where to place his marriage in the European diplomatic balance.5 His requirements were unrealistically high; not only did he seek beauty and the prospect of more children, he wanted to kill as many diplomatic birds with one stone as possible, in a situation where the two European dynasties greater and more secure than the Tudors, the Habsburgs and Valois, seemed dangerously close to finding real agreement after years of warfare. Grave dangers for England and its excommunicated monarch loomed from these Catholic rulers making common cause; inevitably that would exclude Henry, and maybe lead to something much worse. This was perfectly realistic. In August 1538, Chapuys once more delicately raised with the Lady Mary the prospect of flight abroad; although she discounted the idea for the moment, looking instead for better treatment from her father, she did not definitively reject it, and significantly told the imperial ambassador that she might herself write to the Emperor.6 At the end of the year, the current French ambassador in England, the Sieur de Castillon, wrote to his friend Constable de Montmorency at a moment of especial exasperation with the English government, outlining at some length a proposal for a joint invasion of England by King François and Charles V.7
What dynastic marriage would best minimize such a risk? Apart from himself (whom some observers might have considered a
dubious asset), King Henry now had three children to offer, at various levels of diplomatic attractiveness. Obviously Edward was the prime exhibit, but Mary and Elizabeth gained much from being part of the portfolio. Accordingly, King Henry was promiscuous in his approaches to the most senior eligible ladies in western Europe, in ways entertaining to members of Europe’s political elite with a greater sense of the absurd than himself. Perhaps his most ambitious effort, a parody of Cardinal Wolsey’s efforts at universal peace, was a suggestion retailed to a carefully straight-faced Castillon in February 1538 that the King himself should marry the twenty-three-year-old French Duchess Marie de Guise (from one of France’s greatest ducal houses), while Edward should marry the Emperor’s daughter, Mary wed the heir to the throne of Portugal and Elizabeth the heir of Charles V’s brother King Ferdinand. Three days before, Cromwell sent his protégé Thomas Wyatt (at present ambassador to the Emperor) a version of this scheme minus any reference to its principal French component, to offer Charles V. It is unlikely that that well-informed monarch would have failed to ask about the missing element in the package.8
Cromwell was not an honest broker in all this. His emphatic preference was as ever for a Habsburg alliance, all the more so because the Duke of Norfolk, both from general inclination and because of his long-standing pension from the French, was equally consistent in supporting a French marriage. Their fragile alliance of convenience of autumn 1537 disappeared, particularly when their differences led to Cromwell’s humiliation at Court at the beginning of May. The French ambassador was perfectly aware of these alignments and found them highly amusing; he relished describing to Montmorency Cromwell’s discomfiture when King Henry’s affections veered decisively towards a French alliance cemented by a Guise marriage. This was the same letter in which Castillon reported Henry’s dismissive remarks about Cromwell’s fitness for foreign policy. ‘On that, he sent for Norfolk, whom the Lord Privy Seal was preventing as much as he could from coming to Court. And my said Lord is utterly thwarted [bien camus], and so suspect in matters concerning France that at the moment his advice is not much sought; and now most of the leading men at Court visit me, which is a very good sign . . . in a nutshell, M. de Norfolk is more welcome than for a long time, and my Lord under suspicion for too much Spanish passion.’9
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