Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  This was the tipping-point. By the end of the month, Sir Geoffrey was in the Tower, so crushed by the turn of events that he attempted suicide. As he and others added their fragments to a picture of discontented posturing and occasionally treasonous words, enough was pieced together from early November to justify the arrest of Exeter, Montague and eventually the Countess of Salisbury herself.16 Ambassador Castillon, still lodged in Chelsea, straight away saw this crisis for what it was: ‘Long ago this King said to me that he would like to wipe out this House of Montague, which still represents the White Rose [of York] – and the House of Pole from which the Cardinal comes.’17 Now those sharing the King’s inclination in that direction, principally Cromwell, had the task of keeping their master fixed to that destructive aim.

  This agenda had its problems, because the autumn of 1538 proved a switchback of religious extremes, always dangerous for what by now we can call a new evangelical establishment. Among the peerage they numbered Cromwell, the Grey network, the Seymour family interest and their circle of friendship, and on the ecclesiastical side Cranmer and the group of like-minded bishops from Hilsey to Latimer to Shaxton, backed up by their clientage in the universities.18 The evangelical clergy were much more clear-cut in their views, more committed by vocation and hence more exposed, than the noblemen. Nevertheless, all were painfully aware of their vulnerability, particularly now that one of their most determined opponents, Stephen Gardiner, had returned from near three years of embassy in France, vigilant for any opportunity to arouse the King’s suspicions of evangelical proceedings.

  The evangelicals’ strategy to cover their backs was to show themselves as severe as possible to those on their more radical flank. In any case they saw the persecution of Anabaptists as a necessary and congenial task to protect godly religion, as was apparent when the threat first appeared in 1535 (see above, Chapter 12). It was helpful that a renewed warning of Anabaptist activity in England came in a letter to King Henry from their own allies in mainland Europe, Philipp of Hessen and Johann Friedrich of Saxony. Radical activity, it turned out, had extended to a printed English tract challenging orthodox views on the nature of Jesus Christ. Cromwell acted straight away, appointing vice-gerential commissioners from the areas around London where the threat was most acute; the commissioners were balanced between evangelicals and conservatives. Burnings of Anabaptists followed in the capital and in Colchester.

  Alongside that campaign was an affair potentially far more dangerous to the evangelical cause, because it involved one of their own, a former don of Queens’ Cambridge called John Lambert alias Nicholson. In 1531, when the old Church leadership was still fighting its corner, Convocation singled Lambert out for prosecution alongside such figures of the future establishment as Hugh Latimer. By winter 1536 it was Cranmer and Latimer who found themselves constrained to get Lambert imprisoned by Chancellor Audley for sounding off about prayer to saints. Now, in autumn 1538, Lambert confronted a prominent London evangelical and royal chaplain, John Taylor, with outspoken scepticism about the bodily presence of Christ in eucharistic bread and wine. Taylor called on Robert Barnes to help him defend a real-presence theology which avoided papal error (Barnes was, after all, the most obvious and authentic Lutheran in all England), and he then brought in Cranmer. The Archbishop prudently put Lambert in confinement again – but all in vain: fatally convinced of his own rightness, Lambert appealed to the King to hear his case.

  This was a disastrous misjudgement. Henry’s customary inclination to occupy himself with theology when lacking a wife made him take a particular interest in the case, and his mood was currently veering towards the conservative end of his volatile spectrum. That was apparent from a new royal proclamation on religion: a personal public intervention, sidelining his Vice-Gerent, who one might have thought had already produced enough regulation for the Church less than two months before. The proclamation followed up various of Cromwell’s orders, and repeated condemnations of Anabaptism and Becket, but it also imposed censorship on the printing press, including unauthorized versions of the Bible, and it expressly forbade clergy to marry – a reaction to the fact that in southern England a number of clergy were doing just that (not to mention the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife Margarete, lurking obscurely in one of his palaces in Kent).

  Even if we did not possess a draft of this proclamation emended in the King’s own hand, the general shapelessness and theological incoherence of the final version is redolent of brusque royal papering-over of disagreements among his bishops. Worse still for John Lambert, this document was issued on 16 November as part of the theatrics in the most high-profile heresy trial that early Tudor England had seen, with Lambert himself and King Henry as joint and opposed stars of the proceedings. The Supreme Head of the Church of England chose to preside himself over the event in Westminster Hall, symbolically clad in white, with his bishops merely as assistants to undertake the theological detail of prosecution. Cromwell’s only substantial part was to house the condemned prisoner, presumably at The Rolls, before Lambert was taken to the stake at Smithfield on 22 November: the same fate as Forest had suffered there six months before, but for polar-opposite beliefs.

  The whole Lambert business hugely embarrassed John Foxe when he wrote it up in Acts and Monuments, given that it implicated some of his chief Protestant heroes in burning a man who looked in retrospect like a good Protestant. Cranmer in particular has come in for plenty of abuse for inconsistency among later writers.19 Yet the Archbishop’s own theology of the eucharist at the time was opposed to the views of Lambert, who may also have affirmed some real radicalism on infant baptism and the nature of Christ, and the Lutheran princes of Germany expressed no disapproval of the condemnation. Cromwell kept his counsel. Two days later, effectively in a continuation of the same theatre, Bishop Hilsey returned to Paul’s Cross to deliver a definitive exposure and mockery of the Holy Blood of Hailes, this time with the relic on hand as his visual aid – in careful pairing with this symbol of old error, new error was represented by four immigrant Anabaptist prisoners standing beside the pulpit bearing their heretics’ faggots, preparatory to burning at the stake. The occasion was a necessary act of damage limitation for the evangelical establishment in relation to King Henry.20

  Lurking in the background for evangelical advantage was the chief factor balancing the King’s affirmation of traditional theology and keeping him savagely inclined against the Poles and Courtenays: the threat from Rome. From the early autumn, letters reached Cranmer and Cromwell, principally from their man in Italy Thomas Theobald, reporting proceedings against the King in Rome. Imminent was a final publication of the papal excommunication long hanging over Henry, and there was a prospect of equally damaging practical action to follow: the Pope was urging the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor to impose a trade embargo on England. That had been a standard move against the Infidel in the great days of the Crusades, and though obstinately religion-blind merchants had tended to ignore such orders in the interests of commerce, there was no knowing whether it might not work this time, backed by two great monarchs with modern resources. Accompanying this alarming prospect were Theobald’s caustic reports on Reginald Pole’s household, which included their dealings with William Tyndale’s betrayer Henry Phelips and the Welsh would-be rebel leader James ap Hywel.21

  Royal action against the Montague circle therefore anticipated the formal promulgation of the papal excommunication in Rome on 17 December.22 By then a fortnight had elapsed since the trials, heavily managed by Cromwell, and although the Countess of Salisbury was for the time being spared in the Tower of London, most of the other principals were dead. The one long-term survivor was Sir Geoffrey Pole, who in his state of psychological collapse had babbled out extra evidence of his family’s contacts with the Cardinal. He gained his life at the expense of any remaining self-esteem; his second unsuccessful suicide attempt followed during the Christmas season. Many years later, in changed times, the surv
iving heir of the Courtenays, a pardonably unstable young man, came across Sir Geoffrey travelling in Liège, and only hasty government security work prevented a revenge killing.23

  The evangelicals thus survived some testing times, and disposed of old friends of the King who, had they succeeded in regaining Henry’s old affection, could have destroyed the Lord Privy Seal and all he stood for.24 Cromwell had been doing his best gradually to place his friends in the King’s Privy Chamber; the arrival of Thomas Heneage as Chief Gentleman and Groom of the Stool after the fall of Anne Boleyn had been a satisfying milestone in that process. Now in January 1539, matters decisively speeded up: Sir Francis Bryan, flamboyant (and conservative-minded) veteran of the Privy Chamber, was sidelined in favour of the straitlaced evangelical Anthony Denny, and the senior courtier Sir Anthony Browne was also discountenanced. Most dramatically of all, Cromwell himself was at the same time named Chief Nobleman of the Privy Chamber: a satisfaction for the Putney boy, and another pointed snub to ancient nobility. More and more Privy Chamber staff were evangelicals: joining Denny and Ralph Sadler were Philip Hoby, Richard Morison and John Lascelles, all of whom were Cromwell’s servants before they were the King’s, and did not radically change their allegiance now.25 In regional politics, the counterpart of this was to set up an institution to deal with residual Courtenay or Pole influence in the West Country: a Council like that in the Marches of Wales, to have oversight of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, under Cromwell’s old ally John Russell, who was granted a barony and a Garter knighthood. In fact this ‘Council of the West’ proved an unnecessary precaution, and was closed down without fuss after only a few years.26

  Ripples of evangelical advantage spread outwards from the political upheavals. Notable was a peerage for Cromwell’s colleague and (in most circumstances) collaborator, Lord Chancellor Audley, who gained his barony of Walden on 29 November 1538. His title came from his recent acquisition of the rich Benedictine house of Saffron Walden Abbey in Essex; its Abbot moonlighted for some time before the dissolution not only as suffragan Bishop of Colchester but as Steward of Audley’s estates.27 Today we know the Jacobean successor of the resulting stately home as Audley End. Cromwell hoped for more. The Duke of Norfolk’s later angry reminiscence in 1546 reveals that the Lord Privy Seal had probed whether it might be possible to draw Norfolk into the net of accusation in the course of his interrogations: ‘Cromwell, at such time as the Marquess of Exeter suffered, examined his wife more straitly of me than of all other men in the realm, as she sent me word by her brother the Lord Mountjoy.’28

  This was one of the first signs that the always fraught relationship of Norfolk and Cromwell was badly breaking down. Master Secretary’s questions to the Marchioness about the Duke remained private, but the fate of the White Rose group increasingly convinced the remaining conservative grandees that Cromwell, his policies and ambitions, threatened them too. Amid the general settling of accounts, the Lord Privy Seal grimly pushed change forward. In December, he secured a circular on religious reform in the King’s name to county JPs, vigorously reasserting and further explaining his September injunctions. It went out so abruptly that its last instruction, presumably addressed to a hastily chosen set of local magnates, was to get the letter copied for distribution to all their neighbouring JPs.29 Amid all this fast-moving high politics, one is inclined to forgive Cromwell for badly losing his temper with Lady Lisle when she turned up in London. She badgered him on a range of private business concerns and royal favours sought by the myopic couple, oblivious to how wrong the moment was: ‘how he handled me and shook me up, I will not now write, nor it is not to be written,’ she reported to her husband in great and ungrammatical indignation.30

  On New Year’s Eve came an unexpected addition to the cull among King Henry’s oldest friends: Sir Nicholas Carew, Cromwell’s fellow-conspirator against Queen Anne back in 1536. Carew’s destruction is puzzling and the charges against him so miscellaneous as to suggest an even greater degree of improvisation than in the trials earlier that month. The only previous sign of anything untoward was that he had been passed over in the King’s choice of Sheriff for Surrey in November, which may reflect a suspicion he was too close to the White Rose group to be a reliable agent in their imminent trials.31 Carew was nevertheless on the jury condemning the prisoners. That may have triggered his arrest, since one of the charges in his own indictment was that he commented sceptically about the proceedings, ‘I marvel greatly that the indictment against the Lord Marquess was so secretly handled and for what purpose, for the like was never seen.’32 Diplomatic spin-doctoring about the White Rose conspiracy to foreign powers made much of Carew’s letters found among the papers of the condemned, but it is hardly surprising such letters existed in this small Court circle.33

  Ultimately, given King Henry’s volatility this autumn, there may be some truth in a Carew family tradition preserved by Thomas Fuller that a quarrel during a game of bowls turned sour: Henry ‘gave this knight opprobrious language, betwixt jest and earnest; to which the other returned an answer rather true than discreet’.34 When Carew was eventually executed on 3 March 1539, he was not treated in death with the same fury as the White Rose group. Like Anne Boleyn before him, he did not have his head spiked up in public as a traitor, but it was reunited with his body in a grave near hers in the Tower chapel. That consideration, and Carew’s public announcement from the scaffold that he had converted to evangelical belief in prison, suggests quiet intervention by Cromwell on his old collaborator’s behalf.35 The widowed Lady Carew acknowledged Cromwell’s kindness in getting a royal grant of some of the considerable Carew property, and she sought a supplement to emergency financial support already doled out to her via Richard Cromwell and others of his team. It may be significant that Elizabeth Lady Ughtred’s great friend Arthur Darcy had married Sir Nicholas’s daughter.36 Still the best that could be done was to mitigate, not overturn, the effects of King Henry’s rage.

  The successful resolution of this blood-soaked autumn created another chance to extend Cromwell’s activity in Ireland: in effect, a delayed version of the forward policy in religion he adopted in England during 1538.37 The commission of inquiry he had sent over in 1537 proved a golden opportunity for various groups in Irish government opposed to Lord Deputy Grey, including Cromwell’s trusted old servant William Brabazon and the increasingly embattled Archbishop Browne, plus a good many in the Anglo-Irish governing clique. Their advantage was even greater now the White Rose affinity in England was smashed: they could draw attention to Lord Leonard’s undoubted favour to his Fitzgerald relatives, who might be painted as the Irish equivalent of Poles and Courtenays. That was not an unreasonable line: there was every sign that autumn that the Geraldines were intensifying their links to Rome and to Cardinal Pole’s growing attempts at orchestrating what amounted to a crusade against the Tudor dominions.

  A corollary of complaints against Grey was vigorously to impose English-style reforms in religion within the Lordship. Lord Leonard’s increasing stonewalling in defence of traditional religion in his jurisdiction gave additional advantage to his enemies. During autumn 1538, it looked as if Grey might be replaced as Lord Deputy by the former member of the commission team Anthony St Leger, to the delight of Grey’s opponents.38 Lord Leonard nevertheless enjoyed his own lines of communication to London, and although news of dissension in Ireland was the last thing Cromwell wanted to hear, that worked both ways: Grey might represent his opponents as the source of conflict in his blustering letters to the King and Lord Privy Seal. It may be that Cromwell’s own long-standing links with the Greys stayed his hand for the time being.

  Although Cromwell left the Deputy in place, he gave Grey’s opponents independent control over Ireland’s religious life, in what was also a remarkable power-grab for himself. He prompted the King arbitrarily to extend the jurisdiction of the Vice-Gerency to Ireland. This meant that, under the King, Cromwell was the only man with jurisdiction throughout
all the Tudor dominions. The vice-gerential commission authorized on 3 February 1539 was charged with suppressing images and dissolving monasteries. It was a triumvirate of Archbishop Browne, Brabazon and his close ally, John Allen the Irish Master of the Rolls. Soon they were joined by the like-minded Robert Cowley and Thomas Cusack, veteran informants for Cromwell in Ireland. The one person definitely not in commission with them was Lord Deputy Grey – a straightforward insult, since the commissioners were also named as deputies not to Grey but to the Vice-Gerent.39

  This team in true Cromwellian style began work before receiving their February commission, setting out with a selection of allies in January on an energetic tour of much of southern Ireland. They proclaimed Cromwell’s injunctions, accompanied by copies of the official English translations of the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, Commandments and Ave Maria for general use in the dioceses, and among much else they made a point of hanging in his habit a friar convicted on a theft charge.40 While Cromwell’s power endured, the commissioners spared no effort to bring the English Reformation of 1538 to the Irish Lordship. Their major achievement was to dissolve Ireland’s only monastic cathedral, Christ Church Dublin, refounding it in January 1539 as a secular college with dean and chapter, just as King Henry had done in England the previous year at Norwich.41 This really did show the Vice-Gerency in action, and in fact the inauguration became a rare moment of public harmony between the commissioners, Lord Deputy and the corporation of Dublin. This cathedral church at the heart of the capital, down the street from the Deputy’s castle, thus continued in all its ceremonial magnificence, despite the bizarre circumstance of a second Dublin cathedral, St Patrick, already governed by a dean and chapter, outside the city walls.42