This, then, is how a group of Benedictine abbots had been thinking for some decades – such heads of house as Islip and Benson of Westminster, Cromwell’s friend Kidderminster of Winchcombe or his protégés Sagar of Hailes and Hawford of Evesham. They were encouraged by the proliferation of specifically monastic colleges at Oxford providing accommodation for Benedictines and Augustinians studying in the universities. These institutions were rather paradoxical, a contradiction of monastic enclosure, but an affirmation of monastic scholarship. They began emerging in the late thirteenth century, but a remarkable development among them is specific to the 1530s. In the last five years before the final monastic dissolutions, more Benedictine monks took Oxford degrees than in any period in the previous forty years. The highest numbers were in the last two years – some members continued studying in the universities after the dissolutions. Indeed it is not at all certain how final the dissolution of the Oxbridge monastic colleges was; unlike the former friaries, most eventually saw refoundation under new names, beginning with Lord Chancellor Audley’s remodelling of Buckingham College Cambridge as Magdalene College.*
This phenomenon is a tribute to intellectual liveliness in English Benedictines, and had it continued on the same trajectory it would have resulted in the greatest English monasteries behaving more and more like Oxbridge colleges. That looks like deliberate policy on the part of the elite abbots.6 The last survivor of Queen Mary’s restored Westminster Abbey in the 1550s reminisced that the new community lived more in the manner of Oxford and Cambridge or the Inns of Court than a strict Benedictine community.7 That also reflected government thinking during 1538. There was much anticipation that major Benedictine and Augustinian monasteries would be remodelled as colleges. As central a government figure as Chancellor Audley proposed Colchester and St Osyth’s, the fiery evangelical Bishop Latimer mooted Great Malvern, further suggesting two or three such refoundations in each county; Abbot Sagar of Hailes put forward his own house.8
The unanimity across the religious spectrum is striking. Cromwell himself invested some effort in proposing Little Walsingham (purged of its shrine, like Hailes), his northern evangelical client Prior Robert Ferrar was advocate like Sagar for his own Nostell Priory as preaching centre and school, and the Duke of Norfolk similarly for the Howard mausoleum church of Thetford, envisaging a lavishly funded replacement in precise detail. The Duke, remarkably, proposed to use Matthew Parker’s evangelically inspired new statutes for Stoke College as his model, having already obtained the King’s consent for the transformation, and Ferrar’s plan also sounds like an imitation of Stoke.9 Nearly all these ideas cluster in August and September 1538, just as the destruction of the friaries and shrines climaxed. They culminated in the Vice-Gerent summoning the monastic community of Canterbury Cathedral during the King’s visit to the city in early September; he personally ordered them to change their monastic habits for the garments of secular priests, as the Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral had already done in May.
For reasons unclear to the monks at the time, this transformation of Canterbury was postponed for another couple of years, which reflects the fact that the plans for new colleges were in general drastically slimmed down.10 Nevertheless, they were not totally abandoned, and the initiatives in late summer 1538 ought to be seen alongside Cromwell’s other plans for reformation in this year, not simply as a diffused scramble for survival by the monasteries. The atmosphere did change in the next few months, while the White Rose arrests spooled out. Alternative voices emerged in Cromwell’s correspondence, from servants of his actually involved in the business of dissolution. John Freeman, at work in Lincolnshire since 1536, suggested in October after detecting asset-stripping by Gilbertine houses there that ‘they are in a readiness to surrender without any coming.’ Only a day later, Cromwell’s old friend John Uvedale said of the thirty-nine remaining abbeys and priories in Yorkshire that he would like to see them all dissolved – not without self-interest: he was after a little nunnery called Marrick, and eventually got it.11
Neither of these comments really addressed the Benedictine or Augustinian heart of England’s remaining monasticism. The decisive blow to an expansive plan of remodelling many greater houses came from a voice not to be ignored: King Henry. Now that the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France had come to an understanding, Henry felt desperately vulnerable, and from January 1539 onwards this sent him scurrying to his military engineers for a great southern coastal defence programme. It has left state-of-the-art Tudor strongpoints from St Michael’s Mount to Lowestoft, brand-new fortifications costing huge amounts. No other single country-wide scheme was built on the same scale before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 Such expenditure made a confiscation of estates from the remaining monasteries all the more tempting.
At every stage in 1539, Henry and not Cromwell can be seen taking the decisions. The King was on the move, in the thick of defence preparations, while Cromwell was back in London. Thus it was Ralph Sadler who in mid-March let Cromwell know from Dover that Henry ‘will omit none opportunity in the devising here of such things as bulwarks, blockhouses and fortilaces as shall be meet for surety and defence’. The King ordered Cromwell to get on with implementing his vision.13 As early as 26 January, Ambassador Castillon had heard that the King had decided to grasp the nettle of the many surviving nunneries, whose closure would anger not only the nuns but also their families (generally nobility and gentry), who took advantage of their schooling for girls and young boys – Lady Ughtred with her little daughter at Wilberfoss would be an instance, not to mention Gregory Cromwell. Henry was nevertheless ready to confiscate them all. Sensitivities were such that many nunnery closures were delayed until the end of the year, along with the last of the male communities.14
Nevertheless, despite the financial windfall from great monastic closures during 1539, fragments of the previous plans remained. Two great abbeys, Thornton in north Lincolnshire and Burton in Staffordshire, did indeed become colleges on a generous scale, pure specimens of the scheme, and remained on their new course into the 1540s. Adding to the sense of open-endedness in these events, they must have continued in their communal life before their official refoundation in the years after Cromwell’s death, rather like supposedly dissolved monastic colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. In the case of Burton Abbey, the continuing encouragement may have come from the former Abbot, now Abbot of Westminster, William Benson, who also secured an extraordinarily lavish future settlement for Westminster. Besides these two survivors, the remaining monastic cathedrals were remodelled and some abbeys promoted to cathedrals (Westminster among them), in numbers which remained a major debate of policy right up to Cromwell’s fall in 1540. As preparations for Parliament took shape in early 1539, the future of the monasteries remained untidy and uncertain. The dissolution of the monasteries was not a certainty until it was complete. What it was not was a long-term scheme authored by Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell had good reasons to feel well pleased as Parliament approached in April 1539, quite apart from turning a difficult family situation in Sussex into the planting of a new Cromwell dynasty in Kent. He could rejoice in fulfilling one of his greatest long-term plans, a lasting memorial to his Vice-Gerency: the publication at last of a fully official English Bible.15 This had been a long time in the making. It was a thorough revision of the Matthew Bible whose authorization he had obtained in 1537, and was prepared in Paris, through an ambitious co-operation between the French printer François Regnault and Cromwell’s regular London printers Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, with the hugely experienced Miles Coverdale in charge of textual revision. From a technical point of view, working in Paris made sense, for the French printing industry was far better able to cope with such a complex print-run. Yet the enterprise ran constant risk of sabotage from a suspicious Catholic monarch and an even more suspicious Inquisitor-General and University Faculty of Theology (the Sorbonne).
All through 1538
the operation painfully staggered ahead. Cromwell kept a watchful eye on progress amid all his other concerns that eventful year. There was near-shipwreck over Christmas, just as the work was completed: the Inquisitor-General seized the finished copies. Cromwell now brought all his diplomatic resources to bear on the problem, including some tense meetings with Ambassador Castillon. His advantage as the King’s minister was that he could survey the whole range of Anglo-French concerns to find a useful bargaining counter. The perfect lever emerged, wholly unrelated to the Bible or even religion: a commercial dispute over an English seizure of a French ship for piracy. It was owned by the Sieur de La Rochepot, brother to the very influential Constable of France, Castillon’s great friend Anne de Montmorency.
The pressure worked. Over the winter, 2,500 copies of the Bible were rescued and brought to England, along with vital type and craftsmen prepared to carry on the project, to supply enough copies for the 9,000 or so churches of England and Wales. It was a prodigious operation, without any precedent in the English printing industry, and culmination of Cromwell’s encouragement of the vernacular press. He set up his team in the buildings of the London Greyfriars, so recently dissolved. Curiously, once the French-produced Bibles were safe and the press was busy in London churning out more, negotiations stalled on returning Rochepot’s ship. The French were still angrily pursuing the grievance when Cromwell lay prisoner in the Tower more than a year later; his last dateable letter, four days before his execution, is actually his rejoinder to the King of France’s renewed complaint.16 Cromwell’s recovery of the Bibles was an extraordinary success for Realpolitik applied to a godly cause. The resulting volume in the warehouses in April 1539 was magnificent, and has justly been called the ‘Great Bible’; it was the basis for all official Bibles in England right up to 1611. Thanks to a preface by Cranmer which appeared in the 1540 editions onwards, it has sometimes been called ‘Cranmer’s Bible’, but that is a totally misleading branding: rather, it is Cromwell’s Bible.
The book’s famous title-page, traditionally and wrongly credited to Hans Holbein (the actual artist remains controversial), does indeed give equal credit to both Archbishop and Vice-Gerent, though of course visual pride of place goes to King Henry VIII.17 The King liked the title-page format so much that in subsequent editions, it appears three times at appropriate places in the volume.18 The design exploits the binary format of a title-page to tell two simultaneous descending stories around the title-panel, connected appropriately at the head by the Supreme Head himself. He hands out Bibles in two directions: one side to Cranmer and the bishops, the other to Cromwell and the Privy Council. Cranmer and Cromwell then pass them out to the kingdom’s respective clerical and temporal notables. Cartouches beside them bear their respective coats of arms, to identify the pair for anyone with heraldic knowledge (that is, a great many). At the foot, crowds of the King’s subjects benefit from godly preaching as a result. In the printed editions, a prison at the bottom right-hand corner shows the fate of those who do not listen; one lavish hand-painted version of the title-page in Cromwell’s own surviving copy in Cambridge omitted this warning. (See Plate 38.)
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This was not the only hopeful sign for future progress in religion as elections to Parliament proceeded in April. Diplomacy offered new possibilities, though really they were a by-product of England’s narrowing diplomatic options in relation to the Emperor and the King of France. First was the continuing search for a royal bride. None of the King’s overtures to ladies eligible and available in Europe in 1538 came to anything. The one major marital corridor left relatively unexplored so far beyond France, the Empire and southern Europe was some suitable bride in the evangelical camp in the north; unhappily possibilities were not numerous, either in the Empire or in Scandinavia. The King of England could not be expected to drop further than a duchess in the Tudor equivalent of the Almanach de Gotha, which narrowed the field considerably.
Very early in the whole saga of royal remarriage, in December 1537, Cromwell asked his friend John Hutton, permanent English representative in Brussels, to draw up an overall shortlist. It did not look at all promising. Hutton, never very confident in his own qualifications as a diplomat, said nervously, ‘I have not much experience amongst ladies’ (Mistress Hutton presumably excepted). His tally, apart from the Duchess of Milan, included the widow of the Count of Egmont, who with irresistibly Gilbertian echoes he said ‘passeth forty years of age, the which doth not appear in my judgement by her face’. Last, and least, ‘the Duke of Cleves hath a daughter, but I hear no great praise neither of her personage nor beauty’: a young lady called Anna.19 Thereafter the Cleves idea festered somewhere towards the bottom of the heap, surfacing briefly according to the imperial ambassadors in a proposal from the Germans early in their mission of summer 1538.20
Once the Protestants had left unsatisfied in October 1538, it was the end of the year before the manifest reluctance of the Duchess of Milan (or, perhaps more importantly, her Habsburg relatives) for an English royal marriage left the Cleves option as the best on the table.21 The United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, scattered territories on the western flank of the Empire bordering the Low Countries, were not part of the Schmalkaldic League. In fact they had not broken with the Pope, but under Duchess Anna’s father Duke Johann, a great admirer of Erasmus, they went their own way in Church reorganization as much as Lutheran principalities and cities, and Anna’s sister Sybille married Luther’s protector Johann Friedrich Elector of Saxony. Duke Johann of Cleves might be said to have created his own ‘middle way’ in religion between old and new, just like Henry VIII. Moreover, the ducal family was at odds with the Emperor over further territories whose title was in dispute between them. This mixture might be made to look very attractive to King Henry.
Accordingly, in January 1539, Christopher Mont found himself once more entrusted with a vital mission in Germany, alongside an English diplomat associated with Robert Barnes, Thomas Paynell. Cromwell added his own briefing-notes to those provided in the King’s name, and his instructions (unlike the King’s) explicitly ordered the ambassadors to pursue with the Court of Cleves the idea of Henry marrying Anna. Everything must be as casual as possible, merely indicating that the Lord Privy Seal was well disposed to the idea, and that it might be a good plan to ‘send her picture hither, to the intent his Lordship might persuade his Majesty thereby’. Much was to follow from that.22 This is the most likely moment for Cromwell’s tetchy exchange with Archbishop Cranmer, in which Cranmer insisted that the King needed a common language with his wife for conversation.23 In view of the King’s excellent French, this would not have been a problem with the Valois or Habsburg candidates on display during 1538, but it was sadly true of Duchess Anna. At the same time, the Lord Privy Seal scotched any move to promote into the King’s affections a young lady of the Court, Katherine Howard by name, who lived with her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, just across the river from Westminster at Lambeth. The fact that she was yet another niece of the Duke of Norfolk would have been enough to arouse his alarm.
The other task for Mont and Paynell was to get the Schmalkaldeners back to England for further talks on theology and diplomatic alliance. That would not be easy after the previous summer’s fiasco. The Germans were well informed on the twists and turns of English religious policy, they had come to an understanding with the Habsburgs which relieved previous possible military anxieties, and they were particularly annoyed by the stridently traditionalist tone of Henry’s proclamation of 16 November 1538 which had accompanied John Lambert’s heresy trial. In the end, they agreed to send over yet another preliminary embassy, once more featuring Franz Burchard. It left Frankfurt in the first week of April and arrived on the 23rd, just before Parliament was due to open. The delegates’ instructions and message to the King from the Elector and Landgraf Philipp were coldly correct. It was up to Cromwell to use all his powers of persuasion to produce the right atm
osphere between the prickly delegates and a King once more thwarted in hopes of showing off his learning to Melanchthon.24
While these pieces of his political jigsaw fell into place, the Lord Privy Seal made his usual careful preparations for the first Parliament since the multiple crises of 1536. A great deal of official legislation needed pushing through, as is apparent in one of his ‘remembrances’ from early March.25 Chief among immediate concerns was the official oblivion of the Courtenay/Pole circle. Most were dead already, but attainders in Parliament would add the additional solemnity of consent by the whole realm, useful both domestically and in diplomacy, and Reginald Pole needed to be treated as if he were dead. The resulting Act of Attainder was frighteningly extensive in numbers, comprising a third of all those attainted in sixteenth-century England. Besides that, the King’s ambitious programme of coastal defence loomed large, and would have to be paid for. Among other expedients, this might involve Parliamentary taxation or a forced loan, requiring ‘the names of all the wealthy men of the realm, as well priests, merchants, and others’. There were also necessary tidying-up measures on still half-complete plans for poor relief and government in Wales.
Cromwell also added a note into the list which took on a significance he definitely did not expect: ‘A device in the Parliament for the unity in religion’. This proposal was the twin of a surviving draft proclamation emended in the King’s own hand that was notably savage in tone. It complained indeed about lack of unity in religion, and anticipated Parliamentary legislation to remedy this: what began in the text as the promise of ‘terrible laws’ in Parliament, Henry, in momentarily more emollient mood, changed to ‘good and just laws’, before deciding to shelve the declaration for the moment.26 We will discover what the King meant by ‘terrible laws’.
Thomas Cromwell Page 68