Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  6. Memorandum to Cromwell, dated plausibly to January 1530 in LP: SP 1/56 ff. 216–18, LP 4 iii no. 6186.

  7. For his continuing loyalty to Wolsey, see Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 385, and Wolsey to the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, ?August 1530, SP 1/57 ff. 263–4, LP 4 iii no. 6555: that letter is interestingly a draft in Cromwell’s hand which must then have been transferred to Yorkshire to be emended by Wolsey.

  8. See below, this page, this page. An overview of ap Rhys’s extraordinary career can be gained by combining the accounts in HC 1509–1558 3, 151–2 and ODNB, s.v. Price [Prys], Ellis. A. N. Shaw, ‘The Compendium Compertorum and the making of the Suppression Act of 1536’ (University of Warwick PhD, 2003), 169, also provides a useful addition.

  9. Hall 2, 57.

  10. See the meticulous reconstruction in E. W. Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn ‘The Most Happy’ (Oxford, 2004), ch. 6, with useful summary at 90.

  11. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England is too indulgent to the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk in arguing for their disinterested support of government aims in this affair: cf. his comments at ibid., 92.

  12. Hall 2, 144.

  13. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, ch. 8.

  14. For two letters about foreign shipping, see Cromwell to Thomas Arundell, 30 June [1528], SP 1/49 f. 1, LP 4 ii no. 4441, and Capon to Cromwell, probably 1 July 1528, SP 1/55 f. 18, LP 4 iii no. 5810. LP asserts that SP 1/50 ff. 9–16, LP 4 ii no. 4656[2], an important draft on foreign affairs which it dates to late August 1528, is in Cromwell’s hand. Although it does resemble his hand, many key characteristics show that it is not.

  15. Thomas Rush to Cromwell, 9 January [1529], SP 1/236 f. 69, LP Addenda 1 i no. 632.

  16. John Chaffcombe Abbot of Bruerne to Cromwell, 11 March [1529], SP 1/53 f. 101, LP 4 iii no. 5373, securely dateable by its reference to Sir Simon Harcourt as Sheriff of Berkshire and Oxfordshire; John Smart Abbot of Wigmore to Cromwell, summer 1529, SP 1/52 f. 65, LP 4 ii no. 5121. For dating, as well as an excellent sketch of context, see D. Knowles, ‘The last abbot of Wigmore’, in V. Ruffer and A. J. Taylor (eds.), Medieval Studies Presented to Rose Graham (Oxford, 1950), 138–45, repr. in Knowles, The Historian and Character (Cambridge, 1963), 171–8, at 174.

  17. On these two, see respectively this page and this page. On the document of June 1528, SP 1/59 ff. 106–107v, LP 4 iii Appendix no. 109. Gunn, Henry VII’s New Men, 223, convincingly redates this much damaged document.

  18. For Cromwell’s memorandum to prepare Winter’s lease of the mineral rights, 1528, see SP 1/47 f. 279r, LP 4 ii no. 4229[7 iii] (1528), and for Winter’s surrender of the lease, which shows that he had finally received it on 10 February 1529, just as the Cardinal resigned the see, LP 4 iii no. 6094. See also a clutch of papers relating to Durham as Wolsey’s affairs were wound up there, and referring to lead and the coal supply for Cardinal College Ipswich, SP 1/52 f. 19, LP 4 ii no. 5111[4], and John Metcalfe, Wolsey’s auditor at Durham, to Cromwell, 18 March probably 1529, SP 1/236 f. 75, LP Addenda 1 i no. 637. For an overview of Cromwell in relation to Durham business, Ward, ‘Origins of Thomas Cromwell’s public career’, 172–81.

  19. John Clasey to Cromwell, ?August 1535, SP 1/96 f. 34, LP 9 no. 228.

  20. Minterne’s career is summarized with only a few slips in Emden, Oxford 1501 to 1540, 411. His letters to Cromwell, misdated by LP but probably both of 1538, are 5 June [?1538], SP 1/104 ff. 118–19, LP 10 no. 1065, and 7 December [1538], SP 1/72 f. 117, LP 5 no. 1613; Minterne to the King, writing from Orleans, 12 February 1542, is SP 1/169 f. 26, LP 17 no. 99. The first reference to his royal pension paid at Lady Day 1538 is in the book of royal payments, Arundel MS 97 f. 11v, LP 13 ii no. 1280, at 525; his payment at Lady Day 1540, LP 16 no. 380, at 186, is sandwiched between wages of a stable-hand and the Court rat-catcher.

  21. For Morison as petty canon of Cardinal College Oxford, see BL MS Cotton Appendix L f. 82, LP 13 ii no. 817. Wolsey also arranged a pension out of Worksop Priory for Morison: VE 5, 175. On Winter and Morison, Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, 20, 24, 27–8.

  22. Winter to Cromwell, 9 July probably 1534, SP 1/85 f. 43, LP 7 no. 964.

  23. John Curatt to Cromwell, 24 April 1529, SP 1/53 f. 215, LP 4 iii no. 5491; same to same, 25 April 1529, SP 1/53 f. 216, LP 4 iii no. 5492; Nix to Wolsey, 23 May 1529, SP 1/54 f. 29, LP 4 iii no. 5589. For a more extended account of Nix’s relations with Wolsey, see MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors, 151–3, and for Curatt’s later clashes with Nix over the treatment of Thomas Bilney, see J. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Brighton, 1980), 167–8.

  24. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 114–15.

  25. William Capon to Wolsey, 12 April 1529, SP 1/52 f. 174r, LP 4 iii no. 5458. It is worth pointing out that a house inventory often attributed to Felixstowe from this period has nothing to do with it, concerning instead private business of Cromwell’s with Robert Studley at Filston (Kent) in 1528: SP 1/52 f. 101, LP 4 iii no. 5145; SP 1/48 f. 37, LP 4 ii no. 4295.

  26. For an example of Wolsey’s continuing lavish expenditure on beautiful liturgical books in 1529, and excellent discussion of the plunder of his possessions which followed, see J. P. Carley, ‘Thomas Wolsey’s Epistle and Gospel lectionaries: unanswered questions and new hypotheses’, Bodleian Library Record 28 (2015), 135–51, especially 145 and 151.

  27. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 114–20.

  28. The documents in Darcy’s own hand against Wolsey are SP 1/54 ff. 202–10, LP 4 iii no. 5749[1, 2]. For their discovery, see Duke of Norfolk to Cromwell, 29 April [1537], SP 1/119 f. 53, LP 12 i no. 1064. Cf. Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 106–7; as will become apparent below (this page, and this page n. 61), I have one significant disagreement with Guy and others as to whether Darcy and his fellows were contemplating large-scale dissolutions in those papers.

  29. The letters are undated, Cromwell’s being SP 1/55 f. 19v, LP 4 iii no. 5812, with Claybrook’s now f. 19r (LP 4 iii no. 5813), but dateable here by the mention of Blackfriars. For the context in Wolsey’s administration, see P. D. Clarke in Clarke and M. Questier (eds.), Camden Miscellany XXXVI: papal authority and the limits of the law in Tudor England (Camden 5th series 48, 2015), 1–100, at 25–7.

  30. Edward Brysby to Cromwell, 28 August [1529], SP 1/55 f. 71, LP 4 iii no. 5876 (Cromwell was then at Barnwell Priory, just outside Cambridge, probably dealing with a protracted struggle over whether Wolsey could effect its Prior’s move to become next Prior of the Suffolk house of Butley); John Williamson from London to Cromwell in Ipswich, 5 September [1529], SP 1/59 f. 133, LP 4 iii Appendix no. 237. In administrative documents of the College internally dateable to 1529, there is mention of ‘Books that came last with Master Cromwell the 7 day of September’: SP 1/236 f. 106, LP Addenda 1 i no. 651.

  31. BL MS Cotton Vitellius B/XII f. 168, LP 4 iii no. 5953. The text, damaged in the Cottonian fire, is efficiently augmented in H. Ellis (ed.), Original Letters illustrative of English History . . . from autographs in the British Museum and . . . other collections (11 vols. in 3 series: London, 1824, 1827, 1846), 1st series 1, 307, though one has to correct one important error in the reconstruction, followed by LP, by correcting Ellis’s reading of ‘Greenwich’ to ‘Grafton’.

  32. T. F. Mayer (ed.), The Correspondence of Reginald Pole: a calendar (3 vols., Aldershot, 2000–2004), no. 245 (a draft of Pole’s Apologia ad Carolum Quintum), 1, 212. The dating is clear from Pole’s movements in 1529, and the fact that he says (ibid.) of Cromwell that ‘Tunc in familia Car. Eb. fuit’. Mayer’s arguments for believing that this interview never took place are unimpressive: T. F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: prince and prophet (Cambridge, 2000), 99–100.

  33. Mayer (ed.), Correspondence of Pole, 1, 212: ‘cum a me qureret quo pacto se consiliarius principis cum principe se gerere deberet, si quando principis animus ab eo quod vulgo honestum videbatur inclinaret
, cum vero hoc re quereret illo quidem nulla tum authoritate preditus erat.’ The translation is mine, as Mayer’s manages to obscure the point of the passage.

  34. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 117–20; E. W. Ives, ‘The fall of Wolsey’, in Gunn and Lindley (eds.), Cardinal Wolsey, 286–315, at 294–300.

  35. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 120–26; Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 31. The date of 17 October seems confirmed by Hall 2, 156, though he makes a slip by naming the month November.

  36. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 248, 251–2.

  37. ERP 1, 127 (sect. xxviii): ‘Hic vero notus esse coepit . . . in hac vero statim celebris esse coepit, et pluribus notus . . . ut cum Cardinalis . . . ab administratione Reipublicae remotus esset . . . ipse omnium voce, qui aliquid de eo intellexerant, ad supplicium posceretur . . . Hoc enim affirmare possum, qui Londini tum adfui, et voces audivi, adeo etiam ut per civitatem universam rumor circumferretur, eum in carcerem fuisse detrusum, et propediem productum iri ad supplicium.’

  38. SP 1/53 ff. 36–51, LP 4 iii no. 5330: the transactions listed stretch all the way back to 8 December 1518. LP asserts that the majority of the document is in the hand of Thomas Wriothesley, as it also does of Cromwell’s will, discussed next. This is not so; they are in a commonplace formal clerk’s hand. The identification by LP of Wriothesley’s hand in Cromwell’s papers of the 1520s is the basis for the oft-repeated supposition that Wriothesley was in Cromwell’s employment then. The positive evidence suggests that this is wrong: see below, this page.

  39. SP 1/54 ff. 234–44, LP 4 iii no. 5772. As just noted, the assertion in LP that this document is in the hand of Wriothesley is wrong. An extra folio of provisions added by Cromwell himself includes mention of the lordship of Rhymney, which was formally granted to him on 17 May 1532 (LP 5 no. 1065[33]); his other alterations to the text are probably earlier.

  40. More achieved his moment in the limelight in May 1536, when he was one of a round-up of minor court officials who formed the Westminster jury presenting a remarkably fictional list of charges against Queen Anne Boleyn: LP 10 no. 876[7]; John Avery was also among them. There are various references to ‘Mistress More’ as a close friend and neighbour of Cromwell, and she may have been Roger More’s wife: cf. e.g. Launcelot Colyns to Cromwell, 27 September 1533, SP 1/79 f. 73, LP 6 no. 1159.

  41. Cf. e.g. Cromwell to Wolsey, 2 April 1528, SP 1/47 f. 153, LP 4 ii no. 4135.

  42. On Gregory as delicate, see the remarks of Roland Lee to Cromwell, 27 December 1534, SP 1/87 f. 129, LP 7 no. 1576.

  43. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 258–9; modified as noted, my italics. This reading is admittedly not present in the text of the version in BL MS Egerton 2402, which is the supposedly autograph version used in R. S. Sylvester (ed.), The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish (Early English Text Society original series 243, 1959); cf. 104. Sylvester did not prove that this MS was autograph, as is observed by Gardiner, ‘George Cavendish: an early Tudor political commentator?’, 81. Maybe Cavendish himself changed his mind on the wording.

  44. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 260–70.

  45. Sadler’s letter to Cromwell, 1 November 1529, is BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 211, LP 4 iii Appendix 238. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 77–80, provides excellent comment on the letter without seeing that it was possible to reconcile Sadler’s letter with Cavendish’s account. Indeed, the one remaining apparent discrepancy actually provides further confirmation that Cavendish’s account reproduces the course of events: Cavendish asserts that Thomas Rush provided Cromwell with a Parliamentary seat (Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 273–4). That is what Cromwell would have assumed when speaking with Cavendish at Esher on 1 November, and Cavendish would not necessarily have been told of the change of plan which occurred in the next few days in London.

  46. Satisfyingly, this very ring is likely to be that in Cromwell’s household inventory of 1527, alongside a great many others: ‘A gold ring, with a turquoise like a heart, upon my master’s finger’, worth six pounds, SP 1/42 ff. 101–16 at f. 112r, LP 4 ii no. 3197. As noted by S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), 27n, there is no evidence of bribery in any of these transactions.

  47. Once more, commentators, including Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 27, have not seen how to reconcile Sadler’s letter with Cavendish’s statement that Cromwell ‘had chanced to meet with one Sir Thomas Rush . . . whose son was appointed to be one of the burgesses of that Parliament, of whom [i.e. Sir Thomas] he [Cromwell] obtained his room’. The interpretation I provide removes the problem; Cavendish recorded what he knew of Rush and Alvard’s situation that All Hallows’ Day, and he does not say that Cromwell substituted for Alvard.

  48. HC 1509–1558 1, 191–3 on Ipswich and Orford, and corresponding biographies, and on the Orford disputes, MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors, 63, 70, 306–7, 322–3. Hunt’s role in the fight is related in TNA, STAC 2/20/400.

  49. BL MS Cotton Otho C/X f. 218v, LP 10 no. 40[ii], is a slip in Cromwell’s hand listing certain names headed by the three Winchester episcopal boroughs ‘Taunton, Downton, Hindon’, which suggests that for the new 1536 Parliament he designated his fellow of 1529, a locally based lawyer called William Portman, alongside his own servant Richard Pollard, to be burgesses for Taunton. He himself may have moved on to be knight of the shire for Kent, which would be far more appropriate for his status by that time: see HC 1509–1558 1, 112–14, and below, this page.

  50. For Cromwell’s recent purchase of long leases at Sutton-at-Hone and Dartford (Kent), also mentioned in the first draft of his will, see TNA, SP 2/J ff. 159–69, LP 4 iii no. 6336. On the possible role of Gage in Cromwell’s choice of Lewes Priory for his son’s first marital home, see below, this page.

  51. Ives, ‘Fall of Wolsey’, 287–8, 307, drawing on Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 270–71, and Wolsey to Henry VIII, c. 3 November 1529, SP 1/55 f. 191, LP 4 iii no. 6024.

  52. Vaughan to Cromwell, 30 October 1529, SP 1/55 f. 198, LP 4 iii no. 6036.

  53. For slightly exiguous information on Morris, see HC 1509–1558 2, 636–7 and Baker 2, 1126–7, s.v. Morris, John V.

  54. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 22–6, and see the relevant biographies in HC 1509–1558. Hall hosted Wolsey on his journey north in April 1530 (Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 313), and his family had a host of connections with Cromwell, many via Calais. Confusingly, there was a second Sir William Fitzwilliam, not an MP, who was Treasurer of Wolsey’s household (the other Sir William the MP was royal Treasurer), and lived near Peterborough: on him, see Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, ed. Singer, 310–17. Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 119n, adds on the basis of Wolsey connections George Acworth (Bedfordshire), Thomas Audley the later Lord Chancellor (Essex), William Gascoigne (Bedfordshire), Nicholas Hare (Downton) and William Nanfan (Dorchester). Thomas Alvard needs to be subtracted from Hawkyard’s list, since (as we have seen) he did not become an MP till a by-election of 1533; Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 88, also points out that Richard Page was replaced at York within two weeks of Parliament opening.

  55. Chaffyn to Cromwell, 2 January [1530], SP 1/56 f. 190, LP 4 iii no. 6136 (see on the same matter Thomas Bennet to Cromwell, 2 January [1530], SP 1/236 f. 292, LP Addenda 1 i no. 683). HC 1509–1558 1, 608, wrongly reassigns Chaffyn’s letter to 1536; the decorum of the address of both letters makes that impossible.

  56. Hall 2, 155–6; P. J. Holmes, ‘The last Tudor Great Councils’, HJ 33 (1990), 1–22, at 1, 6–8.

  57. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 76–85, provides a sound narrative of opening events in Parliament.

  58. SP 1/236 ff. 168–9, LP Addenda 1 i no. 663; cf. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 96.

  59. SP 1/56 ff. 39–42, LP 4 iii no. 6043[7]; the main body of text, pace G. R. Elton, ‘Parliamentary drafts, 1529–1540�
�, in Elton, Studies 2, 62–81, at 65, does not resemble the hand of any of his clerks at the time. Elton associated another anti-clerical petition with this Parliament, but the evidence points fairly clearly to a date in 1530–31, and it is amusing to observe Lehmberg struggling between respect for Elton and logic in his commentary on it: Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 85 and n. 4.

  60. On those plans, see R. W. Hoyle, ‘The origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, HJ 38 (1995), 275–305, at 282.

  61. SP 1/54 f. 208v, LP 4 iii no. 5749[1]. Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, 106, has misunderstood the import of this clause in the document (which he prints in transcript, at 206–7) to imply that Darcy was exploring the possibility of complete monastic dissolution in 1529; this idea has gained considerable circulation in historiography on the Tudors. Yet Darcy clearly intended his clause as part of a denunciation of Wolsey’s jurisdictional excesses. Hoyle, ‘Origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, 288, concurs with my conclusion here.

  62. ‘ad nostrae religionis [i.e. the Augustinian Order] obprobium, scandalum, dessipacionem et ruinam non solum nostrae Religionis sed etiam Monachorum, Monacharum ac Monialium quasi per totam Angliam’: A. G. Dickens, Late Monasticism and the Reformation (London and Rio Grande, 1994), 46–7.

  63. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 86–94.

  64. J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968), 250–51; J. J. Scarisbrick, ‘Fisher, Henry VIII and the Reformation crisis’, in B. Bradshaw and E. Duffy (eds.), Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: the career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge, 1989), 155–68, at 158. For relevant comment on Fisher’s extraordinary vehemence, Hoyle, ‘Origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, 286, and he also favours taking the dissolution proposal seriously, at 289.