47. Roland Lee to Cromwell, 1 January [1533], SP 1/237 f. 5, LP Addenda 1 i no. 724. LP misdated this letter, which fits into a sequence of letters in 1532–3. Lee’s observation that the King was founder was true only to the extent that Henry II had confirmed the founder’s gift – see ‘Premonstratensian houses: abbey of Coverham’, in VCH: Yorkshire 3, 243–5 – but it was clearly a well-established idea by now: see LP 10 no. 364, 142. Contrast Archbishop Cranmer’s punctiliousness in approaching the Abbot of Welbeck for a preferment to the Abbacy of Newsham, Cranmer to [Abbot of Welbeck], May 1534, BL MS Harley 6148 f. 20r, LP 7 no. 685.
48. E. Jeffries Davis, ‘The beginning of the Dissolution: Christchurch, Aldgate, 1532’, TRHS 4th series 8 (1925), 127–50, remains a model of research, and Geoffrey Elton was unwise to sneer at the idea embodied in the title: Elton, Star Chamber Stories, 147. For the surrender, see Rymer (ed.), Foedera 14, 411–12.
49. For fine surveys of such redeployments, see B. Thompson, ‘The laity, the alien priories, and the redistribution of ecclesiastical property’, in N. Rogers (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century (Stamford, 1994), 19–41; Heale, ‘Dependent priories and the closure of monasteries in late medieval England’. It will be apparent that my account here slightly modifies or amplifies Heale’s lists of suppressions given ibid., 26.
50. The bill is SP 1/238 f. 96, LP 1 i no. 864, which also notes the memorandum on hospital foundation, including its mention of the Waltham exchange, TNA, E 135/8/48; that memorandum was clearly the same as ‘Paper reciting an order for a hospital devised of Christchurch lands made by the King’ mentioned in a catalogue of Cromwell’s papers for the early 1530s, LP 7 no. 923 [xxxvii].
51. Richard Lyst to Cromwell, 4 February 1533, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 34, LP 6 no. 116.
52. Audley to Cromwell, SP 1/78 f. 60, LP 6 no. 927: dateable to late July 1533 by grants which Audley signed at his house of Brettons in Barking, a prospective stay mentioned in his letter, LP 6 nos. 929[51–2], 1060[1–4]. For Stow’s narrative, Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, 1, 142.
53. Richard Strete to Cromwell, 26 April [1532], SP 1/75 f. 174, LP 6 no. 389 (misdated by LP).
54. Richard Strete to Roland Lee, 25 February 1532, SP 1/237 f. 158, LP Addenda 1 i no. 771; Strete to Cromwell or Roland Lee, 12 May [1532], BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 283, LP 10 no. 857 (misdated by LP).
55. Le Neve, Fasti 1300–1541: Coventry and Lichfield 3, sets out the evidence: licence for election was sought on 24 January 1532 (Lichfield Acta Capitularia 4 f. 93v). Lee was granted custody of the temporalities, which had presumably been the responsibility of his team since early 1532, only on 18 December 1533 (LP 6 no. 1595[20]); licence to elect was granted on 23 December 1533 (Acta Capitularia 4 f. 108v). Election came on 9/10 January 1534 (Lambeth Palace, Cranmer’s Register ff. 150, 153), but was then prorogued until 20 January (Cranmer’s Register f. 155). Royal assent was delayed until 19 and 22 March 1534 (Cranmer’s Register ff. 154–155v). Opposition to election was cited by Cranmer on 26 March (Cranmer’s Register f. 149v). Cranmer’s confirmation was granted on 16 April (Cranmer’s Register f. 149) and he finally consecrated Lee on 19 April (Cranmer’s Register f. 156v).
56. Richard Strete to Roland Lee, 25 February 1532, SP 1/237 f. 158, LP Addenda 1 i no. 771; Strete to Roland Lee, 6 April [1532], SP 1/57 ff. 55–6, LP 4 iii no. 6313 (misdated by LP to 1530).
57. Richard Strete to Cromwell, 26 April [1532], SP 1/75 f. 174, LP 6 no. 389 (misdated by LP to 1533); draft indenture of 27 April 1532, SP 1/69 f. 260, LP 5 no. 969.
58. Strete to Cromwell, 22 May [1532], SP 1/70 f. 54, LP 5 no. 1045; commission for the inquisition, undated, SP 1/238 f. 17, LP Addenda 1 i no. 813.
59. From a sequence of correspondence, the most important item is Cromwell to Strete, 14 June 1533, SP 1/77 f. 41, LP 6 no. 645, including this irritated remark (securely dated by the previous letter of Sir Anthony Fitzherbert to Cromwell, SP 1/238 f. 77, LP Addenda 1 i no. 851, which refers to ‘Sir’ Ralph Longford – he was knighted at Anne Boleyn’s coronation, 1 June 1533). For the later accounts detailing Longford’s rental payments, see SP 1/113 ff. 80–81r, LP 11 no. 1411[i and ii], LP 8 no. 802[20].
60. Countess of Salisbury and John Lord Hussey to Cromwell, 30 November 1532, SP 1/99 f. 97, LP 9 no. 900 (misdated by LP to 1535; they did not recognize the Countess’s signature).
61. Sir Richard Bulkeley to Cromwell, 23 June probably 1533, SP 1/77 f. 69, LP 6 no. 690; John Hilsey to Cromwell, undated but after April 1534, SP 1/91 f. 152, LP 8 no. 472. Friar Morris Griffith named in his petition became his diocesan Chancellor when Hilsey became Bishop of Rochester in August 1535.
62. LP 8 no. 802[20].
63. LP 10 no. 226[17]; Smith, 374.
64. Sherburne to Cromwell, 8 December 1532/3, SP 1/72 f. 119, LP 5 no. 1618.
65. West Sussex Record Office, Lavington MS 646, a deed of 1590 which includes a recital of a deed of 1535, describing arrangements made after the collusive sale of Hardham to its patron Sir William Goring (a friend of Cromwell’s) in autumn 1534; among the feoffees for Goring were Sir Giles Covert, who had lobbied for Shulbrede’s survival, Cromwell himself with two of his own household officers and Richard Bedon, another gentleman involved in the Shulbrede affair; curious, since Shulbrede and Hardham are not at all close to each other in the county. For the sale itself, see ‘Priory of Hardham’, VCH: Sussex 2, 74–5. For Cromwell’s annuity from Hardham, see LP 5 no. 1285, 557, where the priory appears under its alternative name of Heringham: annuities in that list are no later than autumn 1532.
66. Heale, ‘Dependent priories and the closure of monasteries in late medieval England’, 22–3.
67. T. Fuller, The Church-History of Britain from the birth of Jesus Christ until the year M.DC.XLVIII (London, 1655, Wing F2416), Bk VI, 307.
68. Loades (ed.), Papers of George Wyatt, 159. The previous folio of this narration is, infuriatingly, lost.
69. Marillac to Montmorency, 23 June 1540, Kaulek (ed.), Correspondance, 195, LP 15 no. 804: ‘qui a esté premier inventeur d’abattre les abbayes et de tout ce qui a esté innové en l’Église, de sorte que cestuy inventoit et Cramvell prestoit l’auctorité . . .’. For the evident complication of dissolution legislation in the 1536 Parliament, see below, this page.
70. LP 5 no. 1209.
71. 23 Henry VIII cap. 22: Statutes of the Realm 3, 392–4.
72. Papers on the suppression, 18 and 20 September 1528: SP 1/50 f. 102rv, LP 4 ii no. 4755; SP 1/44 f. 308v, LP 4 ii no. 3536.
73. Henry Lockwood to Cromwell, 4 March [1532], SP 1/69 f. 140, LP 5 no. 847; my italics. Before becoming Master in 1531, Lockwood had himself been a Fellow of the College from 1523. While all the indications are that Lockwood was a traditionalist in religion, getting a Lincolnshire benefice on a presentation from Syon Abbey and resigning as Master in 1548, Gunthorpe was at least by the late 1530s noted as an evangelical in a warm testimony from his old Cambridge friend Thomas Cranmer: Cranmer to Cromwell, 26 May [1537], SP 1/120 f. 194, LP 12 i no. 1281. On Weeting, see Blomefield and Parkin, Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 2 159–73.
74. Lockwood to Cromwell, 4 January [1534], SP 1/82 f. 13, LP 7 no. 16.
75. Cromwell to Lockwood (draft in the hand of Roland Lee), 7 June [1532], SP 1/238 f. 74, LP Addenda 1 i no. 845. Note also in Cromwell’s list of deeds in his archive in 1535 among material going back years, an ‘Indenture of goods of the late monastery of Bromehill, sold to Roger Fowler’: SP 1/96 f. 41r, LP 9 no. 234.
76. For all this, see Lockwood to Cromwell, 12 September [1532], SP 1/71 f. 26, LP 5 no. 1309, and the undated letter of Lockwood to Cromwell, [1532], SP 1/73 f. 120, LP 5 no. 1745, addressed from Vernon’s priory of Marlow and reporting Gregory as ‘merry’ there. Lee became Rector of St Sepulchre’s in August 1532. In the College audit book for 1532/3 are payments to Cromwell, his servant and ‘Mr Lee the Archdeacon’ [of Cornwall] ‘
for the quicker expedition in our College business’: A. H. Lloyd, The Early History of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Derived from Contemporary Documents (Cambridge, 1934), 234–5.
77. Lee to Cromwell, 9 December [1532], SP 1/237 f. 79, LP Addenda 1 i no. 744 (misdated in LP). Lee actually had a benefice in Norfolk 23 miles from Bromehill, at Banham, and it is interesting that he did not choose to take Gregory there; no doubt the Rectory, designed for a celibate parson, was too small for the visiting party.
78. Lee to Cromwell, 15 August [1533], SP 1/78 f. 111, LP 6 no. 981; 21 August [1533], SP 1/78 f. 143, LP 6 no. 1011. Gregory went on to spend the autumn in Essex with Lee and various of his prosperous clerical neighbours: Gregory Cromwell to Cromwell, 17 and 25 October [1533; both letters previously misdated]: SP 1/68 f. 22, LP 5 no. 479; SP 1/68 f. 32, LP 5 no. 496.
79. Lee to Cromwell, 1 January [1533], SP 1/237 f. 5, LP Addenda 1 i no. 724 (LP misdates to 1531).
Chapter 9: A Royal Marriage: 1532–1533
1. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 156–7; Thurley, Houses of Power, 129–30, 241.
2. For this and what follows, see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 69–77.
3. R. J. Knecht, ‘Francis I, “Defender of the Faith”?’, in Ives, Knecht and Scarisbrick (eds.), Wealth and Power in Tudor England, 106–27, at 123.
4. See above, this page. For all the usual suspects involved in sorting out the final stages of the Anglo-French treaty at home – Gardiner, Cromwell, Oliver, Roland Lee – see Gardiner to Cromwell, c. 21 August 1532, SP 1/70 f. 205, LP 5 no. 1245. On the prospects of a Calais wedding, Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 166.
5. Augustine to Cromwell, 14 October 1532, BL MS Cotton Vitellius B/XIII f. 218, LP 5 no. 1422. In the same letter Augustine reported that ambassador Gregorio Casali had left for England, which was at best a half-truth fed to him, since Casali was actually meeting the King at Calais: Fletcher, Our Man in Rome, 178–9.
6. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 157–61, summarizes events at Calais, and makes the point about descent at ibid., 167. Anne’s estates, with a rental value of c. £5,000, outdid the £4,000 rental value of Richmond’s estates at his creation in 1525: see Hoyle, ‘War and public finance’, 77. On marriage possibilities, see MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, Appendix II.
7. J. G. Nichols (ed.), The Chronicle of Calais, in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, to the year 1540 (CS 1st series 35, 1846), 41–4.
8. Marquess of Bath, Report on the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Bath preserved at Longleat IV: Seymour Papers 1532–1686 (Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1968), 1–3, is a list of those going to Calais, 2,773 in all, with twelve staff of the Jewel House.
9. John Laurence to Cromwell, 30 November 1532, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 132, LP 5 no. 1591. For Laurence’s previous curious and not yet fully explained links to a dissident group among the Greenwich Observants given patronage by Wolsey, see Brown, ‘Wolsey and ecclesiastical order’, 231–8.
10. Thomas Alvard to Cromwell, 2 November [1532], SP 1/72 f. 10, LP 5 no. 1509.
11. John Williamson to Cromwell, 23 October [1532], SP 1/71 f. 139, LP 5 no. 1464: Thomas Farmer was sent over ‘with your viols’.
12. John Benolt to Cromwell, 2 September 1532, SP 1/71 f. 12, LP 5 no. 1284. Benolt’s reward in Crown preferment and ecclesiastical office ran into complications, detailed in extensive correspondence in the State Papers; the jumping-off points are Thomas Goldwell Prior of Christ Church Canterbury to Cromwell, 23 October [1532], SP 1/71 f. 140, LP 5 no. 1465, and 10 November 1532, SP 1/72 f. 19, LP 5 no. 1528. Thomas Baschurch to Cromwell, n.d. but around 12 February 1533, SP 1/74 f. 152, LP 6 no. 154, makes it clear that Cromwell was responsible for arranging the exchange which was the means of Benolt’s preferment.
13. Vaughan [unsigned to remain confidential; significantly misidentified in LP as Wriothesley] to Cromwell, SP 1/72 f. 96, LP 5 no. 1602; Vaughan to Cromwell, 5 December 1532, SP 1/72 f. 99, LP 5 no. 1609; Vaughan to Cromwell, 9 December 1532, SP 1/72 f. 121, LP 5 no. 1620.
14. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 83–5, 637–8.
15. For the loan from the Privy Coffers, 6 February 1533: TNA, E 101/421/9, LP 6 no. 131. Salvago’s involvement is uniquely attested in a wayward but occasionally invaluable Spanish source: M. A. Sharp Hume (trans. and ed.), Chronicle of King Henry VIII. of England . . . (London, 1889), 19. For Salvago’s links with Cromwell, see two letters to Cromwell from their mutual friend (and another Genoese) Antonio di’ Vivaldi: 24 August 1535, BL MS Cotton Galba B/X f. 65, LP 9 no. 175; 2 March 1536, BL MS Cotton Vitellius B/XIV f. 221, LP 10 no. 403.
16. Alexander Alesius to Elizabeth I, 1 September 1559, TNA, SP 70/7 f. 11v, Calendar of State Papers Foreign . . . Elizabeth [I], 1: 1558–59, no. 1303, 533.
17. BL MS Harley 6148: the spirit of recycling seems to have haunted this manuscript, since it was the object of a bizarre attempt at historical forgery in the late Victorian period. On this, see C. J. Wright, ‘The man who wrote on the manuscripts in the British Museum’, British Library Journal 12 (1986), 76–85.
18. Prince Arthur’s letter of 8 June 1501, concerning reforms at the Cistercian house at Abbey Dore, is BL MS Harley 6148 f. 151r.
19. See LP 6 nos. 1473, 1474 (26 November 1533); LP 7 nos. 17 and 20 (5 January 1534); LP 7 nos. 806, 807 (7 June 1534). Archbishop Lee of York was also in the habit of writing double letters to Cromwell on the same day, perhaps in the hope that their different subjects might get individual attention from him. The one letter from Cranmer to Cromwell in the collection’s main sequence is 19 July 1533, BL MS Harley 6148 f. 30v, LP 6 no. 868, and there is one further letter to Cromwell beyond the main dateline, 1 March 1535, right at the end of the collection, BL MS Harley 6148 f. 50v, slightly abbreviated from the original, SP 1/91 f. 2, LP 8 no. 306. Its presence here and in this position may well suggest that the letter-book scheme did not survive the first pair of volumes.
20. I explained this archival paradox in MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 135. Since Everett, Rise of Thomas Cromwell, 137–8, was apparently unable to understand it, I have provided this further explanation.
21. See below, this page.
22. Vaughan to Cromwell, August 1535, SP 1/90 f. 193, LP 8 no. 301; same to same, 4 September [1535], SP 1/96 f. 74, LP 9 no. 275. On Gwynedd, see ODNB, s.v. Gwynneth, John.
23. Vaughan to Cromwell, 1 November [1533], SP 1/80 f. 75, LP 6 no. 1385.
24. Vaughan to Cromwell, 21 November [1533], SP 1/80 f. 106, LP 6 no. 1448.
25. On Skip’s attack on Cromwell from the pulpit in Anne Boleyn’s final crisis, see below, this page.
26. Audley to Cromwell, beginning of October 1532, SP 1/72 f. 15, LP 5 no. 1514; slightly misdated by LP, since it predates Audley’s next letter about the mechanics of the prorogation on 4 November and has in any case to have been written before the King left for Calais around 8 October: cf. Audley to Cromwell, 20 October 1532, SP 1/71 f. 121, LP 5 no. 1450.
27. An additional mystery detailed in HC 1509–1558 3, 640, remains to be unravelled. Wingfield may have been the first Speaker promoted from a borough constituency (which would be another innovation attributable to Cromwell), or (far more likely) he may already have been knight of the shire for Suffolk in replacement for Thomas Wentworth, promoted to the Lords in December 1529.
28. A good discussion of all this is Hawkyard, House of Commons 1509–1558, 96–101, with specimen illustrations of the two crucial documents, SP 1/56 f. 7, LP 4 iii no. 6043[i], and SP 1/82 f. 52, LP 7 no. 56. Cromwell’s memorandum of October 1533 is BL MS Cotton Titus B/I f. 464, LP 6 no. 1382.
29. On this and what follows, see G. R. Elton (ed.), The Tudor Constitution: documents and commentary (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1982), 233–40, 248–9.
30. J. C. Warner, Henry VIII’s Divorce: literature and the politics of the printing press (Woodbridge, 1998), 44–6. For the Act of Succession, see Elton (ed.), Tudor
Constitution, 6–12, and for the proclamation of 5 July 1533, TRP no. 140.
31. Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 170–71. On Monteagle, see above, this page, this page. Benson’s successor at Burton, William Edys, did actually sit for four days in the 1534 session: Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 257.
32. It was one of Geoffrey Elton’s early achievements to sort out these drafts: see G. R. Elton, ‘The evolution of a Reformation statute’, in Elton, Studies 2, 82–106. The diagram of how they relate to each other at 83 makes one grateful for not having to do the work again, though Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 164n, testifies that he did exactly that. What follows draws generously on Elton’s analysis.
33. Slightly abridged text in Elton (ed.), Tudor Constitution, 350–53.
34. On the papal nuncio’s presence, Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 171, and Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 169.
35. Nicholson, ‘Act of Appeals and the English Reformation’, 29.
36. On all this, MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 88–9.
37. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 164; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 89–93.
38. Spanish Calendar 4 i no. 1062, at 646.
39. Thomas Audley to Cromwell, c. 22 April 1533, SP 1/75 f. 151, LP 6 no. 366: the scrabbles to locate a vital misplaced set of ‘opinions of doctors and learned men in the King’s great case’ involve Audley, Cromwell, Cranmer, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Wiltshire, Roland Lee, Bishop Gardiner and a not very pleased Henry VIII.
40. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 90–92.
41. Thomas Bedell to Cromwell, 12 and 14 May 1533: BL MS Cotton Otho C/X f. 164, LP 6 no. 461; SP 1/76 f. 34, LP 6 no. 469. For an account of Dunstable, MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 90–94.
42. The successful result of the York Convocation, after much fraught correspondence from Lee and others to Cromwell, is reported by Lee’s colleague there Thomas Magnus (Archdeacon of the East Riding and Canon of Windsor) to Cromwell, 15 May 1533, BL MS Cotton Caligula B/III f. 169, LP 6 no. 486. Previously Lee had been the messenger considered robust enough for the unenviable task of summoning Queen Katherine to Cranmer’s court at Dunstable, meeting a predictable rebuff: Archbishop Cranmer to Nicholas Hawkins, 17 June 1533, BL MS Harley 6148 f. 25r, LP 6 no. 661.
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