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July 24, 2020 - January 14, 2021
the Duke’s high-spirited daughter Elizabeth, victim of a dynastic marriage to Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk gone horribly wrong.
Oh no, Uncle Norfolk!
they evidently both had faith in Cromwell’s ability to charm widows.
HEYO
one significant silence is obvious in his correspondence: virtually no one bothered to put an address on letters to him, because his name would find him more easily than his exact location.
Fifteen-thirty-five saw Henry VIII and Cromwell embarking on further sewer-related adventures,
‘I well perceive who granteth such men an inch they will take an ell,’
A common expression or indicative of TC's knowledge of textiles?
The often rash ways in which Cromwell pursued his plans over the next few years are some of the best proofs that he was more than a politician shaped by cynical ambition.
As ecclesiastical law and privilege retreated in the 1530s, so did the common law expand, and by implication its restraining power on the Crown. This was one of many ways in which Thomas Cromwell’s work on the immediate needs and policies of Henry VIII pushed the future of England’s government and polity in a direction which would not have been apparent to him at the time.
one feels they were having an extremely good time,
did much to revolutionize teaching in both universities. They banned lecture courses based on the great medieval textbooks of theology and biblical commentary, emphasized direct engagement with the biblical text, strengthened the teaching of Greek (hardly studied at all in medieval Oxbridge)
the stuttering start to poor law legislation underlines the fact that in the 1530s it was perfectly possible for Parliament to show determined and successful opposition to measures proposed by the King’s chief minister, provided they did not focus on the two issues which aroused Henry’s murderous rage: religion and the future of the dynasty. Tudor England was never a simple monarchical tyranny.
At worst it was witty flirtation, but perhaps the worst thing was indeed that it was witty, and Henry felt himself the target of other people’s sniggers.
From the sidelines, other wounded admirers of the Cardinal, including those who had helped to bring Cromwell into the King’s service in 1530, rejoiced at what the architect of Wolsey’s legacy project had achieved. It was a monument for the Cardinal far beyond the skill of Italian craftsmen.
Cromwell was indeed assigned a role of public gallantry for her at Court, so on 22 February 1537 his account-books reveal him dispatching Wriothesley to Mary with the handsome present of fifteen pounds ‘because my Lord was her Valentine’. Given that Cromwell was now around fifty-two and she was twenty-one, this was a symbolic courtship, more the attention of a second father-figure.
Hugh Latimer later reminisced, ‘I heard you say once after you had seen that furious invective of Cardinal Pole that you would make him to eat his own heart.’55
Quietly, with extraordinary discretion, Cromwell put friends and household to support an enterprise of international theological matchmaking with no immediate strategic relevance, and which would have aroused the suspicion and rage of King Henry if he had fully known about it. No cynical, ‘secular-minded’ politician would have taken such risks. Cromwell was deliberately laying foundations for a Protestant future.
The government had made an apparently almost complete surrender to the Pilgrims’ demands. Yet the Pilgrims’ delight in their victory was utterly misplaced. The fatal fact remained: Cromwell was still in place.
He thus paid a price for survival: this newly formalized body sat not as a vehicle for his power, but to check it.
joined the Swiss in making the prohibition of graven images the Second Commandment. Its discussion under that heading was admittedly not long and was also cautiously phrased, concentrating on inappropriate devotion to images, but this was the first sign that Protestant sympathies within Henry’s Church might move away from Luther towards the Reformed.
the bishops rejected a draft text from conservative bishops which would have included an explicit defence of shrines and pilgrimage
The authorization of the Matthew Bible remains one of Thomas Cromwell’s greatest achievements in sneaking evangelical reformation past the King. A translation largely created by the man in whose destruction Henry had connived was now to be placed in every significant church in the realm. It has remained the basis of every English biblical translation until modern times. Around nine-tenths of the New Testament text in the King James Bible of 1611 was in fact produced by Tyndale just under a century earlier.
Cromwell’s patronage was distinctive in concentrating on plays which were evangelical propaganda, with one principal writer and impresario, carefully selected for obvious talent.
Bale operated at the outer limit of what was possible in Henry VIII’s Church of England. When Cromwell fell, he fled the country, until more promising times dawned under Edward VI.
Through this opportunistic acquisitiveness at Wells, the Vice-Gerent may unwittingly have saved cathedrals from their logical extinction in a Reformed Protestant Church, by providing them with a number of powerful lay protectors in their most vulnerable decades.
Friars rapidly became the Western Church’s specialists in preaching, so they needed to be intellectually alert and well informed. Soon they established friaries in university towns to get the best intellectual training they could, and Martin Luther the Austin Friar was only the latest among their academic stars. As a result, many of them followed Luther into that great rebellion of the intellect, the Reformation. Far more friars than monks turned into campaigning Protestant leaders: one might consider the Reformation as a revolution of friars faced with a pastoral crisis.
the Henrician regime quietly gave up on presenting papalist or traditionalist convictions as a crime of heresy. There was a doctrinal standard under which it could have done so, the Bishops’ Book of the year before, but in the middle of Henry’s omnivorous marital overtures abroad in the shadow of a Franco-Imperial alliance against England, pursuing this line would be very unwise. Any potential bride from European royal houses might theoretically be liable to heresy charges the moment she landed in England,
Henry himself, and his more straightforwardly Protestant successors, henceforth killed Catholics (when required) not as heretics but as traitors or fomenters of sedition,
John Gough and James Nicholson published a fierce attack on the friars, attributed mendaciously but with imaginative commercial acumen to Geoffrey Chaucer and almost certainly a Lollard tract from his time.
The town of Ipswich was transformed in 1538. Wolsey had intended his native borough to be a showcase of a reformed humanist Catholicism, its wonder-working Marian shrine nestling amid a dozen and more parish churches. Around this ensemble in stately guardianship would stand the three friaries and surviving Augustinian priory, alongside the greatest institution of all, Cardinal College. Instead, thanks to close co-operation between the Lord Privy Seal and Thomas Lord Wentworth, Ipswich became a model borough of the continent-wide Protestant Reformation.
and in the former Dominican friary the town now cherished its restored school alongside a public workhouse and accommodation for the destitute.
Fifteen-thirty-eight was a turning-point, as more and more of the country’s political elite perfectly prepared to accept King Henry’s new dispensation were nevertheless pushed to the conclusion that Thomas Cromwell was too dangerous to lead it.
Whatever Cromwell meant in his remembrance of March about ‘A device in the Parliament for the unity in religion’, the erratic progress of discussion on six articles of religion in the House of Lords took a very different direction from any intended by him. The Duke of Norfolk introduced it, and Cromwell and Cranmer were increasingly marginalized in its formulation. Its commendations were all traditional: real presence in the eucharist, the acceptability of communicants receiving only bread without wine, compulsory clerical celibacy and perpetuity of monastic vows of celibacy, ‘private’ masses
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A further measure passed without trouble was a brief and innocently titled ‘Act for the Placing of the Lords in the Parliament’. For all that this might sound rather technical, it was a major shake-up in the order of precedence for the most powerful men of the realm, a matter of huge importance when political realities were expressed through public ceremony and formal rankings in seating and processions. The remarkable feature of the Act, a true Tudor Revolution in Government, was that offices of state would now automatically modify any other system of noble precedence: even the classic ladder
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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.
Love a bitchy footnote
