Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Cromwells and the Wests were classified in fifteenth-century England’s intricately stratified society as yeomen: busy industrious folk who liked to see their promising boys get on in the world, and who valued schooling as the key to advancement.

English was a complex hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Norse, with a strong overlay of Norman-French, and was difficult for outsiders to learn fluently because of its consequent lack of linguistic logic. It was nevertheless spoken widely in the Atlantic archipelago beyond English frontiers. In a northern kingdom ruled by the Stewart dynasty whom English kings never succeeded in permanently defeating, the Stewart monarchs united English-speakers with Gaels in an alliance of the unconquered, who found it useful to share a common identity as ‘Scotland’. It is significant how little Scotland will feature in Thomas Cromwell’s story, even in his years in government.

No one in mainland Europe bothered to learn the English language unless they had regular business with the subjects of the king of England. The English did produce remarkably good cloth for export; otherwise, there was not much point in making the effort. English folk remembered fondly various past imperial glories they had enjoyed beyond their shores.

As Henry VII, the new King spent a troubled quarter-century on the throne convincing his subjects that the decision in 1485 had been God’s, though well aware that he needed to exercise his considerable personal talents to sustain that notion. His victory at Bosworth did suggest divine favour to pious contemporaries, but Henry backed up God’s choice by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of King Edward IV. The Tudor dynasty was henceforward slightly more plausible in terms of royal descent. Henry’s surviving son, eighth Henry on the English throne, grew up with a profound sense of divine favour for his crown; in this he was much encouraged by the intense piety of Henry VII’s extremely capable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, whose political skill had done much to aid Heaven in the rise of the Tudors.

Monarchs like Henry VII and the young Henry VIII might cast envious eyes at the Church’s wealth, but they did not seriously challenge churchmen’s right to enjoy possessions which, in many cases, had been given by devout Anglo-Saxon kings and aristocrats before ever there was a single kingdom of England.

The Tudor kings nevertheless remained resentfully conscious of the constraints on their ability to raise revenue from their subjects. They were constantly hobbled by the fact that England had become a centralized polity much earlier than other European kingdoms, and so its tax system, sophisticated by fourteenth-century standards, was now creaky and incapable of doing justice to the riches represented by England’s farms and fisheries. Customary lay taxation was also dependent on the consent of meetings of commons, nobility and leading clergy in Parliament, together with agreement to taxation on churchmen by two clerical assemblies which met in parallel to Parliamentary sessions, called Convocations.* Both Tudor Henrys spent much of their energy finding ways round these obstacles, and it was to be a major theme of the reign of Henry VIII, particularly since he much enjoyed spending money in spectacular ways – on palaces, castles, soldiers, ships, works of art and even books and manuscripts.

Yet even in the early 1520s, there was biological time to spare, and meanwhile King Henry did his best to stride the European stage as if he were one of its really important monarchs, doing his best to equal the Valois King of France, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor or the Jagiellon King of Poland-Lithuania.

Nobles saw themselves as born royal advisers, and deeply resented an upstart whose father had been no more than a prosperous butcher and livestock-dealer in the provincial port town of Ipswich. England in Tudor times was a society obsessed with gradations of hierarchy and status (some say it still is), but there was nothing that outraged nobility and gentry could do while Wolsey continued to please the King, and of course many of them hastened to profit from his spectacular good fortune.

will be one of the main arguments of this book that Thomas Cromwell’s enthusiasm for the Reformation was a constant force in shaping his public career and policy, and that from early in the 1520s he was what a later generation would call Protestant. The term ‘Protestant’ is best put aside in dealing with the very early stage of the English Reformation which Cromwell did so much to advance. ‘Evangelical’ is a better description, for in Cromwell’s lifetime ‘Protestant’ was not a term used to describe English adherents of the Reformation and is best reserved for its place of origin in Germany. By contrast, the terms ‘evangelic’ or ‘evangelical’ were used in England at the time, and that is the usage I will generally adopt throughout this story.16

We all have three basic needs: food, housing and clothing. Modern Western consumers will need to make an effort of imagination to enter a world where little else mattered in commerce: of those three priorities, clothing was the only one involving international trade.

The towns and cities of the Low Countries staged great fairs at certain seasons of the year, to which merchants and manufacturers flocked from southern and northern Europe alike. Thomas Cromwell made his first way in the world amid such commerce. Out of this trade came huge profits for producers and entrepreneurs, and the English economy hinged on the relationship. That was ample reason for the English monarchy to seek the best of relations with whoever ruled the Low Countries. Currently that ruler was the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor; since the 1490s the Habsburgs had been locked in continent-wide military and diplomatic confrontation with the Valois dynasty of France. That made the relationship even more obviously desirable, since the default reaction of the English was always to see the French monarchy as their arch-enemy.

The young Cromwell would have learned some useful lessons in how to render unto Caesar that which belonged to the Vicar of Christ.

Judging from Cromwell’s correspondence, he had a gift for learning languages, though there is no clue to how he acquired them. He spoke, read or wrote fluent Italian and French. He seems to have been at ease in Spanish, certainly in reading it: two people who had the measure of him in English politics, Queen Katherine of Aragon and her imperial nephew’s long-term ambassador in England, Eustace Chapuys, both chose to write to him in Spanish on important occasions.

Cromwell also understood the universal European language of power: the self-consciously elegant Latin written and spoken by Renaissance ‘humanists’, those ardent explorers of a re-emerging classical past. Over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Western Church used but also much adapted the Latin language for the purposes of Christian conversation and liturgy, transforming even its grammar and sentence construction. Humanist scholars, writers and poets modishly reached back across the centuries to classical Latin idioms, and tried to sound as much as possible like great orators of ancient Rome such as Cicero, or poets such as Virgil. They learned their Latin from a mass of ancient texts newly appearing in print. Cromwell loved and avidly collected books. He would recognize that humanism was a practical skill: good expression and forceful rhetoric were essential tools of effective politics. As a good humanist, he also had enough acquaintance with Greek for scholars occasionally to flatter him with a learned tag.

Of all these self-taught accomplishments, Cromwell’s fluency in Italian mattered the most.

Much of Cromwell’s early career rested on his ability to be the best Italian in all England.

How much legal training he undertook is no clearer than any other aspect of his education. Tudor law and its tangle of exotically named courts of justice can now seem very intimidating, but a sharp-witted boy from Putney would have soon mastered as much as his modern equivalent determined to penetrate the arcane world of finance in Manhattan.

In the early sixteenth century London’s foreign trade was dominated by Italians to an extraordinary extent, until the Reformation and a changing dynamic in international commerce virtually wiped out this ancient and flourishing community within a few decades of Cromwell’s death.40 So every leading London merchant had much to do with Italians. What is striking about Cromwell is that he chose to make this relationship unusually close and personal. Few of his contemporaries bothered to learn Italian with anything approaching his own fluency.

Gilds were the bedrock of late medieval popular religion: voluntary associations with all sorts of purposes, some commercial, some social, but all with some religious dimension. Among the thousands of such institutions vastly varied in scale, Our Lady’s Gild of Boston became a flagship. Originally a fairly modest body with a local focus, it hugely expanded its activities in the early 1500s. Its finances were boosted by the sale of indulgences, pardons granting a shortening of time in purgatory for the purchasers and their loved ones.

In early 1517, a few months before Friar Luther started his fateful campaign against indulgences far away in Saxony, thus inadvertently launching the Protestant Reformation, a battle royal for control of the English indulgence market broke out between his English confrères and the Boston Gild. Boston sent its Gild clerk to Cardinal Wolsey to seek a suspension of the Austin Friars’ privileges.47 Yet even Wolsey in his legatine splendour was only a local representative of the Holy Father. More ambitiously, determined to secure reaffirmation and authorization directly from Rome, the Gild recruited Thomas Cromwell.

The irony is obvious. Cromwell the future architect of English reformation was agent in advancing the indulgence trade in the very years when Martin Luther was denouncing it, though it was equally ironic that his employers’ rivals in indulgence-peddling, the English Austin Friars, were actually part of Luther’s order. John Foxe was himself born in Boston around a year before Cromwell’s expedition to Rome; when he came to construct a glowing account of Cromwell’s career in his classic Protestant narrative, he felt very uncomfortable about this story.

Cromwell’s remark to Cranmer that he spent his time on the Rome expedition getting acquainted with Desiderius Erasmus’s newly published edition of the Greek and Latin New Testament, and that this reading first set off doubts in his mind about what he was doing. This cheering thought Foxe noted twice.53

Throughout this long relationship, Cromwell never took the opportunity of joining the extensive and distinguished membership of Our Lady’s Gild of Boston. His professional work for such an extrovert expression of traditional piety as the Gild is no bar to supposing he was becoming precociously involved in the Reformation.

The boy’s Christian name is also worthy of note. The oddness of the name Gregory in early Tudor terms has not been the subject of much comment, and yet not only Thomas’s son but in the same generation one of his nephews, who must be a younger son of his brother-in-law Morgan Williams, was also called Gregory.69 Is it too fanciful to see the baby son born around 1520 as named after Cromwell’s visit to Rome in 1518–19, in honour of Pope Gregory the Great, who sent Augustine to the Anglo-Saxons and hence was known as ‘the Apostle of the English’?70 Once more, we have to remember the fluidity of the Reformation in its first half-decade; there is no reason to back-project

a fully formed version of Cromwell’s later anti-papal outlook on to the Boston Gild’s legal consultant when Gregory was christened.

Particularly indicative is the heraldry Cromwell chose for himself, probably in the late 1520s when his rising position in society began to require it.80 A lesser man might have invented a gentrifying link for himself to the medieval Barons Cromwell; they had taken their title from a Nottinghamshire village which was presumably also the original home of other Cromwells, and the last Lord Cromwell had died long ago, in 1455, without male heirs to cause a fuss over any later appropriation. Yet that grandly simple heraldry from Plantagenet days, or a chief gules, over all a bend azure (a blue diagonal band superimposed on both a gold field and a headband of red), was nothing like the design for the coat-armour Thomas Cromwell suggested to the heralds for his own grant. Rather he took his cue from the even simpler coat Morgan Williams used (sable, a lion rampant argent: a silver lion on a black field). His coat was dominated by three gold lions (lions rampant or), to which when he officially matriculated arms in 1532/3 he added allusive borrowings from the coat of Cardinal Wolsey, a reference then both pointed and brave.81

the early 1520s, that move was as yet several steps ahead. Cromwell’s social position

uncertain, on the lower margins of gentility, but at least in his business transactions it proved irreversible and was reinforced by his growing prosperity, founded on his varied enterprises.

Once more his choice of home brought him into close contact with Italy. Austin Friars was a particular favourite with the Italians of the City, who found it more congenial, or simply safer, to worship in a friary church than face xenophobia in a parish church. More prosaically, they might thus escape demands for tithe or other parish dues; Germans and Flemings worshipped at Austin Friars for the same reasons.

Diplomacy was frequently work for senior clergy. Among the English episcopate was a series of absentee Italians, useful agents for the English Crown amid the complexities of the papal Court, but needing a handsome income for their trouble: a wealthy English bishopric was just what they needed. That offered further opportunities for those like Cromwell with a foothold in both England and Italy to oil the machinery of the dioceses back home and communicate with the absentee in Rome.

The charges against Buckingham remain puzzling, but are unmistakably an early example of King Henry’s ability to destroy members of the nobility with a penchant for boasting about their Plantagenet blood. The proceedings against the Duke show that there had been boasting enough. Over the previous century and more, the Austin Friars of London had come to render a specialist service to whoever was on the English throne, providing a last resting-place for those whom the regime deemed to be its enemies and beheaded as traitors. Treason was not quite so dire a crime as heresy, so such victims of politics deserved a decent Christian burial: only not too decent, nor as honourable as they and their families had no doubt planned. A number of city friaries were drawn into this grisly post-mortem diplomacy (the best-known example now is from outside London, the Franciscan friary of Leicester which famously received the corpse of King Richard III after the battle of Bosworth, to lie eventually under a car park), but the London Austin Friars were way ahead.99 The unfortunate Duke of Buckingham was in fact the last such ‘traitor’ whom the Austin Friars received into their mercy. The great advantage of their church was that its lay congregation was dominated by foreigners, thus going some way to quarantining such politically charged corpses from the wider Tudor public.

In 1523 he entered service with another of England’s greatest men – yet it was not Cardinal Wolsey who first refocused his interests from London and international legal work and commerce, but a different Thomas: Thomas Grey, second Marquess of Dorset, England’s only marquess at the time. It is likely that Cromwell’s Welsh gentleman cousin Morgan Williams, by then in Dorset’s service, was the means of introduction.

Genealogy is all in the Tudor age, and the connections ramify. The second Marquess of Dorset married Margaret Wotton, from a distinguished family of Kent; they were part of that extensive Kentish gentry cousinage in which Cromwell became much involved.

This Grey connection suggests new answers for an old puzzle: when Thomas Cromwell became a member of Parliament for the first time, in 1523, for which borough did he sit? A borough constituency it would have to be; it was inconceivable at this stage of his career for such a nonentity to have been chosen as one of the pairs of knights representing a shire. It was too early for him to have looked to Wolsey for a place in Parliament, and in fact the long speech opposing military intervention in France which he may or may not have delivered to the Commons in that Parliament would have been decidedly unwelcome to the King and his chief minister.

Otherwise, a natural borough for Cromwell to represent would be Southampton, where one burgess for the 1523 Parliament remains unnamed. The even greater port of Bristol, where neither name survives, would probably have been too big a prize for him at that stage.124

The presence in Cromwell’s papers of a speech criticizing government plans to invade France has given this text a significance which is unwarranted. If it was in fact delivered, it is an echo from thousands of such frank contributions to Parliamentary debate, a great many of which would have been far more bilious and less well expressed than his. It is almost impossible to find a Parliament in early Tudor England not resounding with gritty opposition; King Henry VIII would have rolled his eyes in weary longing at modern historians’ talk of ‘Tudor despotism’. Parliament was a ‘high court’ of the realm, which meant that on many occasions, in conformity with the assumptions of the time, it showed due deference to the monarch’s wishes, particularly when God’s anointed ruler had properly explained the justification for what he wanted.

At other times, it fulfilled the role of any good advisory council in remonstrating, but on a scale intimidating to any monarch: an assembly several hundred strong, ranging exuberantly from peers of the realm to borough burgesses, brimming with opinions and local knowledge, and many understandably grumpy at being uprooted from their families and businesses.

Likewise, we do not have any explanation for why Cromwell left the service of the Greys; but that may not be the right question to ask, for the answer is provided by his entering Wolsey’s employment. What Wolsey wanted, he got. What did he want from Thomas Cromwell, apart from a decent jobbing lawyer, when there were swarms of them to choose from? The answer is the Cardinal’s legacy project: a monstrous tomb for himself, outclassing the tombs of kings, plus a pair of memorial colleges at Ipswich and Oxford.

His brief was to close a considerable number of small monasteries and nunneries, one of the more dramatic proofs of Wolsey’s willingness to exploit his powers as papal legate over the Church in England in the name of what he could claim was reform. There had been dissolutions of such small religious houses before, particularly during the long fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wars with France, when the Crown confiscated priories with mother houses across the Channel. Just as Wolsey did now, the monarchy had used the monastic estates for new religious purposes: Henry VI’s colleges at King’s Cambridge and Eton drew on such former monastic endowments, and the Cardinal’s new colleges followed the lead of King Henry’s lavish creations in this and in other respects, though always concerned to outdo the royal saint in fostering education and liturgical prayer.

It was a major administrative task to sort out the transfer of assets. All through his time in Wolsey’s service, it was this ‘legacy project’ which was Cromwell’s main work for the Cardinal, even when the Cardinal’s power started disintegrating in 1528, and his servant moved in to cover duties deserted by men less loyal to Wolsey than himself.

The cosmopolitan European traveller had a fairly limited acquaintance with his own country: largely London, Surrey and Essex and the ports of Southampton and Bristol. Now he was given the chance to roam widely (on travel expenses) across the whole of lowland England, and used his considerable charm to make all sorts of interesting friendships. This meant that, just at the moment when the kingdom was beginning to divide on religious lines under the influence of the Reformation in mainland Europe, Cromwell came to the King’s service on the fall of Wolsey equipped with a range of acquaintance on both sides of the

Despite understandable expressions of popular anger against Wolsey’s agent in dissolution, it is clear that at the same time Cromwell became a welcome visitor in a widely dispersed range of monasteries beyond those which might be threatened. He appears (rather remarkably for a layperson in a cardinal’s employ) to have taken on a general informal portfolio for monastic affairs.

Altogether, Cromwell in his travels around monasteries gained an interest in and country-wide knowledge of monastic life which was very unusual among laypeople in his day, and which fatefully transmogrified with remarkable speed after he gained real power under King Henry in 1532. This distinctive set of relationships reflected his anomalous place among Wolsey’s servants dealing with Church affairs. Most were clergy, as one would expect from the Pope’s legate a latere in England, but Cromwell was not, because of his specialist role in preparing the Cardinal’s plans for immortality in both this world and the

Lollardy was an irritant a century and a half old in early Tudor England’s otherwise placid religious landscape: a native movement, taking its inspiration in the late fourteenth century from bitter critiques of the official Church developed by the Oxford philosopher John Wyclif. Official persecution by both Church and monarchy had rooted Lollards out of the universities and normally out of gentry society, but they clung on in their clandestine religious life, generally keeping a tepid outward conformity to their community’s public worship. Not many made enough public fuss to attract examination by authority, though some suffered death at the stake as heretics, particularly if a bishop or Church official was unusually enthusiastic for ferreting them

Cromwell’s careful plans for the education of his son Gregory are relevant here. He did not try to repeat his own triumphantly successful history of self-tutoring, but was concerned to do the best for his son. Over the years, as his own status rose, his priorities shifted from scholarly grounding to the moulding of a potential courtier (a move in any case encouraged by Gregory’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for scholarly pursuits). What is significant is strong evidence of evangelical connections in the academic foundations of Gregory’s programme of schooling.

The evidence for Cromwell’s involvement in England’s networks of early evangelicals and even Lollards in the 1520s is thus inescapable. It is true that in his years of power under Henry VIII, while he steadily promoted his own dynamically evangelical agenda, he went on being capable of publicly making apparent gestures towards traditional religion. In 1517, at the dawn of the Reformation, Cromwell’s service to the Gild of Boston promoted the very indulgence trade which in the same years sparked Martin Luther’s wrath. Then he made his greatest career move so far on the basis of a spectacular project of soul-provision for England’s papal legate.

How can we characterize this form of religion, already forged in Cromwell’s career in the 1520s? It is deceitful, certainly, hypocritical perhaps: very different from the stentorian public proclamation which marked out the magisterial Reformations of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin. At the time, Cromwell was often called a Lutheran, particularly by those who hated the Reformation. But the reality of his religion is anything but Lutheran.

But there is yet another Italian speciality contemporary with Cromwell’s public career: Nicodemism, that quiet decision to hide one’s religious views and practice amid some degree of conformity to the surrounding official religion (as John Calvin pointed out sarcastically in coining the label, Nicodemus had dared come to see the Saviour only by night).77 The Nicodemites of the Italian Reform demonstrate many features of Thomas Cromwell’s mature religious creed: much that was

outward did not reflect that which was inward.

A consciously Nicodemite outlook might explain the apparently stark contradiction between Cromwell’s developing evangelicalism and his loyal service to that most grandiose of late medieval English churchmen, Thomas Wolsey. In Italy, such conjunctions were not at all unusual while that paradoxical near-miss, an Italian Reformation, took shape in the 1530s.