Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

drafts reveal how many anxious hands other than Cromwell’s contributed to getting the legislation and its criminal penalties for the realm’s most serious temporal crime into a form likely to be acceptable to Parliament. Not only was the range of activities defined as treason much expanded, but crucially the ‘overt deed’ of treason at the heart of the 1352 legislation was now more closely defined to include opposition ‘by writing or imprinting’. Technological advance – the rise of printing – demanded this expansion from the fourteenth-century statute. It was a logical but radical consequence of the years after 1529, when William Tyndale and Thomas More began their literary duel, turning the nation’s divisions into polemical printed text, and from 1531, when Cromwell started marshalling the printing press for government propaganda purposes. Any work challenging that official message now made its author liable to suffer the new penalties for treason. Treason by words had always been one of possible grounds for conviction, but the evidence was often too vague to satisfy lawyerly precision. Accordingly, and rather adroitly, the royal Council agreed before presenting the bill to Parliament that oral treason would now be covered in the Act of Succession by a lesser though very serious offence in existing law, misprision of treason. This covered oral attacks on the Boleyn marriage and refusal to swear an oath upholding the succession. Those convicted of misprision were still liabl...