Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

In the England of the 1520s, the best or speediest chance of reform in Church and commonwealth alike was at the hands of a cardinal of the Roman Church: the papal legate, Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey’s general concern for justice and reform was exemplified in his activity as Lord Chancellor and in his galvanizing the King’s Council to act more systematically as a court of law in Star Chamber. He spent a greater fraction of his energy than was politically sensible in prosecuting enclosures of arable land for pasture and extending existing legislation against it. It may now seem surprising that this could be considered a moral issue, but so it was for many people in Tudor England, concerned both for food production and for social justice, protecting the weak against the strong.

In the Church, the Cardinal had great plans for reorganization and rationalization of the English diocesan system (not merely for the educational fruits of his monastic suppressions) and for wider intervention and renewal in the orders of monks and friars – all of which made him detested by his colleagues on the episcopal bench.

Wolsey was consistently easy-going on heresy compared with his English episcopal confrères, never initiating the burning of a heretic.

Yet Wolsey’s handicap as Church reformer, apart from personal self-indulgence far outstripping any other late medieval English cleric, was the vast scope of his duties not simply as papal legate, but also as omnicompetent royal minister and dispenser of justice in Star Chamber. It was just all too much.86 Wolsey also had a personality defect deriving as much from his limited attention-span as from the burdens of his work.

It is clear that for Cromwell frustration long jostled with deep and lasting loyalty in his complex relationship with his master. While learning a great deal by observing Wolsey in government, and drawing on Wolsey’s initiatives and schemes, he did his best not to make the same mistakes, once he had a chance to exploit his own power in the kingdom.

Two factors turned Henry’s amorous playfulness with Anne into a political and theological project to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, his wife of nearly two decades. First were the idiosyncratically pious King’s long-standing doubts about the canonical validity of that marriage; Henry decided that he had breached biblical prohibitions on marrying one’s deceased brother’s wife, sparking the wrath of God. That seemed manifest in his lack of a male heir from all Katherine’s pregnancies. If the King was right in his assessment of God’s law, his marriage had never existed. For the good of his and Katherine’s souls, as well as the kingdom’s future, it must be publicly declared null.* Second, and subsequent to that existential disquiet, came Anne’s unusual and unexpected insistence that she would not share Henry’s bed unless she was his wife. Her charisma and sheer force of personality so captured the King that he accepted this audacious challenge.

It was the passionate nature of their relationship, so unusual in royal liaisons, that made Henry capable over the next few years of pursuing courses of action which a lesser man would have found too embarrassing or foolish to contemplate, against both common decency and the opposition of some of the most powerful people in the realm. Henry deeply resented such opposition, and was inclined to put the most sinister construction on it. Though he never admitted it for one moment, his father’s claim to rule had been laughably feeble in hereditary terms, and throughout his reign he pursued to the death anyone who challenged his family’s grasp on the crown, either by their actions or by merely existing.

A pattern emerges from all this. Cromwell’s supporters at Court were those who owed Wolsey much and now felt sorry for the Cardinal and his man. Not much surprise there. But it is also clear that generally they coupled that with a low opinion of Anne, and were complying with the drive to annul the Aragon marriage only out of loyalty to the King. They were by and large religious conservatives, but they shared or publicly professed to share King Henry’s fury with the Pope over his betrayal in the Blackfriars trial, and they were prepared to support a campaign of harassment against the exercise of papal power in the kingdom.

The price of winning hearts and minds for the King in a Tudor Parliament was eternal vigilance. The problem for official management was the constant difficulty of orchestrating three different arenas at the same time: Lords, Commons and Convocation (not to mention the fact that Convocation too had its upper and lower houses).

And so on 15 January 1532 Parliament opened once more. By the time it was prorogued four months later, Cromwell had been prominent in drafting and seeing through to royal assent a good many pieces of worthy and useful legislation from both government and local interests, ranging from a long-lasting new framework for ‘commissions of sewers’ to administer flood defences and waterways through to a prohibition on selling horses to Scotsmen.10 Yet any management he attempted of the most politically important and contentious proceedings was largely ineffective.

The importance of the Supplication in the religious changes of the next decade cannot be over-estimated. The ‘Ordinaries’ under attack were the bishops and their senior officials, controlling the entire system of Church courts, whose procedures were those of the Western Church’s international system of canon law. Their activities ran in parallel with the business transacted in an intricate variety of temporal law courts which made up the King’s judicial jurisdiction, and which operated England’s unique legal system of royal writ and precedent dating back to the twelfth century – the common law. If things were going well, Church courts complemented common law courts. If things were going badly, the two systems became rivals, with little parallel elsewhere in Europe. All medieval legal jurisdictions were liable to clash and try to steal each other’s business, but nowhere else was there a contest of two such giants. English common law was unique because no other kingdom or sizeable principality in Europe had such a long tradition of centralized administration as England. Over four centuries, English monarchs had created royal courts whose practices in turn fostered a brotherhood of lawyers to run them, with their own system of higher education as a complete alternative to Oxford and Cambridge: the Inns of Court in London. Common law thus created a second English learned profession alongside the clergy, boasting its own traditions, training and esprit de corps, a profession wh...

There could hardly be a more telling symptom of Cromwell’s arrival at the centre of power than his presence at this tense interview, tugging at the King’s sleeve. Henceforward, 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. Now, at last, came the beginnings of formal royal office.

There is a pattern in these non-appointments and relatively minor appointments between 1530 and 1534; witness the furtive way Cromwell became a royal councillor in early 1531. The outward appearance clashed with the reality that he grew ever more important in government through these four years. Even by early 1533 no one under the King could match him, and so Ambassador Chapuys repeatedly affirmed that he was the man enjoying most credit with the King.39

It took time for Henry, a thorough coward when it came to personal confrontations, to manoeuvre his new minister into an unassailable public role. Most likely Anne could only be persuaded to accept something of the reality of Cromwell’s position with good grace once he had triumphantly steered her through to marriage and coronation.

These formal acquisitions of Court offices demanded a thorough overhaul of Cromwell’s social status, which duly followed in no fewer than four different respects. First adjustment: it must be given substance by appropriate landholding.

Second adjustment: etiquette would demand that the holder of a feudal lordship, however minor, must obtain an official grant of a coat of arms from the College of Heralds if he did not have one.

The fact that the allusion to jewels is merely in the crest, and not in the body of the coat itself, raises the suspicion that Cromwell had been using that coat of arms before, simply not bothering to get it authorized. That thought is strengthened by the nature of the coat, all of which suggests his life in the later 1520s.

Third adjustment: a Crown official of some status (in fact rather more status than currently met the eye) needed his portrait painted, both to display in his own mansion and also as a model, if his influence and reputation so expanded that people would wish to have copies for their own walls.

Holbein was a master of a realism which has left us riveting character-sketches of the Tudor Court, but he nevertheless found significantly few imitators in English portraiture over the next century. Cromwell’s portrait may suggest why. No one has ever suggested that it is an endearing picture, and now the watchful, slightly hooded-eyed minister, within a minute of losing his temper, hangs in the Frick Collection in New York, paired with Holbein’s image of bleakly fearless, clear-sighted Thomas More: not to the advantage of the Master of the Jewels. Hilary Mantel has engagingly imagined the reactions at Austin Friars when the painter delivers the result.

Fourth and last adjustment: no royal official with pretensions to gentle status could possibly tolerate not being named to that essential organ of local government, the county commission of the peace, which the Crown or its local delegates issued for every shire or county in England. Since the fourteenth century, the justices of the peace (JPs) had taken on more and more local powers: they were ideal agents from the monarchy’s point of view, since apart from a fairly nominal daily payment for turning up at the ‘quarter sessions’ every three months, they cost nothing (most of them got ample reward from the prestige and power the office brought). Better still, they could be dismissed or appointed by the simple means of issuing another royal commission with a new list of names to sit on the county bench of JPs, cancelling out the previous commission.

The circumstances of Cromwell’s rise in spring 1532 involved two immediate political casualties, who would now be marked out as his enemies for life, however much public proprieties might be observed: Sir Thomas More and Bishop Stephen Gardiner. More had had enough of trying to reconcile his conscience with public office and, as we have seen, the submission of the clergy to the King provoked his resignation as Lord Chancellor, to be succeeded by Thomas Audley.

From the moment of his resignation, despite his considerable powers of public discretion, More became one of the chief symbols of opposition to the King’s plans for marriage and religion. Consequently not only did Henry turn to hate him as only Henry could, but Thomas Cromwell became the chief agent in his destruction.

Less immediately obvious casualties of events were the three great Court magnates in the King’s counsels, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and Anne Boleyn’s father the Earl of Wiltshire. Wiltshire was an able diplomat, but diplomats seldom have the qualities for leadership in government, and there was no question that he owed his sudden prominence to his daughter’s increasingly certain marriage to the King. His fortunes rose and fell in relation to hers, and he was no match for the new arrival among royal ministers.

Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk’s remarkable staying power in the King’s affections relied on his pliable charm and Henry’s warm memories of their common youthful prowess in the tiltyard. Otherwise he lacked the administrative abilities required for celebrations in a brewery, let alone governing a kingdom.

The Duke of Norfolk was a man of much greater ability than his fellow-magnate: experienced as a diplomat and military commander, with a decent record in that most intractable of Tudor territories, Ireland, and ruthlessly determined to build on his own already exalted position in the realm. His niece Anne Boleyn’s cause looked like an asset in pursuing that aim, but his own uneasy combination of religious traditionalism and brusque contempt for the Church’s power at home and abroad did not produce results for the Great Matter after the fall of Wolsey any more impressive than the Cardinal’s strenuous efforts.

During 1532, it became painfully apparent to those close to events that Cromwell’s rise was edging Norfolk aside.

Norfolk’s aristocratic hauteur was all the more pronounced because of its fragility: for all the Howards’ pretensions, someone as versed in history as Thomas Cromwell could have pointed out that the family’s entry to the peerage had been no more than six decades before, and their ducal title had been granted around the time of Cromwell’s own birth. Howard magnificence was borrowed plumage from their Mowbray predecessors in the Norfolk title, complete with an ancient Norfolk mausoleum in their Cluniac priory of Thetford, a funereal venue which meant a great deal to the Duke.

This was a relationship characterized by an unstable mixture of ducal anxiety and outward friendship. The Duke had all the ability of the professionally insincere to put up an effective act in the role of bluff honest comrade. It is a shame that we cannot certainly date or place in context the most extreme of his falsehoods, when the Duke avowed to Cromwell, in his own distinctive and rather pleasing handwriting, By my friends I have been advertised that since I saw you last, ye have most lovingly handled me, for the which . . . I assure you in few words you will always find me a faithful friend, grudge who will, the King only reserved, not doubting once to shew the same with effect, though ye shall have little need thereof, as I pray Almighty God ye never have . . .80 Cromwell on his side was always punctilious in maintaining the charade, until the pressure of events impaired his judgement in his last year of life.

A fascination of Cromwell’s years in power is deciding what difference he made, after subtracting what would have been the routine aims or achievements of any half-competent minister, and after assessing what is likely to have originated from his royal master – who had a quarter-century’s experience of kingship by the time Cromwell became his chief minister, and was not a fool. Are there political initiatives attributable to his arrival at the centre of government? Straight away, the story of the later 1530s presents itself as the unfolding story of key Parliamentary decisions. We have already noted Cromwell’s ability to seize the moment; nowhere is that more obvious than the use to which the King and his ministers put England’s and Ireland’s legislative assemblies.

Only after its recall in winter 1531 did this Parliament become remarkable and indeed unprecedented, not merely for the number of times it was summoned again, but for what it actually achieved in legislation. The 1531 session was the first in which Cromwell emerged as a government spokesman, but at that stage he was still one royal minister among several, and there was much disorder and failed business.

Cromwell’s opportunism in using existing situations in and beyond Parliament and bending them to his purposes could have remained a matter of ambition and temperament, rather than shaping distinctive policy agendas which would have taken a different course without him. What remains to demonstrate is that in these years from 1531 up to 1540 one can isolate policy initiatives which seem peculiarly his. In order of importance, from the apparently ridiculous to the sublime, we begin with sewers, pass through public relations and end with the Church.

This was an issue where one man’s profitable weir or mill-race was an infuriating obstruction to many more people’s community fishing, or the free flow of water to keep river silting at bay, or to boats at a time when water transport was the easiest way to move bulky goods, grain and agricultural produce included. Tudor people were more ready to judge problems in terms of morality than economics. Just like enclosure for sheep-farming, the matter of weirs took on moral dimensions: it demonstrated human greed and selfishness, which threatened to damage a frail social fabric by endangering food supplies. In Tudor society, famine still loomed, with all its capacity to poison human relations and cause very public suffering, let alone riot and rebellion; the moral outrage was not some academic debate. Weirs had been the subject of moral outrage long before Cromwell’s years of power, when he was just a boy living in a Thames-side village (with a father who owned a mill); there was repeated agitation in the Parliaments of Henry VII about them, resulting in one or two pieces of legislation with a local focus and not much effect.

Next in Cromwell’s catalogue of innovation is the development of official printed propaganda in English directed to a domestic reading public, followed by a keen interest in other varieties of mass communication such as public drama.

Cranmer was not the man to initiate the first hesitant English imitation of Lutheran Flugschriften. The likelihood is that Cromwell was doing what he did so often in the next few years, nudging the King into an enthusiasm which Henry then made his own. Cromwell was not himself inclined to authorship, but he was a vigorous impresario of many other voices, directing an increasingly formidable output of official propaganda not merely in print, but in the pulpit and popular drama. His hour for such enterprise had come: for, as we have seen, by the end of 1531 the King was allowing him the

power to shape official policy: an opportunity through which he shaped a near-decade of English politics, and much more beyond.

Such by-elections were a necessary innovation in a Parliament which eventually sat over an extraordinary and unprecedented seven years. Yet this apparently minor piece of administrative creativity was also the outward sign of the momentous decision of the 1530s. In these years there was so much business of national importance and controversial character being transacted that it would have been foolish to impose it on the kingdom by royal fiat. Rather, it demanded the appearance of consensus, even initiative, from the highest assembly of the realm. As a result of this need, it was during the 1530s that the assembly of ‘commons’ became a ‘House’ with a status equal at least in terms of function to the Lords, and most legislation was introduced in the Commons. Soon afterwards in 1548 it acquired its own permanent chamber in the Palace of Westminster.29 Official propaganda and public pronouncements put out through these years fully exploited this rhetoric of consensus in a variety of ways, emphasizing the active role of Parliament in a manner with little precedent.

This intensive use of Parliament in the 1530s, a crucial moment in its consolidation and growth when many other such assemblies in Europe were atrophying, had implications not merely for the religious future of Tudor England, but for the shape of national history thereafter. When, over the next 400 years, other European commonwealths evolved into something like nations, it was usually through an exercise of will by monarchs who felt little need of their medieval representative assemblies. Cromwell the Parliamentary veteran is the most likely candidate for having promoted Parliament in the kingdom of England at this moment. It is much less likely that his plans encompassed later centuries, and there was another immediate negative consequence. If the official theory of the 1530s ran that the realm was united with one voice as expressed in Parliament, once this expression had been made anyone dissenting was not a true subject, or churchman, lord, knight or burgess. The fate of such individuals could be dire. If Cromwell crafted the rhetoric, he was also put in charge of enforcing the consequences.

The efforts leading to these culminating events of 29 May to 1 June 1533 had brought down Cardinal Wolsey and radically changed the direction of Cromwell’s life, to say little of other lives already remade or ruined, with many more to come. The centrepiece was a coronation, not a wedding, for, as the discreet meeting at Lambeth legally confirmed, the wedding had already happened; maybe in reality twice. In fact, this was the only solo coronation to be held for any of the six ladies who married King Henry VIII (Katherine of Aragon had been crowned alongside him), and as such it was a symptom of the constant over-assertion which characterized the establishment of the Boleyn marriage.

In immediate practical terms the Chancellorship brought Cromwell one chore, but in the longer term one highly important opportunity for patronage. The chore was to collect the fines or hear excuses from a wide range of gentlemen and esquires who had to their dismay been confronted with a demand to come to Queen Anne’s coronation and be knighted, or face a fine. In fact it may have been to undertake this imminent task that Cromwell was given the Chancellorship as the most immediately vacant office in the Exchequer. Knighthood was of course an honour, but came with the expectation of much ill-rewarded public service, and many were genuinely unable to contemplate such a lifetime’s financial burden. In any case, this was in reality a windfall tax on the moderately well-off, with the actual knighting as the alternative. The protests of those claiming they should not have to pay the fine because their income fell below the forty-pound-a-year income threshold for knighting, plus wheedling letters from their friends, built up to a considerable correspondence, which in itself gave Cromwell the chance to dole out favours right across the realm.53

The new phase of the campaign had various elements. One was to go even further in building up a case from history to show that Henry enjoyed an imperial jurisdiction by right, which inexplicably his predecessors had long neglected. The Collectanea satis copiosa had been a start, but who knew what else was sitting in monastic libraries in the kingdom and beyond? So, soon after the city pageants had been dismantled, Cromwell’s deviser of elegant verse for the coronation, John Leland, already marked out as a precocious investigator of antiquity, was dispatched to travel the length and breadth of the kingdom looking for further manuscripts, armed with a royal commission to secure entry to ancient abbeys, priories and friaries. Thus began Leland’s marvellous investigative journeys across Tudor England which have left us so much, but which in their antiquarian excitements, overwhelming possibilities and distressing witnesses of destruction eventually robbed him of his sanity.

Often in previous accounts of this Parliament and similar occasions, these absences have been interpreted as the result of government pressure, but that is too crude an interpretation of the transaction. Unity was a prized good in medieval and Tudor England: division was an aberration from the norm, hence the government’s use of voting by division in Parliamentary proceedings as a way to shame people into conformity. Respected county leaders like Throckmorton or Constable, or long-term Crown servants, would not wish to show open defiance to royal policy: absence was a useful middle way between defiance and assent.

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...

The noisy rows of the weekend and the emotions they revealed seem to have been the catalyst to transform what might have been a relatively decorous set of annulment proceedings into steadily more insane charges of treason, adultery and incest, and the judicial murders that were their consequence. Henry’s paranoia was best provoked by making the most extreme of accusations.

Anne was now victim of the most extreme example of Henry’s ability to turn deep affection into deep hatred, and then to believe any old nonsense to reinforce his new point of view. Cromwell was his minister and must do his bidding, but (if the reader has been in any measure convinced by this retelling of Court politics in the 1530s) the minister had his own reasons for enthusiastically pursuing the Queen to destruction. That is what he did, eliminating both her and the courtiers whom he and the King had singled out.

The various charges of sexual crimes and treasonous talk were full of fictions that can easily be dismissed for putting the accused in locations where they certainly had not been at the time of their supposed offences.

Confusion about the shape of the coup against Anne has been aided by the embarrassment of Protestant commentators from John Foxe onwards that one Protestant champion should eliminate another, and a consequent lack of comment on the subject.

The evidence for an original Catholic conspiracy which Cromwell then belatedly took over is equally flimsy. Of course conservatives at Court enthusiastically joined in the destruction of Anne and had great hopes for it, as did every Catholic in the land and beyond.

As that famous observation indicates, the responsibility for Anne’s destruction remains squarely with Cromwell, as he cheerfully admitted. At least he thought of her as a worthy adversary, as he observed in that remarkably frank debriefing with Chapuys on 24 May: ‘he emphatically praised the sense, wit and courage of the late Concubine, and of her brother.’74 Cromwell did not abandon or betray a partner in reformation. With Anne dead, the Reformation which he sought suddenly became much less complicated, though he would always have to work in a roller-coaster collaboration with the King’s tempestuous emotional appetites. If the royal passions had not veered so decisively towards Jane Seymour that Henry once again broke all decencies, destroying Anne and then immediately marrying a successor, no one could have achieved the result of May 1536.

The new Queen had an easy task in creating a new atmosphere of unity, after the public confrontations and partisanship which had been the product of Anne Boleyn’s temperament. Chapuys adroitly conferred on Jane at their first interview the title of ‘peacemaker’, which had a fairly obvious diplomatic purpose, but which was seized on with pleasure by the King, a little nervous about how his demure bride might perform in front of the most important foreign envoy in the realm.1 Whatever courtiers thought about the rights and wrongs of destroying the Boleyns, the sense of relief among them after months of storms or brooding atmospheres is palpable.

In keeping with the current emphasis on reconciliation and unity, the summer saw a doling out of good news in religion to both traditionalists and evangelicals, neither of whom could really have been said to have won when Anne was destroyed. In the middle of the new Parliamentary session, the King and Queen led a solemn procession from Whitehall Palace to Westminster Abbey to the most elaborate possible celebration of Corpus Christi Day (15 June 1536), accompanied by the two archbishops, peers and courtiers.8 Conservatives received the appointments to vacant dioceses, but on the other hand Bishop Latimer was only the most prominent figure among various evangelicals allowed to preach attacks on such aspects of traditional religion as purgatory, pilgrimages and devotion to images – the sorts of issues Cromwell had envisaged making the subject of a campaign in monasteries the previous winter.