Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The most striking expression of this mood of concession to old and new alike was the first effort to define what the infant Church of England believed: ten Articles of religion approved by Convocation that summer. Reflecting what was obviously quite a tussle between evangelicals and conservatives in Convocation, they uncomfortably amalgamated material from several months of Bishop Foxe’s gritty theological discussion with Lutherans in Germany, with stout rearguard action from bishops like Cuthbert Tunstall in defence of traditional doctrine. Confession to a priest, for instance, was defended in traditional style, but that sat side by side with a very Lutheran-sounding exposition of justification by faith. Theologically alert commentators spotted the pantomime-horse dual character of the Articles and were displeased from opposing points of view. Alesius, particularly upset, complained bitterly to Johannes Aepinus the Superintendent of Hamburg, and unsuccessfully petitioned Cromwell to let him leave the country.9

No obvious bounty at first appeared for the chief architect of the new order. Cromwell’s gratification was a little deferred. The easy part was to make sure he would have reliable subordinates at the heart of the King’s private apartments, so central to the revolution just effected.

After that wretched confrontation, in which in agony of mind Mary gave no ground, the King angrily prepared legal proceedings which might have led to her death for treason. Maybe there was a good-cop/bad-cop strategy here, but Cromwell made a point of telling Chapuys that he recognized that ‘the almost excessive love and affection’ of Henry’s subjects for Mary had become much more obvious after Anne’s fall. He realized what a catastrophe the execution of the King’s daughter would be for the monarchy, far outclassing the destruction of More and Fisher.19 His own continued position was now entirely dependent on Mary giving way, and his desperation generated his own fury in answering her steadily more emotional pleas.

She surrendered in the end on 22 June, explicitly accepting the demands conveyed by Norfolk and Sampson: a bitter moment, which amply explains some of the bitterness in her later years of power. Many eyes across the nation were trying to penetrate official darkness around these proceedings, and there was general relief when news gradually filtered out that further savagery had been averted.

Historians have concentrated on the undoubted humiliation of Mary’s submission, so soon after losing the mother who had been denied her presence even at the deathbed. Understandably that has obscured Cromwell’s major role in sustaining her in this crisis against real danger stemming from her father’s anger; he remained a resource of support for her.

Such was the intensity in the relationship between Mary and Cromwell set up in this traumatic struggle of May and June that a rumour was born that they might marry.

Stories of Cromwell’s marital intentions did not go away, resurfacing in particular around the months of his fall in 1540. It is not entirely implausible that this was in his portfolio of possible outcomes, given the astonishing further ascent which we will trace, but if so it was one of the most dangerous thoughts he ever entertained. There were more immediate rewards for securing Mary’s submission. After years of anomaly between his real power and its lack of outward expression, he now gained a peerage and one of the highest secular offices in the land, that of Lord Privy Seal, then the third-ranking office of state after the Lord Chancellor and Lord Treasurer, with control over a crucial stage in the procession of documents for sealing after the initial royal signature on any grant or decision. Possession of the privy seal forged yet another link in Cromwell’s increasingly comprehensive chain of control of access to the King for anyone seeking action or favours.

It is of course an irony that Cranmer, the champion of evangelical reformation, should be the first victim among incumbent bishops of what over the next two decades became an accelerating royal policy of stripping the episcopate of much of its prime estates.

Pole’s hectoring effusion, including unflattering accounts of the King’s behaviour back to his accession, based on first-hand observation, and clarion-calls for him to return to papal obedience, was the opposite of Campeggio’s emollient overtures. Its contents were, as Pole’s biographer perceptively comments, the sort of unvarnished truths that a conscientious spiritual adviser might present to a penitent in the privacy of confession. The vital difference was that they had already been said in draft

to a wider audience than the recipient, and that audience was widening all the time.52 Pole seemed oblivious to this discrepancy. He envisaged his text as addressed to the entire English people; it is understandable that, in his rage after Henry’s atrocities against his relatives in 1538, he allowed his Latin text to appear in print for the whole world to read.

It is possible Henry did eventually fathom an even more audacious stratagem of Cromwell’s, though he could not possibly have understood its profound effect over time. This moved the course of English religion not merely towards the Protestant Reformation but towards a particular strand within it that the King would unquestionably consider obnoxiously heretical: the newly established Protestant Church in the Swiss city of Zürich. Cromwell did not originate this initiative, which to begin with heavily implicated Archbishop Cranmer, but in his characteristically improvisatory fashion he sustained the enterprise when theological considerations checked Cranmer’s enthusiasm, and did so in ways that have left a permanent mark on the Church of England and its various world offshoots till the present day. Put simply, the move to embrace Zürich turned English Protestantism’s path away from Lutheranism and towards what became the Reformed Protestant family of Churches. This move we can trace back to the year 1536.63

There was no escaping the fact that the two Protestant blocs had disagreed very quickly on fundamental issues. Most importantly, Luther, like the Pope and Henry VIII, believed that in the mass bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ (though he disagreed with Pope and King as to how this miracle took place). By contrast, the Swiss and south Germans saw this liturgical drama as ‘the Lord’s Supper’: a memorial of Christ’s great sacrifice on the Cross, mystically symbolized in bread and wine, which nevertheless remained bread and wine still.

The southerners also abhorred idolatry, by which they principally meant sacred images in churches. Luther, after some thought, decided that the issue was unimportant and let most images stand in his church buildings. Even the music of the two groupings differed. To a toleration of traditional Latin church music (and pipe-organs), Luther added his own freshly composed hymns, usually to new tunes. The southerners considered all that on the edge of idolatry – indeed, Zürich abolished all music in churches as potentially idolatrous in distracting worshippers for God, and kept the ban right into the 1590s. Other communities which in general followed Zürich did not take that extreme position, but still allowed congregations only biblical music, by which they principally meant the 150 psalms. Even Luther’s Protestant hymns were beyond the pale.

This formidable chasm among Protestants crystallized by mid-century into two hostile camps with names to identify them: Lutherans and the Reformed – both Protestants, but irredeemably at odds (as, formally, they still are). That was in the future, but the gulf was already wide and Martin Bucer was anxious to bridge it, encouraging a series of discussions which ultimately foundered both on Luther’s unwillingness to see other people’s ...

It is dependent on seeing how his early service to the second Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset in the 1520s created links into the Kentish upper gentry and a common disposition not just towards Protestant religion, but to the crystallizing identity of that form of Protestantism later called Reformed. 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. Many in England in 1536 could already perceive at least that broader intention. Their moment was at hand to strike against the heretical minister.

In the background of this immediate unpleasantness was Westminster’s decades-long neglect of northern interests, symbolized by the lack of a resident Archbishop of York between Thomas Savage’s death in 1507 and Wolsey’s belated arrival in 1529, but above all by Henry VIII’s laziness in never having visited his northern shires. That was in sharp contrast to his father, who went to York three times. In the fickle memory of northerners, who had once given Richard III his only taste of popularity, Henry VII was now the focus for nostalgia.

Then had followed the rapid changes of the Cromwell era, particularly and overwhelmingly the dissolution of monasteries, but also the vague threat of much more, the possibility of new taxation adding injury to insult. Such challenges to old certainties needed explanation or at the least forceful personal statement.

Michaelmas, 29 September, was a resonant feast in the Tudor calendar. Its only rival in the rhythm of everyday life was Lady Day (25 March), but Michaelmas had much more heft, for the harvest was in and folk could afford to relax a little and find time for matters both solemn and festive. It was the main season at which leases were renewed and rents paid, so money (or its absence) was much on people’s minds. All sorts of administrative decisions were taken at Michaelmas: most cycles of local elections took place then, together with all sorts of regular courts, borough, manorial and diocesan, and one of the quarterly meetings of justices of the peace. Folk gathered to exchange gossip, opinions, grievances, drink too much. This year there were many surprising and distressing novelties to announce in the regular Michaelmas meetings of bishops, archdeacons and their officials with diocesan clergy: all the measures from the summer Convocation and Cromwell’s pioneering vice-gerential injunctions.

The most immediately offensive new injunction was a drastic simplification of saints’ days, so that all parochial dedication festivals from now on must be celebrated on 1 October, regardless of the local saint. Following immediately after Michaelmas itself, this was a bolt from the blue to offend the most compliant church official, not least for its insensitive indifference to the preparation time needed for such an important local festival. Among other new provisions, the threat that clergy would be examined to assess their learning hugely offended parsons and curates satisfied with their own estimate of their pastoral abilities: a common clerical reaction in every age to such demands.19 Small wonder that all over the country Michaelmas 1536 invited trouble. As tax officials gathered their files and as monasteries shut their doors in Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire and all points north, not only Lincolnshire was poised on the edge of explosion.

Dentdale was the first outbreak of real English resistance to the Reformation of Cromwell and Henry VIII to resemble the Irish rebellion of summer 1534.21 For almost a month, the Dentdale men kept to their own territory, but others began imitating their example. Dentdale pioneered an aspect of the northern troubles which became characteristic, the taking of oaths, and it eventually provided a full-scale contingent joining the Pilgrimage by 21 October, a fortnight after the big outbreak in south-east Yorkshire around 8 October.

Effectively the government had now lost control of two widely separated regions of northern uplands, but so far these unprecedented expressions of defiance had not resulted in the insurgents moving beyond their home bases – yet, crucially, neither had anyone in authority tried to restore order, as they had done so quickly in Craven the previous year. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen next.

In doing so, Heneage was acting in his capacity as Steward of the Bishop of Lincoln, John Longland, Lord of the Manor of Louth. As a cleric of unmistakably traditionalist outlook, Longland might seem an unlikely pairing with Cromwell as the symbol of obnoxious religious change, but the very nature of the Bishop’s jurisdiction in Louth invited local resentment. Borough manors dominated by great churchmen rarely had an easy relationship with their clerical overlords. If they had become prosperous boroughs on their own account, they sought rights and freedoms unimagined in the remote ages when episcopal lordship was first imposed; but clerical lordship never died. That structural problem fatally entwined Longland’s evident unpopularity in Louth with Thomas Cromwell’s.

The King reacted to the first reports from Lincolnshire with incandescent rage and a thirst for revenge. Yet he recovered fast from initial panic, and made an adroit choice of commander in the Duke of Suffolk for a substantial military force, hastily gathered from those regions the regime calculated would remain loyal, in southern and eastern England. Brandon may not have been especially bright, but he was as physically imposing as the King himself, genuinely experienced in real warfare in France as well as tournaments, and possessing a unique asset in the situation.

There was no question of Thomas Cromwell getting anywhere near confrontations with the rebels. It would have been the height of folly to inflame their passions still further, quite apart from his indispensable role in shuttling between Windsor Castle and London, busily drafting statements and letters for the King to send out to insurgents and loyalists alike, and frantically scrabbling to finance this totally unexpected and deeply expensive eventuality.43 Cranmer was sent off into virtual invisibility in deepest Kent to keep an eye on any local trouble, not an especially demanding task in that region, while Bishops Foxe and Sampson remained at Court and active on the Council: they were probably considered more politically capable figures than him, and certainly less provocative, considering the obvious hatred most northerners felt for the Archbishop.44

The most violent of these acts took place in what became a second phase of the Pilgrimage in winter 1537, when far fewer of the northern governing class were involved in disturbances and therefore less able to moderate them. One feature of the main outbreaks in the autumn was that many northern people directly associated with Cromwell were not treated in this extreme fashion. Once identified, they were ritually humiliated, but then given a chance to be reintegrated into the newly fashioned society of the North by oath-taking. It is fortunate for our understanding of events that most of them complied, because this forced them to explain themselves at length to the government after the rising’s defeat; their depositions and other excuses are very informative.

now it will be apparent that the Lincolnshire Rising and Pilgrimage of Grace were aimed at Cromwell and his associates more precisely and carefully than has generally been appreciated. The unpardonables were (as the Sawley Abbey ballad written for the Pilgrims ran) ‘Crim, Cram and Rich / With three Ls and their like’, the ‘three Ls’ or hells probably being Lee, Leighton and Hugh Latimer, or maybe just the whole clan of Lees, Bishop and

The royal armies were still dangerously weak in relation to the thousands of insurgents across a swathe of the North, and the appearance of concession and conciliation must continue, particularly in religion; hence the retention of that passage in the printed text suggesting that the King would listen to complaints against his ministers. Yet that did not stop the reviser of the King’s original draft adding a page and a half in print vigorously defending the suppression of monasteries, with detailed and accurate historical examples right back to Edward III, taking in on the way ‘the Cardinal of York’ and his suppressions ‘for a College in Oxford’. Such a positive mention of Wolsey, possibly the first in a government publication since his fall, reeks of Cromwell’s editorial hand.80

At this moment of balance, it was especially important to rein in aggressive evangelicals in southern England.

The round-up might seem at first sight illogical, but it is likely that it was a decision by Cromwell, both as a gesture to please conservatives and as protective custody for his protégés. It was he who had commissioned Latimer to preach in his absence, and the Bishop’s rather defensive account of his peroration suggests that the Lord Privy Seal was not pleased with the result.

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. Both King and minister were furious at what they had been made to agree, and were just waiting for a chance to overturn it. Both were good at keeping their counsel; and what better time could there be to show spurious goodwill than at Christmas?

The Pilgrimage was a watershed in Tudor England and in Cromwell’s career. It so nearly succeeded, and so nearly destroyed him, revealing a stark and much simpler new configuration of politics. No longer did Anne Boleyn’s existence complicate England’s ideological divide, yoking together those of otherwise disparate views who supported or detested her. The injustices done to Queen Katherine and Princess Mary became far more obviously a cause allied to traditional religion, and the golden memory of Cardinal Wolsey ebbed in its capacity to bind Cromwell to those of very different religious outlook. Former friends and allies, even courtiers who had helped him enter the King’s service like William Fitzwilliam and William Paulet, now became much more ambiguous in their relationship to him – even, perhaps, opponents. He would not have forgotten their inclusion in that poisonous royal draft of early November. That was a future problem. In the meantime, many more than Thomas Kendall faced retribution.

The formal position at the beginning of 1537 was that the Pilgrims had secured everything they wanted – short of the removal of Thomas Cromwell. One permanent change in Henry’s government was the definition of a small set of councillors around the King as his ‘Privy Council’. This was not a new term: it had often been used over the previous decade, either to distinguish those councillors meeting at Westminster from those named to the Council in the Marches of Wales, the Council in the North or other subsidiary conciliar bodies, or as a shorthand description for councillors attendant on the King for a particular purpose.

Geoffrey Elton saw this change as part of Thomas Cromwell’s ‘Revolution in Government’, formalizing executive power and taking it ‘out of Court’. That puts the matter the wrong way round. Until the fall of Anne Boleyn in 1536, Cromwell thrived on indeterminacy in government, which allowed full rein to his improvisatory skill. After that, his own position crystallized much more clearly into office and formal honour, and the Pilgrimage was at least in part an expression of fury at that development.

From now on, Cromwell became far more single-minded in pursuing evangelical reformation. He would still have to step very carefully, for he was conscious of many enemies.

Among those examined, tried and executed were some very senior political figures, now firmly defined as traitors and treated accordingly. One was John Lord Hussey, whose main crime was to dither and, as a nobleman of Lincolnshire, not to show himself strong enough to lead the county’s trouble-makers away from full-scale revolt. Nevertheless, there was more: Hussey had drifted into the group of traditional-minded noblemen (still represented as far into King Henry’s personal circle as Lord Montague and the Marquess of Exeter) who habitually offloaded their anger at Cromwell’s religious policy on to Ambassador Chapuys. In 1534 Hussey even went so far as to seek Charles V’s intervention in England on behalf of the true faith. Cromwell must have known enough about such mutterings to decide that Hussey must have an exemplary if mercifully swift death.

After the Pilgrimage, religion could make old friendships grow cold: at Court, no one was more identified with the evangelical cause than Cromwell.

For all the wretchedness of the Carthusian deaths, the fact remains that in May 1537 Cromwell secured assent to the royal supremacy from the majority of the Charterhouse community, in fact two-thirds of them.

The synod’s work on General Councils served the useful purpose of uniting the opposed camps in the episcopate, smoothing the way to steady evangelical encroachment on the uncomfortable doctrinal balance set out in the Ten Articles of 1536.

One distinctive feature of the Bishops’ Book had a major effect on the future of the Church of England: its numbering of one basic building-block of the text, the Ten Commandments. The importance of this requires some explanation. Although all Christians agree on the sacred number ten, they have never agreed on how to divide up the biblical passages which make up the Commandments into that number. The issue is whether to classify a rather long-winded commandment to destroy ‘graven images’ as a separate free-standing commandment, or amalgamate it with the snappy first commandment to ‘have no other Gods but me’. In the latter case, the rationale is to assume that this anomalously wordy piece of text is just a comment on the basic thought (having done that, the total of ten commandments is made up by dividing commands about covetousness towards the end of the commandment material). If on the other hand the graven image commandment stands separately, as Commandment Number Two, rather than Commandment Number 1B, then it forms one of God’s basic priorities. The issue extended in the Reformation beyond graven images as such, since devotion to images shaded into devotion to physical objects and locations generally, in shrines and sacred places. That in turn was the basis of the vast medieval enterprise of pilgrimage.

Protestants all agreed that shrines and pilgrimages were bad ideas, but they flatly disagreed on numbering the Commandments, and therefore on the status of sacred art in church.

A parallel story of reformation this summer was Cromwell’s final securing of an officially authorized vernacular Bible. A Bible available for all to read or hear was essential if Henry’s idiosyncratic Church could make any claim to evangelical godliness.

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 tenure as Dean of Wells set a precedent for several such appointments of laymen as cathedral deans in the Tudor age: they were generally civil lawyers, such as the celebrated Crown servant and intellectual Sir Thomas Smith, who graced the Deanery of Carlisle Cathedral with his absence for much of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. 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. That had remarkable consequences for the future course and theological complexion of the Church of England, since cathedrals brought to a Reformed Church an entirely alien flavour of ceremony and the beauty of holiness.

In the fraught period after Anne Boleyn’s death, religious divisions increasingly mapped themselves on to family alliances. That accelerated in summer 1537 around a dynastic marriage that has been seriously underplayed in previous accounts of events: Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory, now around seventeen and ready for adulthood after his long and careful education, married Elizabeth Seymour, the King’s sister-in-law. This signalled the construction of a Seymour/Cromwell bloc which, but for the premature death of Queen Jane Seymour, might have carried all before it and radically reshaped the last years of King Henry’s reign. As it was, the results were dramatic enough, both immediately and in the long term.

Gregory Cromwell’s wedding in August 1537 thus had momentous consequences. Immediately, it produced new areas of demarcation in local politics across lowland England, pivoting on deals between Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk, but additionally it created patterns for the remaining monastic dissolutions up to 1540. The aftermath of the Pilgrimage saw the Crown close not only all smaller monasteries reopened by the Lincolnshire rebels and Pilgrims but, additionally, larger houses with heads implicated in the stirs. Whalley, Hexham, Bridlington, Jervaulx, Kirkstead, Barlings were all declared forfeit to the Crown by the attainder of their heads for treason; that followed the provision thoughtfully inserted to this effect in the Treason Act of 1534 (see above, this page). Further suppressions were swelling beyond a trickle, to the extent that Cromwell found himself financially disadvantaged. In the course of his long involvement in monastic affairs, he had accumulated so many grants of fees from monasteries that he now felt their loss. A partial solution emerged only in spring 1538, when he was awarded the Stewardship of all suppressed monasteries north of the Trent, plus a set of named dissolved houses around the kingdom: an office with a handsome fee of £100 per annum.47

As surrenders accumulated, it became clear that a mode of proceeding was necessary for monastic houses outside the scope of the first dissolution Act, and for which there was neither a pretext of treason nor that rationale of debt or misrule first employed at Christ Church Aldgate back in 1532. That is precisely what the closure of Lewes and Titchfield provided: surrender with full compensation for livelihood.

Cromwell himself had no doubts about the answer, as was starkly revealed in a private argument with Cranmer, who took the opposite view.4 The two men’s disagreement nicely demonstrates their different priorities. Cranmer was solicitous for Henry’s personal happiness, as a royal chaplain should be. He said he did not wish to see the King ‘marry without [outside] the realm’. The Archbishop ‘thought it most expedient the King to marry where that he had his fantasy and love, for that would be most comfort for his Grace’. Cromwell snapped back furiously, ‘There was none meet for him within this realm.’ One can see exactly why the Lord Privy Seal should say that: a marital alliance with any noble family of the kingdom, but with the Howards in particular, would suck further value out of his alliance with the Seymours.

During the next two years of long-distance courting, his clear priority was the overseas option; the question was where to place his marriage in the European diplomatic balance.5 His requirements were unrealistically high; not only did he seek beauty and the prospect of more children, he wanted to kill as many diplomatic birds with one stone as possible, in a situation where the two European dynasties greater and more secure than the Tudors, the Habsburgs and Valois, seemed dangerously close to finding real agreement after years of warfare.

The mission came armed with a list of four points to be resolved on German terms: allowing communion ‘in both kinds’ (bread and wine) to all communicants; abolishing ‘private masses’ (directed towards particular prayer intentions, especially prayers for the dead); denying the value of monastic vows and, finally, abolishing universal clerical celibacy. Even monastic vows remained an open question in England, despite everything that was happening to the regular life, and all the other points were likely to arouse King Henry’s disapproval. On the German side, the issue of ‘both kinds’ was particularly important: for centuries the Western Latin Church had restricted the laity to taking only bread at mass, on the infrequent occasions that they received communion at all, and the restoration of the cup had become one of the chief symbols of the Reformation.

The combination of viewpoints spoke to the self-image the King had chosen for himself amid the debates of the 1530s: proponent of the ‘middle way’, weighing opinions from both extremes and sternly holding the balance between them. At the time it was a favourite pose to claim oneself as the centre-point of extremes, and the King’s centre-point did not coincide with any of those espoused by his theological team – not least because it was liable to shift without warning.