Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

From the beginning of the year, Cromwell moved ever more decisively to knock down two pillars of traditional religious life in England and Wales: one, the friaries, and the other, pilgrimages to shrines and relics. These twin campaigns can be followed through together to the watershed of October 1538. Both treated the supremacy as a weapon of violent reform, purging old superstition.

Lurking behind all this was the uncomfortable fact that King Henry and his family had a lesser share of historic royal blood than the Courtenays and Poles between them possessed through their Yorkist ancestry. This mattered all the more to King Henry now that his legitimate heir was a robust one-year-old. History has come to call the autumn debacle the Exeter or Montague Conspiracy. How much actual conspiracy was involved is not clear, but the events were not short of the conspiratorial on all sides.

This sequence of events sounds all very haphazard and circumstantial, and twice the Poles had exercised their credit with the King to slide the family circle away from trouble. Yet it was part of a gathering storm of little incidents and conflicts all tending in the same direction. The troubles at Calais involving the Lisles were part of that pattern. The result was only accidental in the sense that the fall of Anne Boleyn was accidental; both convulsions were triggered by happenstance, no single incident of which would have proved fatal without the vigilance and helping hand of a man looking out for such matters, waiting for the right moment to persuade the King of their significance.

The evangelicals’ strategy to cover their backs was to show themselves as severe as possible to those on their more radical flank. In any case they saw the persecution of Anabaptists as a necessary and congenial task to protect godly religion, as was apparent when the threat first appeared in 1535

This was a disastrous misjudgement. Henry’s customary inclination to occupy himself with theology when lacking a wife made him take a particular interest in the case, and his mood was currently veering towards the conservative end of his volatile spectrum. That was apparent from a new royal proclamation on religion: a personal public intervention, sidelining his Vice-Gerent, who one might have thought had already produced enough regulation for the Church less than two months before. The proclamation followed up various of Cromwell’s orders, and repeated condemnations of Anabaptism and Becket, but it also imposed censorship on the printing press, including unauthorized versions of the Bible, and it expressly forbade clergy to marry – a reaction to the fact that in southern England a number of clergy were doing just that (not to mention the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife Margarete, lurking obscurely in one of his palaces in Kent).

alignment of forces in Cromwell’s favour continued to crystallize in a last tragedy of England’s medieval monasticism: the execution in late autumn of three abbots of great and venerable Benedictine monasteries, Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester.8 Their turnaround in fortunes was remarkable: the Abbots of Reading and Colchester actually attended Parliament in spring and summer. The sudden catastrophe may be explained by their bleak realization that summer that there was no likely future for their houses: that despair led them into varied and unconnected indiscretions, all of which provoked sudden retaliatory action from Cromwell’s agents at a time when he knew that conservative forces were marshalling against him. Was the final flurry of dissolutions from late autumn 1539 a reaction to the discoveries and the consequent executions? It is by no means clear that even Cromwell had any plan to make a clean sweep of all monasteries until that moment. Indeed in one sense, the clean sweep never happened.

more. In the next two or three days those determined to foil the spreading evangelical coup said the right things to the King to achieve the desired result. The psychology with Henry was to find an oblique reason why he should feel savage fury with a victim, to fuel his self-righteousness and draw attention away from his own sense of humiliation. With Anne, it had been the notion that she had committed the crimes of adultery with all and sundry, and incest with her own brother. With Cromwell, the obvious (and in fact accurate) direction was religion: his constant private initiatives, often amounting to deception of his prince, which could be construed as heresy.

This must reflect a conscious royal decision not to allow the conservative counter-coup to become more than a surgical excision of the Lord Privy Seal. The Privy Council was left balanced between evangelicals and traditionalists; a fortnight after his execution, on 10 August 1540, its proceedings were bureaucratized as they never had been under Cromwell himself, by instituting a minute-book of proceedings with its own clerk. That would give the King a chance to scrutinize their proceedings, if he ever felt they were trying to act beyond his control.7 Rumours that Cuthbert Tunstall would succeed Cromwell as Vice-Gerent in Spirituals proved untrue. No one individual apart from the monarch ever again held the fate of the Church of England in his hands, for no one else ever enjoyed this innovation in English office-holding. Its archive disappeared from sight, remnants resurfacing only in the twentieth century.8 The Vice-Gerency was a Tudor Revolution in Government that never happened.

This delicate tidying of debris from the Earl of Essex’s fall was an indication that the evangelical revolution had some sort of future, as long as it avoided showing too much open regret for the late minister. In a significant negotiation of the new situation, a further edition of his beloved Great Bible appeared soon after his destruction – with one noticeable alteration. The monumental title-page, as we have seen, originally displayed two cartouches of the arms of Cranmer and Cromwell, identifying their figures distributing Bibles to the kingdom. Now, anticipating modern airbrushing of photos, Cromwell’s arms were simply removed from their cartouche, leaving a blank oval amid the busyness of the design. It was so obvious as to be almost a statement.

Behind all the attainder’s bluster about treason and heresy, it was the Cleves marriage that had brought Cromwell down. Appropriately enough, during August 1540, the splendid furniture of his house at Austin Friars was raked through to set up the Lady Anne in comfort in her new country house (Bletchingley, Surrey, available thanks to the recent execution of Sir Nicholas Carew).16

The next few years proved full of administrative drift in the regime. That reflected a general incoherence of political and religious decision-making in Henry’s government as it lurched between factional conflicts in Privy Council and Privy Chamber.

Debasement was a cynical confidence trick against the monarchy’s subjects whenever money returned to the mint for recoinage, and was ultimately deeply damaging to government itself. Although Northumberland’s regime tried to grapple with the problem under King Edward VI, it took some determined work on Queen Elizabeth’s part to make an end of it – one of the achievements of which she was most proud.19

establish a carefully static version of her half-brother’s dynamic Protestant revolution; in the words of her favourite royal minister Sir Christopher Hatton to a not over-sympathetic House of Commons, the Queen ‘placed her Reformation as upon a square stone, to remain constant’.35 Elizabeth had good reason to detest the nexus of politicians with Cromwell at their centre who had first destroyed her mother and then tried to divert the succession from herself and her half-sister; yet she was irreversibly tied to them in her role as Europe’s leading Protestant monarch; and, like Cromwell, she was a Nicodemite who had kept quiet about her Protestantism in her sister’s return to Roman Catholicism. At least some of the old resentments fell away when she was drawn into an intimate and indeed passionate relationship with John Dudley’s son Robert, but quite apart from his place as favourite and leading Councillor, much else bound her to the Protestant elite of her father’s Court.

Cromwell’s evangelical religion had included a strange sort of Nicodemism, which ran alongside and contributed to the Reformation that he promoted openly and aggressively in the name of Henry VIII during the 1530s: it was hidden in plain sight. Its permanent results became apparent only after his death, in the Reformations under Edward VI and Elizabeth.36 These later developments of the English Reformations fulfilled many venerable Lollard hopes, including the destruction of sacred imagery and the promotion of a Reformed sacramental theology which the old King had murderously loathed. Because of this posthumous result, Cromwell’s religious programme must count as the most successful Nicodemite enterprise of the whole Reformation. While the Italian Reform of the Spirituali and their Nicodemite fellow-travellers was in the 1540s and 1550s exposed, crushed and scattered abroad by the Counter-Reformation, to diffuse into central European Reformed Protestantism and into varied Unitarianisms in eastern Europe, Thomas Cromwell’s Nicodemite version of Reformed Protestantism endured. Under the tutelage of his most accomplished imitator, Queen Elizabeth I, it became the Church of England.37

Ireland was a totally different story. The degree of separation was much greater than between Wales and England: because of the far greater distance not merely between Westminster and Dublin (to say nothing of the distance between Westminster and Galway) but between the two cultures within the island. One was a decayed version of high medieval England; the other was a Gaelic society of much greater antiquity. Their relationship to the English Crown was radically different, both in formal terms and in practice.

Now a long-standing stability based on all sorts of informal understandings and local realities had been sacrificed by confrontation with various Irish magnates, principally the Fitzgeralds. There was a fatal conjunction at work, because Cromwell’s interventionist policy also revealed sources of Irish revenue which were incentives to further intervention, only exacerbating the instability.42

Notably for a supposed agent of bureaucratic revolution, Cromwell did not foster a great network of royal officials, like the 40,000 or 50,000 who came to run the kingdom of France by the early seventeenth century. English government was largely provided for free by local volunteers, which made for a fruitful and complex relationship between provincial and central governors.

Because of Cromwell’s sensitivity to the grand bargain in Tudor government between monarch and magistrate, he elaborated on Wolsey’s agenda by hugely developing Parliament’s role in both England and Ireland, confirming it as the instrument of government when elsewhere its role was dwindling; woe betide any later English monarch who tried to dispense with it. In fact he extended Parliamentary participation to the vast majority of the Tudors’ possessions, in the course of building a Church independent of Rome and creating new institutions in the realm. The process was never complete, for outlying islands are still excluded.

As Geoffrey Elton observed, Parliament was chief among the King’s ‘points of contact’ with his subjects. The frequent awkwardness and lack of co-operation in Parliamentary proceedings produced ultimate if grudging and ungracious consent. The relative stability of Tudor England was the product of ‘moderate contentment’. The King’s leading men were far more frequently Parliament men from the 1530s – more precisely, they became Commons men, if a peerage did not bar them and provide a seat in the other place. That produced a very different dynamic in the royal Council in the 1530s from the time of Henry VII or indeed the earlier years of Henry VIII, and matters did not change thereafter. From Thomas Cromwell’s time onwards, royal advisers mostly knew what it was to sit through the squabbles, the excitement and the tedium of a Tudor Parliamentary session. Other European rulers would have done well to foster such a political culture.48

Some readers may consider that this book underplays the theme of rapacity in Cromwell’s public career, which did witness the single greatest land transfers in this country’s history since the Norman Conquest. I have tried to show that while there was selfish greed enough among the King and his leading councillors, eagerly imitated by the wider group of his subjects who had funds to invest in suddenly available church lands, there was a degree of idealism and reforming enthusiasm in Cromwell’s vision of what it all meant. The balance between idealism and rapacity was easily tipped. Fifteen-forty-eight saw outbursts of popular rage against the governing classes which fully erupted nationwide a year later. They were sparked by the greed of two former servants of Thomas Cromwell, and yet the risings also appealed to the idealism embodied in his own reforms.

The stirs of 1549 displayed two contrasting rhetorics: traditionalist in the West Country and the Midlands, evangelical in eastern and southern England. Yet both were directed against acquisitive gentry, and had been anticipated the previous year by attacks on two distinctly unlikeable individuals.

It is one of the accidental ironies of history that Richard’s great-grandson removed the head of Lady Margaret Douglas’s great-grandson, whose collateral ancestor performed a similar service for Richard’s uncle. The execution of Charles I in 1649 was as great a national trauma as England’s break with Rome in 1533, though in the end it may have had the unintended effect of curbing this country’s enthusiasm for destroying monarchy. More than a century after Richard Cromwell alias Williams/Williams alias Cromwell made his will as a knight of the realm in 1544, one of his descendants reversed their ambiguity of surname once more.

Thomas Cromwell did so much in a decade. He served his king with careful attention to what Henry wanted, and an even more careful attention to insinuating his own plans and hopes into the King’s proceedings. Partly he wanted to forward a religious revolution; partly his aim was more predictably to forward his own family’s dignity in the realm, and his success in that respect was astonishing: the grandson of a Putney brewer married the sister-in-law of a king.

Protestant England endured, gradually outstripping the great powers which in the Tudor age had made it seem marginal in Europe. It took a new and steadily more dominant place on the world stage.

All transitory things shall fail at the last, and the worker thereof shall go withal. Every chosen work shall be justified, and he that meddleth withal, shall have honour therein. Ecclesiasticus 14.19, in the translation of Miles Coverdale, 1535