Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (16 page)

When it came to Ireland, however, his mind was often elsewhere, and Cromwell consequently had a free hand. He was mainly concerned to extract some revenue from the country which had consistently overspent its budget for many years, and to suppress the aristocratic quarrels which had bedevilled its government. These had led the Earl of Desmond into secret negotiations with an envoy of Charles V in June and July 1533, and to bitter complaints about the partiality of the Lord Deputy, the Earl of Kildare, who was summoned to London to account for his actions in September of that year.
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The earl appointed his son, Thomas Lord Offaly, as his stand-in, but did not eventually leave for the court until February 1534. Offaly, it quickly transpired, was opposed to Cromwell’s policies, and in sympathy with the Irish chieftains who resented the whole notion of English overlordship. On 11 June 1534 he resigned his position and renounced his allegiance, thus converting a problem into a crisis. The rebellion of ‘Silken Thomas’, as he was known, was the most serious challenge to English rule for a generation, and seems to have been provoked by Cromwell’s intrusive policies.
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As long as Wolsey had been in charge, Ireland had been left very much to its own devices, and a balance of power had prevailed between the Anglo-Irish, the Obedient Lands and the Wild Irish. This had not been peaceful, but the strife which it engendered had been low-key and manageable. Cromwell’s attempts to enforce accountability to the council in England were very much resented, almost as much by the Anglo-Irish of the Pale as they were by the Irish nobility. Silken Thomas rapidly overran most of the Pale, and seemed likely to take the whole of Ireland. The Archbishop of Dublin, John Alen, made an attempt to escape, but was caught and murdered by Thomas’s followers on 28 July.
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This overt rebellion had the effect of attracting the king’s attention, and on 29 June the Earl of Kildare was arrested and sent to the Tower, a rather futile gesture but one which was inevitable in the circumstances. More to the point the experienced soldier Sir William Skeffington was appointed Lord Deputy and sent across with a substantial force on 24 October, in time to raise the siege of Dublin, which had been going on since August.
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The appearance of this significant army, and the countervailing need to establish it, led Thomas to accept a three-week truce on 19 December. His less wholehearted followers were beginning to think twice about their commitment to his cause, and Skeffington received a number of submissions at about that time. After the expiry of the truce, he laid siege to Thomas’s main stronghold at Maynooth and took it after five days.

The rebels’ support was beginning to crumble, and Thomas took refuge among the Irish tribes with whom he had maintained a friendly contact. In May and June he sent envoys to Rome and to the Emperor in Spain, asking for aid and representing himself as a defender of the Catholic Church.
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Both Paul and Charles were, however, sufficiently well informed about Irish affairs as to recognise these pleas for what they were, the appeals of a failing rebel, and responded only with encouraging words. Lord Leonard Grey, who was undoubtedly Cromwell’s choice, arrived with reinforcements as marshall of the army at the end of July, and Silken Thomas surrendered in August 1535. Lord Deputy Skeffington died at the end of the year, and was replaced by Lord Grey, who fully shared the secretary’s conviction that only military conquest would solve the Irish problem.
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Unfortunately the resources were never available to make such a solution a realistic proposition, and Lord Grey had to be satisfied with the temporary ascendancy which the collapse of Thomas’s rebellion had given him. This enabled him to go ahead with the commission to suppress the nunnery of Graney in County Kildare, and arrest Thomas’s five uncles in February. The 9th Earl had died in the Tower in September 1534, and although Thomas was never recognised as the 10th Earl he had in a sense held the title since then. George Browne was consecrated Archbishop of Dublin at Lambeth on 19 March 1536, and the Irish Parliament met in Dublin on 1 May.
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This was in a co-operative frame of mind, as the members were keen to display their loyalty. It passed Acts attainting Kildare and his supporters, another endorsing the reforming legislation already enacted at Westminster, and a third against absentee incumbents, always a problem in Ireland given the poverty of many benefices. Meanwhile Kildare and his uncles had been attainted by the English Parliament in July, and they were all executed at Tyburn on 3 February 1537.
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It would be an exaggeration to say that Ireland was pacified, but the warfare had returned to its familiar pattern of small-scale skirmishes with the native Irish, and border raids by the latter into the ‘settled lands’. Cromwell’s policy of repression, in which he was opposed by the Duke of Norfolk, would appear to have been vindicated, and the Royal Commission which visited Ireland in September 1537 found the same. The shock of Silken Thomas’s rising, and its aftermath, had also served to curb the internecine strife between the nobles, which had been one of his principal objectives. That this was the Lord Privy Seal’s policy rather than the king’s was apparently confirmed in 1540, when immediately after his fall, and while the Duke of Norfolk was dominant in the council, Lord Grey was recalled from the deputyship and replaced by Sir Anthony St Leger, with an altogether different agenda.
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The only snag with his preference for ‘new English’ administrators, and greater accountability to London, was the cost. In spite of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in English Ireland, and the revenues that it brought to the Crown, Cromwell never succeeded in balancing the books. Ireland was in many ways his least successful theatre of operations, because he set a precedent there for that forward policy which was to produce the Elizabethan plantations, and the long legacy of bitterness which they created. Norfolk and St Leger’s approach, which involved conciliating the Irish chieftains and bringing them within the establishment by means of surrender and regrant, can be seen to have been the better long-term prospect.
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In the case of Ireland, Cromwell’s preference for the simple and logical solution seems to have betrayed him, but that only sets his success in other areas in context.

One of the more obvious of these is the measures that he took to ensure that the king’s writ ran uniformly throughout his dominions. The origins of this problem lay far back in the early Middle Ages, when, in order to defend the boundaries of the realm, kings had created a number of franchises, and delegated the administration of justice, no less than the question of defence, to the noblemen who held them. Although granted originally by the Crown, these franchises had come to be seen as held by prescriptive right, and there was no obvious way of discontinuing them. Even when they escheated to the Crown through failure of heirs, or for other reasons, the jurisdictional structure of the liberties remained intact. Thus when the earldom of March was absorbed by the Crown on the accession of Edward IV in 1461, the Marcher liberties remained intact, and the king’s writ ran as the holder of the franchise, not as monarch.
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This meant that lawlessness might become a serious problem as the stewards and others who acted in his name might be rather less than zealous, and as Marcher custom protected offenders, as was the case with Welsh law. Cromwell had already partly addressed this issue in respect of the Marches of Wales by taking certain types of case into the jurisdiction of neighbouring English counties, but this proved less than satisfactory.
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By 1536 the time had come for more drastic action, and the recently enhanced authority of Parliament offered a way forward. Consequently in the spring of that year a Bill was introduced to ensure that

no person or persons, of what estate or degree soever, from the first day of July which shall be in the year of our Lord God 1536, shall have any power or authority to pardon or remit any treasons, murders, manslaughters or any kind of felonies,
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but that the king shall have the ‘whole and sole’ power and authority thereof ‘united and knit to the Imperial crown of this realm’. In other words the rights of franchise holders were abrogated, and all writs were henceforth to run in the king’s name only. Partial exceptions were then made for the Bishopric of Durham, where the bishop was to be an
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Justice of the Peace, and for the Duchy of Lancaster, which was to continue to use its existing seals and processes. However, the effect of the whole Act (as it soon became) was to remove a major jurisdictional anomaly, and to centralise the administration of the law in the manner beloved of Cromwell’s tidy mind. Wales was at the same time ‘reduced to shire ground’, several new counties being created out of the erstwhile Marcher lordships, and endowed with sheriffs, commissions of the peace and parliamentary representation. Wales was effectively merged into England, and the language of the courts was to be English. Welsh law was thus relegated to the manorial and honour courts where it could not touch felonies, and this caused some discontent.
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However, the Welsh gentry were on the whole in favour of the move, which gave them a new measure of local self-government as Justices of the Peace, and a doorway into national politics through Parliament. The perception of the Welsh as being second-class citizens, which had followed the Glyndŵr revolt in the early fifteenth century, was thus finally laid to rest, and Cromwell had, through Parliament, carried out a reform which had baffled generations of royal lawyers.
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Reginald Pole was a kinsman of the king, being the son of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, and grandson of George, Duke of Clarence, the uncle of Henry VIII’s mother, Elizabeth of York. He had been educated largely at the king’s expense, and had served him in collecting the opinions of the universities in the early days of his search for an annulment of his first marriage. At the time he had been spoken of as a possible future Archbishop of York.
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However his conscience turned him against the king’s proceedings, and he begged leave to return to the Continent to continue his studies, which was granted him in 1533. In Italy his opinions soon became known to the Pope, and a prince of the English royal blood was great catch. Henry, meanwhile, had encouraged him to write, thinking perhaps that the exercise of putting his thoughts in order would convert him to the official point of view. Cromwell also appears to have corresponded with him with the same objective, but the result was an open letter to the king entitled ‘Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitate Defensione’, which arrived in May 1536, and was not at all what was required. Instead it was a reasoned denunciation, not only of Henry’s second marriage, but of the whole drift of royal policy over the previous five years.
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Henry was furious, declaring that he was an ungrateful subject and a self-proclaimed traitor. Shortly afterwards Pole justified this description of himself by accepting a cardinalate from Paul III, and a mission from the Pope to stimulate Charles V and Francis I into supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace. His mission failed, and Cromwell’s agents dogged him every step of the way, reporting on his ill success to a gratified Lord Privy Seal. His failure, however, owed nothing to Cromwell’s efforts and everything to the continuing war between Francis and Charles, which made each of them reluctant to acquire another enemy. He did, however, succeed in eluding the assassins that Henry sent out to kill him, and returned safely to Italy in the spring of 1537.
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These agents also reported to Cromwell, but he seems to have had nothing to do with the decision to send them, murder not usually being in his line as a political weapon. If a man or a woman had to die, it must be by due process of law, however strained that process might be. Reginald’s treason, however, brought his whole family under suspicion. His mother was a known supporter of the old ways in religion, and his brothers, Geoffrey and Henry, Lord Montague, were in touch with the exile, and sympathised with his point of view. They were also known friends of the Lady Mary, who had not gone away in spite of her reticence since her surrender in July 1536. There was even talk of marrying her to Reginald, who in spite of his status was only in deacon’s orders and could therefore have obtained a dispensation. However this was mere gossip as neither of the principals expressed any interest in the proposal.
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All this was known to Cromwell’s agents, and in the summer of 1538 he sent a certain Gervase Tindall down to Hampshire with a spying brief. This was about the same time that the Truce of Nice between Charles and Francis had brought a temporary end to their warfare, and raised again the spectre of papally inspired intervention in the affairs of England. It was very important to know what the conservative opposition was up to, especially those of its members, like the Countess of Salisbury and the Marquis of Exeter, who had extensive coastal estates in Cornwall and Devon that could be used as a landing place for any planned invasion.
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The marquis was not known to have corresponded with Reginald, but he was a famous supporter of Mary, and had been kept out of the council for that reason when her fate had been under discussion in June 1536.

Gervase Tindall, who had been in Cromwell’s service for several years, parked himself in a ‘surgeon’s house’ near Warblington in Hampshire on the pretext of needing medical assistance, and became very friendly with Richard Ayer, who ran the house.
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It was patronised by the Countess of Salisbury, and Ayer was close to the family. He was also inclined to gossip, and Tindall picked up a good deal of information as to what went on in those establishments, which he duly passed on to the Lord Privy Seal. As a result in August Sir Geoffrey Pole was arrested, and the whole neighbourhood began to buzz with rumours about the family. Ayer was alleged to have said that if Geoffrey had not been apprehended he would have sent a band of men over to Reginald in the spring of 1539, and Hugh Holland was a regular bearer of messages to and fro.
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Under questioning John Collins, another Pole servant, corroborated this saying that he