Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (21 page)

Meanwhile, Cromwell’s policy towards religious houses underwent a subtle shift of emphasis. From trying to make sure that abbots and priors of a reforming disposition were appointed, he now began to seek for those who would make no difficulty about surrendering their responsibilities. Admittedly these were often the same men, because the task of converting obstinately conservative monks and friars not only proved uncongenial but usually impossible, and those religious of a reforming turn of mind were often the first to seek escape from the ‘imprisonment’ of their orders. Negotiations with heads of houses began to move away from prospects of continuity to discussions of pensions and capacities, and the frequent expressions of gratitude which the Lord Privy Seal received have to be seen in this light.
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Appeals to be good to this or that monastery meant not so much exemption from the process of dissolution as a generous deal, which it was within the commissioners’ powers to grant under Cromwell’s supervision. In active collaboration with Cranmer, Cromwell also continued his patronage and protection of evangelical preachers, and indeed seems to have been the senior partner because his patronage network was so extensive. His correspondence with bishops and deans, putting pressure upon them to appoint his approved men to benefices or prebends within their gift, is voluminous, and although some excused themselves on the ground that the place was already filled, on the whole he was successful. When his chosen men aroused, as they frequently did, the indignation of the other clergy in the vicinity, he proved remarkably deaf to the complaints.
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As former monastic lands were sold or granted by Henry, Cromwell was also able to ensure that the advowsons of the churches, which were often granted with the lands, were used in the reforming interest, this being part of the understanding when the grant was brokered, as it usually was, through his intercession. At this stage the king was complaisant, being preoccupied first with clearing up the affairs of the North and then with his wife’s forthcoming confinement. However, he was not theologically idle. Provoked possibly by convocation’s Ten Articles of 1536, upon which he made some superficial comments, towards the end of that year he commissioned a group of bishops to produce a new definition of the faith of the Church of England which was published under their own names in September 1537. It had been completed in July, and Edward Fox, one of those involved in its production, had then written to Cromwell asking to know the king’s pleasure about its printing, and most particularly whether it should go out in the king’s name or not.
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Henry did not reply, nor, apparently did he read it at that time. It was consequently printed with a humble Episcopal petition as a preface:

We knowledge and confess that we have none authority either to assemble ourselves together for any pretence or purpose, or to publish anything that might be by us agreed on and compiled…

It also asked the king to make any corrections which he thought fit.
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This preface was accompanied by a note from Henry to the effect that he had not had time to read it, but that was the nearest it got to royal approval. It was only after Jane’s death, in December, that the king got down to the task of correcting the text of the Bishops’ Book, and then he was fairly drastic, implying that the saints are mediators between God and man, and adding the name of Jesus Christ to the first commandment. Where the book had stated that all men are equal in God’s eyes, he added the proviso, ‘Touching the soul only’ and added the warning ‘that there be many folk which had liever live by the graft of begging slothfully’ than earn an honest living. He also deleted astrology from the list of superstitions warned against, because he was a keen believer in that pseudoscience.
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In general his corrections were in a conservative direction, and greatly annoyed Cranmer, to whom they were communicated. Cromwell, to whom the archbishop passed them on, was equally concerned, and was able to make sure that as long as his influence prevailed, they never saw the light of print. A number of them appeared eventually in the King’s Book, but that was not published until 1543.
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Cromwell’s reform programme was not much set back by Henry’s eccentric doctrinal opinions, which remained within the confines of the court. Publicly he inspired the destruction of the shrines and the emergence of the English Bible. The king’s views on the saints were not entirely consistent. While he continued to regard them as intercessors between God and man, he rejected as superstitious the value of relics and the uses of pilgrimage. He also endeavoured to distinguish between the acceptable appearance of images as reminders of the Godly lives of those commemorated, and the unacceptable worship of the same. He therefore objected to the reformers desire to remove all images from churches, while at the same time supporting the abolition of shrines. The latter activity began in 1535 with the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Thomas had been, in the king’s eyes, a traitor to his prince and therefore in no way worthy to be regarded as a saint.
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Moreover his shrine was the richest in England, and several wagons were required to take away the loot which accrued to him from its abolition. The most celebrated destruction came two years
later in the context of the pressure building on the greater abbeys; the exposure of the so-called ‘Rood of Boxley’ by Cromwell’s commissioners in 1537. This was
an image which appeared to respond to petitioners, particularly those bearing gifts, and was revealed to be animated by a subtle system of wires and levers operated by the brother in charge. It was seized and exhibited with much derision first in Kent and then in London, where it was publicly hacked in pieces and burned.
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Another fraud was the ‘blood of Hailes’, which was brought to Cromwell by the reforming abbot, who was uncertain what to do with it. He swore that it had not been tampered with during his incumbency, and a commission appointed to look into it could only decide that the phial contained ‘a thick, red, sticky substance’ that was certainly not blood. It was valueless, and was returned to the abbot for safekeeping until the king’s pleasure respecting it should be known. What Henry decided is not known, but the treasures of the shrine went the same way as all the others – into the king’s coffers. There is no doubt that the profit to be made from this destruction was a considerable motive, particularly in Cromwell’s case, but it could not have been carried out without Henry’s full consent and support. His sense of pastoral responsibility was also engaged by the question of an English Bible. The first attempt in this direction had been William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526, which conservative bishops hastened to assure him was full of heretical errors, and which he had banned for that reason.
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However he was more than half-persuaded that it was his responsibility to bring the gospel of Christ to his people in their own language. Perhaps he was convinced by the value of Bible study to his own matrimonial cause, or perhaps by the words of St Paul about worshipping in a strange tongue, but in any case as early as 1530 he had promised convocation that he would authorise a new translation by ‘wise and Catholic men’.

He did not, however, commission such a work, but rather, advised by Cromwell, waited for a suitable effort to emerge from the work which was already ongoing. The first candidate to appear was Cromwell’s friend Miles Coverdale, who completed his translation in 1535. This was based mainly on the Vulgate, Erasmus and Luther, and Cromwell was not overly impressed, perhaps because he was looking for a version derived from the original Greek and Hebrew, and he knew that Coverdale’s Hebrew was not up to the task. He would also have been aware that much of the New Testament was derived from Tyndale, and that the king would also have known that. He toyed with the idea of getting it authorised, and included in his first draft of the injunctions of 1536 a requirement that every parish should possess a copy.
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However he then drew back, and that clause did not appear in the injunctions as issued. Coverdale thus missed out on being the first authorised version, but it was not banned and continued to circulate, being reprinted in 1537 by James Nicholson of Southwark. By the time that this happened, a rival had appeared on the scene in the form of the ‘Mathew’ Bible, printed in Antwerp. This claimed to be the work of Thomas Mathew, but had in fact been prepared by John Rogers, another of Cromwell’s protégés and a friend of Tyndale.
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It was derived from the Greek and the Hebrew, but the New Testament was unadulterated Tyndale, although taken from his 1534 revision, not the 1526 original. The Pentateuch was also Tyndale’s work with minor revisions, and the Psalms and the Prophets were taken from Coverdale. They had probably been prepared by one of his collaborators, and the historical books may well have been Rogers’ own contribution. Aware of Henry’s reservations about Coverdale, Cranmer commended this version to Cromwell on 4 August 1538, and asked him to present it to the king in the hope of securing royal authority for it to be sold throughout the land.
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In spite of its close similarity to Tyndale this rather surprisingly produced a favourable response, and Cromwell was able to insert in his second set of injunctions, sent to Cranmer on 30 September, the clause which he had omitted from the first set. Every parish was now to purchase a copy and display it in the nave of their church for everybody who was literate to read on at their will. The clergy were expressly forbidden to inhibit access to these scriptures, and were enjoined to encourage all who could do so to study them.
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Cranmer was delighted and thanked his friend in terms which suggest that Henry’s approval was by no means to be taken for granted. Cromwell’s ‘high and acceptable service’ to God and the king ‘shall so much redound to your honour that, besides God’s reward, you shall obtain perpetual memory for the same within the realm’.
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Henry’s attitude towards the English Bible is a somewhat puzzling one, because within months of having approved it for general access he was worrying about the holy scriptures being ‘railed on’ in every alehouse instead of treated with the reverence which was their due, and in April 1539 he issued a proclamation limiting access to the educated. This did not, however, prevent him from authorising Cromwell in November of the same year to approve a new translation, the result of which was the Great Bible, which was issued with a preface by Thomas Cranmer in 1540;
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or the issuing of a new proclamation in May 1541 repeating the order contained in the injunctions of 1538. In spite of his reservations, the king seems to have been convinced that it was his duty as a Christian prince to make the Bible available to his subjects, and it was Cromwell who persuaded him of that. In so doing he was following unintentionally the reformers’ agenda, and creating a demand which proved stronger than the conservative instincts of his people, as some of his bishops ruefully acknowledged at the time.

The year 1538 was a difficult time for Henry in diplomatic terms, as the Truce of Nice brought Francis and Charles into unusual alignment, and as his marriage negotiations struggled on into the autumn. Cromwell was using Robert Barnes to keep
his lines of communication with the Lutherans open, and Barnes had been in trouble for heresy over a number of years. This had never come to a head because of the Lord Privy Seal’s protection, but he was undoubtedly taking a risk in using Barnes in this way as the authorised agent of a king who prided himself upon his doctrinal orthodoxy. As the Pope prepared to promulgate the sentence of excommunication issued against him three years earlier, Henry felt it to be necessary to demonstrate this orthodoxy in order to prove that Paul was acting out of malice and not for any genuine religious reason, and an opportunity was presented to him by the case of John Lambert.
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Lambert was a sacramentary, that is to say one who denied the real presence in the Eucharist, and as such was not much more popular with the evangelicals than he was with the conservatives. In fact it had been the reformers Barnes and Rowland Taylor who had first complained about him to Cranmer. The archbishop questioned him and endeavoured to reason with him, as he was accustomed to do, but for some extraordinary reason, Lambert appealed over him to the king.
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He must have been aware of Henry’s extreme dislike of sacramentaries, and the suspicion is that he wished to make a martyr of himself in the most public possible way. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he may have been encouraged in this appeal by Cromwell, who would have been anxious to give Henry an occasion to demonstrate his orthodoxy in a way which did not compromise his relations with the evangelicals, who, as we have seen, were on his side in this matter. The king decided to make an exhibition of Lambert, and laid on a show trial in November 1538. At this a number of bishops and peers were in attendance, and the former played a full part in the arguments, which went on for nearly five hours, at the end of which time Lambert, who had not budged an inch in his resolution, appealed again directly to the king. Henry, who had also played a full part in the debate, is alleged to have referred him to the reserved sacrament, which was present in the room, saying, ‘There is the maker of us all’; at which he doffed his bonnet.
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But Lambert was not moved and the king called upon Cromwell, who had sat silent throughout the proceedings, to read the sentence against him. When reporting these proceedings to the ambassadors abroad, the Lord Privy Seal commended Henry’s ‘excellent gravity and inestimable majesty’, but he might as well have commented upon his stamina. He called Lambert that ‘miserable man’ and there is no reason to suppose that he had any sympathy with him at all, but on the day of his execution a few days later, he was taken first to Cromwell’s house where they engaged in an extended discussion. It is reasonably supposed that he had word that Lambert’s death would be unusually protracted on the king’s orders, and that he was endeavouring to secure a last minute recantation. If that was the case then he failed, and Lambert was burned in a slow fire a few hours later.
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Cromwell’s recorded part in Lambert’s end was purely formal, but it is hard to believe that he did not derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that he and Cranmer and the king were all on the same side, because it was very important to distance the evangelicals from the radicals who were beginning to appear, and whose extreme notions gave the conservatives the opportunity to tar all reformers with the same brush, as Cromwell had pointed out to Lord Lisle in May 1538.
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