Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (23 page)

In 1536 he ventured to draft an injunction in the king’s name requiring every parish to acquire a copy of the English Bible. This did not feature in the injunctions as issued because neither of the versions then available was deemed to be satisfactory. The second edition, the Mathew Bible, had been heavily criticised for being too dependent upon Luther, so Cromwell decided to arrange another translation, direct from the Greek and the Hebrew. This work he entrusted to Coverdale, Grafton and Whitchurch, and it was to be printed in Paris, where the workmanship was superior, and it would be away from critical English eyes.
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Although this was Cromwell’s project, not the king’s, he managed to persuade Henry to secure Francis’s approval, and by the early summer of 1538 he was receiving progress reports from Paris. These were very technical, and suggest not only a high level of engagement on his part, but also a rather unexpected expertise in the business of translation. This would seem to indicate that Henry’s action had not undermined his position as much as is sometimes supposed. The king took his patronage of the Great Bible as acceptable service.
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Cromwell was not therefore ‘tottering’ in the autumn of 1539, or at least no more so than he had been on a number of occasions in the past, and his fall in June 1540 was not directly connected either with the Great Bible or with the Act of Six Articles. It was the result rather of a combination of factors which gave his enemies the critical leverage to turn the king’s mind against him. One of these was the German alliance, for which Cromwell had been angling for a number of years. In 1532 he had persuaded Philip Melanchthon to dedicate his
Apology
to Henry, as a part of his campaign to soften Henry’s attitude towards the Lutherans. The king was favourably impressed, and tried on a number of subsequent occasions to persuade Melanchthon to come to England with a Lutheran delegation in an attempt to sort out their theological differences.
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One such mission, although without Melanchthon, had come in the summer of 1538, without any positive result, but in January 1539, faced with the ominous friendship between Charles and Francis, Cromwell decided to try again. He sent Christopher Mont to the Duke of Saxony, and Robert Barnes to the King of Denmark, with suggestions for an anti-papal alliance, linked with a proposal that the king should marry the daughter of the Duke of Cleves.
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Henry must have been aware of these moves, and have approved them. They represented a break with his well-established policy of non-alignment, but one which could be easily justified by the unprecedented international situation. As we have seen, the Schmalkaldic mission came to nothing on account of the Act of Six Articles, but left the Cleves marriage on the table for further negotiation. In fact the Lutherans may have been a little hasty in judging Henry’s religious attitude by the Act, because a few days after the dissolution of Parliament in June the king staged an anti-papal pageant on the Thames, wherein a boat representing Paul and his cardinals was unceremoniously overturned by another representing the king’s true subjects, the message of which was clear to see.
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The orthodoxy of Henry’s doctrinal position did not imply any
negotiations for the ending of the schism. At the same time an identical message was being conveyed in inn yards and private houses up and down the country by groups of players operating in the name of the Lord Privy Seal or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cromwell had shrugged off the reverses represented by the failure of the Schmalkaldic negotiation and the Act of Six Articles. The king was still very much on his side, and the Cleves marriage, revitalised by William Petre, was proceeding satisfactorily.
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These favourable circumstances did not continue very long. By the end of the year Franco–Imperial hostility was beginning to reappear, and Henry was tied into a treaty which he did not really need. A lot therefore depended upon the king’s marriage, because, if it worked, the link with Cleves might seem a small price to pay. Unfortunately it did not, and Cromwell found himself saddled with the responsibility for locking Henry into an unwanted treaty as the price of securing a highly unsatisfactory bride. After his disappointment at Rochester, the king had confided to Cromwell that he liked Anne ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’ and that if he had known the truth about her, she would never have come to England. For two days he struggled to find a way out of his commitment, but there was none and even if there had been another twist in the international situation that would have forbidden it, Charles had decided to put his friendship with Francis to the test, and asked for safe conduct to go from Spain to the Low Countries through France. Put on the spot, Francis could not refuse, and the Emperor was being lavishly entertained in Paris even as the king contemplated his options.
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Reluctantly, he agreed to put his head into the yoke, saying to Cromwell (who seems to have been the recipient of a number of these confidences), ‘My lord, if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do that I must do this day, for no earthly thing.’ They were quietly married in the palace at Greenwich, and the king swallowed his distaste sufficiently to behave towards his bride with most scrupulous courtesy.
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It is hardly surprising that after such a beginning, the wedding night was a fiasco. It is not clear whether Henry attempted to consummate their union that night or not, because it was quite common for newly-weds to abstain for the first night, in order to ensure that the woman was not menstruating. However it is clear that he slept with her for many nights thereafter, entirely without success. Anne, however, was so innocent that she did not notice anything wrong. In spite of her twenty-four years she clearly did not have the faintest idea of what was supposed to happen on a wedding night. The king had kissed her and bade her ‘good night’; should there be more? she asked her incredulous ladies after a few nights. Indeed there should be more, they assured her; and Lady Jane Rochford is alleged to have muttered that at this rate it would be a long time before they had a Duke of York to celebrate.
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Henry meanwhile had confessed to his physician, William Buttes, that although he was confident of his ability to ‘do the deed’ with any other woman, he had left Anne as good a maid as he had found her. Shortly after Easter, in early April, the king began to have fresh scruples about his marriage. Not only did he return to the old issue of her precontract with the Duke of Lorraine’s son, but he also began to allege that he had never consented to the union in the first place. The first objection was readily disposed of, and had indeed been dismissed during those fraught days between Anne’s arrival and their marriage. The documentation was missing, but Cromwell had caused Anne herself to repudiate that agreement, which was in itself sufficient discharge. It had been this news which had caused Henry to utter the ill-omened words, ‘I am not well handled’, and the situation had not changed since then, so there was little point in raising that scruple now.
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The second allegation was more ominous, because it reflected directly upon the Lord Privy Seal’s role in the negotiation. The evidence of lack of consent lay in the failure to consummate, which was evidently true of the first days of the marriage itself. However, for the discussions which had preceded it and for the treaty with Cleves, such a lack was largely fictitious. Reluctantly, the king had gone along with Cromwell’s policy because he was desperate to avoid diplomatic isolation, but the king’s memory was notoriously selective, and he remembered only what he chose to remember. So in early April Henry was remembering that his Lord Privy Seal had saddled him with an unattractive wife in pursuit of a foreign policy which was by that time again unnecessary.
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Charles had passed through France, and was again busy with Imperial affairs, one aspect of which was a threat of military action against Cleves in pursuit of his claim to Gelderland, which Duke William had inherited in controversial circumstances in July 1538. The prospect of having to go to the aid of an ally to whom he had looked for political, but not military, support, was altogether repugnant to the King of England, and he began to show every sign that he would renege on the undertakings which Cromwell had made on his behalf only about six months before. To make matters worse, Edmund Bonner was having some success in persuading Francis that his whole policy of reconciliation with the Emperor was a mistake, and that was not good news for Cromwell either.
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So he had lost a couple of rounds in his constant battle to influence the king, but that was by no means decisive. Parliament reassembled on 12 April, and that gave him a fresh chance. There had been a general election in March 1539, and Cromwell had performed his usual feat of using his patronage in the Crown’s interests. In Gatton, for example, which was a ‘proprietary borough’, the agent wrote asking for Cromwell’s nomination, which enabled the owner, Sir Roger Copley, to present a suitable name to the sheriff. Norfolk was more complicated, because there the opposition of a local gentleman, Sir Edmund Knyvett, had to be overcome before the ‘official’ candidates could be returned, which was successfully accomplished.
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His main problem came not from local interest groups but from rival patrons. At Farnham he came up against the Bishop of Winchester, who had already provided two members before the Lord Privy Seal’s letter arrived and was unwilling to concede. A second test against Gardiner came over the county of Hampshire, and there, in spite of making a false start, Cromwell prevailed. ‘I marvel not a little,’ wrote one commentator, ‘[at] the great intended hindrance of the Bishop of Winchester’, who was mightily displeased at this setback to his influence in his own backyard.
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About a third of the membership of the House of Commons could be constructed in this fashion, which does not amount to the packing sometimes alleged. Nor was it the creation of a personal party. Although some of the members elected by this method were Cromwell’s servants or dependants, more were household servants of the king and their brief was to support royal policy, which was how the Act of Six Articles came to be passed so easily.
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Cromwell was absent from the first few days of the session because of illness, but the king was well aware that there were two conflicting parties among the members in respect of his desire for religious uniformity; one conservative and the other of the new learning. He caused a committee to be established to advise him on this vexed issue, under the chairmanship of the Viceregent in Spirituals and consisting of members of both parties. Needless to say it rapidly became bogged down in controversy, and without waiting for its report Henry decided to cut the Gordian knot. He came down on the conservative side and on 16 May the Duke of Norfolk moved the Six Articles.
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There was no question of Cromwell opposing this move, but he used the prorogation over Whitsun to regroup, with the result that by the time the Act received the royal assent on 28 June, it had been amended in two modest but significant ways. The first put back the date by which married clergy had to repudiate their wives to 12 July, and the second limited the binding nature of religious vows to those persons who had made their vows at the age of twenty-four or older, thus freeing those who had been sworn as children and removing one of the more rational grievances against the Act.
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Some ardent, but not very well-informed, reformers thought that Cromwell was finished and lamented the resurrected power of Gardiner, but others like Burghkardt, who knew the situation better from his recent visit to the country, contradicted them. In October Burghkardt wrote to Melanchthon to reassure him. The Six Articles had been the work of Stokesley and Gardiner, of whom the first was dead and the latter in disgrace. The king was already showing his disillusionment with the conservative religious party, and Cromwell had survived the attack. He had even succeeded in keeping Gardiner away from
the court, and arranged for Edmund Bonner to take his place as ambassador to France.
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Although the Lord Privy Seal had not been fully in command of the agenda of Parliament in 1539, there is plenty of evidence that he had recovered that control by the time that it reassembled in 1540. The king’s anxiety for unity in religion was as strong as ever, and he was now concerned to round off the basic test imposed in 1539 with an authoritative statement of doctrine and ceremonial, a full declaration of his patriarchal role as Supreme Head. Cromwell introduced this theme when he spoke in the king’s name, immediately after Lord Chancellor Audley had opened the session.

The king’s majesty desires nothing more than concord … he knows there are those who would stir up strife, and in many places in his field tares have sprung up to harm the wheat. The forwardness and carnal lust of some, the inveterate corruption and superstitious tenacity of opinion of other excite disputation and quarrels most horrible in so good Christian men; one side calls the other papists, and the other calls them heretics, both naughty and not to be borne; and
that the less so because they miserably abuse the Holy Word of God and the scriptures which the same most noble prince of his gentleness, and for the salvation and consolation of his people has permitted them to read in the vulgar tongue. They twist God’s sacred gift, now into heresy and now into superstition.
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The fact that he spoke thus is significant, but unity in religion was part of his agenda also, because with the king in his present orthodox mood, and himself associated with the reformers, continued squabbling could only damage his position. Two committees were therefore established to examine these problems, and although he remained Viceregent in Spirituals and the king’s mouthpiece, it is obvious that Henry controlled the composition of these committees himself, that for doctrine being particularly dominated by conservatives, including Lee, Gardiner and Tunstall. That for ceremonies was more evenly balanced, but the traditionalists were still in a majority. However, it remained to be seen what these committees would recommend, and what the king would do with their suggestions.
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Cromwell’s own business for this session was rather different in its nature, and it has been alleged that it was only that business which caused the king to postpone his disgrace. However, if that was the case it suggests that Henry had little confidence in the other members of his council. The first such item was the dissolution of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, and the confiscation of its property. This was really a tidying-up operation after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, because the Knights of St John were not technically monks, but rather a military order based in Malta. They were thus in theory at least survivors of the old popish regiment, and held several rich preceptories. The Bill annexing all this property to the Crown was sent from the Lords to the Commons on 8 May, and passed through all its stages in time to receive the royal assent on the 11th.
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The second item was the subsidy Bill, in which Cromwell used the unprecedented argument that Henry deserved the benefit of the tax, not because of impending war, but because of his good government. In other words it was an acknowledgement that, in spite of the wealth of the monasteries, the king could no longer even pretend to ‘live of his own’, and thus marked an important shift in the basis of Tudor taxation.
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In spite of this and of the vigorous debate which it provoked, the Bill passed through all its stages by 8 May. However, when the session was prorogued for a fortnight on the 11th, the two religious committees had made no progress. They were deadlocked along predictable lines, and the brief recess was probably designed to help them to sort themselves out. It did not work, and neither had reported by the time that the Parliament was dissolved on 24 July.