Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (25 page)

Truly, my lord, though my talent be not so precious as yours, yet I trust with his help who gave it to me, to use it so as it shall do his office without gathering such suspicions upon friendship. I repeat that word again because I meant friendly in the writing of it … And now for that advice which I took to be friendly, you take great pains to make me believe that I have neither friendship in me nor honesty…
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The annuity had been allocated by the king’s personal wish, without any influence from Cromwell, which was probably nothing but the truth. He warned Gardiner that spending his money lavishly was not advisable while he had debts to pay, and the king had not taken kindly to the claim that it should have been his by law. The protest seems in fact to have done the bishop no harm with the king, who was minded in 1537 to bring him back to the council. However he decided to leave him in post because of the delicate state of Anglo–French relations at that time, and Cromwell may have been behind that decision.
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Gardiner was naturally pressing for his recall, and his discontent may nave been partly responsible for the deterioration in the diplomatic situation which occurred early in 1538. He was blamed for being irritable and clumsy and the king sent him a letter of reproof in February, which Cromwell went out of his way to explain in conciliatory terms. Henry was not really displeased with him; his words were intended as a spur to greater efforts, ‘nothing doubting of the continuance of his favour towards you’.
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His efforts seem to have been wasted on the disgruntled bishop, who almost certainly blamed him for the terms of the king’s letter. Gardiner was eventually recalled in July in response to his repeated requests, and this seems to have implied neither favour nor disfavour because he was allowed to retire to his see until the parliament of 1539 brought him again into the political limelight. Throughout the period from 1532 to 1539 relations between the two men seem to have been characterised by thinly veiled hostility, or at least hostility on Gardiner’s part towards the man who had so clearly replaced him in the royal favour. He had no use for the Duke of Norfolk’s bland assurances of friendship, and the Lord Privy Seal anticipated his opposition from the first days of the session.

As we have seen, Gardiner’s thinking proved closer to the king’s over the Act of Six Articles, and that was a setback to Cromwell’s programme, but it did not signify any dramatic change of political fortunes. By the autumn of 1539 the Lord Privy Seal appeared to be in charge as usual, and the bishop was back in his see. Cromwell was conducting all manner of business on the king’s behalf; supervising the Dissolution of the Monasteries, arranging matters of patronage and receiving reports from English agents abroad. Indeed it was obvious by the time that the parliamentary session ended on 28 June that any intention that Cromwell’s enemies might have had to use the Act of Six Articles to bring about his dismissal had failed. It may have been this realisation that caused Norfolk to discard his mask of benevolence and to quarrel openly with the Lord Privy Seal on the 29th. Ironically the occasion was a ‘reconciliation dinner’, which the king had encouraged Cranmer to provide at Lambeth in an attempt to reduce the hard feelings created by the Act.
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Gardiner was present, and so also was Tunstall, but they behaved themselves appropriately. Not so Norfolk, who seems deliberately to have picked a quarrel with Cromwell over the legacy of Thomas Wolsey, which resulted in high words on both sides. The archbishop pacified them to the best of his ability, but thereafter there was no longer any pretence of friendship between the two, and their subsequent correspondence was strictly on matters of business. This may have come as a relief to the Lord Privy Seal, who was now under no illusion as to the identities of his principal opponents. Although he was no doubt glad to get him out of the country, Norfolk’s mission to France in February 1540 also enabled the duke to stir up anti-Cromwell sentiment at the French court. Gardiner’s hostility had already rubbed off on Francis’s servants, and Norfolk was able to point out that Cromwell had always been Imperialist in his foreign policy (which was true) and had been restrained from being more open about it mainly by the wishes of the king.
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Norfolk, on the other hand, had always been pro-French, and the improvement in Anglo–French relations that resulted from this mission was an underhand blow against the Cleves alliance, which the Lord Privy Seal had arranged. With France in a friendly mood, Cleves became dispensable, and with it the Lord Cromwell. The King of France was certainly hostile to him, and it is possible that the duke brought back with him secret assurances of French support if he should be overthrown. The king certainly knew that he would not be running any risks in his foreign policy if he should decide to remove him from office.

Cromwell’s fate, however, was not decided in France, but in England, and even within the king’s own mind. Robert Barnes, who had been on mission to the Elector of Saxony and the King of Denmark early in 1539, had returned home when the Act of Six Articles made his efforts useless, and Henry, annoyed by his decision to return without being called, refused to see him in spite of Cromwell’s intercession.
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Ignoring this clear evidence that Barnes was no longer in favour, his patron persuaded the Bishop of St Davids to bestow upon him the Welsh prebend of Llanbedye, and thus provided clear evidence of where his sympathies lay. Should the reforming preacher commit any
indiscretions in future, it would be relatively easy to hold his patron responsible, and that is precisely what Barnes did. In February 1540 the Bishop of Winchester preached at Paul’s Cross, denouncing certain reformed positions in unmeasured terms. This may well have been a deliberate provocation, to tempt anyone who dared to respond, and if so it worked, because a fortnight later Robert Barnes rose to the bait. Relying perhaps on Cromwell to protect him, he denied all that Gardiner had said, and openly insulted him.
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This was a step too far, and the Lord Privy Seal, recognising the limits of his authority, did not intervene. The Bishop of Winchester complained to the king, who was scandalised at this treatment of one of his councillors and ordered Barnes to be examined before him. Having declared him to be defeated in a theological argument, he ordered him to apologise to Gardiner and to preach a recantation sermon, which Barnes duly did at Paul’s Cross on 12 March.
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There the matter might have ended, except that the reformer’s conscience smote him sore and on 30 March he publicly withdrew his recantation. Henry was enraged, not only by this act of defiance but also by the evidence which it provided that the Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinion had failed in its purpose. Barnes and two reforming colleagues, Thomas Garrett and William Jerome, ended up in the Tower, and London was full of rumours. The French ambassador reported that Cranmer and Cromwell did not know where they were, and forecast great changes within the next few days.
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Marillac had probably been listening to the hopes of the Duke of Norfolk’s friends, and those hopes proved premature. The council had indeed been recast, and Gardiner and Tunstall readmitted, which would have been little to the Lord Privy Seal’s pleasure, but there is no hard evidence that his own position was under threat; except perhaps the effort which he made to repair his relations with Gardiner. This took the form of an invitation to dinner on 30 March, in the course of which they spent four hours, ostensibly restoring their damaged friendship. This constituted a strategic retreat on Cromwell’s part, and protected him against any possible fallout from Barnes’s behaviour.
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It did not, however, alter the fact that Gardiner was back in favour and in contact with the king, from whom Cromwell had for so long succeeded in excluding him.

It was at about this time in March 1540, that Cromwell surrendered his office of secretary to the king. His motives for doing so are not very clear, but since he was allowed to dispose of it more or less to suit himself, it cannot have been due to hostile pressure. It was of course in Henry’s gift, but it must have been Cromwell who decided to divide it into two, and to appoint two of his own servants, Ralph Sadler and Thomas Wriothesley, to discharge it, an appointment which took effect around 1 April. This may have been connected with his own forthcoming promotion, or it may have been due to his desire to increase his influence within a divided council.
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If it was the latter, then it did not work because neither of them spoke decisively in his support, or made any move to defend him when the crunch came. What it does prove, however, is that Cromwell’s influence with the king was unimpaired as late as the middle of April. This impression is confirmed by his elevation to the Earldom of Essex on the 18th of the month. This ancient and prestigious earldom had been vacated by the death of Henry Bourchier without heirs as recently as March 1540, and on the same day Cromwell was created Lord Great Chamberlain, an office vacated by the death of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, at about the same time.
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The earldom of Essex had escheated to the Crown on Bouchier’s death, and was therefore unquestionably available, but the great chamberlainship had been hereditary in the de Vere family for several generations, and Cromwell’s appointment meant disappointing the legitimate expectations of the 16th Earl. It is highly unlikely that the Duke of Norfolk would have regarded either of these promotions with any sympathy, holding as he did strong views upon the virtues of hereditary nobility. Cromwell’s elevation was exclusively the king’s doing, and represented the highest expression of his favour. About a month later, just after the reassembly of Parliament on 25 May, Cromwell brought off his last major coup with the arrest of Richard Sampson, Bishop of Chichester, and Dr Nicholas Wotton, staunch conservatives in religious matters.
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Both were members of the committees which had been established in April for the examination of doctrine and ceremonies, and Sampson has been described as Gardiner’s right-hand man in the struggle with the Lord Privy Seal. The charge was popish sympathies, and Cromwell was alleged to have his eye on five other bishops, who were not named but almost certainly included Gardiner and Tunstall.
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On 11 May Lord Lisle, the Deputy of Calais, had been summoned home and placed under arrest for suspected dealings with Reginald Pole, and that also may be attributed to Cromwell’s influence. However in that case the tactic backfired because the resulting investigation also revealed the activities of the sacramentary preacher Adam Damplip, which damaged both Cranmer’s and Cromwell’s credibility.
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Sampson was probably arrested on Cromwell’s orders alone, but if that was so then the king made haste to endorse his action, and was, according to Sadler, highly displeased with the bishop’s answers to the interrogatories which had so far been administered to him. Rumours flew about; Latimer was to be released from house arrest when Henry had spoken to Cromwell about his case, and Barnes would be freed from the Tower. To all appearances the Lord Privy Seal was as much in command of the situation as he ever had been, and the only negative sign was that the king would not allow Bishop Sampson’s goods to be confiscated, which indicated that he had not made up his mind about him.

There were therefore no outward indications that the king was about to turn on his Lord Privy Seal, although the reactions of his councillors indicate that they were not taken by surprise. At about noon on 10 June, Cromwell left the parliament where he had been attending to normal business and went to a Privy Council meeting. At three o’clock the door of the chamber opened to admit the Captain of the Guard and half a dozen halberdiers. The captain bore a warrant carrying the royal seal, for the arrest of the Earl of Essex on a charge of high treason. If we are to believe Marillac, Cromwell cast down his bonnet with a gesture of exasperation, and asked if this was a fair reward for all his services.
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He appealed to his fellow councillors, but they said not a word in his defence, some reviling him and others saying that he should be judged by his own laws, by which presumably they meant the 1534 Treasons Act, which had been largely of his devising. If Marillac is correct these words were ill advised because all laws were the king’s, but they passed unrebuked in the heat of the moment. The Duke of Norfolk, with opprobrious comments about his unworthiness to keep company with members of the royal family, relieved him of the insignia of the Garter, and he was hustled out by a side entrance and conveyed by boat to the Tower.
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Cromwell had been installed as a Knight of the Garter in August 1537, when he had been at the height of his power. It was special sign of the royal favour, but had hitherto been reserved largely for those who were of the royal blood, or whose services had been of a military nature, to which Cromwell could lay no claim. The duke, in spite of his smooth professions of friendship, had been particularly incensed by this creation, and no doubt welcomed the opportunity which the Lord Privy Seal’s disgrace had offered. Seeing the way in which the council had turned against him, Cromwell is alleged to have renounced all hope of pardon and asked only for a quick end.

The reasons for Henry’s
volte-face
in early June 1540 have been much debated. One theory is that Cromwell was made to shoulder the blame for the failed Cleves marriage, and the king’s words make that plausible, except that he had already pointed to the way out and there is no reason to suppose that he could not have arranged the annulment in the way which was eventually done.
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Henry was very good at blaming others for his own mistakes, but there is no conclusive evidence that he did so on this occasion. Another idea is that the king was already infatuated with Catherine Howard, and that Cromwell was hanging back on annulling the Cleves marriage because he had no desire to see the Duke of Norfolk’s niece installed in Anne’s place. In other words he was in the same fix that Wolsey had been in 1529 when confronted with the rise to favour of Anne Boleyn, and this is true up to a point. It is certainly true that Cromwell had no desire to see the fortunes of the Howard clan in the ascendant, and regarded Catherine with distaste, but there is no evidence that he was delaying the Cleves solution for that reason.
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He probably already knew that the Duke of Cleves would accept whatever decision Henry reached, and that the treaty would not be annulled by her rejection, because the duke’s relations with the Emperor over the Duchy of Gelderland were far from resolved. The third idea is that the king was worried by the evidence of religious dissent which confronted him on all sides, and blamed Cromwell for encouraging the dissidents. This distrust was converted by interested parties, particularly the Bishop of Winchester, into the conviction that his Lord Privy Seal was a closet Lutheran, a conviction more obvious in the charges against him than in anything which he had actually done. After Cromwell’s arrest, Henry sent word to Marillac to explain his action, which according to the ambassador had taken everyone by surprise.