Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (35 page)

His first weapon was Henry’s vanity and love of showy displays of
glory. Cromwell had been instrumental in setting up a new and glamorous bodyguard for Henry and was now finalising their organisation and terms and conditions of employment. The fifty ‘Spears’ or ‘Gentlemen Pensioners’ had made their first appearance, armed with poleaxes,
¹⁹
at Greenwich during the official ceremonies welcoming Anne of Cleves to England in January that year. They were deliberately mustered from the younger sons of the nobility and the ranks of the senior gentry
²⁰
and were a conscious replication of the 200
Gentilhommes du Bec de Corbin
who had protected the French kings since the fifteenth century. Four of the Spears were identified as ‘my Lord Privy Seal’s men’, and these included a black sheep amongst them – ‘John Portinary’, probably the Italian military engineer whom Cromwell had employed to demolish Lewes Priory so ruthlessly and efficiently in March 1538. The new corps must have presented a dazzling image in their uniform of velvet and cloth of gold with silver ornaments and heavy gold chains around their necks. But this new appendage to the royal household was more than mere empty, glittering show, pandering to the King’s well-known egotistical love of pomp and pageant. In the aftermath of the dangerous Pilgrimage of Grace rebellions, Henry needed additional personal security from a military force that he could rely on for absolute loyalty. Indeed, each Pensioner swore an oath to be a ‘true and faithful subject and servant to our sovereign lord King Henry the Eight and to his heirs … and diligently and truly give my attendance … and I shall be retained to no man … of what degree or condition, [who]soever he be, by oath, livery badge, promise or otherwise, but only to his grace’.
²¹

Henry’s mistrust of religious reform was probably the most potentially dangerous weapon being deployed against Cromwell by his enemies at court. On 29 February, the third Sunday in Lent, Robert Barnes, a headstrong former Augustinian friar and friend of Cromwell,
²²
preached a vitriolic sermon against Gardiner at Paul’s Cross, the open-air pulpit alongside the great cathedral.
²³
He told his congregation that if he and the Bishop of Winchester were ‘both in Rome, he knew that great sums of money would not save his life’, but Gardiner would have no such fear as ‘a small entreatance [pleading] would serve [him]’.
²⁴
Moreover, he mockingly referred to the Bishop as a ‘gardener setting ill plants in a garden’
²⁵
– a pun guaranteed to nettle the humourless Bishop of Winchester. Gardiner unsurprisingly took great offence and forced Barnes to seek his pardon. The Bishop’s only response, when ‘being twice desired by him [Barnes] to give some sign that he forgave him, [was to] lift up his finger’.

Contrition, however sincere, was not enough for the prelate and he complained to the King about Barnes, who was promptly summoned to Hampton Court to explain himself. His fellow evangelicals William Jerome, the vicar of Stepney in East London, and Thomas Garret, who had narrowly escaped execution for heresy in Oxford in 1532,
²⁶
were also called to the palace. Both had also recently delivered inflammatory sermons attacking orthodox religious doctrine. Barnes humbly apologised to the King, but Henry ignored him and limped to the small altar standing against the wall of his privy chamber, devoutly genuflected to the crucifix and told him piously: ‘Submit not to me. I am a mortal man, but yonder is the Maker of us all – the author of truth.’
²⁷
He ‘sharply reprimanded’ them and ordered all three to make public recantations of their beliefs during special sermons at St Mary’s Church Spitalfields, north of the city, at the end of March. Sir John Wallop told Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, the devoutly Catholic Lord Deputy of Calais, that they had recanted ‘from their lewd opinions, and be plain, his highness is of such sort that I think all Christendom shall shortly say “the King of England is the only perfect of good faith”, God save him’.
²⁸

But even this was not enough for Gardiner. Despite his subsequent denials, it seems clear that he was behind their arrest and imprisonment in the Tower by the King’s commandment on the following Saturday. There, all too conscious of the fate of heretics, they renounced their earlier recantations, preferring to die steadfast in their faith. For the Bishop of Winchester, their downfall registered a palpable hit on the position and authority of Cromwell, who was uncomfortably associated with some of the miscreants. It also rekindled the King’s anger over liturgical change and fuelled his growing intolerance of unorthodoxy and heresy within his own church in England.
²⁹

The French ambassador de Marillac reported on 10 April that now Cromwell and Cranmer ‘do not know where they are’. He predicted that

within a few days, there will be seen in this country a great change in many things; which this king begins to make in his Ministers, recalling those he had rejected and degrading those he has raised.

Cromwell is tottering; for all those recalled, who were dismissed by his means, reserve [not]
une bonne pensée
[one good thought] for him – among others, the bishops of Winchester, Durham and Bath, men of great learning and experience, who are now summoned to the Privy Council.

The envoy had heard ‘on good authority’ that Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, ‘a person of great esteem with the learned’, would soon replace Cromwell as Vicar-General and that John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells, would become Keeper of the Privy Seal:
³⁰
‘In any case, the name of Vicar-General will not remain to [Cromwell] as even his own people assert. If he remains in his former credit and authority, it will only be because he is very assiduous in affairs, although rough in his management of them, and that he does nothing without first consulting the king.’
³¹

The next day, a Sunday, a triumphant Gardiner preached himself at Paul’s Cross, but his words sparked an angry fight between ‘three or four serving men’ amongst those listening in the churchyard and his sermon was disrupted.
³²

Another front in this war of religious ideas had opened up in Calais, where many religious reformers had fled after the Six Articles became law in June 1539. Both Cranmer and Cromwell had turned a conveniently blind eye to their vocal presence there: another case of out of sight, out of mind. But Lisle, the Lord Deputy of the English town and fortress, had been plotting against Cromwell for months. He had recently complained to Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse, that Cromwell’s inaction against religious reformers had made his job enforcing the Six Articles virtually impossible in Calais. Only too conscious of the Minister’s power, he ended his letter: ‘I beseech you, keep this matter close, for if it should come to my Lord Privy Seal’s knowledge or ear, I [would be] half undone.’
³³
Unbeknown to him, his words had a prophetic edge.

After Norfolk had gleefully reported Lisle’s concerns to London, Cromwell was forced in early April to appoint a six-man commission,
under Robert Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, to investigate the activities of the ‘Sacramentaries’ in Calais. With great speed, they began their inquiries and on 5 April wrote to Henry about the ‘great division about religion’ in the town. They discovered not only a nest of heretics, including one William Kennedy, who said ‘there were twenty more of his opinion in the town’, but other disquieting information such as the fact that Sir George Carew, Lieutenant of the town of Rysebank within the English Pale, had been eating flesh during Lent, as had Thomas Brooke, one of the two Members of Parliament for Calais, the latter with ‘none other excuse but that he has great pain with the colic and would neither have mass, matins nor evensong’.
³⁴

Three days later, the King replied to the commissioners, marvelling ‘that no more persons were convicted [by] you. It appears you intend to banish four persons named in your letters, one of them Brooke, who seems to have used himself very arrogantly before you.’ Henry urged them to impose heavy-handed justice: Brooke had been imprisoned in the Tower the previous year for his opposition to the Six Articles, but had saved his life by recanting and performing a public penance by carrying the heretic’s bundle of wood faggots in a humiliating parade through the London streets. The King chillingly pointed out how much more the ‘execution of one or two should confer to the redubbing [resolution] of these matters than the banishment of many. Thinking how this contempt and eating flesh of … Brooke will extend to … as grievous an offence as a relapse into his former heresies, we wish, if you find further matter upon our new Statute [the Six Articles] to condemn him … either as a traitor or heretic … then immediately cause him to be executed.’

As for Sir George Carew: ‘We reserve the determination of his case to ourselves. If you think him a man of so evil a sort … and that all the depositions against him are substantial, send him over [to London] under guard, together with a copy of the evidence against him.’
³⁵

Then the witch-hunt against the heretics fell pell-mell into an unexpected hole, which pulled it up short. The investigators discovered that Gregory Botolph, who had been Lisle’s chaplain, had not only joined the traitorous Cardinal Pole in Rome, but had devised a ludicrously
unworkable plan to betray Calais into his hands. Botolph had now arrived at the Crown Inn in Gravelines and was secretly exchanging letters with Clement Philpot, a parish priest inside Calais. Moreover, the commission revealed that Lisle had granted a passport to his chaplain.

If you even dared to utter the name ‘Pole’, Henry’s suspicions and deep mistrust would immediately surface and become rampant. He quickly wrote to his commissioners on 17 April, cunningly instructing them to ‘devise among you a letter from Philpot to the priest Gregory, giving him some hope of a benefice to be obtained … in those parts and requiring his immediate repair thither for that purpose. Get Philpot to write it in his own hand and send it to the priest.’
³⁶

Furthermore, he summoned Lisle to London, appointing the Earl of Sussex to remain in charge of Calais in his absence. Philpot duly wrote the required letter to Botolph, offering him the parish of Arderne, within the Pale of Calais, valued at £20 a year, and suggesting a meeting there ‘where is a good fellow that serves the cure and has stable and hay for your horse. Bread and drink shall you find, cheese and eggs, but no other cares,’ he added reassuringly.
³⁷
Botolph eluded the King’s ambush and Richard Pate, the English ambassador in Ghent, was forced to invent a tale of sacrilegious theft from a church as an excuse for the Netherlanders to arrest him. But they refused to extradite the errant chaplain.

Back in London, it was high time Cromwell seized the initiative on the thorny religious issue. He had now recovered from a short bout of sickness. On the first day of the new session of Parliament, 12 April, Cromwell, speaking in the King’s name, told the lords temporal and spiritual and the assembled commons of the importance of a ‘firm union’ on religious issues amongst Henry’s subjects. He knew that

there were many incendiaries and much cockle grown up with the wheat. The rashness and licentiousness of some, and the inveterate superstition of others in the ancient corruptions had [caused] great dissent, to the sad regret of all good Christians.

Some were called papists, other[s] heretics; which bitterness of spirit seemed the stranger, since now the Holy Scriptures, by the king’s great care of his people, were now in all their hands in a language they understood.

But these were grossly perverted by both sides who studied rather to justify their passions out of them than to direct their belief by them.

He had come there with a clear message to deliver from Henry, beset by the constant wrangling of the religious factions at court: ‘The king leans neither to the right nor to the left hand, neither to the one nor the other party, but set[s] the pure and sincere doctrine of the Christian faith before his eyes.’
³⁸

Cromwell stressed that his royal master was anxious to see ‘decent’ religious ceremonies continued in the cathedrals and parish churches ‘and the true use of them taught, by which all abuses might be cut off and disputes about the exposition of the Scriptures cease’. Moreover, Henry was firmly ‘resolved to punish severely all transgressors … [who]soever they were’ and was piously determined ‘that Christ, the gospel of Christ and the truth shall have the victory’. The Lord Privy Seal therefore asked the Lords to set up ‘commissions of bishops’
³⁹
to investigate and correct abuses and to ‘enforce respect for the Church’ – but this was merely a piece of empty political flummery on Cromwell’s part, as he had little interest in burning those heretics who denied the presence of Christ at communion, or hanging married priests for their wanton transgressions.
⁴⁰
Such prosecutions were the thin edge of the wedge and would be seized upon by the conservatives as nails in the coffin of Cromwell’s reforms of the Church. Now, cannily, he was simply providing visible evidence that he was acting to promote observance of his King’s well-known and steadfast conservatism towards the old liturgy.

He had successfully won a trick, unexpectedly playing the religious card, but unbeknown to him, while he was haranguing Parliament at Westminster, Norfolk and Gardiner were down the River Thames at Greenwich Palace, closeted with Henry, slowly pulling the drawstrings of their conspiracy against him ever more tightly around his neck.

The Lord Privy Seal swiftly moved on to another of Henry’s prevailing preoccupations: the level of spending money he had in his exchequer. Cromwell had already implemented a widespread reform of the organisation of the royal household, which had reported a financial deficit in 1539 and was now running perilously close to the red again,
owing to an additional number of those pensioned and more than £7,000 in extra pay,
⁴¹
partially caused by the recruitment of the Spears.
⁴²