Hello Tudor Summit attendees – this is David from The History of England Podcast, a podcast in which we go from the Romans legging it back home and what that did for us, all the way through to well, all the way through to yesterday afternoon just in time for a nice cup of tea and a bun. You can find me in all good podcatchers, and at my very own website www.TheHistoryofEngland.co.uk
It just so happens that we have reached that lovable pussy cat Henry VIII on the History of England Podcast, a man served by three of the most remarkably talented servants in English history, the three Thomases, Wolsey, More and Cromwell. So when Heather very kindly asked me if I would like to do a piece for the Tudor Summit I spoke to them, Thomas Cromwell gave me the biggest bribe so I have gone with him.
Now Thomas Cromwell is a little like Marmite. If you are not from the UK, and don’t know Marmite, it is essentially untreated, used engine oil masquerading as an edible spread. You either love it or hate it. Just to demonstrate my point, let me give you a couple of contemporary quotes. About Cromwell, not Marmite.
The first is from Cardinal Reginald Pole. He was a descendent of English royalty, the house of York, and had been groomed for the top by Henry VIII. But he became Henry’s greatest opponent. His description of Cromwell was less than glowing.
‘an agent of Satan sent by the devil to lure King Henry to damnation’
It is worth noting that Pole felt it necessary to invoke the Prince of Darkness to explain not only Cromwell’s politics, but to explain why such a low born oik could ever have been in a position of such power that should be clearly reserved for their social superiors like, well like Reginald Pole.
Then let me introduce you to one of the architects of the English Reformation, Thomas Cranmer. When Anne Boleyn was executed, Cranmer was horrified, and screwed up enough courage to write a letter to Henry in her defence. It is a letter than has been described by critics as rather feeble and cowardly, which is a bit of a hoot given that as far as we can see Cranmer was the only person who dared speak up for Anne in any way at all, and that might include her father. When Cromwell was executed, Cranmer once again did his best to speak up for his friend, for such he seems to have been. He described Cromwell as
‘such a servant, in my judgement, in wisdom, diligence, faithfulness and experience, as no prince in this realm ever had’
Now we don’t have space for a detailed historiography but I should add John Foxe, the Protestant Martyrologist of the later 16th century who added evangelicalism to the list of Cromwellian characteristics. And it went down the ages – a broadly negative Catholic story with the tone set by Pole, and a broadly positive Protestant one set by Foxe. Sadly for Cromwell, when we get to the 19th century William Cobbett adds the accusation that Cromwell and the nobility robbed the poor of their comfy monasteries that sustained them, and with the Catholic emancipation movement Cromwell’s reputation took a firm dive into nasty thug territory, nothing more than Henry’s brutal enforcer out to enrich himself by doing his boss’s bidding.
G R Elton did try to resuscitate Cromwell’s reputation in the 1950s. Elton looked at the events of the 1530s, put 2 and 2 together and came up with a mastermind called Cromwell, who knowingly engineered a revolution in Tudor Government, sweeping away medieval institutions, enriching the king, enabling the powers of Central government with a modern bureaucracy, elevating the role of parliament.
However, Elton’s thesis has been picked away at, and in general it’s the Cromwell of ‘A Man for All Seasons’ and ‘Anne of a Thousand Days’ that stayed in people’s minds – manipulative, brutal, venal and corrupt, relentless.
And then, we get Hilary Mantel who really has thrown the cards up into the air. I tried and failed to read the books, but saw the plays and Telly stuff, and really with Mark Rylance at the helm, it’s Cromwell as thoroughly lovable, reasonable, 21st century man fighting the forces of medieval superstition. Interestingly there’s a sort of see saw with Thomas More’s reputation that also goes on – when one goes up the other comes down. Hence the Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury’s horrified reaction to Mantel’s Cromwell:
It would be sad if Thomas Cromwell, who is surely one of the most unscrupulous figures in England’s history, was to be held-up as a role model for future generations.
So what is the real story here? Well I suspect this will run and run, and the captain’s log stardated 4153.7 will voice its opinion, Alpha Centauri will be deeply divided on Cromwell’s reputation. But there are a few aspects we might like to consider in this brief biography.
- How far was Cromwell the conscious mastermind of a revolution in government in the 1530s?
- Was Cromwell just following the king’s orders, or was in fact Cromwell that drove the bus?
- Was Cromwell guilty of visiting a tyranny on England, with no other interest than enriching himself – or was he a stateman, with a vision based on coherent principles?
- Was Cromwell genuinely motivated by religious reform? Or was it just a cover to grab the wealth of the monasteries?
I might mention that you can not only get free podcasts through the history of England, you can also become a paying member and get more, much more. I mention this as a venal, money grabbing advert in the style of Thomas Cromwell, but also because we’ve just had a quiz, poll and competition about Thomas – I will reveal what the members decided at the end of my talk; and one of the interesting comments was about the impact of Cromwell’s father.
Because Cromwell’s background is absolutely unique in Tudor history and indeed English political history up to the 16th century. Cromwell’s father was a blacksmith, publican, tenant farmer. This is a very lowly background for a chief minister; Cromwell is often compared to Wolsey who’s dad was a butcher, but at least Wolsey came through accepted path – the church, University. Not Cromwell. Sadly, we know almost nothing about his mother, but his father Walter Cromwell comes across as a ducker and a diver, a bobber and a weaver, who was convicted of watering his beer not once, not twice, not 10 times, not 20 times but 48 times. Who was eventually thrown off his rented land for forging his papers. We should bear in mind Philip Larkin’s dictum about the influence mum and dad have on their children should we not?
So Cromwell leaves – he leaves home, he leaves England. Why? Is this because he emulates his father, as thought Eustace Chapuys, the Empire’s Ambassador when he said
‘Cromwell was ill-behaved when young, and after an imprisonment was forced to leave the country.’?
Or did he react against his father, leave the family home to find his fortune? If it helps, Thomas Cromwell admitted to Cranmer, what a ‘ruffian he was in his young days’. What happened next is very much open to conjecture, but it appears he became a soldier, and probably had a brief, inglorious career in the French army, experiencing the French defeat at Garigliano. This was no great recommendation of the life military, and so Cromwell jumped ship in Italy.
Italy of course was the centre of the Renaissance, a soup of the latest religious, literary, political thinking, and the perfect place not only for the English humanist scholar to learn their trade, but your budding political hegemon and tyrant too. But the likelihood is that he was on the streets in 1504. One theory is that he managed to convince one of Europe’s greatest and richest bankers to trust him, and take him in, a man called Francesco Frescobaldi.
This was Cromwell’s big break; from there he sets up in business in the low countries and in England as well, to where he returns at least by 1512. He sets up his own legal business – and all of this is self-taught by the way. Essentially he was a sort of man of affairs – a combination of Tom Hagen in the Godfather and Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction; Cromwell was a man who could get things done, a business agent, lawyer, expediter. Let me give you one example.
Of we go, then, to the town of Boston, Lincolnshire. The Guild of St Marys there made most of its money by speeding souls through purgatory; the guild had a licence from the Pope to sell indulgences. But in 1517 their licence from the Pope was due to run out. So they asked Cromwell to win a renewal for them; by the way the whole process would cost them, £1,200, the equivalent of £600,000 today. So clearly selling indulgences was good business.
So, picture the scene. Pope Leo Xth in all his renaissance glory was returning from a busy day hunting with the papal court. As they approached Rome, they heard the sound of singing, in an unusual style; it was in fact something called an English 3 man song, about which I know nothing more except that apparently Shakespeare used one in a Winter’s Tale. Leo was intrigued – he liked shiny new things. He stopped to speak to the group to find out more. There attached to the group was our very own Thomas Cromwell ready to step forward and seize the moment. But he didn’t go straight for the close; no, no, softly softly catch the monkey; he played his fish a bit more, presenting Leo with a range of English sweetmeats and delicacies, having heard that Leo was partial to a nibble. Here are the finest English sweetmeats he declared
‘such as Kings and Princes only…in the Realm of England use to feed upon’.
It worked like a dream, the fish was hooked, landed, gutted and fried. Before the meeting was over the order had been given and a papal bull dated 24th February 1518 confirmed the St Mary’s Guild licence.
From there, Cromwell’s business and reputation grew, and his circle of clients with it. His elf taught knowledge and skills were remarkable; he mastered Greek, Latin, French, Italian, he had a detailed knowledge of the bible, probably drawn from the Latin translation made by Erasmus. It so happens that Cromwell had a habit of dating his letters with the time as well as the day, so something of his working practices emerge, which on the scale of ‘workaholic’, to ‘acceptable work life balance’, to ‘franky comatose’ went off the top of the scale; 4am to midnight was common or even usual. It was doing the trick, though; he acted for nobles and London guilds, often pleading to the king’s household or to Cardinal Wolsey’s.
In 1523 he was elected as an MP, and somewhere in the 1520’s, some say as late as 1525 but probably before that, Cromwell became known to Wolsey. The two of them recognised a good partnership when they saw it. Maybe their similar backgrounds helped; or maybe it was the similarity in talent and energy. One thing the two never shared; while both Wolsey and Cromwell clearly lived for the reality of power and influence, Cromwell had little of the desire for outward expression that Wolsey had. Not for Cromwell the vast entourage, the silver crosses, no one would have dreamt of describing Cromwell as a glorious Peacock. Although the Holbein portrait of Cromwell was made before the height of his power, it is still notable that he is wearing sober dark colours, and is represented as though he’s a bureaucrat just broken off work for a moment. Cromwell was altogether business like than his mentor.
In entering Wolsey’s household, Cromwell’s path now crossed future antagonists, notably Stephen Gardiner and Thomas More, with whom the rest of his life would be intertwined. One of his largest tasks was of course the first round of dissolution of monasteries – the 30 houses dismantled by Wolsey, and the channelling of the proceeds into what would become ChristChurch College, Oxford. There’s no doubt that through this process Cromwell demonstrated his extraordinary energy, and efficiency. But he was also accused, and marginally guilty, of the corruption which history would lay at his door. There is little doubt that Cromwell accepted bribes and payments; there is little doubt that he would do the same when it came to the wider dissolution that would follow. The classic situation would be the arrival at a monastery of Cromwell’s commissioners; the application from the Abbot for an exemption, accompanied by a suitable gift, followed, spookily, by the award of said exemption.
Now then, how far does this constitute bribery? Seems like an open and shut case, but it’s worth noting that this was pretty standard stuff; it was accepted that when you gained a royal office, the salary was something, but this was not the way you made money; but the real way you made money was to make a profit from the job. The general conclusion seems to be that while Cromwell was sometimes on the wrong side of the line, he was by no means unusually corrupt for the time. And I should go back to that work rate thing – there is no doubt at all of Cromwell’s work rate, he treated none of the offices he acquired as though it was a sinecure. If you are looking for a timeserving corrupt minister who exploited public money to hit the party scene, you are looking in the wrong place, sorry not at home. Thomas Cromwell, I suspect, earned every penny, every groat.
Wolsey and Cromwell’s relationship was notably close; when Wolsey’s aristocratic enemies finally got their man in 1529, it was therefore unsurprising that Cromwell was worried about his future, and the accusations that would be laid against this creature of Wolsey. But Cromwell’s response to disaster is surely to his credit.
‘I do intend this afternoon, when my lord hath dined, to ride to London and so to the Court, where I will other make or mar or I come again, I will put myself in the press to see what any man is able to lay to my charge of untruth or misdemeanor.’
He did not fight just for himself though, he fought to save Wolsey; the negative views of Cromwell need to deal with the unswerving loyalty he showed his fallen master in 1529 and 1530, seeking to rehabilitate a deeply unpopular man in a way that could well have torched his career permanently. It is the same loyalty that Cromwell will show the king.
The anti Cromwellian rubric is that he snuck up to the king in an oily kind of way and told him he could make him the richest king in Europe, Henry said ‘alright the you can be my No 1 then’. The truth is very different. Cromwell had to work the self promotion and patronage system just like any other; he gave himself a platform by getting himself elected as an MP to parliament again. He had officers of the Crown such as John Russell and Christopher Hales recommend him to the king. And his work under the Cardinal had caught the king’s eye anyway. But there were also those working against him, Wolsey’s enemies who had no desire to see one of his proteges fill his dead men’s shoes. Specifically, the Duke of Norfolk persuaded a diplomat called John Wallop to whisper poison into the king’s ear. But Cromwell won this round as he would win many more. In April 1530, he was elected to the King’s Council.
If you have a vision of Cromwell’s ample buttocks settling comfortably into the indents made by the Cardinal’s even chunkier cheeks, put that vision from your mind. Henry would never again give a minister the freedom and dominance he had given Wolsey. In the fullness of time, Cromwell will get close – but will always be subjected to a level of scrutiny, questioning, correction that Henry did feel he could be bothered or needed to give Wolsey.
In 1530, Cromwell was simply one of many members of Council. By 1536, however, Cromwell would have achieved the unassailable position of dominance of the royal court and of government, however subject he was to the king’s scrutiny. How did he get there?
What it was not, was a novel masterplan such as dissolving the monasteries. Let me instead boil things down to absurd levels of simplicity, and reduce it to 2 things; firstly, Cromwell was a model of efficiency, effectiveness and hard work and outshone any possible competitor as the sun outshines the moon, as Led Zep out shone the Clash. And secondly Cromwell was a brutally effective politician and player of factional politics; and was prepared to do whatever it took to achieve and hold on to power.
Take the king’s divorce, marriage and break with Rome. Henry had been struggling to gain his divorce since 1527, and broadly got nowhere after 5 years. After Cromwell achieved real influence from 1532, within two years the English clergy had submitted to their king in a welter of legislation, much of it written by Cromwell’s own hand, and the royal supremacy legally and formally declared and endorsed by the English parliament, breaking a thousand years of tradition. None of this requires us to believe that this was anything other than the king’s reformation, with the basic strategy of royal supremacy set by the king. But Cromwell brought a transformation to its implementation.
And Cromwell’s strategy in this was utterly brilliant. Through his use of parliament and statute law, he took the whole thing out of the realm of academic debate and into the court of law. Once Cromwell had laws created, there was no more need to persuade players of the rights and wrongs about the supremacy or submission of the clergy; More, Fisher, the Carthusians, didn’t have to be defeated by force of academic argument – they simply had to be convicted under the law.
Cromwell’s political approach, meanwhile, was very different to that of Wolsey. Wolsey stood alone in glorious magnificence, the king’s friend; he fell because he allowed his enemies to block his access to the king. Cromwell worked the factional politics to gain and maintain power. In gaining power and influence he initially aligned with the Boleyns. In 1536, as the distance between him and Anne grew, he executed his brilliant and brutal coup causing Anne and some of the king’s closest friends and confidentes to be judicially murdered. His particular genius was not just in implementing the orders of his king to destroy his wife; it lay in gaining the support of a conservative faction to carry out his coup – then destroying their power and removing them as potential rivals, almost as completely as the Boleyns.
Cromwell would give further examples of his ability to play factional politics; in 1538, threatened once again by a conservative faction he created a trumped up plot against Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter and had him executed by order of the king. Whatever you think of Cromwell, he was a dangerous man to know. As Cromwell would find out however if he didn’t know already, this was a case of do unto others as they would do unto you
Throughout the early and mid 1530’s, Cromwell accumulated offices which reflected his growing influence with the king, made him personally richer, but crucially gave him access to networks and control of patronage. April 1532, Master of the King’s Jewel House; Chancellor of the Exchequer, Clerk of the Hanaper. In 1535 he became, responsible for all administrative aspects of the English Church – Vice Gerend. And in 1536 his pre-eminence was confirmed when he was appointed Lord Privy Seal, a position of genuine social clout as well as political.
But the basis of his dominance was a previously rather non-political position, that of Secretary to the king. This role gave Cromwell the single most critical thing – unfettered access at any time to the king – he had learned from Wolsey’s experience.
We posed the question at the start – once he’d gained his supremacy, did Cromwell really mastermind a revolution in Government? And was he no more than the king’s brutal enforcer?
I should start with the point that while today we might see the very idea of the royal supremacy as an absurdity, and look at events like the dissolution of the monasteries, and condemn them as a cynical exercise in greed, things looked very different in the 16th century. There was a perfectly reasonable and well argued European tradition around the concept of the supremacy of princely power over the church and that the wealth and temporal power of the church was excessive. Although Pole condemned Cromwell as a believer in Machiavelli it’s more likely that Cromwell’s thinking was influenced by one Marsilio of Padua, a 14th century Italian scholar, who wrote radical works in defence of imperial authority over the church. Cromwell would refer back to Constantine, the Roman Emperor, supreme over both church and state. He would have also been influenced by the concept of Commonwealth, the philosophy that emphasised the interconnection of the components of society, with its general health depending on each part knowing its place and playing its part. And at the top of the Commonwealth sat the king, from which all flowed.
My point is that it is too simple to equate the seizure by the crown of the wealth of the church as cynical. At the centre of Cromwell’s strategy was the belief that endowing the king with the riches of the monasteries and the wider church would satisfy the political nation, it would reward their services to the king and state, through them provide for the needs of the poor and for education, provide for defence of the realm.
Cromwell succeeded in enriching the king in spades; even accounting for the fact that Henry sold much of the land of the monasteries, royal income increased from around £100,000 a year to somewhere between £200 and £250,000. And of course while Cromwell would no doubt have hidden his face in his hands with frustration at Henry’s profligate selling off the monastic lands in the 1540s, this equally did exactly what Cromwell hoped for in another sense – it enriched the political nation. It constituted the largest transfer of wealth before modern times, and served to enrich those social classes, and expand them – still a pretty tiny percentage of the population but it is a much larger tiny percentage of the population. Many Yeomen simply bought their farms rather than being tenants to their monastery; the Gentry in particular profited; for example in Essex before the dissolution, 12 % of the land was held by the nobility, 52% by the gentry; afterwards, the nobility’s share rose a bit to 17%, but the gentry’s exploded to 72%.
If it is unfair to paint Cromwell as unscrupulous and unprincipled, how far did he shape or even define strategy?
It is hard to tell; but it is probable that the royal supremacy, break with Rome and reformation of doctrine was Henry’s; the process of Henry’s movement towards divorce and the supremacy can be seen from 1529; his exalted view of the role of the prince from even earlier, in the Hunne affair as far back as 1515. Subsequently, it was Henry who in 1537 demanded a review of doctrine; and wrote over 250 comments on the resulting Bishop’s Book. It’s tempting to paint Henry as nothing more than a hedonistic and violent tyrant, but it ignores his evident if sometimes eccentric intellect. Although Henry is capable of dithering, never he nor his court doubted that he was the person to make the key decisions.
However, he was clearly open to influence; the very existence of court faction confirms it. Although Henry was an unpredictable and occasionally vicious master he was not a man that demanded time servers and sycophants as his advisers. He surrounded himself with brilliant royal servants, and had the confidence to manage them. Cromwell frequently debated and voiced disagreement; Cranmer the same.
So I would contend that as far as the reformation in all its aspects was concerned, Henry decided where the bus was going. But it was Cromwell who got the it there. Because in ways and means, in the details of administration and bureaucracy, with the mention of the very word Henry had reached the limit of his interest, talk to the hand, whatever, JDI. Try and have a conversation with this Tudor about the account books or look for an intimate chat about job descriptions and you’d find yourself pretty quickly talking to fresh air. Henry was interested in outcomes; he expected Cromwell to deliver him an effective and efficient service, and didn’t much care how he did it.
And so to that claim about Cromwell’s revolution in government. Everyone agrees on is that the 1530s were an extraordinary decade which transformed English history; but how far was this a conscious plan that started to deliver a modern style of government driven by a centralised authority, professional bureaucracy, and statute law?
Cromwell does indeed seem to have created a more direct relationship between the central power of the king, and his subject. There was nothing of the social radical in Cromwell; he was innocent of Lord Darcy’s accusation that he was out to destroy the nobility. But nor was he content with that Medieval and Yorkist idea that it was the nobility and the magnates that represented royal power in the regions; not for Cromwell the idea of a Gloucester ruling in the north, or a Kildare in Ireland.
Cromwell takes the idea of regional Councils, in the North, Wales and a new one in the South West, and makes them agents of royal power, rather than a forum where the local magnates exercise their local dominance. In Wales and the North in particular, the Regional Councils are run by men of the middling sort, by Gentry and lesser nobility. The power of the Clifford, Percies, Darcy are all broken and sublimated in the North. The Marcher Lordships are broken up and subsumed into 6 new counties – for the first time since Billy the Conq the royal writ now runs in the Welsh Marches. Central rule also dominated Cromwell’s policy in Ireland; the power of the Kildares was broken and Silken Thomas Fitzgerald, 10th earl of Kildare, executed in favour of power and rule from the Pale. By 1542, Henry VIII had made himself king of Ireland.
By the end of Cromwell’s period in power, Tudor bureaucracy did indeed look very different. All through the Yorkist and Henry VII we have seen the personal household organs of the king, the chamber, increasingly dominate public finance, overriding the traditional departments of State like the Exchequer; by 1540, the growing role of the king’s chamber in public finance was definitively reversed, and would never re-surface. In it’s place were new ministries – the Courts of Augmentation and Wardship, and Cromwell’s own office, the King’s Jewel House.
Cromwell also believed deeply that the king’s government should be blind to social background. Once a man was acting as an official with the authority of royal government, the greatest must submit to the meanest. This is the instinct of the true bureaucrat, the true public servant. It ran very much against the concept of a special role of the nobility, the ability of the magnate to protect his people against the operation of central government and the law – which it is true to say, kings had been attacking since Richard II’s laws on livery and maintenance.
Again this doesn’t mean Cromwell was a social radical. But, just like Henry VII, he also saw the potential in a partnership with the middling sort in operating the bureaucracy. For the same reasons as Henry VII; they had more reason to be loyal, they were more dependent on royal patronage to make a living. So the 16th century continued to be a good time for some level of social mobility. We can see a good example in the King’s Council. So, after he had slaughtered Anne Boleyn and her clients, he packed the king’s council with new men. These new men were very of a very different hue to the courtiers who had lost their lives or power along with Anne’s fall. The new men were people like Ralph Sadler and Anthony Denny; these are men who would ordinarily have been lawyers or merchants, never the courtiers they now became.
Finally, in the hunt for the modernising Thomas, came his relationship with parliament. Once upon a time, parliament an institution called only when absolutely necessary, and was simply an opportunity to agree taxation, give the king’s subjects an opportunity to present petitions and act as the ultimate court of law; it was the Convocation of the Church that legislated on moral and church matters. After the 1530’s Parliament legislated on all aspects of religious reform, and statute law was definitively recognised as superior to canon law. It would be unthinkable for the later Tudors to rule without parliament. Cromwell even convinced that supposed tyrant Henry, of parliament’s importance; in 1543, Henry himself came to parliament and announced:
…We at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in time of parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together into one body politic
Well, this makes a compelling list does it not? A more professional bureaucracy that was establishing public offices as superior to the king’s personal household; government increasingly peopled by a wider social range, more dependent on and loyal to central authority; a direct relationship between the centre and the regions, turning those old medieval satraps into a service nobility, with regional councils as expressions of central, not regional power; a parliament that was essential to legitimate rule. Good golly Miss Molly, how could anyone deny a Tudor revolution in government?
It’s a little harder to believe, though that all of this followed a plan. Again, in our Members debate, one person advanced the view that Cromwell was deeply pragmatic, and an alternative interpretation is that Cromwell was a simply a highly effective minister of the traditional model, finding solutions to a series of individual problems, albeit informed by his belief in the supremacy of royal power.
The idea that Cromwell created a modern, impartial bureaucracy autonomous to the king’s household is very difficult to maintain. Actually, his very own public servants like Paget and Wriothesley complained that Cromwell cut across bureaucratic protocols, ruling by fiat rather than process, and created confusion rather than order. While Cromwell is there, suddenly the Jewel House becomes the centre of financial management; when he is gone, it resides into obscurity again – this is the importance of the office being defined by the man who held it rather than an ordered structure. Cromwell certainly never saw the potential for the exchequer to bring together public finance under one roof, as will ultimately happen.
Cromwell bears all the hallmarks of a very hardworking man, trying to get things done and cutting corners to do so – not a man trying to create a new machine. The new ministries, of Augmentations and Wards, have the same characteristic – departments created to tackle a specific job, not part of a thought-through structure.
Parliament’s role is certainly enhanced by the 15030s; but then Cromwell didn’t have much choice but to use parliament – he had to find a way of involving the political nation in these dramatic changes, and legalising the transfer of all these powers from Pope to king. It seems more likely that the transformation of parliament’s role was an unforeseen outcome. However it is entirely reasonable to recognise Cromwell’s belief in the importance and supremacy of the law., Because he made no attempt to take the other alternative route, of imposing absolutism, of achieving the royal supremacy purely by royal proclamation and decree.
So we end up with an extraordinary decade, and an extraordinarily effective minister, but hardly the coherent masterplan. It’s also of course important to note that Cromwell has a pretty good hit rate, but he’s far from always successful. The Regional Council of the South West for example crashes and burns, his reforms in Ireland were doomed to failure. Not all of his changes were revolutionary, many are simply evolutionary; the Regional Councils had been established by the Yorkists, his use of the gentry in government was very much a continuation of Henry VII’s policy.
While Cromwell made no attempt to impose absolutism, both he and Henry are have been consistently described as imposing a vicious tyranny on England. And it’s difficult to underestimate just how hated Cromwell was by the political and indeed non political nation at the time, as an innovator and social abnormality. I wonder, though, if part our modern opinion of Cromwell is coloured by the standards of our day. The executions of those who were convicted of heresy on either side of the line looks suitably hideous; but the importance of religious uniformity was deeply held in 1530; many thousands had been slaughtered over the centuries throughout Europe in defence of the idea. Furthermore, the idea of deterrence through vicious legal penalties, which is not terribly popular today, was absolutely accepted at the time. These are things society agreed on, they are not imposed on an unwilling society from unthinking tyrants, and they are European-wide, not a preserve of the English. So the executions for heresy to the sight of the bodies of executed peasants rebels from the pilgrimage of Grace would not have been a surprise; and in fact mercy would have been considered a failure of the prince’s duty.
Of course, the high-profile convictions and executions of people like Anne Boleyn, John Fisher and Thomas More stand as evidence that Cromwell subverted the law for political ends – and this seems undeniable, especially in Anne’s case. Though to be controversial we do at least know that More and Fisher were guilty as charged, even if they both tried to take refuge in silence. There is Cromwell’s infamous 1534 Treason law, which made words treason, to the outrage of many historians; though, I’d argue many had been effectively executed for mere words before since imagining the king’s death was already treason. Much is made of Cromwell sitting at the centre of a spy network, buying information from people in the households of the mighty, spying on foreign visitors and ambassadors; well those magnates and foreign ambassadors would have been amazed if he had not done so, and Cromwell’s network was more an informal network of people coming forward to offer information for cash.
My point about all of this is that there is a lot of sensationalism. Figures fly around about how many died in Henry’s reign. However, during the period 1532–40, the best estimate is that a total of 883 people in England, Wales, and Calais came within the compass of the treason laws, of whom 308 were executed. That means 2/3rds were acquitted or pardoned. And of those that were executed, over 200 were in open rebellion against the crown, and nobody in Christendom would have approved of mercy for them. Only sixty-three people suffered for the new offence of speaking against the supremacy in the Treason act.
There is no doubt that the changes of the 1530’s, forced through by Cromwell and Henry, created an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, uncertainty and terror, especially in London. But neither Cromwell nor Henry made any attempt to create absolutism; Cromwell was assiduous in his attempts to convince the political nation of the rightness of his policies; and both consistently use the process of law. In fact Tudor society were great believers in law, however heavily influenced some of the outcomes were, and all convictions go through the process of law. It seems to me that Cromwell himself articulated his motivations accurately when he wrote:
Yet in case prayer and gentle entreaty cannot pull and allure you away from the doing of wrong and injury, both to the king and his subjects, I will not fail to advance to the utmost of my power Justice and to see punished with extremity the interrupters thereof to the example of the other.
I’d also argue that far from being motivated simply by a lust for power and wealth, Cromwell was exceptional in the breadth of his dedication to strengthen the Commonwealth. His legislation speaks of a statesman with a vision that extended across all aspects of the health of the kingdom. The volume of legislation, much of it drafted personally by Cromwell, is enormous. Between 1509 and 1531, 203 Acts were passed during nine sessions of parliament. By contrast, between 1532 and 1540 when Cromwell was at the height of his powers, there were 333 Acts during eight sessions. And these statutes cover all manner of activities, not just the reformation we all know about – they cover trade, social reform, poor laws, price regulation, enclosure, what people could and should wear.
The Poor laws of 1536 are particularly important. To modern ears they are pretty nasty; the amount of whipping involved, and particularly the distinction between the deserving poor, people who for some reason could not work, and what were known as sturdy beggars, those suspected of simply being too idle to work. But again the context is important. There was no understanding at the time of the economic forces at work in the 16th century, with population growth and an economy not flexible enough to absorb the extra workers. And, for the first time, Cromwell’s laws acknowledged that the state had a responsibility to make provision for the poor. Previously it had been the church and individuals. For the first time it was acknowledged that there were people out there that wanted to work, but could not do so, and that work should be provided. Yes, by modern standards Cromwell’s Poor Laws are pretty hideous; but their mere existence is a fundamental and radical change in attitude.
Which brings us finally to Cromwell’s religion. These days, Cromwell’s evangelical leanings seems accepted by most; despite Cromwell’s dying words on the scaffold:
I die in the Catholic faith, not doubting in any article of my faith, no nor in any sacrament of the church
The statement was partly in response to the accusations that he was a lover of Anabaptists, which was considered almost as bad as saying you’d invited the devil round for tea, buns and a bit of slap and tickle for old time’s sake. It’s also because Cromwell and Henry were firmly convinced that the Church in England was part of the Catholic church it’s just that they’d cleaned the barnacles off it, given it a good buff and so returned it to its state before the Bishop of Rome had got his grubby hands on it.
Cromwell makes no explicit statement apart from this scaffold speech about his religious views, but there is too much evidence of his support for reformists and evangelicals to argue that he did not have a deep interest in the ideas of the reformers. He consistently supports evangelicals, such as reforming bishops Latimer and Shaxton; he tries to bring Tyndale back to England, he supports the evangelical ABC Cranmer, he put an end to Thomas More’s heresy hunt through the bishops once More resigned as Chancellor. And then there is his big achievement – having a Bible in English placed into every church in England. Cromwell’s views have been described as a sort of rationalist, humanist belief in reform.
The dissolution of England’s monasteries are relevant to both Cromwell’s religious views, and the accusations of tyranny. The destruction of all England’s monasteries was an artistic disaster, deeply disruptive to much of the population, and resulted in the loss of priceless books. But they have to be seen in the context of Cromwell’s strategy to enrich the king for the benefit of the Commonwealth; in the context that he was not alone in viewing the wealth of the monastic movement as excessive, and that their purpose in supporting pilgrimage and veneration of relics was no longer relevant to religious doctrine as set by the king. Monasticism was also vulnerable to the accusation that it had ceased to be at the centre of spiritual or educational life, and even their charitable activities have been estimated as attracting only around 5-7% of their income.
It is, though, difficult not to have some distaste for Cromwell’s methods; right up to 1538 he was claiming that he had no designs on the larger monasteries for example. His Commissioners reviewing the state of the monasteries showed an unhealthy interest uncovering shortcomings – though true enough did not make things up, they did not make accusations without evidence. But most of all Cromwell looks dishonest in the preamble to his bills which make much of diverting the wealth generated into education and the poor, when in fact very little made its way there.
There is something deeply mysterious about Cromwell’s fall. Not that it wasn’t in the air; by April 1540, the French Ambassador related that Cromwell was tottering and 1539 had been rocky, with a swing from Henry back to support for the religious conservatives. And of course there was the disastrous affair of Anne of Cleves. But he seemed to have ridden the crises out. In 1540 Cromwell was made earl of Essex and Lord Chamberlain, so it seemed he was out of trouble and back in the ascendant. And then on 10th June he was arrested by Norfolk at Council.
I imagine Norfolk could hardly keep the grin off his face, Wolsey gone, another oik laid low, come on bring on the next one and I’ll have ‘im too. Cromwell’s first reaction was to throw his cap on the floor in frustration and exclaim in exasperation if this was all he got for the years of service. It’s a nice reaction. Exasperation seems reasonable in the circumstances. Still, the conservative faction was trailing the attractive Catherine Howard in front of Henry’s eyes we have after all seen with Anne that Henry’s ability to dissemble was A grade; I would not put it past Henry to create Cromwell Earl of Essex just to put him off his guard, and maybe that is what happened. Or maybe it was pure impulse.
Whatever it was, Cromwell was sent to the Tower. During his 3 month wait, Cromwell wrote a long letter of explanation to the Prince he had served so well, long and loyally, and his loyal household companion Ralph Sadler bravely smuggled the letter to Henry – but it’s not known if he read it. The PS on Cromwell’s letter read ‘mercy, Mercy, mercy’ so exasperation appears to have yielded to terror in the light of cold reality.
Let’s return to the 4 questions then. I find it difficult to credit the idea that Cromwell set out to transform government; but nonetheless, as an exceptionally effective minister his energy and innovation changed England forever. While Henry may have defined the strategy in the divorce and reformation, Cromwell influenced his thinking, held complete responsibility for implementation. A rationalist belief in religious reform and a desire to put the word of God within the reach of everyone in England ran throughout his life, alongside a belief in the supremacy of royal power to enhance the strength of the health of society, the Commonwealth.
It is impossible to deny that Cromwell had his unattractive side. There is no doubt that when in his view occasion demanded it, he was prepared to let nothing stand in his way, could be utterly ruthless and bend the law if required. His rationalism and logic could lead him to be a cold man and brutal in rolling over the lives of individuals who stood in his way. He fully shared Tudor society’s values that his power and position should bring him privileges and wealth; but he was by no means exceptional in that, and he was most certainly exceptional in the dedicated service he delivered to his master and country. And all of this must be set besides his quite extraordinary achievement in overcoming his background to rise to the pinnacle of power in a deeply hierarchical age.
Given that positive view of the man, I shall end with the judgement of J J Scarisbrick, still considered Henry VIII’s leading biographer, which is actually even more positive:
Far from being the ruthless Machiavellian of legend, Cromwell was a man possessed of a high concept of the ‘state’ and national sovereignty, and a deep concern for Parliament and the law; an administrative genius; one who may have lacked profound religious sense (though instinctively favourable to some kind of Erasmian Protestantism), but something of an idealist nonetheless. That the 1530s were a decisive decade in English history was due largely to his energy and vision.
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Thank you then for listening, I hope you liked it, and enjoy the rest of the Tudor summit.