Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (3 page)

In addition to running an effective legal practice, and a rather less effective clothing business, Cromwell also seems to have been a money lender. In this connection his international contacts were invaluable, because he probably borrowed the money in Antwerp at a standard rate, and then loaned it onto his clients with an enhancement. He was well known, as we have seen, in the house of Frescobaldi, where he would have learned the basics of the banking business in his youth, and was friendly with Antonio Bonvisi of Lucca, also well known in London, who included Wolsey among his clients. In his cosmopolitan experience, there were many features which point towards money lending as an attractive proposition, and his entrée to the Antwerp exchange would have given him a decisive advantage.

So what manner of man was Thomas Cromwell by 1522? His unusual youth had left its mark upon him, particularly in the skills that he had acquired. He was knowledgeable about banking, and the cloth trade, and had a most unusual command of languages. He had friends in Italy, in the Netherlands, and among the merchants strangers based in London. There is, however, no reason to suppose that he was that reviled creature, an ‘Italianate Englishman’, nor a disciple of Machiavelli, suppositions derived from his time in Florence.
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Nor, in spite of Foxe, was he a closet Lutheran. His trips to Rome had alienated him from the papacy, and he appears to have become sceptical about such standard devotions as the veneration of relics. However his will of 1529 reveals him to have been a man of conventional piety at that stage of his life, and there is no reason to suppose that that had changed over the previous seven years. That he was acquisitive is a reasonable supposition, but the only hint in his correspondence that that was frowned upon comes in a letter of 1532, charging him with not having paid for certain goods of the Duke of Buckingham which he had received eleven years earlier.
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The circumstances of this charge are unknown, and it could have been the result of mere oversight. However, it remains a mystery how and where he acquired the legal knowledge which supported his main business in the 1520s, because it was not until 1524 that he was enrolled at Gray’s Inn, and by that time he was well established.
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If he learned ‘on the job’ as an apprentice to an established attorney, that has escaped the record, and the only possible conclusion is that he was self-taught. Presumably he started in a small way, on the back of his merchandising, because his experience on the Continent would have taught him nothing about the English common law. Apart from membership of an Inn of Court, there was no recognised qualification for the profession, so he must have started with the occasional low-grade assignment and built up his practice by personal recommendation. There are a few suggestions in the records that this might have been so. In which case his success would have built upon itself, which is a testimony to his personality as well as to his learning ability. Apart from the fact that he was highly intelligent and adaptable in his approach, we have no evidence of that personality in these early years, but he clearly had a great capacity for friendship because he corresponded with men (and a few women) all over Europe, and they nearly all seem to have held him in warm regard. About his family life we know next to nothing. His wife and his daughters are mere names, and most of our knowledge of his son Gregory comes from later years. However the fact that he gave a home to his widowed mother-in-law suggests a congenial nature, which is reflected also in his letters. That he was a hard man of business may be deduced from his growing prosperity, but of the ruthless ideologist of later legend there is not a trace.

The Cardinal of York, seeing Cromwell’s vigilance and diligence, his ability and promptitude, both in evil and in good, took him into his service, and employed him principally in demolishing five or six good monasteries…

Eustace Chapuys

Thomas Cromwell sat in the parliament of 1523, but we do not know his constituency, or the circumstances of his election.
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Because he was in the cardinal’s service by this time, and was known to be so, it is likely that the Archbishop of York placed him in one of the boroughs whose patronage he controlled, but which one is unclear. It is, however, inconceivable that one who was fairly close to Wolsey should have entered Parliament without at least his knowledge and consent. This raises an interesting question about what double game the cardinal may have been playing, because we have the text of a speech, allegedly delivered by Cromwell in one or other of the sessions, which runs directly counter to the cardinal’s declared purpose.
²
Ostensibly, Wolsey was arguing for an invasion of France, in accordance with the Anglo-Imperial treaty of the previous year, and a subsidy of 4
s
in the pound to support it. Cromwell’s speech, however, is opposed to all such schemes. It starts with judicious flattery of the king’s intentions.

To recover again by the sword the realm of France, belonging to our most redoubted Sovereign by good and just title, and to change the sums of money which we have in sundry years received from thence into the whole and just revenues that might there from year to year be levied, if we did peaceably enjoy the same, who is here present that would not gladly dispend his goods but also his life … to help to obtain unto our most benign sovereign his most noble succession…
³

However, he then goes on, in equally dulcet tones, to argue against the king taking the field in person, suggesting that it would be a disaster to the kingdom if he should miscarry, bearing in mind his ‘forward courage’. He would leave a daughter as his heir, and she but a child. Without suggesting the difficulties of a female succession, he points out that Mary’s well-being demands her father’s safety, not the kind of risks which he would be taking on campaign. If the king’s warlike energy demands action, let him attack the Scots, who are a perpetual threat to his northern borders, ‘for though it is a common saying that in Scotland is nought to win but strokes, for that I allege another common saying, who that entendeth France to win, with Scotland let him begin’.
⁴

He therefore discreetly opposes the subsidy that Wolsey had demanded, but ends on the same flattering note on which he had begun: ‘I beseech God send our most dear and most redoubted sovereign prosperous succession and fortunate achieving of all this his noble enterprise.’ This speech has been rightly described as a masterpiece of eloquence and discretion, full of mature wisdom and sharp insights. If it was ever delivered, no doubt it helped to persuade the Commons to reject the grant asked for, and to replace it with a much smaller tax. Instead of £800,000, Wolsey would have to be content with £152,000, spread over three years.
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The cardinal was apparently deeply chagrined at this rebuff, but one wonders whether his disappointment was as great as he wished to make it appear. He had been very active in the promotion of peace between England and France since at least 1514, and the great Treaty of London of 1518 had been largely his handiwork. Since then he had been exercised to restrain his master’s martial ardour. He was, however, the king’s servant, and bound to follow Henry’s policies when these were clearly articulated. Consequently he had negotiated the treaty of 1522 with the Emperor, which had committed England to war against France, and set out to raise the necessary money by way of forced loans. By this means he raised over £350,000, but this, as he knew well, was nowhere near enough to cover the cost of the Army Royal which Henry proposed to lead. In fact it was £40,000 short of what was actually spent on the Duke of Suffolk’s raid in the autumn of 1523, and on the activities of the Earl of Surrey on the Scottish borders, which fell well short of open warfare.
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Hence his reluctant consent to meet Parliament in April 1523, with the object of raising the enormous sum of almost £1 million. This was based on accurate estimates of what would be required, and was by no means exaggerated. The convocations, which met at the same time as Parliament, made the unprecedented grant of 10 per cent of all clerical incomes, but that was spread over five years, whereas Wolsey’s need was for cash in hand. However, the House of Commons proved to be difficult, with or without Cromwell’s help, and in spite of the cardinal’s state visit, clearly designed to intimidate, would grant only the smaller sum. That was accomplished with much bitching and grinding, and the first instalment of the new tax was not to be paid until the spring of 1524.
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However, in spite of Wolsey’s vigorously expressed disappointment, in fact the rebuff suited his purposes very well. Another forced loan in the autumn of 1523 failed even partly to close the financial gap, and the Army Royal was never launched. In spite of the king’s obvious frustration, with which Wolsey was quick to sympathise, nothing could be done in 1524 or 1525, and the cardinal’s peace policy eventually prevailed at the Treaty of the More in August of the latter year.
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Although he could not admit it for obvious reasons, the House of Commons’ refusal of his subsidy request in April 1523 was not quite the setback that it appeared to be. This raises the intriguing possibility that Thomas Cromwell was acting as Wolsey’s agent in his well-known speech, and the reason why a complete text survives in the handwriting of one of Cromwell’s scribes is because it was carefully crafted in advance with the cardinal’s consent and approval. No one commented upon this at the time because the two were ostensibly so much at odds, and if anyone observed the oddity of one of Wolsey’s servants contradicting his master, their comments have not survived. The speech as recorded was cleverly designed to avoid giving offence to the king, and seems to have impressed with its force and subtlety, because when Cromwell next sought a place in Parliament in 1529, Henry was ‘well contented’ that he should be a burgess, provided that he obeyed the king’s orders, which suggests that his value as an orator was well appreciated.
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It may therefore have been with a wry sense of satisfaction that Cromwell wrote to his friend John Creke, who was in Bilbao at the time, on 17 August 1523, that he

… with others have endured a parliament which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, perjury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemperance, treason, murder, felony, conciliation, and also how a commonwealth might be edified and also continued within our realm. Howbeit in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say as well as we might, and left where we began.
¹⁰

The session had not been a rich one in legislative terms, and no doubt Wolsey would have written similarly if he had been so inclined, but it would be wrong to read into this humorous letter any deep disillusionment with Parliament as an institution. Rather it expresses a measure of frustration with this particular session, which the cardinal, who was also Lord Chancellor, had managed with such apparent incompetence. That may, however, have been planned by Wolsey, who had no opinion of parliaments, and avoided them whenever possible. By demonstrating the futility of such meetings, which became mere talking shops that did nothing to alleviate the king’s poverty, he was no doubt hoping to convince the king that further sessions would be a waste of time, and indeed as long as his influence prevailed Parliament was not called again.
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Cromwell, however, learned much about its potential power in his weeks as a burgess. It had the ability to frustrate or implement the king’s policies, and it discussed every subject under the sun. Although it had a defined professional competence, the constraints upon it were self-imposed and the result of tradition rather than law. With proper management those limitations could be transcended. It only needed a minister with the right skills and the king’s backing to turn Parliament into an effective instrument of the royal will, and that he was to remember in due course.

Meanwhile, he turned back to his legal practice, and to his regular activities on Wolsey’s behalf. It is often difficult to determine which was which. In January 1523 he had been given authority, with others, to call in the cardinal’s debts, a position of household responsibility, whereas in May he was asked by John Robinson of Boston to get Robert Pynson to print a large number of letters and briefs ‘for which he will send’, which seems to have nothing to do with Wolsey or his service.
¹²
At the same time his admission to Gray’s Inn must have owed something to his position with the cardinal, and may have been the result of prompting by his employer, because he entered as a qualified lawyer, which he surely was not unless his years of experience were taken in lieu. It is difficult to be sure. In December 1523 he was making presentments before the alderman of Breadstreet ward in the City of London concerning nuisances about St Mildred’s church, and in November he was appealed to by Henry Wykys, his brother-in-law, for assistance in selling a house in Chertsy. In November also he was in correspondence with Sir Peter Vavasour concerning the cheating ways of one Wim Bank, who was withholding his rents in the Low Countries. Vavasour was promising to come to London to consult him.
¹³
All this would seem to belong to his private business, but the Bill which he drafted on behalf of John Palsgrave, one of Wolsey’s clerks, for a Chancery suit in which Palsgrave was suing the executors of one Henry Wilcocks for the moiety of a benefice in Leicestershire, or the licence to a Hanseatic merchant to pass into France in pursuit of Hanseatic goods seized there, must be activities undertaken on the cardinal’s behalf. The latter was an extraordinary concession in view of the state of war between the countries at the time.
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Also as a result of his service to Wolsey he was instructed to set up an investigation into a dispute within the family of the Earl of Oxford concerning inheritance; and he received a petition addressed to him as ‘councillor to the Lord Legate’ from Edward Smything requesting the recovery of some cloths painted by Smything which had been, he alleged, wrongfully detained. In December 1524 he dealt with a case of breach of covenant in Yorkshire, and in May 1525 drafted a lease of some church lands in York, while in June he received a letter from one Cowper requesting his aid in providing a relative to a benefice.
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These are just a few examples of what was obviously an intensely busy life, but one which enabled Cromwell to prosper. In July 1526 George Monoux, an alderman of London, promised him 20 marks (£13 6
s
8
d
) for the successful outcome of a suit which he had in hand, and in June 1527 a detailed inventory of Cromwell’s house shows him to have been well set up with the goods of this world.
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