Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (8 page)

On 16 May 1532 the Submission of the Clergy, which embodied complete surrender on the question of jurisdictional independence, was offered to the king at Westminster. An interesting group of councillors was present on that occasion: George, Lord Abergavenny; John, Lord Hussey; John, Lord Mordaunt; Sir William Fitzwilliam; and Thomas Cromwell. None of these was a senior councillor, and Cromwell’s closeness to the king can be deduced rather than proved. He had only just become an office holder, having been appointed Master of the King’s Jewels on 14 April, but the others were all household officers, and with the exception of Hussey were to be associated with Cromwell over the next few years.
³⁵
Archbishop Warham had been opposed to the surrender, but had lacked the resolution to withstand it. He was a long-standing royal servant and had no wish to be seen as resisting the king’s wishes on so important a matter. What he might have done about implementing the new powers which he had been given by implication we do not know, because he died on 22 August, and that left the way open for Henry to proceed to the next stage of his plan. Cromwell could not have anticipated Warham’s death, but it came very opportunely for the campaign which he had been discreetly waging for the last two years, to persuade the king to act unilaterally.
³⁶
The Church as an institution would no longer oppose him, and now he had the opportunity to appoint a compliant archbishop. At the same time, and with the same ultimate objective in view, Henry pursued his plan for a face-to-face meeting with Francis I. Whatever course of action he followed in order to rid himself of Catherine, it was bound to be opposed by the Emperor, and Francis, who was constantly at odds with Charles, even when not actually at war with him, was naturally looked on as an ally. The King of France appreciated this point perfectly, and wished to take advantage of it to seal his friendship with Henry, whose position athwart the Emperor’s lines of communication between Spain and the Low Countries was potentially of great value to him. After considerable negotiation a meeting was therefore arranged to take place at Calais in October 1532.
³⁷
Anne Boleyn was to accompany her lover, and in order to give her a suitable dignity for the occasion, he created her Marquis of Pembroke on 1 September. Whether he had any other plans for her at this stage is not clear. There was speculation that they might marry in Calais, and they may in fact have done so, but if so, then it was kept very secret.
³⁸
Francis proved affable, but his queen refused to receive her on the grounds of her ambiguous status, which suggests that even the most private of assurances that she was actually married to Henry was not forthcoming. Nevertheless the king seems to have convinced her, and himself, that a way out of his matrimonial difficulties had now been found. Thomas Cromwell, who was by this time a member of the inner ring of the council, accompanied him to Calais and persuaded him to proceed from words to actions. At some point in late November or early December the couple slept together for the first time. Their decision to do so was no doubt aided by the fact that they were weatherbound in Calais, but it still represented a decisive change in their relationship, thanks to the opportune death of Warham, and Cromwell (if he knew about it) was no doubt suitably gratified.
³⁹

It had taken time to induce Henry to move from the brave words of 1530 to the resolute action of November 1532, and this change has been attributed to the influence of Thomas Cromwell. It was probably at the end of 1531 that Cromwell had advanced from being a Councillor at Large to membership of the inner ring, and the Supplication against the Ordinaries was his first major service to the Crown. There is no doubt that he was responsible for converting the Commons draft of 1529 into the supplication as that was presented to the king, or that it was a cautious but deliberate step on the road that he had mapped out. How completely Henry understood this at that time we do not know, but it is never safe to underestimate the king’s intelligence, and it is quite possible that he had grasped the fact that he was heading for a breach with the papacy. His mindset, however, was entirely traditional, and his arguments with the Curia had so far been conducted in terms of precedent and history, so it is likely to have been no easy task to persuade him to so radical a course.
⁴⁰
Anne had been urging unilateral action since at least 1529, so that when the king eventually came round to the same point of view, her consent was natural. Should she become pregnant, Henry would now have no option but to marry her and declare (by whatever means) his existing union to be null and void. In view of Clement’s attitude, a formal breach with Rome would then become inevitable. In late January or early February her condition was established, and the fuse which led to the Act in Restraint of Appeals was lit. An unreliable tradition maintains that they were married on 25 January, but that may well have been the date upon which her pregnancy was discovered.
⁴¹
Meanwhile it was essential that the jurisdictional structure necessary for such a sequence of events should be completed by the appointment of an acquiescent archbishop. Henry had already renounced any claim to exercise spiritual jurisdiction in his own person, so the settlement of his marriage would be a matter for the archbishop’s court, and he had to be sure that the archbishop would be willing to do his bidding. His choice fell on Thomas Cranmer, the Archdeacon of Taunton; not the most obvious choice, but one who had the essential qualification. Cranmer was wholeheartedly and honestly the king’s man over his ‘divorce’ issue. He had been a member of that group which had produced the
Collectanea satis copiosa
in 1530, and the idea of consulting the European universities had been his.
⁴²
He had also written a tract, now lost, on the divorce issue, and had lodged with the Earl of Wiltshire (Anne Boleyn’s father) while he wrote it. In the autumn of 1532 he had been sent off on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor, to whom he was introduced as the king’s ‘new theologian’, and it was during that mission that he was recalled to be the next archbishop. Cranmer was appalled by the summons. Not only did he have no episcopal experience, but he had recently married, his bride being the niece of the Lutheran divine Andreas Osiander. Marriage was forbidden to priests, let alone to an archbishop, and the appointment would mean at least many years of secrecy.
⁴³
It is to be hoped that he consulted Margaret, because the sacrifice would be mainly hers, but there could really be no hope of avoiding it and remaining the king’s good subject. So in mid-January he returned to take up the unwelcome office, and Henry applied to Rome for his pallium. In spite of his marriage, he was not a Lutheran, and his doctrinal and ecclesiastical positions were very close to those of the king. In short he was an ideal man for the job, and returned to a situation in which his first task would be to declare the king’s marriage to Catherine to be null and void, and to confirm the nuptial which had already taken place between Henry and Anne. In spite of being aware of Cranmer’s antecedents, Clement made no difficulties about granting the pallium, and he was consecrated on 30 March 1533.
⁴⁴
It was therefore as a papally confirmed archbishop that he prepared to ignore the Pope’s prohibition and to pronounce on Henry’s first marriage. We do not know what Cromwell’s reaction to this appointment may have been, but he certainly knew Cranmer and knew the way that he was thinking. It is just possible that he may have suggested him to the king, because he understood the importance of the office, and indeed had set up the task which Cranmer inherited. It is hard to believe that he was not delighted.

While Thomas Cranmer awaited his consecration, Parliament had taken the essential step to make his decision final in English law; it enacted the Restraint of Appeals. This measure, which was introduced into the Commons on 14 March, was based upon the position already conceded that the king was the fountainhead of all jurisdiction, spiritual as well as temporal. However it went further and prohibited all appeals to the papacy, on the ground that the English Church was sufficient to fulfil the offices of the spirituality ‘without the intermeddling of any exterior person or persons’. Spiritual jurisdiction descended from the king or from his Imperial crown, God having given to him authority to render justice in all manner of causes arising within the realm.
⁴⁵
The king was no ‘exterior person’ as far as the Church of England was concerned; he was its Supreme Head, the implication being that all Christian princes should exercise similar control. The draft of this Act was amended a number of times, both by Cromwell and the king, with the intention of making it as little contentious as possible, because the government really needed a swift and sure resolution of the king’s matrimonial problems. Apart from the thumping theoretical assertion in the preamble about the realm of England being an empire, Cromwell made sure that the Act was strictly practical, concentrating on the costs and delays of the present system. The complaints in the Act are strictly confined to the political interference of Rome within the realm, and the remedies proposed are similarly political.
⁴⁶
The implication is that this new law is only an extension and revision of the statutes already in place, and that an Act of Parliament could modify the canon law and provide protection against spiritual censures. The Act develops the Royal Supremacy, and places the king at the head of the spiritual jurisdiction. It also, however, indicates that the law necessary to make that jurisdiction effective is a matter for Parliament, which is thus built into the Supremacy in a most fundamental way. All use of the papal authority becomes a usurpation, and the habits of many generations are thus dismissed as fraudulent. On account, however, of the way in which these measures were wrapped up in talk of precedent and ‘ancient chronicles’, the Bill appeared less revolutionary than it really was, and it rapidly passed both houses, receiving the royal assent on 7 April.
⁴⁷
Thanks to Cromwell’s skilful manipulation of the text, Henry now had his law in place, and in the following month Cranmer’s court at Dunstable pronounced his marriage to Catherine null and void, and his marriage to Anne good, in open defiance of the papal prohibition, which was now irrelevant.

By this time there is no doubt, not only that Cromwell was a senior councillor and a member of the inner ring, but that it was he who was guiding Henry’s most sensitive policies. His fingerprints are all over the Annates Act, and the plans for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, which took place on 1 June. The ceremonial was not his responsibility, but he did succeed in persuading most of the senior nobility to attend a function which they regarded with distaste. The Duke of Suffolk, for example, functioned as High Constable for the day, in spite of being well known for his opposition to the marriage.
⁴⁸
His duchess, Mary, the king’s sister, did not attend, but she was laying sick at Bradgate and died shortly after. Even Cromwell, however, could not conjure a display of enthusiasm out of the citizens of London, and in spite of Anne’s studied affability, caps remained on heads and few voices cried out ‘God save her’. The king pretended not to notice, but the message would not have been lost on Cromwell, who knew that it would fall to him to implement what was clearly an unpopular policy. The next stage of this was to persuade Catherine to accept her demotion to Princess Dowager of Wales, which the logic of her divorce required. A few days later she was visited at Ampthill by a delegation of councillors, armed with cogent arguments. Cromwell was not among them, but he had drawn up the articles, and it was to him that the browbeaten delegation reported on their return. He cannot have expected any other outcome, and is alleged to have commented wryly that God had done her a disservice in not making her a man, because her courage surpassed that of all the heroes of history and legend.
⁴⁹
Henry, however, was neither impressed nor amused. He had Catherine moved to Buckden in Cambridgeshire, and reduced her household as a penalty for her intransigence. Shortly after, on 11 July, Pope Clement finally got around to condemning Henry for his abandonment of Catherine and his relationship with Anne, giving him until September to return to his lawful wife.
⁵⁰
The king, however, had burned his boats, and treated the papal sentence with contempt, no doubt to Cromwell’s huge relief because this demonstrated, even more than his marriage had done, Henry’s commitment to the policy which they had thrashed out between them. There could now be no turning back, and the future rested on the child which Anne was carrying. However on 7 September she was delivered of a daughter and there was no option but to try again. In spite of respectful congratulations, Cromwell must have cursed his luck, because it would now be at least another year before dynastic security, which had been his objective from the beginning, could be assured.

Meanwhile, he was not spending the whole of his energies on the high politics of the realm. His surviving correspondence shows him to have been active in a multitude of ways. In October 1531 for example he drafted a number of letters concerning various aspects of the king’s business, and in 1532, when Gardiner, the king’s secretary, was absent on a diplomatic mission to France, Cromwell seems to have stood in as assistant secretary.
⁵¹
In January he wrote to the Bishop of Winchester, saying that the king was missing him, and was so pestered with business that he did not know which way to turn. This letter was presumably intended to reassure Gardiner, whose absence from the court was causing him anxieties, and may indicate that Cromwell had been responsible for suggesting him for this mission, since both his going and his coming home were at Henry’s discretion.
⁵²
Cromwell also seems to have acquired a reputation as a general ‘Mr Fixit’ about the court. In January 1531 a priest wrote to him, asking for his help over a matter of debt – ‘except only for the help of your mastership, I am utterly undone’ – and in February one Reginald Lytylpace wrote from Norwich, ‘I hear that you are in the king’s service, and in high favour’, which suggests that the said Reginald was a little behind the times. In April Henry Darrell solicited his ‘continued favour’ to his son (who had a place at court with the clerk controller), John Gostwyck (who was not without other contacts at court) besought him to continue his good work in ‘the Welsh matter’, and the Corporation of Salisbury asked for a commission of Gaol Delivery.
⁵³
Even the nobility expressed their gratitude to this upstart politician. In July 1531 the Earl of Huntingdon solicited his favour for a servant of his, expressing appreciation for past kindnesses, and in August the Earl of Northumberland thanked him for manifold favours in the process of soliciting his intervention with the king to redress a legal decision which had gone against him.
⁵⁴
We do not know the outcome of either of these letters, but probably their lordships were satisfied with the service that they received.