Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (12 page)

The other Act which was called into operation at once was that which granted to the king a 10 per cent tax on all ecclesiastical property, because that necessitated an investigation into the assets of the Church, and in January 1535 Cromwell was specially commissioned to conduct such an investigation. This was a large-scale operation and the secretary, acting in the King’s name as he was specifically empowered to do, set up a network of subordinate commissions to carry out the actual work, using the Privy Seal for that purpose.
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The bishops served on these commissions
ex officio
, but the other members were drawn mainly from the sympathetic laity, and included a great many of Cromwell’s friends, servants and associates. It was particularly important that these visitors should not connive at any kind of concealment, because the situation was complicated by leases and other arrangements which meant that some properties were worth very little to the Church, while others were more valuable that at first appeared. The commissioners worked fast and efficiently and before the end of the year produced a
Valor Ecclesiasticus
which showed the overall wealth of the Church at nearly £500,000 a year, a colossal sum which includes everything from the bishopric of Winchester, at £3,000 a year, to the smallest vicarage, worth only a few shillings. It was the largest and most comprehensive survey to be conducted since the Domesday Book in the eleventh century, and was a tribute to the bureaucratic capability of the Tudor state.
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Cromwell drove it forward, and was indefatigable in dealing with the questions which inevitably arose, and which only he possessed the grasp and knowledge to answer. This was all the more remarkable because at the same time he was conducting a second enquiry into the state of the religious houses. This is also usually attributed to the king’s need for money, and the investigations as a mere excuse to proceed to dissolution. However that was probably not the case, at least not at this early stage. There is plenty of evidence, going back to 1530, that both Cromwell and the king had a genuine interest in reforming the monastic establishment. Complaints of misconduct were encouraged, and unsatisfactory priors and abbots warned to mend their ways.
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When vacancies occurred, Cromwell was often careful to ensure that suitable incumbents were put in post; and suitability included not only a willingness to accept the Royal Supremacy, but an exemplary private life and a conscientious attitude towards the rules of their order. The piety of previous generations had left a monastic establishment which was overgrown and more than little flaccid. The case for pruning was overwhelming, as Wolsey had demonstrated, and the initial policy behind the investigation appears to have been positive. The visitors were originally briefed to report on the conduct of the monks and nuns, both moral and professional, and on the existence or otherwise of dissent within the houses, but with a view to rectifying the abuses rather than closing them down. The characters of the visitors themselves has been subject to much unsympathetic scrutiny, and Dr John London in particular has been accused of inventing or exaggerating abuses.
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In general the
Compendium Compertorum,
the commissioners’ final report, presents a depressing picture of the life of the religious houses, and although this may contain individual exaggerations, on the whole other evidence supports these conclusions. Cromwell is alleged to have considered following the lead of his old master, and closing down gradually houses which were particularly prone to abuse, but the
Compertorum
was not submitted until the summer of 1536, and by then other priorities had to be taken into account. In January 1535 Cromwell had been granted the new office of Viceregent in Spirituals to enable him to carry out these multifaceted tasks, and this empowered him in effect to exercise the Supremacy on the king’s behalf instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would have been the natural choice for such a position. Henry seems to have been determined to appoint a layman, and since it also carried the right to preside at the convocations, to emphasise the secular superiority to which the Church was now subjected.
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Cranmer is not known to have objected; he was Cromwell’s friend and the two of them shared an ecclesiastical agenda. Time was to show that this differed in various ways from the king’s, but that was not apparent at the beginning of 1535.

Meanwhile events were moving on. On 23 March 1534 Pope Clement at last pronounced a definitive sentence in favour of Catherine of Aragon. This carried a renewed threat of excommunication for Henry, but again the sentence was not fully promulgated, probably because Clement realised that neither Francis nor Charles would be willing to enforce it. England had effectively renounced papal authority by then, but it may well have been these events which prompted Henry to make his position abundantly clear by the Act of Supremacy in the autumn.
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Consequently when Clement died in September 1534 and was succeeded by Paul III, the latter’s tentative hints at renewed negotiations were not acted upon. Henry was no longer interested in reconciliation, and Cromwell, who was certainly consulted about this attitude, must have breathed a sigh of relief. One of the reasons for this recalcitrance lay in the preamble to the Act for the Succession, which had unequivocally asserted that Catherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated, and that therefore the papal dispensation for her second marriage was invalid:

The Bishop of Rome and see Apostolic, contrary to the great and inviolable grants of jurisdictions given by God immediately to Emperors, Kings, and Princes in succession to their heirs, hath presumed in times past to invest who should please them to inherit in other men’s kingdoms and dominions, which thing we your most humble subjects both spiritual and temporal do most abhor and detest.
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Such usurpation was to cease forthwith, and all the king’s subjects were to swear an oath to observe the succession laid down in the Act. This should not be taken literally. There was never any intention that ploughmen and labourers should be required to swear, but by July over 7,000 clergy and gentlemen had taken the oath, which was administered by commissioners appointed for the purpose.
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Resistance was slight but significant. Sir Thomas More was summoned from his retirement in Chelsea to swear in April, and refused to do so. He was, he professed, willing to accept the succession, but declined to set his hand to anything which implied the rejection of papal jurisdiction, as that was set out in the preamble. On 13 April John Fisher, summoned with other bishops to do his duty, likewise declined, and a few days later both of them were sent to the Tower.
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At the same time the visitors entered the religious houses of London, and as a result four Carthusians, one Brigettine and a secular priest, John Haile, were arrested on Cromwell’s orders and similarly imprisoned for refusing the oath. The Viceregent then commenced the long and frustrating task of attempting to persuade them to change their minds. In this context just about the last thing that he needed was martyrs to the Old Faith. Nevertheless that was what he got. Even before the Carthusians were arrested, in the spring of 1534, Thomas Bedyll had been sent into the Charterhouse, armed with a variety of books and ‘annotations’ in an effort to persuade them. He may have succeeded with the less obdurate, but not with the four who ended up in the Tower.
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It was obviously not in Cromwell’s interest that these men should be executed, and he kept up a steady pressure, using a variety of agents and methods to persuade them to recant, but without success. In April 1535 he reminded himself to ask the king what to do about them, and the answer was apparently to put them on trial, and on the 29th of that month they duly appeared before the court of King’s Bench at Westminster. Once the indictment had been properly found, and perhaps with the intention of intimidating them, Cranmer visited them himself, and reminded them of the awful consequences of continued obstinacy, but had no more success than lesser agents.
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In the course of their trial it emerged that Syon was a hotbed of treasonable gossip. One of the accused, Richard Reynolds, alleged that the king had kept a ‘company of maidens’ at Farnham Castle in Surrey while he was staying with the ‘old lord’ Bishop of Winchester (Foxe), while an anonymous layman attached to the house expressed the view that he had kept ‘many matrons … in the court … almost all he has violated … and now he has taken to his wife of fornication this matron Anne not only to the highest shame and undoing of himself, but also of all this realm’.
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With opinions like this being expressed it is not surprising that all the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to the extreme penalty of the law. Finally, Cromwell himself visited not only the imprisoned monks but also the house from which they had come. In the latter case he engaged in disputation with various of the monks on the subject of Peter’s pre-eminence among the Apostles, denying vigorously that the Royal Supremacy made the king a priest, but he had no better success than Bedyll had had before. The prior submitted and so did some of the monks, but the remainder were sent off to Newgate and the house was closed. The six who had been convicted were executed at Tyburn on 4 May. They had not been degraded as was customary with clerical felons, but were hanged in their habits to make a point about the nature of their treason. According to one report which reached Paris soon after the whole city was horrified ‘because they were of exemplary and holy life’, but in fact opinion in London was divided, a fair proportion of the onlookers feeling that they had got what they deserved.
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They had undoubtedly been guilty of treason as that was then defined, and so were those who had been sent to Newgate. For some unknown reason the latter were not brought to trial, but were left to rot in prison where they died of starvation and maltreatment, a fate which reflects credit on neither the king nor Cromwell.

The more exalted prisoners were not similarly neglected. Indeed in the case of Thomas More Cromwell seems to have had a great deal of sympathy with the man, if not with his opinions. They had belonged to the same humanist group as Lord Morley and Richard Pace, and had passed many congenial hours in discussing the classics before their views on the scriptures and the Royal Supremacy drove them apart. In his memoirs written during his interrogation, More describes the secretary as his ‘good master’, and ‘one that tenderly favoureth me’, not language which he would have employed about one whom he was convinced was harrying him to his death, although it is possible that More was being ironic.
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It seems that Cromwell did his level best to save More from himself, and might have been prepared to accept an equivocal submission, which was the most that More was prepared to offer. To this he was urged by Thomas Cranmer, who shared his respect for the sage of Chelsea, and it was the king himself who scotched that scheme on the harsh but logical grounds that it would encourage others in similar evasions. Even just before his trial, Cromwell was prepared to assure him that Henry would still be a good lord to him if only he would swear the oath without dissimulation. More was prepared to insist that he was the king’s good subject, but not to take the oath:

He did no one any harm, said no harm and thought no harm, but wished everyone good. If this was not enough to keep a man alive, he longed not to live … his poor body was at the king’s pleasure, and he wished that his death might do him good.
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This plea (if such it was) went unheeded and he was tried in Westminster Hall on 1 July 1535. What happened then is well known, but owed nothing to Thomas Cromwell, who had parted with More in a state of some exasperation on 3 June. The chief witness for the prosecution was Sir Richard Rich, who alleged that on visiting the Tower to collect More’s books on 12 June, he had become involved in a discussion with him on the powers of Parliament, in the course of which he had declared that Parliament did not have the authority to make the king Supreme Head of the Church, an opinion which Rich probably transmitted to Cromwell, who ensured that it took its place in the trial. More of course denied that he had said any such thing, making the valid point that since he had refrained from saying anything so incriminating in the course of his interrogations, he was unlikely to have made such an observation in the course of casual conversation.
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The court, however, chose to believe Rich, and More was condemned. Following his condemnation, and in order to clear his conscience as he put it, he proceeded to confirm the substance of Rich’s testimony by asserting that his indictment was grounded upon a statute ‘directly repugnant to the laws of God’ and invalid for that reason. This, as the Duke of Norfolk put it, confirmed his ‘malice’ in the terms of the Act, and Lord Chancellor Audley observed that if the statute was valid, which he did not doubt, then the indictment was good enough.
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More was executed on Tower Hill on the morning of 6 July, and Cromwell was, as his duty bound him, present at his death. This was a consummation which was far from what he had desired and worked for while More was alive. During his sojourn in the Tower he had indeed appeared to be so solicitous for his welfare that he had attracted a series of grateful letters from his wife, Alice, saying that she was ‘most deeply bound … for your manifold goodness and loving favour, both before this time and yet daily now also showed towards my poor husband and me’.
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In fact More’s death, and the circumstances of it, was a setback for Cromwell, although he could not afford to admit it.

In a way John Fisher’s execution had also been a setback, although there is much less evidence to demonstrate the fact. Fisher had originally been condemned for misprision, for not revealing the nun Elizabeth Barton’s prophecies, but remained in the Tower after he had refused to take the oath. Imprisonment took its toll upon his health. He was an old man, and suffered from the cold and the poor prison diet, in spite of the supplements which he received from Antonio Bonvisi. Just before Christmas 1534 he wrote to Cromwell pleading for some relief, identifying him as the only person whom he could approach in his distress.
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He had corresponded with Cromwell before, and although only the latter’s reply survives, it is clear why he felt that he could be appealed to. Cromwell’s letter, which was about the nun and her delinquencies, was crisp and theologically well informed, taking the bishop to task for misapplying texts of scripture, but it was not at all hostile, and that must have given Fisher his cue. Unfortunately we do not know what the result of his appeal may have been, although the fact that he survived to stand trial indicates that there may have been some improvement. It was not Cromwell who was after Fisher’s blood – it was the king – and the key factor was probably Pope Paul’s decision to confer the cardinalate upon him. This may have been done under the mistaken impression that the rank would offer him some kind of protection, although the sanctity of his life and the circumstances of his imprisonment would have constituted sufficient reasons. Henry was furious. A papal honour for his suspect traitor was an insult of the first order, and he is alleged to have remarked that he would send Fisher’s head to collect his hat, ‘so the twain met not’.
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The bishop was tried by a special commission of oyer and terminer on 17 June, and inevitably found guilty. Unlike More, he probably was guilty, although the crucial evidence against him could not be produced in court. According to Chapuys, Fisher had urged Charles to intervene and ‘undertake a work which must be as pleasing in the eyes of God as war upon the Turks’, which was treason even by the unmodified law of 1352.
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Cromwell was a member of the commission that condemned him, and had been involved in the interrogations which had preceded his trial, although there is no evidence about what part he played. He is alleged to have urged the bishop to confess his errors and to throw himself on the king’s mercy, but this met with no response. However, it shows a good understanding of Henry’s psychology, because the one thing which might have turned aside the royal wrath was the spectacle of this learned and ascetic prelate grovelling for mercy. As it was that wrath was fully expressed on 22 June 1535 when Fisher, who was too weak to walk, was borne to his death on Tower Hill. On the scaffold, after his gown was removed, men ‘marvelled to see [any man] bearing life to be so far consumed, for he seemed a lean carcass; the flesh clean wasted away … as one might say death in a man’s shape and using a man’s voice’.
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His body was left lying for several hours under guard, until it could be quietly interred nearby. Thomas Cromwell was left with the unenviable task of justifying both these executions (and those of the Carthusians) to the hostile courts of Europe.