Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (24 page)

That was not Cromwell’s fault, because by then he had fallen victim to the king’s unpredictable whims. As we have seen, his position had been precarious for some time, as he himself was the first to acknowledge, because he was so absolutely dependent upon the royal favour, and Henry seems to have been in two minds about his minister for several months. He had been a liability before, in 1536, but then there had been no doubt that his actions represented the king’s intentions. Now however there was doubt, over his foreign policy and the Cleves marriage, and particularly over his patronage of religious reformers.
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After much vacillation, in June 1540, Henry decided that he must go. It should be emphasised that this was the king’s decision, very much as the fall of Wolsey had been. Faction certainly existed at Henry VIII’s court, but it was always competition for influence and never for control. It also tended to be negative rather than positive in its inspiration. The faction that worked for Wolsey’s overthrow was held together only by that purpose, consisting as it did of Boleyn supporters, religious reformers and others such as the Duke of Suffolk, who had personal axes to grind. It fell apart as soon as its objective had been achieved.
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Similarly, that group which worked for the rejection of Anne Boleyn was motivated by hostility to her and to her family rather than by any
enthusiasm for Mary or the Seymours. It was the same with Thomas Cromwell, because those who worked against him were driven by a multitude of private agendas, in which jealousy played a prominent part, as well as by religious conservatism. It is often said that Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk were the leaders of the anti-Cromwell faction, but it would be more accurate to describe them as personal enemies. Nor was there a faction supporting him, any more than there had been a pro-Wolsey group in the council of 1529. In spite of his pleasant conversation, broadly ranging intellectual interests, and capacity for loyal friendship, it cannot be said that Cromwell ever succeeded in creating a party of councillors who were devoted to him, or willing to take the smallest risk on his behalf.
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The exception to this generalisation was Thomas Cranmer, but one man, however important, does not make a faction. Sir Thomas Audley, the Lord Chancellor, acted generally as though he were Cromwell’s creature, which in a sense he was, but he did nothing to support him in this crisis. Ralph Sadler and Thomas Wriothesley were the Lord Privy Seal’s servants, and he had elevated them to share the secretaryship when he resigned that office in April 1540, but each of them was too concerned with his own safety to run any risks on Cromwell’s behalf. Sadler has been described as ‘cautious enough to give his enemies not even the shadow of an accusation against him’ when Cromwell fell, which given the closeness of their relationship was quite an achievement.
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Others who had maintained good relations with him during his years of prosperity, such as Kingston and Browne, now emerged as good conservatives, and had even been involved in a plot in 1539 to replace Cromwell as Lord Privy Seal with the impeccably orthodox Cuthbert Tunstall – a plot which failed at the time because the king was not prepared to go that far. The bishops had been divided by the Act of Six Articles, but two of the small group of reformers had since resigned their sees, and Latimer was in prison.
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There was therefore no such thing as a pro-Cromwell faction in the council, and no one to share his misfortune when it came.

At the same time, in spite of the strong feelings which he aroused, there was no organised party opposing him either, because all the councillors were primarily interested in their own positions. They were concerned to read the king’s mind, and therefore men like Southampton and Russell stood behind Cromwell when he was in favour, and turned against him when he was not. Their primary allegiance was to Henry, and as he altered his mind, so did they. This was understood by all concerned, and could even be described as a principle. It is unlikely that Cromwell was disillusioned by the failure of his friends to show up when he lost favour. It is also true that different councillors had different agendas. Southampton, for instance, was ready enough to attack the Church for its arrogance, and to seek for former monastic property, but not to favour reformed ideas in liturgy or worship.
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Others, particularly members of the old nobility, such as the Earl of Oxford, resented the power of an upstart, just as they had with Wolsey. Oxford was prepared to be friendly enough when seeking the Lord Privy Seal’s favour for himself or his servants, and even wrote in 1538 thanking him for looking after his son. However he would not let that influence him when the tide turned, and both Cromwell and Henry knew this perfectly well. It is even possible that it was a desire to maintain the support of the traditional nobility, whom he had demoted in other ways, which inspired the king to turn against Cromwell at this juncture.
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The king knew that his minister was unpopular, not only with the nobles, but also with those old gentry families upon whom he relied for the control of the counties, and that made him willing to listen to his enemies. In the forefront of these stood his two long-standing rivals for the royal ear, the Duke of Norfolk and the Bishop of Winchester, both of whom he had outmanoeuvred repeatedly over the previous seven years and who now stood poised for revenge.

Apart from his loyalty to the king, the duke was mainly motivated by personal and family ambition. His niece, Anne Boleyn, had married Henry, which had brought him into prominence at court, but when the king turned against her he had obediently followed suit, and even presided at the trial which had condemned her. He had been ostensibly Henry’s leading councillor after the fall of Wolsey, an event in which he had played a leading part, but he had been adroitly elbowed aside by Thomas Cromwell, largely because he lacked the imagination and intellectual ability to come up with a solution to the king’s problems.
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At first their relations were superficially friendly, and Norfolk made use of the secretary to secure some personal favours from the king. However late in 1534 the troubles in Ireland caused a split to develop in the council, and Norfolk became highly critical of Cromwell’s methods. This had caused the latter to mount a surreptitious campaign against him, and Henry ceased to consult him on important issues. By February 1535 Norfolk had withdrawn to his estates at Kenninghall to nurse his grievances. He had effectively been driven from the council and deprived of access to the king, which was the lifeblood of all courtiers’ careers. Cromwell was in no position to prevent so senior a nobleman from paying occasional visits to the court, and Henry would not have wanted to alienate him, but he came much less often and did not venture to raise personal matters with the king, because he realised that petitions needed to be cleared with the secretary first, which he was at that time unwilling to do.
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His duchess, Elizabeth, whom he had set aside in order to live with his mistress, Bess Holland, warned Cromwell of the duke’s duplicity. He could ‘speak as fair to his enemy as to his friend,’ she wrote, although such a warning was hardly necessary to the astute secretary.
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Throughout his time at Kenninghall Norfolk kept up his appearance of friendship for the man whom, he was reasonably certain, had engineered his exile, reporting his doings in the country and using him as a means of access to the king. After the fall of Anne Boleyn, in spite of doing his duty as Lord Steward, as the Boleyn party collapsed he imagined that he felt the chill wind of royal disfavour. This was aggravated soon after by the death of his son-in-law, the Duke of
Richmond, whom he caused to be quietly interred at Thetford Priory. Richmond was Henry’s only illegitimate son, and the king apparently expected him to be buried with royal honours. On 5 August 1536 the duke wrote to his friend Thomas Cromwell, saying that he had heard from several sources

that the king’s highness should be in great displeasure with me because my lord of
Richmond was not carried honourably … A great bruit doth run that I should be in the Tower of
London; when I shall deserve to be there Tottenham shall turn French…
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Norfolk naturally wanted to come to court and clear his name, but Cromwell did not rise to the bait, and no invitation came. He could be there in a few days, he went on, and begged to be told the truth about these rumours which were being spread about him. He would not, in any case, go to court until he had spoken with the secretary. However, he was not given the chance, and on 10 August he was writing again, still from Kenninghall, acknowledging receipt of
a letter (now lost) which had obviously set his mind at rest on the subject of
malicious rumours, although it contained no suggestion that he should visit the capital. This time the subject of his concern was more practical. Monastic lands were being distributed and ‘every other nobleman hath already his portion’. Would Cromwell please look after his interests, since he was unable to do so himself?
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This was obviously a task well within the secretary’s power, and worth undertaking to preserve the friendship even of so slippery a customer as the Duke of
Norfolk, because shortly after, Norfolk, his anxieties apparently forgotten, was writing a letter of
fulsome gratitude. Thanks to the king ‘for his most kind handling of
me’, and a million thanks to Cromwell for his pains ‘taken in all my affairs’. He had got what he wanted, and was reassured of the king’s favour, which was even more important.
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How large a part the secretary had actually played in this rehabilitation is unclear. Chapuys was under the impression that Cromwell had poisoned the king’s mind against the duke, but that is not consistent with what actually happened, and the ambassador was in any case far too willing to listen to gossip, which was often all he had to go on.

In early October 1536 the king sent for Norfolk, not because he wanted his company but because he had a mission for him. The Lincolnshire rebellion had broken out, and the duke was England’s foremost military commander. Consequently he was summoned to London, had an amicable interview with the king, and was despatched back to Norfolk to raise troops against the rebels.
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For the next few weeks military affairs kept him far from the court, and an understanding of
what happened there depends upon which source one chooses to read. According to Chapuys, animosity lingered, with Cromwell working to keep Norfolk in the North, and the latter using his friends and agents in an attempt to exploit the rebels’ grievances to discredit the secretary with the king. However, the correspondence which passed directly between them tells a different story, with Cromwell working hard to persuade the duke that he was his chief link with the life of the court, and Norfolk begging him for favours particularly in respect of his daughter the Duchess of Richmond.
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He made Cromwell an executor of his will, and told him stories about the punishments which he had inflicted on those Northern men who had spoken hostile words against the secretary – of
whom there were plenty! The early part of 1537 saw the same pattern continued. In March the duke applied for permission to come south, which was refused by the king on the ground that his mission in the North was not completed. However, the letter was drafted by Cromwell, and his hand in keeping Norfolk away from the court is clear enough.
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The duke kept up his professions of friendship, but in July he ventured to disagree with his mentor’s advice to stay where he was, because he had reason to suppose that certain ‘back friends’, as he put it, were damaging him with the king. In early August he was prevented from seeing Henry when the latter went north to Ampthill, and that did produce an expression of frustration, although not aimed directly at Cromwell, who was probably responsible. It was only in the latter part of the year, when his work in the North was done, and even the secretary could no longer think of plausible reason to keep him away, that Norfolk returned to the court and had an interview with the king.
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What transpired between them we do not know, but the duke soon returned to Kenninghall and resumed his sequence of friendly letters to Cromwell. By March 1538 he was asking his advice and reassurance concerning his access to the king, and asking anxiously about the latter’s attitude towards himself.
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Neither his absence nor his presence had altered the situation in the slightest. Cromwell was as firmly in control after the Pilgrimage as he had been before, and it became a wise man to keep on the right side of him. This was especially the case since there were unfocussed rumours of popish sympathies in circulation, which can probably be traced to the Lord Privy Seal, and Norfolk went out of his way to dissociate himself from any such inclinations. So in February 1539, when the duke undertook a three-week diplomatic mission to France, everything was ostensibly sweetness and light between them. However, that did not alter Norfolk’s resentment at having to go cap in hand to a ‘foul churl’ like Cromwell for favours which he considered to be his right as rewards for his nobility and his service. When he returned to the council in March 1539, that resentment was still beneath the surface, but it is reasonable to suspect that the Lord Privy Seal recognised its presence, and assessed his professions of friendship for what they were worth.
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His relations with his other principal opponent were less complicated by duplicity. Stephen Gardiner had abandoned Wolsey’s service with more haste than dignity after the latter’s fall from grace in the autumn of 1529, and had seemed well on the way to power before Cromwell’s arrival on the scene. However he had been out of the country, on embassy in France, early in 1532, when Cromwell was gaining the king’s ear, and on his return had made the disastrous mistake of replying on behalf of convocation to the Supplication against the Ordinaries. This earned him a period of serious disfavour, in the course of which he lost his office as king’s secretary to Thomas Cromwell, who had been acting on his behalf during his absence from court. By this time the two men were enemies, both in principle and in practice, and that hostility came to the surface during the first parliamentary session of 1534, an outburst which earned the bishop a period of rustication to his diocese.
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It was during this period that Gardiner wrote his only known conciliatory letter to the man in power. On 4 July 1534 he expressed his thanks for the ‘friendly handling’ of his affairs during his exile, and referred to Cromwell as his ‘especial friend’. For the rest his communications with the secretary were on formal matters of business. For his part, Cromwell was too wise to exult in his victory, or to imagine that a man of such evident ability would be permanently out of favour. He even advised him about the writing of
De Vera Obedientia
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which brought about his partial restoration. However, he made sure that Gardiner’s employment was far from the court, and must have been at least partly responsible for his posting to the court of France where he remained from September 1535 to July 1538.
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Away from the council, the bishop was unable to make his views known, or to exercise any influence on the conduct of policy. The letters which passed between them were cool and correct, Cromwell writing to Gardiner in December 1535, congratulating him from the king on the quality of his performance. There was only one flurry which occurred in 1536. The king had granted to Sir Francis Bryan an annuity forfeited by Henry Norris’s attainder, which Gardiner thought should have gone to him. He suspected Cromwell’s hand in the allocation and wrote a letter of protest to the minister, which provoked a rebuke worthy of quotation: