Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (32 page)

Needless to say, Elton’s thesis came under immediate attack. Medievalists like Gerald Harriss stressed the continuities which ran through the period, and would not admit that any
very revolutionary changes had taken place in the 1530s, while Tudor specialists of a different persuasion, such as Penry Williams, tended to place the responsibility for the changes on Henry himself. Cromwell was undeniably a good minister, even a great one, but they denied him the constitutional vision which Elton had proposed.
³⁶
The latter’s thesis was nevertheless a compelling one, and excellently presented, especially when set in context, as the author himself did in his
England under the Tudors
,
first published in 1955. This traced the whole history of the dynasty, and pointed out that Henry had never shown any
originality of thought on political issues either before or after Cromwell’s time, and that the developments which took place later in the sixteenth century can be traced largely to those who had been trained by Cromwell, or consciously modelled themselves on him. The century as a whole saw the transformation of a medieval monarchy into a modern sovereign state, and the epicentre of that revolution was the 1530s. The polemical balance on the whole lay with Elton, and in 1973 he extended his interpretation in the published version of his Wiles lectures, given at the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1972. In this work, called
Reform and Renewal
,
he proposed a rather different Thomas Cromwell; not only an intellectual, persuaded by the
Defensor Pacis
of Marsilius of Padua, but a man who added a vision of the commonweal to his concept of the state.
³⁷
Again proceeding largely by statute, he sought to revitalise the economy by encouraging the trade in unfinished cloth, and created the first poor law worthy of the name. This not only distinguished the impotent poor from the ‘sturdy vagabonds’, which earlier legislation had been designed to punish, but provided a system of local relief for them. This was set up on a parish basis, and involved the appointment of collectors and distributors of the relief payments, operating under the supervision of those favourite workhorses of Tudor government, the Justices of the Peace. This Act of 1536 created the model for all subsequent poor law legislation down to the seventeenth century, and Elton argued that it reflected Cromwell’s sensitivity and compassion as well as a willingness for the state to assume a degree of responsibility for the well-being of all its subjects.
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Law enforcement was no longer his primary concern.

This thesis proved equally controversial. David Starkey pointed out that, far from creating a kind of impersonal bureaucracy, Cromwell had actually created a highly personal ascendancy, the main difference from the medieval system being that it was not centred on the court. Nevertheless, he argued, the court, and particularly the Privy Chamber, not only retained but actually increased its importance during these years, as the king sought agents and means of communication that did not depend upon his ubiquitous chief minister.
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He was inclined to agree with Penry Williams and with Pollard that Henry had himself been responsible for the Royal Supremacy, although he did not deny that Cromwell had shown him the best way to realise his ambitions. Altogether Starkey regarded the whole Elton thesis of the visionary Cromwell with scepticism, pointing out that many of his actions can be explained just as plausibly by the minister’s need to respond to immediate and urgent situations which had developed, as to any vision, whether political or social. John Guy showed a similar scepticism, although with a narrower focus, when he challenged Elton’s view that the development of the Privy Council, which the latter had attributed to the Lord Privy Seal and dated to 1536–38, was actually the result of his fall and did not occur before 1540.
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Was it likely, he asked, that a man who had spent his public career building up a highly personalised administration, would have surrendered a large part of his control to an institution over which not he, but the king had ultimate authority? Guy and Starkey between them created another orthodoxy, which did not deny the revolutionary nature of the changes which had taken place during the 1530s, but were inclined to emphasise contingency in the actions which were taken, thus diminishing Cromwell’s role from that of a visionary statesman to that of an inspired opportunist. At the same time, they did not really address that other aspect of the Elton portrait, the generous and compassionate Cromwell, who could always be appealed to by the unfortunate with a reasonable chance of success. In place of the harsh and
avaricious minister of Merriman’s biography, Elton had portrayed a man with a highly developed sense of justice, careful to investigate every case which was brought before him, and scrupulous in the administration of the law.
⁴¹
He was also a man of faith, or at least of the Bible, which he regarded as an infallible guide to life and morality. So devoted was he to the promulgation of the scriptures that he risked falling out with his master over them, and although not a heretic in any obvious sense of that word was nevertheless a Protestant in certain aspects of his beliefs.
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There is no room here for the cynical scepticism of Merriman, whose Cromwell treated religion merely as a means of his own personal advancement. He was a man who took his faith seriously. He was also a man of charm and humour, some of whose more lapidary utterances can be attributed to the quality of his hospitality, which not even his worst enemies denied.

Faced with this criticism, Elton reiterated his interpretation, only slightly modified, in
Reform and Reformation
in 1977. He might, he admitted, have been overly dismissive of the court. The Privy Chamber retained an independent role, and although Cromwell succeeded in placing some of his own men in it, they did not dominate. It was predominantly the king’s own context, and he alone appointed its members. He also conceded that the financial reorganisation could be interpreted as a personal bid by Cromwell to control the royal money, because Augmentations did not endure as a separate institution. It was absorbed into a reformed Exchequer in 1554.
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On the centralisation and bureaucratisation of government, however, he retained his position, pointing out that although the secretaryship lost some of its power when Cromwell surrendered it, it did not return to its earlier household status. It remained central to the administration of the state, to be picked up and augmented further by Sir William Cecil. Above all, he held his ground over the relative importance of Parliament, re-emphasising that the ecclesiastical supremacy, although personal to the king, made it a sovereign legislative body. This was new, and in accordance with Cromwell’s vision of the state. These views he also defended in a series of trenchant papers, most notably ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’, which appeared originally in 1956 and was reprinted in his
Studies in Tudor and Stuart Government and Politics
in 1974.
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Others meanwhile had entered the fray on his side. In
Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation
(1959), Geoffrey Dickens went further in the direction which Elton had indicated, arguing that the secretary was indeed a covert Protestant, and the success of the reformation after Henry’s death owed a great deal to the foundations which he had been able to lay. Henry had accepted his concept of a ‘middle way’ for the English Church, but differed from him in where to draw the line, a difference which was exploited by his enemies in order to destroy him in 1540. It was, however, above all in his patronage of the English Bible that Cromwell had laid the foundations for ultimate Protestant success, creating a taste for Bible reading which remained popular throughout the changes which took place in 1547–58. It was he who had facilitated the shift in reform from a Lollard base to a Lutheran one, and thus laid the doctrinal foundations which were to be developed after 1547.
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He had not been a sacramentary, but he had been close to being a Lutheran; far too close for Henry’s comfort as he never relaxed his hostility to the German reformer. In 1978 B. W. Beckingsale summed up the debate as it had developed by that time, expressing a cautious support for Elton’s interpretation. His
Thomas Cromwell, Tudor Minister
, based largely on published works, was judicious but added little that was original. He was inclined to believe that his subject had indeed been the brains behind the Henrician Reformation, both in its political and its religious aspects, although admitting that the evidence was not altogether clear, being based mainly on Cromwell’s own archive, which had been confiscated at the time of his fall. In 1990 Glyn Redworth, in his study of Stephen Gardiner, denied that Gardiner had been a party to any conspiracy against the minister at the time of his fall, thus removing a minor plank from Elton’s platform and placing the responsibility firmly and only on the king.
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This had the effect of reviving the debate of King or Minister, but only in respect of the end of Cromwell’s career.

In 1991, just three years before his death, Geoffrey Elton expressed his final thoughts on the man who had dominated so much of his academic career:

These issues are here important because they must be fundamental to any assessment of Thomas Cromwell’s role and achievement. He exercised at least a great measure of authority for not more than eight years; if ever he was influential it was between 1532 and 1540. Now it is plain that that period coincided with the main unfolding of dramatic change, even if much of that change had signalled its coming before 1532 and continued to work itself out after 1540. On these grounds I long ago concluded that the peculiar character of the years in question must be ascribed to the particular work of the man who operated in high office at that time and no other, while the reign of Henry VIII before Cromwell’s arrival and after his departure bore noticeably different features.
⁴⁷

Much evidence had emerged since he originally wrote, but he remained convinced that the 1530s were Cromwell’s decade. That did not necessarily justify the extreme respect which he had once bestowed upon him as the creative statesman who was single-handedly responsible for the transformation. The only view which he continued to regard as wholly mistaken was that nothing of great significance happened in the 1530s at all.

The creation of a national church under a layman as Supreme Head, the insertion into the system of a sovereign law-making Parliament, the consolidation of diverse members of the commonwealth into a unitary state, and indeed the recasting of the central administration which replaced government by the king by government under the king – all these, with their tenuous prehistory and their shaky aftermaths characterise the age of Thomas Cromwell and make it an age of change sufficient to permit thoughts of revolution.
⁴⁸

So Elton stood by his original thesis, although without the thumping affirmatives which had originally characterised it. The emerging evidence had undermined certain aspects of his proposition, but had confirmed others. Perhaps Cromwell had not been wholly responsible for the emergence of the Privy Council, and perhaps his regime had been highly personal. He had, on the other hand, reformed the household, streamlining it and making it more effective for the king’s service, and nothing had touched his idea that Cromwell’s initiatives had transformed the role of Parliament in the government of a centralised state. Henry’s principal minister thus remains supreme. A man ruthless in pursuit of his chosen objectives, but extremely careful of the niceties of the law, and a humane man
even to those who stood in his way, like Thomas More.
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A
bon viveur
, and a man of humour and wit, who impressed his contemporaries with the quality and quantity of his hospitality. Above all, a man of faith, who may not have been always certain where his doctrinal sympathies lay but who honestly professed himself to be a Christian and a follower of scriptural precepts.

The biographies which have emerged since Elton wrote, Robert Hutchinson’s in 2007, John Schofield’s in 2008 and J. P. Coby’s in 2012, although carefully researched, have not significantly modified his last considered opinion. Hutchinson is relatively unsympathetic to his subject, following Merriman in portraying him as a harsh man and incurably avaricious, but the others are more judicious, accepting Elton’s revised judgement of the man and of his achievements.
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A word should also be said about the fictitious Cromwell portrayed in Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning novels,
Wolf Hall
and
Bring up the Bodies
. These are naturally concerned with him as a man rather than as a public figure, portraying his relationships with his son, his servants and his friends in a lively and realistic fashion. They are careful to respect the known facts about his career, and steer carefully between the conflicting theories about his role, operating (as it were) in the interstices of the established evidence. Together they constitute a fictional tour de force, but do not amount to a biography. The Cromwell they present is humane, intelligent and devout, closer to the man portrayed by Elton than to Merriman’s austere and corrupt figure, but they are essentially concerned with his private life, about which the authentic record is usually and infuriatingly silent.

1. Henry VIII by Holbein.