Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (15 page)

The visitors soon discovered the salacious material they were earnestly seeking. No doubt a large degree of embellishment also went on: ‘Ask and it shall be given: seek and you shall find.’ In the next century, Thomas Fuller was contemptuous about the visitors’ doubtful characters: ‘They were men who well understood the message they went on and would not come back without a satisfactory answer to him that sent them, knowing themselves were likely to be no losers thereby.’
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Cromwell must have been thoroughly entertained by their spicy, sensational reports when they arrived in his normally dry-as-dust administrative postbag.

At the Benedictine abbey at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, Abbot Thomas Corton had nine accusations levelled against him, including that he kept his mistresses ‘in the cellars, especially one named Joan Postell or Bakers’ and ‘for wasting the goods of the monastery on his concubines and natural children and giving the former great gifts on their marriages’. Corton was also alleged to have sired a number of bastards including a son ‘called Harry whom he begat on Alice Roberts to the great slander of our religion’ at Thomas Parker’s house in Cerne. His sexual appetites were plainly unrelenting and insatiable: ‘He openly solicits honest
women in the town and elsewhere to have his will of them.’ At least he was gentleman enough to feed them, as it was reported: ‘His concubines sit at table with him.’ The forbidden, lusty needs of his fellow monks did not go forgotten either: ‘He allows women to stay with the brethren from noon to evensong,’ but the feminine attractions did not distract them from ‘playing at dice and cards all night’.
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When one of the monks remonstrated about all this wicked sinfulness around him, he was speedily exiled to a sister house in Monmouth, where he was ‘very ill handled’.

Layton was scathing about the human frailties of Richard Jenyn, prior of the inappropriately named Augustinian house at Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire, where

The holy father has but six children and but one daughter married, yet of the goodness of the monastery, [is] shortly to marry [off] the rest.

His sons be tall men waiting upon him and he thanks God [he] never meddled with married women but [always] with maidens, the fairest [that] could be gotten and always married them [off] right well.

The Pope, considering his fragility, gave him licence to keep a whore and [he] has good writing … to discharge his conscience.
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At the rich Cluniac priory of St Pancras outside Lewes in East Sussex, Layton claimed he found not only rampant homosexuality amongst some of the inmates, but also a treasonous sermon preached by the sub-prior, who mockingly referred to ‘the authority of God the Father Almighty, the authority of the king and the authority of Master Thomas Cromwell’. Layton reported: ‘I have called [the prior] heinous traitor with the worst words I could deliver, he all the time kneeling upon his knees making intercession to me not to utter to you the principal for his undoing.’
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Layton visited the Premonstratensian abbey at Langdon in Kent, 3 miles (4.83 km) from Canterbury, going alone to the lodgings of the abbot, William Sayer. He hammered on his door for a ‘good space’, but neither ‘sound nor sign of life appeared, saving the abbot’s little dog that within his door fast locked, bayed and barked’. This was all too much for the impatient commissioner: ‘I found a short pole-axe standing behind
the door and with it dashed the abbot’s door in pieces [and went] about the house with the pole-axe, for the abbot is a dangerous, desperate knave. Finally the abbot’s whore, alias his gentlewoman, bestirred her stumps.’

She took to her heels and fled the abbey, but ‘the tender damsel’ was grabbed by Layton’s companion, John Bartelot (who was one of Cromwell’s servants) and was incarcerated in the cage at Dover for eight days. Her clothes were triumphantly found in the abbot’s coffer. Layton reported to his master in London: ‘I brought holy father abbot to Canterbury and there in Christchurch [Priory] I will leave him in prison.’
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Layton was consumed with righteous indignation. The abbot

passes all that ever I knew in profound bawdy: the drunkest knave living. All his canons [are] as he is, not one spark of virtue amongst them: arrant bawdy knaves every one. The abbot caused his chaplain to take a whore; brought her up into his own chamber, took one of the featherbeds off his own bed and made his chaplain’s bed in the inner chamber and there caused him to go to bed with his whore …

To rehearse you the whole story [would take] too long and [be] abominable to hear. The house is in utter decay and will shortly fall down.
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At the Gilbertine house of nuns and canons at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the diligent Layton, who clearly enjoyed his work, was barred entry by the defiant nuns. Two, however, he discovered were pregnant, one by the sub-prior, the other by a serving man. ‘The two prioresses would not confess this, neither the parties nor none of the nuns but one old beldame
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… They were bound by their religion never to confess the secret faults done amongst them, but only to their own visitor.’

He went on to the Augustinian canonesses at Harrold, also in Bedfordshire, where there were ‘four or five nuns with the prioress, [and] one of them had two fair children’.
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Layton moved north to the College and Hospital of St Mary Newark in Leicester, which held £300 in their treasure house. ‘The abbot is an honest man and does very well but he has here the most obstinate and factious canons that ever I knew. This morning I will object against
diverse of them [for] sodomy and adultery and thus descend to particulars which I have learned of others.’
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Thomas Legh, meanwhile, was in Cambridgeshire, and had visited a Benedictine nunnery at Swaffham Bulbeck, where the prioress, Joan Spylman, had given the local vicarage, worth £30 a year, to a friar ‘whom they say she loves well’. Legh told Cromwell: ‘To make you laugh, we send you a letter supposed to be sent to her by the friar in the name of a woman, although anyone may perceive it comes from a lover.’
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The visitations were clearly open to any amount of abuse and extortion. John Bartelot, Cromwell’s nimble servant who caught the abbot’s mistress at Langdon, found Edmund Streatham, the prior of the Crossed Friars in London, ‘in bed with his whore, both naked, about eleven of the clock in the forenoon upon a Friday’ in Lent. The prior fell down on his knees and begged Bartelot and his five companions not to report him and ‘freely’ gave them £30 as the price of their silence, of which Bartelot received £7. The prior promised more money ‘by a certain day’ but did not pay, and Bartelot cheekily had him arrested for non-payment. The abbot then reported him to Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Audley, saying that Bartelot had ‘committed a heinous robbery’ and was ‘worthy to be hanged’ and seeking repayment of his £30. Plucky prior – he knew the best way to deal with blackmailers. Bartelot begged Cromwell to intercede on his behalf, for he had spoken the whole truth.
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There is little doubt that the English and Welsh monasteries needed some measure of reform, as there was clearly corruption and immorality within some of the houses. More significantly, many were now in a state of dilapidation. Endowing them had gone out of fashion: no new monasteries were established in the three decades before Henry VIII’s accession in 1509 and the smart money instead went into seats of learning or almshouses. But Cromwell’s visitors swiftly gathered sometimes very dubious findings – from only a third of the eight-hundred-odd religious houses – which were to form the bedrock on which he would build his legislation for their dissolution.

There were other pressing decisions to be made about several houses that had become annoying thorns in Cromwell’s side. It seemed highly important to him that the inmates of the Charterhouse in London and
the Bridgettine house at Syon in Middlesex should fully conform to the supremacy because of their popularly perceived eminence as sanctuaries of piety and honour in an increasingly venal world.

The Charterhouse was a particular target: John Houghton, the prior, had been executed on 4 May 1535; three others died on 19 June, all for refusing to acknowledge the King’s authority over the Church.
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Sebastian Newdigate, one of the second group, had been a page at court and a gentleman of the privy chamber but had quit royal service when the issue of divorce had first been raised.

It was critical to win over the Carthusians’ hearts and minds, as foreign reaction to the execution of their brethren had been especially violent.
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At the end of April 1535, Cromwell was told by his servant John Whalley that the monks were ‘exceedingly superstitious, ceremonious and pharisaical and wonderfully addicted to their old mumpsimus’.
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He urged that a succession of approved preachers be sent into the Charterhouse to convert them ‘and if this does not answer, call them before the whole nobility, temporal and spiritual, and sentence them according to law’.
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One of the monks, John Darley, had been at the bedside of a ‘very old man … of our religion’ called Father Raby when he lay dying the previous year. Darley had asked him: ‘Good Father Raby, if the dead may come to the quick, I beseech you to come to me.’ The dead monk duly appeared to him at five o’clock on the afternoon of 24 June at the entrance to his cell, and asked him: ‘Why do you not follow our father [Prior Houghton], for he is a martyr in Heaven next to angels.’ The following Saturday the ghost reappeared, now ‘with a long white beard and a white staff in his hand’, terrifying Darley. The apparition spoke of his regret at not being a martyr in life, ‘for my lord of Rochester and our father was next unto angels in heaven’ and added: ‘The angels of peace did lament and mourn without measure.’ The ghost then vanished again.
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Faced with such dangerously seditious reports, Cromwell dispatched another of his servants, Jaspar Fylolle, to talk to the recalcitrant Carthusians and, more prosaically, to calculate the finances of the house. In September 1535, he discovered its annual revenue was £642 0s. 4½d, but the outgoings were £658 7s. 4d. Worse still, costs were rising. ‘Wheat has
risen four shillings in every quarter and malt twenty pence … and commonly, all other victuals rise therewith.’ The charitable brothers also liked to have ‘plenty of bread and ale and fish [to give] to strangers … at the buttery door … and to vagabonds at the gate, which cannot be. It seems [very] necessary to diminish either their number or dainty fare and also the superfluous delivery of bread and ale.’ He warned it was the time of year ‘when provision was wont to be made of ling
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… and of other salt store and also of their winter vestures [to] their bodies and to their beds and for fuel to their cells’.

Fylolle also reported that a lay brother from the sister Charterhouse at Axholme had been ‘secretly received in the cloister, [with] the great sickness and died in four days. One of the lay brothers who tended him is now sick of the same.’ Finally, he attached a roll-call of the London Carthusians, noting down his belief about each one’s loyalty to either sovereign or God: on the ‘first line before every man’s name that has confessed himself to be the king’s true man, there is set a “g” for good and before the other, a “b” for bad’.
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A month later, Fylolle made another plea for immediate action:

If the king and you wish this Charterhouse to stand without a prior, as now, the number of the cloister monks and lay brethren should be diminished at least by those who will not acknowledge the king as their supreme head under God.

It is no wonder that many of these monks have offended God and the king by their foul errors, for I have found in the prior’s and proctor’s cells three or four foreign printed books [full] of as foul heresies and errors as may be.
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Cromwell’s patience snapped. In October 1535, he issued an order appointing ‘five or six governors’ of the Charterhouse – ‘temporal men, learned, wise and trusty of whom two or three shall be together every meal and lodge there every night’. He laid down nine other instructions, including the stark ultimatum that the ‘governors should assemble the monks, servants and officers, show them that the king has pardoned their previous heresies and treasons, but if they again offend, they shall die without mercy’.

He also planned to divide the Carthusians and so conquer their will. Each would be examined separately ‘as to their opinions and exhort them to the truth’. Those who remained obstinate and refused to discard their old religious doctrines would be immediately jailed. ‘Those that will be reformed must be separated from the others and gently handled to cause them to utter the secret mischiefs amongst them.’
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The monks would be completely isolated ‘for a season and let no man speak to them but by the governors’ licence’. All except the sick had to attend three or four sermons a week ‘preached by discreet, well-learned men’, no doubt approved by Cromwell.
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However, Henry was not satisfied with the arrangements. On 27 September 1536, on his way in to supper with the Queen, he waylaid Ralph Sadler and asked him pointedly: ‘Howbeit the Charterhouse in London is not ordered as I would have it?’ Working himself up into a temper, the King complained that he had ordered Cromwell ‘long ago’ to expel the Carthusians who ‘had been so long obstinate’.

His Minister was slow to act because he feared further adverse reaction overseas. In May 1537, the King’s Council threatened to suppress the house out of hand, but still, ten inmates – three priests, a deacon and six lay brothers – refused to swear the Oath of Supremacy. They were carted off to Newgate Prison on 18 May 1537 and held there, chained to posts like their brethren before them. Nine died of starvation and ill-treatment.
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The survivors surrendered the house on 10 June 1537
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and the ‘House of Salutation of the Mother of God’, as it was officially called, was finally suppressed on 15 November 1538, to be used briefly as a store for the King’s tents and hunting equipment, with the altars utilised as gaming tables by workmen.
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