Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (16 page)

The other house that regularly featured in Cromwell’s ‘remembrances’ was Syon, where he had been Chief Steward some time after 1524.
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Syon was famous for its preaching and learning: it had a renowned library with at least 1400 volumes, but the invention of printing enabled it to reach a much wider audience with its devotional literature.
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The most prolific of the community’s authors was Richard Whitford, who wrote six books on monastic or spiritual life between 1514 and 1541 under the beguiling nom de plume ‘the Wretch of Syon’. The
power and influence of their printing press may have been another of Cromwell’s worries. Amongst its nuns, however, were many daughters of the noble and courtly families, so he had to tread warily.

In July 1535, Thomas Bedyll had reported Agnes Jordan, the abbess, and the sisters agreeable ‘in everything’, but there were two who might have to be expelled.
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In December, the prurient Layton was at Syon. He discovered one brother had convinced a blacksmith ‘to have made a key for the door, to have in the night time received in wenches for him, specially a wife of Uxbridge now dwelling not far from old Lady Derby’. He also ‘persuaded a nun, to whom he was confessor,
ad libidinem corporum perimplendam
[and completely filled with lust for her body] … making her believe that when so ever and as oft as they should meddle together, if she were immediately after confessed by him … she should be clear forgiven by God.’ An iron bar in a window between the huge twin naves of the church, which separated the nuns from the monks, had also been pulled out and ‘by that means was many nights in the church talking with her at the said grating of the nuns’ choir’.
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Cromwell was not interested in these nocturnal shenanigans at Syon. He sought religious rather than moral conformity for political reasons and sent down a swarm of reformist preachers, as well as trying eloquent or even threatening argument himself. Despite the reputation of the house, and the noble connections of the sisters, there could be no exceptions allowed. Opposition continued, however, and Bedyll wearily commented in December: ‘I have had much business with this house since your departing hence and as for the brethren, they stand [as] stiff in their obstinacy as you left them.’ One lay brother, Thomas Brownell, was imprisoned at Newgate and this may have been a salutary lesson to the community.
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In September 1536, Cromwell attended the election of John Copinger as Confessor-General, who had earlier conformed after a tortuous conversion by the stuttering Bishop of London, and sent books to Syon to keep them steadfast. Copinger wrote to Cromwell on 23 September:

Please … accept our hearty thanks with the promise of our perpetual prayers for you and yours for your high charity which we cannot recompense.

We have put [the books] in certain public places for the comfort of the convent with your lordship’s name as donor. The work which you last sent is read among us for a lecture at dinner.
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This all smacks of the insidious ‘re-educational techniques’ used by twentieth-century totalitarian regimes against their political prisoners. At Syon, so famous for its pious learning and devotional library, it seems incongruous that books should have been deployed against the inmates to correct their thinking and beliefs.
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While he attempted to bring these famous monastic foundations firmly into line, Cromwell was still anxious to sequester the wealth of the smaller houses. The parliamentary Bill for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries was brought into the House of Commons early in March 1536 and the lurid, shocking details of some of the excesses Cromwell’s agents had discovered were bandied about the horrified chamber during the debates. The Act was inevitably passed, yielding all religious houses with an annual income of £200 or less to Henry, his heirs and successors for ever. The colourful language of its preamble, redolent of a bureaucrat’s horror at wasted assets, has all the hallmarks of being penned by Cromwell himself:

Manifest sins, vicious, carnal, and abominable living, is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories and other religious houses … where the congregation is under twelve persons. Whereby the governors of such religious houses and their convent
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spoil, destroy, consume and utterly waste, as well as their churches, monasteries, priories, principal houses, farms, granges, lands, tenements and hereditaments, as the ornaments of their churches and their goods and chattels to the high displeasure of Almighty God, slander of good religion and to the great infamy of the king’s highness and the realm if redress should not be had.
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The Court of Augmentations was established on 24 April 1536 to control this legal pillage and Solicitor General Sir Richard Riche – as we have seen, a man entirely innocent of scruples or honesty – was appointed its Chancellor.
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Cromwell issued a letter to his new commissioners for
dissolution, ordering the heads of the monastic houses to cooperate or ‘you will answer to the contrary at your extreme peril’. The circular also contained an inducement: obedience in surrendering the property would make an abbot or prior ‘worthy to be otherwise advanced and in the mean season to deal the more liberally with you in the assignment of a convenient stipend for your honest sustentation’.
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They were to be paid pensions in return for their collaboration: the easier the dissolution, the greater their cash handout.

As soon as news of the legislation authorising the suppressions spread amongst England’s devout nobility and gentry, Cromwell was inundated with appeals from those anxious to get their hands on monastic property. Greed spread like a contagion. Lord Lisle in Calais was one of those early off the mark, beseeching Cromwell ‘to help me to some old abbey in my old days’. The Duke of Norfolk – anxious not to appear too grasping, but ‘where others speak, I must speak’ – particularly coveted the houses at Bungay and Woodbridge in Suffolk. Sir Thomas Eliot, whilst admitting his ‘natural shamefacedness’, fervently hoped that his well-known friendship with the executed Sir Thomas More would not prevent him from receiving ‘a convenient portion’ of the suppressed lands, for which he promised Cromwell hard cash – ‘the first year’s fruits with my assured and faithful heart and service’.
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One of the new Queen’s sisters, Lady Elizabeth Ughtred, was not very discerning, merely seeking ‘one of those abbeys’ – clearly, anywhere would do.
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Conversely, others hoped their local abbeys would be spared Cromwell’s hand of sequestration. Thomas, Lord Delawarr, wrote to him, pleading the case of Boxgrove Priory in West Sussex. It was ‘very near to my own poor house, where I am founder and there lies many of my ancestors and also my wife’s mother … and I had made a poor chapel to be buried in’. With unfortunate timing, his glorious chantry chapel, carved in Caen stone in the choir of the priory, had just been completed. He suggested: ‘Whereof it might stand with the king’s grace’s pleasure, for the poor service I have done his highness to forbear the suppressing of the same or to translate it into a college.’ Delawarr knew who would be making the decision and told Cromwell: ‘I beseech you that I may
have your lawful favour, goodwill and help … And surely sir, I shall recompense your goodness, kindness and pain herein.’
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Here, then, was more income for Cromwell: bribes from those who desired grants of monastic property; bribes from the abbots, priors and prioresses who wanted their houses to remain. For example, Edward Calthorpe offered him £100 ‘for the pains that your mastership shall take therein’, as well as his eternal friendship, in order to buy the priory of Ingham, Norfolk.
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On the other side of the coin, Nicholas Austen, the abbot of the Cistercian house at Rewley, near Oxford, discovered that his abbey was to be given to one of Cromwell’s servants called Archard. In September 1536, he wrote to Cromwell: ‘I submit myself fully and wholly to your mastership, as all my refuge, help and succour is in you, glad of my voluntary mind to be bound in obligation of £100 to be paid to your mastership, so that our house may be saved, although it be converted into … a college.’
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It was suppressed the following year.

Sometimes it was not cash, but bribes paid in kind. John Welles, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Croyland, Lincolnshire, sent Cromwell ‘part of our fen fish, right meekly beseeching your lordship favourably to accept the same fish and to be [a] good and favourable lord to me and my poor house … I with my brethren shall daily pray to our Lord God for the long continuance of your good lordship in health.’
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Doubtless Cromwell was grateful for both the fish and the prayers.
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The process of dissolution was simple and brutal. Cromwell’s commissioners visited a monastic house, called together the community and announced their fate. Its property deeds were collected together, its great seal seized and the movable valuables – the gold and silver sacred vessels and the vestments – inventoried. The lead on the roof was measured and the bells counted as the first stages in the recycling of the monastic buildings. A second visit checked the accounts and accepted the surrender. The tombs within the church were sometimes removed by the deceaseds’ families to places of safety. Others were destroyed for the price of their stone and metal and still more appropriated for re-use elsewhere by some who sought status on the cheap.
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Some buildings were demolished; others merely had their roofs removed to render them
unfit for future worship. Monasteries were also sold and converted into private homes for the gentry enriched by the redistribution of their lands.

A total of 376 smaller houses were dissolved and eighty spared from suppression over the next few years. The value of the spoils to the King may have amounted to around £68 million at 2006 prices, with income from the monastic property and lands totalling about £20 million a year. Much of the land was shared out at generous knock-down prices – sometimes even given as free gifts – in a cynical effort to buy the nobility’s loyalty and bind them tighter to the fortunes of the Tudor dynasty. Henry’s attempts to keep them sweet cost him dear: his exchequer benefited only by an average of £37,000 a year from this dissolution – an indication of just how widespread was the redistribution of wealth, planned or illicit. Thomas Wriothesley, one of Cromwell’s creatures, had drawn up plans to spend £6600 a year from the monastic wealth on hospitals, and £3300 per annum on new roads to provide work for the poor and jobless. Neither scheme was implemented. Earlier royal promises of social spending came to naught.

There was another, far more direct human cost. Chapuys protested in July 1536 that it was a ‘lamentable thing to see a legion of monks and nuns who have been chased from their monasteries wandering hither and thither, seeking means to live. Several honest men have told me what with monks, nuns and persons dependent on the monasteries suppressed, there were over 20,000 who knew not how to live.’ The ambassador had no doubts that one day God would hear their complaints and avenge them.
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Cromwell had his own plans for the poor and destitute. His Beggars Act, passed in 1536,
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ordered a parish or municipality to assume full responsibility for the ‘impotent poor’. These were now restricted to their home towns and villages and prevented from wandering the countryside in search of food or money. Those capable of labour would be given work and their children taught a trade. The ‘sturdy vagabonds and valiant beggars’ who refused to work were to be whipped ‘until their bodies were bloody’. Alms were to be raised voluntarily in each parish to support the ‘lame, feeble, sick and diseased people’. It was not only the first attempt
at an official welfare policy but also marked the beginnings of the civil parish as a unit of local government in England and Wales.

Henry was so delighted at the privatisation of religious houses that he heaped more offices and honours on Cromwell’s willing head. Not only had his Minister organised and prosecuted the seizure of the monasteries’ wealth and sorted out a new law dealing with the annoyance of beggars, he had also pushed through Parliament a second Act of Succession, declaring Henry’s two previous marriages null and void and entailing the crown on Jane Seymour’s male children. With commendable foresight, Cromwell included a clause that would grant the throne next to male children by any future wife.
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On 1 July 1536, he was appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal, with fees of twenty shillings a day paid from the customs dues of Poole, Bristol, London, Plymouth and Fowey. On 9 July, he was created Baron Cromwell of Oakham. Nine days later, he was made Vicar-General and Vice-regent of the King in matters spiritual. On the same day, Cromwell was knighted.

These appointments were not the only gains to come Cromwell’s way. He reserved for himself the choice priories and abbeys of Michelham in East Sussex, St Osyth in Essex, Alcester in Warwickshire, Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, and Launde in Leicestershire, and bestowed on his nephew Richard the abbeys at Ramsay and Sawtry in Cambridgeshire, Neath in South Wales and the nunneries at Hinchinbroke, Cambridgeshire, and St Helen’s in the City of London.
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But some monastic houses would not surrender quietly.

The commissioners found the Augustinians at Hexham Priory in Northumberland a difficult nut to crack in September 1536. Three miles (4.83 km) from the house ‘they were credibly informed that the religious persons had prepared themselves with guns and artillery meet for war, with people in the same house and to defend and keep the same with force’.

Cromwell’s henchmen must have taken a few deep breaths to steady their nerves. Two of the four, Lionel Gray and Robert Collingwood, rode on alone into the town of Hexham and towards the monastery. They saw: