THOMAS CROMWELL 1st EARL OF ESSEX
By Holbein, from an Engraving by Houbraken in the British Museum
Diversities in the judgments passed on Thomas Cromwell are less marked than in the case of most of the statesmen portrayed in this volume. There is no possibility of questioning the utter absence of moral scruple in the methods by which he pursued his ends, the completeness with which he subordinated every other consideration to their achievement, the vast organising power he displayed. That he was actuated by a moral repulsion to the Roman system, or a religious enthusiasm for the purity of the Gospel, is a view that can only be put forward on the sweeping assumption that everybody concerned in the Reformation at all was so actuated, except feeble or wicked bigots who clung to the old order. Cromwell as a Protestant Martyr is very much like Frederic the Great as Protestant Hero. Every one who believes that it was good for England to reject the Papal authority and to subordinate the Church in England to the State, is bound to consider that the man who did these things for England rendered his country a great service. Every one who holds the contrary view as to the Papacy and the Church must hold that he rendered her almost immeasurable dis-service. But these are judgments not on the man but on the circumstances.
Yet there is one very curious fact about Thomas Cromwell. Although he set his mark indelibly on the history of his country, and in spite of the exceptionally dramatic course of his career, his name seems to convey very little to most Englishmen—save as the secretary whom Wolsey charged to “fling away ambition.” Oliver looms so large that it is difficult to grasp the idea that another person of the same name also loomed large a hundred years earlier. No playwright or novelist has made him a central figure in drama or novel. Yet it may at least be argued that of the ten characters here examined, his personality was the one which most decisively influenced the course of history.
II
EARLIER CAREER AND RISE TO POWER
In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there was dwelling in Putney one Walter Cromwell, alias Smyth, who appears to have been a brewer, smith, and armourer, and incidentally to have been a very troublesome person with a taste for breaking the law in minor matters. There is no doubt that Walter was the father of Thomas: whose birth conjecture places about 1485. Down to 1512, the accounts of Cromwell’s life rest entirely on later gossip, sometimes professedly derived from remarks which he himself let fall. All reports, however, agree in saying that he went to Italy when very young—“fleeing from his father,” one of them avers. It needs no evidence to show that he had a remarkably enterprising and self-reliant spirit, and if he did run away from a turbulent parent to seek his fortune by his wits, it was a course thoroughly consonant with his subsequent career. The reports state further that he served as a man-at-arms under an Italian nobleman, and with the French in 1503. Allowing for presumable inaccuracies of detail, there is no reason to doubt that he tried his hand as a trader of sorts in the Low Countries and in Italy. There is, however, definite ground for believing that he returned to England about 1512, and married the next year. If Mistress Elizabeth Wykeys did not bring something fairly handsome in the way of a fortune, Thomas Cromwell must have strangely forgotten himself. For some years, it may be affirmed with confidence that he took part in business as a wool-merchant or “shearman,” combining this trade with practice as an attorney. Documentary evidence puts it effectively beyond doubt that he was professionally known as a man of law to Wolsey in 1520. In 1523 he sat in the House of Commons as a Member of that Parliament which, under Sir Thomas More’s Speakership, declined to discuss the voting of a subsidy in the Cardinal’s presence.
By this time we are getting away from the region of conjecture, anecdote, and hearsay, into that of definite records. What we know of Cromwell’s share in this Parliament is derived from two documents; one, a letter of his own, in which he gibes at his fellow members for having babbled at large about everything under the sun without doing anything. “I have endured,” he says, “a Parliament which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, temperance, treason, murder, felony, and also how a commonwealth might be edified and continued within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do; that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.’ If Carlyle had lighted upon that, how his heart would have rejoiced! The second document, however, suggests that if Cromwell, like Carlyle, had no great opinion of talkers, he meant his own voice to be heard: since it is almost certainly the MS. draft of a speech which he prepared for delivery in that same Parliament. The speech is exceedingly clever, and most diplomatically expressed—but is dead against Wolsey’s subsidy. Perhaps he thought better of it, and kept it in MS. If not, it was an audacious speech to make, for a man who was getting in touch with the Cardinal, from whose good graces much might be hoped. Still, a like audacity paid him well some six years later. It may have been carefully calculated in both instances; but in both there were big risks.@
At any rate, his favour with the great minister increased. He dropped his wool-business, extended his private legal practice, was entrusted with much legal work by the Cardinal, and became known as the person through whom suitors to Wolsey might find it advisable to make their applications. It was not long before he found, in his capacity as a man of law, congenial employment in the suppression of small religious Houses, and the appropriation of their endowments to Wolsey’s colleges at Ipswich and Oxford. This business he did to the entire satisfaction of his master; and since he never at any time hesitated to accept or extract material contributions to his private exchequer from any one concerned, his accumulations grew pari passu with his favour. So also, incidentally, did his unpopularity, for which he cared absolutely nothing. His confidential relations with the apparently all-powerful minister made him a person of considerable though unofficial importance; bringing him in contact with people of high position. Thus in 1527 he was well-known to Reginald Pole (afterwards Cardinal), whom he counselled to drop high-flown ideas, and learn the practical business of a politician by studying Machiavelli’s “Prince”—a work of which he must have obtained a MS. copy, as it had not yet been printed, though written probably as early as 1513.
But the toils of the divorce business were already enmeshing Cromwell’s patron; as the year 1529 advanced, clouds, lightning-charged, were gathering over his head, and the secretary knew that the hour was about to strike when he himself must either “make or mar.”