Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

The year 1533 may be regarded as marking the irreparable breach with the Papacy, though it was not till 1534 that Clement gave his own formal judgment in favour of Katharine, and Convocation issued its own declaration that the “Bishop of Rome” derives from Scripture no more jurisdiction in England than “any other foreign bishop”—two sentences which may perhaps be regarded as merely bolting an already locked door. The purpose of Cromwell’s anti-clerical campaign was so far achieved that the clergy had been driven out of their main strongholds by their “submission,” and had next been cut off from the aid of a Papal alliance. These were the preliminary measures to the assertion in very concrete guise of the untrammelled supremacy of the Crown in things ecclesiastical and temporal alike, which was the aim of the policy we have ascribed primarily to Cromwell rather than his master. An additional reason for so ascribing it is to be found in the strong presumption afforded by the evidence that Henry himself did not wish to cast off the Papal allegiance utterly, until he found that he could get the divorce in no other way. Apart from his fixed resolution to make Anne Boleyn his wife at all costs, it may be doubted if he reckoned that the complication of foreign relations involved in a final repudiation of the Pope’s authority would be compensated by the more unqualified control of ecclesiastical matters at home. For him the divorce turned the scale: and since he could not escape the disadvantages of revolting, he meant to have every scrap of advantage that could be reaped from it too. The differences which presently arose between the king and his minister on the conduct of foreign affairs will be found to have some bearing on this view of the case.

At any rate, the breach being made, Henry was as ready as Cromwell for aggression; and Cromwell was let loose to carry out his policy—within the realm—to the uttermost: no longer working in the background, but in a position as openly dominant as Wolsey himself had occupied.

The first business was to confirm formally the positions already taken up, in a fresh series of Acts of Parliament, in the early session of 1534; embodying the recent measures, but generally carrying them a step further. Thus “Peter Pence” were abolished as well as Annates. An appeal to the King’s Court of Chancery from the Ecclesiastical Courts was substituted for the Appeal to Rome abolished by the Restraint of Appeals. The “submission of the clergy” was extended so as to bring the whole instead of a part only of the canon law under the purview of the commission to be appointed for its examination. The corollary of the Boleyn marriage was an Act of Succession in favour of the offspring of Anne: but the Act carried with it a murderous sting. “I pray that these things be not confirmed with oaths,” More had said when the marriage was ratified. His anticipation was justified. An oath of obedience to the Act was to be administered.

In this affair of the oath, we as usual find Henry and Cromwell in perfect accord as to policy, but not actuated by precisely the same motive. The thing in Cromwell’s mind is the Royal Supremacy; he is determined to be rid of conditions which check the activities of the Crown, and of men whose influence tends to keep alive doubts as to the Crown’s legitimate powers. Henry’s point of view is the personal one. He has done a very unpopular thing in divorcing Katharine and marrying Anne, and is determined to make every one admit that he was entirely in the right. Now, there was in England no ecclesiastic so universally esteemed for probity and saintliness as Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester; there was no layman who could compare for intellectual eminence and beauty of character with Thomas More. It was known to the world that both these men held that Katharine’s marriage had been valid, and that both disapproved the recent anti-Papal developments. So also it was known that in the Houses of Religion which stood highest in reputation for sincerity and austerity, and were untouched by the breath of scandal, the divorce and the revolt were regarded with horror. To force these recalcitrants openly to declare in favour of the divorce and the Royal Supremacy, would be a great triumph. On the other hand, nothing would so terrorise opposition as the smiting down, before the horrified eyes of the world, of victims so distinguished. Cromwell therefore drafted the oath of obedience to the Act of Succession in such terms that the subscriber would have to swear not only loyalty to the provisions of the Act, but acceptance of the divorce as right, and of the Royal Supremacy as theoretically sound. More, Fisher, and some of the monks to whom the oath was administered, refused to desert their principles. They would swear to maintain the succession as laid down, since it lay within the function of the State to order the succession; but they would not take the oath as it stood. Thereupon they were sent to prison.

It may readily be believed that the minister, as reported, swore a great oath when he heard More’s refusal. The moral effect of winning such converts would have been incalculable: preferable certainly to shocking public sentiment as the alternative course must do. But he was not in the least afraid of shocking public sentiment, at any rate if he at the same time inspired terror; if circumstances demanded victims, the more conspicuous they were, the better.

For once, however, a point had been overlooked: it appeared impossible lawfully to proceed to extremities on the ground of refusal to take the oath. The omission was rectified in the next session of Parliament. In a fresh Act of Succession, the oath as administered was expressly ratified, and the occasion was seized to pass a new Treasons Act, inadequately described as drastic. It was made treason to question the titles of the queen and the heirs apparent, or to impute heresy or schism to the king; and the lawyers were able so to interpret it that mere silence might be construed as treason—it was enough to refuse to affirm the Supremacy and the rest of it. The two new Acts were brought to bear on the victims, who remained firm and were executed in the following summer. There is no shadow of a hint anywhere that Cromwell suffered a single qualm in working out the destruction of either More or Fisher, but it is hardly necessary to make him responsible for the equally ruthless attitude of the king. According to Roper’s circumstantial narrative, Henry was so vindictive towards More when once he had turned against him, that he could hardly be persuaded to have him left out of the Bill of Attainder in the affair of the Nun of Kent, until the Chancellor, Lord Audley, and others succeeded in convincing him that Parliament could not possibly pass the Bill with More’s name included. If ever there was a chance of life for Fisher and More, it was destroyed when Henry’s fury was roused by the new Pope making Fisher a Cardinal. These facts illustrate the difference between Henry’s attitude and Cromwell’s. To Cromwell, More and Fisher are merely obstructions to his policy. They must either cease to obstruct or be crushed. To spare them for sentimental reasons would be absurd, but there is no passion or vindictiveness or animosity about their destruction, as far as he is concerned.

Never had any king of England wielded so deadly an engine of despotism as was placed in Henry’s hands by this Treasons Act of Cromwell; whereof, however, the full force depended on its manipulation by its designer. The country was in a very short time so sown with the minister’s spies that the moment any one became obnoxious to authority it was the simplest thing possible to procure an information of a hasty word spoken or passed by in silence, of a phrase that might have carried a double meaning; and the victim’s doom was virtually sealed. The excuse, of course, was the one on which a tyranny that seeks to justify itself invariably falls back—that an unparalleled emergency demands extraordinary powers. It was not, indeed, quite obvious that there was an unparalleled emergency in existence, but then it might arise at any moment. Cromwell was going on to a series of measures which might prove acceptable, but might on the other hand provoke a storm of indignation. With the Treasons Act ready to his hand, he could anticipate conspiracy by striking wherever and whenever it pleased him. It was an integral part of his political theory that Government—i.e. the Despot—should have that power. It was not, of course, aimed specifically at the Church; it was only incidentally concerned with More and Fisher. The repression of clericalism was only a part of the scheme for a legalised Despotism. The climax, the theoretical coping-stone of the edifice, was not achieved till the Act which in 1539 gave Royal Proclamations the force of law; but for practical purposes, the Treasons Act made Henry a monarch more absolute than any other in Christendom.

Cromwell, however, had not as yet fulfilled the promise he is said to have given of making Henry “the richest king that ever was in England.” As a matter of fact, whatever riches had come in his way Henry would never have kept a full treasury, since he always emptied it with both hands. But Cromwell in his capacity as Vicar-General, or representative of the Supreme Head with unlimited powers—which office was bestowed on him early in 1535, a few months after the Treasons Act—was to make him a record present. It was a matter of principle with him, in his methods, to make rude display to the higher clergy of the fact that they must now recognise themselves as mere menials of the Crown, whose functions might be superseded at the royal pleasure; and on those lines he acted in striking his next blow, sending out a commission of his own creatures to “visit” the monasteries, and report upon them. It is only necessary to recall one of his casual memoranda at a later date—“Item, the Abbot of Reading, to be sent down to be tried and executed”—to feel properly satisfied that the case of the monasteries was prejudged. The commission was intended to report evil concerning them, and not good; and the commissioners acted up to their instructions. It is quite possible that a perfectly impartial tribunal after complete investigation would have found the evidence hardly less damning; but what the commissioners did was to pay a series of hasty visits, collect all the scandal they could get any one to retail to them, insult or frighten respectable and responsible inmates till they gave confused or evasive answers, or none at all, to interrogatories, and so to produce what passed as evidence of a very abominable and corrupt state of affairs. Whereupon Parliament passed an Act dissolving between three and four hundred Houses, in effect handing their property over to the Crown. Some of this wealth was theoretically appropriated to endowing new bishoprics and to other corresponding purposes; but in practice a fraction of it only was so utilised. Some of the lands were given away to people whom it was convenient for the king—or Cromwell—to placate; most were sold at low prices—with the effect of establishing a new landed proprietary which in the years long after was to play a part in the national politics which their creator can hardly have foreseen. It was not Cromwell’s way to reach for more than he could grasp; before he made one stride, he had calculated for the next, but he did not take it till his own time. So he did not wipe out the monastic system at a blow. The completion of the business waited—like the Royal Proclamations Act—till 1539. For the present, Cromwell was content to impose on the greater monasteries, and such of the lesser ones as still survived, a disciplinary code which professed to have in view the enforcement of a becoming austerity, but was felt to be so intolerably severe as effectually to bring about several voluntary dissolutions or surrenders.

Cromwell’s royal partner, no doubt, in a famous phrase of much later date, “stood amazed at his own moderation.” But the country hardly took the same view. The year which saw, in February, the first Act dissolving the lesser monasteries, saw also in the autumn a rising in Lincolnshire, very shortly followed by the organised Yorkshire insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. As in all the religious rebellions of the Reformation, the issues were a good deal mixed up with social discontents; and the last straw was probably a piece of Cromwell’s handiwork which had nothing to do with ecclesiastical matters, being a measure known as the Statute of Uses, designed to get rid of a maze of legal complications which had arisen from ingenious evasions of the law as to the inheritance of land. The insurgents, however, put the religious innovations in the forefront of their schedule of grievances: openly demanding the dismissal of both Cromwell and Cranmer. The military management of the suppression of the rebellion was left to the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, but no collision was allowed till the northern levies had been diplomatically induced to disperse; after which some sporadic outbreaks were used, after the turn of the year, as an excuse for an extremely heavy-handed exaction of retribution. Cromwell, however, turned the whole thing to account; as certain abbots and priors had been more or less deeply implicated, whereby the opportunity was given for suppressing several considerable religious communities, and hanging some highly placed Churchmen. A further result was the re-organisation of the government of the counties constituting the Marches—those which were always living with an eye on Scotland, and enjoyed or suffered a special system of control—by the establishment of a new Council of the North which diminished the power of the nobility in those regions; Cromwell always maintaining the same end persistently in view, the weakening of all power of organised resistance to the king’s will.

Another year brought another opportunity. In 1538, Cromwell discovered a conspiracy. The South-west of England, like the North, was ever on what may be called the Romantic side when developments, political or religious, were in progress. It was now perturbed over the innovations. It appeared that the Marquis of Exeter, the king’s first cousin and a grandson of Edward IV., was engaged in some sort of conspiracy with the Poles, whose mother was the old Countess of Salisbury, daughter of “false fleeting perjured Clarence.” Amongst them, they stood for the relics of the old Yorkist anti-Tudor faction. Cromwell had already taken occasion to warn Reginald Pole—whose diatribes against Henry, issued from abroad, had brought him under the royal ban—that his kinsmen in England might pay the penalty for his audacity. Whether there was any real body in the conspiracy is open to doubt, but there was quite enough evidence to go upon under the Treasons Act. The process by attainder practically suppressed any defence. Exeter, Montague (the head of the Poles) and others were executed; and there were sufficient means for involving some more Houses of religion, with their heads, notably the revered Abbot of Glastonbury, who were hanged as traitors.