Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, Vol. 1 of 2 / Life, Letters to 1535

by Roger Bigelow Merriman

INTERNAL POLICY

From the close of the year 1532 until his fall, the entire domestic administration of England was in Cromwell’s hands. From the moment that he entered the King’s service he had definitely committed himself to the policy which he was to follow till the end of his days. His own theories of internal government, the traditions of the Tudor monarchy, and the situation of the realm at the time of his accession to power, combined to convince him that the maintenance of an all-powerful kingship was indispensable to England’s safety; the nature of the proposal by which he first won Henry’s confidence was tantamount to an irrevocable declaration of that principle, and a promise that it should be the guiding thought of his entire administration. The revolt from Rome was an incident rather than an aim of his policy. He had suggested it at first as offering the only possible solution of the immediate difficulties of the Crown, and as affording golden opportunities for the increase of the power of the monarchy; but as soon as the decisive step had been taken, he saw that the security of his own position had become conditional upon the permanence of the new ecclesiastical system, which in turn could only be ensured if the King, for whose sake it had been created, was rendered supreme in Church and State. Cromwell’s very existence had thus become dependent on the success of his endeavours to maintain and carry further the policy initiated by Henry VII., and to elevate the Crown to sovereign power above every other institution in the realm. Perhaps no minister has ever had more varied problems to confront him, than those which Cromwell had to deal with during these eight years; and yet his action in every case is a logical, intelligent application of the theory of internal government, which he believed was the only sure road to national greatness. With this great principle firmly borne in mind, the history of Cromwell’s domestic administration becomes comparatively simple.

A further assertion of the Supremacy of the Crown in ecclesiastical affairs was necessary, before Cromwell could attempt to strengthen its already predominant position in the State. The chief object of the more important measures of the years 1533 and 1534 was to utilize the consequences of the breach with Rome for the benefit of the monarchy, and to provide that none of the power of which the Pope had been deprived should be permitted to escape the King. During the year 1532 Henry had deluded himself with hopes that his first attack on the liberties of the English clergy might frighten Clement into acquiescence in the divorce, but at last his patience came to an end, and he surrendered himself entirely to the guidance of Cromwell, who had been persuaded from the first that nothing further was to be obtained from the Pope. In January, 1533, the King was secretly married to Anne Boleyn; on the 10th of May Cranmer, who had lately been raised to the see of Canterbury, opened his archiepiscopal court at Dunstable[222]. With a promptitude which must have been highly satisfactory to Henry after the delays of the previous proceedings at Rome, the sentence of divorce was pronounced. There can be little doubt that Cromwell gave efficient aid in hastening the verdict[223]; but what is far more important, he took effective measures, even before it was rendered, to prevent its revocation. Parliament had been in session during the three months previous to the assembling of the court at Dunstable: in anticipation of the coming sentence, it had been induced to pass an Act[224] to deprive Katherine of the only hope that remained to her by forbidding appeals to Rome, and by ordaining that the decision of an archiepiscopal court should be final, except in cases where the King was concerned, when appeal might be made to the Upper House of Convocation. A notable effort was made to conceal the obvious and immediate purpose of this statute under a shroud of pious and patriotic verbiage. The life of the Act, however, was but short. Though it had dealt the death blow to the jurisdiction of the Pope in England, it had not made adequate provision for the maintenance of the Supremacy of the Crown; so in 1534 the statute of the previous year was superseded by a new one[225], which enacted that an appeal might always be made from an archbishop’s court to the King’s Court of Chancery, the decision of which was to be final. The abolition of the Annates (which will be considered in another place) occurred at the same time. The effect of these two measures was to complete the work begun in 1530, and to sever the last links of the chain which bound the Church of England to Rome.

In the meantime the famous Act of Succession[226], bastardizing the Princess Mary and establishing the offspring of Anne Boleyn as lawful heirs to the throne of England, had also been passed in Parliament, and before the year had closed a new statute[227] had formally recognized the King’s ecclesiastical supremacy for the third time; for Henry was not satisfied with the acknowledgements he had wrung from the clergy in 1531 and 1532, nor with the express assertion that the King was on earth Supreme Head of the Church of England, contained in the oath to the new succession, which Cromwell’s commissioners began to administer throughout the realm in the summer of 1534. The last vestige of the independence of the English bishops was also removed in the course of this memorable year, by certain provisions of the final Act for the restraint of Annates[228]. It had not been necessary, however, to introduce any very radical innovation here. The bishops were already virtually in the King’s hands, for the elections by chapters had long been a mere farce, and the royal nominee had been almost invariably chosen. So the Act had aimed at a legalization of the status quo—merely adding a few new provisions to strengthen the King’s hold on the Church. All relations with the Pope were of course to cease; the bishops were to be consecrated by virtue of a royal commission; and if the chapter failed to elect within twelve days, the King was empowered to fill the vacancy by letters patent. But even this does not seem to have been enough to satisfy Cromwell. A letter of Chapuys in the early part of 1535 informs us that the King’s Secretary called some of the bishops before the Council to ask them if the King could not make and unmake them at pleasure: ‘they were obliged to say yes, else they should have been deprived of their dignities: as the said Cromwell told a person, who reported it to me, and said that the Council had been summoned only to entrap the bishops[229].’ Cromwell followed this up, later in the year, by causing a Prohibitory Letter to be sent out in the King’s name, forbidding the bishops to visit any monastery or to exercise any right of jurisdiction during the visitation of the religious houses then in progress[230]. It appears that even Cromwell, with all his audacity, was at a loss to devise a means to silence the objections which were raised against this high-handed measure. He was not ashamed to take a hint from the fertile brains of his two blood-hounds, Legh and Ap-Rice, who suggested an ingenious argument to crush all opposition, the gist of which is contained in the following quotation from a letter which they wrote to Cromwell, Sept. 24, 1535[231]:—

‘Yf they (the bishops) had any Jurisdiction, they muste nedes haue receued ‹it› either by the lawe of god or by the busshop of Romes Authoritie or els by the Kinges grace permission. Which is no sufficient discharge ageinst the statute.

‘Yf they saye by the Lawe of god, Lett theym bring foorth scriptur but I thinke theym not so impudent as to saye so.

‘Yf they saye by the busshop of Romes Authoritie. Lett theym exercise it still, yf they thinke it mete.

‘Yf they saye by the Kinges permission why be they more discontent that the king shuld call agein nowe to his handes that which came from hym to theym, than they wolde haue bene yf he had never graunted it theym. And surely they are not able to iustifie thexercise of their iurisdiction hetherto.’ Fortified by such reasoning as this did the Royal Supremacy pass into effect.

Having thus obtained the complete submission of the greater lights of the Church, Cromwell consistently pursued his relentless policy with the humbler orders of friars and monks. His method of dealing with the latter did not differ materially from his policy with the former, except that it was perhaps more sanguinary. Priors Lawrence and Webster, two Carthusians who denied the validity of the King’s new title, were examined by Cromwell, and when they stubbornly refused to retract their assertions, they were promptly sentenced and executed[232]. Three others, Houghton, Hale, and Reynolds, suffered death a little later, and the latter dared to tell Cromwell that in spite of the terror he had caused by his late proceedings, all good men in the kingdom really held the same opinion, that the Headship of the Church was not the King’s[233]. But notwithstanding the wide popular dissatisfaction at the new measures, most malcontents, both lay and spiritual, kept their thoughts to themselves. Men were beginning to discover how dangerous it was to criticize the doings of the King and his minister. The elaborate system of espionage and the commissions to seek out and punish treason, which Cromwell had so laboriously established all over the country in 1532, had now begun to bear fruit. It was impossible to tell who the government spies were: impossible to know when or against whom the next accusation would be made. The words which men spoke in the bosom of their families or to their most intimate friends and neighbours were as likely to be laid to their charge as their utterances in public: harmless, obscure and ignorant country folk were brought before the magistrates as often as those of higher degree. Edmond Brocke, husbandman, eighty years of age, of Crowle in Worcestershire, was walking home in the rain from Worcester market on the Saturday before St. Thomas’ Day, in company with Margaret Higons. ‘Yt ys long of the Kyng that this wedre is so troblous or vnstable,’ he said, ‘and I wene we shall nevir haue better wedre whillis the Kinge Reigneth, and therefore it makith no matter if he were knocked or patted on the heed[234].’ These facts were declared on August 12, 1535, before John Russell Esq., Justice of the Peace, by Richard Fulke, husbandman, and Joan Danyell of Crowle. Brocke confessed that he had said ‘that it was a hevy and grevous wether and that there was neuyr good wedringes sithins the King began this busines,’ but what he meant by ‘busines’ he could not tell: as to the rest of his words, he said, he was mad or drunk if he spoke them—more than this he would not answer. William Ferrall, of Eastbourne in Sussex, deposed before Sir John Gage on August 14, 1536, that Sir William Hoo, vicar of Eastbourne, and suffragan of the diocese of Chichester, walking with him in the churchyard, said that ‘they that rule about the King make him great bankettes and geve him swete wynes and make him dronke,’ and that then ‘they bring him byllis and he puttyth his sign to them whereby they doo what they will and no man may Correcte them[235].’ Margaret Chanseler, of Senklers Bradfeld in Suffolk, spinster, was forced to confess before Sir Robert Drury in February, 1535, that, when drunk and under the influence of an evil spirit, she had said, in presence of Edmond Tyllet and Anthony Harward, ‘that the quenes grace had one child by our souereigne lorde the Kynge, which the seid ‹child› was ded borne, & she prayed god that she myght neuer haue other; also that the quenes grace was a noughtty hoore & that the Kynges grace ought not to mary within his realme.’ Tyllet and Harward, when summoned, made the matter somewhat worse. They declared that the spinster had called the Queen ‘a goggyll yed hoore,’ and that she had added ‘God save queen Katteryn for she was ryghtuous queen, & that she trusted to see her queen Ageyn & that she should warrant the same[236].’ All the magistrates before whom these depositions were laid, received ample instructions from Cromwell how to deal with every case; if the accusation was very heavy, the offender was usually sent up to the minister himself, to answer for his misdeeds at head quarters. The punishments in these cases were very severe: there are almost no records of the penalties inflicted on those against whom the depositions were brought, but there is reason to believe that comparatively slight misdemeanours were not seldom rewarded with death.

But of all the devices ‘For the putting the Kynges subiectes and other in more terroure,’ as Cromwell once expressed it[237], the most ruthless remains to be mentioned. The execution of the Carthusians had had its effect, but Cromwell was persuaded that more blood would have to be spilled before his victory could be considered complete. As was usual with him, he laid the axe at the root of the tree, and chose as his victims the noblest and foremost in the land. The opinions of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More were well known to be opposed to the Royal Supremacy, and as such they carried enormous weight. Cromwell must have seen that it would be impossible to establish the King in his new position with any security, until these two men were either converted or destroyed. So, never once swerving from his purpose, nor letting the rank and position of these distinguished men change or deter him, he set about the business of ‘making or marring,’ with his usual directness and method. If he knew More and Fisher at all well, he must have been reasonably certain that he could never alter their convictions, so it became necessary for him to look for some adequate pretext for getting rid of them. Such a pretext soon presented itself.