He was Henry’s parliamentary agent, but even in this capacity his power has been overrated, and he is supposed to have invented those parliamentary complaints against the clergy, which were transmuted into the legislation of 1532. But the complaints were old enough; many of them had been heard in parliament nearly twenty years before, and there is ample evidence to show that the petition against the clergy represents the “infinite clamours” of the Commons against the Church, which the House itself resolved should be “put in writing and delivered to the king.” The actual drafting of the statute, as of all the Reformation Acts between 1532 and 1539, was largely Cromwell’s work; and the success with which parliament was managed during this period was also due to him. It was not an easy task, for the House of Commons more than once rejected government measures, and members were heard to threaten Henry VIII. with the fate of Richard III.; they even complained of Cromwell’s reporting their proceedings to the king. That was his business rather than conveying imaginary royal orders to the House. “They be contented,” he wrote in one of these reports, “that deed and writing shall be treason,” but words were only to be misprision: they refused to include an heir’s rebellion or disobedience in the bill “as rebellion is already treason, and disobedience is no cause of forfeiture of inheritance.” There was, of course, room for manipulation, which Cromwell extended to parliamentary elections; but parliamentary opinion was a force of which he had to take account, and not a negligible quantity.
From the date of his appointment as secretary in 1534, Cromwell’s biography belongs to the history of England, but it is necessary to define his personal attitude to the revolution in which he was the king’s most conspicuous agent. He was included by Foxe in his Book of Martyrs to the Protestant faith: more recent historians regard him as a sacrilegious ruffian. Now, there were two cardinal principles in the Protestantism of the 16th century—the supremacy of the temporal sovereign over the church in matters of government, and the supremacy of the Scriptures over the Church in matters of faith. There is no room for doubt as to the sincerity of Cromwell’s belief in the first of these two articles: he paid at his own expense for an English translation of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, the classic medieval advocate of that doctrine; he had a scheme for governing England by means of administrative councils nominated by the king to the detriment of parliament; and he urged upon Henry the adoption of the maxim of the Roman civil law—quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem. He wanted, in his own words, “one body politic” and no rival to the king’s authority; and he set the divine right of kings against the divine right of the papacy. There is more doubt about the sincerity of Cromwell’s attachment to the second article; it is true that he set up a Bible in every parish church, and regarded them as invaluable; and the correspondents who unbosom themselves to him are all of a Protestant way of thinking. But Protestantism was the greatest support of absolute monarchy. Hence its value in Cromwell’s eyes. Of religious conviction there is in him little trace, and still less of the religious temperament. He was a polished representative of the callous, secular middle class of that most irreligious age. Sentiment found no place, and feeling little, in his composition; he used the axe with as little passion as the surgeon does the knife, and he operated on some of the best and noblest in the land. He saw that it was wiser to proscribe a few great opponents than to fall on humbler prey; but he set law above justice, and law to him was simply the will of the state.
In 1534 Cromwell was appointed master of the Rolls, and in 1535 chancellor of Cambridge University and visitor-general of the monasteries. The policy of the Dissolution has been theoretically denounced, but practically approved in every civilized state, Catholic as well as Protestant. Every one has found it necessary, sooner or later, to curtail or to destroy its monastic foundations; only those which delayed the task longest have generally lagged farthest behind in national progress. The need for reform was admitted by a committee of cardinals appointed by Paul III. in 1535, and it had been begun by Wolsey. Cromwell was not affected by the iniquities of the monks except as arguments for the confiscation of their property. He had boasted that he would make Henry VIII. the richest prince in Christendom; and the monasteries, with their direct dependence on the pope and their cosmopolitan organization, were obstacles to that absolute authority of the national state which was Cromwell’s ideal. He had learnt how to visit monasteries under Wolsey, and the visitation of 1535 was carried out with ruthless efficiency. During the storm which followed, Henry took the management of affairs into his own hands, but Cromwell was rewarded in July 1536 by being knighted, created lord privy seal, Baron Cromwell, and vicar-general and viceregent of the king in “Spirituals.”
In this last offensive capacity he sent a lay deputy to preside in Convocation, taking precedence of the bishops and archbishops, and issued his famous Injunctions of 1536 and 1538; a Bible was to be provided in every church; the Paternoster, Creed and Ten Commandments were to be recited by the incumbent in English; he was to preach at least once a quarter, and to start a register of births, marriages and deaths. During these years the outlook abroad grew threatening because of the alliance, under papal guarantee, between Charles V. and Francis I.; and Cromwell sought to counterbalance it by a political and theological union between England and the Lutheran princes of Germany. The theological part of the scheme broke down in 1538 when Henry categorically refused to concede the three reforms demanded by the Lutheran envoys. This was ominous, and the parliament of 1539, into which Cromwell tried to introduce a number of personal adherents, proved thoroughly reactionary. The temporal peers were unanimous in favour of the Six Articles, the bishops were divided, and the Commons for the most part agreed with the Lords. Cromwell, however, succeeded in suspending the execution of the act, and was allowed to proceed with his one independent essay in foreign policy. The friendship between Francis and Charles was apparently getting closer; Pole was exhorting them to a crusade against a king who was worse than the Turk; and anxious eyes searched the Channel in 1539 for signs of the coming Armada. Under these circumstances Henry acquiesced in Cromwell’s negotiations for a marriage with Anne of Cleves. Anne, of course, was not a Lutheran, and the state religion in Cleves was at least as Catholic as Henry’s own. But her sister was married to the elector of Saxony, and her brother had claims on Guelders, which Charles V. refused to recognize. Guelders was to the emperor’s dominions in the Netherlands what Scotland was to England, and had often been used by France in the same way, and an alliance between England, Guelders, Cleves and the Schmalkaldic League would, Cromwell thought, make Charles’s position in the Netherlands almost untenable. Anne herself was the weak point in the argument; Henry conceived an invincible repugnance to her from the first; he was restrained from an immediate breach with his new allies only by fear of Francis and Charles. In the spring of 1540 he was reassured on that score; no attack on him from that quarter was impending; there was a rift between the two Catholic sovereigns, and there was no real need for Anne and her German friends.
From that moment Cromwell’s fate was sealed; the Lords loathed him as an upstart even more than they had loathed Wolsey; he had no church to support him; Norfolk and Gardiner detested him from pique as well as on principle, and he had no friend in the council save Cranmer. As lay viceregent he had given umbrage to nearly every churchman, and he had put all his eggs in the one basket of royal favour, which had now failed him. Cromwell did not succumb without an effort, and a desperate struggle ensued in the council. In April the French ambassador wrote that he was tottering to his fall; a few days later he was created earl of Essex and lord great chamberlain, and two of his satellites were made secretaries to the king; he then despatched one bishop to the Tower, and threatened to send five others to join him. At last Henry struck as suddenly and remorselessly as a beast of prey; on the 10th of June Norfolk accused him of treason; the whole council joined in the attack, and Cromwell was sent to the Tower. A vast number of crimes was laid to his charge, but not submitted for trial. An act of attainder was passed against him without a dissentient voice, and after contributing his mite towards the divorce of Anne, he was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 28th of July, repudiating all heresy and declaring that he died in the Catholic faith.
In estimating Cromwell’s character it must be remembered that his father was a blackguard, and that he himself spent the formative years of his life in a vile school of morals. A ruffian he doubtless was, as he says, in his youth, and he was the last man to need the tuition of Machiavelli. Nevertheless he civilized himself to a certain extent; he was not a drunkard nor a forger like his father; from personal immorality he seems to have been singularly free; he was a kind master, and a stanch friend; and he possessed all the outward graces of the Renaissance period. He was not vindictive, and his atrocious acts were done in no private quarrel, but in what he conceived to be the interests of his master and the state. Where those interests were concerned he had no heart and no conscience and no religious faith; no man was more completely blighted by the 16th century worship of the state.
The authorities for the early life of Cromwell are the Wimbledon manor rolls, used by Mr John Phillips of Putney in The Antiquary (1880), vol. ii., and the Antiquarian Mag. (1882), vol. ii.; Pole’s Apologia, i. 126; Bandello’s Novella, xxxiv.; Chapuys’ letter to Granvelle, 21 Nov. 1535; and Foxe’s Acts and Mon. From 1522 see Letters and Papers of Henry VIII., vols. iii.-xvi.; Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey; Hall’s Chron.; Wriothesley’s Chron. These and practically all other available sources have been utilized in R. B. Merriman’s Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (2 vols., 1902). For Cromwell and Machiavelli see Paul van Dyke’s Renascence Portraits (1906), App.
(A. F. P.)
CRONJE, PIET ARNOLDUS (c. 1840- ), Boer general, was born about 1840 in the Transvaal and in 1881 took part in the first Boer War in the rank of commandant. He commanded in the siege of the British garrison at Potchefstroom, though he was unable to force their surrender until after the conclusion of the general armistice. The Boer leader was at this time accused of withholding knowledge of this armistice from the garrison (see [Potchefstroom]). He held various official positions in the years 1881-1899, and commanded the Boer force which compelled the surrender of the Jameson raiders at Doornkop (Jan. 2, 1896). In the war of 1899 Cronje was general commanding in the western theatre of war, and began the siege of Kimberley. He opposed the advance of the British division under Lord Methuen, and fought, though without success, three general actions at Belmont, Graspan and Modder River. At Magersfontein, early in December 1899, he completely repulsed a general attack made upon his position, and thereby checked for two months the northward advance of the British column. In the campaign of February 1900, Cronje opposed Lord Roberts’s army on the Magersfontein battleground, but he was unable to prevent the relief of Kimberley; retreating westward, he was surrounded near Paardeberg, and, after a most obstinate resistance, was forced to surrender with the remnant of his army (Feb. 27, 1900). As a prisoner of war Cronje was sent to St Helena, where he remained until released after the conclusion of peace (see [Transvaal]: History).