Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (21 page)

Were there angry words between father and son over all this expenditure? Probably not, as the frequency of such payments surely confirms that Gregory was the apple of his father’s eye and, moreover, the Minister would have been keen to make obvious the Cromwell dynastic wealth.

Where did he get his riches from?

Thomas Polsted, his receiver, reported income totalling £4,011 17s. 4¼d, or nearly £1,500,000 in today’s money, in the twelve months beginning Michaelmas (29 September) 1534.
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During the same period, Cromwell spent £3,290 13s., of which nearly £1,200 was on household and construction expenditure. It is interesting to compare his costs with the £3,840 incurred by Anne Boleyn at exactly the same time. There was not much difference between Queen and Minister in terms of their spending.

Cromwell’s revenue came from three sources: income from his lands; fees from his offices of the crown; and a healthy level of annuities – pensions paid by those interested in maintaining his goodwill. Revenues from lands and rents totalled more than £400 and formed the smallest contribution during this period. Cromwell by now was accumulating an assortment of lucrative government posts and sinecures, all paying annual fees. His Mastership of the Rolls carried a salary of £284 1s. 6d a year, but this salary does not include the tun of wine (252 UK gallons, or 1,146 litres) munificently supplied by John, Lord Hussey, the Butler of England, or the 12 yards of broadcloth given annually by the
Order of St John of Jerusalem. Cromwell also picked up £65 10s. as Chancellor of the Exchequer; £75 as Master of the King’s Jewel House; £58 6s. 0½d as Clerk of the Hanaper; and £20 as High Steward of the Queen’s Lands. He also received a share of the profits of the Privy Signet, which that year yielded £94 0s. 8½d. Minor positions produced another £32. Prominent amongst those paying annuities were the heads of a number of religious houses: history was to prove their investments unwise.

The following year, covering the period 29 September 1535 to 21 July 1536, Cromwell’s income almost doubled to total £7,965 19s. 11d,
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principally from the proceeds of property speculation and the increased value of his annuities – amongst them £20 from Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. But the Minister’s expenses also jumped to £7,871 9s. 7¾d, reflecting the substantial construction work in which he was engaged. With the dissolution of the monasteries, more annuities, payments for offices in his gift and income from an informal usury business, Cromwell’s revenues went up to £12,548 in 1537, or £4,650,000 at 2006 prices, and stayed roughly around this level for the next two years. Admittedly, some of this income was made up of repayments of capital sums loaned out, but the fact remains that apart from the King and probably the Duke of Norfolk, he must have ranked as the richest man in all England.

There is no doubt that he was dipping his venal fingers into the royal money pot as it received the proceeds of the privatisation of the monasteries. His accounts record a number of sales of silver and gold that look suspiciously like spoil from dissolved priories. On 9 October 1538, ‘Gadbury the goldsmith’ handed over £18 19s. 4d to Cromwell – probably the Lord Privy Seal’s share of the plate bought from the late prior of Lenton Abbey, Nottinghamshire.
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Martin Bowes was another purchaser of precious items, paying £44 5s. 4d on 11 October 1539 for ‘the silver bought of my lord’, and again, on 16 November the same year, ‘for 144½ ozs of gold, at 33s. the oz’, totalling £247 11s. ‘Trapes the goldsmith’ also made staged payments to the Minister amounting to £1,348 15s. 2d in early 1539, most likely for monastic gold items and jewellery sold to him. Indeed, a receipt survives for the £69 paid by the Dean of Hertford ‘for jewels sold to
Trapes the younger’. On Cromwell’s behalf, his steward Thacker also sold ‘ingots of gold and silver’ for £97 16s. 11d on 21 October 1539, probably once sacred vessels, subsequently melted down for the value of their metal. Other deals more overtly capitalised on monastic loot:

In addition, Cromwell had been granted the wealthy monastery of St Pancras in Lewes, and its demolition, the subsequent sale of its goods and the recycling of its building materials raised a first instalment of £467 0s. 13½d for him in May 1539, and a second, totalling £229 18s. 5d, was sent on by Thomas Bishop in July. Another payment of £726 3s. 6d on 22 December that year was for the lead that had been stripped off its huge roof and the scrap-metal value of its bells.

Together with his habitual duplicity and ruthless manipulation of those around him, it is Cromwell’s reputation as a rapacious loan shark and taker of bribes that seems so distasteful to twenty-first-century palates. He continued to lend money at exorbitant rates even after his appointment to senior government posts. The accounts for 1537–9 are full of repayments of money borrowed from him, some made by the noblest in the realm and some involving large sums of money, such Sir William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, Lord High Admiral and Treasurer of the Royal Household, who repaid a loan of £100 in November 1537; and Lord Bowrough, who repaid the £25 ‘my lord lent him’ in April 1538, and a further £200 that June. Henry Percy, Sixth Earl of Northumberland, who died in 1537, was also deeply in debt to Cromwell, and he received £62 from Henry Lord Clifford (who bought the Earl’s gold chain off him in November that year) and £28 17s. 10d in final payment of Northumberland’s debts the following month. Sir Thomas Arundel, High Bailiff of Salisbury, repaid the £100 ‘lent him upon a bill of his hand [an IOU]’ in February 1538. Andrew, Lord Windsor, wrote piteously to Cromwell in July 1535, enclosing a list of his creditors and begging ‘that money will be provided for them, for they make much calling for it daily’.
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These grandees who had fallen on hard times were all victims of vanity: their unsuppressed urge to spend money on gaudy clothes and fine possessions to advertise their status and nobility. Penury was the harsh penalty of keeping up with the noble Joneses. Forced to go cap in hand to Cromwell, no wonder they hated and despised the Minister. Other, smaller fry also became his debtors, such as the Bishop of Hertford’s executors, who borrowed £100 merely to decently bury the prelate, or, in the same year, the £80 lent to some merchants so they could recover their impounded ship. The repayment of a £10 loan by Richard Bream in December 1537 demonstrates that Cromwell charged him 15 per cent interest, although happily Sir Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, paid only 2.5 per cent on a £100 loan in May 1538 – doubtless a preferential ‘family’ rate because of Gregory’s marriage to his sister.

Recently, eloquent claims have been made that Cromwell might have been far less corrupt than his popular image suggested.
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Certainly, bribery was regarded as almost a norm in Tudor administrations and the odd gift of a side of venison or some pheasants would not be construed by society then as wholly immoral.
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Our loyal Minister, however, went far beyond all that and plumbed new depths of venality. The state papers are littered with supplicants promising him ample reward if he granted them this office, or the lands of that monastery. Take just two examples from April 1535. Sir Richard Riche, himself no angel of purity, wrote to Cromwell on 3 April begging him to remember him when the Mastership of the King’s Liveries came to be appointed ‘and I will give you £40 and pray for you, as ever I have done’.
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Then there is the case of Elizabeth, Lady Burgh, who probably did not have to bribe Cromwell but readily declared her willingness to have done so. After her husband’s death, she faced the embarrassment of her children being declared bastards by the Act of Parliament
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procured by her father-in-law Thomas, Lord Burgh, who was plainly worried about where his estate would end up. She told Cromwell on 27 April: ‘I am informed by Mr Treasurer [Southampton] how much I have been bound to your goodness in my late business, which I regret I am unable to recompense but I trust you will take the will for the deed.’
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The Minister’s accounts reveal numerous unexplained receipts of various sums of money handed over by him to his receiver personally. Here is a strange coincidence: they normally appear to have been made after his attendance at court. Did he really carry around so much loose cash? Or was he collecting it? Then there are entries, beginning in 1538, which have similarly sinister connotations: the receipts of various sums contained in purses, ‘in a white paper’ and, most tellingly of all, perhaps, hidden in gloves, mostly received by Cromwell himself:

Why the subterfuge? Why was the money hidden in gloves? The most suggestive evidence of his dishonesty may be the money mentioned in the entries for December 1539. Here there is the £20 ‘which was in a glove under a cushion in the gallery window’; the £10 ‘under the cushion in the middle window’; and the £150 contained in white and red purses hidden in the same place. It must be nice to have so much cash that you can afford to leave it lying around.

Then there are more blatant payments. Richard Sampson, Bishop of Chichester, told Chapuys in October 1536 of a French attempt to bribe Cromwell: ‘Had indeed the French been left to themselves they would have got Master Cromwell into the nets … Only a few days ago, they tried hard to gain him over to the cause by offering him, in
King Francis’ name, an annual pension of 2,000 ducats besides certain valuable presents. Whatever they do in that respect, they will not succeed.’

By the following February, the perfidious French clearly had succeeded. His Imperial Majesty himself, Charles V, reported that Henry had granted permission for Cromwell ‘to accept the gift (a good sum of money) and the pension upon which the councillor, who hitherto befriended us, has suddenly turned round and is working in favour of France’.
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Yes, in truth, Cromwell was as guilty of corruption as sin itself.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Merry Widower Thwarted

You shall receive the king’s letters with a commission to treat with those princes for his grace’s part. Use all dexterity, for the king was never more willing to forget the past and make a perfect reconciliation and do all things to the Emperor’s honour. If the Emperor will esteem his grace as he pretends … all will proceed to God’s glory and the quiet of Christendom
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CROMWELL TO SIR THOMAS WYATT, ENGLISH AMBASSADOR TO CHARLES V, LONDON, 25 DECEMBER 1537
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At two o’clock on the morning of Friday 12 October 1537, Henry’s elusive dream of a lawful male successor for his uncertain Tudor dynasty was at long last transformed into happy reality. His third queen, Jane Seymour, was delivered of a healthy boy after spending more than thirty hours in the agony of labour in her newly decorated apartments at Hampton Court. The King’s joy and relief at this resolution of his greatest political and personal problem must have been unbounded.

The birth came on the eve of the feast of St Edward the Confessor, that most English of all Heaven’s community of saints. Henry’s loyal subjects wisely and willingly shared their sovereign’s elation at the arrival of his son. Six hours after the baby’s first raucous cries of life, a
triumphant
Te Deum
was sung in every church in the City of London and all the bells rang out joyously to celebrate the arrival of a male heir to the throne of troubled England. Charles Wriothesley,
Windsor Herald
, reported: ‘At nine of the clock, there was assembled at [St] Paul’s [Cathedral] all the orders of friars, monks, canons, priests, clerks about London, standing all about Paul’s in rich copes, with the best crosses and candlesticks of every parish church in London.’ Solemn Masses were sung in the echoing Gothic cathedral, attended by a number of clerical and court dignitaries including Cromwell himself, who doubtless lustily joined in the anthems and responses in gratitude for the huge burden of uncertainty now lifted from his own shoulders by that tiny, weak child. Typically, his satisfaction was not only derived from purely patriotic motives: a few months earlier, his twenty-four-year-old son Gregory had married Elizabeth, the widowed sister of the Queen. With the birth of a healthy prince, the house of Seymour’s star had attained the zenith of royal favour and Cromwell must have quietly congratulated himself on having backed the right noble horse. Around him, the jubilation continued: