Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (29 page)

and have showed him such store of harness [armour] and weapons as I have, the which he seemed to esteem much. I told him there were other particular armouries of the lords and gentlemen of this realm, more than the number of twenty, as well or better furnished than mine was, whereat he wondered and said he thought your grace the prince best furnished thereof in Christendom.
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The Frenchman collected his passports and departed London the following day, naively impressed by all he had seen during Cromwell’s tours: such is the value of carefully orchestrated disinformation.

This militarist hyperbole was all very well, but some substance was required to cloak the illusion of strength. Henry’s realm was, in reality, largely unprepared to repel a determined and powerful invasion. To deploy the limited forces more efficiently, England and Wales were divided into eleven defensive regions. Work also began on the construction of new circular artillery forts, all protected by dry moats and providing 360° arcs of fire from their bastions – ‘all-round defence’, in modern military jargon. These were sited at Walmer, Sandgate and Deal in Kent, facing the narrowest section of the English Channel, and at Camber in Sussex, to guard the south-coast harbour of Rye. The forward defence of the naval base at Portsmouth was to be bolstered by building forts at Hurst Spit and Calshot, overlooking the Solent, and on the Isle of Wight. Some of the building material used was stone looted from demolished religious houses.

It would take time to complete these new defences, so, as temporary measures, Cromwell organised an army of labourers to dig barrier ditches and erect barricades at vulnerable points. Beacons were set up along the south and east coasts of England, ready to be fired in warning that enemy forces had landed. Men aged seventeen and over were liable to be conscripted into the militia and foreign ships were impounded, under pain of death if they sailed, at the ports of London and Southampton, to be commandeered for naval service if necessary. At Harwich in Essex, even women and children were pressed to work on the defences of the harbour.

The panic of war intensified when reports reached London in April of 8000 mercenaries mustering in Friesland in the Low Countries and, more worrying still, a threatening fleet of sixty-eight ships was spotted off Margate in Kent on 9 April 1539. Defence forces were swiftly mobilised at Ashford, in the same county, and at Hayling Island, near Portsmouth, but happily the alarm proved false and the ships sailed on to Spain to join the Emperor’s navy in the imperial campaign against the Turks in the Mediterranean. The mercenaries ended up in the Baltic.

A new religious bulwark was also thrown up: an officially approved edition of the Bible in English, which Cromwell firmly believed would calm religious controversies and improve morality.
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He also viewed it as an elegant and cost-effective method of constantly re-emphasising the King’s supremacy over the Church of England.

Cromwell had issued injunctions to the clergy in September 1538 requiring them to formally warn their congregations at least once every three months against false works devised by men’s fantasies: offering money or candles idolatrously to relics or images and reciting ‘meaningless’ prayers over their rosary beads. He also ordered the parishes to maintain their own registers of baptisms, deaths and marriages and to provide, before that Easter, a copy of the Bible in English ‘in a convenient place in the … church … whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it’.
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The clergy ‘should expressly provoke, stir and exhort every person to read the same, as that which is the very lively word of God, that every Christian man is bound to
embrace, believe and follow if he look to be saved; admonishing them … to avoid all contention’.

Almost inevitably, the requirement to keep parish registers – today, the greatest boon to family historians and genealogists – was viewed with deep distrust, and many suspected this instruction was a wily precursor to a brand-new tax about to be imposed by Cromwell. Lewis Herbert, who returned to Gloucestershire from London just after the religious injunctions were issued, unwisely repeated rumours he had heard that no capon, goose or pig was to be eaten without a tribute being paid to the King.
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William Hole, a blacksmith from Horsham, West Sussex, maintained in March 1539 that fifteen pence would have to be paid for every christening, wedding and burial,
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and the month before, Sir Piers Edgecombe scribbled to Cromwell ‘in haste’, warning him that the men of Devon and Cornwall, ‘in great fear and mistrust’, believed ‘that some charges, more than have been in times past, shall grow to them by this occasion of registering of these things. Wherein, if it shall please the king’s majesty to put them off doubt, in my poor mind shall increase much hearty love.’
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Cromwell was at some pains to explain that the motivation behind the registers was purely administrative: to avoid ‘sundry strifes, processes and contentions rising upon age, lineal descendants, title of inheritance, legitimation of bastardy and for knowledge whether any person is our subject or no’.
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But his bureaucratic blandishments fell on deaf ears.

Delivering those quarterly sermons must have been an irksome duty for many clergy. Robert Mawde, the angry curate of Whatcote, Warwickshire, told his congregation on 2 March 1539:

By God’s bones, I have read this out to you a hundred thousand times, and yet you will never [be] the better [for it]. And it is a matter that is as light to learn as a boy or a wench should learn a ballad or a song.

And by God’s flesh, there is a hundred words in these injunctions where two words would serve, for I know what it means, as well as they that made it. For lo, it comes like a rhyme, a jest or a ballad.

One can sympathise with the priest’s frustration at government verbosity, but he probably went too far for his own good when he added: ‘A vengeance upon him that printed these injunctions, for by God’s bones,
there is never one in Westminster Hall that would read this much for twenty nobles [£6 6s. 8d, or £2,500 in 2006 money].’
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Cromwell was hopelessly over-optimistic in believing that the English Bible would be ready to be distributed around the parishes in time for Easter 1539. Two years before, two printers – Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch – had brought out a new English translation. Because of the very limited capacity of English printing presses, a revised edition of this was to be produced in Paris, with a generous contribution of 600 marks (£400, or £150,000 at 2006 values) provided by Cromwell out of his own purse. Archbishop Cranmer believed each copy should be sold at 13s. 4d each, but Cromwell preferred the neat round sum of ten shillings,
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the cost to be met equally by clergy and congregation in each parish.

However, just as the typesetting was completed, the Parisian printers were reported to the Inquisitor General of France, who promptly seized their work, and despite Cromwell’s best efforts to rescue both the Bible and his own largesse, production had to be completed in London by Grafton. The title page of the so-called
Great Bible
was a woodcut portraying a munificent Henry, with Cranmer and Cromwell, surrounded by his loyal subjects patriotically crying ‘
Vivat Rex
’ and ‘God Save the King’ as they received their new Bibles. Copies, however, only became widely available in November 1539.
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Henry, no doubt cajoled by Cromwell, meanwhile was looking overseas for friends in his hour of need. He wrote to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, whose territory in Italy had been seized in a papal invasion, encouraging his resistance to the Bishop of Rome – that ‘enemy of God and ours’ who was in league with his ‘false prophets and sheep-clothed wolves’.
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For all his immoderate rhetoric, Henry’s overtures were to no avail. He then tried to recruit a potential ally in the German Protestant League of Schmalkalden, who after much prodding finally sent over a low-key delegation in April, headed by the Vice-Chancellor of Saxony, Francis Burckhardt. The English King, however, was not interested in adopting Lutheran beliefs – indeed, was intent on maintaining the old, familiar and comfortable doctrine of his Church. That Good Friday, at his Palace of Westminster, he had practised the
pre-Reformation rite of devoutly creeping to the cross on his knees from the door of the Chapel Royal and had served at the altar during the mass with ‘his own person, kneeling on his grace’s knees’
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– despite the pain in his legs caused by unhealed fistulas. Every Sunday Henry received ‘holy bread and holy water and does daily use all other laudable ceremonies … In London no man upon pain of death [can] speak against them’. The King was anxious to demonstrate that he was no heretic; indeed, that he was a truer Catholic than the Pope.

Fortunately, the threat of invasion receded as it became apparent that neither Charles V nor Francis I were interested in heeding strident papal cries for military action against Henry and embarking on a costly and perilous assault on the heretics across the Channel. England was safe, for the time being, at least.

On 28 April, a new Parliament met at Westminster. Cromwell, who was too ill to attend, had nonetheless carefully scrutinised the membership of the House of Commons to ensure that he had solid support for the controversial legislation he intended to table for ratification during the opening session.
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His first proposal was both audacious and unprecedented: that the King should be granted powers to legislate merely by proclamation, thus effectively bypassing any need for parliamentary scrutiny or approval.

Just before the Bill was presented to Parliament, Cromwell used the issue in an attempt to cut Bishop Gardiner down to size in front of Henry. The Bishop, recounting the episode eight years after, said he had been summoned to Hampton Court, where he was confronted by the proposals for the King ‘to have his will and pleasure regarded [as] a law’. Gardiner ‘stood still and wondered in my mind to what conclusion this should tend’. Henry saw him thinking and ‘with earnest gentleness said, “Answer him [Cromwell] whether it be so or no.” I would not answer my lord Cromwell, but delivered my speech to the king.’ Gardiner told Henry that he had read of kings whose will was ‘received of a law but … to make the law his will was more sure and quiet’. Henry turned his back ‘and left the matter after, until the Lord Cromwell turned the cat in the pan before company, when he was angry with me, and charged me as though I had played his part’.
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Gardiner’s opposition made Cromwell even more determined to implement the measure. The Lord Privy Seal strenuously forced the bill through its first and second readings in the House of Lords, but then even his stooges revolted at its provisions and he was forced to withdraw it for amendment. This new version was also thrown out by the Commons
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and Cromwell was obliged to point out privately some harsh truths to his nominees. Eventually, his threats worked: the measure was passed by both Houses at the end of June as the Statute of Proclamations.
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The legislation was now cloaked in comfortable, reassuring words:

… that sudden causes and occasions many times do require speedy remedies, and that by abiding for a parliament in the meantime might happen great prejudice to ensue to the realm … it is therefore thought … more than necessary that the king’s highness, with the advice of his honourable council, should make and set forth proclamations for the good and politic order and governance of his realm … from time to time for the defence of his regal dignity and the advancement of his commonwealth and good quiet of his people …

Be it therefore enacted … that always the king, with the advice of his honourable council, or with the advice of the more part of them, may set forth … by authority of this Act his proclamations, under such penalties and pains and of such sort as to his highness and his said honourable council or the more part of them shall see[m] necessary and requisite; and that those same shall be obeyed, observed and kept as though they were made by act of parliament for the time in them limited.

A modern Whitehall apparatchik would dismiss concerns that parliamentary liberties were being eroded by describing this Stalinist legislation as purely ‘an enabling measure’ – to be used only in appropriate circumstances. Cromwell doubtless stressed that it was true (in theory, anyway) that the power of the King remained very limited, as he still could not arbitrarily condemn his subjects to death, imprisonment or even sequester their goods and chattels solely by proclamation. But the sting in the tail was that any offenders against the Act would now be summoned before the sinister Star Chamber at Westminster, and if
found guilty, ‘shall lose and pay such penalties, forfeitures of sums of money … and also suffer such imprisonment of his body as shall be expressed, mentioned and declared in any such proclamation’.
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In truth, it was carte blanche for despotism. Today, those who operate the levers of power in the British government fondly refer to any measures that amend primary legislation by ministerial order without parliamentary debate as ‘Henry VIII powers’.

As if to reinforce the image of a state taking a firm grip on its subjects’ lives, Cromwell moved on to subtly change the Law of Attainder, the means whereby guilty verdicts against traitors were confirmed by Parliament and the confiscation of their property and estates agreed. He had been frustrated by the legal system’s failure to deal adequately with Elizabeth Barton, the so-called ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, in 1534. She and her associates had had to be condemned by an Act of Attainder after the likelihood of a successful trial had collapsed because her offence had involved words only – and treason by word of mouth was not then unlawful.

Now he seized an opportunity to refine his process for punishing crimes against the state following the precedent of this expedient decision. This appeared in the frail guise of the ageing Countess of Salisbury, still miserably imprisoned after the execution of her son Henry, Lord Montague, and his allegedly treacherous accomplices some months earlier.
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Although collectively warned by the judges of the dangers of the measure, Cromwell proposed, and Parliament meekly agreed, that Acts of Attainder could now always be used against traitors without the tiresome formality of a full trial. For someone skilled in packing Parliaments with his payrolled nominees, it was a convenient device with which to secure the condemnation of an individual when evidence was insufficient to ensure a successful prosecution in the courts, even with his carefully selected juries. The Countess was accordingly attainted on 28 June 1539. She was probably selected as the first victim because of Henry’s monomania about the Yorkist threat to his dynastic succession.
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