Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (30 page)

Ironically, Cromwell was later to painfully discover to his cost just how potent was this weapon he had blithely handed to a ruthless, absolute ruler.

The Lord Privy Seal also had very personal concerns about some aspects of the mechanics of the governance of the realm. His Act of Precedence
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for the House of Lords added fresh importance to the role and status of the secretary to the King. Now, ‘the chief secretary being of the degree of a baron of the parliament shall sit and be placed afore and above all barons … and if he be a bishop, that then he shall sit and be placed above all other bishops’. Moreover, the Act laid down that the Viceregent in ecclesiastical affairs – Cromwell again – should rank above the Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords. In 1539, the Minister stood low in precedence, being merely baron of the realm. By this simple measure, he leapfrogged all the other members of the upper chamber of Parliament, to the simmering anger of his fellow peers, who now felt their own positions degraded. Was this legislation simply a matter of clarifying the labyrinth of protocol, or perhaps an attempt to reflect more accurately the impact of his reorganisation of the workings of the King’s government? No, more likely for the low-born Cromwell, it was an issue of enhanced personal pride, clout and status, and a further, permanent demonstration of his authority in the land to the arrogant nobility swaggering about him.

Meanwhile, propaganda now began to play a greater role in Cromwell’s exercise of power and he regularly wielded an impressive array of media to shape and influence the minds of Henry’s subjects: from licensed public preaching to pamphlets; from plays to proclamations; and, finally, popular polemical ballads. Even with the threat of invasion now fading, he still required a show of strength, not only as a demonstration of English resolve, intended for the benefit of ambassadors and the foreign spies undoubtedly based in the capital, but also as a domestic morale-building exercise, a stage-managed outpouring of patriotism.

But he had no standing army at his disposal to parade. Instead, he summoned the citizens of London to the King’s colours to mount an inspiring display of defiance and to warn any adversary who still nurtured any thoughts of aggression of the scale of opposition they would have to confront. On Thursday, 8 May 1539, thousands of able-bodied men and youths, aged between sixteen and sixty, armed and clad in what armour they could scavenge, assembled at Mile End and Stepney, in the East End of
London. It was ‘a beautiful sight to behold: for all the fields from Whitechapel to Mile End and from Bethnal Green to Ratcliffe and Stepney were covered with men and weapons … The battalion of pikes seemed to be … [like] a great forest’.
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At about seven o’clock that spring morning, the citizen soldiers began to march westwards through the narrow streets of the city in three battalions, led by their light field guns, complete ‘with stone [ammunition] and powder’ and followed by a band of drums and fifes. The long, straggling column eventually circled the King’s park at St James’s and turned back over the verdant fields to Holborn before dispersing at Newgate at four o’clock in the afternoon. An eyewitness reported:

The battalions were thus ordered: first gunners and four great guns drawn amongst them in carts; then morris pikes;
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then bowmen and then bill men.
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All the chief householders … having coats of white damask and white satin on their harness [armour], the constables in jerkins of white satin and the aldermen riding in coats of black velvet with the cross and sword of the city
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on their coats over their harness …

My lord Cromwell had amongst them one thousand … gunners, morris pikes and bowmen, going in jerkins after the socager [armed tenants’] fashion and his gentlemen going by, to set them in array.

Cromwell’s own contingent included his son Gregory and nephew Richard, mounted on ‘goodly horses and well apparelled’ in armour.
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The personal cost of this martial splendour to Cromwell is reflected in the sum of £117 16s. 3d, or more than £44,000 in 2006 money, paid to one of his servants, Henry Habblethorne, who was probably involved in the organisation of the muster, most likely for all those jerkins and expensive weapons.
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Henry, preening himself with pride, watched the warlike cavalcade pass by from his vantage point of the new gatehouse of his palace at Westminster.

They were numbered by my Lord Chancellor
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… [at] 16,500 and more. However, a man would have thought they had been above 30,000 [as] they were so long passing by. They went five men [abreast] together and began to enter the city … at Aldgate at nine of the clock and it was five …
before the end passed before the king and, ere the last battalion … entered Cornhill, the first battalion were breaking home at Newgate.

Henry was elated by the parade and even more thrilled by another of Cromwell’s propaganda extravaganzas, staged on 17 June. It was not a subtle piece of persuasion, but then it was not intended to be. Cromwell knew full well that the citizens of London probably appreciated the delights of a humorous entertainment rather more than a finely argued intellectual debate. Nonetheless, his underlying message to the masses was unequivocal.

He organised a spectacle staged by two barges on the River Thames, both fitted with guns equipped to fire blank shots and darts, or
flèchettes
, harmlessly made of reeds. One was crewed by men dressed flamboyantly as the Pope and his cardinals; the other represented Henry and his government. A special platform was constructed ‘over the leads’ or roof of the privy steps leading from the river to the Palace of Westminster from which Henry and his cronies would witness the political pantomime. It was covered with canvas and ‘set with green boughs and roses properly made, so that rose water sprinkled down from them into the Thames upon ladies and gentlemen which were in barges and boats under to see the pastime’. Whether they found this dampening benefit to the attractions of the sham fight in any way welcome must remain a matter of conjecture.
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Both sides of the river bank were crowded with expectant onlookers.

Battle then commenced.

The barges rowed energetically up and down from Westminster Bridge to the King’s Bridge
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and

the Pope [and his cardinals] made their defiance against England and shot their ordnance at one another and so had three courses up and down the water.

At the fourth course they joined together and fought sore, but at last the Pope and his cardinals were overcome and all his men cast over into the Thames.
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Happily none were drowned, as those taking part had been hand-picked for their prowess in swimming. Cromwell, with an admirable regard for
the rigours of health and safety, had also organised the King’s barge to be at hand to quickly pluck the soggy vanquished out of the water. Lord! What a merry jape this was – as one eyewitness recorded, ‘a goodly pastime’ with much merriment for the spectators. But the all-important political message had been planted in the citizens’ minds: this ‘triumph’ was intended, albeit crudely, to illustrate how the King would always entirely confound and abolish the power of the Pope.

This noisy charade was not the only weapon in Cromwell’s pervasive propaganda campaign against the enemies of the realm. The new French ambassador Charles de Marillac, who also watched the Thames tour de force, three days afterwards reported angrily that there was no village feast or celebration anywhere in England that did not include some derogatory allusion to the Holy Father in Rome. There was clearly a widespread government initiative at work.

Drama itself was an important vehicle for Cromwell’s propaganda. The notion may have come to him via his old friend Richard Morison, appointed a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral in 1537. In a treatise addressed to Henry, obscurely entitled ‘A Persuasion to the King that the Laws of the Realm should be in Latin’
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he had suggested that plays should be specially written to declare

lively before the people’s eyes, the abomination and wickedness of the Bishop of Rome, monks, friars, nuns and suchlike, and to declare and open to them the obedience that your subjects by God’s and man’s laws owe unto your majesty. Into the common people, things sooner enter by the eyes than by the ears; remembering more better that [which] they see than they hear.
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This was a political manifesto that would have been immediately recognised by any of history’s great propagandists, from Roman historian Titus Livy to Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Public Enlightenment in the Third Reich. Cromwell certainly became an enthusiastic patron of staunchly Protestant playwrights such as John Bale.
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In 1534, Bale had been dragged up before Archbishop Edward Lee at York to explain one of his more vituperative sermons, but Cromwell rescued him from any punishment.
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He wrote a number of plays, all containing strongly
royalist overtones, including
King John, The Tradition of Thomas Becket
and
The Three Laws
, all produced before 1536. His drama about the English King in particular appealed to Cromwell, as the Plantagenet monarch was an especial hero for Protestant reformers because of his excommunication by Rome in 1212 and his subsequent retaliatory confiscation of church property. The Minister’s personal accounts, kept by Thomas Avery, include a number of disbursements to the playwright and his merry actors, such as for 8 September 1538: ‘Bale and his fellows at St Stephen’s beside Canterbury, for playing before my lord [Cromwell], 40 shillings’, and again on 31 January 1539: ‘Bale and his fellows, for playing before my lord, 30 shillings’
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– the latter possibly a performance of
King John
staged at the home of Archbishop Cranmer himself.
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Bale’s company of actors could well be the group known as ‘Lord Cromwell’s Players’ who performed between 1537 and 1540 at Leicester and elsewhere.
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Thomas Wiley, Vicar of Yoxford in Suffolk, sought Cromwell’s assistance in February 1537 after he had written a play denouncing the Pope, but had encountered fierce opposition to his preaching from his brother priests and was now existing ‘fatherless and forsaken’. His gripping drama consisted of a dialogue between children, who were murky metaphors for the Word of God, Christ Himself, the saints Paul and Augustine and a nun, rather obviously called ‘Ignorance’. He told Cromwell that he had been called ‘a great liar’ after producing the allegory, which fulminated ‘against the Pope’s counsellors, Error, Clogger of Conscience and Incredulity’. Wiley was no mere flash in the Protestant pan of playwrights: he had also penned
A Rude Commonalty
and
The Woman on the Rock
, two more spellbinding tales, ‘in the fire of faith and a purging in the true purgatory’.
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Morison also published topical pamphlets designed to shape and mould public opinion. His ‘Invective Against the Great and Detestable Vice of Treason,’ written in early 1539,
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was a virulent attack on those whom Cromwell had lately slaughtered as traitors: the Courtenays, Nevill and Cardinal Pole himself, an ‘arch-traitor … whom God hates, nature refuses, all men detest, yes, and beasts too would abhor if they could perceive’. England was secure, declared Morison, because of the wisdom
of her ‘honoured’ king: ‘Of all the miracles and wonders of our time, I take the change of our sovereign lord’s opinion in matters concerning religion to be even the greatest.’ The pamphlet was so popular amongst the Tudor predecessors of the chattering classes that it speedily went into a second edition and there was even talk, never fulfilled, of it being translated for foreign circulation.
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Within a month or so, Morison weighed in with a second pamphlet, ‘An Exhortation to Stir all Englishmen to the Defence of their Country’,
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written with an eye to the growing threat of invasion by the Catholic continental superpowers. It was a paean of patriotism, a rallying call to the barricades, and deliberately invoked England’s valiant past in passionate, ringing tones: ‘We may forget the Battle of Agincourt, but they will remember and are like never to forget with how small an army … King Henry V vanquished that huge host of Frenchmen … Let us fight this one field with English hands and English hearts: perpetual quietness, rest, peace, victory, honour, wealth, all is ours.’ All the familiar tricks of the adept propagandist are contained in its pages, such as utilising the adversary’s mistaken contempt for English courage and military prowess, as allegedly expressed by Chapuys, the Spanish envoy. This was deployed to shame the reader and rouse up, in English hearts, a brave response to Morison’s strident call to arms: ‘The activity of Englishmen has been great, if historians be true, but if I may judge by my conjectures, it is nothing so now. I see neither harness [armour] nor weapons of manhood among them … They have been of good hearts, courageous, bold, valiant in martial feats, but those Englishmen are dead.’

No wonder he appears on Cromwell’s payroll: the Lord Privy Seal’s accounts record the generous payment to Morison of £20 (£7,500 at 2006 prices) ‘by my lord’s command’ in April 1539, possibly for writing the ‘Exhortation’.
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In 1537, Morison wrote to Cromwell: ‘Your lordship sees all my living in your liberality. Thanks to your bounty I have no cause to complain of fortune and, whatever may hereafter befall me, my hope is in you.’
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Not everyone welcomed this onslaught of government-inspired invective. John Hussey, the London agent of Lord Lisle, the religiously conservative Deputy of Calais, fell foul of Cromwell over his master’s
sacking of one of the town’s garrison for avidly reading such government publications. Hussey and Cromwell were deep in conversation when the dismissed soldier came in sight, and the Lord Privy Seal pointed him out: ‘Yonder comes a man whom my lord has put out of wages – wherein he has not done well.’ The Lord Privy Seal’s words were ominous and worse were to follow. Cromwell sternly counselled Hussey: