Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (31 page)

Well, I would you advise my lord to meddle in no such light matters.

For what is passed by books, or otherwise, by the king’s privilege must be common [circulated] and it is lawful for every man to occupy [read] them.

All such books are set out in furtherance of the king’s matters, in derogation of the Pope and his laws.
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Another propaganda method was the nationwide promulgation of the printed statutes of the realm, which naturally included a strong element of politically correct information and exhortation. Not all of these government documents were always treated with the respect they merited. In the city of Coventry, Warwickshire, in November 1535, four late-night drunken revellers got into hot water with the mayor and aldermen over their unfortunate destruction, or more accurately defilement, of such proclamations. John Robbins, a local tailor, had earlier happily met up with old friends – the yeomen Henry Haynes of Allesby in the same county, William Apreston of Windsor and Robert Knottesford of Lutterworth – and to celebrate they had gone drinking at ‘Roger’s tavern’. Their evening turned into a real tavern crawl. About ten o’clock, ‘overseen by drink’, they had staggered on to the city’s Pannier Inn and continued imbibing there until late. After such a prodigious intake of alcohol, it is not surprising that their normal inhibitions were cast aside. They all fell out of the inn and into the silent and darkened market square, where urgent and pressing calls of nature unfortunately overtook them at the market cross. After these were fully and satisfactorily answered, one of the carousers, possibly Apreston, tore down some of the proclamations nailed to the notice boards there and carelessly tossed the papers to Haynes ‘and bid him wipe his tail with them’. They also ripped down ‘other proclamations and acts’, but the next morning, no doubt barely
sober and certainly oppressed by stonking hangovers, they failed to remember what they had done with them. Their actions were technically treason under the law, but their fate sadly remains unknown.
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Cromwell’s adroit manipulation of Parliament in the spring of 1539 marked the high-water mark of his period in power. Despite his earlier promises that the suppression of monasteries had ended, a new Act for the lucrative dissolution of the last remaining and larger, wealthy religious houses was passed in early July,
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without protest from the abbots then sitting in Parliament, or any other opposition. The great monasteries in the North involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace had been punitively dissolved in 1537 and now the last vestiges of monastic life were to be wiped from the landscape. Fifty-seven surrendered to the crown in 1539. At Christchurch in Dorset Cromwell’s commissioners found the house ‘well furnished with jewels and plate, whereof some be meet for the king’s majesty’s use, as a little chalice, a goodly large cross, double gilt with a foot garnished with stone and pearl, two goodly basins, double gilt, having the king’s arms well enamelled, a goodly great pyx for the sacrament, and there be other things of silver right honest and of good value’. They also found a tomb, already prepared in stone imported from Caen by the attainted Countess of Salisbury, mother of Cardinal Reginald Pole. ‘This we have caused to be defaced and all the arms and badges to be deleted’ – an official action necessary to expunge the standing of a traitor.
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Cromwell’s despoilers were by now well versed in the methodology of dissolution. Once valuable assets like the roof lead had been recycled into ‘pigs’ or ingots
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for easy transportation and the bells scrapped; the stone was sold off as building materials. Recent archaeological excavation has shown that the systematic looting of architectural features and stone was well thought out and disciplined. At the Benedictine churches at Coventry and Chester, salvaged stone was removed in wagons through the great west doors to take advantage of easy access to local highways. A large earth ramp was built up the western steps at Coventry Cathedral’s priory so that carts could drive straight into the nave. The wheel ruts in the floors, by now stripped of stone slabs, demonstrate that they then reversed into the north arcade, turned around and came out laden –
thereby utilising an early one-way system.
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The echoing, empty monastic churches must have resembled builders’ yards, with material stored in piles, ready to be sorted for sale or re-use.

There were human victims, too, in this new wave of monastic obliteration. At the Benedictine house at Glastonbury, in September 1539, the commissioners searched the abbot’s rooms and that night ‘found in his study secretly laid [hidden] as well a written book of arguments against the divorce of his king’s majesty and the lady dowager [Catherine of Aragon] … also diverse pardons, copies of [papal] bulls and the counterfeit life of Thomas Becket in print.’
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Abbot Richard Whiting was swiftly taken to the Tower of London, even though he was ‘but a weak man and very sickly’.
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They later found money and plate hidden ‘in walls, vaults and other secret places’ and assured Cromwell ‘that the abbot and monks have embezzled and stolen as much plate and ornaments as would have sufficed to have begun a new abbey’. The abbot paid dearly for his temerity in hiding the wealth. He was taken back to Glastonbury, with Cromwell jotting down a note reminding himself ‘to see that the evidence be well sorted and the indictments well drawn’ at Wells in Somerset. But the outcome of the trial had already been decided: another of Cromwell’s terse aides-memoires talks of ‘the abbot of Glastonbury to be sent down to be tried and executed at Glastonbury’. Whiting and two monks died by hanging, drawing and quartering on Tor Hill, Glastonbury, on 15 November 1539. The abbot’s head was set up over the main gate to his abbey and the quarters of his body distributed around the local market towns. The previous day, the Abbot of Reading, that ‘stubborn monk’ Hugh Cook, alias Faringdon, a former royal chaplain
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who had paid Cromwell an annual bribe of just over £13, had suffered the same barbarous fate outside the gates of his monastery for denying the King’s supremacy. Two priests called John Rugg and John Enyon or Onyon died with him in the Berkshire town for the same reason. On 1 December, John Bech, Abbot of Colchester, was also slaughtered
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after maintaining that God would take vengeance on Henry ‘for pulling down the religious houses’ and that Fisher and More ‘died like good men and it was a pity of their deaths’.
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Cromwell may well have provided a new source of wealth for a rapacious Henry, but he must have sensed that slowly, the King was moving away from supporting some of his religious reforms, egged on by those fundamentalists around him at court. Was it a surprise to him on 16 May 1539 that Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk, stood up in Parliament and announced that Henry desired the passing of legislation to create new tenets of religion in England ‘to abolish diversity in opinions’?

These draconian measures – ‘the Six Articles’ or, in Protestant eyes, ‘the whip with six strings’ – stopped the evolutionary religious reforms dead in their tracks and strongly reflected Henry’s personal obsession with orthodoxy. The British Library today retains a copy of the proposals, copiously corrected and amended in the King’s own hand,
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which indicates his considerable personal involvement. The first article, targeted chiefly at the ‘Sacramentaries’ and Anabaptists, laid down legally that the Body of Christ was truly present within the consecrated bread and wine during mass, the so-called ‘transubstantiation’ of God. The penalty for denying this was death by burning at the stake for heresy, even after a recantation. The other articles covered the continued validity of the vows of celibacy for nuns and monks, a new prohibition against the marriage of priests, the continuation of private masses ‘as whereby good Christian people … do receive both Godly and goodly consolations and benefits’ and the importance of the sacrament of confession and the administration of Holy Communion.

The new measures were probably inspired by Gardiner: certainly the harsh measures now faced by offenders bear his distinct stamp of intolerance. Penalties for transgressors were death by hanging, drawing and quartering and forfeiture of estates and goods. Anyone who tried to flee England in the teeth of the new articles would also be guilty of treason and would suffer the awful fate of traitors after capture.

Those priests already married – and there were probably around three hundred of them in England at that time
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– had to desert their wives. Those who married after the law came into force also faced the death penalty. The notion of married priests was one of Henry’s specific dislikes amongst the changes brought in by the reforming religion. Two
years later, he told the French ambassador de Marillac that he was even more opposed to the clergy marrying than he was to papal supremacy. There was no doctrinal issue involved here: the King feared that if priests did marry, their benefices could be passed on to their sons and a new powerful hereditary class thereby be born in England that might one day challenge the power of the monarch.

The statute also modified and consolidated existing laws against religious deviation and dissent. Taken together, they made heresy a secular offence and closely redefined it. Any person ‘by word, writing, imprinting, ciphering
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or any other wise [ways] to publish, teach, say, affirm, declare, dispute, argue or hold contrary opinion’, together with their aiders and abettors, would now ‘be adjudged heretics and therefore have [to] suffer judgement, execution, pain and pains of death … by burning’.

The doctrinal changes so alarmed Archbishop Cranmer that he boldly sought the King’s permission to speak against the legislation in Parliament. It was perhaps not merely concerns about their impact on the embryonic Church of England that moved him: Cranmer was himself married.
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Cromwell kept his head down and took no part in the parliamentary proceedings, as he knew only too well his royal master’s views. The debate raged in the House of Lords on three successive days, 19–21 May 1539, with Gardiner and his fellow orthodox bishops leading the charge for the approval of the Six Articles. Henry insisted on attending each day’s debate and spoke strongly in support of the Six Articles on each occasion. ‘Never [has a] Prince showed himself so wise, learned, Catholic as the king has done in this Parliament,’ reported one conservative and sycophantic peer.
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His personal intervention meant that continued opposition was nugatory. The Act duly became law on 28 June by royal assent
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and Parliament, its work done, was prorogued.

The next morning, Henry joined Cromwell and the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk at a conciliatory dinner with a chastened Cranmer across the river at Lambeth Palace. After the meal, in conversation, the Lord Privy Seal supported his ally Archbishop Cranmer, favourably comparing his qualities with those of Wolsey: the Cardinal ‘had lost his friends by his haughtiness and pride’ but Cranmer ‘gained on his enemies by his
gentleness and mildness’. Norfolk sneered that at least he could speak well of Wolsey, as ‘he knew him well, having been his man’. Cromwell was nettled by the sly remark and snapped back that yes, he had worked for Wolsey, ‘yet he never liked his manners’. Furthermore, he ‘was never so far in love with Wolsey as to have waited on him to Rome, as he thought Norfolk would have done’, adding that if the Cardinal had become Pope, Norfolk would have been his Lord Admiral. The Duke retorted ‘with a deep oath’ that Cromwell had lied.
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Norfolk’s recent amity with the Minister ended in that one brief angry exchange and Cromwell had created an implacable and jealous enemy.

The evangelical bishops were placed in great difficulty by the Six Articles. There was wild talk that Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, had been caught in disguise at Gravesend in Kent, illegally trying to flee England for the safety of the Lutheran states in Germany. The rumour was untrue, but Latimer and his fellow reformer Bishop Nicholas Shaxton of Salisbury resigned their bishoprics within the week and were placed under house arrest in London.

Cranmer sent his wife back to Germany – a case, plainly, of out of sight, out of mind. At the end of the month, he presided uncomfortably at the trial of a local priest in Croydon, Surrey, accused of fornication with a woman with whom he had cohabited for three years. Although the lady confessed to enjoying the delights of illicit sex with the priest after the Act came into force, they demonstrated that they were unmarried. Cranmer, doubtless relieved at the legal loophole, sentenced them to imprisonment for fornication rather than imposing the death penalty for married priests, as prescribed under the Act.
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The new law triggered large-scale arrests of dissidents over the coming months. But it was not used as a licence for wholesale slaughter, as many Protestants feared, probably because of Cromwell’s efforts to protect potential victims, such as arranging for their flight overseas. Five hundred who had been detained were freed by Henry in a general pardon of ‘all heresies, treasons, felonies, with many other offences committed before 1 July 1540’ and of the two hundred incarcerated in the diocese of London, only three remained imprisoned. Overall, only six were burnt at
the stake for transgressing the Act, again probably owing to Cromwell’s influence.
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Cranmer, however, walked a precarious tightrope between Henry’s favour and displeasure. After the Six Articles entered into law, he wrote detailed notes on his reasons for opposing the measures, backed up by citations from various learned scholars’ writings and the Bible. He planned to give these fresh arguments to the King in the hopeless, perhaps vain, belief that, even now, he could persuade Henry to change his mind. His long-serving secretary Ralph Morice made a fair copy of the Archbishop’s thoughts in a small notebook and departed by boat from Lambeth to deliver them to the King just downriver at his Palace of Westminster.