Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (9 page)

The measures to be tackled covered a very wide raft of issues, ranging from the administratively banal – importation of bow-staves at
Southampton and ‘diligent process’ against the King’s debtors – to brand-new ordinances. Two of the listed bills were passed – the first covering customs dues on wines imported via the Netherlands and the second regulating the work of the commissioners of sewers.
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But two items of proposed legislation also failed to see the light of day: a bill of ‘Augmentation of Treason’ encouraging loyal informers against traitors and another governing the distribution of bishops’ incomes.

A year later, in 1532, Cromwell began to amass a considerable collection of royal offices and appointments, most of which he grimly hung on to throughout his eight more years in power despite advancement in other areas of the King’s service. At the New Year, he presented Henry with a ‘ring with a ruby’ and a ‘box with the images of the children of the French king, Francis I’.
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His sovereign gave him a small gift of a goblet, merely listed amongst those presented to other gentlemen of the court.

Now came more signs of Henry’s grace and goodwill. Cromwell’s first post was Mastership of the King’s Jewels, granted on 14 April, at a salary of £50 a year, in succession to the London goldsmith Robert Amadas, who had died.
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Hard on the heels of this appointment came the clerkship of the Hanaper of Chancery on 16 July. The name of this strange-sounding post comes from the Old English word ‘hanap’,
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a wicker basket (the picnic hamper has the same etymological origin) in which writs and other legal documents were collected. The Clerk of the Hanaper was paid fees by suitors to ensure that their grants, charters and patents were properly impressed with the Great Seal to prove their legality, and these fees were additional to an annual salary of between £30 and £60. Cromwell apparently did not draw the 1s. 6d per day due to him for special expenses, probably because the work was done by the under-clerk.
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Some transactions were specifically excluded from fees: the King’s warrant in September 1532 ordering Cromwell to deliver to Anne Boleyn the patent creating her Marquis of Pembroke in her own right stipulated that it should be sealed ‘without taking any fine for us or to our use for the seals’.
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These appointments were made as rewards for Cromwell’s skilful stage-management of parliamentary antipathy towards the clergy. The
Commons’ ‘Supplication Against the Ordinaries’,
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a petition of March 1532 drawn up mainly against bishops, was probably compiled and written behind the scenes by Cromwell some time before the issue came up for debate. The complaints of 1529 were now repeated with new protests arising out of MPs’ disquiet over the increasing number of heresy trials.
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The contemporary chronicler Edward Hall wrote: ‘For the ordinaries would send for men and lay accusations [against] them of heresy and say they were accused and lay articles to them but no accuser should be brought forth, which the Commons [found] very dreadful and grievous – for the party so cited must either abjure or be burned, for purgation he might make none.’
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Cromwell had directed the chorus in this latest assault on church authority on behalf of his master, but echoing Simon Fish’s thoughts, was also pursuing his own grand vision of ‘one body politic’ within England.
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On 15 May 1532, the Church’s Convocation finally agreed that they should not assemble without a royal writ and no new ecclesiastical (or canon) law could be enacted without the King’s full assent. Finally, all existing church laws would be examined by a thirty-two-strong committee, half of them laymen, under royal auspices. The following day, Sir Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor, surrendering the Great Seal of England in a white leather pouch, supposedly on grounds of ill health. In reality, as many suspected, his departure was a matter of conscience.

In 1533, Cromwell laid down a key piece of legislation as a foundation stone of the English Reformation. The Statute in Restraint of Appeals
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prohibited any kind of appeal to the Pope under pain of praemunire and made Henry the ultimate legal authority on religious matters in England and Wales. Cromwell’s preamble to the Act robustly declared: ‘This realm of England is an empire … governed by one supreme head and king, having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, to whom a body politic, compact of all sort and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality, be bounden and owe next to God a natural and humble obedience.’ An ‘empire’, the ‘imperial crown’ – these ringing, grandiose words fashioned the autocrat’s own political and emergent religious manifesto. They also
bestowed upon Henry everything he sought: exalted stature, additional grandeur to the throne of England and his perceived rightful place on the European political stage. Most importantly of all, the Act made it a crime to acknowledge papal authority over his realm.

Away from the noisy cockpit of religion and politics, Cromwell was still the man to consult if you were experiencing any kind of problem with the King’s administration. Stephen Gardiner, Henry’s principal secretary, was appointed Bishop of Winchester in succession to Wolsey in 1531 and was to become one of Cromwell’s greatest and most devious enemies in the years ahead. In June 1532, he complained to Cromwell about having to pay too much to the King for his new diocese:

Truth it is, I would be glad to pay nothing … Wherefore now all is in your hands. The delay of my end depends only upon you. In concluding, I pray you remember that I receive less of the bishopric of Winchester by £1,300 a year than Bishop Fox did and owe twice as much as he was worth when he died, if his inventory was true.

I pray you good master Cromwell, determine you the end for my part, as shall be agreeable with the king’s pleasure, in such ways as I should not seem to huck [haggle or bargain] or stike [delay] to pay my duty.
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YOUR LOVING AND ASSURED FRIEND
STEPHEN WINTON [WINCHESTER
]

Within two months, Gardiner again sought Cromwell’s help, and his latest appeal indicated that the lawyer’s duties had now extended into diplomatic affairs: ‘I send to you herewith … the treaty with France and a commission signed, ready to be sealed. To the doing whereof, you must necessarily help or it shall, I fear me, be undone. I pray you also to send to Dr Oliver or Dr Oliver to be with the king on Sunday to [act] as notaries at the taking of the oath.’
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Moreover, Cromwell had attended Henry’s fifteen glittering and flamboyant days of meetings with his French counterpart Francis I in Boulogne in October 1532 and had earned high praise from both monarchs.
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It was one of the very few occasions when Cromwell left the shores of England after entering royal service: he much preferred to remain always at the heart of power.

Meanwhile, time was running out to finally resolve Henry’s ‘Great Matter’.

Anne Boleyn, who had accompanied the King to France amongst his two-thousand-strong entourage, found herself pregnant some time in the middle of January 1533 after finally yielding to her royal lover’s efforts to bed her the previous month. Doubtlessly delighted at the prospect of fatherhood again, Henry could no longer tolerate diplomatic procrastination over his divorce, or dally further in achieving his personal desires. He secretly married Anne on 25 January in the high chamber over the Holbein Gate in his new Palace of Westminster, the ceremony probably conducted by one of his chaplains, Rowland Lee.

The King had irrevocably turned his back on the Pope and the rest of Christendom and now looked to Cromwell to construct the legal means to break with Rome and allow his divorce solely on the authority of his Church in England.

A new champion had arrived to defend Henry: Thomas Cranmer, still only an archdeacon,
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was nominated to the see of Canterbury, left vacant by the death of William Warham the previous August. His selection might, in part, be laid at Cromwell’s door: he was fully aware that Cranmer had long supported the notion of the divorce being decided under English jurisdiction.
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This information had probably been passed on to Henry when the names for a new primate were being considered. Clement VII in Rome innocently – perhaps naively – approved the choice and issued the necessary nine papal bulls on 21–2 February 1533, allowing the consecration of Cranmer as primate of England to go ahead on 30 March in St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster.

The new archbishop wasted no time in raising the question of the divorce and wrote to Henry on 11 April from his palace at Lambeth across the Thames from Westminster: ‘It may please … your most excellent majesty … to license me, according to my office and duty to proceed to the examination, final determination and judgment in the said great cause touching your highness.’
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Henry naturally agreed, licensing Cranmer

to proceed … not doubting but that you will have God and the justice of the said cause only before your eyes and not to regard any earthly or
worldly affection therein. For assuredly, the thing which we most covet in this world is so to proceed, in all our acts and doings, as may be most acceptable to the pleasure of Almighty God, our Creator, and to the wealth, honour of us, our succession and posterity.
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The King also seized this opportunity to underline the new reality of religious authority in England. So there could be no doubts, he told Cranmer that the office of Archbishop of Canterbury and its powers existed ‘only by the sufferances of us and our progenitors’ and ‘you be,
under us, by God’s calling and ours
[emphasis mine], the most principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction within this our realm’.
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Cromwell had meanwhile been busy drafting two new uncompromising parliamentary bills: the first established special meetings of the clerical Convocation to sit in judgment, without appeal, on the King’s twenty-four years of marriage to Catherine of Aragon. There were no scruples about prejudging its deliberations or decision. The royal union was now considered ‘definitely, clearly and absolutely invalid’. The second bill freed Henry to marry again.

With the cold clarity of a lawyer’s mind, Cromwell had carefully considered every detail, every ramification: Queen Catherine was now to be styled ‘the Princess’ and the succession to the throne of England would henceforth be based solely on any offspring of Henry and Anne Boleyn. Princess Mary, the only surviving progeny from the marriage with Catherine, was effectively declared illegitimate. At the last moment, the bills were dropped, but were replaced by the Act of Appeals,
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which effectively prevented Catherine from taking her case to Rome. Nonetheless, on 5 April, the Convocation of Canterbury, meeting at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, decided with some difficulty that Henry’s first marriage was impeded by divine law and that any decisions by the Pope could not, would not, alter that stark fact. Twenty-five brave clerics voted against that decision, including Bishop John Fisher, who was promptly arrested for his defiance.
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An ecclesiastical court was established on 10 May at Dunstable in Bedfordshire, close to where Catherine had been exiled and well away from any raucous protests by her supporters amongst the London mob.
Inevitably she refused to appear before this tribunal, presided over by Cranmer, and was promptly declared ‘contumacious’ – wilfully disobedient to the court’s powers and jurisdiction. On 23 May 1533, the King’s proctor, John Tregonwell, quickly dashed off a dispatch to Cromwell, announcing that the inescapable divorce had finally been granted:

This shall advertise you that my Lord of Canterbury this day at ten of the clock before noon, has given a sentence in this great cause, whereby he has declared the matrimony to be against the laws of God and [has] therefore divorced the king’s highness from the noble lady Catherine.

My lord of Canterbury has used himself in this matter very honourably. And to say the truth, every man (sent hither by the king’s grace) has handled himself with as much diligence … in this as any men might have done.

We trust that a sentence shall be given for the king’s second contract of matrimony before the feast of Pentecost.
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Cranmer himself wrote to Henry that day with the news ‘that I have given sentence in your grace’s great and weighty cause’ and asking what his pleasure was regarding his marriage to Anne, ‘for the time of [her] coronation is so instant and so near at hand, that the matter requires good expedition’.
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The court decided that the marriage between Henry and Catherine of Aragon was and always had been unlawful; they should certainly no longer cohabit as man and wife and both were now free to marry again. One of them, of course, already had.

Five days later, Cranmer at Lambeth confirmed Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn: the coronation, arranged for Whit Sunday, 1 June 1533, could go ahead. She was six months pregnant and despite her opulent flowing robes, her condition was very obvious. She left her state apartments in the Tower of London at ten o’clock

in a [horse-drawn] open litter, so that all might see her … [preceded] by the cavalry, all in very fine order and richly bedecked. Then came the gentlemen of rank and then all the ladies and gentlemen on horseback and in [carriages] very brave.

The queen was dressed in a robe of crimson brocade covered with
precious stones and round her neck she wore a string of pearls larger than chick-peas and a jewel of diamonds of great value.

On her head she bore a wreath in the fashion of a crown of immense worth and in her hand she carried some flowers.

As she progressed through the London streets, en route to Westminster, she ‘kept turning her face from one side to the other, [but] there were not, I think, ten people who greeted her with “God save you!” as they used to when the sainted Queen [Catherine] passed by’, reported a not entirely impartial eyewitness.
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When her procession reached Westminster Hall, the waiting Henry took her into his arms and enquired how she liked the look of London. She answered: ‘I liked the city well enough but I saw a great many caps on heads and heard but few tongues.’