Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (15 page)

Cromwell’s remembrances also indicate the huge range of business passing across his desk; memoranda as to what to do with suspects under examination, with suitors for ecclesiastical benefices, with monastic appointments and for the repair of the king’s navy.
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Very often these notes contain the phrase ‘to know the king’s pleasure’, indicating that the secretary had to exercise a fine judgement as to what things he could process himself and what needed to be referred upwards. This was not straightforward because Henry applied no rules to himself, and was just as likely to be concerned about the disposal of a rectory in Suffolk as he was about the latest twists in Francis I’s diplomacy. It depended upon what had been brought to his attention, and how it had been done, because Cromwell did not have a monopoly of access to the king. The Duke of Suffolk, or the members of the Privy Chamber might approach him via the secretary, or they might speak to him directly during their periods of attendance. A good deal depended upon whether a petitioner felt that he needed help with his suit or not; the more he felt that the king needed to be kept in mind of his request, the more likely he was to seek Cromwell’s help. Miles Spencer offered to pay Cromwell £100 ‘to his use’ for a benefice recently vacated by the death of the Bishop of Chichester. The settlement of debt was a particularly thorny issue, and several suitors wrote to the secretary repeatedly over a number of months concerning sums that were owed them by the Crown.
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These might involve damages awarded by a court and never paid, payments due to the garrison of Calais or the wages of workmen at Westminster or Greenwich. It depended upon which pocket the sums due should be drawn from. In the case of the Exchequer or the main Chamber account, Cromwell would deal with them himself, having checked with the relevant treasurer that the sums involved were actually available. But in the case of moneys to be drawn from the Privy Purse, which would include work on the royal palaces, Henry’s signature might well be required, and that could take time and patience to obtain. It also did not do to assume that the king was ignorant of other payments which had been made from other sources. It would depend on who he had been talking to, and over those conversations Cromwell had no control. It was important never to take Henry for granted, and his relationship with his secretary must have been based on many consultations which were not strictly speaking necessary, but which persuaded him that he was directly involved in the running of the country at a manageable cost in time and effort.
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One of the major decisions of 1536, which involved both Cromwell and the king, was the dissolution of the minor monasteries. The former had been originally of the opinion that this should proceed on an individual basis, as had been done by Wolsey, but by the beginning of 1536 had been persuaded that it would be better done by Act of Parliament. This may well have been for the purpose of demonstrating that the country was behind the king in this exercise of the Royal Supremacy, and Henry would have been easily convinced for the same reason. The reports of the commissioners, who had been visiting the religious houses since the previous year, provided an adequate excuse, and Cromwell was able to prepare a Bill stating that

manifest sin, vicious carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories and other religious houses of monks canons and nuns where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of 12 persons.
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Consequently all religious houses with an income of less than £200 a year were to be dissolved and their assets given to the king. This he was able to steer safely through both houses, and it received the royal assent on 14 April, coming into immediate effect. A companion statute, passed at the same time, established a Court of Augmentations to administer this property on the king’s behalf, and this also bears the unmistakable marks of its origin in the secretary’s office, because it formed a key element in his reorganisation of the financial administration, and because the first officers of the court all had close associations with Cromwell.
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Queen Anne Boleyn was opposed to this secularisation of the monastic properties, arguing forcefully that the proceeds should be used for religious purposes, such as education, and it may be that the new parliament, which met in June, was called partly to resolve this disagreement. If so, it was made redundant by Anne’s fall and execution in May, but was able to occupy itself fruitfully by reorganising the succession. At the same time, the accompanying convocation passed the Ten Articles, which reflected the state of Henry’s thought on the reformation of the Church, and which was pushed through by Cromwell sitting as Viceregent in the upper house. The rank-and-file clergy were required to preach in support of these Articles, and the furious unpopularity of that helps to explain what happened next in Lincolnshire, because in early October the men of Louth, stirred up by a conservative parish priest, rose in rebellion.
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The situation in Louth was complicated by social tensions within the town, and by the arrival of Dr Frankish, the bishop’s commissary, who was probably engaged in the collection of the clerical tenth which had been voted by Parliament. However, he was suspected of having come to arrange a general confiscation of church goods, and possibly the merging of parishes. Consequently he was set upon by an angry mob, and compelled to burn all the books of the ‘new learning’ which he had brought with him.
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At the same time the crowd set out in pursuit of the commissioners who were currently dissolving the nearby nunnery of Legbourne, and who promptly fled the hostile demonstration. Inspired by this success, the following day the men of Louth set off for Caistor, where they succeeded in raising a sympathetic movement, and it began to seem that the whole of that part of Lincolnshire was disaffected. Egged on by their priests, the demonstrators then began to turn their attention to the local gentry, capturing a number of them and forcing them to take an oath to uphold the cause of the commons.
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Some may not have been as reluctant as they later alleged, and as the rebels converged on Lincoln a few days later, they helped to draw up a set of articles which it was agreed should be sent to the king, outlining their grievances and suing for redress.

These articles were a mixture. The first and third dealt with the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the latest tax or ‘quindene’, which they complained would ruin the commons, being payable upon every beast. However the second article protested at the Statute of Uses, which was purely a gentleman’s grievance, and the fourth at the king’s employment of low-born councillors:

Item, we your true subjects think that your Grace take of your council, and being about you such person as are of low birth and small reputation, which hath procured the profits [of the dissolution] most especially for their own advantage, the which we suspect to be the Lord Cromwell and Sir Richard Rich, Chancellor of Augmentations…
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Cromwell thus had the finger of popular disapproval pointed directly at him, and the warning was clear to see. Henry of course responded that no one had the right to tell him how to pick his council, least of all the inhabitants of one of the ‘rudest’ shires in the land, and because its leadership was divided, the Lincolnshire protest made no further progress. Even the more militant of the commons leaders saw themselves as a demonstration, not a rebellion, and the gentry who had been coerced into the leadership were only too anxious to escape from the trap in which they found themselves. So having, as they thought, made their point, the protesters dispersed even before the king’s response arrived, which was just as well because it was less than conciliatory.
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The king had no intention of dismissing either Cromwell or Rich, or Cranmer or Audley, his other councillors who might come within the designation of ‘baseborn’. He would not be bound, he declared later, to be served by noblemen, but would choose such men as might be most suitable for the tasks he had in mind. His authority alone should be sufficient to ensure that they were obeyed.
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There the matter might have rested if it had not been for the fact that the disaffection had already spread across the Humber into Yorkshire. There it quickly assumed a more formidable aspect, thanks largely to the leadership provided by Robert Aske. Aske was lawyer and a dependant of the Percy Earls of Northumberland, who felt very strongly about the direction of the Crown’s religious policy, and particularly about the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was he who chose the evocative description of the movement as a ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, and the badge of the five wounds of Christ under which they marched. The Pilgrim’s hymn, adopted at the same time, started with the lines

Christ crucified
for thy woundes wide
Us commons guide,
That pilgrims be…
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Again they saw themselves as a protest rather than a rebellion, and followed the same strategy as their Lincolnshire colleagues in recruiting the local gentry to their cause. They seemed both more numerous and more purposeful than their Lincolnshire counterparts, and Henry was constrained to take them more seriously. They took York without encountering any resistance, and advanced to Pontefract, 30,000 strong, at the end of November, capturing the castle there and recruiting Lord Darcy to their cause.
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Although the Earl of Shrewsbury remained loyal, he had only a tenth of that number under his command, and the king was unable to raise an adequate force in time to confront the ‘rebels’. He therefore sent the Duke of Norfolk north with power to negotiate, and the duke was presented at Doncaster on 4 December with the so-called Pontefract Articles, embodying the Pilgrims’ demands. These were more direct, and more political, than those of Lincoln, starting with demand that the Royal Supremacy be abrogated and the Lady Mary restored to her rightful place in the succession. They then proceeded to the dissolution of the abbeys, the restoration of the friars, and to the Act of First Fruits and Tenths. Article 7 read, ‘To have the heretics, bishops and temporal [men] to have condign punishment by fire or otherwise’, and Article 8,

to have the Lord Cromwell, the Lord Chancellor, and Sir Richard Rich, Knight, to have condign punishment as the subvertors of the good laws of this realm, and maintainers of the false sect of those heretics, and the first inventers and bringers in of them.
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The last verse of the Pilgrims’ hymn ran,

Crim, Crame and Riche,
With the ILL and the Lich,
As some men teach
God them amend
And that ask may
Without delay
Here make a stay
And well to end…

‘Crim’ is undoubtedly Cromwell. The duke may not have been altogether displeased by this fierce criticism of his successful rivals for the king’s ear, but the most that he was empowered to concede was a general pardon and a parliament somewhere in the North, in Nottingham or York, to discuss the rest of their agenda. With this, Aske, mindful of his pose as a protester, professed himself satisfied, and after a sharp tussle among the Pilgrims’ leaders, he was able to prevail. The rebels, many of whom were far from home and anxious to return, agreed to disperse and so lost their critical advantage.
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Aske meanwhile accepted an invitation to go to court and discuss the Pilgrims’ grievances face to face.

Throughout these events, Cromwell kept a low profile. There is no reason to suppose that he lost his place as the king’s right-hand man, or even that his advice on how to deal with the Pilgrimage was ignored, but he played no part in negotiating with the rebels either in Lincolnshire or in Yorkshire. Henry was sensible enough to realise that working through him in such a context would have been unacceptable, and he was kept in the background, working through the Duke of Suffolk and other front-line noblemen. He even kept out of the way while Aske and his colleagues were at court, to avoid giving additional provocation. Had Parliament been held at York, it is difficult to see how Henry could have avoided sacrificing him, but it never was. A relatively insignificant rising in Yorkshire, led by Sir Francis Bigod in January 1537, absolved the king of all undertakings, and he found pretexts to punish all the leaders of the original Pilgrimage. Lord Darcy was beheaded in May, and Robert Aske hanged from the walls of York in July.
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There were minor disturbances in Cumberland and Westmorland thereafter, but nothing to cause the government the anxiety of the pre-Christmas period. So Henry escaped what was in some ways the most perilous crisis of his reign, without any obligation to dismiss his most valued servant. Indeed he was on record as saying that ‘he will not forgo my Lord Privy Seal for no man living’. Cromwell was no soldier and could not have been used in the way in which the Duke of Norfolk served, but it is clear that he wrote some of Norfolk’s instructions, and advised the king when it was expedient to make concessions, especially to prevent these from making any allusions to himself, or Cranmer or Rich, or any other servants who had been vilified. He even criticised Norfolk, in the king’s name of course, for being soft on the monasteries that had been involved in the rising, and on papists in general; a rebuke which evoked a furious protest from the duke, who probably detected its origin, and struck back in the only way in which he was able.
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The execution of the leaders drew a line under the events of the Pilgrimage without in any way diminishing the popular hostility towards Cromwell, or his awareness of it.

However, it was not only in internal policy that the king leaned on his Lord Privy Seal. He was equally crucial in maintaining that strict neutrality in the affairs of France and the Empire, which was the key to Henry’s foreign policy during the years 1535–37. He toyed with the idea of a Lutheran alliance, both in 1533 and 1535, but in both cases drew back probably on account of the king’s reluctance to commit himself. Henry on the whole leaned towards France in these diplomatic exchanges, while Cromwell leaned towards the Empire, and this tension kept the declared policy in a suitable balance.
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When open war broke out between the rivals in the summer of 1535, it was expressed in a variety of subtle ways to keep the antagonism on the boil. Henry was always sufficiently concerned about his Continental relations to keep them in the front of his mind, and his treaty with Lübeck in 1534 was definitely a gesture against the Emperor, just at the time when he was rejecting diplomatic overtures from France over the marriage of the Lady Mary.
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