Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII (28 page)

It was not always thus, and when a riot broke out at Taunton in April 1536 it was very differently handled. This was provoked by the activities of a purveyance commission, which was buying up grain at a time of dearth. The rioters were gaoled, but an armed demonstration demanded their release, threatening the magistrates. The trouble spread to Frome, where the disaffected were confronted by a local gentleman, Robert Liversiche, who was well supported. Their courage failed them and they laid down their arms without a fight.
²¹
However the threat had appeared to be real, and when Cromwell was informed, on 7 April he wrote ordering them to be dealt with severely. In the king’s name he issued a commission of oyer and terminer, which sat in judgement before the end of the month, and sentenced twelve of them to death. They were executed in three different places over the next couple of weeks. Fifty others were also condemned, but being penitent and not ringleaders they were allowed to buy their pardons; personal recognisances of £20 and £10 in sureties being required from each of them.
²²
Henry was very pleased with the prompt and severe response to this abortive riot, and in the light of what was to happen at Louth only six months later, one can see why. Cromwell was quite prepared to act ruthlessly, even when political and religious issues were not involved, but he was always concerned to use the due process of the law. At Bristol the situation was different again, because there the troubles were caused almost exclusively by religion and were stirred up by the arrival of Hugh Latimer, the reforming preacher who was favoured by the town authorities. Latimer had already been censured by convocation, but that did not prevent the mayor from appointing him to preach the Lent sermons in 1533. The Bristol conservatives struck back by importing William Hubberdyne, a popular preacher whose appeal rivalled Latimer’s own, and battle royal was joined, setting the town by the ears.
²³
The chancellor of the diocese then inhibited them both, and informed Cromwell of his action. The latter responded by upholding his ban on Hubberdyne because the conservatives were notorious partisans of Queen Catherine, but ordering that on Latimer to be lifted. The remaining conservatives stepped into Hubberdyne’s shoes, however, and the battle continued. By 5 June the reformers were sufficiently incensed, and sufficiently sure of themselves, to send a complaint to the king’s council, which was promptly referred to Cromwell. According to the protesters, Hubberdyne, before he was inhibited, had said that the Pope was above all kings, and that in matters of the faith he could not err. He had also claimed that the English Bible led men into heresy.
²⁴
Although he swiftly presented Cromwell with his side of the case, claiming malice, the secretary was not convinced and on 4 July ordered him to the Tower. On the 10th the mayor wrote to Cromwell, thanking him for the prompt action that he had taken. At the same time the secretary ordered a commission to be appointed to examine the Bristol stirs, and carefully excluded known partisans such as the mayor, who would otherwise have been expected to serve. Instead he chose five local worthies under the chairmanship of the Abbot of St Augustine’s, and they began their work on 6 July.
²⁵
In several sessions between 9 and 11 July a large number of witnesses came forward, and although the commissioners’ powers covered both parties, all the testimony was against Hubberdyne, who, it was claimed, had reviled the men of the new learning and stated that to deny the Pope’s authority was heresy. In sending their report to Cromwell, the commissioners admitted that the evidence with which they had been presented was biased, but unless the king provided a remedy, ‘more inconvenience’ was likely to ensue.
²⁶
Hubberdyne remained in the Tower, and Latimer, presumably on Cromwell’s orders, ceased to preach in Bristol and went to work under Cranmer’s direct authority in London. The situation in Bristol was pacified, at least for the time being.

Cromwell was not, therefore, concerned to harry dissidents, even those who mixed a measure of politics with their religious protest, and certainly not those whose zeal for reform outran their discretion. What he was concerned to do was to ensure the preservation of the king’s peace and good order in the realm, and to punish severely those who threatened that peace. This could involve some difficult decisions. Mrs Amadas, for example, the widow of his predecessor as Master of the Jewel House, was something of a wise woman who claimed to have been in the prophesying business for twenty years. In 1533 she declared that her ‘book of prophecy’ had told her that the king was the moldwarp, and that he would be banished from the realm before midsummer.
²⁷
Her sayings rambled on obscurely, but ended with some straightforward abuse of Queen Anne and Thomas Cromwell. The latter was called upon to investigate and had her to the Tower for interrogation, but decided that she was mad and took no further action. Given that shortly after Elizabeth Barton was executed for saying much the same thing under the guise of divine revelation, Mrs Amadas could consider herself fortunate, but then the king himself did not become interested in her utterances. A similar case which ended very differently was that of John Dobson, the vicar of Muston in Yorkshire. As a priest he had a certain prestige which made his prophecies the more dangerous, and when he forecast that the king would be driven from the realm and that the Emperor would restore the true faith, he was listened to. ‘When Crumme is brought low, then we shall begin Christ’s Cross row,’ he is alleged to have said, with a clear reference to the secretary.
²⁸
Unfortunately for Dobson, he uttered these opinions within the jurisdiction of the Council of the North and in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a time and a place of particular sensitivity. Tunstall reported him to Cromwell, and the latter told him to send the vicar for trial. He was convicted and executed at the Lent Assizes in York in 1538.
²⁹
Many other examples of soothsayers and rumourmongers could be cited, but what is clear in every case is that Cromwell took the time and the trouble to examine it carefully, and based his judgement on the best evidence that was available. If he was not satisfied, then he went on investigating until he was, and came to his decision on the basis of the danger which the person or persons represented to the security of the state. In the first instance the information was almost always volunteered; only in a minority of cases did it come from his own servants or from professional informers. The fact that it was often malicious merely made his task more difficult, and led him to seek circumstantial confirmation, but what he never did was to treat accusations as proven without examination, and given the number of denunciations with which he was constrained to deal, that is a great argument for his conscientiousness.

Cromwell, however, was more than a scrupulous administrator of the law. He was a statesman with a vision of how the kingdom should be run, and this involved defending the king’s honour and interests. In some respects this was relatively simple. He never, for instance, took an initiative in foreign policy without Henry’s express knowledge and support.
³⁰
This did not prevent him from having his preferences and there is plenty of evidence that he would sooner have had an Imperial alliance than a French one. He went out of his way to reassure Eustace Chapuys, Charles’s ambassador in England, about the king’s intentions in respect of his daughter, Mary, putting the most favourable gloss on Henry’s frequently unsympathetic actions, and (with Chapuys’s help) rescuing her when the crunch came over her submission to the king’s will in 1536.
³¹
As relations with the Emperor eased after Catherine’s death, he did his best to steer Henry in the direction of an Imperial alliance, but drew back when he encountered the king’s obstinate refusal to go down that road. Henry preferred to see himself in the role of mediator in the perpetual conflict between France and the Empire, and did not want therefore to appear too close to either. While Anne Boleyn was queen, and Catherine was alive, he was inclined to favour France, as the only source of diplomatic support which he was likely to get against the papal/Imperial alliance, but when they were both gone he allowed Cromwell to make overtures to the Imperial camp, and encouraged his amicable relations with Chapuys.
³²
The ambassador was happy to enjoy such a position, but he never really trusted the secretary, or knew quite what to make of him. His reports are full of their conversations, where apparently confidential information was passed, but Chapuys was never sure that he was not being taken for a ride, particularly where the French were concerned, and he was right to be cautious. This was particularly the case in 1538 and 1539, when Cromwell was urging the king into an alliance with the League of Schmalkalden as an alternative to France, but was trying to stay friendly with the Emperor at the same time. This was a delicate diplomatic juggling act which was never likely to succeed, but it was the king, not Cromwell, who brought that negotiation to an end by refusing the terms which the Germans offered.
³³
The alliance with Cleves was an alternative, and although the idea for that may have come from Stephen Vaughn via Cromwell, it would be fictitious to claim that Henry was not fully behind it. At the time the king welcomed the initiative, and encouraged it in every way. From 1533 until the early months of 1540, the secretary was the king’s first line of defence in all diplomatic encounters. He guided the council, and frequently interviewed ambassadors ahead of their audiences with the monarch, but it would be a mistake to suppose that he controlled foreign policy. The attempt to intervene in the dispute between Lübeck and the Danes over the Danish succession in 1538 was almost certainly the king’s idea, and threw his relations with the Emperor into confusion for several months as Chapuys tried to work out what he was trying to achieve.
³⁴
With Scotland, on the other hand, Cromwell had a freer hand. Henry’s intention was to assert his long-standing claim to feudal suzerainty over the northern kingdom, but there was little opportunity for that as long as James V lived, and he concentrated his efforts on attempting the persuade the Scots to follow his lead against the papacy. That was certainly in accordance with Cromwell’s advice but enjoyed little success, and the day-by-day diplomacy which accompanied those efforts was left largely to the secretary. Cromwell was also responsible for managing the borders. The wardens on the spot reported to him, and badgered him for the money necessary to pay their soldiers.
³⁵
With such details Henry had no desire to be concerned.

Cromwell’s statesmanship is less obvious in his handling of foreign policy than in his dealings with Parliament, where he was responsible for a genuine revolution. As we have seen, he first sat in the House of Commons in 1523, and his ironic comment on the proceedings there led many generations of historians to believe that he held that institution in contempt. However this was no pompous or weighty judgement, but a humorous observation born of a practical man’s exasperation with the long-windedness of his colleagues, and perhaps of frustration that the potentialities of Parliament were so little realised in that somewhat abortive session.
³⁶
In 1529, at the crisis of his career, he deliberately chose to enter the House again, not with the intention of evading his enemies, but with a view to relaunching himself in public life. As he told George Cavendish later, ‘he once adventured to put in his foot where he trusted shortly to be better regarded before all was done’.
³⁷
As well as talking out the Bill of Attainder against Wolsey, he threw himself into the committee work of the House, and soon attracted a disproportionate share, because of the reluctance of other members to serve. By 1531, when he was in the royal service but not yet conspicuous, reports of his activity were spreading far and wide. Lists of things to be done dating from this time and corrected drafts of Bills survive among his papers. Entries in the Lords Journals show him bearing Bills from the Lower House on numerous occasions, indicative of his active involvement with the relevant committee, and observations in the letters of his contemporaries confirm the same impression. It would be an exaggeration to claim that this was evidence of statesmanship, but it does show him to have been an active and well thought of parliamentary politician.
³⁸
Above all he had grasped the fact that Parliament was the highest source of law in the land. The common law was customary in origin, and derived its authority from ancient prescription. For centuries the only method of amending or adding to the law had been by judicial interpretation, but by 1485 it had been accepted that Parliament, as the representative institution of the realm, also had that right. Statute, therefore, which represented the consent of the king, Lords and Commons, was a true vehicle of legislation. The Acts of Provisors and Praemunire had established the fact that its power extended to those border lands between ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction which were in dispute between the two, and that ecclesiastical property fell within the remit of the king’s laws.
³⁹
Statute was also the only method of approving royal taxation because it was an ancient maxim
quod omnes tetigit
,
ad omnibus approbetur
(that which touches all must be approved by all), and the commons were the principal taxpayers. It was generally accepted, however, that statute could not touch the spirituality, nor legislate on matters of the faith, such as the authority of the papacy. It was that boundary which Cromwell, using the undefined legislative power of Parliament, planned to cross, and did so with the Act in Restraint of Appeals.

However, it was not only the Church which felt his enthusiasm for legislation. Henry convened eight sessions in as many years while Cromwell was his chief minister, and those sessions saw the passage of 333 Acts, of which about 200 bear the unmistakable marks of his influence. This compares with 200 acts, of which 148 can be deemed public, during the twenty-two years of Henry VII’s reign, and 444 during the forty-five years of Elizabeth.
⁴⁰
There is no doubt that Cromwell preferred statute to any other form of lawmaking, basing royal proclamations on statute whenever possible. In 1535 for example, when Parliament was not sitting, he had an urgent need to prohibit the export of coin, and consulted the judges, who dug out an Act of the reign of Richard II which served his purpose. In spite of a judicial opinion to the effect that proclamations were ‘of as good effect as any law made by Parliament’, Cromwell was not reassured.
⁴¹
He enacted the new ordinances for Calais in 1535 and in 1539 caused the famous Act of Proclamations to be passed. In spite of superficial appearances, this Act was not intended to give proclamations the force of law, but only to improve their implementation, stating that the king and his council ‘may set forth at all times by authority of this act his proclamations’. It was a general empowering Act, and as such subject to repeal, a fate which befell it in 1547.
⁴²
Neither the passing of the Act nor its repeal had any noticeable effect upon the use of proclamations as executive instruments, which reached a peak under the minority government of Edward VI as conducted by Protector Somerset (1547–49). That Cromwell did not trust the interpretative power of the judges is evident from his care to include treason by words in the Act of 1534, because constructive treasons had been drawn out of the Act of 1352 in the course of the fifteenth century.
⁴³
This statute also provided legal safeguards for the king’s unprecedented position as head of the Church, declaring that