Cromwell, Thomas

Cromwell, Thomas (c.1485–1540). Thomas Cromwell was the second of the great ministers to whom Henry VIII gave much trust and an imposing array of offices; he was the one most personally associated with the programme which made Henry VIII supreme head of the church in England.

1. Early career

Thomas Cromwell was born c.1485, the son of a Putney cloth-worker. In his early life he followed the French campaigns in Italy, and somehow acquired a broad education including some knowledge of business and law. He sat in the 1523 Parliament and entered the service of Thomas Wolsey, assisting in the dissolutions of religious houses used to endow Wolsey's college and school. Though he stayed with Wolsey longer than most after his disgrace, he escaped the wreck to join a group of intellectuals and administrators, including Edward Foxe, Thomas Audley, and Richard Rich, who were working on plans for Henry VIII to escape from the impasse in his divorce negotiations.

Cromwell became master of the king's jewel house in 1532 and principal royal secretary in 1534. Though he was thereafter to accumulate other offices including chancellor of the Exchequer, master of the rolls, lord privy seal, and great chamberlain, it was on his role as royal secretary, to which he gave unprecedented political importance, that his power rested. Thanks to the survival of vast amounts of his personal papers, seized before his attainder in 1540, his extensive contacts across the entire Tudor state can be documented.

2. Cromwell and the royal supremacy, 1532–1536

It is not certain exactly what role Cromwell played in the birth of Henry VIII's campaign for supremacy over the church. The arguments used to justify this campaign antedated Cromwell's rise to influence. Nevertheless, it seems likely that Cromwell drew the strands together, eliminated the more obviously implausible proofs, and recognized that parliamentary statute—hitherto used only for issues where church affairs bordered on secular concerns—offered the most public and authoritative way to announce and embody the new changes. Cromwell is thought to have been responsible for drafting the Supplication of the Commons against the Ordinaries in 1532. This parliamentary petition resurrected the protests against church courts originally made in 1529 in the attack on Wolsey; it was used to secure the submission of the clergy, which finally subjected canon law to secular review. Cromwell certainly took charge of the drafting of the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome (1533) and the Act of Supremacy (1534).

Parliamentary statute was only one of several means Cromwell found to secure consent to the supremacy. Using Berthelet, the royal printer, he saw to the publication of a sheaf of propaganda tracts, written by a range of intellectual clients and allies in both English and Latin, which justified the royal proceedings to readers of every level of education. Just as important was Cromwell's meticulous and ruthless treatment of high-profile opponents of the policy. The long examinations of Sir Thomas More, and his eventual trial and conviction for treasonably refusing the oath of supremacy, testify to Cromwell's anxiety to be seen to observe the forms of law; this trait can also be seen in his efforts to secure convictions of those implicated in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536.

3. Cromwell and the Reformation

For all his ruthlessness, Cromwell gave away a hostage to fortune by his efforts to propel Henrician religious policy in a moderately protestant direction. As royal vicegerent in spirituals from 1535 Cromwell was responsible for the Ten Articles of 1536 and the royal injunctions of 1536 and 1538, which systematically attacked catholic teaching on works-righteousness, the cult of saints, offerings for the dead, holy relics and shrines, and religious festivals. On a wider front, Cromwell patronized ideas for social reform, especially improvements to poor relief and economic welfare schemes, similar to those being promoted in Europe at the same time. Though largely unsuccessful in the 1530s, these projects anticipated parts of the successful Tudor Poor Law reforms of the 1570s.

4. Cromwell and faction, 1536–1540

Thomas Cromwell never enjoyed the sort of ascendancy in Henry VIII's councils held by Cardinal Wolsey. The last four years of his life were a constant struggle to overcome rivals. Using parliamentary Acts of attainder he secured the judicial killing successively of Anne Boleyn and her household (1536), and the Courtenay and Pole families (1538). By this period Cromwell was seeking an alliance with pro-protestant princes in Germany who belonged to neither the French nor the Habsburg allegiance. In 1540 he brought about the disastrous marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves in pursuit of this policy. He had even intervened to protect preachers at Calais who were almost certainly pushing a harder protestant line than royal policy allowed. In self-defence he tried to accuse the lord deputy of Calais (who knew of his dealings there) of treason. Political and religious enemies led by the Norfolk and Bishop Stephen Gardiner momentarily gained the king's ear and convinced Henry that Cromwell was not only a traitor but an ultra-protestant ‘sacramentarian’ heretic; he was condemned untried by the weapon of parliamentary attainder which he had himself used so often, and executed on 28 July 1540.

5. Assessment

Thomas Cromwell presents the paradox of a statesman of great breadth of vision, who pursued his goals with a degree of judicial brutality only previously seen in times of civil war. Many of his policies display pragmatic calculations of factional advantage as much as, or more than, political principle. His creation of the courts of revenue now looks more like wasteful inflation of his own patronage than modern ‘bureaucratic’ innovation. The Privy Council was conjured up to throw a smoke-screen over the Cromwell clique's role in government in 1536, rather than to create an efficient executive committee of the crown. Yet after the bloody backbiting of the 1530s was over, many of his achievements were rediscovered and adopted to become part of the foundations of early modern government.

Euan Cameron

Bibliography

Beckingsale, B. W. , Thomas Cromwell (1978).