Tudor monarch King Henry VIII has rightly been portrayed as narcissistic, cruel and vindictive. A tyrant, and especially in his last 10 years, a murderous monster. Allowing for the different attitudes of different times, this is largely true. But as so often when monarchs or other heads of state are involved, many people then (understandably) and even today (less so) prefer to blame ‘evil counsellors’ for the problems. It handily absolves the perpetrators of blame for their policies or actions, and preserves any fragile belief in the legitimacy and laws of the constitution. We should always avoid it.
Servants of the state
Cardinal Wolsey and especially Thomas Cromwell have
suffered in public perception over the years. Wolsey as Lord Chancellor was
effectively chief minister under Henry until his fall in late 1529. He had
great capacity for work and organised the machinery of the state on both a
secular and religious level. An administrative and political genius, he built a
team of assistants and advisers to form the core of the Tudor government. He
failed in the end to procure Henry his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. This was
the reason for his downfall.
Cromwell had worked on smallish scale deals, and led
an embassy to Rome for some merchants in Boston, Lincolnshire. Established in
London as a legal and political fixer, in 1523 he obtained a seat in the House
of Commons. He soon joined Wolsey. As an Italian speaker, lawyer and
politician, with a foreign banking back story, his range of skills and
experience was pretty useful. But his modest and unconventional background perhaps caused
him to be a late developer - he was about 40 before joining the Cardinal’s
council.
By 1529 Cromwell had become Wolsey’s chief adviser and
secretary. He had a prime role in the dissolution of nearly 30 small
monasteries in the 1520s, raising cash for Wolsey’s new King’s School, Ipswich
and Cardinal College, Oxford. This experience proved useful 10 years later. Like
his boss, he worked noticeably hard across several fields - political, commercial, legal, administrative
and ecclesiastical.
Fate of upstarts
Cromwell has been painted as a rapacious, unprincipled
and cynical thug. But he was clearly loyal to Wolsey after his fall, rather risky in
the circumstances. He was loyal to Henry, too, despite everything. From the
humblest origins, this son of a violent (possibly Irish) Putney publican had as
a young man travelled extensively in Europe working in various jobs, including,
maybe, as a mercenary in Italy. Extremely able, he learned several languages.
Cromwell had a wide circle of friends including notably
the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys. While at times he could show a filthy
temper he was usually kind and encouraging to those in what was effectively a
large extended family living under his roof. His wife and daughters had died of
the sweating sickness in 1529. But he promoted his son Greg, who joined the
nobility in 1537 after marrying Jane Seymour’s sister,
Elizabeth. He trained and encouraged his nephew Richard, too, another who was to prove a useful servant of the state. Finally, Cromwell evidently kept a good table at his residence at London’s Austin
Friars.
Thomas Cromwell attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger
Until the recent Mantel novels and the Schofield and MacCulloch biographies Cromwell endured a bad press. Why? One reason is religion, which in a secular age we tend to underplay. He maintained a close friendship with Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, and his reformist sympathies were evident from the correspondence between the two. In an age when religion was so important and just as Luther’s ideas had kick started Europe’s Reformation, the nascent Protestant tide and its supporters had an active and important fan in Cromwell.
This was all done under Henry’s nose, and probably
without him being fully aware. These Protestant sympathies hardly endeared him
to Catholics later on. Apart from his overtures to German Lutheran princes for
a prospective alliance against France and Spain, he bravely kept contacts with the sort of radical Swiss reformers Henry would have hated. Very risky.
Monastic destruction
In the last five years of his life, when he had taken
on the mantle of Wolsey’s former powers in the church as ‘Vice-Gerent in
Spirituals’ and Vicar General, he drove the Dissolution of the Monasteries. This
act of destruction is, from a modern standpoint, unforgivable, but we might
recognise that the Church largely went along with it at the time. Monastic
foundations had grown rich as landlords and rights holders so among the general
public they were hardly the week’s good cause. Henry wanted the money for the
state - including defence, to build up the navy’s south coast port and military
facilities. Here Cromwell was acting as the royal servant. In fact most of those displaced from the monasteries were given pensions or re-employed in cathedrals, a point often lost in the usual narrative of ruined abbeys and persecuted monks.
Henry VIII attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger
Apart from upsetting Catholics, Cromwell was an upstart without breeding. After Wolsey, the Ipswich butcher’s son, this nobody from a Putney pub was just too much. Pedigree was vital in the culture of the age and his rise attracted a deal of snobbery. In fact English history is full of ‘low born’ characters who made their mark through sheer ability. It was just not easy for aristocrats with a born to rule mentality to accept. It made him enemies. Even more so after he arranged his son Greg's marriage to Queen Jane's sister.
There were of course some real negatives with
Cromwell. Apart from his role in the Dissolution, his enthusiastic procurement
of Henry’s divorce from Catherine and the accompanying legislation to make the
king head of the church and break England’s residual ties with Rome, via the
Acts of Supremacy and Succession, damn him in some eyes. Yet it was the basis
of a successful Elizabethan state. On a secular level his self-enriching and
aggrandisement were legion, if typical for the period. He held scores of offices,
some pretty lucrative. He also acquired land, property and eventually a title,
Earl of Essex.
Cromwell fell out early on with Anne Boleyn - rather uncharacteristic
of him. She made her disdain for him pretty clear. Her destruction was inspired
by the king and organised by Cromwell, once Henry’s mind was made up. It seems Cromwell
had no real motive here other than carrying out the king’s will.
He failed over the Anne of Cleves affair of course, despite it seeming an obvious trap to avoid. But this appeared to have been settled amicably enough when he was suddenly stripped of power at a Council meeting in June 1540. He’d angered the catholic Duke of Norfolk in his general behaviour, and in particular the closing of one Norfolk priory that was still a Howard family cemetery. Attainted, not tried in court. Henry was easily persuaded that his chief minister was a heretic. He was found guilty of this with other trumped up charges, sentenced to death and in July, beheaded.
Cromwell's legacy
Within a few months Henry regretted his killing, accusing ministers of using ‘pretexts and false accusations’ against ‘the most faithful servant I ever had’. And indeed, the list of Cromwell’s achievements is impressive. In 10 years as head of the government he streamlined Crown finances - with a huge windfall from the Dissolution. Realising its potential he used Parliament to push social and economic reforms, including action against enclosures. He promoted religious reformers and had copies of the (largely Tyndale) Great Bible sent to every parish in England. In modernising the government he mainly removed the medieval features of central administration.
Cromwell should be seen as the key figure in the Tudor revolution. He continued Wolsey’s work in building the fabric and structure of the new English state, translating royal supremacy into parliamentary terms. He also trained young Protestants like Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil to become the statesmen who later steered Elizabethan Reformation England. “That is the measure of Cromwell’s greatness, and of the way he shaped the future of these islands”, according to Diarmaid MacCulloch, “a cool, self-contained idealist - the remaker of this realm”.
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