For six years, Thomas Cromwell was palpably and unmistakably the ruler of England—subject to the approval of the king. For the four years preceding, it is practically certain that he both suggested and organised Henry’s policy. England has never known a statesman so irresistible, so relentless, while his power lasted; nor one whose downfall was more sudden or so universally applauded. He is the most terrifying because he is the most passionless figure in our history. He wrought like fate, with a perfect disregard of all human sentiment and emotion; a scourge of God. Not, however, a mere scourge like the earthquake and the pestilence; not a mere destroyer; for, while he shattered, he built. But for Cromwell, it may be doubted whether Elizabeth’s England could have come into being.

For a second time Henry VIII. found the man most consummately fitted to minister to his own ambition; to plan, to organise, to smite—and to be smitten. As Wolsey, having accomplished his work, fell because he failed to engineer his master’s matrimonial projects, so Cromwell, having accomplished his work, fell in attempting to engineer a matrimonial project which displeased his master. Both the great ministers were men of humble birth at the best: popular report gave out that the father of the one was a butcher, that of the other a blacksmith. The one mounted to power, the last and perhaps the greatest product of the old relation between Church and State; the other was the first layman who, lacking even gentle blood, achieved the highest position in the State, and shattered her old relation with the Church. The reign of Henry VIII. abounds in huge ironies: it is not perhaps the least of them that the Hammer of the Monks passed into the service of the king from the service of the Cardinal.

Diversities in the judgments passed on Thomas Cromwell are less marked than in the case of most of the statesmen portrayed in this volume. There is no possibility of questioning the utter absence of moral scruple in the methods by which he pursued his ends, the completeness with which he subordinated every other consideration to their achievement, the vast organising power he displayed. That he was actuated by a moral repulsion to the Roman system, or a religious enthusiasm for the purity of the Gospel, is a view that can only be put forward on the sweeping assumption that everybody concerned in the Reformation at all was so actuated, except feeble or wicked bigots who clung to the old order. Cromwell as a Protestant Martyr is very much like Frederic the Great as Protestant Hero. Every one who believes that it was good for England to reject the Papal authority and to subordinate the Church in England to the State, is bound to consider that the man who did these things for England rendered his country a great service. Every one who holds the contrary view as to the Papacy and the Church must hold that he rendered her almost immeasurable dis-service. But these are judgments not on the man but on the circumstances.

Yet there is one very curious fact about Thomas Cromwell. Although he set his mark indelibly on the history of his country, and in spite of the exceptionally dramatic course of his career, his name seems to convey very little to most Englishmen—save as the secretary whom Wolsey charged to “fling away ambition.” Oliver looms so large that it is difficult to grasp the idea that another person of the same name also loomed large a hundred years earlier. No playwright or novelist has made him a central figure in drama or novel. Yet it may at least be argued that of the ten characters here examined, his personality was the one which most decisively influenced the course of history.

II
EARLIER CAREER AND RISE TO POWER

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there was dwelling in Putney one Walter Cromwell, alias Smyth, who appears to have been a brewer, smith, and armourer, and incidentally to have been a very troublesome person with a taste for breaking the law in minor matters. There is no doubt that Walter was the father of Thomas: whose birth conjecture places about 1485. Down to 1512, the accounts of Cromwell’s life rest entirely on later gossip, sometimes professedly derived from remarks which he himself let fall. All reports, however, agree in saying that he went to Italy when very young—“fleeing from his father,” one of them avers. It needs no evidence to show that he had a remarkably enterprising and self-reliant spirit, and if he did run away from a turbulent parent to seek his fortune by his wits, it was a course thoroughly consonant with his subsequent career. The reports state further that he served as a man-at-arms under an Italian nobleman, and with the French in 1503. Allowing for presumable inaccuracies of detail, there is no reason to doubt that he tried his hand as a trader of sorts in the Low Countries and in Italy. There is, however, definite ground for believing that he returned to England about 1512, and married the next year. If Mistress Elizabeth Wykeys did not bring something fairly handsome in the way of a fortune, Thomas Cromwell must have strangely forgotten himself. For some years, it may be affirmed with confidence that he took part in business as a wool-merchant or “shearman,” combining this trade with practice as an attorney. Documentary evidence puts it effectively beyond doubt that he was professionally known as a man of law to Wolsey in 1520. In 1523 he sat in the House of Commons as a Member of that Parliament which, under Sir Thomas More’s Speakership, declined to discuss the voting of a subsidy in the Cardinal’s presence.

By this time we are getting away from the region of conjecture, anecdote, and hearsay, into that of definite records. What we know of Cromwell’s share in this Parliament is derived from two documents; one, a letter of his own, in which he gibes at his fellow members for having babbled at large about everything under the sun without doing anything. “I have endured,” he says, “a Parliament which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, temperance, treason, murder, felony, and also how a commonwealth might be edified and continued within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do; that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.’ If Carlyle had lighted upon that, how his heart would have rejoiced! The second document, however, suggests that if Cromwell, like Carlyle, had no great opinion of talkers, he meant his own voice to be heard: since it is almost certainly the MS. draft of a speech which he prepared for delivery in that same Parliament. The speech is exceedingly clever, and most diplomatically expressed—but is dead against Wolsey’s subsidy. Perhaps he thought better of it, and kept it in MS. If not, it was an audacious speech to make, for a man who was getting in touch with the Cardinal, from whose good graces much might be hoped. Still, a like audacity paid him well some six years later. It may have been carefully calculated in both instances; but in both there were big risks.@

At any rate, his favour with the great minister increased. He dropped his wool-business, extended his private legal practice, was entrusted with much legal work by the Cardinal, and became known as the person through whom suitors to Wolsey might find it advisable to make their applications. It was not long before he found, in his capacity as a man of law, congenial employment in the suppression of small religious Houses, and the appropriation of their endowments to Wolsey’s colleges at Ipswich and Oxford. This business he did to the entire satisfaction of his master; and since he never at any time hesitated to accept or extract material contributions to his private exchequer from any one concerned, his accumulations grew pari passu with his favour. So also, incidentally, did his unpopularity, for which he cared absolutely nothing. His confidential relations with the apparently all-powerful minister made him a person of considerable though unofficial importance; bringing him in contact with people of high position. Thus in 1527 he was well-known to Reginald Pole (afterwards Cardinal), whom he counselled to drop high-flown ideas, and learn the practical business of a politician by studying Machiavelli’s “Prince”—a work of which he must have obtained a MS. copy, as it had not yet been printed, though written probably as early as 1513. But the toils of the divorce business were already enmeshing Cromwell’s patron; as the year 1529 advanced, clouds, lightning-charged, were gathering over his head, and the secretary knew that the hour was about to strike when he himself must either “make or mar.”

We have seen that practically nothing is known with absolute certainty as to Cromwell’s early years; we have seen also that the reports about that period of his life are sufficiently consistent with each other and with his later career to warrant us in assuming that they were tolerably well grounded. It would be difficult to conceive of any man thus trained, turning out otherwise than a cynic. At home, we have the father, a man in a respectable position, who is, however, eternally being summonsed for some breach of the law. The clever and independent youngster quarrels with his father, and takes himself off to foreign parts. He makes for Italy—the land of all others where brains counted most; the land also where morals counted least; the land par excellence of poison and poniards; the land where every one was formally orthodox, and hardly any one—least of all the priests—believed anything much. Only a religious enthusiast could pass through the ordeal of life in Italy—at the age of twenty or thereabouts—without becoming a sceptic. That a Cromwell should have passed through it without conceiving a most heart-felt contempt for the whole Roman system would be incredible; but it is hardly more credible that he should have been converted into a cold, stern moralist. If he was, he kept the cold, stern morality pretty thoroughly in abeyance until it found vent in the destruction of the monasteries.

After a brief experience of life in camp and in the guard-room, the young man is apparently for some ten years knocking about from Venice to Antwerp, acquiring a sound knowledge of trade and a mastery of the ways of traders. Then he returns to England and turns his knowledge to account, combining with it a lucrative practice, as a presumably somewhat unscrupulous but amazingly clever attorney. Always it is the seamy side of life which concerns him; and at any rate, after he has sown his wild oats and acquired experience, he adds to the conviction that most men would be knaves if they could, the certainty that, at least in comparison with Thomas Cromwell, most of them are fools. This consciousness makes him ambitious. He manages to attract the great Cardinal’s attention by his abilities. The summoning of a Parliament gives him an opportunity. He prepares a speech for it, which will certainly make him a man of some mark if it is delivered—and a clever speech in opposition, as many parliamentarians learned when Parliament had become a real power, is not always an obstacle to government favour. Cromwell is still a man of the people, and the speech is on the people’s side. Whether he made that speech pay him by delivering it or by suppressing it remains uncertain—either is possible. Anyhow, from that date his favour and his prosperity advanced rapidly; his thorough knowledge of law, of business, and of character, and his immense mastery of detail, making him a quite invaluable servant. And he who has become invaluable to the first minister of the Court may become invaluable to the Court itself.

Now what would be the natural political attitude of such a man? Had there been room for a career as a demagogue when he sat in the Parliament of 1523, he might have adopted that rÔle: aiming, of course, at a dictatorship. But there was no opening. To such a man, however, it is quite certain that the absolute rule of one man would present itself as the sole really strong form of government. Absolutism was taking the place of the old Feudalism all over Europe; Henry VII. had laid sure foundations for it in England; Wolsey had carried on the work; it would be the business of Wolsey’s successor to complete it. The political theory of Machiavelli was not in itself novel; it must have been familiar, as a latent theory, to every one who knew anything of the Italy of the Medicis and the Borgias. The novelty lay in stating it boldly in the open. That, even the author of the “Prince” had not done as yet: he had merely formulated it for private circulation. Publication was deferred. But the Machiavellian creed had reached the hands of Wolsey’s secretary, who had adopted it with complete appreciation. Its central tenets are the complete divorce between ethical considerations and political methods, and the complete concentration of all power under the control of one will. The “Prince” became Cromwell’s political text-book, whose principles and maxims he was prepared to apply with appalling thoroughness if ever the opportunity offered. It was remarked that before the appointment of Sir Thomas More in 1529, no one had held the office of Lord Chancellor unless he was either of noble birth or an ecclesiastic. More, however, was of gentle blood. It required a yet more violent departure from precedent for the king to take as his own most confidential adviser a layman of plebeian origin; and some considerable time elapsed before Cromwell held openly the position which in effect had already long been his. The story of his elevation will occupy the section now following: here we have attempted to present the figure of the man who in the autumn of 1529 was nothing more than the confidential secretary of a minister who was on the very verge of the historic “farewell to all his greatness.” The secretary presents in many respects a very marked contrast to his master, but the contrast with his master’s successor in the Chancellorship is still more striking. England never knew a statesman whose politics were so entirely ethical as More; never one who ignored ethics so completely as Cromwell. With the one, conscience stood unmistakeably first; with the other it was non-existent, as far as state-craft was concerned. That is not to say that the man himself was without conscience or moral sense; just as Machiavelli, his master, was the last statesman in Italy who could be called a scoundrel. Cromwell held with Machiavelli that the political end justifies any means; the only question for the statesman is, whether in the particular instance a flagrantly immoral method may frustrate the end sought instead of furthering it, by shocking sentiments which require to be conciliated. The Italian would not personally practise all that he preached: his English disciple went farther. Both doctrine and practice were the direct contradictions of the doctrine and practice of Thomas More.

III
PLANNING THE CAMPAIGN

The blow fell: the Cardinal was struck suddenly down. What did Cromwell do? In effect, we have two authorities—Cavendish, Wolsey’s honest but not over astute biographer, and Foxe, honest too, but ready to believe whatever chimed in best with his own theories. On Hallowmass Day, November 1, Cavendish found the secretary in the Great Chamber at Esher, whither the fallen Cardinal had retired; in much perturbation of spirit over the prospect of his own ruin for his faithful service to Wolsey, and resolved, in his own phrase, to go up to London, and “make or mar.” He did not desert his master, but he went up to London and made haste to commend himself to the other side. He played his cards boldly, bidding directly for the favour of Norfolk, with whose approbation he forthwith entered the newly-called Parliament as member for Taunton. In fact, he had the wit to recognise that by skilful management he could be loyal to Wolsey and push his own prospects at the same time. The move was audacious, and successful. He had three possible courses. A baser or a less astute man would have tried to win favour with his master’s enemies by turning and rending his master. A less daring one would have carefully dropped out of sight, taking his chance of being able some day to retrieve his position. Cromwell was bold enough to take up the cudgels openly in defence of the Cardinal, thereby winning much credit for courage and loyalty: at the same time, retaining the fallen minister’s confidence. Thus he was also enabled to manoeuvre for Wolsey, and to mollify some of his enemies by judicious presents, bestowed under his advice and direction—and passing through his hands. There is no need to discredit either the loyalty or the courage displayed, but there is no denying that in displaying it he served his own interests better than he could have done in any other way.

Cromwell’s public defence of the Cardinal did not in fact mean much more than active opposition in Parliament to the Bill of Attainder; and Henry, at any rate, was not thirsting for Wolsey’s blood. It was probably some time before he quite made up his mind that he could do better without the man who had done so much for him. It is not unlikely that what ultimately decided him was the growing perception that he could make the combination of Cromwell and Cranmer serve his turn more effectively. He had just caught from the Cambridge Doctor the idea of discarding the Papal jurisdiction in the divorce in favour of the National Ecclesiastical Courts supported by the opinion of the qualified University doctors of Europe. There is very little doubt that one of the first steps taken by Cromwell was to obtain an interview with the king, nominally to defend himself against the malice of the Cardinal’s enemies; and that he turned the interview to account by hinting pretty openly that he could work out for the king a policy which would not only ensure the divorce, but bring him much profit in other ways, making him “the richest king that ever was in England,” says Chapuys, the emperor’s ambassador.

Now Henry’s was not the type of mind which invents large and far-reaching schemes of political action; but it was the type which can appreciate and appropriate a big scheme designed by some one else. Hitherto, until he became awake to the idea that Clement, under pressure from the emperor, might actually deny him the divorce, there is no reason to suppose that he had ever dreamt of quarrelling with the Papacy as an institution, or with the ecclesiastical body in England. Recently things had looked as if there might be a serious personal quarrel with Clement, of a kind for which there were precedents, and Stephen Gardiner had used distinctly threatening expressions in that sense to his Holiness. Wolsey’s difficulties had been largely due to his anxiety lest the divorce should lead to something still more serious; but that had been all. Now, however, Wolsey was hardly displaced when the first moves were made in what was revealed later as a huge campaign, directed in the first instance against clerical abuses, extending to privileges, and finally absorbing property; in the course of which every pretension of the Holy See to jurisdiction, authority or tribute in the realm of England was flatly and decisively repudiated.

The whole thing worked out in its successive stages with such systematic precision that there is no room for doubt of its having been completely planned from a very early stage. Throughout, Henry identified himself with it thoroughly. But it is almost inconceivable that he should have had any such plan in his head when he was making Sir Thomas More his Chancellor, and Norfolk to all appearance his principal counsellor. On the other hand, the scheme is precisely such a one as would have formed in the brain of the student of Machiavelli who felt himself to be the one man who was able and willing to carry it out in the king’s service. The old Baronage was already hardly dangerous; a very few judicious blows would make it utterly incapable of organised resistance; but if the English ecclesiastical body, with its great corporate wealth, worked in harmonious accord with the Papacy, under skilful leadership, in opposition to the Crown, the Crown might not get the best of the conflict. With the Church brought to heel in England, itself severed from the Papacy, and its wealth in the grip of the sovereign, the royal will would be irresistible. To suggest this new policy to the king, with himself as the instrument to put it in execution, not perhaps all at once, but enough at a time to carry the king along with him, would be a stroke which could hardly fail of success; especially as, in enumerating the advantages the policy offered, the certainty of getting the desired divorce could be placed in the forefront. Henry could be perfectly relied upon to see his own advantage in the proposal; he was equally certain to recognise in the designer of the scheme the qualities needed for carrying it out. Everything points to Cromwell, not Henry, as the deviser. The only alternative is, that Henry had already made his plan, but only began to regard it as practicable after he had guessed at and tested Cromwell’s capacities as an instrument; a very much less probable hypothesis on the face of it. Moreover, it is quite certain that neither before 1529 nor after 1540 did Henry show any power of creating out of his own head a deeply considered and far-reaching policy. When he was left to himself, or when he went counter to Wolsey or Cromwell, he never showed himself a statesman who naturally took “long views.”

Cromwell, then, is to be regarded not as the able and unscrupulous instrument chosen by Henry to carry out his own preconceived design of revolutionising the relations between the secular sovereign, the Church in England, and the Papal authority. Henry had the ability to appreciate and to adopt the plan, but the brain which both conceived and organised it, as well as the hand which executed it, belonged not to the king but to the minister.

IV
CONTRA ECCLESIAM

It does not in effect militate against this view, that before Cromwell could have set any agency in motion, Parliament did itself lead the way by attacking certain minor and universally recognised abuses, without waiting for Convocation to deal with them. It needed nothing in the way of a campaign to ensure reforms being demanded and approved where the clergy themselves admitted that the existing state of things was scandalous. The first real blow was struck some months after Cromwell had obtained the king’s ear, when Convocation, towards the close of 1530, was startled by a message that the whole of the clergy had offended against the Statute of PrÆmunire in admitting the Legatine authority of the deceased Cardinal. That authority had of course been sanctioned by the approval of the king; but the fact that it was illegal was not thereby altered. Technically, there was no possibility of evading the charge. The clergy had broken the law; they must pay the penalty. They did, fining themselves to the tune of a million or so of our money. If they had not been perfectly helpless, the impudence of the demand, coming from the king, would have been simply colossal: but a demand which cannot be gainsaid can hardly be called impudent. Wolsey, of course, had been penalised for exercising the authority, but then there was the superficial excuse that he had obtained his master’s sanction by beguiling his unsuspecting innocence. Here the king could not even produce that flimsy excuse.

This financial operation, however, struck the keynote of the Cromwellian policy. Wolsey had over-ridden the law in procuring the Legatine appointment: he had sought to do so by demanding Benevolences: he had sought to do so by overawing Parliament. Now, everything was to be done under form of law. Even if—unwittingly of course—the authorities transgressed their legal powers, the transgression was to be regularised by a statute ad hoc. The principle was equally agreeable to the tender conscience of Henry and the legal proclivities of his minister.

The huge fine, however, did not satisfy the requirements. Convocation, in passing the Bill, was compelled to pass also a clause acknowledging the king as the “Only Supreme Head” of the Church, though it was allowed to introduce the qualifying phrase “so far as the law of Christ permits.” Except as an ingenious salve to clerical consciences, the qualification was futile, since, in the exercise of his supremacy, Henry would certainly not admit that he was going farther than those laws permitted, and he would also be the de facto judge on the question if any one should dare to raise it. The whole clause might be interpreted as meaning everything, or as meaning nothing—but the king would be the interpreter.

The Bill, with the clause, was passed in 1531. Again the campaign rested for about a year. So far, apart from a slight rectification of abuses, nothing more—in form—had been done than to exact from the clergy a penalty to which they had rendered themselves technically liable, and to demand from them the formal admission of what was asserted to be already the constitutional position of the Crown in relation to them. In theory there had been nothing in the nature of innovation. Now, it was time for innovation; so Parliament had to be called in, as against the Church. But the innovation was to threaten the Papal claims, so the Church must share the responsibility. Thus a fresh phase of the campaign opened with the beginning of 1532.

Again there were in the first place obvious abuses which were dealt with under Acts concerning mortmain and benefit of clergy. These, of themselves, implied nothing in particular. But it was a very different thing with the Annates Act: the first direct and manifest challenge of a Papal claim. Rome had claimed from every bishop on his appointment to a See the whole of the first year’s revenue. This, as the Act pointed out, was a very grievous burden on the bishops, for whose relief this system was to be stopped. Until quite recently, it has never been disputed that this Bill was introduced in response to the actual petition of Convocation. That idea was based on the existence of a document which—closer examination leaves no doubt—did not proceed from Convocation at all, as had hitherto been supposed. Chapuys reported at the time that the bishops opposed the measure. By this time, doubtless, the supremacy business had awakened their alarm, and others besides Fisher were beginning to dread a rupture with the Papacy. There are however, two special features which demand our attention. The Bill was framed ostensibly for the relief of the clergy, implying that the Crown, not the Papacy, was the true protector of their interests, and emphasising an antagonism between English Churchmen and the Pope. Also, it was not required to be put in immediate execution, but was to be held in suspense during the king’s pleasure. A double purpose was served thereby, though the intention was masked. Clement could buy the withdrawal of the measure by conceding the divorce: while if he should elect to close that door to reconciliation, it would not be too late to divert the annates into the king’s pocket, instead of abolishing the impost. The clergy would be none the better in either event, but the trick would have helped to keep them on the king’s side till it was too late to change. Henry was still playing for a divorce with the Papal sanction; he had not come to regard a final breach with the Papacy as an end desirable per se. Cromwell, we may assume, took a different view, but of course could not dream of forcing Henry’s hand: what he could do was to have everything in thorough order for a decisive breach, if and when the moment should come.

There was something more, however, for Parliament to do, namely its presentation of the Supplication against the Ordinaries. There is no doubt at all that in every essential this was Cromwell’s personal handiwork. It was a double-barrelled attack, from the popular point of view, on the way in which the Church exercised its jurisdiction; from the sovereign’s point of view, on the authority of the Church’s legislation. The whole intention of it was to force the clergy as a body to admit that their authority, whether as individuals or as a corporate body, was subordinate to that of the sovereign. Its object was attained with entire success: it resulted in what was known as the “Submission of the Clergy,” virtually a complete surrender. The defeat was practically the death-blow of the aged Archbishop Warham; while the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, found himself so totally opposed to the principle involved that he resigned office and went into retirement.

Warham’s death at this juncture was most convenient. The old man had not been sufficiently stout of heart to offer a stubborn resistance to the new policy, but he had yielded with much misgiving and soreness of spirit. He had been restive enough to make it doubtful whether in the last resort he might not decline to pronounce a judgment against Katharine in defiance of the Pope. By appointing Cranmer to the Archbishopric, Henry made sure of a primate who would have no qualms on the point. This security made him ready to precipitate the crisis which the Pope was craving to postpone or evade. The simple truth was that Clement felt himself to be completely in the grip of the emperor, and no conceivable threats from England could have extracted the desired verdict from him. The fact was unmistakeably revealed by the publication, in February, of what was in effect an order to Henry to re-instate Katharine on pain of excommunication. The reply was the Act in Restraint of Appeals—in form an Act declaratory of the existing law of England, in effect an announcement of independence—immediately followed by Cranmer’s judicial pronouncement invalidating the marriage with Katharine ab initio. Until Clement retorted by declaring Cranmer’s judgment void, Henry abstained from confirming either the Act in Restraint of Appeals or the Annates Act; their confirmation was his rejoinder. After that, there might be talk of reconciliation, but the practical possibility was gone past recall.

V
THE FABRIC OF DESPOTISM

The year 1533 may be regarded as marking the irreparable breach with the Papacy, though it was not till 1534 that Clement gave his own formal judgment in favour of Katharine, and Convocation issued its own declaration that the “Bishop of Rome” derives from Scripture no more jurisdiction in England than “any other foreign bishop”—two sentences which may perhaps be regarded as merely bolting an already locked door. The purpose of Cromwell’s anti-clerical campaign was so far achieved that the clergy had been driven out of their main strongholds by their “submission,” and had next been cut off from the aid of a Papal alliance. These were the preliminary measures to the assertion in very concrete guise of the untrammelled supremacy of the Crown in things ecclesiastical and temporal alike, which was the aim of the policy we have ascribed primarily to Cromwell rather than his master. An additional reason for so ascribing it is to be found in the strong presumption afforded by the evidence that Henry himself did not wish to cast off the Papal allegiance utterly, until he found that he could get the divorce in no other way. Apart from his fixed resolution to make Anne Boleyn his wife at all costs, it may be doubted if he reckoned that the complication of foreign relations involved in a final repudiation of the Pope’s authority would be compensated by the more unqualified control of ecclesiastical matters at home. For him the divorce turned the scale: and since he could not escape the disadvantages of revolting, he meant to have every scrap of advantage that could be reaped from it too. The differences which presently arose between the king and his minister on the conduct of foreign affairs will be found to have some bearing on this view of the case.

At any rate, the breach being made, Henry was as ready as Cromwell for aggression; and Cromwell was let loose to carry out his policy—within the realm—to the uttermost: no longer working in the background, but in a position as openly dominant as Wolsey himself had occupied.

The first business was to confirm formally the positions already taken up, in a fresh series of Acts of Parliament, in the early session of 1534; embodying the recent measures, but generally carrying them a step further. Thus “Peter Pence” were abolished as well as Annates. An appeal to the King’s Court of Chancery from the Ecclesiastical Courts was substituted for the Appeal to Rome abolished by the Restraint of Appeals. The “submission of the clergy” was extended so as to bring the whole instead of a part only of the canon law under the purview of the commission to be appointed for its examination. The corollary of the Boleyn marriage was an Act of Succession in favour of the offspring of Anne: but the Act carried with it a murderous sting. “I pray that these things be not confirmed with oaths,” More had said when the marriage was ratified. His anticipation was justified. An oath of obedience to the Act was to be administered.

In this affair of the oath, we as usual find Henry and Cromwell in perfect accord as to policy, but not actuated by precisely the same motive. The thing in Cromwell’s mind is the Royal Supremacy; he is determined to be rid of conditions which check the activities of the Crown, and of men whose influence tends to keep alive doubts as to the Crown’s legitimate powers. Henry’s point of view is the personal one. He has done a very unpopular thing in divorcing Katharine and marrying Anne, and is determined to make every one admit that he was entirely in the right. Now, there was in England no ecclesiastic so universally esteemed for probity and saintliness as Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester; there was no layman who could compare for intellectual eminence and beauty of character with Thomas More. It was known to the world that both these men held that Katharine’s marriage had been valid, and that both disapproved the recent anti-Papal developments. So also it was known that in the Houses of Religion which stood highest in reputation for sincerity and austerity, and were untouched by the breath of scandal, the divorce and the revolt were regarded with horror. To force these recalcitrants openly to declare in favour of the divorce and the Royal Supremacy, would be a great triumph. On the other hand, nothing would so terrorise opposition as the smiting down, before the horrified eyes of the world, of victims so distinguished. Cromwell therefore drafted the oath of obedience to the Act of Succession in such terms that the subscriber would have to swear not only loyalty to the provisions of the Act, but acceptance of the divorce as right, and of the Royal Supremacy as theoretically sound. More, Fisher, and some of the monks to whom the oath was administered, refused to desert their principles. They would swear to maintain the succession as laid down, since it lay within the function of the State to order the succession; but they would not take the oath as it stood. Thereupon they were sent to prison.

It may readily be believed that the minister, as reported, swore a great oath when he heard More’s refusal. The moral effect of winning such converts would have been incalculable: preferable certainly to shocking public sentiment as the alternative course must do. But he was not in the least afraid of shocking public sentiment, at any rate if he at the same time inspired terror; if circumstances demanded victims, the more conspicuous they were, the better. For once, however, a point had been overlooked: it appeared impossible lawfully to proceed to extremities on the ground of refusal to take the oath. The omission was rectified in the next session of Parliament. In a fresh Act of Succession, the oath as administered was expressly ratified, and the occasion was seized to pass a new Treasons Act, inadequately described as drastic. It was made treason to question the titles of the queen and the heirs apparent, or to impute heresy or schism to the king; and the lawyers were able so to interpret it that mere silence might be construed as treason—it was enough to refuse to affirm the Supremacy and the rest of it. The two new Acts were brought to bear on the victims, who remained firm and were executed in the following summer. There is no shadow of a hint anywhere that Cromwell suffered a single qualm in working out the destruction of either More or Fisher, but it is hardly necessary to make him responsible for the equally ruthless attitude of the king. According to Roper’s circumstantial narrative, Henry was so vindictive towards More when once he had turned against him, that he could hardly be persuaded to have him left out of the Bill of Attainder in the affair of the Nun of Kent, until the Chancellor, Lord Audley, and others succeeded in convincing him that Parliament could not possibly pass the Bill with More’s name included. If ever there was a chance of life for Fisher and More, it was destroyed when Henry’s fury was roused by the new Pope making Fisher a Cardinal. These facts illustrate the difference between Henry’s attitude and Cromwell’s. To Cromwell, More and Fisher are merely obstructions to his policy. They must either cease to obstruct or be crushed. To spare them for sentimental reasons would be absurd, but there is no passion or vindictiveness or animosity about their destruction, as far as he is concerned.

Never had any king of England wielded so deadly an engine of despotism as was placed in Henry’s hands by this Treasons Act of Cromwell; whereof, however, the full force depended on its manipulation by its designer. The country was in a very short time so sown with the minister’s spies that the moment any one became obnoxious to authority it was the simplest thing possible to procure an information of a hasty word spoken or passed by in silence, of a phrase that might have carried a double meaning; and the victim’s doom was virtually sealed. The excuse, of course, was the one on which a tyranny that seeks to justify itself invariably falls back—that an unparalleled emergency demands extraordinary powers. It was not, indeed, quite obvious that there was an unparalleled emergency in existence, but then it might arise at any moment. Cromwell was going on to a series of measures which might prove acceptable, but might on the other hand provoke a storm of indignation. With the Treasons Act ready to his hand, he could anticipate conspiracy by striking wherever and whenever it pleased him. It was an integral part of his political theory that Government—i.e. the Despot—should have that power. It was not, of course, aimed specifically at the Church; it was only incidentally concerned with More and Fisher. The repression of clericalism was only a part of the scheme for a legalised Despotism. The climax, the theoretical coping-stone of the edifice, was not achieved till the Act which in 1539 gave Royal Proclamations the force of law; but for practical purposes, the Treasons Act made Henry a monarch more absolute than any other in Christendom.

Cromwell, however, had not as yet fulfilled the promise he is said to have given of making Henry “the richest king that ever was in England.” As a matter of fact, whatever riches had come in his way Henry would never have kept a full treasury, since he always emptied it with both hands. But Cromwell in his capacity as Vicar-General, or representative of the Supreme Head with unlimited powers—which office was bestowed on him early in 1535, a few months after the Treasons Act—was to make him a record present. It was a matter of principle with him, in his methods, to make rude display to the higher clergy of the fact that they must now recognise themselves as mere menials of the Crown, whose functions might be superseded at the royal pleasure; and on those lines he acted in striking his next blow, sending out a commission of his own creatures to “visit” the monasteries, and report upon them. It is only necessary to recall one of his casual memoranda at a later date—“Item, the Abbot of Reading, to be sent down to be tried and executed”—to feel properly satisfied that the case of the monasteries was prejudged. The commission was intended to report evil concerning them, and not good; and the commissioners acted up to their instructions. It is quite possible that a perfectly impartial tribunal after complete investigation would have found the evidence hardly less damning; but what the commissioners did was to pay a series of hasty visits, collect all the scandal they could get any one to retail to them, insult or frighten respectable and responsible inmates till they gave confused or evasive answers, or none at all, to interrogatories, and so to produce what passed as evidence of a very abominable and corrupt state of affairs. Whereupon Parliament passed an Act dissolving between three and four hundred Houses, in effect handing their property over to the Crown. Some of this wealth was theoretically appropriated to endowing new bishoprics and to other corresponding purposes; but in practice a fraction of it only was so utilised. Some of the lands were given away to people whom it was convenient for the king—or Cromwell—to placate; most were sold at low prices—with the effect of establishing a new landed proprietary which in the years long after was to play a part in the national politics which their creator can hardly have foreseen. It was not Cromwell’s way to reach for more than he could grasp; before he made one stride, he had calculated for the next, but he did not take it till his own time. So he did not wipe out the monastic system at a blow. The completion of the business waited—like the Royal Proclamations Act—till 1539. For the present, Cromwell was content to impose on the greater monasteries, and such of the lesser ones as still survived, a disciplinary code which professed to have in view the enforcement of a becoming austerity, but was felt to be so intolerably severe as effectually to bring about several voluntary dissolutions or surrenders.

Cromwell’s royal partner, no doubt, in a famous phrase of much later date, “stood amazed at his own moderation.” But the country hardly took the same view. The year which saw, in February, the first Act dissolving the lesser monasteries, saw also in the autumn a rising in Lincolnshire, very shortly followed by the organised Yorkshire insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. As in all the religious rebellions of the Reformation, the issues were a good deal mixed up with social discontents; and the last straw was probably a piece of Cromwell’s handiwork which had nothing to do with ecclesiastical matters, being a measure known as the Statute of Uses, designed to get rid of a maze of legal complications which had arisen from ingenious evasions of the law as to the inheritance of land. The insurgents, however, put the religious innovations in the forefront of their schedule of grievances: openly demanding the dismissal of both Cromwell and Cranmer. The military management of the suppression of the rebellion was left to the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, but no collision was allowed till the northern levies had been diplomatically induced to disperse; after which some sporadic outbreaks were used, after the turn of the year, as an excuse for an extremely heavy-handed exaction of retribution. Cromwell, however, turned the whole thing to account; as certain abbots and priors had been more or less deeply implicated, whereby the opportunity was given for suppressing several considerable religious communities, and hanging some highly placed Churchmen. A further result was the re-organisation of the government of the counties constituting the Marches—those which were always living with an eye on Scotland, and enjoyed or suffered a special system of control—by the establishment of a new Council of the North which diminished the power of the nobility in those regions; Cromwell always maintaining the same end persistently in view, the weakening of all power of organised resistance to the king’s will.

Another year brought another opportunity. In 1538, Cromwell discovered a conspiracy. The South-west of England, like the North, was ever on what may be called the Romantic side when developments, political or religious, were in progress. It was now perturbed over the innovations. It appeared that the Marquis of Exeter, the king’s first cousin and a grandson of Edward IV., was engaged in some sort of conspiracy with the Poles, whose mother was the old Countess of Salisbury, daughter of “false fleeting perjured Clarence.” Amongst them, they stood for the relics of the old Yorkist anti-Tudor faction. Cromwell had already taken occasion to warn Reginald Pole—whose diatribes against Henry, issued from abroad, had brought him under the royal ban—that his kinsmen in England might pay the penalty for his audacity. Whether there was any real body in the conspiracy is open to doubt, but there was quite enough evidence to go upon under the Treasons Act. The process by attainder practically suppressed any defence. Exeter, Montague (the head of the Poles) and others were executed; and there were sufficient means for involving some more Houses of religion, with their heads, notably the revered Abbot of Glastonbury, who were hanged as traitors.

Thus, by the opening of 1539, everything was ready for the two final measures. The regrettable conduct of the monastic establishments in associating themselves with treason provided a final justification for the complete suppression of the system, and incidentally the further enrichment of the Crown. In the field of constitutional practice, the Crown had frequently proceeded by Royal Proclamations, but there was generally some attendant danger of the authority of these being challenged. Parliament was now called upon formally to concede to such proclamations the effect of regular Statutes. It may be remarked in passing that the Parliament called in 1529 had been responsible for the whole of the legislation down to its last session in the early spring of 1536, when it passed the Act dissolving the lesser monasteries. Whether it was subservient or not, Cromwell had nothing to do with packing it: it was only at the last moment that he was provided with a seat in it. But there is no doubt that the subsequent Parliaments, beginning with that summoned in May 1536, were packed by Cromwell and his agents. That was an inevitable part of the system which was to make the king absolute, whilst preserving the traditional forms.

VI
CROMWELL AND PROTESTANTISM

The policy of organising a Despotism was necessarily anti-Papal and also anti-clerical. In the former aspect, it complicated foreign relations; in the latter, it was involved with the movement towards a spiritual and dogmatic reformation of religion. Cromwell’s course in foreign politics was dictated by anti-Papal considerations. So long as Katharine, the aunt of Charles V., was alive, there was no prospect of reconciliation between the Emperor and Henry, so that England could not work on Wolsey’s favourite line of holding the balance between Charles and the French king, who felt himself perfectly safe from any risk of a renewed combination between his rivals. Hence, Cromwell usually hankered for close association with the German Protestant princes, united in the League of Schmalkad, as an effective counter to the Emperor. Such an alliance might either coerce Charles into a reconciliation with Protestantism and England, or might make Francis think it worth his while to join an anti-Papal league. Having this idea in his mind, Cromwell’s attitude towards Lutheranism abroad and the religious progressives in England was always friendly: since he realised that the course of events must divide Christendom under the Papal and anti-Papal standards, which came to be called Catholic and Protestant respectively. If Rome were cast off by some of her children, while others remained faithful, sooner or later the latter would be compelled to unite for the purpose of crushing the rebels. Thus the defiance of Rome and of Charles by the pronouncement of the divorce in 1533, was attended by overtures to the League of Protestant Princes.

The Lutherans, however, looked askance. They feared the Greeks et dona ferentes; had not Henry taken the field conspicuously against their leader? German Lutheranism was deep-rooted in a genuine religious feeling; it could feel no confidence in the king of England as a convert to the Augsburg confession. Therefore the princes and the divines of Protestant Germany went warily. On the other hand, the isolation of England made Francis more than careless of an English alliance unless on terms extremely profitable to himself. The death of Katharine, however, in January 1536, changed the situation. It was no longer necessary for the emperor to range himself against England. It is noteworthy that the immediate effect on Cromwell was to make him desire an Imperial (which meant the old Burgundian) alliance, but he was promptly pulled up by the king, who had learnt once before that Wolsey had been right in his policy of holding the balance, and that he himself had erred in forcing an alliance with Charles. The emperor and Francis fell to fighting again, and for a while England was approximately in the old position of having each of the great Powers intriguing for her alliance, while she held aloof and coquetted with both. Then the combatants grew tired, and, with the improved prospect of their reconciliation, their ardour for English friendship cooled.

Just before this time, Henry’s third wife died. Neither his first nor his second spouse had provided him with a male heir; he had divorced the one, and cut off the head of the other. Jane Seymour did what was expected of her, but died in the execution of her duty. One not too sturdy baby boy, and two daughters who had been judicially pronounced illegitimate, gave room for uneasiness as to the succession. A fourth matrimonial venture was thus rendered advisable: providing opportunities for diplomatic intrigue. The royal ladies of Europe, however, do not seem to have coveted the position: “If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England’s disposal,” is said to have been the caustic comment of a suggested bride. Neither Francis nor Charles would be inveigled. On the contrary, they patched up a peace in the summer of 1538, and Henry’s policy of keeping them at odds with each other, while dangling an English alliance before both, broke down, as Cromwell’s previous attempt to join decisively with Charles had been frustrated. Cromwell fell back on the line which in his heart he would probably have preferred throughout, of alliance with the Lutherans: and at last he hoped—by finding a Lutheran bride for Henry—to attach his master decisively to that policy. Henry gave a half-hearted assent; the minister made his final throw. In the moment of seeming victory, his knell was sounded. Before we come to this, the last act in Cromwell’s drama, we may revert to his relations with the religious movement in England.

In the whole of his record, so far as we have at present reviewed it, there is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that Henry’s Vicar-General ever cared a straw about any properly religious question at all. We can be tolerably sure, no doubt, as to some of the things he did not believe in. He did not believe that the Pope was the holder of the keys to heaven. He did not believe that the clergy were the divinely appointed channel through whom alone salvation must be obtained. He did not believe in the effectual sanctity of relics. Such beliefs would at least have been impossible to reconcile with his anti-Papal and anti-clerical campaigns. But it would be exceedingly difficult to find any positive dogma to which it would be possible to point as an article of faith with him. On the other hand, every circumstance of his life before 1529, known or surmised, was calculated to produce and to foster scepticism on the intellectual and carelessness on the emotional side of religion, generating a hardened materialism. The resulting attitude towards men who were actuated by strong religious convictions would be regulated entirely by policy.

Obviously, then, doctrines which weakened the hold of the Papacy, the priesthood, and the monks, on the popular imagination, would recommend themselves to his mind—not as particularly credible or true, but as deserving encouragement, weakening the spell of the great organisation whose power he desired, for reasons of policy, to reduce to the uttermost. Hence, it would be his wish to be at least on friendly terms with the reformers who were defying the Pope and setting ecclesiastical conventions at naught. More particularly, he would find the most dangerous opponents of his political design in that school of English Churchmen, headed by the Bishop of Winchester, who were determined to employ every instrument of intrigue to retain as much power as possible for the clergy, and he would seek as natural allies the men like Cranmer who were unqualified advocates of the Royal Supremacy. Further, he foresaw the ultimate necessity of a political understanding, if not the actual alliance which he would have preferred, with Continental Protestantism. On the other hand, he was thoroughly aware that the king plumed himself on his theological learning and orthodoxy; and it was no part of his scheme to run counter to the king. Hence, it became his business so far as he could to influence Henry in favour of the respectable reformers—not, of course, those who were tainted with Anabaptism or the suspicion thereof. But there is no hint anywhere in his conduct that he thought of the actual tenets of any reformers as in themselves worth any sacrifice. The king took a keen interest in theological controversies on their merits; his minister did not.

This view of his attitude, or of what we should have expected his attitude to be, tallies precisely with what we know of his actions. When called upon to intervene in clerical controversies, he habitually backed up Cranmer as against Gardiner, working in concert with him, except when he perceived that Cranmer wanted to go farther than Henry was willing to accompany him. Cranmer was a useful ally, who never lost his place in the royal favour: and the archbishop’s greatest enemy was his own also. But when the Six Articles Act was introduced, and he knew the king’s mind on the subject, he promptly left his ally in the lurch; though no doubt his influence was exerted, when it had been passed, to check its active enforcement. The passing of the Act—the crack of the “whip with six strings”—sufficiently served Henry’s immediate purpose, which was to make a display of rigid orthodoxy for the benefit of the emperor and King Francis. Cromwell, who had just committed himself to the Lutherans too deeply to retract, must have viewed the Act itself with painful feelings; but he could not afford to resist. Compliance offered the one chance of bringing his master round.

VII
CROMWELL’S FALL

The Act of the Six Articles, the Royal Proclamations Act, and that for the final suppression of the monasteries, were all passed in the early summer—May or June—of 1539, when Cromwell was already fully involved in his scheme for creating a matrimonial bond between Henry and the German Protestants. In 1538, when peace between Charles and Francis seemed imminent, he had succeeded in persuading Henry to invite a visit from the Lutherans with a view to arriving at a mutual understanding on the theological questions: but even the reconciliation of the French king and the emperor failed to make the English king at all cordial, and the envoys went back to Germany in the autumn with nothing accomplished. As the year drew to a close, however, there were ominous signs of a league being formed to threaten England—which perhaps was one of Cromwell’s incentives to the destruction of Exeter and the Poles, by way of a hint to the Continental Powers that the government was far too strong to be endangered by any domestic discontents. The warnings from abroad had their effect on Henry, who began to think that a counter-alliance might be really necessary. Thus, immediately after the New Year, Cromwell opened negotiations with the intention of obtaining Anne of Cleves, sister of the young duke, as a bride for King Henry. Yet even this concession to his policy was only, so to speak, a half-loaf: since Cleves was not actually in the League of Schmalkald, or irrevocably bound to Lutheranism, though the duke happened to have his own quarrel with the emperor.

In April, another embassy from the League was in England; but so also was an ambassador from France, bent on placating Henry—and about the same time, intelligence arrived that the emperor and the League had come to terms. So very cold water was poured on the Lutheran envoys, to whom the Six Articles Act was virtually a direct snub: as it was to Cromwell, whose policy it signified that Henry meant to desert. Yet once more the prospect seemed to right itself for the minister. It appeared that the king had been deluded by the diplomatists, and that after all the chance of a coalition against England was by no means dissolved. Before the summer was fairly over, the politest of overtures were passing between Francis and Charles; while the Duke of Cleves, who had been to some degree holding off, again became urgent for the marriage, being, like Henry, threatened with danger from the restoration of amity between the two great rivals. Henry was beguiled into believing that the lady of his minister’s choice would make him a charming and attractive spouse; negotiations were pushed forward apace, and in the last days of December, Anne of Cleves landed in England. On January 6 the marriage was celebrated.

But fate was against Cromwell. In the first place, the king took a violent antipathy to his bride: and though, for an adequate political end, he would have accepted the situation, his soul was wroth with the man who had brought him into it. Moreover, so far as concerned domestic affairs, the minister had done all that Henry needed of him. He had so handled the Church that she lay defenceless under the king’s hand. He had brought to the block every one who could be made a figure-head for insurrection, and had made organised rebellion an impossibility. He had done all that there was to be done in the way of despoiling the king’s subjects for the king’s benefit. Finally, he had just placed in the king’s hand the last administrative instrument of despotism in the Royal Proclamations Act, as he had before provided an irresistible weapon in the Treasons Act. He was not required for any further religious reforms, since his master had already gone as far as he meant to travel in that direction. There was left only one reason why the royal anger should be restrained—a demonstration that his foreign policy was right; that he was needed as foreign minister. And ere many weeks were passed, conclusive reasons appeared for judging that the theory to which Henry had endeavoured to cling was right after all, that a lasting coalition between Francis and Charles was a mere bugbear, that there had never been any need for the Cleves marriage. Moreover, the demonstration was effected by one of Cromwell’s two most determined rivals, the Duke of Norfolk, who at any rate got the credit for bringing about the open rupture which promptly succeeded the fraternal embraces of the emperor and the French king. At last the game was in the hands of Gardiner and Norfolk. On June 10 the bolt fell. Absolutely without warning, Cromwell was arrested for treason at the Council, and sent forthwith to the Tower. His own weapons were turned against him, his own interpretation of treason, his own favourite process of attainder. Like Wolsey, he had served his master only too well; and his master rewarded him as pitilessly as he had rewarded the Cardinal. The only man in England who dared to plead on his behalf was—Cranmer. On July 28, Cromwell’s head was hacked from his shoulders. With what measure he meted, it had been measured to him again.