The fall of Chief Minister Wolsey in 1529 left a striking void in the Tudor Government. For 15 years the Cardinal was arguably as powerful as the young king and it has been widely claimed he was effectively ruling the country. Henry listened to Wolsey above all others and up until 1529, took heed of the Cardinal’s advice in almost every matter. Yet for all the political talent and ruthlessness Wolsey possessed, for all the time and effort that were put into his last task, he couldn’t find an answer to his king’s greatest dilemma; that of the ‘great matter.’ It seemed a divorce was not possible, that Henry would never have Anne Boleyn as Queen, that for the dynastic stability a male heir brought, an illegitimate son would be the only option. There was but one mind in the land that saw a way out for the king; the mind of Thomas Cromwell.
The first critical achievement was the realisation that parliament was not a rarely called upon commodity but a body of potential power that could install secular authority over Rome. By 1532 Thomas Cranmer had already risen to prominence as Archbishop of Canterbury and used this new found standing to champion the cause of a Royal Supremacy. Also the country’s leading law theorist Christopher St. German provided the detailed theoretical justifications that were needed in undertaking this most ambitious of reforms, but both lacked the method and vision that was required. It was Cromwell who suggested that parliament be used to revolutionise the relationship between Church and State and it was Cromwell who persuaded Henry that in doing so he was the man to orchestrate the solution to the ‘great matter’. Henry and Wolsey had busied themselves with the theological intricacies and contradictions of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and while they had a substantial case, complex political stances in Rome at the time withstood calls for a divorce. Cromwell’s radical proposal that finally gave the king hope was perhaps the sole reason for his ascent to prominence and shows that it really was his idea and his alone.
The Act in Restraint of Annates banned all but 5% of income paid to the Pope (income that had been the papacy’s largest financial source from Henry’s kingdom). The Pope’s right for confirmation on the marriage was effectively ended in March 1533 with the Act in Restraint of Appeals declaring that authority in all lay and clerical matters rested with the monarch. An appeal to Rome as the final court of appeal concerning canon law and legal rulings now had no jurisdiction.
Parliament had played a minor part in the first 20 years of Henry’s reign as it had done with previous monarchs, so it can be said Cromwell’s vision was truly innovative. Had there been no Cromwell and no such suggestion, the course of English History may well have taken a vividly different path. Anne Boleyn may perhaps have buckled and accepted a role as Henry’s mistress and nothing more. One last pregnancy may have given a male heir and the dynastic stability Henry so desired and no need for a divorce would surely have prevented the Reformation’s beginnings. Thus the significance of Cromwell’s vision and execution in extirpating the Pope cannot be underestimated or denied.
With the Act of Supremacy Cromwell attempted to develop a permanent interdependent relationship between King and Parliament, but this time Henry stopped his minister’s ambitious nature and cunning from eroding his power as King. The precise wording of this act (no doubt much against Cromwell’s private wishes) effectively made Henry a dictator and even the Church could now not escape his hand. The Royal Supremacy’s primary consequence was in making the secular arm of power dominant over its ecclesiastical rival. For the first time in centuries the Church in England could not be seen as a legitimate challenger to the monarchy or an alternative source of power.
It must be noted though that Cromwell failed to pass this act as he wholly intended. It shows that Henry was not blindly led through the break with Rome and that he was astute enough to recognise what would be in his best interests (he himself was a ‘theologian’ after all). Whether Henry knew it or not, both were working towards different objectives, but it was Cromwell who had to on occasions compromise, not Henry. Cromwell had to at the same time please and appease his King - not the other way around. For all Cromwell’s cunning, Henry could still see what was best for him rather than his minister. Wolsey had often been left to work alone but Cromwell always had the king’s eye never far away. However Cromwell got his own back so to speak when he was appointed vicegerent (the lay equivalent of a papal legate). What legal powers belonged to the King he now also exercised. Within days Cromwell was using this newly found authority to lay the preparations for a campaign that would change the face of the English countryside and “destroy the last possible refuge of papalism.”
Although Henry often told of his desires to clean up the church, gaining the wealth of England’s monastic order was surely the primary incentive. The act of Supremacy allowed him to ‘visit, extirp and redress.’ In his name all three were done but it was the hand of Thomas Cromwell that dissolved the monasteries. In 1935 Cromwell ordered his most trusted servants, among them Thomas Legh and Richard Layton, to compile information on and ‘assess’ England’s monastic houses. The manner in which they undertook this mammoth task became infamous in its cynicism of the monasteries and the bullying of its nuns and monks. The tax-book that was eventually assembled became one of Cromwell’s finest administrative achievements: the Valor Ecclesiasticus. However the traditional view that there were scandals and abuses to be found up and down the land has been proved to be an exaggerated claim with new evidence suggesting the majority of monasteries were honest and genuine in their work. To maximise the feeling of anticlericalism, Cromwell needed to use a line of attack that few before him were skilful enough to use let alone think of. The art of propaganda had rarely been used as successfully; every major conceivable abuse was not only highlighted but exaggerated.
In March 1536 an act was passed which resulted in the ordered dissolution of more than 200 smaller houses. With the uncompromising execution of this act, rumours began to circulate in the “backward and barbarous north”of exaggerated secular actions to iconoclast the church and impose taxes on services such as marriage and baptism. Religious change was by no means the only cause of the notorious rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, but by the autumn of that year almost the entire north had sided with the rebels and were under arms. General consensus ever since Madeleine and Ruth Dodds’ two volume history of the rebellion has been that the majority of those who marched with Robert Aske under the five wounds of Christ, felt that their fundamental beliefs were being undermined by the fulfilment of this wicked policy. The oath of the honourable man, in which the rebels swore their allegiance to the King and indicated that the ‘men of low birth’ pay for their actions, shows that the dissolution was seen in the pew, as well as by many magnates of the north, as Cromwell’s doing rather than Henry’s. They demanded the King’s minister be handed over to the people and they infamously said of him, ‘we shall crumb him and crumb him till he is ever so crumbed.’ This cannot be treated as hard evidence for showing that Cromwell single handedly dissolved the monasteries but it shows the feelings of the time.
Retribution after the rebellion eventually crumbled totalled almost 200 executions and it was said every village of the north was left with a hanging body as reminder of their folly. The question would there have been a rebellion on this scale without the dissolution of the monasteries is a straightforward no. Disorder as a result of taxation and general economic hardship was rife throughout the turbulent dynasty, but at one point Aske had 30,000 armed men just at Doncaster. It was anarchism on a scale not seen in centuries, with most of it directed at Thomas Cromwell.
The Pilgrimage of Grace and its ultimate collapse were defining points of the Reformation. The actual uprising showed the point when King and minister had effectively gone too far with the northern populace abandoning toleration to religious change. Its failings showed the population not to stand in the way of the ‘rehabilitation’ of church and possibly paved the way for further reforms to meet less opposition. In March 1540, Waltham monastery surrendered and just four years after the first had done, England’s monasteries were gone. Cromwell’s achievement replenished the King’s financial resources and took the country that step further to Protestantism as a whole form of religion was smothered out with no opportunity to return. Monasteries are not essential components of Catholicism in general but for many at the time they were important aspects of their religion.
Catholicism was further attacked with the publication of the Ten Articles in 1536 stating the ‘new’ Church’s beliefs. In common with early orthodox Lutheranism, it excluded four of the seven sacraments practised by the Catholic Church. Ardent Catholics understandably feared for the survival of their religion as legislation increasingly took just one direction: toward Protestantism. Parallels between northern Europe were all too easy to see.
Seeking to follow this up with a definitive explanation of doctrine, Cromwell sought the king’s name on the document but Henry showed the type of restraint seldom seen in his earlier years, by refusing publication under his name until closer scrutiny. In September 1537 the Bishops’ Book appeared but Henry had deliberately instructed that the book “be clearly marked as carrying only the bishops’ authority”. The four ‘lost’ sacraments were found again due to strong opposition but were significantly devalued. Though a “continuing slide away from the orthodox Catholic position towards Protestantism,” it was for Cromwell not perfect. As with the Act of Supremacy, Cromwell had been prevented from creating his ideal statute or publication and just as the definitive step away from the old religion was in sight, Henry shut the door on Protestantism in his reign at least. The king’s title ‘Defender of the Faith’ still held some merit.
Not to be disheartened, Cromwell doggedly carried on. Protestant historians have unsurprisingly seen the introduction of the vernacular Bible as one of the Reformation’s key acts. Although in writing Cromwell possessed no spiritual authority over the church, he alongside the similar minded Thomas Cranmer, set about changing the very doctrine that held Catholicism together. In 1537 it was ordained that within two years every parish church must possess of the English Bible and that it be readily available for every parishioner to read. Carried out with staggering efficiency, it was just another example of Cromwell’s skills as a Vicegerent, particularly given the ability of most central governments of the time to enforce and arrange policies to be put into place in the localities. Five years previously it would have been unimaginable that (essentially) the work of William Tyndale be encouraged to read, let alone be found in every parish church.
The Injunctions of 1536, detailing specific policies bishops should implement in their dioceses, were at the time vague enough for conservatives to ignore. However, feeling the current climate secure enough, in 1538 Cromwell gave specific orders that costly objects of worship be removed from churches and superstitious practices (suspiciously akin to transubstantiation) along with the undertaking of pilgrimages be discouraged. This though was the pinnacle for Cromwell as the remainder of his time in office saw more of a return to conventional Catholicism. Although the remaining monasteries were dissolved, the Act of Six Articles reaffirmed some of the questioned catholic practices and by the end of Henry’s reign England was unquestionably a Catholic country.
From 1532 to 1538 the defining acts of the Reformation Parliament seem to be principally the work of Thomas Cromwell. Here and there the king reigned in his minister’s ambitions, but this largely slowed the rate of reform instead of halting it. What is so remarkable though is that all these acts had to be shown to be serving the interests of the staunchly Catholic Henry, yet they seemed to serve the decidedly Lutheran Cromwell better. One wonders at the fascinating but dangerous game Cromwell played with Henry. At every sign of the king’s early anti-papalism and latter anticlericalism, the minister tentatively sought to use it to his advantage in creating a more evangelical England. Cromwell walked this tightrope for eight years but this game as such proved too precarious and resulted in his dramatic fall from grace and subsequent execution in 1540. Just months later Henry was bemoaning his loss, citing Cromwell as ‘the most faithful servant he had ever had’. It could be said that was all he was, but servants do not forcibly attack and help bring down the faith of their deeply religious master.
The Elton ‘thesis’ of Thomas Cromwell was so revolutionary and radical at the time of its publication that revision was inevitable. Jack Scarisbrick takes an alternative view but even he admits Henry was “often helpless without his servants.” Scarisbrick sees the Reformation in the eyes of Henry’s motivation and wishes, but it was Cromwell’s genius that fulfilled his master’s desires. Elton’s view that Cromwell was throughout following a master plan seems to have been an exaggerated claim as the period was too spontaneous and turbulent for such a vision; amongst all his meticulous records, there is nothing to suggest Cromwell was following anything like a path. However for five years or so statute after statute propelled the country from Roman Catholicism nearly into the arms of Protestantism and while much of this was reaction to unfolding events, the direction in which it took the country seems too much of a coincidence considering Cromwell’s Erasmian Protestantism.
The orchestration of Henry’s first divorce gave birth to the Reformation, so to say the momentous event as a whole is anything other than Cromwell’s is to take something away from a remarkable man. Cromwell could have achieved divorces and supremacies with the aid of and on behalf of any king, but Henry could never have achieved what he did without his chief minister, and that is the most important point here. Cromwell’s visionary work coupled with his contentious spirituality cost him his life, but as his original and greatest champion described his achievements, “he laid foundations that did not crumble for centuries” Truly the hallmark of an individual that shaped a historical event.
Thomas Cromwell shaped one of the most important events in English history.
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Bibliography
A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation
A.G. Dickens, Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation
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G.R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal
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