Part 8

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 manœuvre 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.