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.
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.