History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. III

Sir Thomas Wriothesley gives advice at a quarter sessions in Hampshire.

Three abbots fall under suspicion.

The Abbots of Colchester and Reading.

The Abbot of Glastonbury.

Layton and Pollard are commissioned to examine the charges against the Abbot of Glastonbury.

The abbot’s rooms are searched.

He is sent to the Tower.

The abbey plate and jewels had disappeared.

General tendency in the monks to plunder.

The king, he told the magistrates, desired most of all things that indifferent justice should be ministered to the poor and the rich, which, he regretted to say, was imperfectly done. Those in authority too much used their powers, “that men should follow the bent of their bows,” a thing which “did not need to be followed.” The chief cause of all the evils of the time was “the dark setting forth of God’s Word,” “the humming and harking of the priests who ought to read it, and the slanders given to those that did plainly and truly set it forth.” At any rate, the fact was as he described it to be; and they would find, he added, significantly, that, if they gave further occasion for complaint, “God had given them a prince that had force and strength to rule the highest of them.”⁴⁹³ For the present no further notice was taken of their conduct. There is no evidence that any magistrates were deprived or punished. The work which they had neglected was done for them by others, and they were left again to themselves with a clearer field.⁴⁹⁴ One noticeable victim, however, fell in this year. There were three, indeed, with equal claims to interest; but one, through caprice of fame, has been especially remembered. The great abbots, with but few exceptions, had given cause for suspicion during the late disturbances; that is to say, they had grown to advanced age as faithful subjects of the Papacy; they were too old to begin life again with a new allegiance. Information had transpired – I do not know the precise nature of it – to persuade Cromwell that the Abbots of Reading, Colchester, and Glastonbury were entangled in some treasonable enterprise or correspondence.⁴⁹⁵ The charges against the Abbot of Reading I have been unable to find. The Abbot of Colchester had refused to surrender his house, and concealed or made away with the abbey plate, and had used expressions of most unambiguous anxiety for the success of the rebellions, and of disappointment at their failure.⁴⁹⁶ They were both executed. On the first visitation of the monasteries, Whiting, Abbot of Glastonbury, received a favourable character from the visitors. He had taken the oaths to the king without objection, or none is mentioned. He had acquiesced generally, in his place in the House of Lords, in Cromwell’s legislation, he had been present at one reading at least of the concluding statute against the Pope’s authority;⁴⁹⁷ and there is no evidence that he distinguished himself in any way as a champion of the falling faith. In the last parliament he had been absent on plea of ill health; but he appointed no proxy, nor sought apparently to use on either side his legitimate influence. Cromwell’s distrust was awakened by some unknown reason; but both to him and to those who had spoken previously in his favour, it seemed, according to their standard of appreciation, sufficiently grounded. Perhaps some discontented monk had sent up secret informations.⁴⁹⁸ An order went out for an inquiry into his conduct, which was to be executed by three of the visitors, Layton, Pollard, and Moyle. On the 16th of September they were at Reading: on the 22d they had arrived at Glastonbury. The abbot was absent at a country house a mile and a half distant. They followed him, informed him of the cause of their coming, and asked him a few questions. His answers were “nothing to the purpose;” that is to say, he confessed nothing to the visitors’ purpose. He was taken back to the abbey; his private apartments were searched, and a book of arguments was found there against the king’s divorce, pardons, copies of bulls, and a Life of Thomas à Becket, – nothing particularly criminal, though all indicating the abbot’s tendencies. The visitors considered their discoveries “a great matter.” The abbot was again questioned; and this time his answers appeared to them “cankered and traitorous.” He was placed in charge of a guard, and sent to London to the Tower, to be examine by Cromwell himself. The occasion of his absence was taken for the dissolution of the house; and, as the first preliminary, an inventory was made of the plate, the furniture, and the money in the treasury. Glastonbury was one of the wealthiest of the religious houses. A less experienced person than Layton would have felt some surprise when he found that neither plate, jewels, nor ornaments were forthcoming sufficient for an ordinary parish church. But deceptions of this kind were too familiar to a man who had examined half the religious houses in England. He knew immediately that the abbey treasure was either in concealment or had been secretly made away with. Foreseeing the impending destruction of this establishment, the monks had been everywhere making use of their opportunities of plunder. The altar plate, in some few instances, may have been secreted from a sentiment of piety – from a desire to preserve from sacrilege vessels consecrated to holy uses. But plunder was the rule; piety was the exception. A confession of the Abbot of Barlings contains a frank avowal of the principles on which the fraternities generally acted. This good abbot called his convent into the chapter-house, and by his own acknowledgment, addressed them thus: —

Address of the Abbot of Barlings.

“Brethren, ye hear how other religious men be intreated, and how they have but forty shillings a piece given them and are let go. But they that have played the wise men amongst them have provided aforehand for themselves, and sold away divers things wherewith they may help themselves hereafter. And ye hear also this rumour that goeth abroad that the greater abbeys shall down also. Wherefore, by your advice, this shall be my counsel, that we do take such plate as we have, and certain of the best vestments and copes and set them aside, and sell them if need be, and so divide the money coming thereof when the house is suppressed. And I promise you of my faith and conscience ye shall have your part, and of every penny that I have during my life; and thereupon,” he concluded, “the brethren agreed thereunto.”⁴⁹⁹

Appropriation or concealment of plate regarded as felony.

Discovery of the Glastonbury plate which had been concealed by the abbot.

The motive, if good, could not excuse the fact.

Evidence of treason found against the abbot,

Which need not be called in question.

The quarrel with the Papacy exasperated by the persecution of English residents in Spain.

A less severe government than that of Henry VIII. would have refused to tolerate conduct of this kind. Those who decline to recognise the authority of an act of parliament over the property of corporate bodies, cannot pretend that a right of ownership was vested in persons whose tenure, at its best and surest, was limited by their lives.⁵⁰⁰ For members of religious houses to make away their plate was justly construed to be felony; and the law, which was necessarily general, could not recognise exceptions on the ground of piety of motive, when such an exception would but have furnished a screen behind which indiscriminate pillage might have been carried on with impunity. The visitors had been warned to be careful, and practice had made them skilful in means of detection. On the first day of the investigation at Glastonbury, “a fair chalice of gold” came to light, “with divers other parcels of plate;” all of which the abbot had concealed, committing perjury in doing so, on their previous visitation.⁵⁰¹ The next day brought out more; and the day after, more again. Gold and silver in vessels, ornaments, and money were discovered “mured up in walls, vaults, and other secret places,” some hidden by the abbot, some by the convent. Two monks who were treasurers, with the lay clerks of the vestry, were found to have been “arrant thieves.” At length as much treasure of various sorts was recovered as would have begun a new abbey.⁵⁰² The visitors did not trouble themselves to speculate on the abbot’s intentions. There is nothing to show that in collusion with the brethren he was not repeating the behaviour of the Abbot of Barlings; or, like so many of the northern abbots, he might have been hoarding a fund to subsidize insurrection, preserving the treasures of the temple to maintain the temple’s defenders; or he might have acted in a simple spirit of piety. His motives were of no moment. The fact of the concealment was patent. The letter communicating these discoveries to the government was written on the 28th of September. Another followed on the 2d of October, stating that, since the despatch of the last, the visitors “had come to the knowledge of divers sundry treasons committed and done by the Abbot of Glastonbury, the certainty whereof would appear in a Book of Depositions,” which they forwarded with the accusers’ names attached to their statements, “very haut and rank treason.”⁵⁰³ I have not discovered this “Book of Depositions;” but those who desire to elevate the Abbot of Glastonbury to the rank of the martyr, confess, in doing so, their belief that he was more faithful to the Church than to the State, that he was guilty of regarding the old ways as better than the new, and they need not care to question that he may have acted on his convictions, or at least have uttered them in words. After the recent experience of the Pilgrimage of Grace, an ascertained disposition of disloyalty was enough to ensure a conviction; and the Pope by his latest conduct had embittered the quarrel to the utmost. He had failed to excite a holy war against England, but three English merchants had been burnt by the Inquisition in Spain.⁵⁰⁴ Five more had been imprisoned and one had been tortured only for declaring that they considered Henry VIII. to be a Christian. Their properties had been confiscated, they had borne faggots and candles in a procession as sanbenitos,⁵⁰⁵ and Paul had issued a promise of indulgence to all pious Catholics who would kill an English heretic.⁵⁰⁶

November. The abbot is sent back to Somersetshire.

Nov. 14. He is arraigned at Wells for stealing the plate, and condemned.

He was unpopular in the county and among his tenants.

He is hanged on Glastonbury Torre.

Six weeks elapsed before the abbot’s fate was decided, part or the whole of which time he was in London. At the beginning of November he was sent back into Somersetshire, already condemned at a tribunal where Cromwell sat as prosecutor, jury, and judge. His escape in a more regular court was not contemplated as a possibility; among loose papers of Cromwell still remaining there is a memorandum in his own hand for “the trial and execution” of the Abbot of Glastonbury.⁵⁰⁷ But the appearance of unfair dealing was greater than the reality. Lord Russell, whose stainless character was worthy of his name, was one of the commissioners before whom the trial was conducted; and Russell has left on record his approval of, and acquiescence in the conduct of the case, in plain and unmistakeable language. Whiting was arraigned at Wells on Thursday, the 14th of November, with his treasurers, “before as worshipful a jury as was charged there for many years.”⁵⁰⁸ The crime of which he was formally accused was robbing the abbey church; and there was no doubt that he was guilty of having committed that crime, to whatever the guilt may have amounted. But if the government had prosecuted in every instance of abbey-church robbery, a monk would have hung in chains at all the cross-roads in England. The Abbot of Glastonbury was tried and convicted of felony; his real offence was treason, as the word was interpreted by Cromwell. He was unpopular in the county, and among his dependents. “There were many bills,” Lord Russell said, “put up against the abbot, by his tenants and others, for wrongs and injuries that he had done them.”⁵⁰⁹ He was sentenced to death, and the day following was fixed for the execution. He was taken with the two monks from Wells to Glastonbury; he was drawn through the town in the usual manner, and thence to the top of the conical hill which rises out of the level plain of Somersetshire, called Glastonbury Torre. To the last he was tormented with questions, “but he would accuse no man but himself;” he only requested the visitors’ servants who were present on the Torre to entreat their masters and Lord Russell “to desire the King’s Highness of his merciful goodness and in the way of charity to forgive him his great offences by him committed and done against his Grace.”⁵¹⁰ The modern student, to whom the passions and the difficulties of the time are as a long forgotten dream, who sees only the bleak hill-top on the dreary November day, the gallows, and an infirm old man guilty of nothing which he can understand to be a crime, shudders at the needless cruelty. Cromwell, for his share in this policy of death, was soon to receive as he had given; a few more months, and he too on Tower Hill would pass to his account.

CHAPTER XVII
ANNE OF CLEVES, AND THE FALL OF CROMWELL

Increasing impatience of the country for the king’s marriage.

The king’s marriage could not be longer delayed. Almost three years had been wasted in fruitless negotiations, and the state of his health threatened, more and more clearly, that his life would not be prolonged to any advanced period. The death of the Duke of Richmond⁵¹¹ was a fresh evidence of the absence of vital stamina in Henry’s male children; and the anxious and impatient people saw as yet but a single fragile life between the country and a disputed succession. The disloyal Romanists alone desired to throw obstacles between the king and a fresh connexion – alone calumniated his motives, and looked forward hopefully to the possible and probable confusion.

The recommendation of Anne of Cleaves.

Among the ladies who had been considered suitable to take the place of Queen Jane, the name had been mentioned, with no especial commendation, of Anne, daughter of the Duke of Cleves, and sister-in-law of the Elector of Saxony. She had been set aside in favour of the Duchess of Milan; but, all hopes in this quarter having been abruptly and ungraciously terminated, Cromwell once more turned his eyes towards a connexion which, more than any other, would make the Emperor repent of his discourtesy – and would further at the same time the great object which the condition of Europe now, more than ever, showed him to be necessary – a league of all nations of the Teutonic race in defence of the Reformation. A marriage between the king and a German Protestant princess would put a final end to Anglo-Imperial trifling; and, committing England to a definite policy abroad, it would neutralize at home the efforts of the framers of the Six Articles, and compel the king, whether he desired it or not, to return to a toleration of Lutheran opinions and Lutheran practices.

The opportunity favourable to a Protestant connexion.

Prorogation of parliament.

Supposed pre-contract between Anne of Cleves and a Count of Lorraine.

Her appearance and accomplishments.

Cromwell neglects a warning.

Her portrait taken by Holbein.

Barnes goes as commissioner into Germany.

The persecution in England ceases.

The opportunity of urging such an alliance on Henry was more than favourable. He had been deceived, insulted, and menaced by the Emperor; his articles of union had been converted by the bishops into articles of a vindictive persecution; and the Anglicans, in their indiscreet animosity, had betrayed their true tendencies, and had shown how little, in a life-and-death struggle with the Papacy, he could depend upon their lukewarm zeal for independence. Affecting only to persecute heterodoxy, they had extended their vengeance to every advocate for freedom, to every enemy of ecclesiastical exemptions and profitable superstitions; and the king, disappointed and exasperated, was in a humour, while snatching their victims from their grasp, to consent to a step which would undo their victory in parliament. The occasion was not allowed to cool. Parliament was prorogued on the 11th of May, with an intimation from the crown that the religious question was not to be regarded as finally settled.⁵¹² The treaty with Cleves was so far advanced on the 17th of July that Lord Hertford⁵¹³ was able to congratulate Cromwell on the consent of Anne’s brother and mother.⁵¹⁴ The lady had been previously intended for a son of a Duke of Lorraine; and Henry, whom experience had made anxious, was alarmed at the name of a “pre-contract.” But Dr. Wotton, who was sent over to arrange the preliminaries, and was instructed to see the difficulty cleared, was informed and believed that the engagement had never advanced to a form which brought with it legal obligations, and that Anne was at liberty to marry wherever she pleased.⁵¹⁵ Of her personal attractions Wotton reported vaguely. He said that she had been well brought up; but ladies of rank in Germany were not usually taught accomplishments. She could speak no language except her own, nor could she play on any instrument. He supposed, however, that she would be able to learn English in no long time; and he comforted the king by assuring him that at least she had no taste for “the heavy-headed revels” of her countrymen.⁵¹⁶ Wotton could not be accused of having lent himself to a deception as to the lady’s recommendations. It would have been well for Cromwell if he too had been equally scrupulous. He had been warned beforehand of an unattractiveness, so great as to have overcome the spontaneous belief in the beauty of royal ladies;⁵¹⁷ but, intent upon the success of his policy, he disregarded information which his conduct proves him to have partially believed. Holbein was despatched to take the princess’s picture; and Holbein’s inimitable skill would not have failed so wholly in conveying a true impression of the original if he had not received an intimation that an agreeable portrait was expected of him; while, as soon as it was brought into England, Cromwell’s agents praised to the king “her features, beauty, and princely proportions,” and assured him that the resemblance was perfect.⁵¹⁸ The German commission was as expeditious as the Spanish had been dilatory. To allay any uneasiness which might remain with respect to the Six Articles, and to furnish a convincing evidence of the toleration which was practised, Dr. Barnes was sent over as one of the English representatives; and he carried with him the comforting assurance that the persecution had been terminated, and that the Gospel had free way. His assertions were afterwards confirmed by unsuspicious and independent evidence. “There is no persecution,” wrote a Protestant in London, a few months later, to Bullinger. “The Word is powerfully preached. Books of every kind may safely be exposed to sale.”⁵¹⁹ “Good pastors,” wrote another, “are freely preaching the truth, nor has any notice been taken of them on account of the articles.”⁵²⁰ Even the Elector of Saxony, jealous and distrustful as he had ever been of Henry, was so far satisfied as to write to him that he understood “the sharpness of the decree of the Six Articles to be modified by the wisdom and moderation of his Highness, and the execution of it not put in use.”⁵²¹

Cromwell’s dangerous game.

His attitude towards the peers,

All promised well; but it is not to be supposed that Cromwell was allowed without resistance to paralyse a measure which had been carried by an almost unanimous parliament. More than half the Privy Council, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Bishops of Winchester, Durham, and Chichester, were openly and violently opposed to him. The House of Lords and the country gentlemen, baffled, as it seemed to them, by his treachery (for he had professed to go along with their statute while it was under discussion), maintained an attitude of sullen menace or open resistance. If the laws against the heretics might not be put in force, they would lend no help to execute the laws against the Romanists.⁵²² They despised Cromwell’s injunctions, though supported by orders from the crown. They would not acknowledge so much as the receipt of his letters. He was playing a critical and most dangerous game, in which he must triumph or be annihilated. The king warned him repeatedly to be cautious;⁵²³ but the terms on which he had placed himself with the nobility had perhaps passed the point where caution could have been of use. He answered haughtiness by haughtiness: and he left his fate to the chances of fortune, careless what it might be, if only he could accomplish his work while life and power remained to him. One illustration of his relation with the temporal peers shall be given in this place, conveying, as it does, other allusions also, the drift of which is painfully intelligible. The following letter is written in Cromwell’s own hand. The address is lost, but the rank of the person or persons to whom it was sent is apparent from the contents: —

Who, to his Majesty’s marvel, persist in maintaining the Papistical sect.

“After my right hearty commendations, the King’s Highness, being informed that there be two priests in your town, called Sir William Winstanley, which is now in ward, the other called Sir William Richardson, otherwise Good Sir William, hath commanded me to signify to you that, upon the receipt hereof, you shall send both the said priests hither as prisoners in assured custody. His Grace cannot a little marvel to hear of the Papistical faction that is maintained in that town, and by you chiefly that are of his Grace’s council. Surely his Majesty thinketh that you have little respect either to him, or to his laws, or to the good order of that town, which so little regard him in a matter of so great weight, which, also, his Highness hath so much to heart; and willed me plainly to say to you all and every of you, that in case he shall perceive from henceforth any such abuses suffered or winked at as have been hitherto, in manner in contempt of his most royal estate, his Highness will put others in the best of your rooms that so offend him, by whom he will be better served. It is thought against all reason that the prayers of women, and their fond flickerings, should move any of you to do that thing that should in anywise displease your prince and sovereign lord, or offend his just laws. And, if you shall think any extremity in this writing, you must thank yourselves that have procured it; for neither of yourselves have you regarded these matters, nor answered to many of my letters, written for like purposes and upon like occasions: wherein, though I have not made any accusation, yet, being in the place for these things that I am, I have thought you did me therein too much injury, and such as I am assured his Highness, knowing it, would not have taken it in good part. But this matter needeth no aggravation, ne I have done anything in it more than hath been by his Majesty thought meet, percase not so much; and thus heartily fare you well.

“Your Lordship’s assured“Thomas Cromwell.”⁵²⁴

A breach begins to open between the king and the minister.

Increasing expenses of the government.

Cromwell prepares for his fall.

His personal expenditure large, and the sources of his income exceptionable.

Between the minister and the king the points of difference were large and increasing. The conduct which had earned for Cromwell the hatred or the immense majority of the people, could not but at times have been regarded disapprovingly by a person who shared so deeply as Henry in the English conservative spirit; while Cromwell, again, was lavish in his expenditure; and the outlay upon the fleet and the Irish army, the cost of suppression of the insurrection, and of the defences of the coast, at once vast and unusual, were not the less irritating because they could not be denied to be necessary. A spirit of economy in the reaction from his youthful extravagance, was growing over Henry with his advancing years; he could not reconcile himself to a profusion to which, even with the addition of the Church lands, his resources were altogether unequal, without trespassing on his subjects’ purses; and the conservative faction in the council took advantage of his ill humour to whisper that the fault was in the carelessness, the waste, and the corruption of the privy seal. Cromwell knew it well.⁵²⁵ Two years previously he had received full warning that they were on the watch to take advantage of any momentary displeasure against him in the king. They were not likely to have been conciliated subsequently by the deaths of the Marquis of Exeter and Lord Montague, for which he personally was held responsible; and he prepared for the fate which he foresaw, in making settlements on his servants, that they might not suffer by his attainder.⁵²⁶ The noble lords possessed, undoubtedly, one serious advantage against him. His own expenses were as profuse as the expenses of the state under his management. His agents were spread over Europe. He bought his information anywhere, and at any cost; and secret-service money for such purposes he must have provided, like his successor in the same policy, Sir Francis Walsingham, from his own resources. As a self-raised statesman, he had inherited nothing. His position as a nobleman was to be maintained; and it was maintained so liberally, that two hundred poor were every day supplied with food at his gate. The salaries of his offices and the rents of such estates as the king had given to him were inadequate for such irregular necessities. In Cromwell, the questionable practice of most great men of his time – the practice of receiving pensions and presents for general support and patronage – was carried to an extent which even then, perhaps, appeared excessive. It is evident, from his whole correspondence, that he received as profusely as he spent. We trace in him no such ambitious splendour as he had seen in Wolsey. He was contented with the moderate maintenance of a nobleman’s establishment. But power was essential to him; and a power like that which Cromwell wielded required resources which he obtained only by exposing his reputation while alive, and his good name in history, to not unmerited blame.

An attempt to destroy Gardiner.

Gardiner escapes;

But, with the Bishop of Chichester, is dismissed from the Privy Council.

Cromwell’s position is not benefited, however.

Weighted as he was with faults, which his high purposes but partially excuse, he fought his battle bravely – alone – against the world. The German marriage did not pass without a struggle at the council board. Cromwell had long recognised his strongest and most dangerous enemy in the person of Stephen Gardiner. So much he dreaded the subtle bishop, that he had made an effort once to entangle him under the Supremacy Act;⁵²⁷ but Gardiner had glided under the shadow of the act, and had escaped its grasp. Smooth, treacherous, and plausible, he had held his way along the outer edge of the permitted course, never committing himself, commanding the sympathy of English conservatism, the patron of those suspected of Romanism on one side, as Cromwell was the patron of heretics; but self-possessed and clear-headed, watching the times, knowing that the reaction must have its day at last, and only careful to avoid the precipitancy, in future, into which he had blundered after the Six Articles Bill. His rival’s counter-move had checked him, but he waited his opportunity; and when Barnes was sent as commissioner into Germany, Gardiner challenged openly before the council the appointment, for such a purpose, of a man who was “defamed of heresy.” He was supported, apparently, by the Bishop of Chichester, or the latter ventured to thwart the privy seal in some other manner. Cromwell for the moment was strong enough to bear his opponents down. They were both dismissed from the Privy Council.⁵²⁸ But this arbitrary act was treated as a breach of the tacit compact by which the opposing parties endured each other’s presence. If the Bishop of Durham’s chaplain spoke the truth, an attempt was made, in which even Lord Southampton bore a share, to bring Tunstall forward in Gardiner’s place.⁵²⁹ And though this scheme failed, through the caution of the principal persons interested, the grievances remained, embittered by a forced submission: a fresh debt had been contracted, bearing interest till it was paid.

Protestant imprudence.

Persecution of a Catholic preacher in London,

As great, or a greater, danger embarrassed Cromwell from the folly of his friends. So long as the tide was in their favour, the Protestants indulged in insolent excesses, which provoked, and almost justified the anger with which they were regarded. Hitherto they had held a monopoly of popular preaching. Tradition and authority had been with the Catholics: the rhetoric had been mainly with their adversaries. In the summer the interest of London was suddenly excited on the other side by a Catholic orator of extraordinary powers, a Dr. Watts, unknown before or after this particular crisis, but for the moment a principal figure on the stage. Watts attracted vast audiences; and the Protestants could not endure a rival, and were as little able as their opponents to content themselves with refuting him by argument. He was summoned, on a charge of false doctrine, before the Archbishop of Canterbury; and even moderate persons were scandalized when they saw Barnes sitting by the side of Cranmer as assessor in a cause of heresy.⁵³⁰ It appeared, and perhaps it was designed, as an insult – as a deliberately calculated outrage. Ten thousand London citizens proposed to walk in procession to Lambeth, to require the restoration of their teacher; and, although the open demonstration was prevented by the City officers, an alderman took charge of their petition, and offered, unless the preacher’s offence was high treason, to put in bail for him in the name of the corporation.⁵³¹