wrote ten years later in 1539, recommended him to read a new
Italian book on politics, which Pole says he afterwards discovered
was Machiavelli’s Prince. But this discovery was not
made for some years: the Prince was not published until 1532,
three years after the conversation; there is evidence that
Cromwell was not acquainted with it until 1537 or 1539, and
there is nothing in the Prince bearing on the precise point under
discussion by Pole and Cromwell. On the other hand, the point
is discussed in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano which had just been
published in 1528, and of which Cromwell promised to lend
Bonner a copy in 1530. The Cortegiano is the antithesis of the
Prince; and there is little doubt that Pole’s account is the
offspring of an imagination heated by his own perusal of the
Prince in 1538, and by Cromwell’s ruin of the Pole family at
the same time; until then he had failed to see in Cromwell
the Machiavellian “emissary of Satan.”
Equally fanciful is Pole’s ascription of the whole responsibility for the Reformation to Cromwell’s suggestion. It was impossible for Pole to realize the substantial causes of that perfectly natural development, and it was his cue to represent Henry as having acted at the diabolic suggestion of Satan’s emissary. In reality the whole programme, the destruction of the liberties and confiscation of the wealth of the church by parliamentary agency, had been indicated before Cromwell had spoken to Henry. The use of Praemunire had been applied to Wolsey; laymen had supplanted ecclesiastics in the chief offices of state; the plan of getting a divorce without papal intervention had been the original idea, which Wolsey had induced the king to abandon, and it had been revived by Cranmer’s suggestion about the universities. The root idea of the supreme authority of the king had been asserted in Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man published in 1528, which Anne Boleyn herself had brought to Henry’s notice: “this,” he said, “is a book for me and all kings to read,” and Campeggio had felt compelled to warn him against these notions, of which Pole imagines that he had never heard until they were put into his head by Cromwell late in 1530. In the same way Cromwell’s influence over the government from 1529–1533 has been grossly exaggerated. It was not till 1531 that he was admitted to the privy council nor till 1534 that he was made secretary, though he had been made master of the Jewel-House, clerk of the Hanaper and master of the Wards in 1532, and chancellor of the exchequer (then a minor office) in 1533. It is not till 1533 that his name is as much as mentioned in the correspondence of any foreign ambassador resident in London. This obscurity has been attributed to deliberate suppression: but no secrecy was made about Cranmer’s suggestion, and it was not Henry’s habit to assume a responsibility which he could devolve upon others. It is said that Cromwell’s life would not have been safe, had he been known as the author of this policy; but that is not a consideration which would have appealed to Henry, and he was just as able to protect his minister in 1530 as he was in 1536. Cromwell, in fact, was not the author of that policy, but he was the most efficient instrument in its execution.
He was Henry’s parliamentary agent, but even in this capacity his power has been overrated, and he is supposed to have invented those parliamentary complaints against the clergy, which were transmuted into the legislation of 1532. But the complaints were old enough; many of them had been heard in parliament nearly twenty years before, and there is ample evidence to show that the petition against the clergy represents the “infinite clamours” of the Commons against the Church, which the House itself resolved should be “put in writing and delivered to the king.” The actual drafting of the statute, as of all the Reformation Acts between 1532 and 1539, was largely Cromwell’s work; and the success with which parliament was managed during this period was also due to him. It was not an easy task, for the House of Commons more than once rejected government measures, and members were heard to threaten Henry VIII. with the fate of Richard III.; they even complained of Cromwell’s reporting their proceedings to the king. That was his business rather than conveying imaginary royal orders to the House. “They be contented,” he wrote in one of these reports, “that deed and writing shall be treason,” but words were only to be misprision: they refused to include an heir’s rebellion or disobedience in the bill “as rebellion is already treason, and disobedience is no cause of forfeiture of inheritance.” There was, of course, room for manipulation, which Cromwell extended to parliamentary elections; but parliamentary opinion was a force of which he had to take account, and not a negligible quantity.
From the date of his appointment as secretary in 1534, Cromwell’s biography belongs to the history of England, but it is necessary to define his personal attitude to the revolution in which he was the king’s most conspicuous agent. He was included by Foxe in his Book of Martyrs to the Protestant faith: more recent historians regard him as a sacrilegious ruffian. Now, there were two cardinal principles in the Protestantism of the 16th century—the supremacy of the temporal sovereign over the church in matters of government, and the supremacy of the Scriptures over the Church in matters of faith. There is no room for doubt as to the sincerity of Cromwell’s belief in the first of these two articles: he paid at his own expense for an English translation of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, the classic medieval advocate of that doctrine; he had a scheme for governing England by means of administrative councils nominated by the king to the detriment of parliament; and he urged upon Henry the adoption of the maxim of the Roman civil law—quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem. He wanted, in his own words, “one body politic” and no rival to the king’s authority; and he set the divine right of kings against the divine right of the papacy. There is more doubt about the sincerity of Cromwell’s attachment to the second article; it is true that he set up a Bible in every parish church, and regarded them as invaluable; and the correspondents who unbosom themselves to him are all of a Protestant way of thinking. But Protestantism was the greatest support of absolute monarchy. Hence its value in Cromwell’s eyes. Of religious conviction there is in him little trace, and still less of the religious temperament. He was a polished representative of the callous, secular middle class of that most irreligious age. Sentiment found no place, and feeling little, in his composition; he used the axe with as little passion as the surgeon does the knife, and he operated on some of the best and noblest in the land. He saw that it was wiser to proscribe a few great opponents than to fall on humbler prey; but he set law above justice, and law to him was simply the will of the state.
In 1534 Cromwell was appointed master of the Rolls, and in 1535 chancellor of Cambridge University and visitor-general of the monasteries. The policy of the Dissolution has been theoretically denounced, but practically approved in every civilized state, Catholic as well as Protestant. Every one has found it necessary, sooner or later, to curtail or to destroy its monastic foundations; only those which delayed the task longest have generally lagged farthest behind in national progress. The need for reform was admitted by a committee of cardinals appointed by Paul III. in 1535, and it had been begun by Wolsey. Cromwell was not affected by the iniquities of the monks except as arguments for the confiscation of their property. He had boasted that he would make Henry VIII. the richest prince in Christendom; and the monasteries, with their direct dependence on the pope and their cosmopolitan organization, were obstacles to that absolute authority of the national state which was Cromwell’s ideal. He had learnt how to visit monasteries under Wolsey, and the visitation of 1535 was carried out with ruthless efficiency. During the storm which followed, Henry took the management of affairs into his own hands, but Cromwell was rewarded in July 1536 by being knighted, created lord privy seal, Baron Cromwell, and vicar-general and viceregent of the king in “Spirituals.”
In this last offensive capacity he sent a lay deputy to preside in Convocation, taking precedence of the bishops and archbishops, and issued his famous Injunctions of 1536 and 1538; a Bible was to be provided in every church; the Paternoster, Creed and Ten Commandments were to be recited by the incumbent in
