The Correspondence of Thomas Cromwell

Primary Contributors:

Caitlin Burge, with the Cultures of Knowledge, Networking Archives, and Tudor Networks of Power projects


Thomas Cromwell, by Hans Holbein the younger. 1532–3. Oil on panel, 78.1 by 64.1 cm. (Frick Collection, New York, Henry Clay Frick Bequest; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex (c. 1485–1540)

Born to a brewer in Putney, Thomas Cromwell rose from obscurity to become Chief Minister to Henry VIII and one of the most powerful and influential men of the Tudor reign. Having left England at a young age, Cromwell spent time living and working across the European continent, including France, Italy, and the Low Countries, developing his language skills and expanding his network of contacts, both personal and professional. Returning to England and becoming a firm member of English legal circles by (at the latest) 1520, Cromwell entered parliament for the first time in 1523, and the employ of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey by 1524, acting as his secretary and managing the cardinal’s lands across the country. As chief advisor to the king, Wolsey offered Cromwell a vital insight into and connection with the court of Henry VIII. Although Wolsey’s fall from favour in 1529 and death in 1530 could have spelled an end to Cromwell’s career, instead he used this an opportunity to enter the king’s employ, first in an attempt to aid his former master before managing lands for Henry as he had once for Wolsey.

By the early 1530s, Cromwell had worked his way into the king’s court, employing letters as an administrative tool as he amalgamated a collection of household offices. In 1532, he was appointed Master of the Jewels and Clerk of the Hanaper; in 1533 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and began taking over many of the duties of the Principal Secretary, to which he was officially appointed in April 1534. In January 1535, Cromwell was made Vicegerent in Spirituals, and in 1536 was appointed Lord Privy Seal, allowing him to hold two of the three great seals of office. Combining these offices together to make himself the king’s right-hand man, Cromwell became Chief Minister, the ultimate—if unofficial—position of influence.

Cromwell’s tenure as Chief Minister during the 1530s saw some of the most tumultuous changes of Henry’s reign: both the marriage and fall of Anne Boleyn; the marriages to Jane Seymour and—the now infamous—Anne of Cleves; the break from Rome; the dissolution of the monasteries; and the Act of Supremacy and the associated trial and executions of Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, to name but a few. Blamed by many across the country for these changes, Cromwell was accused of misleading the king by the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising across northern counties of England in 1536, the largest revolt during Henry’s thirty-eight year reign. The extent to which Cromwell can be considered the true orchestrator of the English Reformation is still hotly contested by historians.

Cromwell’s fall from power in 1540 was as sudden as his rise had been meteoric. Faced with mounting opposition at court from nobles and religious conservatives, and a growing list of failures in foreign diplomacy, the final straw for the king’s chief minister proved to be the disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves in January 1540. Accused of treason, Cromwell was arrested on 10 June 1540 and executed a little over a month later on the 28 July. Despite being stripped of his titles and left in disgrace, Cromwell left a legacy of refined administrative processes and a reformed royal council that would last for decades, and he came to be lamented as Henry’s ‘most faithful servant’.


Partners and Additional Contributors

These letters have been collected and transcribed as part of the PhD ‘Letters, Networks of Power, and the Fall of Thomas Cromwell, 1523-1547,’ being completed at Queen Mary, University of London and funded by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership, an AHRC consortium.

Many thanks go to Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert for sharing the metadata for this PhD from their ongoing AHRC-funded research project, Tudor Networks of Power, 1509–1603.

Preparation of the metadata for upload to EMLO of the letters from the State Papers was carried out under the aegis of the AHRC research project Networking Archives, and the letter transcriptions, created by Caitlin Burge, were set out and published in EMLO with funding from the Packard Humanities Institute. Thanks are due to work-experience student Phoebe Stephenson, currently studying for a Masters in Publishing at the University of Kingston, for her extensive and invaluable help with all aspects of preparation for the publication of this ‘starter’ catalogue; the work experience placement was arranged through Dr Chris Fletcher, Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. Metadata for the letters sent from Margaret Vernon to Thomas Cromwell, which may be viewed within this catalogue, were published in EMLO by Mary C. Erler in 2016 and had been collated in the course of her research for her 2013 publication Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns 1530–1558, and descriptions (including abstracts) for three letters (two received by Cromwell and one authored by him) are included from EMLO’s Bodleian card catalogue.

The listing of letters provided in this catalogue is not complete and has been identified as an EMLO Starter Catalogue. Scholars and students who are interested in working with EMLO and with Caitlin Burge to help bring it to completion are invited warmly to be in touch.

 


Key Bibliographic Source(s)

Transcriptions of Cromwell’s letters were created by Caitlin Burge from scanned manuscript sources available on Gale’s State Papers Online database, accessed at the British Library.

Mary C. Erler, Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns 1530–1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).


Contents

At this stage, the catalogue contains eleven letters from Thomas Cromwell to King Henry VIII, written in English between 1534 and April 1539. These letters—along with the rest of Cromwell’s correspondence—make up part of the State Papers archives and the dates supplied reflect those in the Calendar of State Papers, from which the metadata is sourced. Given Cromwell’s position as Henry’s right-hand man, letters between the two are few and far between. The remaining correspondence reflects instances in which Henry went on progress—or in 1539 to assess sea defences—and Cromwell remained in London, separated from the king. The transcriptions have been designed to replicate physical manuscript features as accurately as possible, including line breaks, page breaks, deletions, additions and contractions. This is currently a starter catalogue and will be supplemented by further metadata and transcriptions of Cromwell’s outgoing letters in the near future.

Incoming letters received by Cromwell include, at present, the letters written to him by the prioress Margaret Vernon (fl. 1509–1546), inventoried in EMLO by Mary C. Erler and published in a discrete catalogue as ‘The Correspondence of Margaret Vernon‘.


Scope of Catalogue

Whilst the survival of Cromwell’s incoming correspondence was aided by his sudden arrest and the seizure of his documents, Cromwell’s extant outgoing letters are limited in number. This is currently a ‘starter catalogue’ and will be supplemented by further metadata and transcriptions of Cromwell’s outgoing letters in the near future, covering the period 1524–1540.


Further resources

Bibliography

Amanda Bevan, ‘State Papers of Henry VIII: the Archives and Documents’, State Papers Online 1509–1714 (Cengage Learning EMEA Ltd., 2007).

Tracy Borman, Thomas Cromwell: The untold story of Henry VIII’s most faithful servant (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2014).

J. Patrick Coby, Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII’s Henchman (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2012).

G. R. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

Michael Everett, The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII (London: Yale University Press, 2016).

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life (Milton Keynes: Penguin Random House UK, 2018).

Launch curated catalogue (Burge) with transcriptions of outgoing letters

Launch all letters in EMLO to and from Cromwell

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