Thomas Cromwell

Henry VIII’s Vicegerent, c. 1485–1540

Thomas Cromwell was neither preacher nor theologian. He was a statesman, the man of humble birth who became Henry VIII’s chief minister and his vicegerent over the Church of England, and in that office he became the patron of the English Bible. John Eadie judged that the Great Bible “owed its existence to Crumwell and to his Protestant zeal.”1 His life shows how God may use the machinery of a kingdom to carry his Word to the people, and how quickly the favor of princes can be withdrawn.

From Putney to the King’s Council

He was born about 1485.2 John Foxe, who counted him among the great friends of the gospel, tells us that “he was borne at Putney or thereabout, being a Smiths son.” As a young man he wandered abroad, served as a soldier, kept the books of the English merchants at Antwerp, and went to Rome on business for the town of Boston. On that journey something happened that Foxe thought worth recording:

All this while it appeareth, that Cromwell had yet no sound taste nor judgment of Religion, but was wild & youthful, without sense or regard of God and his word … till at length by learning the text of the new Testament without book, of Erasmus translation in his going and coming from Rome … he began to be touched and called to better understanding.3 John FoxeActes and Monuments, 1583

He entered the household of Cardinal Wolsey and rose to be his solicitor, and about 1525 he managed the suppression of small monasteries to endow Wolsey’s colleges. When Wolsey fell, Cromwell passed into the king’s service. Foxe says he won Henry by showing him the oath the bishops swore to the pope at their consecration, by which the king was “but as half king, and they but half his subjects in his own land.”4 Then came the offices in quick succession: Secretary in 1534, vicegerent in 1535, the Garter in 1537, and the earldom of Essex on April 17, 1540.5 As vicegerent he held, in Whitford’s words, “considerable power in matters political and ecclesiastical,” and he had already pressed forward the Act of Supremacy (1534) that made the king supreme head of the English church.6

The Vicegerent and the Word

Foxe summed up his religious policy this way:

His whole life was nothing else, but a continual care and travel how to advance and further the right knowledge of the Gospel, and reform the house of God … wherein first he caused the people to be instructed in the Lord’s Prayer, and Creed in English, then procured the Scripture also to be read and set forth in the same language, for every English man to understand.7 John FoxeActes and Monuments, 1583

His dealings with William Tyndale show both the statesman and the patron. In January 1531 he commissioned the merchant Stephen Vaughan to find Tyndale in the Low Countries and sound him about returning to England.8 When Tyndale was betrayed and imprisoned at Vilvorde in 1535, Cromwell obtained the king’s leave to write to two privy councilors in Brabant “for Tyndale,” asking that he be released and sent to England. The attempt failed.9 It was Cromwell who persuaded Henry to license Matthew’s Bible in 1537, though it carried Tyndale’s work under another name.10 In 1538 his injunctions as vicar-general required every parish to provide

one boke of the whole Bible in the largest volume in Englyshe, and the same sett up in summe convenyent place within the said churche that ye have cure of, whereat your parishners may most commodiously resort to the same and rede yt.11 Thomas CromwellInjunctions, 1538

The book that answered that requirement was the Great Bible, prepared by Miles Coverdale under Cromwell’s direction. Eadie concluded, “The merit then belongs really to the vicegerent, and neither to the king nor the archbishop.”12

Fall and Death

Cromwell’s ruin came through a marriage. Hoping to bind England to the Protestant princes of Germany, he arranged Henry’s match with Anne of Cleves; the king took a dislike to her, the marriage was quickly annulled, and Cromwell’s many enemies saw their opportunity.13 He was arrested in the council chamber and attainted by Parliament. Foxe records that he was charged chiefly with heresy: with protecting men such as Robert Barnes, with spreading books of “manifest matter of much heresy,” and with having books against the sacrament of the altar translated into English.14 He had held his earldom, Eadie notes, “but one hundred days.”15 On July 28, 1540 he was beheaded on Tower Hill, the same day the king married Catherine Howard.16 On the scaffold he confessed, “I have lived a sinner, and offended my Lord God,” and then knelt and prayed:

I see and knowledge that there is in myself no hope of salvation, but all my confidence, hope and trust, is in thy most merciful goodness. I have no merits nor good works, which I may allege before thee. … Let thy blood cleanse and wash away the spots and foulness of my sins. Let thy righteousness hide and cover my unrighteousness.17 Thomas CromwellTower Hill, July 28, 1540

When the next editions of the Great Bible came from the press, his arms had been cut from the title page and the circle beneath his figure left blank.18 The Bible he had set in the churches stayed there.

Friends of the Reformation   Hugh Latimer

Notes

  1. John Eadie, The English Bible, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1876), chap. 26. See The Great Bible. ↩
  2. David M. Whitford, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), pt. 2, “A Reformation ABC,” s.v. “Cromwell, Thomas (1485–1540)”; Scott M. Manetsch, “The Man in the Middle: Luther among the Reformers,” in R. C. Sproul and Stephen J. Nichols, eds., The Legacy of Luther (Orlando: Reformation Trust, 2016), gives “c. 1485–1540.” ↩
  3. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London: John Day, 1583), vol. 2, “The history concerning the life, acts, and death of the famous and worthy Counselor Lord Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex.” ↩
  4. Ibid. ↩
  5. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 28. ↩
  6. Whitford, Companion, s.v. “Cromwell, Thomas.” ↩
  7. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Lord Thomas Cromwell.” ↩
  8. David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 209–11. ↩
  9. Ibid., 370–71, 381. ↩
  10. Ibid., 335. See The Matthew Bible. ↩
  11. Cromwell’s Injunctions of 1538, quoted in Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 26. ↩
  12. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 26. See Miles Coverdale. ↩
  13. Whitford, Companion, s.v. “Cromwell, Thomas”; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, on the marriage he “devised” for “the better establishing of sincere religion in this realm.” ↩
  14. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Lord Thomas Cromwell.” ↩
  15. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 28. ↩
  16. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, n.d.), bk. 15, chap. 5; Colin Hamer, Anne Boleyn: One Short Life That Changed the English-Speaking World (Leominster: Day One, 2007), chronology and chap. 13. ↩
  17. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “A prayer that the Lord Cromwell said at the hour of his death.” D’Aubigné prints the same prayer in Time of Calvin, 8: bk. 15, chap. 5. ↩
  18. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 28. ↩