Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIX

Bonner's Cathedral of Saint Paul's

London--this cathedral was 

destroyed in the Great Fire of 

London in 1666 and replaced by 

Christopher Wren's masterpiece.

Another bishop on whom Mary depended in her program to restore England to the Catholic faith was Edmund Bonner.  Bonner had pretty humble beginnings.  His father was a woodsman or a lumberman in Worcestershire.  He studied law—not at the Inns of Court, which was common for a person who intended to follow a career in law, but at Oxford, earning degrees in both the Civil and Canon Law.  He was ordained quite young—perhaps as young as 22.  He was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and loyally stayed with him when he was arrested and accompanied the Cardinal on his trip to London to face the wrath of Henry (a wrath fanned into fury by Anne Boleyn who resented Wolsey’s attempts to break her ambitious relationship with the King.) It was a dangerous thing to do—to stay with the Cardinal in his time of disfavor.  Wolsey was fortunate enough not to make London but to die on the way—at Leicester Abbey, an Augustinian foundation just about halfway from Wolsey’s See at York to London where Henry—and the Tower—awaited him.  Bonner was with the Cardinal when he died. 

Cromwell scavenged the remnants of Wolsey’s service for what talent could go for the King’s work and Bonner found himself in the royal employ.   He was sent to Rome in 1532 to try to forestall action against Henry in the Roman Curia and in a 1533 meeting with Clement VII at Marseilles (where the Pope was conferring with Henry’s current foe, Francis I of France) Bonner threated the Pope with appealing over the Pope to a General Council for an annulment for Henry.  Clement was furious and Henry never got around to the appeal, choosing schism instead.  Bonner served Henry on embassies both to Charles V and to the French court and he made contact with the German Lutherans with whom he showed some doctrinal sympathy.  As an ambassador, Bonner could be quite abrasive and his tendency to get in altercations with his hosts did not help him achieve his diplomatic goals.  Yet this didn’t displease Henry who had a particular antipathy for the French.  Bonner also went out of his way to alienate Stephen Gardiner who had preceded him as ambassador in Paris and about whom he, Bonner, filed a highly critical report. 

Bonner oversaw the printing of “The King’s Great Bible” at Paris while ambassador to the French Court.  Myles Coverdale, later Bishop of Exeter and strong proponent of Protestant doctrine and worship in the reign of Edward VI, had provided this English translation under the sponsorship of Henry for use in the services of the Church of England.  (Henry had retained the Latin Mass throughout his reign, but much like the first introduction of the vernacular in the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council, the custom of reading the Epistle and Gospel in English—after they had been read in Latin—was to pave the way for greater changes yet to come.)  Henry (and his Protestant-leaning minion, Thomas Cromwell) were quite impressed at Bonner’s performance with getting the Bible printed and rewarded him with the Bishopric of Hereford.  As he was still in France, however, he could neither be consecrated or take possession of his see and Henry moved him to London in 1540 where he was consecrated according to the old rites which would remain unaltered in the time of King Henry. 

Bonner had been trained in law, not theology, and he had never shown much interested in the finer points of doctrine. Indeed, if anything he seemed to lean towards a version of Lutheranism.  Yet once in his diocese he became an implacable religious conservative.  When the wind blew in a more traditionalist direction after the execution of Thomas Cromwell, and Parliament passed the Six Articles, Bonner began an earnest persecution of all those in his diocese who did not adhere strictly to Catholic Doctrine on Transubstantiation, on purgatory, and on the cult of the saints. 

The death of Henry and the accession of King Edward changed everything.  Within a few months of the new King’s accession a set of injunctions had been drawn up for reform in the Church and the bishops were entrusted with the task of seeing that they were carried out in their cathedrals as well as in the parishes of their diocese.  The injunctions required

1.    all images were to be taken down

2.    stained glass, statutes, and shrines were to be dismantled

3.    rood screens, their lofts, and the rood beam with its cross and figures of John the Apostle and the Virgin Mary were to be destroyed

4.    vestments were abolished and were to be burned or sold

5.    sacred vessels were to be melted down and replaced by pewter or silver cups and tankards

6.    processions were banned

7.    the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday, Palms on Palm Sunday, and candles on Candlemas was done away with

8.    chantries (mortuary chapels) with endowed masses for those buried there were abolished

9.    masses for the dead were abolished.   

The bishops were responsible to see that these directives were carried out in their respective dioceses, but the Council appointed visitators to go around the kingdom to make sure the changes had been carried out.  Bonner refused to implement the changes and resisted the idea of visitors coming to his diocese.  As London was the national capital, the Council could not afford dissent there. He was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Fleet Prison.  There he changed his strategy and gave in to the visitation so as to be released and take his seat in Parliament where he could fight the new laws.  His resistance to the Prayer Book of 1549, however,  led to his being deprived of his see and imprisoned for the remained of King Edward’s reign.

Mary, on her accession, freed him and restored him to this See.  Bonner vigorously sought to restore Catholic doctrine and practice but had a rough time of it.  During his imprisonment, Edward’s Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, had pretty thoroughly destroyed what elements of Catholicism were left.  Not only had the stone altars been smashed in the London churches, the crosses and crucifixes torn down, the images of the saints ripped from their niches, but more important, Londoners had been well catechized in the Reformed Religion. 

Protestantism appealed to the merchant class and London was a merchant citu.  Protestantism was a religion that showed an appreciation for critical thinking and intellectual pursuits.  It was not a matter of blind authority and ancient traditions that no longer made sense.  Protestantism was rational, a thinking man’s religion.  There was no room for superstition.  Moreover it was economically rational. One didn’t put good money into silk vestments or silver crosses or gold chalices.  One gave to the poor.  One endowed schools.  And one re-invested one’s money for greater profit.  This was a religion for Londoners.  And when Bonner came back to his diocese after an absence of six years, the damage had been done.  Bonner did what he could do to repair the churches for Catholic worship again but he never won the confidence of the Londoners.  Even worse, he undertook a fierce persecution of Protestants, searching them out, trying them in ecclesiastical courts, and subjecting them to torture and being burned at the stake.  He was responsible for some of the worst excesses of “Bloody Mary’s” reign. 

Unlike Gardiner who predeceased Mary, Bonner lived well into Elizabeth’s reign.  He refused to swear to her supremacy over the Church.  Although he sat in her first Parliament where he spoke against her policy of reintroducing Protestantism, he was deprived of his See and imprisoned by the end of her first year on the throne.  Although many called for his death in retaliation for those martyred under his authority for their Protestant faith, he was never executed.  He remained imprisoned under somewhat genteel terms and every four months was given a new opportunity—which he always refused—to swear to the royal supremacy.  He died eleven years into Elizabeth reign. 

I notice that I have quite often used the term “Protestant” here and I need to clarify that term as I am not using it in the somewhat generic sense that we use to cover everything from a Swedish Lutheran to a Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite.  The problem is that the other-than-Catholic movement in the Church of England was not stable through this period.  Phase I which might be thought to be 1520-1540 leaned towards Lutheran thought.  Phase II, which we shall mark as 1540 to the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 leaned more to the Swiss model but I wouldn’t say “Calvinist.”  It was sort of a generic Swiss/Strasbourg variety influenced heavily by Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg reformer who had taken refuge in England between 1549 and 1551, but also drawing on Bucer’s friends among the Swiss, especially Zwingli.  Phase III which will be the reign of Elizabeth will see a real struggle between the Puritan party who are definitely Calvinist and the more moderate party which would have favored the more middle of the road sort of theology typified in the reign of Edward VI.  The Puritan party was to win out, though Elizabeth herself was definitely a theological moderate.  But all that is still away off in our entries. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXI

Peterborough Abbey Church,

raised by Henry VIII to Cathedral

status for a new diocese the King

established. 

Well, let’s leave Pope Francis and his critics for awhile and travel back to Merry Old England and the adventures of Good King Hal.  Or maybe not such a good fellow.  Where we left off the saga was in the middle of the closing of the monasteries. Just to recap:  If you remember, in the 1520’s, before Henry’s break with Rome, Cardinal Wolsey had closed down a number of smaller religious religious houses, transferred their members to more successful communities, and appropriated the endowments and lands of those closed houses to establish Cardinal College (now Corpus Christi College) at Oxford and a grammar school in his native Ipswich.  This was not a new tactic—the Crown had, with permission of the Holy See, suppressed a number of failing monasteries in the 14^th and 15^th centuries and diverted their revenues to other projects.  Wolsey’s right-hand man and leading disciple, Thomas Cromwell, had noticed the profits of this strategy of the Cardinal and after Wolsey’s fall had suggested this strategy to his new master, Henry VIII, in order to replenish the royal funds.   Henry was a spend-aholic. He was taking England from a back-water feudal monarchy into one of the leading Nation States of Europe, competing with both the Empire and France.  Henry was building up the Royal Navy—a task which centuries later would pay off in spades.  He used funds copiously as bribes and rewards to expand his influence on the continent.  He was pushing England into international trade and exploration for new markets and new sources of raw materials.  He also was relying more and more on the gentry and the mercantile classes for civil service and had to find funds with which to pay them or lands which to ennoble them.  Henry was very much the one who laid the foundation for the great Empire England was to become in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  And it cost money.  At the same time he was spending lavishly on himself and his succession of queens.  Henry was into building palaces.  Some he would seize (York Place which became Whitehall, and Wolsey’s Hampton Court along with the Hospital of Saint James which still retains its name today as St. James Palace.  In fact, the Royal entourage is still called “The Court of Saint James.”)  Others he bought and refurbished such as Beaulieu and Oatlands Place.  Some were existing royal residences he rebuilt, remodeled, or refurbished  such as Eltham Palace, Hatfield House, and Greenwich,   Still others he built from scratch such as Bridewell, Chelsea Manor, and Nonsuch Palace.  Henry was also given to magnificent spectacles such as his meeting with Francis I of France in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold because of the extravagance of the two monarchs trying to outdo each other in display of wealth.  Henry regularly traveled in great state—often by a flotilla of royal barges on the Thames.  He loved clothes and armor and tournaments.  In fact, there was probably no European monarch so spendthrift until in the following century Louis XIV, the Sun King, ascended the throne of France.  All this extravagance, whether personal or political, had to be paid for and the English Crown was particularly poor.  The sentiment in England was that “The King should live off his own”—which meant that the King should use the revenues from his own lands to pay not only for his private expenses but even for the Army, the Navy, and other government projects.  The Crown could not impose new taxes without the consent of the House of Commons and the Commons believed, as I wrote, that the Crown should live off its own.  So where was Henry to get money?  The Church had money—more money than the Crown, much more money.  How was the Crown to get that money?   Cromwell remembered the trick of suppressing monasteries.  In 1536 he went after the small monasteries—some of which were quite wealthy in land and revenues, despite their small numbers.  Monks and nuns were given the choice of secularizing with a small cash settlement or of transferring to larger monasteries.  The following year Cromwell went after some of the larger monasteries and gave handsome settlements to those who voluntarily surrendered their property.  This time monks and nuns were not given the option of transferring to other monasteries (Cromwell had determined to pick the monastery tree fruitless) but were given the settlement of an annual pension, sufficient for the monks to live comfortably.  Abbots and priors were given pensions far more generous than that granted to ordinary monks, pensions that enabled them to live as gentlemen of means, and this assured their cooperation in closing down their houses.   (The nuns had a smaller pension that was not quite enough for them to do the same, though it was presumed they would return to their families where the allowance would be sufficient for their maintenance.)  Neither monks nor nuns were released from their vows and thus were not free to marry (though some, especially among the nuns, did).  They also were expected to retain their religious garb (though few did).  Monasteries that did not voluntarily surrender were visited by royal commissioners and shut down.  By 1539 there were still a considerable number of monasteries operating, but these were either in more remote corners of the kingdom or they were some of the great monastic houses with ties to the Crown.  But even these were to fall.    Before we get to that, however, we need to look at a particular type of monastery and how Henry dealt with them and these are the Cathedral priories.
The medieval Church of England had a particularly unique tradition in which several cathedrals did not have the usual dean and chapter of canons but a monastic community that followed the Rule of Saint Benedict and was governed by the Prior (the Abbot being, in theory, the Bishop.)  Canterbury, Winchester, Ely, Carlisle, Durham, Rochester, Norwich, and Worcester were all such arrangements.  (Carlisle was not a Benedictine foundation, but one of the Arrouaisian Canons who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine.)    Typically in such situations, the Prior was named as dean of the newly constituted chapter of secular canons that replaced the monks.     Thomas Goldwell was prior of the Benedictine monks at Canterbury—a large house of 69 monks.  He signed the assent to the royal supremacy in 1534 which acknowledged Henry as head of the Church.  Monastic life continued as normal until 1539 when the monastery was suppressed.   Goldwell was given an annual pension of £ 80 and named a prebendary (canon) of the Cathedral.  (1539 £ 80 equals about $60,000 in modern currency, but approximately five times that in actual buying power.)  Winchester Priory had 45 monks and the last prior, William Kingsmill, was appointed dean of the Cathedral.  Robert Steward had been prior of Ely since 1522.  Although he had supported the validity of the Royal Marriage to Katherine of Aragon, he soon switched sides to Henry and supported the Royal Supremacy as well as playing an active role in convincing monasteries to surrender to the King.  When his own monastery was suppressed in November 1539 he was given a handsome pension.  Two years later he was appointed first dean of the new Cathedral.  Hugh Whitehead was Prior of the monks at Durham from 1519.  Like the others, he acceded to Henry’s supremacy.  The monastic community was dissolved in 1540 and he was pensioned but then appointed first dean of the new secular chapter.   Under Edward VI he was imprisoned in the Tower of London along with his bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, for refusing to go along with the Protestantization of the Church of England by Archbishop Cranmer.     
Henry was not only into dismantling the monasteries—he was also into building up the Church.  While his primary goal in suppressing the monasteries was to enrich the royal coffers, he not only provided for the monks and nuns out of the revenues of the suppressed houses, he also used the monastic endowments to establish a number of new dioceses to provide good pastoral oversight for the Church.  Most of these dioceses were founded on, and from the revenues of, suppressed monasteries.  Dioceses were founded at Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough and Westminster.   Henry also moved the See of Coventry to Lichfield.    Other than Lichfield, the new sees were all established in former Benedictine abbeys, except for Oxford which was originally established in the former Augustinian Osney Abbey and later (1545) transferred to Saint Frideswide’s Priory (Augustinian) which had been suppressed and then incorporated into Wolsey’s Cardinal College in 1525.  Peterborough Abbey was the site of the grave of Katherine of Aragon who had been buried there only five years before and so was saved from being destroyed or deconsecrated.  Henry was faced with an even greater conundrum in what to do with Westminster Abbey which had been the site of English coronations for almost five centuries.  Henry may have been willing to break continuity with the papacy, but not when it came to his Crown and its traditions.  He had a superstitious urgency to preserve any and all symbols of Royal legitimacy and Westminster Abbey was central to this.  Westminster Abbey was also the second wealthiest religious house in England.  The monastic community was suppressed in 1539 and in 1540 Henry took the city of Westminster and the county of Middlesex from the Diocese of London to create the Diocese of Westminster.  Thomas Thirlby, a churchman loyal to Henry was named bishop and William Benson (sometimes Boston), the former monastic prior, was named Dean of a chapter of 12 canons drawn mostly from the monks.  The idea of a Diocese of Westminster was only to preserve a reason for the Abbey Church to be preserved and was neither pastorally useful nor economically feasible.  The Diocese was suppressed in the reign of King Edward VI.  The Abbey was left impoverished of its revenues and almost destroyed by the greed of the Duke of Somerset, the uncle of King Edward VI and “Lord Protector of England” in the King’s minority.  The Church was restored to abbatial status during the reign of Mary and then under Elizabeth became a “royal peculiar”—directly under the Crown who appoints the dean and canons.  It remains that way today as a Collegiate Church (a church with a college of canons led by the dean) under the Crown.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church LVIII

Christchurch, Oxford--a foundation established 

on the income of suppressed religious houses

I want to get back to Pope Francis as he makes history faster than I can write it, but before I do I want to treat Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries as this is his one significant “Protestantization” of the Church of England—other than, of course, the break with the papacy.  Henry was interested in Church Reform—but not in the Protestant mode.  His greatest contribution was the creation of six new dioceses—Westminster, Chester, Gloucester, Peterborough, Bristol, and Oxford.  Each of these was founded on the incomes previously ascribed to various religious foundations that Henry closed down.  Let’s take a look at Henry’s policy of suppressing the religious abbeys, monasteries, and convents. 

In the background of Henry’s decision we should note that over the centuries the Church had become very land rich—indeed the Church owned more land in England than the Crown—owning approximately a third of the land in England.  About half this land was owned by religious orders, the other half by the dioceses, bishops, rectories, and other entities representing the secular clergy. 

How did the Church manage to come into such wealth?  Remember that medieval Europe did not have a cash economy.  The foundation of wealth was land.  And when people wanted to make a contribution to the Church they often gave land.  Kings and nobles, in founding monasteries, provided land for the support of the monks or nuns.  Kings and nobles might also—out of piety or penance or even just good will—give land for the support of a particular church.  The Earl of Warwick, for example, might give a manor to provide income for a pastor in Warwickshire.  The pastor—or actually, “rector” of the church in question would receive the rent each year from this manor as part of his income.  The Duke of Norfolk might give the tolls on a bridge to the Dean of Norwich as part of the income to the deanery.  A knight in Coventry, dying without heirs, might will his fief to salary a canon at Lincoln.  You get the idea.  And of course the King, using the bishoprics to provide positions and salaries for his important advisors, would richly endow those bishoprics with income-producing lands.  These endowments—or rather the positions they salaried—were called benefices.  Over the centuries, these incomes add up and positions from Archbishops and their Archdeacons down to canons and rectors were usually well provided for.

Moreover, people making pilgrimage to certain shrines—the tomb of Saint Thomas a Becket at Canterbury being the richest—but also Saint Frideswide at Oxford, Edward the Confessor at Westminster, Saint Hugh at Lincoln, Saint Cuthbert at Durham, et al—drew pilgrims and gifts to these abbey and cathedral churches.  Glastonbury Abbey was associated with King Arthur but also had legends that it was founded by Joseph of Arimathea. There were even stories that Jesus had visited there as a boy—and returned after his resurrection to see it again.  Some monasteries contained relics of dubious provenance or artifacts that were just outright frauds such as the “Rood of Grace” at Boxley Abbey—a crucifix that could move its head, shed tears, and make various facial expressions—controlled by a system of levers managed by a monk from behind a curtain.   Fraud it may have been, but as P.T. Barnum said—“There’s a sucker born every minute” and pilgrims flocked to the abbey with their gifts and donations.  Such relics—and frauds—would bring in gifts of jewelry, gold, silver, and coin as well as donations of property.  People might give or bequeath in their wills to a monastery or to a cathedral houses or shops—the income from which would provide for Masses to be said or prayers to be offered or processions to be conducted for the souls of the donor and his or her loved ones. 

Property went to the Church—but the Church, like wise financiers, never alienated property and thus grew very rich.   The Benedictine monks and Augustinian Canons, like the bishops and secular clergy, tended to rent out their lands and salary themselves from the rents, but the Cistercian monks were more hands-on.  The Cistercians had vast number of lay brothers who actually worked the monastery properties.  Indeed the Cistercians were masters at sheep-herding and ran a vast wool industry with the work of the laybrothers.  Moreover, unlike the Benedictines and the Canons, both of whom tended to put much of their income into the ornaments for the abbey churches, the Cistercians both lived and prayed frugally.   Cistercian churches had no stained glass.  Vestments were only of wool and never of silk.  Altar cross and candle holders, as well as thuribles and other required furnishings, were of iron, chalices of silver and not gold.  Books were not illuminated and there were no organs or instruments in their churches.  Thus, by hard work and meager living they grew exceptionally wealthy. 

Over the centuries, various monasteries had closed—or been closed—and their incomes diverted to chartable endeavors but the idea of systematically suppressing monasteries was first that of Cardinal Wolsey and it was done for reasons of “reform.”  While many monasteries, and especially those of nuns, were poor and had a tough time getting by, there were others whose incomes were more than sufficient.  Since many of the poorer ones had few—if any—vocations and numbers were dwindling, Wolsey thought for the sake of organization it might be a good idea to close the smaller houses, move the nuns or monks to larger and more secure communities, and use the property of the closed houses to endow a number of new charitable or educational endeavors.   Among his other endeavors, the Cardinal founded two educational institutions from the income of suppressed religious houses: a grammar school in his native town of Ipswich and Cardinal College, Oxford.  The former exists today as The King’s School, the latter as Christchurch College, Oxford.  Wolsey had no idea of eliminating religious life in England—far from it—and indeed at the time of his fall in 1530 it would have been inconceivable to think that the vast monastic institutions would totally disappear in just a little over a decade.  But we will hear more of that in the next posting. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church L

Thomas Cromwell

I got some reactions that I was too hard on Archbishop Cranmer in accusing him for being little more than a careerist but I really don’t think so.  When we talk about the Prayer Book I will give him his due as an English stylist but in his Henry VIII days I can’t help but see him as a man as interested only in his own advancement as was Thomas Cromwell whom we will see later in this  posting.  Cranmer hid his Protestant leanings well from Henry as he knew that the King would not countenance his Lutheran (and later Calvinist) theology and he would not only be deprived of his see but probably of his life.  He also hid his wife—and I consider this even more base—as Henry would not have countenanced a married archbishop.  Given that the King knew that Cranmer and Margarethe were cohabiting, this meant passing the woman off as his mistress.  Cranmer watched without protest as over a dozen men—including one of his own chaplains, Thomas Gerrard—were burned at the stake for publicly holding the same Protestant ideas that he held but would not proclaim for fear of alienating the King.  What most appalls me about Cranmer’s lack of integrity however is that upon his consecration as a bishop he publicly swore an oath upholding the authority of the Pope while having previously privately sworn an oath that he would not mean what he swore in obedience to the Pope.  In other words he publicly called on God to witness something that he had previously sworn he would not mean.  His only loyalty was to the King and to the King he sacrificed his integrity.  Now, I think in many respects his later deeds will balance out—to some extent—his raw ambition during the years of King Henry but at this stage of the game I cannot see him except as a raw careerist who was no less ambitious and no more moral that the most crass of renaissance cardinals or popes—or for that matter some of today’s ecclesiastical princelings whose devotion is only to the institutional structures of the Church and not to the cure of souls for which they were ordained.  Archbishop Lori, Cardinal Burke, Cardinal Law, try on Cranmer’s slipper and ask yourself if it fits.  I have no doubt that Thomas Cranmer sincerely held his Lutheran and Calvinist notions to be the truth and that he wanted the Reform of the Church of what he understood to be false doctrines and superstitious practices and so “played the game.”  Cranmer undoubtedly salved his conscience by assuring himself that in power he could do more good for saving souls than he could by being out of power.  And I am sure that there are many in the Church today who believe that reinforcing the authority of the institutional Church is the best way to save souls and are sincere in their devotion to those institutions.  But what both Cranmer and modern careerists forget that the Church has one Savior and it is not their role to save it.  It is our role to stand faithful to the Gospel and let Christ take care of his Church.  Christ made his promises to the Church that not even the gates of hell would bring it down.  In the sixteenth century John Fisher stood true to his beliefs as today we see men like Archbishop Oscar Romero and women like Sister Dorothy Stang who have stood for truth in a world—and sometimes a Church—of lies.  I honestly have more respect for many of the simple lay folk who died as Protestant martyrs under Bloody Mary (and we will get to that too) because they were men and women of integrity than I do for Cranmer and other prelates who went along with Henry in his break with Rome.  I could respect Cranmer for his Protestant ideals if he had stood faithful to them under Henry but his duplicity cheapens his memory. 

That being said, let’s move on to Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s political agent in the break with Rome.  Cromwell was born in 1485 in Putney, Surrey—the son of a blacksmith who also had a limited trade in wool cloth.  Little is known of his youth and he seems to have had the ambition to be a ne’er do well.  In his late teens he ended up on the continent where he served as a mercenary (a soldier for pay) in the army of the King of France, fighting in Italy.  Giving up the uncertainty of a fighting life,  in his late twenties he lived in Rome where he served as an agent for the English Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge, Archbishop of York, at the Roman Curia.   It is unlikely that Cromwell had much formal education though in his years as a soldier he picked up a number of languages including Latin, Italian, and French, which made his service very valuable.  He obviously was bright and quick-witted—not to mention industrious—to achieve the importance he attained as Bainbridge’s agent with almost no formal education. It was probably his connection to Bainbridge that brought Cromwell to the notice of Cardinal Wolsey, Bainbridge’s successor in York.  Cromwell was employed in several embassies to the Holy See and in 1523 was “elected” to Parliament.  I put “elected” in quotes as he seems to have been planted there by virtue of what would later be called a pocket borough to help get Wolsey’s policies through the House.  During these years he seems to have studied law and in 1524 was elected a member of Grey’s Inn—one of the Inn’s of Court.  This would be equivalent today to graduating Law School.  He was a most industrious and loyal member of Wolsey’s circle and one of the tasks entrusted to him by Wolsey was the suppression of about thirty small monasteries that Wolsey wanted to close and appropriate their revenues for his educational projects at Ipswich and Oxford.  It would provide valuable experience for later. 

In 1529 Wolsey fell but Cromwell, like the proverbial rat abandoning the proverbial sinking ship, cut himself lose from the Cardinal’s service just in time to save his own neck.  Henry recognized the valuable service that Cromwell had rendered the Crown under Wolsey’s tenure and was determined to make use of this very capable servant.  In 1530 Cromwell was appointed to the Privy Council—the King’s cabinet.  Cromwell determined to impress Henry by succeeding where Wolsey had failed—namely in winning the King the dissolution of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so that Henry would be free to marry Anne Boleyn.  This effort won him the loyalty of Anne and the Boleyn faction.  Cromwell was savvy enough to know that the pope would never grant the annulment due to the political ties between the Pope and Katherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles and so Cromwell set out to break the bonds that tied England to Rome.  It was Cromwell that devised the legislative program that between 1531 and 1536 would cut the Church of England loose from the papacy and, at the same time, firmly establish the King at its helm.  Henry was not, as I have pointed out in previous entries, one who much enjoyed the work of kinging and delegated as much of the labor as he could to free himself to hunt, eat, and commit adultery.  (In his younger days he had also enjoyed tennis, wrestling, and jousting but older and fatter, it was now hunting, eating, and adultery.)  On January 21, 1535 Henry appointed Cromwell vicegerent (or vicar-general) for ecclesiastical matters and it was really Cromwell who would direct the processes of the English Church for the next five years until his fall from power and execution on July 28^th 1540.  I am not finished yet with Cromwell as he will play a huge part in the next several entries as we examine the Church under Henry, but while on the scaffold he would proclaim that he “died in the traditional faith” he does seem personally to have had strong Lutheran leanings and fostered many who would in the next reign and in Elizabeth’s reign bring the Church of England into full-blown Calvinism.  I think he was probably more of a religious dilettante than a convinced Protestant—or Catholic, for that matter.  He had never studied theology and like Cranmer was more a man of politics than principle.  In fact, I would say that he was more theologically principled than Cranmer for while Cranmer hid his Protestant sympathies until Henry was in the grave, Cromwell would be responsible—as we shall see—for some rather dramatic Protestant innovations such as the closing of the monasteries and the dismantling of many shrines and images in the churches and cathedrals of England.