Free Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister by Robert Hutchinson

Epilogue
    If we consider his coming up to such high degree as he attained, we may doubt whether there be cause to marvel at his good fortune or at his worthy and industrious demeanour .
    RAPHAEL HOLINSHED, CHRONICLER 1
    After Cromwell’s execution, an extraordinary propaganda war of pamphlets and broadsides broke out in London. A ‘Ballad on Thomas Cromwell’ was swiftly published containing sixteen doggerel verses, each with a repetition of the last line. It begins:
    Both man and child is glad to tell
    Of that false traitor Thomas Cromwell
    Now that he is set to learn to spell
    Sing troll 2 on away.
    And it ends:
    God save King Henry with all his power
    And Prince Edward that goodly flower
    With all his lords of great honour
    Sing troll on away
    Sing troll on away
    Here and now rumellow, 3 troll on away.
    Several rebuttals quickly followed, broadly sympathetic to Cromwell but careful to avoid any direct or implicit criticism of the King. One such broadside, ‘A Ballad Against Malicious Slanderers’, was written by Thomas Smyth, sewer 4 to Henry and possibly a member of the evangelical faction at court. This was in the form of eighteen verses beginning:
    Although Lord Cromwell a traitor was
    Yet dare I say the King of his grace
    Has forgiven him that great trespass
    To rail on dead men, thou art to blame
    Troll now into the way again for shame.
    In that he the law has offended
    By the law he is swiftly condemned
    This mortal life full godly he ended
    Wherefore to rail thus they are to blame.
    Troll etc.
    For all his offences in everything
    He asked God’s mercy and grace of the King
    And of the wide world for his transgressions
    Then nor no man can say nay to the same.
    Troll etc. 5
    Henry meanwhile was demonstrating his even-handedness in punishing transgressors in religion. Two days after Cromwell’s death, the three evangelicals Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome were brought out from the Tower to be burnt at Smithfield for heresy. Alongside them, en route to Tyburn, were three papists, Richard Featherstone, Thomas Abel and Edward Powell, who were to be hanged, drawn and quartered for their denial of the royal supremacy. As they were bumped along on the traditional wooden sheep hurdles, they argued furiously about which of them were truly facing a martyr’s death. 6
    This incident personifies and encapsulates Henry’s constant changes of mind in the creation and fulfilment of religious policy in the later yearsof his reign. How much Cromwell pushed this most single-minded of all English sovereigns can only be a matter of debate: his Minister’s problem was that the King had a number of different minds at times on difficult religious issues. Henry’s accusation that Cromwell was in league with the Lutherans, plotting to impose radical new Protestant doctrines in England, was either convenient propaganda for the moment or the product of the fevered brain of Stephen Gardiner. Certainly Cromwell had an interest in Lutheranism in the 1530s and some sympathy for its adherents. But there is no evidence that he denied Christ’s Presence in the sacrament of communion or wanted to move further down the road of Protestantism than other evangelicals at Henry’s court.
    What Cromwell did achieve was to widen the access of ordinary people to their religion by providing worship in their own language, through the Great Bible of 1539. Although Henry was nervous about its impact and sought to restrict its readership, by 1541 parishes were being fined for failing to buy a copy. Cromwell also destroyed some of the superstitious flummery that pervaded much of the Catholic Church of the time through his attacks on images, pilgrimages and shrines.
    His real attainments, however, were in government. He reformed the royal household and machinery of administration in England, laying down the foundations for today’s departments of state. His loyalty to Henry was unquestionable: all his inventive measures, all his punitive