#diarmaid macculoch

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The ruins of Tilty Abbey, Essex

In an Essex field not far from London's Stansted airport, lie the ruins of Tilty Abbey, one of the victims of the Dissolutions of the 1530s. Diarmaid MacCulloch writes about Tilty as an exception to Thomas Cromwell's usual policy of closing the smallest, most impoverished houses first. Tilty survived the first round of closures because, MacCulloch implies, it was also the retirement home of one of Cromwell's widow friends, "ladies of a certain age," for whom he did favors over the years. Her name was the Marchioness Dowager Margaret Wotton and she was apparently fond of the monks--there were only seven of them and saw them as a comfort in her old age. MacCulloch writes that this was a common arrangement for widows of the gentry, to take a house near or on the grounds of an abbey. Of course, this technically violated the policy that forbade female visitors in monastic precincts. Cromwell's nephew Richard saw to it that the Marchioness kept the house on the abbey grounds well into the Elizabethan era, though the abbey itself was surrendered to the crown in 1536.

Cromwell's connection to the widow, was that her late husband, Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, was his former employer. Cromwell had worked for the family before he had worked for Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell was at the center of a web of alliances based in Kent, including Anthony St. Leger, who Cromwell made Lord Deputy of Ireland, perhaps in return for his assistance in these early years. St. Leger was a relative of Margaret Wotton, another strand in the web.

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How Cromwell used one of Call-me's shared confidences to seize the opportunity to take down Anne Boleyn...

This is paraphrased from Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of Cromwell:

"A 1559 letter of remarkable circumstantial detail to Anne's daughter, the newly enthroned Queen Elizabeth by that self re-named wanderer Alexander Alesius contains an eye witness account for the tangled events of the spring of 1536 that has not been taken seriously enough. His esteem for Anne was based on her reputation, he never met her....He was first the guest of Cranmer and then Cromwell, later a lecturer at Cambridge, well placed to observe and understand events at court. His message emphatically was that from the beginning Cromwell engineered Queen Anne's downfall. Alesius blamed the Papist malice of Bishop Gardiner as the spark for the story that Queen Anne had been accused of adultery. Gardiner had claimed that French court was inundated with rumors of Anne's infidelity to the King. Gardiner had written this from his mission in France to his old servant, Thomas Wriosthley who Alesius records had been placed at court to look after the Bishop's interest while he was away. Wriosthley passed the news to Cromwell. Alesius expressed much admiration for Cromwell in later years and saw him as a protestant hero. Yet he was able to see him as the collaborator of 'Willie Winchester' in these events, particularly when recounting them to the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. It also corroborates Chapuys claim that Cromwell told him he was responsible for her downfall.

...

Both men [Cromwell and Gardiner] were instictively in favor of alliance with the Empire...this resisted the tendency of the [Boleyns and Norfolk to stay close to the French]....Cromwell's correspondence with Gardiner in this period goes out of the way to mend fences with gestures of friendship and confidential gossip and he even sang Gardiner's praises to Chapuys commending his skepticism about French diplomatic overtures to Henry. Chapuys noted his [Cromwell's] extraordinary vehemence on the French manuevers 'in a passion, so much that he could hardly get his words out.'

Alesius tells us the Wriosthley told them about the rumors circulating in France. [Gardiner then ceases to figure in his narrative, except that Wriosthley spent the latter half of the 1530s regretting this betrayal of Gardiner's confidence.] The King reacted in a fury. He needed agents to turn the rumors into a case... So according to Alesius, Henry put Cromwell and Wriosthley secretly to work, together with some unnamed accomplices, well known to dislike the Queen, because she had sharply reproved them and threatened to denounce them to the king for serving their own interests under a pretense of evangelical religion, making everything available for sale and being bribed into making unworthy ecclesiastical appointments for enemies of the gospel. This very specific set of charges sounds unmistakably like a critique of the vicegerential bureaucracy, particularly the visitation commissioners. It also agrees with accounts of clashes between Cromwell and Anne later in the Spring. "

-Diarmaid MacCuloch