FROM A PICTURE IN THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY
LIFE AND LETTERS OF
THOMAS CROMWELL
BY
ROGER BIGELOW MERRIMAN
A.M. HARV., B.LITT. OXON.
WITH A PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE
VOL. I
LIFE, LETTERS TO 1535
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1902
HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to present the life of Thomas Cromwell as a statesman,and to estimate his work without religious bias. Though it would certainly bedifficult to overrate his importance in the history of the Church of England, Imaintain that the motives that inspired his actions were invariably political,and that the many ecclesiastical changes carried through under his guidance werebut incidents of his administration, not ends in themselves. Consequently anyattempt to judge him from a distinctively religious standpoint, whether Catholicor Protestant, can hardly fail, it seems to me, to mislead the student and obscurethe truth. I cannot agree, on the other hand, with those who have representedCromwell as a purely selfish political adventurer, the subservient instrument ofa wicked master, bent only on his own gain. It seems to me as idle to disparagehis patriotism and statesmanship, as it is to try to make him out a hero of theReformation. He merits a place far higher than that of most men of his type, atype essentially characteristic of the sixteenth century, a type of which theEarl of Warwick in England and Maurice of Saxony on the Continent are strikingexamples, a type that profoundly influenced the destinies of Protestantism, butto which theological issues were either a mere nothing, or else totally subordinateto political considerations.
It has been justly said that Cromwell’s correspondence is our chief source ofinformation for the period immediately following the breach with Rome. Totranscribe in extenso the letters he received would be almost the task ofa lifetime; for they form the bulk of the enormous mass of material with whichthe editors of the Calendars of State Papers for the years 1533–1540 have had todeal. But the number of extant letters he wrote is, comparatively speaking,extremely small; it has therefore been possible to make full copies of them inevery case, and I trust that the many advantages—linguistic as well ashistorical—that can only be secured by complete, and as far as possible accuratetranscriptions of the originals, will be accepted as sufficient reason forediting this collection of documents, twenty-one of which have neither beenprinted nor calendared before. The rules that have been observed in transcriptionwill be found in the Prefatory Note(vol. i. p. 311). The Calendar references to the more important letters receivedby Cromwell, where they bear directly on those he wrote, are given in the notesat the end of the second volume.
My warmest thanks are due to Mr. F. York Powell, Regius Professor of ModernHistory in the University of