the monasteries, whose galling injunctions and filthy reports on the state of those establishments paved the way for their downfall. Early in 1536 an act was passed dissolving all those monasteries which had not two hundred a year of revenue, and granting their possessions to the king, who, by Cromwell's advice, sold them at easy rates to the gentry, thus making them participators of the confiscation. On 2 May Cromwell was one of the body of councillors sent to convey Anne Boleyn to the Tower, and before whom she knelt, protesting her innocence. He was also one of the witnesses of her death. Her fall led indirectly to his further rise; for it was doubtless owing to the disgrace that had befallen his family that her father on 18 June surrendered the office of lord privy seal, which was given to Cromwell on 2 July. On the 9th he was raised to the peerage as Baron Cromwell of Oakham in the county of Rutland. At the same time he presided as the king's vicegerent in the convocation which met in June, where grievous complaints were made of the propagation of a number of irreverent opinions, even in books printed cum privilegio. A little later he issued injunctions to the clergy to declare to their parishioners touching the curtailing of rites and ceremonies, the abrogation of holidays, and the exploding of superstitions.
From this time his personal history continues to be till his death the history of Henry VIII's government and policy, tyrannical and oppressive to his own subjects, and wary, but utterly unprincipled towards foreign powers. Just before he was made lord privy seal he had a correspondence with the Princess Mary, the shamefulness and cruelty of which would be incredible if it were not on record. The death of her mother at the beginning of the year had left her more than ever defenceless against her father's tyranny; but the execution of Anne Boleyn removed her most bitter enemy, and it was generally expected that her father's severity towards her would relax. Henry himself indirectly encouraged the belief, and the princess was induced to write letters to him soliciting forgiveness in so far as she had offended him. These overtures for reconciliation (which ought rather to have proceeded from the king himself) Cromwell was allowed to answer in the king's name; and he rejected a number of them in succession as not sufficiently submissive. She was not allowed to use general terms; she must confess that the king had been right all along, and that her disobedience had been utterly unjustifiable. If she would not do this, Cromwell told her he would decline to intercede for her and leave her obstinacy to find its own reward. At last, as the only hope of being allowed to live in peace, she was forced to confess under her own hand that she was a bastard, and that the marriage between her father and mother had been incestuous and unlawful!
That a man like Cromwell should have been very generally hated will surprise no one. When the great rebellion in the north broke out in the latter part of this year, one of the chief demands of the insurgents was that Cromwell should be removed from the king's council, and receive condign punishment as a heretic and traitor. But the rebellion was put down and Cromwell remained as powerful as ever. He was elected a knight of the Garter on 5 Aug. 1537 (Anstis, Hist. of Garter, ii. 407), and in the same year he did not think it incompetent for him, a layman, to accept the deanery of Wells. He already held the prebend of Blewbery in Sarum, which was granted to him by patent on 11 May 1536. In 1538, when the Bible was printed, or rather a few months before it was printed, he issued a new set of injunctions to the clergy in which they were required to provide each for his own church ‘one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English.’ They were also ordered for the first time to keep parish registers of every wedding, christening, and burial—an institution for which posterity may owe Cromwell gratitude. On 14 Nov. 1539 he was appointed to oversee the printing of the Bible for five years and to prevent unauthorised translations. Yet, powerful as he was over church and state, those who had good means of knowing were aware that he retained his position only by an abject submissiveness and indifference to insults, which was strangely out of keeping with his external greatness. ‘The king,’ said one, ‘beknaveth him twice a week and sometimes knocks him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pomelled about the head, and shaken up, as it were a dog, he will come out into the great chamber, shaking of the bushe [sic] with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roast’ (State Papers, ii. 552). Such was the high reward of his great principle of studying the secret inclinations of princes. After two or three years the greater monasteries followed the smaller ones. One by one the abbots and priors were either induced to surrender their houses or were found guilty of treason, so that confiscation followed. Cromwell directed the examinations of several of these abbots; and he himself received a considerable share of the confiscated lands. Among these were the whole of the possessions of the great and wealthy priory of Lewes, extending through
