The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Cromwell’s cause of death? Art failure
Thomas Cromwell’s eye for Holbein was the making of him – then it cost him his life.
Thomas Cromwell is nothing if not divisive. Either you hate him or you love him for leading Henry VIII’s Reformation – and whichever side you’re on, it isn’t easy to forgive him for dissolving the monasteries. For centuries, the haters were in the ascendant. Then came Hilary Mantel, and the public discovered a new, reflective, complicated Cromwell, on the page, on the stage and on the box. Yet even the welldisposed wouldn’t immediately have the monastery-smasher down as a patron of the arts.
The work of art most closely associated with him, his portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, does him no favours in that department. It shouts “dumpy bureaucrat, about to lose his temper”. It doesn’t help that the Frick Gallery in New York has meaningfully paired the original with another Holbein, of
Thomas More, who looks noble and thoughtful.
A little delving reveals some interesting complexity. The More portrait was a great deal altered during its creation, to make him look as noble as possible, no doubt on the orders of More himself. Cromwell’s was not. Moreover, Cromwell’s portrait hung in his own house. He clearly accepted that it told truths about himself, and was big enough a man to live with them. His several-times-great-nephew and namesake Oliver ordered an artist to paint “warts and all”; old Thomas could have said that with pride. It shows a certain style.
Thomas Cromwell was not just the consummate self-made man; he was also a Renaissance man. Born to a brewer in the dull village of Putney, he escaped overseas to Italy in his teens, did a little soldiering, then used his considerable charm to prosper in Florence and Venice, before following the trail of international commerce to Antwerp, northern Europe’s economic hub, and its clearing-house for art and printed books. He returned to England in his 20s mysteriously well educated, speaking at least French, Italian and Latin, enough German and Spanish to get by, and bits of Greek. Small wonder that dullard English noblemen who had never left the kingdom resented him.
When Cromwell had made a bit of money, he took a house in the fashionable enclave of Austin Friars, where he lived alongside diplomats, artists and merchants who traded in Renaissance bling to brighten up life in a dowdy corner of Europe. The higher Cromwell rose, the more homes he accumulated (not least because the strain that a large noble household placed on Tudor plumbing was best dealt with by moving elsewhere for a while). But time has not dealt kindly with the splendid structures that he built or rebuilt. Austin Friars, Mortlake Manor and Lewes Priory now have nothing to show from his period. The one precious remnant that we so nearly enjoyed today, Brooke House in Hackney, which one of his servants called “as pleasant a place as shall be a great way about the city of London”, was damaged in the Blitz, then inexplicably demolished by the council in the mid-Fifties.
Wherever he lived, Cromwell surrounded himself with books. That enthusiasm turned out to be very handy when he was chief royal minister, for a love of books was a distinctive feature of Henry VIII’s great appetite for collecting. The royal library was unrivalled in England, particularly after it had been bulked out with confiscations from monasteries. Cromwell might not have been a glamorous jouster like the Duke of Suffolk or a splendid companion on the hunting field like the Marquess of Exeter, but he could pore enjoyably over a text with His Majesty.
Cromwell’s passion for books came to have a very particular ideological focus, with momentous consequences. He was determined to move England towards the Reformation, and encouraged its sluggish, provincially unambitious printing industry to produce Protestant propaganda, especially in English. His greatest goal was a Bible available for all, something the old Church had banned in England for more than a century.
He patiently supported the most talented translators around, not only the pioneering genius William Tyndale but also the next in importance, Miles Coverdale, a great friend (“your child and bedeman in Jesus Christ,” as Coverdale put it) who wrote him devout and witty letters, which turned to Latin when Coverdale wanted to make Cromwell smile, for instance in gossiping about the misdoings of Cambridge dons.
It took some doing to get Henry VIII to come around to the idea of an English Bible, but even before he did, Cromwell had backed Coverdale to complete Tyndale’s unfinished text, in a beautiful Antwerp edition of 1535. The Tudor royal arms on the title page supported an intricate pageant of Protestant triumph, created by the man who had painted Cromwell’s portrait, Hans Holbein. Another round of quiet politicking and frantic expenditure of Cromwell’s own money resulted in a successor-Bible, issued with explicit royal backing in 1539.
This was the Great Bible, Cromwell’s chief cultural memorial. We don’t know who designed its magnificent title page, but it aptly shows Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer as Henry VIII’s postmen, distributing Bibles to the whole realm. The Great Bible would underpin the King James Bible, a central text in forging a language that now encircles the world. Cromwell’s Protestant effort was not confined to print. One of the tools of traditional religion had been the cycles of mystery plays, a great popular art form, so he backed the first efforts to create rival Protestant drama in English. In 1536, he founded a company of players that relentlessly pursued a Protestant message, led by John Bale, a brilliant playwrightmanager, lately a Carmelite friar, and an obsessive controversialist.
We still have a few of Bale’s plays, all from one moment in his career when his company toured England in 1538-39 as shock-troops in the most aggressive campaign of religious change Cromwell was able to mount. In East Anglia, they mocked the beleaguered friaries and monasteries, as well as the recently defeated conservative rebels in the north; in Canterbury, they hurled abuse at the Church’s 12th-century champion Thomas Becket, whose shrine was demolished that same week. We even have an account of a row in a pub after another Canterbury show
of Bale’s, about whether King John had been a Good Thing or not. Bale’s play foreshadowed a greater artist, William Shakespeare, who would turn the histories of English monarchs into popular theatre.
Yet for all the many facets of his patronage, Cromwell will be remembered above all for his relationship with Holbein. This exceptional Augsburg artist drew or painted everyone who was anyone at the Tudor court, among them Cromwell’s enemies such as Anne Boleyn and the Duke of Norfolk, but his association with the Cromwell family is marked: not merely that difficult portrait of the man himself, but some magnificent images of the next generation.
Chief among them is a portrait of Cromwell’s feisty daughterin-law Elizabeth, sister of Jane Seymour, and two miniatures of her husband Gregory Cromwell, so recognisably Cromwell’s son, although the upturned nose looks a bit more appealing in a teenager. Both are intimate images, probably for a proud father, or for a wife torn between affection and rage at her wayward spouse.
Then came Holbein’s last service to Cromwell, which was central to what turned into a catastrophe: Cromwell’s big idea for Henry VIII’s fourth marriage, an alliance with the Duchy of Cleves. The Duke’s sister, Anne, was an unknown quantity in England, and English envoys were not happy with the portrait supplied, so Cromwell sent Holbein to work his magic. Alas, there was too much magic, and the King was appalled when he met the reality. (This was probably not Anne’s fault, but then again no one ever accused her of charisma.)
This was really what did for Cromwell – not his radical Protestantism, although that was presented as the main reason for executing him. In the end the King, a monster of conceit, was forced to suffer the ultimate humiliation to escape the Cleves marriage, by admitting impotence and nonconsummation. Although the subsequent power-struggles nearly went Cromwell’s way, in 1540 he was arrested at a meeting of the Royal Council, the Duke of Norfolk tearing the gold collar of St George from his neck with great delight. Art was Cromwell’s undoing. Without intending it, Holbein, greatest painter of the Tudor age, had destroyed the greatest Tudor minister.