There seems to be a general agreement that Cromwell was not a Protestant.  His struggle against the temporal power of the pope fostered the reformatory movement, but that did not make Cromwell a Protestant any more than it did his master, Henry VIII.  Foxe describes Cromwell “as a valiant soldier and captain of Christ,” but Maitland retorts “that Foxe forgot, if he ever knew, who was the father of lies.”

Without doubt Cromwell ruled with an iron hand.  He was guilty of accepting bribes, and, as some maintain, “was the great patron of ribaldry, and the protector of the low jester and the filthy.”  But, sadly enough, that is no serious charge against one in his times.  It is said that Henry used to say, when a knave was dealt to him in a game of cards, “Ah, I have a Cromwell!” Francis Aidan Gasquet, a Benedictine monk, in his valuable work on “Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries,” says of Cromwell:  “No single minister in England ever exercised such extensive authority, none ever rose so rapidly, and no one has ever left behind him a name covered with greater infamy and disgrace.”

In 1535, Henry, as supreme head of the church, appointed Cromwell as his “Vicegerent, Vicar-General and Principal Commissary in causes ecclesiastical.”  His immediate duty was to enforce recognition of the king’s supremacy.  The monks and the clergy were now to be coerced into submission.  A royal commission, consisting of Legh, Layton, Ap Rice, London and various subordinates, was appointed to visit the monasteries and to report on their condition.

Henry Griffin says in his chronicle:  “I was well acquainted with all the commissioners; indeed I knew them well; they were very smart men, who understood the value of money, for they had tasted of adversity.  I think the priests were the worst of the whole party, although they had a good reputation at the time, but they were wicked, deceitful men.  I am sorry to speak thus of my own order, but I speak God’s truth.”  “It is a dreadful undertaking,” said Lord Clinton.  “Ah! but I have great faith in the tact and judgment of the men I am about to select,” retorted Cromwell.

Dr. John London was a base tool of Cromwell, and a miserable exponent of the reform movement.  He joined Gardiner in burning heretics, was convicted of adultery at Oxford, was pilloried for perjury and died in jail.  The other royal agents were also questionable characters.  Dean Layton wrote the most disgusting letters to Cromwell.  Once he informed his patron that he prayed regularly for him, prefacing this information with the remark, “I will now tell you something to make you laugh.”

Father Gasquet sums up his view of the commissioners in the words of Edmund Burke:  “It is not with much credulity that I listen to any when they speak ill of those whom they are going to plunder.  I rather suspect that vices are feigned, or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in the punishment—­an enemy is a bad witness; a robber worse.”  Burke indignantly declares:  “The inquiry into the moral character of the religious houses was a mere pretext, a complete delusion, an insidious and predetermined foray of wholesale and heartless plunder.”