He was Henry's parliamentary agent, but even in this capacity his power has been overrated, and he is supposed to have invented those parliamentary complaints against the clergy, which were transmuted into the legislation of 1532. But the complaints were old enough; many of them had been heard in parliament nearly twenty years before, and there is ample evidence to show that the petition against the clergy represents the "infinite clamours" of the Commons against the Church, which the House itself resolved should be "put in writing and delivered to the king." The actual drafting of the statute, as of all the Reformation Acts between 1532 and 1539, was largely Cromwell's work; and the success with which parliament was managed during this period was also due to him. It was not an easy task, for the House of Commons more than once rejected government measures, and members were heard to threaten Henry VIII. with the fate of Richard III.; they even complained of Cromwell's reporting their proceedings to the king. That was his business rather than conveying imaginary royal orders to the House. "They be contented," he wrote in one of these reports, "that deed and writing shall be treason," but words were only to be misprision: they refused to include an heir's rebellion or disobedience in the bill "as rebellion is already treason, and disobedience is no cause of forfeiture of inheritance." There was, of course, room for manipulation, which Cromwell extended to parliamentary elections; but parliamentary opinion was a force of which he had to take account, and not a negligible quantity.
From the date of his appointment as secretary in 1534, Cromwell's biography belongs to the history of England, but it is necessary to define his personal attitude to the revolution in which he was the king's most conspicuous agent. He was included by Foxe in his _Book of Martyrs_ to the Protestant faith: more recent historians regard him as a sacrilegious ruffian. Now, there were two cardinal principles in the Protestantism of the 16th century--the supremacy of the temporal sovereign over the church in matters of government, and the supremacy of the Scriptures over the Church in matters of faith. There is no room for doubt as to the sincerity of Cromwell's belief in the first of these two articles: he paid at his own expense for an English translation of Marsiglio of Padua's _Defensor Pacis_, the classic medieval advocate of that doctrine; he had a scheme for governing England by means of administrative councils nominated by the king to the detriment of parliament; and he urged upon Henry the adoption of the maxim of the Roman civil law--_quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem_. He wanted, in his own words, "one body politic" and no rival to the king's authority; and he set the divine right of kings against the divine right of the papacy. There is more doubt about the sincerity of Cromwell's attachment to the second article; it is true that he set up a Bible in every parish church, and regarded them as invaluable; and the correspondents who unbosom themselves to him are all of a Protestant way of thinking. But Protestantism was the greatest support of absolute monarchy. Hence its value in Cromwell's eyes. Of religious conviction there is in him little trace, and still less of the religious temperament. He was a polished representative of the callous, secular middle class of that most irreligious age. Sentiment found no place, and feeling little, in his composition; he used the axe with as little passion as the surgeon does the knife, and he operated on some of the best and noblest in the land. He saw that it was wiser to proscribe a few great opponents than to fall on humbler prey; but he set law above justice, and law to him was simply the will of the state.