Appendix VIII: Members connected with the treasons bill in December 1534

Members connected with the treasons bill in December 1534

SP1/87, f. 106v

Cromwell used the back of a letter sent to him about the entertainment of the Admiral of France at Calais on 9 and 10 Dec. 1534 to compile a list of some 50 Household officials and others. Internal evidence leaves little doubt that the men so named were Members of the Parliament of 1529, then in its seventh session. Forty-three of the men are known to have been returned to the Parliament in 1529, three (Thomas Alvard, Sir John Dudley and John Goodale) to have entered it later at by-elections, and Sir Francis Bryan to have been nominated as a replacement during 1532-3: Thomas Derby, William Paget and John Uvedale were also presumably returned at by-elections. Cromwell is thought to have drawn the list up before the prorogation of the session on 18 Dec. 1534, as two of those included on the list, Thomas Alvard and Robert Wroth, were to die before the reassembly for the eighth and final session early in 1536. Unlike Cromwell’s list of the previous year the men on this one seem to have had nothing in common save their Membership. The diversity of the selection in itself suggests that Cromwell was trying to obtain a representation of all shades of opinion in the House, perhaps as a first step in the convocation of a committee. Such a committee is likely to have been used in the closing weeks of the seventh session to facilitate the passage of the treasons bill, there being ‘never such a sticking at the passage of any Act in the Lower House’. No other measure known still to have been under consideration in mid December 1534 caused such controversy nor would have required such a large body of well qualified men to help prepare a draft acceptable to the whole House.

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