Thomas Cromwell - Hardcover
Robert Hutchinson investigates the rise and fall of Henry VIII's most notorious minister. The son of a brewer, Cromwell rose from obscurity to become 'Earl of Essex, Vice-Regent and High Chamberlain of England, Keep of the Privy Seal and Chancellor of the Exchequer'. He manoeuvred his way to the top by intrigue, bribery and sheer force of personality in a court dominated by the malevolent King Henry. Cromwell pursued the interests of the king with single-minded energy and no little subtlety. Tasked with engineering the judicial murder of Anne Boleyn when she had worn out her welcome in the royal chamber, he tortured her servants and relations, then organized a 'show trial' of Stalinist efficiency. He orchestrated the 'greatest act of privatisation in English history': the seizure of the monasteries. Their enormous wealth was used to cement the loyalty of the English nobility, and to enrich the crown. Cromwell made himself a fortune too, soliciting collosal bribes and binding the noble families to him with easy loans. He came home from court literally weighed down with gold. The story of his rise and fall is colourful narrative history at its best. Rich in incident and squalid detail, this will increase the author's reputation as a first class popular historian.
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About the Author:
Robert Hutchinson was defence correspondent for the Press Association 1976-83 before moving to Jane's Information Group to launch JANE'S DEFENCE WEEKLY. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a contributing author to THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION.
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CHAPTER ONEThe Most Hated Man in EnglandThe Cardinal of York, seeing Cromwell’s vigilance and diligence, his ability and promptitude, both in evil and good, took him into his service and employed him principally in demolishing five or six good monasteries.SPANISH AMBASSADOR EUSTACE CHAPUYS, WRITING OF CROMWELL’S CAREER, 21 NOVEMBER 15351
Tantalisingly little is known about Cromwell’s early life: even his date of birth remains uncertain. He was born in or just before 1485, the son of Walter Cromwell, alias Smith, a failed small-time Tudor entrepreneur, of Putney, Surrey, south-west of London. Thomas’s mother was the daughter of a yeoman called Glossop, and was living at the home of local attorney John Welbeck, possibly as a servant, when she married Walter in 1474.2 Years later, Cromwell claimed his mother was aged fifty-two when he was born.3Thomas’s uncle was cook to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. His grandfather, who had migrated from Norwell, Nottinghamshire, to Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1461, was probably involved in the cloth trade as a fuller, preparing wool in vats of human urine. Walter followed his father into the business, although he may earlier have been apprenticed to William Smith, who made armoured coats, called ‘jacks’, locally.Probably because of declining demand for such warlike apparel after the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1487,4 Cromwell’s father moved into general blacksmithing and later owned both an inn, called the Anchor, and a brewery. These were built on a few acres of agricultural land west of Starling Lane, now Oxford Road, between today’s Putney rail and East Putney District Line Underground stations. The family’s cottage home and brewery were opposite the entrance to the aptly named Brewhouse Street, which still runs the short distance from Putney Bridge Road down to the River Thames, where a fishery existed in Cromwell’s day.5 An earlier home and Walter’s smithy in Wandsworth Lane were pulled down in 1533.Walter Cromwell was a drunken, quarrelsome scoundrel, always keen to challenge the authority of local government and, if possible, cheat his neighbours. Forty-eight times between 1475 and 1501 he was fined sixpence, or £10 in 2006 monetary values, for evading the Assize of Ale – the official method for testing the quality of all brewed beer before it was sold. He was probably watering it down. He also appeared in court several times, accused of overgrazing public pastures on Putney Common with his cattle and cutting too much furze and thorns for his fuel from the land there. In 1477 he was fined twenty pence for assaulting and drawing blood from William Michell.6 Today, he would be a prime candidate for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Despite all these misdemeanours, Walter surprisingly became constable of Putney in 1495 and served many times as a juryman.However, with old age his temper became more peevish. In October 1512 he was accused of leasing one virgate of land (up to 30 modern acres or 12.2 hectares) belonging to his brewery without permission and a year later, he lost his property in the adjacent parish of Wimbledon when he appeared again before the manor court, accused of fraudulently erasing evidences and terriers – property marker posts — of the local lord ‘to the disturbance and disinheritance of the lord and his tenants’. The parish beadle was instructed to ‘seize into the lord’s hands all [Walter’s] copyholds and tenements held of the lord ... and [he had] to answer to the lord about the issues’.7 Walter Cromwell was clearly the neighbour from hell.Cromwell had two sisters: the elder, Katherine, probably born around 1477, and Elizabeth. Katherine married a Welshman called Morgan Williams8 who came from a prosperous family who had settled in Putney. His brother John was a lawyer, accountant and steward to the local landowner, Lord Scales. Their son, Richard, was to legally change his name to Cromwell and work for his uncle, mainly in the suppression of the monastic houses in the 1530s, as well as becoming an unlikely soldier, chasing rebels in the North of England. Elizabeth married a sheep-farmer, William Wellifed, who folded his business into his father-in-law’s. Their son Christopher was later financially supported by his famous uncle and educated alongside his own son Gregory.Thomas did not get on with his father and, as he later admitted to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, had behaved like ‘a ruffian ... in his early days’.9 Like father, like son. Eustace Chapuys, the gossipy Spanish ambassador, claimed in 1535 that in his youth Cromwell was ‘ill-behaved and after an imprisonment was forced to leave the country’.10 Whether it was this spell in jail or yet another quarrel with his malicious father that forced him to depart England’s shores some time around 1502 is uncertain, but he certainly visited Flanders, Rome and elsewhere in Italy during his early travels.There are several stories about Cromwell’s wanderings around Europe, some probably apocryphal. The contemporary Italian author Matteo Bandello11 recounts in his Novelles how Cromwell, now aged around eighteen, ‘fleeing his father’, joined the French army under Charles, Eighth Duc de Bourbon, to fight the Spanish as a mercenary foot soldier.He had picked the wrong side.A French advance in central Italy was halted at the Garigliano River, near Cassino, and on 28 December 1503 superior Spanish forces, commanded by Gonzalo Fernandez Cordoba, bridged the river upstream and surprised their enemies, miserably encamped on the marshy land on its west bank. In the ensuing battle the French troops were routed, losing their artillery, and the survivors (including Cromwell), now half-naked and starving, fell back to Rome.12 In one daring stroke, the Spanish had captured control of southern Italy.Cromwell eventually found his way to Florence and, still destitute, shrewdly sought help from the Anglophile merchant banker Francisco Frescobaldi, who kindly provided him with shelter and new clothes. After six months spent in his household as a clerk, Cromwell was generously given sixteen gold ducats, worth nearly £11,000 at 2006 prices, and a strong horse for his further adventures. Other versions of his early life maintain that he then worked as an accountant for a Venetian banker and as a merchant for a short period.13 He was now fluent in Italian and French, well versed in Latin, and possessed a smattering of Greek.He ended up in Antwerp sometime before 1512, working as a secretary or clerk for the English merchants based there, who sold their goods in the Flemish markets of Ghent and Bruges. Amongst some of these religiously nonconformist traders, he may have acquired ideas for the church reforms he put into practice in later life. He also moonlighted as a cloth merchant: in June 1536, George Eliot, an English mercer in Calais, recalled that he had experienced Cromwell’s ‘love and true heart’ — friendship, that is – ever since they both attended the Syngsson Mart at the port of Middleburgh, 113 miles (182 km) south-west of Amsterdam in 1512.14 He reportedly saved the life of Sir John Russell, later Earl of Bedford and Comptroller of the Royal Household, by rescuing him from French forces during the siege of Bologna the same year. He returned to Rome to pursue his commercial interests early in 1514 and the archives of the English Hospital record his stay there that June.Cromwell then returned to London and by 1516 had married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Wykes, another shearman, or cloth-worker, of Putney.15 His brother had served as a gentleman usher to Henry VII. Elizabeth was the well-off young widow of Thomas Williams, a Yeoman of the Guard, and the couple settled in the eastern part of the City of London in a house in Fenchurch Street, with Cromwell becoming an agent, or ‘fixer’, for businessmen, as well as dealing in cloth himself, with a number of servants working for him.He was now building up a useful network of contacts, and one of them, John Robinson, an alderman of the prosperous port of Boston, Lincolnshire, commissioned him in 1517—18 to travel to Rome to seek two indulgences from Pope Leo X16 to relax the Lenten observances required by the Guild of Our Lady attached to St Botolph’s Church, today still a towering landmark in the town.17 Together with Geoffrey Chambers – ironically later to become one of the visitors charged with the task of destroying religious images – Cromwell travelled to Italy again, wearily prepared for the inevitable lengthy wait before being honoured by an audience with the pontiff.Cromwell was ever the man of action. Unwilling to wrestle with Vatican bureaucracy, he tracked Pope Leo down on one of his hunting trips outside Rome. John Foxe, the Protestant polemicist, later described the meeting:
At length, having knowledge that the Pope’s holy tooth greatly delighted to new-fangled strange delicacies and dainty dishes, it came in [Cromwell’s] mind to prepare certain fine dishes of jelly, after the best fashion, after our country manner here in England which to them of Rome was not known nor seen before.That done, Cromwell observing his time accordingly, as the Pope was newly come from hunting into his pavilion, he with his companion, approached with his presents brought in with a three man song (as we call it) in the English tongue and after the English fashion.18The Pope, suddenly marvelling at the strangeness of the song ... asked them to be called in. Cromwell there showing his obedience and showing his jolly junkets, such as kings and princes only, he said in the realm of England, used to feed upon, des...
Tantalisingly little is known about Cromwell’s early life: even his date of birth remains uncertain. He was born in or just before 1485, the son of Walter Cromwell, alias Smith, a failed small-time Tudor entrepreneur, of Putney, Surrey, south-west of London. Thomas’s mother was the daughter of a yeoman called Glossop, and was living at the home of local attorney John Welbeck, possibly as a servant, when she married Walter in 1474.2 Years later, Cromwell claimed his mother was aged fifty-two when he was born.3Thomas’s uncle was cook to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. His grandfather, who had migrated from Norwell, Nottinghamshire, to Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1461, was probably involved in the cloth trade as a fuller, preparing wool in vats of human urine. Walter followed his father into the business, although he may earlier have been apprenticed to William Smith, who made armoured coats, called ‘jacks’, locally.Probably because of declining demand for such warlike apparel after the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1487,4 Cromwell’s father moved into general blacksmithing and later owned both an inn, called the Anchor, and a brewery. These were built on a few acres of agricultural land west of Starling Lane, now Oxford Road, between today’s Putney rail and East Putney District Line Underground stations. The family’s cottage home and brewery were opposite the entrance to the aptly named Brewhouse Street, which still runs the short distance from Putney Bridge Road down to the River Thames, where a fishery existed in Cromwell’s day.5 An earlier home and Walter’s smithy in Wandsworth Lane were pulled down in 1533.Walter Cromwell was a drunken, quarrelsome scoundrel, always keen to challenge the authority of local government and, if possible, cheat his neighbours. Forty-eight times between 1475 and 1501 he was fined sixpence, or £10 in 2006 monetary values, for evading the Assize of Ale – the official method for testing the quality of all brewed beer before it was sold. He was probably watering it down. He also appeared in court several times, accused of overgrazing public pastures on Putney Common with his cattle and cutting too much furze and thorns for his fuel from the land there. In 1477 he was fined twenty pence for assaulting and drawing blood from William Michell.6 Today, he would be a prime candidate for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Despite all these misdemeanours, Walter surprisingly became constable of Putney in 1495 and served many times as a juryman.However, with old age his temper became more peevish. In October 1512 he was accused of leasing one virgate of land (up to 30 modern acres or 12.2 hectares) belonging to his brewery without permission and a year later, he lost his property in the adjacent parish of Wimbledon when he appeared again before the manor court, accused of fraudulently erasing evidences and terriers – property marker posts — of the local lord ‘to the disturbance and disinheritance of the lord and his tenants’. The parish beadle was instructed to ‘seize into the lord’s hands all [Walter’s] copyholds and tenements held of the lord ... and [he had] to answer to the lord about the issues’.7 Walter Cromwell was clearly the neighbour from hell.Cromwell had two sisters: the elder, Katherine, probably born around 1477, and Elizabeth. Katherine married a Welshman called Morgan Williams8 who came from a prosperous family who had settled in Putney. His brother John was a lawyer, accountant and steward to the local landowner, Lord Scales. Their son, Richard, was to legally change his name to Cromwell and work for his uncle, mainly in the suppression of the monastic houses in the 1530s, as well as becoming an unlikely soldier, chasing rebels in the North of England. Elizabeth married a sheep-farmer, William Wellifed, who folded his business into his father-in-law’s. Their son Christopher was later financially supported by his famous uncle and educated alongside his own son Gregory.Thomas did not get on with his father and, as he later admitted to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, had behaved like ‘a ruffian ... in his early days’.9 Like father, like son. Eustace Chapuys, the gossipy Spanish ambassador, claimed in 1535 that in his youth Cromwell was ‘ill-behaved and after an imprisonment was forced to leave the country’.10 Whether it was this spell in jail or yet another quarrel with his malicious father that forced him to depart England’s shores some time around 1502 is uncertain, but he certainly visited Flanders, Rome and elsewhere in Italy during his early travels.There are several stories about Cromwell’s wanderings around Europe, some probably apocryphal. The contemporary Italian author Matteo Bandello11 recounts in his Novelles how Cromwell, now aged around eighteen, ‘fleeing his father’, joined the French army under Charles, Eighth Duc de Bourbon, to fight the Spanish as a mercenary foot soldier.He had picked the wrong side.A French advance in central Italy was halted at the Garigliano River, near Cassino, and on 28 December 1503 superior Spanish forces, commanded by Gonzalo Fernandez Cordoba, bridged the river upstream and surprised their enemies, miserably encamped on the marshy land on its west bank. In the ensuing battle the French troops were routed, losing their artillery, and the survivors (including Cromwell), now half-naked and starving, fell back to Rome.12 In one daring stroke, the Spanish had captured control of southern Italy.Cromwell eventually found his way to Florence and, still destitute, shrewdly sought help from the Anglophile merchant banker Francisco Frescobaldi, who kindly provided him with shelter and new clothes. After six months spent in his household as a clerk, Cromwell was generously given sixteen gold ducats, worth nearly £11,000 at 2006 prices, and a strong horse for his further adventures. Other versions of his early life maintain that he then worked as an accountant for a Venetian banker and as a merchant for a short period.13 He was now fluent in Italian and French, well versed in Latin, and possessed a smattering of Greek.He ended up in Antwerp sometime before 1512, working as a secretary or clerk for the English merchants based there, who sold their goods in the Flemish markets of Ghent and Bruges. Amongst some of these religiously nonconformist traders, he may have acquired ideas for the church reforms he put into practice in later life. He also moonlighted as a cloth merchant: in June 1536, George Eliot, an English mercer in Calais, recalled that he had experienced Cromwell’s ‘love and true heart’ — friendship, that is – ever since they both attended the Syngsson Mart at the port of Middleburgh, 113 miles (182 km) south-west of Amsterdam in 1512.14 He reportedly saved the life of Sir John Russell, later Earl of Bedford and Comptroller of the Royal Household, by rescuing him from French forces during the siege of Bologna the same year. He returned to Rome to pursue his commercial interests early in 1514 and the archives of the English Hospital record his stay there that June.Cromwell then returned to London and by 1516 had married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Wykes, another shearman, or cloth-worker, of Putney.15 His brother had served as a gentleman usher to Henry VII. Elizabeth was the well-off young widow of Thomas Williams, a Yeoman of the Guard, and the couple settled in the eastern part of the City of London in a house in Fenchurch Street, with Cromwell becoming an agent, or ‘fixer’, for businessmen, as well as dealing in cloth himself, with a number of servants working for him.He was now building up a useful network of contacts, and one of them, John Robinson, an alderman of the prosperous port of Boston, Lincolnshire, commissioned him in 1517—18 to travel to Rome to seek two indulgences from Pope Leo X16 to relax the Lenten observances required by the Guild of Our Lady attached to St Botolph’s Church, today still a towering landmark in the town.17 Together with Geoffrey Chambers – ironically later to become one of the visitors charged with the task of destroying religious images – Cromwell travelled to Italy again, wearily prepared for the inevitable lengthy wait before being honoured by an audience with the pontiff.Cromwell was ever the man of action. Unwilling to wrestle with Vatican bureaucracy, he tracked Pope Leo down on one of his hunting trips outside Rome. John Foxe, the Protestant polemicist, later described the meeting:
At length, having knowledge that the Pope’s holy tooth greatly delighted to new-fangled strange delicacies and dainty dishes, it came in [Cromwell’s] mind to prepare certain fine dishes of jelly, after the best fashion, after our country manner here in England which to them of Rome was not known nor seen before.That done, Cromwell observing his time accordingly, as the Pope was newly come from hunting into his pavilion, he with his companion, approached with his presents brought in with a three man song (as we call it) in the English tongue and after the English fashion.18The Pope, suddenly marvelling at the strangeness of the song ... asked them to be called in. Cromwell there showing his obedience and showing his jolly junkets, such as kings and princes only, he said in the realm of England, used to feed upon, des...
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- PublisherWeidenfeld and Nicolson
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0297846426
- ISBN 13 9780297846420
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