Eustace Chapuys was sent to act as Katherine of Aragon’s divorce lawyer by Charles V, her nephew, to mediate between Queen Katherine and King Henry. His official position at Henry’s court was Imperial ambassador so it is surprising that, as we shall see, he and Cromwell developed a close personal relationship.
Chapuys was a prolific letter writer, sometimes completing up to ten a day. Many were to Charles V and to Charles’ aunt, Margaret of Austria, and others including his friend and confidant, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, a politician and ambassador from Burgundy.
Chapuys, like all ambassadors, had to be well-informed about the convictions and motives of courtiers, especially those who held sway over the monarch. Assembling fragments of Cromwell’s life and lineage was a particular challenge for Chapuys given the secrecy surrounding his background. But Chapuys did discover that he was imprisoned briefly for crimes unknown, before travelling to Flanders, Rome and other Italian cities. There may be some truth to the imprisonment story as much later, in 1516, Cromwell was involved in a legal dispute against the sheriffs of London who intended to imprison him for an outstanding debt. In one report to Charles V, Chapuys wrote that Cromwell’s uncle had been a cook for William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his father Walter was an unsuccessful and impoverished blacksmith who had lived, toiled and died in Putney. This was rather innocent information which Cromwell himself might have revealed in a rather unguarded moment, or on one of those occasions when he would wallow in regret about his misspent youth, when he was ‘rather ill-conditioned and wild.’
WALTER CROMWELL
Thomas may not have obsessed over his lineage, but in Wolf Hall it is an obsession for his father Walter. His savage beating of son Thomas that opens the novel turns us against Walter and forever wins us over to Thomas’s side. Walter’s life is said to have been full of disappointment and bitterness, eating away at him as his dreams of reclaiming the wealth and status of his ancestors were shattered: ‘Walter thinks he’s entitled. He’d heard it all in his childhood: the Cromwells were a rich family once, we had estates.’
When we look at the history, there is some confusion, unhelpfully perpetuated by historians. Historical references reveal that Walter had various interests, from farming and commercial beer brewing to woollen clothmaking. One historian added blacksmithing to his curriculum vitae, even that he had served as a farrier, a smith who shoes horses, and that he served in Henry Tudor’s contingent at the Battle of Bosworth. Still other historians ascribed a certain degree of lawlessness. Among our 20th-century historians it was Roger Merriman who disparaged Walter’s character, describing him as a ‘most quarrelsome and riotous character’ and ‘not seldom drunk’. It only takes one reference to cause a veritable flood, and soon later historians, building upon these foundations, speculated that Walter was not only a violent man but a criminal; after all, he had a record of being fined for assaulting a man, convicted of brawling, fraud and repeatedly fined for breaking the assize of ale, which meant he sold watered-down merchandise. But the meticulous examination of court records by Professor MacCulloch has rescued Walter from this last accusation, noting that the frequency of the fines points to a ‘routine, manorial system of licensing ale selling, couched in terms easy to mistake as a fine in the modern sense.’
But MacCulloch had drilled down further to find every historian’s dream: real evidence in the form of a letter written to Thomas Cromwell in 1536 from Anthony St Leger, a protégé of Cromwell’s who would later become Lord deputy of Ireland. It thanks Thomas for all that he has done, and praises Walter for his goodness and assistance. Far from being the lawless drunk we have heard about, Walter was a successful local tradesmen and member of the community, as reflected in his frequent calls to serve as a juryman and his appointment as constable of Putney, suggesting he was well thought of in the community.
This has resulted in a debate regarding Cromwell’s parentage, suggesting that it may be more complicated – was Walter Thomas’ biological father? Writing of Cromwell’s years in Italy, his Italian contemporary Matteo Bandello recounted a scene in which Cromwell described himself as ‘the son of a poor cloth shearer’, which is seemingly confirmed by Reginald Pole in his Apologia ad Carolum Quintum (1539). John Foxe, however, was more succinct, writing that Cromwell was ‘born in Putney or thereabouts, being a smith’s son, whose mother married afterwards to a shearman’. Certainly the varying portraits – well-to-do brewer or poor blacksmith and cloth shearer – do not quite correspond.
Far more elusive, historically and in Wolf Hall, is Cromwell’s mother, Katherine. She is rarely referred to in official records although Cromwell once made the unlikely claim that his mother was 52 when she gave birth to him. Her maiden name was Meverell, and she came from a well-to-do family. She and Walter lived in a small house that adjoined their brewery near Putney Bridge Road in London. They had three living children, with Thomas being the youngest, born sometime between 1483 and 1485. Whatever the nature of Cromwell’s relationship with his parents, he remained close to his two older sisters, Katherine and Elizabeth; Katherine’s son, Richard, later adopted the Cromwell surname and became a protégé of his uncle’s.
Thomas Cromwell’s family details continue to be debated among historians, but with so little evidence available, not to mention Thomas Cromwell’s own conflicting stories, we may never have the full picture.
THOMAS CROMWELL ON THE CONTINENT
Thus, in his growing years, as he shot up in age and ripeness, a great delight came in his mind to stray into foreign countries, to see the world abroad, and to learn experience; whereby he learned such tongues and languages as might better serve for his use hereafter.
John Foxe
It is unlikely that Cromwell impetuously left Putney for the Continent to escape his father; more likely, he secured employment abroad before he left London. In Wolf Hall, Mantel draws back the curtain on his time in Europe but only intermittently, allowing us glimpses of the years that really shaped him:
In the year before he came back to England for good, he had crossed and recrossed the sea, undecided; he had so many friends in Antwerp ... if he was homesick, it was for Italy ....
Diarmaid MacCulloch remarks that much of Cromwell’s early career rested on his ‘ability to be the best Italian in all England’. And Italy does loom large in Cromwell’s life, a connection that began in 1503 when, in his early twenties, he joined an expedition to Italy as part of the French army, fighting the Spanish at the Battle of Garigliano, just south of Rome, on 29th December 1503. Mantel invokes the Italian connection when noting that Cromwell does have ‘something of that dark glitter of the Mafia boss about him’.
The Italian peninsula became the battleground for the French Valois kings and the Habsburg monarchs, who for decades were engaged in bloody hostilities known as the Italian Wars (1494–1559) as they fought for control over the powerful and wealthy Italian states of Florence, Venice, Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Milan and the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples. Cromwell may have found himself a war, along with many of the other mercenaries who sustained both armies, but he picked the losing side. His first experience of warfare ended in a decisive defeat for the French, sealing a Habsburg domination of southern Italy. From the humiliation of defeat upon the battlefield, Cromwell slowly made his way to the famed city of Florence. Even then the city lured in 16th-century merchants and tourists alike with its iconic buildings: the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and its magnificent dome by Filippo Brunelleschi; the medieval Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno river; and the nearby Pitti Palace, which the Medici family had coveted for so long and would purchase in 1549, consolidating their rule over this great city of the Renaissance.
THE FRESCOBALDIS OF FLORENCE
It was from the streets of Florence, Bandello tells us, that Francesco Frescobaldi, a member of a wealthy Florentine mercantile family, rescued the young Cromwell from a life of poverty. How this might have happened is a mystery, but we do know that Cromwe
ll was fortunate to associate with Francesco, for the Frescobaldis had been a powerful family in Florence since the 13th century. Their business interests were considerable, extending even to England and the new Tudor king, Henry VII, with whom they enjoyed an informal arrangement whereby goods imported from the East were allowed to travel via England, thence to Florence, thereby circumnavigating the highly taxed papal-controlled routes. The Frescobaldis were in the wine business and a leading exporter to England; today this 700-year-old history continues and they are still a large producer of Tuscan wines.
The Frescobaldi family were well-connected and respected among the Florentine gentry, renowned for their hospitality and entertaining, thus providing Cromwell with an unprecedented entrée into a world of wealth and privilege. Florence was a sophisticated city of art, culture and commerce, home to some of Europe’s leading personalities of the period – including Michelangelo, who received many commissions from the Frescobaldis.
Mantel’s Cromwell fondly recalls his time in the Frescobaldi sphere of influence and there are only a few casual references where she allows Cromwell to briefly reminisce:
It’s not so many years since the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence; or perhaps it is, but his memory is clear, exact. He was clarifying calf’s-foot jelly, chatting away in his mixture of French, Tuscan and Putney, when somebody shouted, ‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs.’
In describing the scene, Mantel may have taken inspiration more from John Foxe’s recollections of a young Cromwell encountering the new Pope, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who became Pope Leo X. Cromwell was hired by the Merchant’s Guild of our Lady in Boston, Lincolnshire, which had been a prosperous wool-trading community since the 13th century. His mission was to travel to Rome to petition the Pope to renew their authority to collect papal indulgences on behalf of the Guild; many religious communities relied on the income generated by indulgences and without the papal licence their revenues would run dry. The mission was successful because Cromwell understood how business worked, perhaps something he had learned at the home of the Frescobaldis. Whereas most petitioners had to wait for months to be heard, Cromwell researched Pope Leo’s personal tastes and discovered that the Pope delighted in new and ‘dayntie dishes’. While on a hunting trip, Leo X was intercepted by Cromwell who had been working on an offering of his own, and produced several culinary delights, including jelly, for the Pope. This was a masterful stroke which so pleased the Pope that the Guild’s petition to renew the indulgences was immediately granted. Frescobaldi’s description then of Cromwell is on the mark:
‘Quick-witted and prompt of resolution...and could dissemble his purpose better than any man in the world.’
The Frescobaldi experience would have been a revelation for Cromwell, arousing a taste for the finer things in life, such as fine art and tapestries, which he collected. This son of a Putney blacksmith must have indeed puzzled those at Henry’s court, for where could this man have acquired such intelligence, worldliness and sophistication?
The provincial world of Putney was far behind as Cromwell, now fluent in Italian, Latin and French, was entrusted with the business transactions on behalf of the family, joining Francesco whenever he travelled for business. Cromwell’s last mission for the Frescobaldis took him to Venice where he and his master parted ways, though not on bad terms. Perhaps Cromwell had decided to broaden his world, and the 16 gold ducats and fine horse that Francesco gave Cromwell as a parting gift shows their close bond. Mantel may even be alluding to Cromwell’s affinity with Florence when her Henry teases him in Bring Up the Bodies: ‘Cromwell has the skin of a lily,’ the king pronounces. ‘The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom.’ The lily is the historic emblem of Florence, a fitting symbol of loyalty to the Florentine family who had set him on the path to success.
ANTWERP
We know that Cromwell also spent a short time in Venice, where he worked as an accountant, but from here the story shifts out of focus once more. Cromwell likely followed the trade routes from Venice through the cities of Europe, eventually reaching the Netherlands where he would again assimilate the skills and machinations of local business in a new area of commerce, namely as a cloth merchant. Cromwell had honed his financial skills in Italy, but Antwerp was the perfect training ground for a merchant.
Antwerp sits on the right bank of the Scheldt river, a gateway to the North Sea, ensuring it would surpass its rival, the city of Bruges, as a major centre of trade and commerce in Europe. Governed by bankers who were forbidden to engage in any trade themselves, Antwerp was well-organized and full of lucrative industries: breweries that would later make the city synonymous with beer; sugar refineries that imported the highly sought-after raw product from Portugal and Spain; salt imported from France and shipped abroad; diamonds bought from Indian merchants that were cut in the city by highly skilled Jews who had fled the persecutions of the Iberian peninsula. Its major activity was its tapestry workshops, which evolved into the major marketplace for Flemish tapestry. Indeed, Antwerp was the centre of the luxury market where dealers traded in exquisite tapestries, English cloth, and high-quality silks from Italy, from where Pope Leo X would commission the finest examples for his rooms in the Vatican. Antwerp was the mercantile capital of Western Europe, a financial centre that launched a stock exchange in 1531, drawing bankers from England, France, Portugal, Italy and the nations of the Holy Roman Empire; London would have to wait another 40 years for the creation of its stock exchange.
These channels of international trade and commerce also brought new religious and humanist influences, with the wind of reform in Antwerp attributable to the city’s pre-existing tensions with the Catholic Church. Cromwell worked as a clerk or secretary, possibly for English merchants, and would have been aware of all the trends and movements in the city, and is likely to have been influenced by the religious discourse flowing through the city. Mantel’s Cromwell gazes up at one of Wolsey’s tapestries and is reminded of a young woman he had loved in Antwerp. Incidentally, the woman would turn out to be the fictional Anselma as Cromwell discovers in The Mirror and the Light, but the real Cromwell would have focused on the value of that tapestry, which workshop made it (Arras or Tournai perhaps) and the going rate for a similar work.
A MERCANTILE EDUCATION
Cromwell knew the value of a practical education and contemplated sending his son Gregory to stay with Stephen Vaughan, a merchant in Antwerp. Cromwell once wrote to Vaughan, declaring ‘You think I am in Paradise, and I think in Purgatory.’ But he did have a great affection for Antwerp and a certain nostalgia for the place where he achieved so much.
Cromwell’s return to England was thought to be some time in 1513 or 1514, but the Boston Guild’s records of Cromwell in Rome place him in Italy in 1517 and 1518, so we can surmise that he travelled between England and Europe on various business trips during those years. With so many years spent in Europe, it is not surprising that Cromwell’s fluency expanded to include numerous languages, including French, Italian, German and Spanish, as well as the languages reserved for scholars and academics: Latin and Greek.
Mantel’s Cromwell overhears several conversations in a variety of languages including Flemish Latin and Greek. Not all of the conversations are useful, Cromwell says to himself, but they are to be remembered.
CROMWELL THE LAWYER
Our lesson with Cromwell is that he can be an unreliable narrator, and so historians have looked to official records to unearth his early career, particularly his time as a lawyer. We have no evidence of where Cromwell might have received legal training or if he had formal training at all, but his years in some of the most important centres of trade throughout Europe were enough to recommend him, and by the early 1520s he was well-known throughout London’s legal and mercantile spheres, both of which offered considerable opportunities for the lawyer and merchant. Cromwell was admitted to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn, one of the four inns of court in London, which was a prer
equisite should Cromwell wish to be called to the bar.
Gray’s Inn is an important element of Cromwell’s professional life in Mantel’s series and was an important stepping stone for Cromwell, allowing him to take on several high-profile clients and to cultivate a legal network. He soon entered into the service of Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville and her first husband, Sir John Grey of Groby. Interestingly, Cromwell was not merely a legal advisor, but rather served in Grey’s household, in charge of conveying private correspondence between Grey and his wife as well as Grey’s younger brother George, and the matriarch of the household, Cecily Grey. This time is not alluded to in the series, but it is clear from letters written by the Marquess to Cromwell years after his service that Cromwell had been held in high esteem, and he would remain connected to the Greys throughout his life.
THE CROMWELL FAMILY AT AUSTIN FRIARS
Sometime in 1515 Cromwell married the daughter of a fellow merchant, Henry Wykys, who had served as Gentleman Usher to Henry VII. Cromwell had already established himself as a successful merchant and lawyer, and took over the reins of Henry Wykys’s business in the cloth and wool trade; marrying Elizabeth Wykys was a beneficial match. The couple lived at Cromwell’s bustling property of Austin Friars, a monastic house in London, which they rented. Several tenements were built on the western side of the precinct and the friary also owned a number of properties just outside the precinct. With its 14 rooms set across three storeys, Austin Friars features throughout the series and is full of Cromwell relatives, in-laws, nieces, nephews and wards. Over the years Cromwell’s neighbours in the building complex include the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador Eustace Chapuys, French ambassadors, and the famed scholar Desiderius Erasmus, who – allegedly – left without paying his bill due to the poor quality of the wine served. It is within its walls that we are introduced to Cromwell’s wife Liz and their children. In Wolf Hall Liz has been fleshed out and, in a sense, gives voice to the female population of England, many of whom protested Henry’s cruel treatment of Katherine: abandoning your wife of over 20 years (for a younger woman) was something the wives of England could empathize with. Every woman in England would be against it, she says:
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