Thomas Cromwell
Page 4
By contrast, people from Cromwell’s Putney days reappeared in significant roles in his later life. The only other eminent escapee from Putney in his time was Nicholas West; West was already Bishop of Ely by the time that Putney’s second-favourite son returned from his travels abroad. Their relationship tells us much about the period in which England entered the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, springing out of the German friar Martin Luther’s confrontation with the Church authorities after 1517. It will be one of the main arguments of this book that Thomas Cromwell’s enthusiasm for the Reformation was a constant force in shaping his public career and policy, and that from early in the 1520s he was what a later generation would call Protestant. The term ‘Protestant’ is best put aside in dealing with the very early stage of the English Reformation which Cromwell did so much to advance. ‘Evangelical’ is a better description, for in Cromwell’s lifetime ‘Protestant’ was not a term used to describe English adherents of the Reformation and is best reserved for its place of origin in Germany. By contrast, the terms ‘evangelic’ or ‘evangelical’ were used in England at the time, and that is the usage I will generally adopt throughout this story.16
Cromwell’s eventual evangelical religious commitment makes the later dealings between the two Putney prodigal sons Nicholas West and Thomas Cromwell all the more interesting. It illustrates an important second strand in his outlook, which during his career often clashed with his religious conviction, yet was characteristic of his times. Place and family mattered profoundly to him, and might outweigh religion. When the relationship of West and Cromwell had utterly changed, and West found himself on the wrong side of Henry VIII’s temper in 1533, he reminded Cromwell of their common origins (as you would): ‘Thus I am bold to write unto you, desiring your favour, and the rather moved thereunto because of our native country [by which he meant ‘county’, Surrey], and that we be god-brothers.’17 Maybe this was literally true, and Nicholas and Thomas shared a godfather, but West may simply have meant that they had both been baptized in the same font in Putney parish church.
In religious outlook, Bishop West and Cromwell proved not to be soulmates, given the royal minister’s central role in religious change which was already all too apparent in 1533. The Bishop shared Cromwell’s fixation with his childhood home, so we can still enjoy viewing his splendid if much altered chantry chapel as part of Putney parish church, and he made equally lavish traditional chantry provision for his soul in his cathedral church of Ely. He was among the foremost opponents of ‘Lutheranism’ from its first arrival in England in the 1520s.18 Yet the Putney connection still proved potent despite the two men’s religious differences. When Nicholas West died that same year of 1533, he was succeeded as Bishop of Ely by Thomas Goodricke, one of England’s first unmistakably evangelical bishops, a boyhood friend of the most highly placed evangelical clergyman of all, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.19 One would have expected Cromwell the evangelical to have found a natural sympathy with Goodricke, but the reverse proved to be the case.*
When Cromwell began constructing a web of acquaintance across lowland England in the 1520s, Nicholas West’s network of relatives in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely provided him with one set of useful local contacts, and that did not change when West died. Alas for Bishop Goodricke, these family links continued to trump religious affiliation. Nicholas West had entrenched his nephew and employee Thomas Megges in an important diocesan Stewardship, and Goodricke could not get rid of him. The new Bishop found himself ranged against a Putney affinity in the Isle of Ely who owed their social position to Bishop West’s clerical career, but who now sustained it through their link with another Putney lad. Thomas Cromwell was probably of much the same age as Thomas Megges, and it is not unlikely that they knew each other as boys. In any case, before his death West made a point of recommending Megges to Cromwell as his business agent, and the relationship blossomed.20 Not only did Cromwell take a protégé of Megges into his own service a couple of years after West’s death, but at much the same time he procured some minor royal office for Megges himself.21 There is no doubt that it was also by his means that in 1538–9 Megges became Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, in succession to Cromwell’s own nephew Richard.
Bishop Goodricke’s origins in a lesser gentry family of Lincolnshire gave him a more elevated start in Tudor society than either West or Cromwell, but now he was at a decided disadvantage in dealing with the legacy of his episcopal predecessor, in the malign shape of Thomas Megges. A long series of conflicts developed between the increasingly infuriated Bishop and his unwanted official, who drew on Cromwell’s support with consistent success, despite a stream of letters from both parties vying for the minister’s favour.22 In 1537 Bishop Goodricke’s frustration exploded after Richard Cromwell visited him to impart the appalling news that Megges had made over his Ely diocesan Stewardship jointly to Richard himself and to Cromwell’s own son Gregory. This key episcopal office thus continued irretrievably beyond the Bishop’s control. Richard enjoyed describing to his uncle the Bishop’s impotent rage.23
There are other Putney straws in the wind. A delicate little reminiscence of Cromwell’s familiarity with his childhood home and its manorial administration comes in a letter to him from his trusted old servant Henry Polstead, a Surrey man, advising him not to let a gentleman tenant of the Manor of Wimbledon get away with an easy deal on transferring a valuable copyhold property in Putney: ‘I suppose your Lordship is not unremembered of the custom: ye must set a great fine, at the least forty pounds.’24 We will find that, unlike Cromwell’s parents, his two sisters and the families of his three brothers-in-law continued to play an important part in his career, and when Cromwell married (probably some time in the 1510s), it was to a local girl. His long-term household servant from the 1520s into the 1530s, Thomas Avery, likewise came from Putney.25
In 1534, looking far westwards to Cornwall, Cromwell dealt with the important but troublesome Augustinian priory at Bodmin by brusquely replacing a newly elected prior with his own man. This Augustinian canon not only had significantly evangelical associations in London, but also bore the particularly unCornish surname in religion of Wandsworth.26* Here sounded echoes of the village on the Surrey bank of the Thames where Walter Cromwell lived, and indeed the grateful carpet-bagger Thomas Mundy alias Wandsworth arrived from Merton Priory, one of the nearest religious houses to the village of Cromwell’s birth. Prior Wandsworth came to be seen as a symbol of Cromwell’s presence in Cornwall, not to the advantage of his local popularity, but at least Bodmin Priory lasted until as late as February 1539 under his leadership.27 Perhaps the boy Mundy and Cromwell had been schoolfriends, along with Thomas Megges.
All these later illuminations of the early years are consistent with the judgement of one of the finest historians of the century after Cromwell’s life, Edward Lord Herbert of Chirbury. Herbert wrote with a proper sense of his own exalted ancestry, his inheritance spreading from his fantasy-castle soaring above the rooftops of Montgomery to the furthest hills, but he admired the way Cromwell was at ease with the memory of his unglamorous childhood: ‘He was noted in the exercise of his places of judicature, to have used much moderation; and in his greatest pomp, to have taken notice, and been thankful to mean persons of his old acquaintance, and therein had a virtue which his master the Cardinal wanted.’28 It is also noticeable that the young Cromwell had not apparently drawn on the obvious source of social advancement in the Wimbledon area, its feudal lord the Archbishop of Canterbury, despite various obvious connections of family and relatives to the Warham household. His career had other more unusual foundations, which took him a long way from Putney and indeed out of his native land as far as the Mediterranean Sea.
2
The Return of the Native
Around the turn of the sixteenth century, a teenaged Thomas shook off the constraints of Surrey and left for mainland Europe. Rather than a quarrel with his father, the impulse may simply h
ave been the restlessness and original intelligence which characterized his public career, and which had made him a ‘ruffian’ in youth. The imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, writing a generally well-informed mini-biography of Cromwell in the 1530s, claimed that Cromwell had left England for Flanders and then Italy after a spell in prison; there is no reason to disbelieve him.1 The spine of what happened when Cromwell eventually arrived in Mediterranean Europe is provided by the most unexpected of sources: an Italian novella by a prolific author and occasional bishop, Matteo Bandello, who in writing his concise little tales took more of an interest in England than most Italians did. Tudor England’s prime Protestant historian John Foxe, author of the great Acts and Monuments (‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’), found Bandello’s account so fascinating that he ignored the deeply negative view of Henry VIII’s marital adventures evident in one or two of the other novellas. In 1570 Foxe inserted a specially translated abridgement of Bandello’s Cromwell story in a newly crafted hagiography of his Protestant hero, a good while before the novelist’s other tales were turned into English.2
Bandello is the best we can do for the obscurity of Cromwell’s Italian years. He takes his hero far from Putney, fleeing his father for Italy: that is the tiny spark of the later idea about Walter Cromwell’s violence towards his son. Interestingly, Foxe slightly modified Bandello’s ‘che fuggendo da mio padre’ – ‘fleeing from my father’ – to the more neutral ‘I am strayed from my country’, which may reflect a warmer tradition about Walter Cromwell that he had heard from his English sources. The novelist records something so specific that it does not sound an invention: Thomas’s presence with the French army at the battle of Garigliano just north of Naples on 29 December 1503, when he was probably not yet twenty.3 This engagement was decisive for placing the future of Naples and Sicily in Spanish hands and ending French hopes in southern Italy.4 Among the casualties on the French side at Garigliano was an exiled but exalted Florentine, Piero de’ Medici, then the leading family representative of the former de facto rulers of Florence. In resonance with Piero’s death, which postponed Medici hopes of regaining power in the city for a further decade, Cromwell’s story now moved to Florence.5
Bandello’s narrative is a picaresque tale of young Thomas rescued from destitution on the streets of Florence by Francesco Frescobaldi, out of sheer pity for the starving youth. Frescobaldi came from another great Florentine mercantile family, and there were long-term virtuous consequences for both in later years, when the tables were turned for the two protagonists, and Cromwell was able to help his former saviour. Just as in Bandello’s novella, Francesco Frescobaldi did indeed find himself in financial difficulties in the years of Cromwell’s greatness. In October 1533, he pledged his gratitude and continued service to Master Secretary, now in a position to return early favours.6 Nevertheless Bandello has exercised the novelist’s prerogative to create a fairy-tale around a real story. This Francesco Frescobaldi was born in 1495, so he is unlikely to have been responsible for rescuing a teenager about twice his age in the first decade of the sixteenth century.7 Perhaps the charitable deed was performed by his father Girolamo, or his elder brother Leonardo.
Nor should we take literally the denouement for Bandello’s story, in which a tearful Cromwell reveals his true identity to the astonished Frescobaldi, much as Joseph did to his brethren in Pharaoh’s Egypt. This quasi-biblical enrichment belies the fact that Cromwell and Francesco Frescobaldi remained in contact in the intervening years, as Francesco took over the family business. During Cromwell’s service with Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s, it would have been impossible for him not to know of the enormous financial debt Frescobaldi, his brother Leonardo and other Italian partners owed to Henry VIII, about which Francesco wrote with anxiety to Wolsey when matters reached a malevolent level of complexity. Probably a later stage of these same financial headaches still concerned him in writing to Cromwell in 1533.8 Frescobaldi’s co-operation with Cromwell is evident in the early 1530s, when Cromwell used him to channel money to a financially demanding Italian friend and spy, Dr Agostino de Augustinis (in his English career, ‘Dr Augustine’), during the doctor’s travels in mainland Europe.9
Yet the likelihood of a continued connection between Cromwell and Frescobaldi has much greater implications than these fairly late encounters. The Frescobaldi were one of Florence’s great mercantile families, involved in trade with England since the thirteenth century. When Cromwell was a boy and over the course of his time in Italy, their English business grew massively in clandestine co-operation with King Henry VII, to include a large-scale alum-smuggling industry to northern Europe via England: they imported this vital dyestuff for the cloth industry from Egypt and the Ottomans in the infidel eastern Mediterranean. This was despite the Papacy’s determined efforts to maintain its monopoly of European supply from mines in the Papal States, backed up by the most solemn papal curses, which Henry VII acknowledged with due reverence and completely ignored. Their impudent bypassing of the papal monopoly netted both the Frescobaldi and the first Tudor king a fine profit, although the enterprise has only recently been discovered as accounting for a major component of Henry VII’s notorious wealth.10 More decorously and festively, the Frescobaldi of Florence are still involved today in the wine business they launched 700 years ago, which in the early Tudor age made them a leading supplier of wine to England.
The Frescobaldis’ mixed interests in woollen cloth and wine are typical of high commerce in their age. Wine was a luxury trade, but cloth concerned everyone. We all have three basic needs: food, housing and clothing. Modern Western consumers will need to make an effort of imagination to enter a world where little else mattered in commerce: of those three priorities, clothing was the only one involving international trade. Treated carefully, cloth does not readily perish if transported long distances, and of the trio of basics it was the only one to be much subject to changes in fashion. Consequently, commerce across the whole continent was largely about cloth, and in the cold of Europe the basic fabric was woollen. England’s complicated geology is a fine basis for intricate variation in breeding sheep, with local specialities of wool producing a rich variety of garments. The English were known for their cloth-weaving; their chief export had become half-finished cloth for others to work up into garments in current styles, via sophisticated markets run by their neighbours across the North Sea in the Low Countries – what are now Belgium and the Netherlands.
The towns and cities of the Low Countries staged great fairs at certain seasons of the year, to which merchants and manufacturers flocked from southern and northern Europe alike. Thomas Cromwell made his first way in the world amid such commerce. Out of this trade came huge profits for producers and entrepreneurs, and the English economy hinged on the relationship. That was ample reason for the English monarchy to seek the best of relations with whoever ruled the Low Countries. Currently that ruler was the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor; since the 1490s the Habsburgs had been locked in continent-wide military and diplomatic confrontation with the Valois dynasty of France. That made the relationship even more obviously desirable, since the default reaction of the English was always to see the French monarchy as their arch-enemy.
Apart from London, the chief port handling Italian wine and cloth business was Southampton, where Francesco Frescobaldi’s brother Leonardo was sufficiently involved to purchase an expensive but clearly profitable licence to buy wool during 1512–14.11 It is therefore fascinating to find that the earliest reference to any of the adult Thomas Cromwell’s friendships is from a leading Southampton merchant. Henry Hotoft or Huttoft was a warm and frequent correspondent of his into the 1530s, and benefited in later years from Cromwell’s favour, while his son John entered the minister’s service.12 Henry became extremely wealthy in Southampton’s wine and cloth trade, rose to be Collector of Customs in the town, and even had an Italian son-in-law from the London expat community, Antonio Guidotti. In summer 1535 Guidotti went bankrupt and Huttoft w
as pulled into the disaster. In an emotional and very personal letter to his old friend, he expressed his shame and anger at the disgrace: ‘Sir, your Mastership hath known me above 25 years for a poor man to have led, I trust, an honest life.’13 So thanks to Huttoft’s misfortune we have a fix on the length of their friendship, taking us back to 1509 or 1510, when Cromwell was in his early twenties.
The Frescobaldi commercial interests in wine, wool and alum-smuggling also necessarily involved the Low Countries, and it is in that connection that we find a less intimate acquaintance of Cromwell’s helpfully prompting him to recall their first encounter, a couple of years or so after Cromwell and Huttoft had first met. An evangelically minded London mercer, George Elyot, wrote to Cromwell in 1535 with a proposal to redeploy Dover’s Benedictine priory as a parish church, inspired, he said, for the honour of God ‘and for the good love and true heart that have held unto you since the Syngsson [Whitsun] Mart at Middelburg in anno 1512’.14 Middelburg becomes part of a skein of early Cromwell and Frescobaldi connections. Francesco and Leonardo Frescobaldi became the Habsburg lessees of tolls in the province of Zeeland, of which Middelburg is the capital – this nice little earner was the ideal counterpart for Frescobaldi export licences in Southampton for English wool. Not only that, but the family’s executive officer in collecting these tolls in Zeeland was a Franco-Englishman from Calais, John Hacket, who took up residence in the Low Countries around 1505. Hacket spent the rest of his life there, and from the 1520s became a remarkably popular resident ambassador to the Habsburg Court in Brussels, the only such permanent representative Henry VIII maintained abroad apart from his diplomats at the papal Court.15