Hacket was Thomas Cromwell’s intimate friend; in the 1530s he shows up as a frequent correspondent from Brussels. Cromwell served as executor of his will, a role which he performed for only a few people and which in this case proved a headache, principally because a former servant of the Frescobaldi obstinately stood out for what he claimed was Hacket’s old debt.16 The ambassador certainly earned his country’s gratitude and Cromwell’s pains in sorting out his affairs. His letters constituted a royal news service first for Cardinal Wolsey and then for Cromwell about politics in the Low Countries, and alongside his official dispatches to Henry VIII he frequently sent Cromwell a more unbuttoned letter.17 He larded these letters to Cromwell with laddish jokes, latterly at the Pope’s expense, and lapsed from time to time into French, a language which they clearly both spoke fluently.
Naturally Hacket also paid as much attention to Antwerp, England’s most important commercial depot in mainland Europe, as he did to the imperial Court in Brussels. All this adds substance to John Foxe’s rather vague remark about Cromwell, that ‘being at Antwerp, he was there retained of the English merchants to be their Clerk or Secretary, or in some such like condition placed pertaining to their affairs.’18 Indeed, in a petition of complaint to the Court of Chancery, Cromwell described his transactions in Antwerp with other English merchants in 1513–14 which had sparked a dispute on debt.19 His memories of Antwerp remained warm, to judge by a bitter joke of his old servant and friend Stephen Vaughan, who in 1536 was not enjoying himself on a royal diplomatic mission there, and observed to Cromwell in characteristically self-pitying mood: ‘You think I am in Paradise, and I think in Purgatory.’20 How much did Cromwell know of the Frescobaldis’ clandestine co-operation with Henry VII to defraud the Pope of alum revenues? No insider to the Antwerp/London/Southampton commercial world with personal connections to the Frescobaldi can have failed to hear the story. The young Cromwell would have learned some useful lessons in how to render unto Caesar that which belonged to the Vicar of Christ.
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In the mid-teens of the century Cromwell was in his early thirties; his life had taken him from Putney to Italy and Antwerp, and back to England. What people remembered about those early years, particularly if inclined (as many were) to shape their memories with malicious snobbery, was his connection to the cloth trade. It was in fact an honourable achievement to be admitted to the great London trade gild of the Merchant Taylors. When Cromwell pursued a routine plea of debt in the Court of Common Pleas in 1523, he was described as citizen and Merchant Taylor (civis et mercator scissor) of London.21 This gave rise to the repeated sneer that he was a ‘shearman’, just as Archbishop Cranmer was habitually dismissed in widely separate parts of traditionalist England as an ‘ostler’ (stableman at an inn).22 The ‘shearman’ jibe was so well known and so toxic that in the immediate aftermath of my Lord of Essex’s fall in 1540, Henry VIII at the height of his vindictiveness against his fallen minister decreed that no one should call him Lord Privy Seal or by any other title of office or nobility, but only Thomas Cromwell, shearman.23
A more rounded perspective suggests that through Cromwell’s own efforts over a decade and more he had become an exceptionally cosmopolitan Englishman, with a web of connections to northern Italy, the Low Countries and the ports of London and Southampton. Working in Antwerp, the entrepôt uniting these various commercial hubs, he knew well some of the most enterprising merchants of England’s international trade, many of whom figure constantly in his later correspondence: William Lock and Richard Gresham, for instance, both on the way to becoming seriously wealthy, and like him enthusiasts for the European Reformation as it unfolded after 1517. Their influence in the City of London was soon to make its mercantile community into a power-base for England’s developing Protestantism: a congenial partner for Cromwell’s own religious programmes in the 1530s.24 Unsurprisingly, John Hacket was by no means his only friend in Calais, and much later Lord Lisle (in a justified panic at finding a war on his doorstep) added a postscript to a letter to a man who was now the King’s chief minister: ‘there is no man living knoweth the open way between Arde [Ardres, in Picardy] and Calais better than you.’25
Judging from Cromwell’s correspondence, he had a gift for learning languages, though there is no clue to how he acquired them. He spoke, read or wrote fluent Italian and French. He seems to have been at ease in Spanish, certainly in reading it: two people who had the measure of him in English politics, Queen Katherine of Aragon and her imperial nephew’s long-term ambassador in England, Eustace Chapuys, both chose to write to him in Spanish on important occasions.26 While he may have been able to read some German, one of his German correspondents habitually wrote to him in Italian, and in 1532 his Italian friend Dr Augustine suggested he get a merchant of the Steelyard to translate the German of an imperial decree against Albrecht of Prussia.27
Cromwell also understood the universal European language of power: the self-consciously elegant Latin written and spoken by Renaissance ‘humanists’, those ardent explorers of a re-emerging classical past. Over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Western Church used but also much adapted the Latin language for the purposes of Christian conversation and liturgy, transforming even its grammar and sentence construction. Humanist scholars, writers and poets modishly reached back across the centuries to classical Latin idioms, and tried to sound as much as possible like great orators of ancient Rome such as Cicero, or poets such as Virgil. They learned their Latin from a mass of ancient texts newly appearing in print. Cromwell loved and avidly collected books. He would recognize that humanism was a practical skill: good expression and forceful rhetoric were essential tools of effective politics. As a good humanist, he also had enough acquaintance with Greek for scholars occasionally to flatter him with a learned tag.
Of all these self-taught accomplishments, Cromwell’s fluency in Italian mattered the most. A significant witness to that is one of the earliest dated items surviving from his archive, from summer 1522: his close friend the merchant John Creke prefaced a letter full of extravagantly expressed and intimate affection with the address ‘Carissimo quanto homo in questo mondo!’ – Italian, even though Creke was writing from Bilbao in Spain.28 Fifteen years later, the seasoned traveller Richard Morison likewise repeatedly turned to Italian in personal letters to him, on one occasion to convey a particularly confidential final sentence, but elsewhere just to be agreeable.29 Cromwell shared Italian books with like-minded friends and colleagues: in 1530 Edmund Bonner begged him to fulfil his promise to send Petrarch’s I Trionfi and Castiglione’s newly published Il Cortegiano up from London to Yorkshire, so Bonner could while away his Yorkshire exile improving his Italian.30 An exceptionally cultured nobleman and enthusiast for translation, Henry Lord Morley, was Cromwell’s friend and shared his love of things Italian.31 It is therefore significant that some time in the late 1530s Morley could assume that Cromwell would be pleased by a gift of Niccolò Machiavelli’s best-known works the History of Florence and The Prince, in Italian editions, for recreational and instructive reading. He accompanied the present with reminiscences about the many occasions he had heard Cromwell observe of the Florentines that he had ‘been conversant with them, seen their factions and manners’.32
Much of Cromwell’s early career rested on his ability to be the best Italian in all England. The first identifiable example of this comes from 1514, when he turned up in Rome, staying at the English Hospice while giving evidence in a tithe dispute concerning east London.33 Thus began an acquaintance with Lancelot Collins, who was testifying in the same case; it ripened into a lasting friendship. Collins was a nephew and leading servant of England’s resident Cardinal in Rome, Christopher Bainbridge, who among much empire-building for himself in the city had taken over the management of the Hospice.34 Colourfully, Bainbridge was murdered that very summer, by another servant who was reputedly his male lover; after his master’s death,
Collins returned to England to the Treasurership of York Minster, to which Bainbridge (a necessarily absentee Archbishop of York) had appointed him. He held this office until his death in 1538, together with one of the Minster’s prebends (an endowment providing a comfortable income).35
The Treasurer’s frequent later letters to Cromwell, invariably written in his own endearingly individual italic hand, reveal him as a cheerful, whimsical and generous soul. Even Cromwell’s cynical lieutenant Dr Thomas Lee gave Collins an admiring obituary: ‘it is thought that that man was not rich . . . seeing he kept so honest hospitality, greatly commended in these parts.’36 Collins came to look on Cardinal Bainbridge and Thomas Cromwell as equal patrons in his career, unlikely as the pairing might at first sight appear. Remarkably, he displayed their heraldry side by side on the façade of his house in York. That public statement brought Collins much trouble in 1536 during the Pilgrimage of Grace, the worst rebellion that Henry VIII ever faced, in which the rebels were intent on targeting any trace of the hated royal minister in northern England (see below, Chapter 16).37
All major elements in Cromwell’s early career – Italy, Antwerp and London – are now linked. A further legal dispute places him securely back in London in January 1516, when he appealed to the sheriffs of London against his imprisonment for debt. One should not consider such debt disputes as anything more than oiling the wheels of credit in early Tudor commerce, and this was just a routine case on a minor sum of money.38 The earliest evidence in his surviving papers for any of his own business transactions dates from 1519, when a London goldsmith accepted a bond from Cromwell and Thomas Allen, an Essex man with strong City connections. Thomas Allen’s brother John was soon to be Cromwell’s colleague under Cardinal Wolsey, and later his protégé as a singularly ill-fated Archbishop of Dublin. The Allen brothers were close kin to one of London’s leading merchants, another John Allen, likewise one of Cromwell’s close business partners. There was a strong set of connections here for the future.39*
Cromwell was already being described in the litigation of 1516 as ‘gentleman’, rather than merely as merchant, suggesting that by then he was well advanced in the practice of English common law, alongside all his other sources of income. How much legal training he undertook is no clearer than any other aspect of his education. Tudor law and its tangle of exotically named courts of justice can now seem very intimidating, but a sharp-witted boy from Putney would have soon mastered as much as his modern equivalent determined to penetrate the arcane world of finance in Manhattan. Where Cromwell can be traced acting as a lawyer, it is in the relatively straightforward business of land conveyancing, the equity law on trusts and credit agreements practised in the Court of Chancery or the informal legal business brought before the royal Council when it turned itself into a court, sitting in the Palace of Westminster’s Star Chamber.
As Cromwell’s career developed, we rarely find him venturing into the more arcane tangles of the ancient royal courts of King’s Bench or Common Pleas that also sat in the Palace of Westminster; when he chose high legal office in 1534, it was the Court of Chancery’s Mastership of the Rolls. A multitude of interests suited him better than concentration on the law, and we should not think of him having a job in the modern sense: such a man was more like our conception of a freelance consultant. These early transactions, and a mass of evidence throughout Cromwell’s archive in the 1520s, suggest a business built on moneylending and the law, particularly practice in the Court of Chancery, with London commerce at the heart of his prosperity.
Yet Italy consistently lurked in the background. In the early sixteenth century London’s foreign trade was dominated by Italians to an extraordinary extent, until the Reformation and a changing dynamic in international commerce virtually wiped out this ancient and flourishing community within a few decades of Cromwell’s death.40 So every leading London merchant had much to do with Italians. What is striking about Cromwell is that he chose to make this relationship unusually close and personal. Few of his contemporaries bothered to learn Italian with anything approaching his own fluency.
His connections extended much further than Florence. His first known home lay in the parish of St Gabriel Fenchurch, the base for the Genoese mercantile colony in the City. London’s Tudor historian John Stow notes this, and provides the information that these so-called ‘galley men’ ‘brought up wines and other merchandises, which they landed in Thames Street, at a place called Galley Quay’.41 As if on cue, we find in Thomas Cromwell’s early papers a lawsuit of 1522–3 concerning a consignment of white soap shipped up from Southampton into Fenchurch parish by Niccolò and Antonio Duodo.42 The Duodos were not Genoese but Venetians, and that fellow-Italianate Englishman Cardinal Reginald Pole asserted in an unfriendly but well-informed biographical sketch that Cromwell was at one stage an accountant to a Venetian merchant.43 It is tempting to identify that merchant with their mutual friend Donato Rullo, who came from southern Italy to make his fortune in Venice. Rullo was personally acquainted with Cromwell before he knew Pole, and in the early 1530s was very happy to do him a favour by being agreeable to that polished young nonentity Thomas Winter, Cardinal Wolsey’s son, then visiting Venice.44
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One wonders whether papal alum had been used to manufacture the Duodos’ shipment of soap. Italy of course meant not just commerce, but also the Bishop of Rome. England’s elite needed middlemen like Cromwell to deal with the complexity of papal bureaucracy, and that has left many clues at this stage of his career. As well as the tithe case of 1514, there was another similar in 1524, when Cromwell acted as London-based attorney in a Hertfordshire tithe dispute which involved an appeal to Rome.45 Cromwell as expert Italian fixer also took on a major assignment which left a considerable mark on his life and led him back to Italy. This was a consultancy for the extremely wealthy and expanding Gild of Our Lady at Boston in Lincolnshire.
Gilds were the bedrock of late medieval popular religion: voluntary associations with all sorts of purposes, some commercial, some social, but all with some religious dimension. Among the thousands of such institutions vastly varied in scale, Our Lady’s Gild of Boston became a flagship. Originally a fairly modest body with a local focus, it hugely expanded its activities in the early 1500s. Its finances were boosted by the sale of indulgences, pardons granting a shortening of time in purgatory for the purchasers and their loved ones. The Gild systematically peddled its indulgences on regular circuits across the kingdom and on at least one occasion as far as Ireland; it may have become the largest such operation in the kingdom.46 We still see its stately side-chapel in one of England’s most prodigious parish churches, whose tower has no rivals in a Lincolnshire Fenland landscape not short of mighty towers.
If the ‘Boston Stump’ triumphantly sees off all competition among neighbouring belfries, the same could not be said of the Boston Gild’s indulgence trade. Its profits needed constant defence against rival indulgence enterprises, particularly the equally expansionist salesmanship of the English Province of Austin Friars (known in the Germany of Martin Luther as the Augustinian Eremites). In early 1517, a few months before Friar Luther started his fateful campaign against indulgences far away in Saxony, thus inadvertently launching the Protestant Reformation, a battle royal for control of the English indulgence market broke out between his English confrères and the Boston Gild. Boston sent its Gild clerk to Cardinal Wolsey to seek a suspension of the Austin Friars’ privileges.47 Yet even Wolsey in his legatine splendour was only a local representative of the Holy Father. More ambitiously, determined to secure reaffirmation and authorization directly from Rome, the Gild recruited Thomas Cromwell. As ‘Master Cromwell’, a form of address which stands out in the Gild accounts as once more indicating gentleman’s status, he first appears in the Boston Gild accounts for Whitsun 1517–18, travelling up to Boston and generally running up expenses and fees to the tidy sum of £4 6s 8d.48
The following accounting
year, Whitsun 1518–19, Cromwell undertook a much more ambitious task in the Boston Gild’s campaign. He accompanied Geoffrey Chamber, the Gild secretary, on an expedition to Rome. John Foxe described Cromwell’s special contribution with relish, a perfect anecdote to illustrate papal worldliness and corruption. Cromwell followed the Pope on the hunting field, and secured renewal of Boston’s bulls by charming his Holiness with the aid of fine dishes of English jelly, serenaded by a group of singers demonstrating English three-part harmony. So Pope Leo, ‘knowing of them what their suits were, and requiring them to make known the making of that meat . . . without any more ado, stamped both their pardons, as well the greater as the lesser’.49 The Boston accounts less picturesquely reveal Chamber as main negotiator; it was in fact Chamber’s second trip in two years, and when Cromwell went home he left Chamber to spend another sixteen weeks in Rome working out details of the deal with Pope Leo X’s officials.50
Nevertheless, Cromwell’s contribution was still important, earning him £47 12s 7d in expenses from the grateful Gild and a fee of £13 6s 8d. He spent half a year (exactly twenty-six weeks) in Rome and getting there and back via Calais. Given that Pope Leo was the younger brother of that Piero de’ Medici who had died at the battle of Garigliano, Cromwell’s Florentine links might have been of value oiling the bureaucratic wheels. We also have one intriguing survival in the State Papers suggesting that while in Rome he made himself useful in clearing up other bits of business with papal officials. This document is a fragmentary draft of court pleadings by Richard Belamy, attorney for Joan Harte and John Turner, to prove that they had fulfilled conditions of a bond dated 8 February 1519, concerning a dispensation from the Roman bureaucracy for the said Joan and Thomas Addington, a London skinner: each to be at liberty to marry any suitable person. Addington and his future wife Joan remained Cromwell’s good friends, and the draft appears to be in Cromwell’s hand.51 Perhaps he set off to the Eternal City with that bond from February stuffed into his file of papers; if so, we could narrow down his travels to winter and spring 1519.
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