A specimen of English indulgence literature: a letter printed by Richard Pynson for the Gild of St Mary, Boston. The date is completed by hand for 16 June 1530, but this is the sort of material for which Cromwell was acting as agent in the early 1520s.
The whole three-year saga of the papal bull cost the Boston Gild the astonishing sum of £1,212 12s 8½d, but when we see that a year or two later the Gild’s various revenue streams reached a peak of £1,550 in a single year, Our Lady’s Gildsmen would think it money well spent.52 The irony is obvious. Cromwell the future architect of English reformation was agent in advancing the indulgence trade in the very years when Martin Luther was denouncing it, though it was equally ironic that his employers’ rivals in indulgence-peddling, the English Austin Friars, were actually part of Luther’s order. John Foxe was himself born in Boston around a year before Cromwell’s expedition to Rome; when he came to construct a glowing account of Cromwell’s career in his classic Protestant narrative, he felt very uncomfortable about this story. As a conscientious historian he could hardly ignore it, for he had rich reminiscences from the ultimate primary source, Cromwell himself, talking to Archbishop Cranmer, who relayed it to his secretary Ralph Morice (another Boston boy).
Foxe punctiliously pointed out that his hero had told Archbishop Cranmer ‘what a great doer he was with Geoffrey Chamber in publishing and setting forth the pardon of Boston everywhere in churches as he went’. Foxe’s refuge was to treat the whole affair with clumsy satire, including the sneers at papal love for jellies, and a sarcastic marginal commentary alongside one of Boston Gild’s bulls to which he had access (not actually the one Cromwell’s expedition had obtained). Foxe did however take relief in a reminiscence which likewise came to him from Morice: Cromwell’s remark to Cranmer that he spent his time on the Rome expedition getting acquainted with Desiderius Erasmus’s newly published edition of the Greek and Latin New Testament, and that this reading first set off doubts in his mind about what he was doing. This cheering thought Foxe noted twice.53
Whatever immediate effect Erasmus had on Cromwell – and there is no reason to doubt the story in itself – his dealings with Boston Gild were not over. One letter in Cromwell’s archive from the early 1520s shows him acting as agent for a new print-run of 4,000 indulgences and as many publicity letters from the Gild’s customary London printer Richard Pynson (who, in a generously ecumenical spirit of entrepreneurship, also printed the Austin Friars’ indulgence in 1517).54 Cromwell’s correspondent was the Gild’s Alderman during this period, John Robinson, who thanked him for sending Pynson’s previous batch of Gild printing, passed on warm greetings to his wife and mother-in-law, and said he expected to see him soon in Boston: this had become a personal relationship.55 His last recorded legal business for the Gild was in the accounting year 1523–4, when he was among a consortium of London lawyers acting in the Gild’s dispute with its West Country pardoner, but he remained in friendly contact with the town leadership for the rest of his life.56 They regularly sent him substantial presents of North Sea fish or wildfowl from the Fens (a Boston speciality), either for his own enjoyment or to pass on to even more powerful folk, first Wolsey, then the King and Queen. From being a useful dogsbody, by the 1530s he had become a potent patron.57
Throughout this long relationship, Cromwell never took the opportunity of joining the extensive and distinguished membership of Our Lady’s Gild of Boston. His professional work for such an extrovert expression of traditional piety as the Gild is no bar to supposing he was becoming precociously involved in the Reformation. The recent rediscovery of a stray document from his archive provides an interesting parallel case from exactly this stage of his career. Among many contract negotiations he undertook for London merchants, there remains a draft agreement of 1522 to build a new aisle to house a chantry altar in the Bedfordshire parish church of Biddenham: the client was the local squire, contracting with a St Albans freemason in partnership with Cromwell’s friend Thomas Somer, a London stockfish merchant.58* Despite Somer’s financial involvement in this eminently traditional project to found a chantry for soul-prayer, his evangelical credentials proved impeccable, to the extent of what amounted to martyrdom for his faith: Somer was a member of the shadowy dissident group known as the Christian Brethren, was punished in 1530 for owning a copy of William Tyndale’s pioneering evangelical translation of the New Testament and died in prison.59 In the first stages of the English Reformation, religious boundaries were yet to be defined clearly, particularly when people balanced lucrative careers with sincerely held but evolving belief. We will find plenty of evidence of this in Cromwell’s later life.
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John Robinson’s greeting to Cromwell’s wife is the first positive evidence of his marriage to Elizabeth. Her birth surname was either Wykes or Prior (her mother Mercy appears in his correspondence as Mistress Prior, which could be thanks to a second marriage). About the time of Robinson’s letter, Henry Wykes wrote to Cromwell from Thorpe, a village upstream from Putney on the Thames, with commendations to ‘my sister and your good bedfellow’, who could of course be either his actual sister, his stepsister or his sister-in-law.60 Regardless, the Wykes connection suggests a local alliance, at much the same social level from which Cromwell started out: on the borders between yeomen and minor gentry.61 Mistress Mercy Prior moved into the Cromwell household after the marriage, at some stage in the 1520s.62 She seems to have inspired widespread affection – Cromwell’s long-time associate Stephen Vaughan called her ‘after you my most singular friend’ – particularly for her skill in preparing medicines. In 1536, Cromwell’s leading propagandist Richard Morison paid handsome tribute to her talents: ‘I thank God and Mistress Prior, I may go well again.’63 She remained an honoured fixture at Cromwell’s private London home at Austin Friars, apparently a more than adequate substitute for his own mother, and she was still living at New Year 1540 when he sent her a gift via her grandson Gregory. One wishes to spare her the catastrophe of six months later.64
We know of three children of the marriage: one son, Gregory, and two daughters, probably younger, though these two girls Anne and Grace both died in late 1529, leaving Gregory alone to go on to adulthood and in the end, despite everything, a peerage.65 After Elizabeth’s death, earlier in that same year of 1529, Thomas sent his son to live most of the time till adulthood with a variety of tutors and sympathetic mentors, but one should not regard this as a rejection of the boy, whom, as we shall see, he clearly adored. Perhaps it was more a way to shield him from his father’s increasingly frenetic and sometimes dangerous life in government. It is also worth registering the single devastating fact that after Elizabeth’s death Thomas never remarried, ignoring hard-headed but well-intentioned suggestions from friends to take another wife straight away.66 Not even in his years as the King’s all-powerful minister, when he could have had almost any bride he pleased, on any terms he liked, is there any hint of serious marriage negotiations.* There is more than one interpretation of that, but the most likely is that he could not bear the thought of marrying anyone else.
Thomas and Elizabeth’s marriage must have been in the 1510s, since Gregory’s age revealed throughout his father’s papers places his birth at the earliest in 1519 and far more likely 1520 – not 1516, as many commentators have asserted since the early nineteenth century.67 Much patronizing nonsense has been written about Gregory based on that persistent miscalculation of his age. He has frequently been denigrated for not having the educational attainments of a teenager at a time when he was in fact ten years old or less, while the progress of his handwriting through the 1530s, plus the carefully planned steps in his education, tells the real story: not scholarly, but not stupid or embarrassing.68 In Thomas Cromwell’s whirlwind decade of royal service, Gregory’s exact age was to prove of very great significance.
The boy’s Christian name is also worthy of note. The oddness of the name Gregory in early Tudor terms has not bee
n the subject of much comment, and yet not only Thomas’s son but in the same generation one of his nephews, who must be a younger son of his brother-in-law Morgan Williams, was also called Gregory.69 Is it too fanciful to see the baby son born around 1520 as named after Cromwell’s visit to Rome in 1518–19, in honour of Pope Gregory the Great, who sent Augustine to the Anglo-Saxons and hence was known as ‘the Apostle of the English’?70 Once more, we have to remember the fluidity of the Reformation in its first half-decade; there is no reason to back-project a fully formed version of Cromwell’s later anti-papal outlook on to the Boston Gild’s legal consultant when Gregory was christened.
Cromwell’s wife also brought a link to her brother-in-law John Williamson. As Cromwell’s public and private life became a large and complex operation, Williamson developed into an increasingly crucial, discreet and trusted domestic steward. His tact comes through in his letters to Cromwell, as their common mother-in-law Mercy Prior changed from ‘your mother’ to ‘my mother’ once Thomas became Principal Secretary and Master of the Rolls.71 That whole relationship might have seemed awkward, but since the Wykes, Prior and Williamson families were clearly situated on the same margins of gentility as the Cromwells, they were happy to enjoy the fruits of his success.72 That was also the case with William Wellifed, who married Cromwell’s sister Elizabeth, lived in Putney and must have been the same William who was chief cook and senior servant to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1520s; Chapuys later heard with some slight confusion that an uncle of Cromwell’s had been Warham’s cook.73
The two Wellifed boys from this marriage joined Gregory Cromwell in his boyhood studies at Cambridge at the end of the 1520s. The elder, Christopher, Gregory’s senior by several years, was genuinely clever. Supported by funding from his uncle which was generous though sometimes extracted only by dint of silky epistolary Latin, Christopher Wellifed stayed on at Cambridge, eventually at the well-endowed King’s Hall. He repeatedly appears in later correspondence as the Trollopian-sounding ‘Parson Wellifed’, usually indeed in connection with his considerable appetite for acquiring cathedral prebends which his uncle’s consistent generosity largely satisfied.74
Cromwell’s other sister Katherine made the one marriage in his generation which could be considered without qualification to be to a gentleman, albeit a Welsh gentleman: Morgan Williams. He appears in Cromwell’s correspondence under the polite form of address for a Welshman as ‘Master Morgan’; he was the son of William Morgan ap Howell of Newchurch or Whitchurch, Glamorgan, maybe the same as a William Morgan who was in minor Court service to Henry VII.75 William Morgan acquired property in Putney, which was certainly common among Court officials with duties at Richmond Palace; his son Morgan Williams was sufficiently close to Thomas Cromwell’s father to name his second son Walter, presumably as Walter’s godson: maybe another hint that Walter Cromwell was not as dislikeable as posterity has painted him. Yet the omnivorous historical traveller John Leland, who was in a position to know, made it clear that the family kept their Welsh connection. He provides us with the precious nugget of information that Richard son of Morgan Williams and Katherine Cromwell was born in Llanishen, the Glamorgan parish adjacent to Newchurch.76*
Of all Cromwell’s family, it was the Williams connection that meant most to him, not least in status. Theirs was the name most securely tied into the gentry, boasting for instance among their dispersal in England John Williams, sometime Sheriff of Oxfordshire, and father to a second John. In the 1530s, on a career path leading him to a peerage as Lord Williams of Thame, the younger John hosted Thomas Cromwell’s now teenaged son Gregory for an exceptionally enjoyable summer. But there was also something especially close in the relationship. After Morgan’s death at the end of the 1520s, Cromwell – his wife and two little girls now dead – effectively adopted his brother-in-law’s son Richard to be an elder brother for Gregory, then less than ten years old. Richard took the surname Cromwell alongside his Welsh patronymic, as did his younger brother Walter; for understandable reasons, a third brother, Gregory Williams, retained his Williams surname alone.77 Richard seems to have taken up his new surname in autumn 1529, for in mid-December he was already referred to as ‘Richard Cromwell’.78 By the mid-1530s Thomas Cromwell had set Richard up with his own satellite household in Stepney, part of Thomas’s growing landed estate.79
Particularly indicative is the heraldry Cromwell chose for himself, probably in the late 1520s when his rising position in society began to require it.80 A lesser man might have invented a gentrifying link for himself to the medieval Barons Cromwell; they had taken their title from a Nottinghamshire village which was presumably also the original home of other Cromwells, and the last Lord Cromwell had died long ago, in 1455, without male heirs to cause a fuss over any later appropriation. Yet that grandly simple heraldry from Plantagenet days, or a chief gules, over all a bend azure (a blue diagonal band superimposed on both a gold field and a headband of red), was nothing like the design for the coat-armour Thomas Cromwell suggested to the heralds for his own grant. Rather he took his cue from the even simpler coat Morgan Williams used (sable, a lion rampant argent: a silver lion on a black field). His coat was dominated by three gold lions (lions rampant or), to which when he officially matriculated arms in 1532/3 he added allusive borrowings from the coat of Cardinal Wolsey, a reference then both pointed and brave.81
Lions rampant or recur not only in Cromwell’s arms but in the new coat adopted by Morgan Williams’s son Richard, after he took his uncle Thomas’s surname: an allusion both to his birth and to his second father.82 Moreover, Cromwell’s first acquisition of a major seigneurial title was not in Surrey or the environs of London but far away in Wales, the lordship of Romney or Rhymney, up the valleys north of that Glamorgan parish where Richard Williams had been born. Thomas received this grant from the Crown (jointly with his son Gregory) in 1532, at much the same time as his official grant of arms. These two scraps of evidence suggest that he was at that stage making his bid for upper-gentry status via his Welsh family connections.83
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In the early 1520s, that move was as yet several steps ahead. Cromwell’s social position remained uncertain, on the lower margins of gentility, but at least in his business transactions it proved irreversible and was reinforced by his growing prosperity, founded on his varied enterprises. That inevitably meant acquiring a new house, and his choice (made, as far as the evidence goes, in 1523) was a property on the bounds of the Austin Friars, up in the north-east of the City (the familiar landmark of the area is now Liverpool Street Station). This was the chief English friary in the order that had so rivalled his recent employers at Boston in selling indulgences. Austin Friars became the nearest thing he had to a family home for the rest of his life. Even in the Act of Attainder that destroyed him seventeen years later, Cromwell was said to have committed his treason in the parish of St Peter-le-Poer, which embraced the precinct of the friary.84* Austin Friars properties were prime city real estate, and over a decade Cromwell here created a palatial house, devouring more and more of the friars’ long-term leases to private occupants to form a freehold dwelling with garden space to match.85
Nicholas Holder’s reconstruction of the ground-plan of Cromwell’s expanded Austin Friars house in the late 1530s.
The Throgmorton Street façade of Cromwell’s expanded Austin Friars house, in Holder’s reconstruction.
Once more his choice of home brought him into close contact with Italy. Austin Friars was a particular favourite with the Italians of the City, who found it more congenial, or simply safer, to worship in a friary church than face xenophobia in a parish church. More prosaically, they might thus escape demands for tithe or other parish dues; Germans and Flemings worshipped at Austin Friars for the same reasons.86 Cromwell added to his amoeba-like expanded estate in the late 1520s by buying up one of the most lavish Austin Friars houses from its rich Florentine occupants, the
business partners Pier-Francesco de’ Bardi and Giovanni Cavalcanti. Predictably, the Bardi and Cavalcanti were close allies of the Frescobaldi. Cavalcanti, while still living at Austin Friars, became at one stage in the early 1520s rather too intimately involved in the chaotic administration of its Prior Edmund Bellond, a crisis which also drew in Cromwell.87 More positively, Cavalcanti demonstrated how important the friary church was to the Italian community by donating an altarpiece by the Florentine artist Antonio Toto del Nunziata to its chapel of St John the Baptist, who happened to be patron saint of Florence.88
Cromwell’s Throgmorton Street house (3), together with the parish church of St Peter-le-Poer nestling beside the Austin Friars church (1) (assigned in Edward VI’s reign to the refugee ‘Stranger Church’), is depicted in this section of London’s first detailed map, produced in Mary Tudor’s reign; the friars’ domestic buildings (to the north) have been converted into a luxury mansion (2) and grounds for William Paulet, by then Marquess of Winchester.
One of Cromwell’s greatest Italian friends was Antonio Buonvisi, from a great merchant-banking family of Lucca, with branch offices in Lyon, Paris, Antwerp and Nuremberg as well as London. If anyone was the doyen of London’s Anglo-Italian community in the 1520s and 1530s, it was Buonvisi. He was a few years older than Cromwell, and became lessee of Crosby Hall, in the next parish to Austin Friars, one of the City’s most magnificent houses.89 Buonvisi was equally connected to that great humanist writer and lawyer Sir Thomas More: he had taken over the lease of Crosby Hall from More in 1523, and remained a loyal friend and sustainer right through More’s imprisonment in the Tower and execution in 1535.* It is easy to forget, given those later dark events, that in earlier years there was no contradiction in being friends with both Cromwell and More.90
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