Naturally a stream of eminent visiting Italians came to the Bardi/Cavalcanti in Austin Friars, several of them as long-term guests. In the year Cromwell moved next door, one of the visitors who stayed for six months or more was Gregorio Casali, sharing the house with the secretary of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, soon to become Pope Clement VII.91 Casali, an energetic young Italian with useful connections in the Vatican, was in the early stages of varied service for Henry VIII in Rome. Once he became Henry VIII’s ambassador to the Papacy in the increasingly delicate diplomatic situation of the late 1520s, he would meet Cromwell again in royal service. For the time being, Casali was by any standards Cromwell’s social superior, but in these earlier and happier days the two had plenty of time and every reason to get to know one another.92
Diplomacy was frequently work for senior clergy. Among the English episcopate was a series of absentee Italians, useful agents for the English Crown amid the complexities of the papal Court, but needing a handsome income for their trouble: a wealthy English bishopric was just what they needed. That offered further opportunities for those like Cromwell with a foothold in both England and Italy to oil the machinery of the dioceses back home and communicate with the absentee in Rome. Antonio Buonvisi, for instance, was a senior diocesan official for Silvestro Gigli, Bishop of Worcester, and likewise for his successor at Worcester from 1521, Hieronymo Ghinucci. Ghinucci, like Gigli a good servant of English interests in the Vatican, was at the time of acquiring Worcester also papal nuncio (ambassador) in London, and given this conjunction of acquaintance with Buonvisi he cannot have failed to have known Thomas Cromwell. He proved rather touchingly loyal to Henry VIII even after the break with Rome, and then he looked to Cromwell as the only man to secure him due financial recognition (again via Buonvisi) after he had eventually been deprived of his Bishopric. Dr Augustine, whom we shall meet frequently as Cromwell’s friend and agent in the 1530s, was the Bishop’s nephew.93
Cromwell’s correspondence in the early 1520s shows he had significant links also with Bristol, an even greater international port than Southampton, as well as chief city in the diocese of Worcester.94 One of his Bristol friends, William Popley, who in the 1530s became one of his leading servants, developed a similar mixture of international diplomatic, ecclesiastical and commercial activity. In 1518 Popley acted as royal courier to the King’s chaplain and diplomat William Knight, English ambassador in the Netherlands, while also acting as go-between with Cardinal Lang (a leading adviser to the Holy Roman Emperor), Knight’s absentee predecessor in a Salisbury Cathedral prebend. Dr Knight was described in 1516 as a good Italian, a description equally applicable to Thomas Cromwell, who in the same years Knight had been studying law in Italy had been gaining a rather more eclectic education there.95
Now the Italians of Austin Friars brought Cromwell within one tantalizing remove of the English Court: much closer glimpses than the Putney boy in the 1490s would have seen of comings and goings at Richmond Palace. The Bardi/Cavalcanti firm ran the trade in luxury fabrics which meant so much to nobility and monarchy: silks, gold thread, Genoese black velvet. They frequently spent precious face-to-face time with King Henry VIII himself, tempting him with a range of splendid new outfits, presented with long-practised deference.96 The nature of the occasion was likely to dispose Henry to the best of moods, and cheerfulness in that notoriously volatile monarch was a priceless opportunity for pressing advantage. These cultured and personable Italians were nothing if not versatile. One of the many opportunities for profit to come Giovanni Cavalcanti’s way was a remarkable commission in 1521 from Pope Leo X, to arrange a mock-up of a magnificent tomb for Henry VIII to be paid for by the Pope, obviously in gratitude for Henry’s recent repudiation of Martin Luther in his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. Unlike the Pope’s simultaneous grant of the honorific title ‘Defender of the Faith’, to which Henry clung with obstinate and illogical pride through all his religious adventures, this recipe for future embarrassment came to nothing. It was an astonishing might-have-been of history.97
While Italians went to Court to see the King, the King’s courtiers also arrived as visitors to Cromwell’s Bardi/Cavalcanti neighbours. Great men of the realm appeared for convivial evenings – no doubt some, like Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk, were too socially exalted for Cromwell at that stage of his career to be included in the party, but others were well known to him from his old family connections with the Kentish gentry. Sir Henry Guildford was one, a leading gentleman of Kent and great courtier, in whose family affairs Cromwell became much entangled in the 1530s. Guildford was patron to another brilliant young man who shared Cromwell’s enthusiasm for Italy, the budding poet Thomas Wyatt, a frequent and welcome visitor to the Bardi/Cavalcanti house in Austin Friars. The young Wyatt’s talents, charm and immersion in Italian culture no doubt appealed to his Italian hosts, but they would not have been unaware that his father Sir Henry Wyatt, as Master of the King’s Jewel House, was vital to their complex financial relationship with the Court.98 Cromwell did much for Wyatt’s survival and promotion through many troubles in the 1530s, and Wyatt was standing at the scaffold when he died.
Cromwell’s arrival to live at the Austin Friars in 1523 had a further and darker resonance. Among the host of funeral monuments crowding the friars’ church he would see a very recent grave: Edward Stafford Duke of Buckingham, hastily buried there after his execution for treason on 17 May 1521. The charges against Buckingham remain puzzling, but are unmistakably an early example of King Henry’s ability to destroy members of the nobility with a penchant for boasting about their Plantagenet blood. The proceedings against the Duke show that there had been boasting enough. Over the previous century and more, the Austin Friars of London had come to render a specialist service to whoever was on the English throne, providing a last resting-place for those whom the regime deemed to be its enemies and beheaded as traitors. Treason was not quite so dire a crime as heresy, so such victims of politics deserved a decent Christian burial: only not too decent, nor as honourable as they and their families had no doubt planned.
A number of city friaries were drawn into this grisly post-mortem diplomacy (the best-known example now is from outside London, the Franciscan friary of Leicester which famously received the corpse of King Richard III after the battle of Bosworth, to lie eventually under a car park), but the London Austin Friars were way ahead.99 The unfortunate Duke of Buckingham was in fact the last such ‘traitor’ whom the Austin Friars received into their mercy. The great advantage of their church was that its lay congregation was dominated by foreigners, thus going some way to quarantining such politically charged corpses from the wider Tudor public. A London burial also kept the graves of traitors away from provincial churches (some, indeed, friary churches) which were mausolea for the victims’ families, where their presence amid the tombs of their ancestors might inflame seditious thoughts in relatives or former servants. For reasons that are not now clear, Buckingham had quite a following, and for a while even the church of Austin Friars was not immune from demonstrations of popular grief for him.100
There is no question that Thomas Cromwell came to some involvement in Buckingham’s affairs around the Duke’s last crisis of 1521; the problem is to gauge what it was. He was understandably not anxious later on to advertise any such toxic connection, and the most precise fragment of evidence is distorted by malice. A decade or so after the event, a relative of Cromwell’s called John Gough, a member of the royal garrison in Calais (probably another Welshman, in his own language Ieuan Goch), wrote warning him in slightly impressionistic prose of wild but dangerous accusations by a Welsh colleague in the garrison, Robert ap Reynold, ‘naughty words spoke behind your back . . . such words . . . that, an [if] company had not been, one of us had smarted’:
he saith that he sold you much stuff of the Duke of Buckingham, which he saith that you do owe him 47 angels [£18 16s 6d], with many rigorous words that he said he had done for you before any promoti
on that God did send you, and moreover he saith that he will come over into England and show it unto the King and the Duke of Norfolk of certain words that you should show him before the Duke [of Buckingham] died a month, as God knoweth, for I cannot tell what they be, but he spaketh like a naughty fellow.101
Ap Reynold’s own contemporary letters to Cromwell about this debt or a smaller one are unsurprisingly less incendiary (and also interestingly emphasize his Welshness, in an effort to please his correspondent). Any repercussions Gough’s revelation earned him from his increasingly intimidating debtor seem to have been fully expunged over the next few years.102
One might therefore be inclined to write off this incident as the result of an over-festive night out in Calais, were there not a cache of legal papers in Cromwell’s archive, all directly concerning one of the chief accusers of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521, the senior ducal estate official Charles Knyvett. They are an extensive selection of drafts, some fifty-five folios, covering business in which Knyvett was involved, extensively annotated or prepared by Cromwell himself or his clerks, and they date from around 1521–2. Several are drafts of Knyvett’s petitions to the King (plus one to Cardinal Wolsey) for restoration to estate offices from which the Duke had dismissed him, and they revisit Knyvett’s recent accusations against Buckingham. The final item is a royal protection for Knyvett in travels between London and Calais as a member of the retinue of Lord Berners, Deputy of Calais in the 1520s, with a commencement date in April 1521, the very month when Buckingham was arrested.103
Calais; ap Reynold and Welshmen; Knyvett; Cromwell – if these are coincidences, they are remarkably suggestive, even if we cannot join the dots any further than suggesting that he was drawn in some minor capacity into the Duke’s destruction. The Duke of Buckingham was strongly connected with south Wales, as greatest of the remaining Marcher lords whose lands dominated the Welsh border with England; his last and in the end unfinished headquarters, Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire, was in sight of the Welsh hills. Cromwell’s first major acquisition of land in 1532, the Welsh lordship of Rhymney, was a former Marcher lordship of the Duke of Buckingham. Throughout the 1530s, Cromwell remained a good and constant friend to two of the Duke’s children in their continuing difficulties: his son and heir Henry Lord Stafford, struggling to maintain his household on a fragment of his father’s possessions in the Midlands, and, even more consistently and demandingly, the Duke’s high-spirited daughter Elizabeth, victim of a dynastic marriage to Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk gone horribly wrong. These two orphans remained close in their multiple misfortunes, as attested in a sad little poem from Lord Stafford for Elizabeth, ‘a mother, a sister, a friend most dear’, which he placed on her grave at Lambeth as late as 1558.104 If Cromwell’s attention to the pair was intended to make amends to the house of Stafford, then it was a creditable effort.
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With Stafford fortunes in ruin after 1521, a different figure moved Cromwell’s career in a new direction, with consequences for the whole realm unfolding over decades. In 1523 he entered service with another of England’s greatest men – yet it was not Cardinal Wolsey who first refocused his interests from London and international legal work and commerce, but a different Thomas: Thomas Grey, second Marquess of Dorset, England’s only marquess at the time. It is likely that Cromwell’s Welsh gentleman cousin Morgan Williams, by then in Dorset’s service, was the means of introduction. In the later 1520s, when Cromwell was in the household of that other Thomas (my Lord Cardinal), he still displayed the Marquess’s coat of arms in the hall of his house in Austin Friars.105 Not much correspondence survives from this phase of Cromwell’s career, and two crucial items have been misdated, causing commentators to pass over his service with the Greys. What does remain extant confirms that he was not merely some legal consultant to the Marquess, but actually in his household. He was go-between for private correspondence between the Marquess and Marchioness and also with the Marquess’s younger brother Lord George Grey, and he acted at the beck and call of their mother the Dowager Marchioness Cecily, to move household stuff for her.106
Another reason why Cromwell’s service to the Marquess has been ignored is that it lasted no longer than a year, which might lead us to suppose that the relationship cooled or at any rate ceased to be of significance – but not so. Morgan Williams continued to serve in the Marquess’s household, and his son Richard, destined to be so important to Cromwell in his years of power, was also in the Marquess’s service at the end of the 1520s.107 Quite apart from that, a skein of connections runs between Cromwell himself and the Greys all through those years, including an extraordinarily cordial note from Lord George Grey of 1527 or 1528 addressed to ‘my fellow and friend Master Thomas Cromwell’ – a remarkable form of address to a former menial servant who had been moving his mother’s wardrobe around only a few years before.108 Even more remarkable is a letter from 1526 of a further brother of the Marquess, Lord John Grey, who calls Cromwell ‘brother Cromwell’.109
The Greys were not slow to call on their former servant in his steadily increasing good fortune when he entered royal service. In 1532, the second Marquess of Dorset’s brother Lord Leonard Grey enlisted Cromwell, newly appointed a royal councillor, in what turned out to be an unsuccessful quest to marry a rich Lincolnshire widow. Amid promises of handsome reward, Lord Leonard emphasized to his ‘loving friend and fellow’ that ‘my whole trust next God and the King is in you.’110 In the mid-1530s, this relationship became entangled in Cromwell’s interventionist policies in Ireland, when he engineered Lord Leonard’s appointment as the King’s Lord Deputy in Dublin. Grey was meant to be Cromwell’s deputy as well, equivalent to Master Secretary’s friend Bishop Roland Lee in the Marches of Wales (though, it turned out, not nearly so effective).
Further members of the family, Lord Thomas and Lord Leonard Grey’s sister Cecily Lady Dudley and her children, were also beneficiaries of Cromwell’s kindness well beyond the call of duty. Cecily’s fortunes were shipwrecked by the mental incapacity of her husband John Lord Dudley alias Sutton. In the mid-1530s Cromwell took her son Edward Dudley under his wing, and later even allowed the impoverished youth to dine regularly at his lodgings at St James’s before getting him promoted to a military position in Ireland under his uncle Lord Leonard.111 Touching if injudiciously overlong letters to Cromwell from young Edward survive, including repeated efforts to enlist the Lord Privy Seal, and through him the King himself, in his exceptionally callow pursuit of a wealthy young widow, the Dowager Lady Berkeley – she had more sense than to go beyond flirting with the boy. It was a similar story to Uncle Leonard’s five years before, and although neither lovelorn (or predatory) swain won his desire, they evidently both had faith in Cromwell’s ability to charm widows.112
Genealogy is all in the Tudor age, and the connections ramify. The second Marquess of Dorset married Margaret Wotton, from a distinguished family of Kent; they were part of that extensive Kentish gentry cousinage in which Cromwell became much involved. In 1525 the Marchioness’s sister Mary Wotton married Sir Henry Guildford. A generation down in Sir Henry’s family was his half-brother Edward’s ward, a young man called John Dudley, who married Edward’s daughter Jane, also in 1525. This same John Dudley much later became Duke of Northumberland, calling his youngest son Guildford (an ill-starred youth, it turned out). The tendrils go on extending beyond the Greys into Cromwell’s expanding household. The Marquess of Dorset’s chief house lay at Bradgate in Leicestershire; Cromwell’s leading servants recruited from a family named Whalley came from Leicestershire, as did William Brabazon, whom Cromwell later made one of the most important royal officials in Ireland. Lord Leonard Grey reproachfully recalled his long acquaintance with Brabazon after the two fell out in Irish government.113
Cromwell’s most troublesome inheritance from the Grey household turned out to be Anthony Budgegood, a veteran senior servant of the Marquess. Budgegood continued to serve the Mar
chioness in her widowhood, but also counted himself as servant to both Cromwell and Richard Cromwell (his former fellow-servant in Dorset service).114 His story ended very messily: after Cromwell had sent Budgegood over to Lord Leonard on Irish business in 1537–8, the old man returned to England only to flee to Italy, intent on joining the exiled dissident group around Cardinal Pole, financing himself by purloining a sizeable hoard of Cromwell’s cash. The last we hear of this servant of the Greys and the Lord Privy Seal is from a papal prison in Rome, trusted by neither side, desperately pouring out well-informed reminiscences about his English political acquaintance, and begging the Pope to lead an invasion of Henry VIII’s realm.115
One important reason for the previous lack of attention to Cromwell’s intimate relationship with the Grey family is an accident of history: Thomas Marquess of Dorset died on 10 October 1530, just too early to help Thomas Cromwell extract himself from the aftermath of Cardinal Wolsey’s fall, or to become his ally at Court through the 1530s. His son Henry, third Marquess, was then a young teenager and so remained of no practical account in politics through the rest of Cromwell’s career. Yet we should notice that this actually resulted in Cromwell taking on a crucial role in the affairs of the Greys. True to form, he got on very well with the second Marquess’s widow Margaret, and sorted out for her the misgovernment of the Cistercian abbey of Tilty in Essex. This was her home, as the Greys as founder-family annexed its guest-house in the 1520s and 1530s.116 Cromwell later arranged an early and discreet surrender of Tilty in 1536 before any general legislation on monastic dissolutions, using his nephew the Marchioness’s former servant Richard Cromwell as agent (see below, this page). The Greys’ Steward at Tilty was one Henry Sadler, whose son was Ralph Sadler, one of Cromwell’s most reliable and trusted servants. Henry Sadler was himself a good friend to Cromwell and Richard, who was probably much the same age as Ralph.117
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