Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  2. T. Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. J. Freeman (London, 1952), 547.

  3. Foxe 1570, 1386.

  4. D. Gerhold, Thomas Cromwell and his Family in Putney and Wandsworth (Wandsworth Historical Society Papers 31, 2017).

  5. The traditional evidence is summarized in Merriman 1, 2–5, drawing on the wildly untrustworthy research of John Phillips. It is carefully analysed and much discarded in Gerhold, Thomas Cromwell and his Family. The articles to be treated with scepticism are J. Phillips, ‘The Cromwell family’, Antiquary 2 (1880), 164–8; ‘The Cromwells of Putney’, Antiquarian Magazine & Bibliographer 2 (1882), 56–62, 178–86; Wandsworth Notes and Queries (1898), part 3, 42–3. Gerhold’s excellent research substitutes facts for fiction, such as the exact location of land held by Walter Cromwell in Putney, Wandsworth and Roehampton.

  6. See e.g. D. Stuart, Manorial Records (Chichester, 1992), 4. I am very grateful to the Rev. Thomas Steel for putting me back on the right course of interpretation of these entries.

  7. Anthony St Leger to Thomas Cromwell, 17 October [1536], SP 1/108 f. 114, LP 11 no. 746. The year date derives from the address to Cromwell as Lord Privy Seal, while subsequent years are very unlikely: in October 1537, St Leger was in Ireland, on royal business which permanently transformed his fortunes for the better.

  8. See below, this page, for what was certainly a link of the Wellifed family to Archbishop Warham’s kitchen in the 1520s.

  9. In the earlier letter, SP 1/76 f. 162, LP 6 no. 604, St Leger to Thomas Cromwell, 8 June, possibly 1533, St Leger attributes him ‘half the living that I have’. He is writing from Slindon, an archiepiscopal demesne leased to him by the Archbishop; he had given his son and heir the Christian name Warham. The later letter is St Leger to Cromwell, 20 June, probably 1534, SP 1/84 f. 193, LP 7 no. 862.

  10. C. L. Kingsford (ed.), ‘Two London Chronicles from the collections of John Stow . . .’, Camden Miscellany 12 (Camden 3rd series 18, 1910), iii–59, at 15; report by William Berners on Paulet’s conversation, SP 60/6 f. 52, LP 13 i no. 471[4].

  11. [Unknown] to Thomas Broke, 3 January [1535]), SP 1/89 f. 6, LP 8 no. 11.

  12. On Cromwell and Francis Meverell: Thomas Abbot of Croxden to Cromwell, 13 January ?1533, SP 1/74 f. 25, LP 6 no. 35. Francis Meverell’s mother was from the prominent Derbyshire family of Babington of Dethick (HC 1509–1558 2, 597), and her nephew John Babington of Dethick (on whom see HC 1509–1558 1, 356) was a servant of Cromwell’s by 1536: Sir Anthony Babington to Cromwell, 2 May 1536, SP 1/103 f. 216, LP 10 no. 787. For John Babington’s lobbying of his master on behalf of the evangelical musician William Senhouse, see papers on Senhouse at SP 1/123 ff. 201–4, LP 12 ii no. 436; Babington to Cromwell, 16 October 1537 (SP 1/125 f. 182, LP 12 ii no. 925) and 21 August 1538 (SP 1/135 f. 133, LP 13 ii no. 149). Oddly enough, a century later, the last of the direct line of the Meverells married Thomas, fourth Lord Cromwell of the third creation and first Earl of Ardglass (1594–1653), great-great-grandson of Thomas Cromwell: Complete Peerage 1, 192–3.

  13. Cranmer to Cromwell, 8 April 1539: SP 1/150 f. 98, LP 14 i no. 720. For Francis Bassett’s part in bringing defaced pilgrimage images to Cromwell in London, see a letter from his elder brother Sir William Bassett to Cromwell, late August 1538, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 285, LP 13 ii no. 244.

  14. See a tangle of references to troubles in Derbyshire involving the relatives of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s leading servant Ralph Leche, the Basfords, Lekes and Sacheverells, all of whom claimed kinship to Cromwell: 25 July ?1534, SP 1/85 f. 69, LP 7 no. 1006; 26 August ?1534, SP 1/85 f. 121, LP 7 no. 1089; ?October 1534, SP 1/86 f. 56, LP 7 no. 1268; 1 August 1537, SP 1/123 f. 177, LP 12 ii no. 417.

  15. Nicholas Glossop to Cromwell, 24 June ?1533, SP 1/77 f. 77, LP 6 no. 696.

  16. D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a life (revised edn, New Haven and London, 2016), 2.

  17. West to Cromwell, 18 February 1533, SP 1/74 f. 167, LP 6 no. 167.

  18. For West’s anti-Lutheran addition to the oath sworn by those being admitted as incumbents in the Ely diocese, see Thomas Goodricke Bishop of Ely, Somersham, to Cromwell, 29 July 1535, and accompanying enclosure, SP 1/94 ff. 186–8, LP 8 no. 1131[1, 2].

  19. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 15.

  20. West to Cromwell, 18 February 1533, SP 1/74 f. 167, LP 6 no. 167.

  21. Thomas Megges to Cromwell, 10 April 1535, SP 1/91 f. 194, LP 8 no. 528. On the royal appointment, see Megges to Cromwell, 22 July ?1535, SP 1/94 f. 118, LP 8 no. 1088, and 8 April [1536], SP 1/103 f. 100, LP 10 no. 634, where Megges is not more specific than saying that Cromwell has preferred him into the King’s service.

  22. Thomas Goodricke Bishop of Ely to Cromwell, 29 December [1534], SP 1/87 f. 130, LP 7 no. 1583; a series of letters from Megges to Cromwell, including 10 March [1535], SP 1/91 f. 71, LP 8 no. 367; 22 July ?1535, SP 1/94 f. 118, LP 8 no. 1088; 3 November ?1535, SP 1/98 f. 159, LP 9 no. 754.

  23. Richard Cromwell to Cromwell, 11 July 1537, SP 1/122 f. 228, LP 12 ii no. 241. See Goodricke’s detailed and deeply hurt letter to Cromwell, 18 August 1537, SP 1/124 ff. 52–3, LP 12 ii no. 533.

  24. Henry Polstead to Cromwell, 30 July 1538, SP 1/134 f. 284, LP 13 i no. 1499.

  25. References to Cromwell’s servant Thomas Avery (not to be confused with a close friend of Cromwell’s from Suffolk, Thomas Alvard) litter Letters and Papers, but he also appears in the manorial records of Wimbledon, amerced for breaking rules on appropriating wood for fuel: P. H. Lawrence (ed.), Extracts from the Court Rolls of the Manor of Wimbledon, extending from 1 Edward IV. to AD 1864 (London, 1866), 85. He was son-in-law of another of Cromwell’s most trusted servants, Thomas Thacker: Thacker to Avery, 26 September 1537, SP 1/125 f. 30, LP 12 ii no. 751.

  26. For Cromwell’s sponsorship of Wandsworth’s promotion to Bodmin, see John Veysey Bishop of Exeter to Cromwell, 18 February recte 1534, SP 1/74 f. 168, LP 6 no. 169; for Wandsworth’s lavish acknowledgement of what he owed Cromwell, Wandsworth to Cromwell, 23 February recte 1535, SP 1/82 f. 176, LP 7 no. 222. Prior Wandsworth was thoroughly enmeshed in the London mercantile community of evangelicals: see Wandsworth to William Lock, 28 May recte 1535, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/IV f. 139, LP 10 no. 981. Gerhold, Thomas Cromwell and his Family, 15–19, 28–9, provides the evidence of Walter Cromwell’s move from Putney to Wandsworth soon after 1500, and he has made the important discovery that the fragment of will appended to Thomas Cromwell’s own will, LP 4 iii no. 5772, can be identified as that of William Sharparow, 1526, TNA, PROB 11/22/130, who owned a mill at Wandsworth.

  27. For malicious Cornish reference to his links to Cromwell, Wandsworth to Cromwell, 21 July ?1536, SP 1/105 f. 95, LP 11 no. 133.

  28. E. Lord Herbert of Chirbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1649, Wing H1504), 462.

  Chapter 2: The Return of the Native

  1. Eustace Chapuys to Nicolas de Granvelle, 21 November 1535, Spanish Calendar 5 i no. 228, at 568.

  2. The first English translations of Bandello material were made by William Painter in 1566; the standard edition is M. Bandello, The novels of Matteo Bandello Bishop of Agen now first done into English prose and verse, ed. and trans. J. Payne (6 vols., London, 1890). The Italian original of this story can be found in M. Bandello, Novelle, ed. G. Mazzuchelli (9 vols., Milan, 1813–14), 5, at 227–46. On Bandello’s opinion of Henry VIII, see M. Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with England: a cultural politics of translation (Cambridge, 2005), 66–7.

  3. Bandello, Novels of Matteo Bandello, ed. and trans. Payne, 4, 103–16, abridged in Foxe 1570, 1396–7. On the alteration, cf. Bandello, Novels of Matteo Bandello, ed. and trans. Payne, 4, 107 with Foxe 1570, 1396.

  4. Foxe adds (Foxe 1570, 1386) from recollections of Archbishop Cranmer conveyed to his secretary Ralph Morice that Cromwell had been ‘in the wars of Duke Bourbon at the siege of Rome’ [1527], which is chronologically impossible, and may result fr
om misremembering the Duke of Bourbon’s earlier Italian campaigns for France in the years following Garigliano – for instance, at the French siege of Genoa in 1507. That would make perfect sense alongside Bandello’s story.

  5. Bandello, Novels of Matteo Bandello, ed. and trans. Payne, 4, 107; Foxe 1570, 1396.

  6. For Frescobaldi’s plea to Cromwell, 4 October 1533, SP 1/79 f. 122, LP 6 no. 1215. I am grateful to Dr Simone Maghenzani for helping me with the Italian of this letter.

  7. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (1960–, in progress), s.v. Frescobaldi, Francesco. In his letter to Cromwell of 4 October 1533, he called himself a young man.

  8. Francesco Frescobaldi to [Wolsey], ?1529, SP 1/55 f. 142, LP 4 iii no. 5974, and cf. memoranda of 1519 on the debts owed by the Frescobaldi brothers to the Crown, SP 1/232 ff. 153–9, LP Addenda 1 i no. 238, or other copies of the same material at SP 1/18 ff. 18–21, LP 3 i no. 54, LP 3 i no. 54; SP 1/29 f. 166, LP 3 ii no. 3694, 1530.

  9. On Dr Augustine’s chequered career, see E. A. Hammond, ‘Doctor Augustine, physician to Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII’, Medical History 19 (1975), 215–49; for samples of his monotonous pleas to Cromwell for the payment of subventions as agreed via Frescobaldi, see SP 1/70 f. 170, LP 5 no. 1188 (22 July 1532); SP 1/70 f. 174, LP 5 no. 1197 (28 July 1532); BL MS Cotton Vitellius B/XIII f. 217, LP 5 no. 1413 (12 October 1532); BL MS Cotton Vitellius B/XIII f. 218, LP 5 no. 1422 (14 October 1532), BL MS Cotton Vitellius B./XIII f. 142, LP 6 no. 22 (5 January 1533).

  10. T. Penn, Winter King: the dawn of Tudor England (London, 2011), 201–4, and see J. Finot, ‘Le commerce de l’alun dans les pays-bas et la bulle encyclique du Pape Jules II en 1506’, Bulletin Historique et Philologique (1902), 418–31.

  11. C. Platt, Medieval Southampton: the port and trading community, A.D. 1000–1600 (London and Boston, 1973), 204, and ibid., 258 and passim, for references to the port’s Italian trade.

  12. A useful summary account of Huttoft is ibid., 244–5. On his son John’s service to Cromwell, John Huttoft to Thomas Wriothesley, 20 August ?1537, SP 1/124 f. 64, LP 12 ii no. 546.

  13. Henry Huttoft to Cromwell, 16 June 1535, SP 1/93 f. 77, LP 8 no. 878.

  14. George Elyot, mercer, to Cromwell, 28 June [1535], SP 1/104 f. 211, LP 10 no. 1218, misdated to 1536 by LP, but Dover Priory had been dissolved by then. Elyot dated his letter from Calais, but depositions relating to events in summer 1535 name him as a mercer of London: SP 1/99 f. 173v, LP 9 no. 1059.

  15. For Hacket’s thirty years in the Low Countries, see Stephen Vaughan to Cromwell, 7 December 1534, SP 1/87 f. 81, LP 7 no. 1515. Hacket was according to his wishes buried in Calais, and it may be that his surname should rightly be Hacquet. His letters are collected in E. F. Rogers (ed.), The Letters of Sir John Hackett 1526–1534 (Morgantown, VA, 1971).

  16. For Hacket’s connection with the Frescobaldi, and Bernardo de’ Pigli’s claim on his estate, see Vaughan to Cromwell, 7 December 1534, SP 1/87 f. 81, LP 7 no. 1515. An English copy of Hacket’s will, made on 26 October 1534, is SP 1/86 ff. 93–6, LP 7 no. 1309; Cromwell’s fellow-executor was no less a figure than the Archbishop of Palermo, the leading figure in Habsburg administration in the Low Countries.

  17. For one example of many, illustrating how Hacket’s letters passed on a routine basis via Calais, see Hacket to Cromwell, 22 April 1533, SP 1/75 f. 156, LP 6 no. 372. For Stephen Vaughan’s praise of Hacket, see Vaughan to Henry VIII and Cromwell, 26 January 1531, BL MS Cotton Galba B/X ff. 46–7, LP 5 no. 65[1, 2].

  18. Foxe 1570, 1385.

  19. TNA, C 1/482/33: complaint of Cromwell against Anthony Wells and William Thomas about a dispute in the regnal year 5 Henry VIII [1513–14].

  20. Vaughan to Cromwell, 13 April 1536, SP 1/103 f. 122, LP 10 no. 663.

  21. TNA, CP 40/1038 (Hilary Term 1523), mm. 263d, 595d: the gentleman defendant was Edward Fetyplace, whom we will meet again as an uneasy colleague of Cromwell’s at Poughley Priory later the same decade.

  22. On abuse of Cranmer, MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 22, 169–70. For the ‘shearman’ trope from an Essex parson who had been in the North just before the Pilgrimage of Grace, see SP 1/116 f. 9, LP 12 i no. 407[2]; and for the same in a long poem against Cromwell by the friar Dr John Pickering from east Yorkshire in late 1536, SP 1/118 f. 292v, LP 12 i no. 1021[5].

  23. Kaulek (ed.), Correspondance, 194: ‘seulement Thomas Cramvell, tondeur de draps’. In practice, the King quickly drew back from this extreme, and even Cromwell’s enemies such as Bishop Gardiner often could not help themselves referring to him as the Earl of Essex after his fall: cf. SP 1/161 f. 1, LP 15 no. 821[1].

  24. S. Alford, London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor city (London, 2017), 46–51.

  25. Lisle to Cromwell, 17 June [1536], SP 3/9 f. 18, Lisle Letters 3 no. 727. For another Calais acquaintance, see Henry Lacy to Cromwell, 18 August 1522, SP 1/25 f. 117, LP 3 ii no. 2445; 30 April 1527, SP 1/41 ff. 179–80, LP 4 ii no. 3079. Laurence Giles of Calais was also important to him, and a man to introduce to friends: see inter alia John Croke at Calais to Cromwell, 16 July 1527, SP 1/235 f. 216, LP Addenda 1 i no. 539.

  26. Katherine of Aragon wrote to Cromwell, 1 September 1534, SP 1/85 f. 135, LP 7 no. 1126, an extremely personal letter. Rather unusually in Cromwell’s correspondence, he had the letter carefully and accurately translated into English, the fair copy of this being BL MS Cotton Otho C/X. f. 176, LP 7 no. 1126[2], but that may have been for the benefit of his fellow-councillors, or even for Katherine’s royal husband. Cf. Chapuys’s letter of farewell to Cromwell, 21 March 1539, SP 1/144 f. 153, LP 14 i no. 579: this is a notably friendly and informal note from a man who could now afford to relax at the end of many duels over the previous decade.

  27. See the letter in Italian of Joachim Hochstetter of Augsburg to Cromwell, 24 August 1528, SP 1/50 ff. 23–49, LP 4 ii no. 4662[1]. Augustine to Cromwell, 16 May 1532, SP 1/70 f. 38, LP 5 no. 1027. For Ambassador Nicholas Hawkins’s forwarding of a German pamphlet via Thomas Cranmer for Cromwell to find a translator, see Hawkins to Henry VIII, 21 November 1532, SP 1/72 f. 46, LP 5 no. 1564. A letter from Wolf Reittwiser to Cromwell, 26 November 1539, SP 1/155 f. 47, LP 14 ii no. 589, is nevertheless written in German and seems to be couched in personal terms as if its writer expected Cromwell to be able to read it.

  28. Creke to Cromwell, 17 July 1522, SP 1/25 f. 55, LP 3 ii no. 2394. For the ongoing importance of Spain in Creke’s life, see below, this page.

  29. Confidential final sentence: Morison to Cromwell, ?May 1537, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E/VI ff. 323–4, LP 12 i no. 1311; see also Morison to Cromwell, ?1537, SP 1/127 f. 158, LP 12 ii no. 1330.

  30. Edmund Bonner to Cromwell, ?April 1530, SP 1/57 f. 75, LP 4 iii no. 6346.

  31. On Morley, see M. Axton and J. P. Carley (eds.), ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, translator to the Tudor Court. New essays in interpretation (London, 2000), 77–86.

  32. Morley to Cromwell, 13 February s.a., SP 1/143 f. 74, LP 14 i no. 285, and useful contextual commentary in K. R. Bartlett, ‘Morley, Machiavelli, and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, in Axton and Carley (eds.), ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, 77–86. The dating of this letter is controversial: see discussion in Bartlett, 83 n. 2. I suggest that related correspondence of Morley to Cromwell, 18 January s.a., SP 1/114 f. 151, LP 12 i no. 128 and 25 March s.a., SP 1/117 f. 120, LP 12 i no. 728, has been wrongly dated to 1537, and that all these three letters are of 1538; the last item refers to the likelihood of the imminent suppression of Beeston Priory in Norfolk, which in fact took place in May or June 1538 (see Smith, 374). Nothing in any of the three letters precludes a date in early 1538.

  33. A. J. Slavin, ‘The Gutenberg galaxy and the Tudor revolution’, in G. P. Tyson and S. S. Wagonheim (eds.), Print and Culture in the Renaissance: essays on the advent of printing in Europe (Newark, NJ, 1986), 90–109, at 95, and G. Parks, The English Travell
er to Italy (2 vols., Rome, 1954).

  34. On Collins as Bainbridge’s nephew, and his and Cromwell’s testimony in the Stratford Langthorne tithe case, see D. S. Chambers, Cardinal Bainbridge in the Court of Rome 1509 to 1514 (Oxford, 1965), 77, 115–16.

  35. Le Neve, Fasti 1300–1541: Northern Province, 15: he was admitted to the Treasurership by proxy on 5 May 1514 and in person on 14 November 1514, suggesting he had just returned from Rome then.

  36. Lee to Cromwell, 14 April 1538, SP 1/131 f. 91, LP 13 i no. 762.

  37. See Collins’s testimony after the Pilgrimage, SP 1/118 f. 268r, LP 12 i no. 1018. Note also his reference to ‘my late Lord’ when writing to Cardinal Wolsey, Bainbridge’s successor at York, 27 March 1529: SP 1/53 f. 130, LP 4 iii no. 5400.

  38. TNA, C 244/163/92. A memorandum on the Empson family dated by LP to 1512 with a possible endorsement by Cromwell, SP1/3 f. 73, LP 1 no. 1473, offers no proof of date at all, and probably relates to material in later legal cases involving the Empsons, e.g. TNA, C 1/512/71.

  39. SP 1/53 f. 37v, LP 4 iii no. 5330, a summary record from 1529 or ‘Dettes due unto me, Thomas Crumwell, by statutes, billes, and obligations’, and see below on the Ughtred transaction about Kexby, this page n. 39. The same folio has a record of a slightly earlier bond in Cromwell’s possession, between Robert Croxton and Thomas Barley, but that does not involve Cromwell himself. For Allen, the Archbishop and Alderman John Allen, see Thomas Allen to Cromwell, August 1534, SP 60/2 f. 57, LP 7 no. 1109.

  40. A decline ably analysed in G. D. Ramsay, ‘The undoing of the Italian mercantile colony in sixteenth century London’, in N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (eds.), Textile History and Economic History: essays in honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann (Manchester, 1973), 22–49.

  41. John Stow, A Survey of London. Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. C. L. Kingsford (2 vols., Oxford, 1908), 1, 132. For Cromwell’s Fenchurch residence in 1522–3, see Wm Popley to Cromwell (dwelling by Fenchurch), 15 January ?1522, SP 1/23 f. 271, LP 3 ii no. 1963; Thomas Twesell to Cromwell at Fenchurch London, 20 October 1522, SP 1/26 f.108, LP 3 ii no. 2624 .