Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (19 page)

As befits a man who revealed little about himself – certainly rarely his inner thoughts – his portrait itself is something of an enigma. The inclusion of the job title suggests strongly it must have been painted early on in Cromwell’s service to the crown, yet the legend scroll at the top clearly proclaims him ‘Earl of Essex’ – a dignity not awarded him until the dark days of 1540, and thus added later.

Like many self-made successful men, Cromwell liked to surround himself with the trappings of affluence as a lasting expression of his increasing wealth. A ritual distribution of bread, meat and drink to two hundred poor Londoners twice daily at the gates of his main residence emphasised his deep pockets and his continual ability to handout largesse.
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His chief concern, if not obsession, was the accumulation of property, which he constantly improved and extended, frequently at several sites simultaneously. Money was never an issue in these grandiose building projects. He saw them merely as another means to underline his growing importance in the politics and governance of England.

In 1536, he jotted down approvingly all the ‘things done by the king’s highness since I came to his service’ – the purchase of St James in the Fields and the building of ‘a magnificent and goodly house’ there; the creation of a park around it and the demolition of old tenements to make way for the new gardens, tennis courts and cockfighting pits of the Palace of Westminster.
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Cromwell was now to follow his master’s lead in his own ambitious acquisitions of property.

His first home of any stature was in Stepney, located outside the eastern walls of the City of London, which he leased from 1524 but probably handed on to his nephew Richard some time before 1535.
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An inventory of its contents in June 1527 provides a tantalising glimpse of his lifestyle and possessions before his salad days of service to the crown. The house boasted three bedchambers, a hall, buttery, new and old parlours, kitchen, larder and various ancillary rooms. His total of thirty-one pieces of plate included a gilt goblet with silver-gilt salt cellar; a silver-gilt ale pot and three masers, or drinking bowls, in the same precious metal. Significantly, perhaps, Cromwell may at that time have been suffering a temporary embarrassing period of straitened finances: the inventory includes notes of six gilt dishes with covers, two gilt flagons, a salt cellar and a sergeant-at-arms’s ceremonial mace, all in pledge at the pawnbroker’s. Cromwell’s extensive wardrobe of clothes, in the new chamber, included a dark tawny gown faced with damask and an old nightgown faced with fox to keep him warm during the cold nights as he lay on his mattress on the ‘truss bed, [surrounded] with curtains of red and green say [serge], with gilt bells’. He possessed twelve doublets, including five in black satin and two in crimson, twelve pairs of gloves and nine pairs of black hose. In that room, one can imagine him sitting before his polished-steel mirror, combing his hair with one of the bone combs from the box of four listed in the household contents. There were also four ‘writing stands’, one with five pewter inkwells. In the corner stood a ‘carved and gilt altar’ tablet, depicting the ‘Nativity of Our Lord’ with two brass pricket candlesticks on either side, symbolising his own private religious devotion. Some would believe it ironic that in later years Cromwell was to preside over the iconoclastic destruction of religious images during the state-sponsored attack on what was suddenly perceived as idolatry.

He had already amassed considerable quantities of jewellery, valued in the inventory at £64 11s. – or £22,500 in 2006 cash equivalents. These included three ‘on my master’s finger: a gold ring with a table diamond, a gold ring with a rock ruby’ and another ‘with a turquoise like a heart’, possibly a gift from his wife. These jewels also included two items with devotional significance: a ‘gold
Agnus Dei
[the image of the Lamb of God
carrying a cross or a flag] graven with Our Lady and St George’ and a gold brooch ‘with an image of Mary Magdalene’. The last part of this list of jewellery is in Cromwell’s own hand and details nine objects, all unvalued, including ‘a diamond triangle set in gold, at the goldsmith’s’ and ‘eight pearls on a string’. Were these his latest acquisitions, or were they pledges – collateral – against loans he was arranging at his notoriously high interest rates?

The hall was decorated with hangings of red- and green-bordered serge, and amongst the furnishings were six verdure
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cushions embroidered with a red rose; a wooden table on trestles; six gilt foot stools; and three ‘little gilt chairs for women’. There was also a canvas panel depicting Cardinal Wolsey’s arms in gilt, prominently and loyally displayed. For special occasions, Cromwell dined off a twelve-piece dinner service in pewter.

Elsewhere in the house were two
mappae mundi
– maps of the known world – painted on canvas,
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perhaps a throwback to his previous travels in Europe or his involvement in Wolsey’s interests overseas.

The Minister’s efficient steward later demolished two ‘old and small tenements’ in Throgmorton Street in order to build a new ‘very large and spacious’ house just south of the Augustinian priory of Austin Friars, in Broad Street Ward, in the north-west area of the City of London. The hall of the Drapers’ Company now occupies the site
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but then it was a fashionable residential part of the capital, with wealthy Italian merchants living in dwellings within the monastic close, and the home of Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, was located near the church.
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The house was erected on the friars’ land, next to their churchyard, which Cromwell had leased for ninety-nine years from 1532 after he suborned their prior, George Brown. The prior became very much a creature of the ambitious administrator, to the extent that his Easter sermon in 1533 urged the congregation to pray for Queen Anne [Boleyn]. ‘Astonished and scandalised’, they walked out of the church in angry protest at his dutiful appeal.
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He was suitably rewarded for his services to Cromwell by being chosen as one of the commissioners appointed to inspect the friaries in England in April the following year.
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Cromwell
plainly used a range of underhand methods to pressure the unworldly friars into agreeing to his every requirement for his new home.

In 1534, an anonymous informant – doubtless one of the friars, motivated by a well-placed, generous bribe – claimed in a badly written and misspelled letter that masses at the priory were being rushed or neglected, whilst the brothers spent much of their time drinking in the beer house in bad company. Monastic rules were no more kept there ‘than in hell among devils’ and the authority of the new prior, Thomas Hamond, was insufficient to maintain any discipline. In addition, the cloister and doors were so unguarded that ‘the Lombards dwelling within the gate take their pleasure in conveying off their harlots’.
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Even now, one smells the rank stench of blackmail deployed remorselessly by Cromwell.

This extortion, coupled with Austin Friars’ continued debts of up to £300 (or £104,000 in today’s money) must have rendered Hamond malleable and compliant with any demands forced upon him. The priory, with an annual income of £57, was finally surrendered in 1538 by Hamond and his twelve remaining brethren.
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Cromwell desired a mansion fully commensurate with his growing prestige and status, with attractive gardens in which he could stroll and enjoy some privacy. The major portion of the building work was finished probably some time late in 1536, but he was dissatisfied with the size of the remaining plot of land. The Tudor antiquary and topographer of London John Stow, writing six decades later, describes Cromwell’s innovative solution to this problem: ‘He caused the pales
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of the gardens adjoining to the north part, [suddenly] to be taken down. Twenty-two feet [6.71 m] to be measured forth right into the north of every man’s ground, a line there to be drawn, a trench to be cast, a foundation laid and a high brick wall to be built.’

Worse was to come:

My father had a garden there and a [rented] house standing close to his south pale. This house they loosed from the ground and bore upon rollers into my father’s garden, twenty-two feet [6.71 m].

Ere my father heard thereof, no warning was given him, nor other
answer, when he spoke to the surveyors of that work, but that their master, Sir Thomas, commanded them so to do.

No one dared to argue with Cromwell and, to heap further helpings of resentment upon his anger, Stow’s father still had to pay his whole rent of 6s. 8d that year for the property, of which only half now remained to him. Stow ruefully adds: ‘Thus much of my own knowledge I have thought good to note: that the sudden rising of some men causes them to forget themselves.’
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Austin Friars remained Cromwell’s preferred London home because of its convenient location between the royal palaces at Westminster and Greenwich and its proximity to the Tower of London. The house was constantly being extended and improved, right up to the end of 1539. He also acquired other properties: a farm at Canonbury, in the parish of Islington, north of London, and, briefly, the manor house at Hackney,
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where lands formerly owned by the Knights of St John of Jerusalem were conveyed to Henry’s use by Henry Percy, Sixth Earl of Northumberland, in 1535 and formally granted to Cromwell on 24 September that year.
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The residence closest to his heart was probably the manor of Wimbledon, comprising lands in the north Surrey parishes of Wimbledon, Putney, Mortlake, Roehampton, East Sheen and parts of Barnes and Wandsworth.
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This area was the old stomping ground of his troubled youth and it must have given him great pleasure to become lord of the manor there. He augmented these property holdings with the lease of the manor of Allfarthing in Wandsworth in 1534, when Henry granted it to him for a term of sixty years, and the purchase of the nearby manor of Dunsford from Charles Brandon, First Duke of Suffolk, for £403 6s. 8d in 1539.
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During the early years of his government service, Cromwell routinely had more than two hundred ‘or greater number’ of retainers dependent upon him, all clad in a grey livery, the gentlemen in velvet and the yeomen wearing long tunics with ‘their skirts large enough for their friends to sit upon them’.
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In June 1537, he paid out £60 for ‘diverse servants’ green coats’ and £53 5s. 10d for yellow velvet for the liveries of
fifty-two gentlemen in July 1538.
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He also employed a chaplain called Thomas Rose.
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After the death of his wife Elizabeth some time around 1529, he lacked a formal hostess for his lavish entertaining, but he clearly enjoyed the company of women. When he stayed with that rough old soldier Norfolk in 1537, the Duke joked that if he ‘lust not to dally with my wife’ he could find him ‘a young woman with pretty proper tetins [breasts]’ for his entertainment.
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Cromwell welcomed the great and good to his luxurious homes, surrounded by the unmistakable symbols of his wealth. Chapuys, who often dined with him at Austin Friars, said Cromwell ‘lived splendidly and is very liberal both of money and fair words and remarkably fond of pomp and ostentation in his household and in building’.
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He now had ample funds with which to indulge in luxuries; for example, eating off solid-silver plates.
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The lawyer John Oliver recalled the ‘dinners and suppers, where I indeed did hear such communications which were the very cause of the beginning of my conversion’ to the truth of the Gospel. Thomas Starkey, one of the King’s chaplains, enjoyed at these meals conversations ‘of God, of nature and of other politic and worldly things’.
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Cromwell’s accounts for 1537–9 fortunately survive and provide a detailed and revealing insight into his everyday life at the height of his power.
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Away from the grim business of state, there were times when Cromwell must have allowed his inscrutable mask to slip, when he adopted almost a playful, frivolous air. One such moment is suggested by the accountant’s payment of £15 in February 1537 to his henchman Wriothesley, who had acted as an intermediary with Princess Mary ‘because my Lord was her valentine’. Was this bashful, coy ‘suitor’ the same ubiquitous autocrat, the vengeful grim reaper of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the scheming architect of the barbarous executions of those who defied the King’s supremacy?

The Cromwell of his leisure hours seemed fond of gambling – particularly playing at dice, when substantial sums sometimes changed hands, although there is a payment of a mere £1 for lost wagers during a game of bowls. He was consistently unlucky, his total gambling losses for
these three years amounting to at least £150, or more than £50,000 at 2006 monetary values. Most of the debts were incurred at cards and dice, played with courtiers or officials such as Walter Cromer (Henry’s Scottish physician), Sir William Paulet (Comptroller of the Royal Household), or Sir Richard Riche (the avaricious Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations). With the latter’s proven track record of dishonesty,
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one finds it very difficult not to suspect cheating on his part. Other gambling cronies included the Lord Mayor of London in 1538, the haberdasher William Forman (when the stakes at dice were lower, as Cromwell’s debts were only twenty shillings, calculated in groats or four-penny coins) and the distressingly named Bastard Falconbridge.
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Cash was also probably paid out copiously to the King, who was an inveterate gambler, for the interminable games played during those long evenings at Greenwich and Westminster. Henry may have been the winner of the £11 12s. 6d owed by the Lord Privy Seal for playing dice at Mayfield, East Sussex, during the stately royal progress in southern England in August 1538. Doubtless the old ogre derived considerable spiteful pleasure from taking money from Cromwell, and it is tempting to assign the £18 13s. 4d handed out by the Minister ‘at diverse times in one night’ in September 1537 to an expensive losing streak during a hard gambling session with the monarch.