Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (2 page)

He was probably the most hated man in the kingdom.

John Tutton of Mere, near Glastonbury in Somerset, spoke ‘great slanders’ in March 1537 about Henry’s Minister, maintaining that he was ‘a stark heretic’ and one of those ‘wicked men’ who constantly deceived the King and thus deserved a bad end.
⁸
In February 1538, John Hampson, decener
⁹
(or titheman) of Boarstall, Buckinghamshire, angrily told local constable Richard Hore that Cromwell, ‘that traitor, has destroyed many a man and if I were as near to him as I am to you, I would thrust my dagger into the heart of him’.
¹⁰
In 1539, Thomas Molton said scornfully of Cromwell: ‘There is one of the king’s council … of such low birth that the world shall never be quiet and rest for so long as he continues.’
¹¹
At the Minister’s downfall the following year, the citizens lit bonfires in the streets in joyous celebration over his arrest.
¹²

Cromwell’s road to wealth and power was truly paved with bad intentions. For more than a decade he had walked the tightrope of his royal master’s Tudor tantrums and vengeful spite and had survived – despite the best efforts of those around him to tear him down. Now the time had come for those countless scores against Cromwell to finally be settled.

CHAPTER ONE

The Most Hated Man in England

The Cardinal of York, seeing Cromwell’s vigilance and diligence, his ability and promptitude, both in evil and good, took him into his service and employed him principally in demolishing five or six good monasteries
.

SPANISH AMBASSADOR EUSTACE CHAPUYS, WRITING OF CROMWELL’S CAREER, 21 NOVEMBER 1535
¹

Tantalisingly little is known about Cromwell’s early life: even his date of birth remains uncertain. He was born in or just before 1485, the son of Walter Cromwell, alias Smith, a failed small-time Tudor entrepreneur, of Putney, Surrey, south-west of London. Thomas’s mother was the daughter of a yeoman called Glossop, and was living at the home of local attorney John Welbeck, possibly as a servant, when she married Walter in 1474.
²
Years later, Cromwell claimed his mother was aged fifty-two when he was born.
³

Thomas’s uncle was cook to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. His grandfather, who had migrated from Norwell, Nottinghamshire, to Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1461, was probably involved in the cloth trade as a fuller, preparing wool in vats of human urine. Walter followed his father into the business, although he may earlier have been apprenticed to William Smith, who made armoured coats, called ‘jacks’, locally.

Probably because of declining demand for such warlike apparel after the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1487,
⁴
Cromwell’s father moved into general blacksmithing and later owned both an inn, called the Anchor, and a brewery. These were built on a few acres of agricultural land west of Starling Lane, now Oxford Road, between today’s Putney rail and East Putney District Line Underground stations. The family’s cottage home and brewery were opposite the entrance to the aptly named Brewhouse Street, which still runs the short distance from Putney Bridge Road down to the River Thames, where a fishery existed in Cromwell’s day.
⁵
An earlier home and Walter’s smithy in Wandsworth Lane were pulled down in 1533.

Walter Cromwell was a drunken, quarrelsome scoundrel, always keen to challenge the authority of local government and, if possible, cheat his neighbours. Forty-eight times between 1475 and 1501 he was fined sixpence, or £10 in 2006 monetary values, for evading the Assize of Ale – the official method for testing the quality of all brewed beer before it was sold. He was probably watering it down. He also appeared in court several times, accused of overgrazing public pastures on Putney Common with his cattle and cutting too much furze and thorns for his fuel from the land there. In 1477 he was fined twenty pence for assaulting and drawing blood from William Michell.
⁶
Today, he would be a prime candidate for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Despite all these misdemeanours, Walter surprisingly became constable of Putney in 1495 and served many times as a juryman.

However, with old age his temper became more peevish. In October 1512 he was accused of leasing one virgate of land (up to 30 modern acres or 12.2 hectares) belonging to his brewery without permission and a year later, he lost his property in the adjacent parish of Wimbledon when he appeared again before the manor court, accused of fraudulently erasing evidences and terriers – property marker posts – of the local lord ‘to the disturbance and disinheritance of the lord and his tenants’. The parish beadle was instructed to ‘seize into the lord’s hands all [Walter’s] copyholds and tenements held of the lord … and [he had] to answer to the lord about the issues’.
⁷
Walter Cromwell was clearly the neighbour from hell.

Cromwell had two sisters: the elder, Katherine, probably born around 1477, and Elizabeth. Katherine married a Welshman called Morgan Williams
⁸
who came from a prosperous family who had settled in Putney. His brother John was a lawyer, accountant and steward to the local landowner, Lord Scales. Their son, Richard, was to legally change his name to Cromwell and work for his uncle, mainly in the suppression of the monastic houses in the 1530s, as well as becoming an unlikely soldier, chasing rebels in the North of England. Elizabeth married a sheep-farmer, William Wellifed, who folded his business into his father-in-law’s. Their son Christopher was later financially supported by his famous uncle and educated alongside his own son Gregory.

Thomas did not get on with his father and, as he later admitted to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, had behaved like ‘a ruffian … in his early days’.
⁹
Like father, like son. Eustace Chapuys, the gossipy Spanish ambassador, claimed in 1535 that in his youth Cromwell was ‘ill-behaved and after an imprisonment was forced to leave the country’.
¹⁰
Whether it was this spell in jail or yet another quarrel with his malicious father that forced him to depart England’s shores some time around 1502 is uncertain, but he certainly visited Flanders, Rome and elsewhere in Italy during his early travels.

There are several stories about Cromwell’s wanderings around Europe, some probably apocryphal. The contemporary Italian author Matteo Bandello
¹¹
recounts in his
Novelles
how Cromwell, now aged around eighteen, ‘fleeing his father’, joined the French army under Charles, Eighth Duc de Bourbon, to fight the Spanish as a mercenary foot soldier.

He had picked the wrong side.

A French advance in central Italy was halted at the Garigliano River, near Cassino, and on 28 December 1503 superior Spanish forces, commanded by Gonzalo Fernandez Cordoba, bridged the river upstream and surprised their enemies, miserably encamped on the marshy land on its west bank. In the ensuing battle the French troops were routed, losing their artillery, and the survivors (including Cromwell), now half-naked and starving, fell back to Rome.
¹²
In one daring stroke, the Spanish had captured control of southern Italy.

Cromwell eventually found his way to Florence and, still destitute, shrewdly sought help from the Anglophile merchant banker Francisco Frescobaldi, who kindly provided him with shelter and new clothes. After six months spent in his household as a clerk, Cromwell was generously given sixteen gold ducats, worth nearly £11,000 at 2006 prices, and a strong horse for his further adventures. Other versions of his early life maintain that he then worked as an accountant for a Venetian banker and as a merchant for a short period.
¹³
He was now fluent in Italian and French, well versed in Latin, and possessed a smattering of Greek.

He ended up in Antwerp sometime before 1512, working as a secretary or clerk for the English merchants based there, who sold their goods in the Flemish markets of Ghent and Bruges. Amongst some of these religiously nonconformist traders, he may have acquired ideas for the church reforms he put into practice in later life. He also moonlighted as a cloth merchant: in June 1536, George Eliot, an English mercer in Calais, recalled that he had experienced Cromwell’s ‘love and true heart’ – friendship, that is – ever since they both attended the Syngsson Mart at the port of Middleburgh, 113 miles (182 km) south-west of Amsterdam in 1512.
¹⁴
He reportedly saved the life of Sir John Russell, later Earl of Bedford and Comptroller of the Royal Household, by rescuing him from French forces during the siege of Bologna the same year. He returned to Rome to pursue his commercial interests early in 1514 and the archives of the English Hospital record his stay there that June.

Cromwell then returned to London and by 1516 had married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Wykes, another shearman, or cloth-worker, of Putney.
¹⁵
His brother had served as a gentleman usher to Henry VII. Elizabeth was the well-off young widow of Thomas Williams, a Yeoman of the Guard, and the couple settled in the eastern part of the City of London in a house in Fenchurch Street, with Cromwell becoming an agent, or ‘fixer’, for businessmen, as well as dealing in cloth himself, with a number of servants working for him.

He was now building up a useful network of contacts, and one of them, John Robinson, an alderman of the prosperous port of Boston, Lincolnshire, commissioned him in 1517–18 to travel to Rome to seek two indulgences from Pope Leo X
¹⁶
to relax the Lenten observances required
by the Guild of Our Lady attached to St Botolph’s Church, today still a towering landmark in the town.
¹⁷
Together with Geoffrey Chambers – ironically later to become one of the visitors charged with the task of destroying religious images – Cromwell travelled to Italy again, wearily prepared for the inevitable lengthy wait before being honoured by an audience with the pontiff.

Cromwell was ever the man of action. Unwilling to wrestle with Vatican bureaucracy, he tracked Pope Leo down on one of his hunting trips outside Rome. John Foxe, the Protestant polemicist, later described the meeting:

At length, having knowledge that the Pope’s holy tooth greatly delighted to new-fangled strange delicacies and dainty dishes, it came in [Cromwell’s] mind to prepare certain fine dishes of jelly, after the best fashion, after our country manner here in England which to them of Rome was not known nor seen before.

That done, Cromwell observing his time accordingly, as the Pope was newly come from hunting into his pavilion, he with his companion, approached with his presents brought in with a three man song (as we call it) in the English tongue and after the English fashion.
¹⁸

The Pope, suddenly marvelling at the strangeness of the song … asked them to be called in. Cromwell there showing his obedience and showing his jolly junkets, such as kings and princes only, he said in the realm of England, used to feed upon, desired to be accepted in benevolent part.
¹⁹

The way to a pope’s heart was clearly through his stomach. A convenient (and presumably expendable) cardinal tasted the strangers’ sweetmeats and pronounced them not only safe to eat but entirely delectable. The Pope then consumed the delicacies and, enchanted by their flavour, ordered the indulgences to be approved by his personal signet stamp without further ado. On the tediously long journey back to England, a triumphant Cromwell is said to have learnt by heart the entire text of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus’s Greek–Latin translation of the New Testament, first published in 1516.
²⁰

Back in London, Cromwell extended his business interests into
money-lending at exorbitant rates and the law, and soon built up a client base amongst the rich and famous as both an open-handed creditor and a shrewd and perspicacious advocate.

In October 1520, Nicholas Cowper, Vicar of Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, sued Margaret Chawry, prioress of the neighbouring Benedictine nunnery, in a disagreement over tithes on a farm leased from her twelve years before. After hearings in the Consistory Court of Bishop of London Richard FitzJames, Cowper appealed to Rome,
²¹
and this brought the powerful Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, papal legate and Lord Chancellor of England, into the case. Wolsey requested that Cromwell assist in his judgment on the complex rights and wrongs of the dispute and the documents contain his precise annotations. It was the first time that they had dealings with each other, and it was the start of a fruitful relationship for the son of the Putney blacksmith and shearman.

In 1521, Cromwell acted for Charles Knyvett, who had the misfortune to resign as surveyor to Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, just before he was executed by Henry for treason on 17 May that year. Knyvett now sought to recover the offices he had lost and forgiveness of £3,100 of debt he had been forced to incur on his master’s behalf. Cromwell’s carefully drawn up petitions pressing Knyvett’s suit were dispatched both to the King and to Wolsey.
²²
Unfortunately the plea was rejected, but Cromwell’s name and the quality of his work had become known in government.
²³

The death of Buckingham also created other opportunities for Cromwell to exploit. He plainly snapped up some of the attainted noble’s possessions, as eleven years later, in 1532, Robert ap Reynolds of Calais claimed with ‘naughty words’ that these had been bought from him, but that Cromwell still owed him 47 angels (or £17 13s.) for the goods. As the lawyer had by then risen in the world, Reynolds believed he now possessed ample wherewithal to pay him – with generous outstanding interest. Otherwise, he hinted darkly, he would have to reveal some unpleasant truths about him to the King and the Duke of Norfolk.
²⁴
Blackmail was a tactic Cromwell understood very well and used frequently himself, but history is silent on the result of Reynolds’s threat. He probably discovered, to his cost, that Cromwell was not a man to cross lightly.