Thomas Cromwell
Thomas Cromwell was an English statesman and lawyer who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540, when he was beheaded on orders of the King, who later blamed false charges for the execution.
Cromwell was one of the most powerful proponents of the English Reformation. As the King's chief secretary, he instituted new administrative procedures that transformed the workings of government. He helped to engineer an annulment of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that Henry could lawfully marry Anne Boleyn. Henry failed to obtain the approval of Pope Clement VII for the annulment in 1533, so Parliament endorsed the King's claim to be Supreme Head of the Church of England, giving him the authority to annul his own marriage. Cromwell subsequently charted an evangelical and reformist course for the Church of England from the unique posts of Vicegerent in Spirituals and Vicar-general.
During his rise to power, becoming Baron Cromwell, he made many enemies, including Anne Boleyn, with his fresh ideas and lack of inherited nobility. He played a prominent role in her downfall. He fell from power in 1540, despite being created Earl of Essex that year, after arranging the King's marriage to the German princess Anne of Cleves. The marriage was a disaster for Cromwell, ending in an annulment six months later. Cromwell was arraigned under an act of attainder and was executed for treason and heresy on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. The King later expressed regret at the loss of his chief minister, and his reign never recovered from the incident.
Family background and early life
Putney
Thomas Cromwell is thought to have been born by or around 1485 in Putney, then a village in Surrey providing a ferry service across the Thames upstream from London. His grandfather, John, had moved to the area from Nottinghamshire to run a fulling mill leased to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had a mansion further upstream at Mortlake and was lord of the local manor of Wimbledon. His father, Walter, was an ambitious yeoman landowner who plied various trades, operating as a sheep farmer and wool processor, while also running a tavern and a brewery. A popular tradition that he was also a blacksmith is plausible, although the association could have arisen from his use of the alternative surname of Smith. As a successful tradesman, Cromwell's father was regularly called upon for jury service and was elected Constable of Putney in 1495. He had frequent brushes with the law himself in the local manorial court, often on relatively minor matters, but also for assault and, ultimately, in 1514, for "falsely and fraudulently" removing evidence from the court roll regarding his manorial tenancy, a judgement that led to confiscation of all his accumulated lands.Little is known about Cromwell's mother, even though she came from a recognised gentry family, the Meverells of Staffordshire. Generally referred to as "Katherine Meverell", her first name is uncertain. She married Cromwell's father in 1474 while living in Putney in the house of a local attorney, John Welbeck.
Cromwell is assumed to have been the youngest of three children. He had two sisters: the elder, Katherine, married Morgan Williams, a Welsh lawyer's son who came to Putney as a follower of King Henry VII when he established himself in the nearby Richmond Palace; the younger, Elizabeth, married William Wellyfed, a sheep farmer. Katherine and Morgan's son, Richard, was employed in his uncle's service and by the autumn of 1529 had changed his name to Cromwell. Richard was the great-grandfather of Oliver Cromwell.
No record survives of Cromwell's childhood days in Putney, and it is unknown whether he was ever sent to school or had to serve an apprenticeship. Various people from Putney crop up in his adult life, and he maintained close relations with his two sisters and their extended families.
Early life
France, Italy and the Low Countries
Cromwell acknowledged to Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that he had been a "ruffian... in his young days". Around the start of the 16th century, for reasons which remain unclear, he left his family in Putney and crossed the Channel to continental Europe, allegedly after spending some time in prison. Accounts of his activities in France, Italy and the Low Countries are problematic. The tradition that he quickly became a mercenary and marched with the French army to Italy, where in 1503 he fought in the Battle of Garigliano, stems from a novella by the contemporary Italian writer Matteo Bandello in which Cromwell is portrayed as a page to a foot-soldier, carrying his pike and helmet. This account was treated as fact by many later writers, including John Foxe in his Actes and Monuments of 1563. Despite the obvious exaggerations contained in Bandello's novella, MacCulloch points out that the "picaresque" narrative provides the best available clues to shine some light on the obscurity of Cromwell's first Italian trip.While in Italy, Cromwell seems to have entered service in the household of the Frescobaldi family of Florentine bankers. It appears that he later worked as a cloth merchant in the Low Countries, where his frequentation of English Merchant Adventurers allowed him to develop useful contacts and gain familiarity with several languages. Cromwell, who was known to have a prodigious memory, was probably already fluent in French and Italian, as well as being proficient in Latin, with some knowledge also of Ancient Greek.
Return to Italy
At some point Cromwell returned to Italy: the records of the English Hospital in Rome indicate that he stayed there in June 1514, while documents in the Vatican Archives suggest that he was an agent for the Archbishop of York, Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge, and handled English ecclesiastical issues before the Roman Rota.In 1517–1518, he travelled to Rome again, this time to gain Pope Leo X's approval for plenary indulgences to be sold by the St Mary's Guild, Boston as part of a thriving trade. During this lengthy trip, Cromwell studied in detail Erasmus's new edition of the gospels. His reading made him, for the first time, doubt the legitimacy of the practice he was advocating. Tracy Borman has suggested that it was at this point Cromwell developed his contempt for the papacy, because of the ease with which he had been able to manipulate the Pope into granting the Boston petition without due consideration.
Marriage and issue
At one point during these years, Cromwell returned to England, where around 1515 he married Elizabeth Wyckes. She was the widow of Thomas Williams, a Yeoman of the Guard, and the daughter of a Putney shearman, Henry Wyckes, who had later served as a Gentleman Usher to King Henry VII.The couple had three children:
- Gregory Cromwell, 1st Baron Cromwell, who became Elizabeth Seymour's second husband.
- Anne Cromwell
- Grace Cromwell
Cromwell also had an illegitimate daughter, Jane, whose early life is a complete mystery. According to novelist Hilary Mantel, "Cromwell had an illegitimate daughter, and beyond the fact that she existed, we know very little about her. She comes briefly into the records, in an incredibly obscure way—she's in the archives of the county of Chester." Jane was born to an unknown mother during the time Cromwell was mourning the loss of his wife and daughters. Jane presumably was educated and resided in Cromwell's homes, but in 1539, Margaret Vernon, the worldly prioress of Little Marlow Priory suggested she take Jane to begin her education away from home. In that same year Jane's half-brother Gregory and his wife Elizabeth moved into Leeds Castle, Kent, in preparation for Gregory's election as a knight of the shire for the county. Jane, then nine years of age, accompanied him. Cromwell's records show him paying Elizabeth for clothing and expenses for Jane. It is unknown what became of Jane's mother, though historian Caroline Angus argues that Jane's mother was Elizabeth Gregory, a former household servant who was left a surprisingly large amount of money and items in Cromwell's will. Elizabeth Gregory was listed among family members in the will, despite not being any relation to the Cromwell, Williams, Wyckes or Williamson families. Cromwell was known to be one of the few men at court without mistresses and tried to keep this indiscretion secret.
Jane married William Hough, of Leighton in the Wirral Hundred, around 1550. William Hough was the son of Richard Hough who was Cromwell's agent in Chester from 1534 to 1540. Jane and her husband remained staunch Catholics, who, together with their daughter, Alice, her husband, William Whitmore, and their children, all came to the attention of the authorities as recusants during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Lawyer, Member of Parliament, adviser to Wolsey
By 1520, Cromwell was firmly established in London mercantile and legal circles. In 1529, he obtained a seat in the House of Commons as a burgess, though the constituency he represented has not been identified with certainty. He prepared a daring speech against King Henry's declared intention of leading an invasion of France, although it was expressed tactfully in terms of concern for the King's safety while on campaign and fear of the costs such an overbold policy would entail; it was the latter point that embodied Cromwell's true concern. There is no record of when Cromwell actually delivered the speech in the chamber and some modern historians, including Michael Everett and Robert Woods, have suggested that the whole episode was no more than a ploy, sanctioned by Henry himself, to allow him to withdraw graciously from his rash threat of war.After Parliament had been dissolved, Cromwell wrote a letter to a friend, jesting about the session's lack of productivity:
I amongst other have indured a parlyament which contenwid by the space of xvii hole wekes wher we communyd of warre pease Stryffe contencyon debatte murmure grudge Riches poverte penurye trowth falshode Justyce equyte dicayte opprescyon Magnanymyte actyvyte foce attempraunce Treason murder Felonye consyli... and also how a commune welth myght be ediffyed and a contenewid within our Realme. Howbeyt in conclusyon we have d as our predecessors have been wont to doo that ys to say, as well we myght and lefte wher we begann.
For a short while early in 1523 Cromwell became an adviser to Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, drafting a parliamentary bill to relieve his sponsor of taxation on some property in Cumberland. Although the bill was not introduced in the 1523 session of Parliament, this may indicate that the unidentified seat for which Cromwell was returned in that year was Carlisle, Cumberland, to present the Marquess's bill. Early in 1524 he became a member of the household of Lord Chancellor Cardinal Thomas Wolsey although, initially, he maintained his private legal practice; in that year he was elected a member of Gray's Inn, a lawyers' guild. Cromwell assisted in the dissolution of nearly thirty monasteries to raise funds for Wolsey to found The King's School, Ipswich, and Cardinal College, in Oxford. In 1527 Wolsey appointed Cromwell a member of his personal council, as one of his most senior and trusted advisers. By the end of October of that year, however, Wolsey had fallen from power. Cromwell had made enemies by aiding Wolsey to suppress the monasteries, but was determined not to fall with his master, as he told George Cavendish, then a Gentleman Usher and later Wolsey's biographer:
I do entend this after none, whan my lord hathe dyned to ride to london and so to the Court, where I wyll other make or marre, or ere I come agayn, I wyll put my self in the prese to se what any man is Able to lay to my charge of ontrouthe or mysdemeanor.
Cavendish acknowledges that Cromwell's moves to mend the situation were by means of engaging himself in an energetic defence of Wolsey rather than by distancing himself from his old master's actions, and this display of "authentic loyalty" only enhanced his reputation, not least in the mind of the King.