Bibliography.—See the article in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, and authorities there cited; Noble’s Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell (1787); Memoirs of the Protector ... and of his Sons, by O. Cromwell (1820); The Two Protectors, by Sir R. Tangye (1899); Kebleland and a Short Life of Richard Cromwell, by W. T. Warren (1900); Letters and Speeches of O. Cromwell, by T. Carlyle (1904); Eng. Hist. Review, xiii. 93 (letters) and xviii. 79; Cal. of State Papers, Domestic, Lansdowne MSS. in British Museum.
(P. C. Y.)
CROMWELL, THOMAS, Earl of Essex (1485?-1540), born probably not later than 1485 and possibly a year or two earlier, was the only son of Walter Cromwell, alias Smyth, a brewer, smith and fuller of Putney. His grandfather, John Cromwell, seems to have belonged to the Nottinghamshire family, of whom the most distinguished member was Ralph, Lord Cromwell (1394?-1456), lord treasurer; and he migrated from Norwell, Co. Notts, to Wimbledon some time before 1461. John’s son, Walter, seems to have acquired the alias Smyth from being apprenticed to his uncle, William Smyth, “armourer,” of Wimbledon. He was of a turbulent, vicious disposition, perpetually being fined in the manor-court for drunkenness, for evading the assize of beer, and for turning more than his proper number of beasts on to Putney Common. Once he was punished for a sanguinary assault, and his connexion with Wimbledon ceased in 1514 when he “falsely and fraudulently erased the evidences and terrures of the lord.” Till that time he had flourished like the bay-tree.
Under these circumstances the absence of Thomas Cromwell’s name from the Wimbledon manor rolls is almost a presumption of respectability. Perhaps it would be safer to attribute it to Cromwell’s absence from the manor. He is said to have quarrelled with his father—no great crime considering the father’s character—and fled to Italy, where he served as a soldier in the French army at the battle of the Garigliano (Dec. 1503). He escaped from the battle-field to Florence, where he was befriended by the banker Frescobaldi, a debt which he appears to have repaid with superabundant interest later on. He is next heard of at Antwerp as a trader, and about 1510 he was induced to accompany a Bostonian to Rome in quest of some papal indulgences for a Boston gild; Cromwell secured the boon by the timely present of some choice sweetmeats to Julius II. In 1512 there is some slight evidence that he was at Middelburg, and also in London, engaged in business as a merchant and solicitor. His marriage must have taken place about the same time, judging from the age of his son Gregory. His wife was Elizabeth Wykes, daughter of a well-to-do shearman of Putney, whose business Cromwell carried on in combination with his own.
For about eight years after 1512 we hear nothing of Cromwell. A letter to him from Cicely, marchioness of Dorset, in which he is seen in confidential business relations with her ladyship, is probably earlier than 1520, and it is possible that Cromwell owed his introduction to Wolsey to the Dorset family. On the other hand, it is stated that his cousin, Robert Cromwell, vicar of Battersea under the cardinal, gave Thomas the stewardship of the archiepiscopal estate of York House. At any rate he was advising Wolsey on legal points in 1520, and from that date he occurs frequently not only as mentor to the cardinal, but to noblemen and others when in difficulties, especially of a financial character; he made large sums as a money-lender.
In 1523 Cromwell emerges into public life as a member of parliament. The official returns for this election are lost and it is not known for what constituency he sat, but we have a humorous letter from Cromwell describing its proceedings, and a remarkable speech which he wrote and perhaps delivered, opposing the reckless war with France and indicating a sounder policy which was pursued after Wolsey’s fall. If, he said, war was to be waged, it would be better to secure Boulogne than advance on Paris; if the king went in person and were killed without leaving a male heir, he hinted there would be civil war; it would be wiser to attempt a union with Scotland, and in any case the proposed subsidy would be a fatal drain on the resources of the realm. Neither Henry nor Wolsey was so foolish as to resent this criticism, and Cromwell lost nothing by it. He was made a collector of the subsidy he had opposed—a doubtful favour perhaps—and in 1524 was admitted at Gray’s Inn; but he now became the most confidential servant of the cardinal. In 1525 he was Wolsey’s agent in the dissolution of the smaller monasteries which were designed to provide the endowments for Wolsey’s foundations at Oxford and Ipswich, a task which gave Cromwell a taste and a facility for similar enterprises on a greater scale later on. For these foundations Cromwell drew up the necessary deeds, and he was receiver-general of cardinal’s college, constantly supervising the workmen there and at Ipswich. His ruthless vigour and his accessibility to bribes earned him such unpopularity that there were rumours of his projected assassination or imprisonment. All this constituted a further bond of sympathy between him and his master, and Cromwell grew in Wolsey’s favour until his fall. His wife had died in 1527 or 1528, and in July 1529 he made his will, in which one of the chief beneficiaries was his nephew, Richard Williams, alias Cromwell, the great-grandfather of the protector.
Wolsey’s disgrace reduced Cromwell to such despair that Cavendish once found him in tears and at his prayers “which had been a strange sight in him afore.” Many of the cardinal’s servants had been taken over by the king, but Cromwell had made himself particularly obnoxious. However, he rode to court from Esher to “make or mar,” as he himself expressed it, and offered his services to Norfolk. Possibly he had already paved the way by the pensions and grants which he induced Wolsey to make through him, out of the lands and revenues of his bishoprics and abbeys, to nobles and courtiers who were hard pressed to keep up the lavish style of Henry’s court. Cromwell could be most useful to the government in parliament, and the government, represented by Norfolk, undertook to use its influence in procuring him a seat, on the natural understanding that Cromwell should do his best to further government business in the House of Commons. This was on the 2nd of November 1529; the elections had been made, and parliament was to meet on the morrow. A seat was, however, found or made for Cromwell at Taunton. He signalized himself by a powerful speech in opposition to the bill of attainder against Wolsey which had already passed the Lords. The bill was thrown out, possibly with Henry’s connivance, though no theory has yet explained its curious history so completely as the statement of Cavendish and other contemporaries, that its rejection was due to the arguments of Cromwell. Doubtless he championed his fallen chief not so much for virtue’s sake as for the impression it would make on others. He did not feel called upon to accompany Wolsey on his exile from the court.
Cromwell had now, according to Cardinal Pole, whose story has been too readily accepted, been converted into an “emissary of Satan” by the study of Machiavelli’s Prince. In the one interview which Pole had with Cromwell, the latter, so Pole wrote ten years later in 1539, recommended him to read a new Italian book on politics, which Pole says he afterwards discovered was Machiavelli’s Prince. But this discovery was not made for some years: the Prince was not published until 1532, three years after the conversation; there is evidence that Cromwell was not acquainted with it until 1537 or 1539, and there is nothing in the Prince bearing on the precise point under discussion by Pole and Cromwell. On the other hand, the point is discussed in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano which had just been published in 1528, and of which Cromwell promised to lend Bonner a copy in 1530. The Cortegiano is the antithesis of the Prince; and there is little doubt that Pole’s account is the offspring of an imagination heated by his own perusal of the Prince in 1538, and by Cromwell’s ruin of the Pole family at the same time; until then he had failed to see in Cromwell the Machiavellian “emissary of Satan.”
Equally fanciful is Pole’s ascription of the whole responsibility for the Reformation to Cromwell’s suggestion. It was impossible for Pole to realize the substantial causes of that perfectly natural development, and it was his cue to represent Henry as having acted at the diabolic suggestion of Satan’s emissary. In reality the whole programme, the destruction of the liberties and confiscation of the wealth of the church by parliamentary agency, had been indicated before Cromwell had spoken to Henry. The use of Praemunire had been applied to Wolsey; laymen had supplanted ecclesiastics in the chief offices of state; the plan of getting a divorce without papal intervention had been the original idea, which Wolsey had induced the king to abandon, and it had been revived by Cranmer’s suggestion about the universities. The root idea of the supreme authority of the king had been asserted in Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man published in 1528, which Anne Boleyn herself had brought to Henry’s notice: “this,” he said, “is a book for me and all kings to read,” and Campeggio had felt compelled to warn him against these notions, of which Pole imagines that he had never heard until they were put into his head by Cromwell late in 1530. In the same way Cromwell’s influence over the government from 1529-1533 has been grossly exaggerated. It was not till 1531 that he was admitted to the privy council nor till 1534 that he was made secretary, though he had been made master of the Jewel-House, clerk of the Hanaper and master of the Wards in 1532, and chancellor of the exchequer (then a minor office) in 1533. It is not till 1533 that his name is as much as mentioned in the correspondence of any foreign ambassador resident in London. This obscurity has been attributed to deliberate suppression: but no secrecy was made about Cranmer’s suggestion, and it was not Henry’s habit to assume a responsibility which he could devolve upon others. It is said that Cromwell’s life would not have been safe, had he been known as the author of this policy; but that is not a consideration which would have appealed to Henry, and he was just as able to protect his minister in 1530 as he was in 1536. Cromwell, in fact, was not the author of that policy, but he was the most efficient instrument in its execution.