IT sometimes happens that a remarkable man has a very commonplace history; sometimes that a man whose life has been full of strange events has been a person of a very commonplace character: in the present instance the man and his fortunes were alike extraordinary. The life in all its parts has the colour of a legend or romance; both his rise and his fall were rocket-like; but he was neither carried so rapidly to so great a height solely by the force of circumstances, nor would he perhaps have been thrown down as he was but in some degree through that same irrepressibility, and, as we may say, brilliant VOL. III. B wildness of nature which had helped him to mount so far above his original condition. Thomas Cromwell, best known, both in his own day and in our national history, by his first title of nobility, the Lord Cromwell, was born in or near the village of Putney, in Surrey, where his father, Walter Cromwell, it is commonly said, followed the trade first of a blacksmith, afterwards of a brewer; but, according to another account, was a fuller, though that version of the story may possibly have arisen from the circumstance of his mother after his father's death, which appears to have happened when her son was a boy, marrying a London shearman, or cloth-shearer. The date of his birth is not recorded, but it was probably about the year 1490. Of his other relations we only know that he had a sister who married Morgan Williams, a gentleman of an ancient Welsh family, whose son, changing his name to that of his uncle and patron, became Sir Richard Cromwell, and was the grandfather of Oliver Cromwell the Protector. From this marriage of Thomas Cromwell's sister, which must have taken place before her brother became a great man, since his nephew, Richard Williams, or Cromwell, was then of mature age, and from other considerations which he advances, Noble, the author of the Memoirs of the Protectoral House,' argues that the blacksmith or brewer of Putney was probably, although a tradesman, a man of substance, and by no means, as he has been sometimes represented, a mere handicraftsman or mechanic. "We may presume," says Noble, “that, as the blacksmith was enabled to change his business, from many favourable circumstances, to that of a brewer, which latter was a much superior one in the reign of King Henry VIII. than at present, it is highly probable that, though he died a brewer, he might leave a very good (perhaps large) fortune behind him: we know of many of the noblest families in England that are descended from persons who were lord mayors and sheriffs of London, and others who were of trades which would disgrace (in the estimation of the illiberal) the families of the middling class of people in this kingdom. If we suppose that Mr. Walter Cromwell, the brewer of Putney, died rich, as there is the highest probability he did not die poor, there can be no reason assigned why his daughter should be thought an improper match for Mr. Morgan Williams, a Welsh gentleman of an estate of three or four hundred a year, when Mr. Morgan Williams's son and grandson, two of the richest knights and private subjects in the kingdom, married, the one the daughter of a skinner, and the other that of a mercer, or at least of those companies. Lady Ann Bolen, or Bullen, and Lady Jane Seymour, two of the many wives of King Henry VIII., were descended from tradesmen of London." On the whole, then, we may conclude Walter Cromwell of Putney to have been no common blacksmith, wielding his hammer and shoeing horses with his own hands, but a master tradesman, probably employing many workmen, and prospering so as to be eventually enabled to set up as what we may call a capitalist, and the head of what was more of the nature of a commercial establishment than a trade. His widow, too, in this case, may have made a good second marriage, and the shearman may have been a merchant, not, as is commonly assumed, a mechanic. Noble supposes that Morgan Williams, whose father was employed by Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford, uncle to King Henry VII., and also by King Henry VIII., may have made the acquaintance of Miss Cromwell, living with her mother in London, when he and his father came up to give their attendance at court. This connexion among the three families of Cromwell, Williams, and Tudor-the history of each of which is so remarkable-merits the more attention, that it has not been usually noticed. We shall find that the marriage of his sister was not Cromwell's only alliance with the Williamses. Young Cromwell does not appear to have received what can be called a learned education; but it is admitted that, besides the more ordinary branches, he was taught a little Latin at school; and this may give additional probability to what has been said about his father not having been a mere common blacksmith. The popular tradition of the next age, indeed, appears to have represented him as having been a bookish boy, filled and inflamed with many sublime and mysterious studies. There is an old play, called The Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell,' first published, as far as is known, in 1602, but perhaps written a good many years before that date, in the opening scene of which one of his father's men is introduced complaining that he can hardly take his afternoon's nap for young Master Thomas, who, says he, "keeps such a coil in his study, with the sun and the moon and the seven stars, that I do verily think he'll read out his wits." And then the youth himself is brought forward soliloquizing, after the fashion of a juvenile Faustus :— "Good morrow, morn, I do salute thy brightness. The night seems tedious to my troubled soul; Whose black obscurity binds in my mind A thousand sundry cogitations. And now Aurora with a lively dye Adds comfort to my spirit, that mounts on high; Too high, indeed, my state being so mean. My study, like a mineral of gold, Makes my heart proud, wherein my hope 's enrolled; And unto them I have engaged my heart. This play has been attributed to Shakspere; but, although it is not in his manner, nor in any high manner, and has little or no dramatic or even poetical spirit, it is not destitute of a certain kind of talent, that at least by which a story is clearly told in the way of dialogue; and it is at any rate curious as preserving the notions about Cromwell and his history which had floated in the popular mind probably ever since his own day. Whatever may have been his original advantages or disadvantages, it appears to have been mainly to his own abilities, and his mounting or restless spirit, that he owed his rise from obscurity. The story that is told of his early life is, shortly, that, impatient of confinement within the bounds of his native country, he set out before he had yet taken to any occupation by which he might earn his bread for the continent; that after rambling over France, Germany, and Italy, and acquiring the languages of all these countries, he was engaged as their chief clerk or secretary by the English factory, or body of resident English merchants, at Antwerp; and that he remained in that situation till about the year 1510, when he embraced an opportunity that offered of accompanying two of his countrymen on a mission to the papal court. The case was this, as related by Fox in his 'Acts and Monuments :-The town of Boston, desiring to have a renewal from the pope, Julius the Second, of certain privileges, called the great and the lesser pardons, which had been repeatedly confirmed by his holiness's predecessors, despatched two persons for that purpose, who, coming to Antwerp on their way, there fell into company with Cromwell, and, probably struck by his evident capacity, while they had great doubts of the sufficiency of their own qualifications for the important business that had been intrusted to them, proposed that he should become their associate. The sequel is curious, as told by the old martyrologist, who, it may be observed, does not much relish such an introduction of his hero to public life :-"Cromwell, although perceiving the enterprise to be of no small difficulty, to traverse the pope's court, for the unreasonable expenses amongst those greedy cormorants, yet, having some skill of the Italian tongue, and as yet not grounded in judgment of religion in those his youthful days, was at length obtained and content to give the adventure, and so took his journey towards Rome. Cromwell, loth to spend much time, and more loth to spend his money, and again perceiving that the pope's greedy humour must needs be served with some present or other (for without rewards there is no doing at Rome) began to cast with himself what thing best to devise wherein he might best serve the pope's devotion. At length, having knowledge how that the pope's holy tooth greatly delighted in new-fangled strange delicates and dainty dishes, it |