CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY OF BRITISH WORTHIES. Ir 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 irrepressibility, and, as we may say, brilliant that same 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 |