The Private Life of Thomas Cromwell

By Caroline Angus

A new biography revealing the personal story of the powerful, doomed minister to Henry VIII.

Thomas Cromwell was King Henry VIII’s most faithful servant, the only man the king ever openly regretted executing. But Cromwell came to royal prominence late in life, and had forty-five years of family, friends, and experiences behind him before catching Henry’s eye.

Born a commoner at a time of significant change in England, Cromwell grew up in a happy, close-knit family before heading to Europe for dramatic adventures. Returning a decade later, he emerged with the skills of a lawyer and merchant, with the European language skills and connections to match. Marriage, children, friends, family, and manor homes all furnished Cromwell’s life, a man happy and settled in London. But more beckoned for the Italian-Englishman when a special friendship with Cardinal Thomas Wolsey grew, along with the attention of the king.

This book delves into the life beyond the historic role in Reformation England—a life marked by tragic personal loss; by friendships that endured through changes in allegiance and even religion; and of aspirations for his son Gregory. Far from the seemingly dour, black-clad, serious man, Cromwell lavished those around him with gifts, parties, extravagant games, entertainments, animals, and outfits. But the glamour and beauty of Cromwell’s life would come to a sudden end, leaving a trail of devastated men and women, and an extraordinary manor home, Austin Friars, scattered to the wind. Using a wide variety of primary material, this exciting biography weaves a new narrative on the indefatigable Thomas Cromwell, illustrating him more vividly than we’ve known him before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399095822

Book preview

Introduction

No one expects a pawn to take the queen.

The men and women who dared to defy Thomas Cromwell rarely noticed when he laid in wait to destroy them. A charming, ruthless, and scrupulous man from Putney became the right man, at the right place, at the right time to upset an entire country. Someone needed to be the one to pull England from the medieval period into the light of renaissance and reformation, and it fell on the shoulders of an unassuming merchant turned lawyer, who had no desire to rule.

After languishing in archives for centuries, Thomas Cromwell, or Crumwell, as he was known, is now notorious and well-assumed to be the man behind King Henry VIII. Cromwell has become popular in fiction and non-fiction alike, yet many tropes remain. The man who killed Anne Boleyn. The man who destroyed the monasteries. A dull, overweight man who plodded the royal halls destroying lives, who got what he deserved in July 1540. But how much is true, and how much makes for a convenient scapegoat in history, or an easy villain in novels?

A man whose formal education, in the weakest form of the expression, comprised of basic reading and writing became the shrewdest, most formidable man in the kingdom and entirely reformed English government. Cromwell grew up in a household that understood the importance of honest labour, and yet also knew how to leave international diplomats hanging on his words. His father was a yeoman, his mother from a simple but respected family, and yet Cromwell learned to speak the languages of European kings and queens, popes and emperors. The disparity could not be more astonishing. But King Henry liked men from less auspicious backgrounds; common men had no supporters, and this brief window of opportunity gave Thomas Cromwell an elevation he never sought.

To go from the family home of selling beer and fulling cloth, to a clerk in Florence, and then a certified lawyer and merchant in the Italian community of London was a grand elevation. How was it done? With a personality that drew in friends, and a community of people who valued one another. While the nobility jostled for power, living on what they believed they were owed, the commoners carved out their own lives. There, in the merchant streets of east London, Thomas Cromwell and his family developed everything they wanted. Only when Thomas Cromwell’s master, Cardinal Wolsey, was betrayed and ruined did Cromwell dare poke his head into the royal court to help a man in need. This uncharacteristic move led to ten years of English reformation, both in religion and governance, and the creation or destruction of four queens.

When a man was pulled from his life at his king’s command, thrust into a world not his own, he needed friends and supporters. Cromwell’s rise at court is often described as startling, unforeseen, rapid, yet Cromwell was a man well-placed for such a position. Nothing happened by surprise, and no successes came by luck. Thomas Cromwell was no quiet loner, but a man surrounded by family and friends, giving him a private life filled with the support that could propel him to public revolution.

Chapter 1

1485–1504: Adventure

‘nothing as so hard with which wit and industry he could not compass’

On the day Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, battled King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the men who would control the royal court one generation later were taking their first steps in splendid and well-appointed nurseries. Thomas Howard was learning to walk around Kenninghall Manor. Charles Brandon was blissfully unaware his father would not return home from battle. Thomas More was attending class at St Anthony’s School outside London. But men, both noble and common, fought for the future of England, men like farrier Walter Cromwell shoeing horses for Henry Tudor’s army. ¹ His infant son Thomas was at home in Putney, none of the family under any impression the boy would one day control England beside the future king’s son.

The origins of the Cromwell family suffer the fate of anyone born beneath the noble class, with their births, deaths and marriages not recorded. In the absence of evidence, a mixture of half-truths, guesses and fabrications have filled the vacuum over the past 500 years.

The nineteenth-century theory has been told many times, a mixture of guesswork and poor assumptions. The story begins with Robert, Lord Cromwell of Coleton, who died in the devastating Battle of Towton in 1461 while aiding Edward IV.² While the Cromwell family estate was in Norwell, Nottinghamshire, his son William Cromwell had been granted land in Wandsworth in 1452 by Archbishop John Kemp. William Cromwell gave up much of his family land in Palacehall in Norwell and he and his wife Margaret Smyth relocated south to Putney in the heart of the Wandsworth and Wimbledon areas.³ This long-accepted tale of the Cromwell family was thrown into doubt, when, a century later, Sir George Paulet, charged by his king to quell rebellion in Ireland, let down his guard and told slanderous stories of England’s Lord Privy Seal. While speaking poorly of Thomas Lord Cromwell’s treatment of the rebellious FitzGeralds, arguing Cromwell had been too lenient, Paulet said, ‘the lord Cromwell was so affectionate unto the same land because his ancestors were born there and had been the cause of the King wasting his treasure in suppressing the Geraldines’.⁴ The FitzGerald family ruled the huge county of Kildare, west of Dublin, for almost 100 years before King Henry VIII gave the country to Thomas Cromwell, expecting it to be ruled from London. While Paulet’s comments could have simply been a mistake, the information came from eyewitness accounts. It is entirely possible a young Walter Cromwell came over from Ireland with his parents and bore little or no relation to the Norwell Cromwell family at all. On the other hand, Paulet was also heard to say, ‘a pelican would fly out of Ireland to England to do marvellous things’, such as predict the future. Each theory about the Cromwell family seems as obscure as the other.

But what is certain, is that the land in Putney, leased from Archbishop Kemp, gave William Cromwell approximately sixty acres and a fuller mill,⁵ a building on the edge of the Thames with a watermill for making fabric. William and Margaret Cromwell had two sons, William and John, with John soon taking over as the patriarch, claiming the mill and lands,⁶ describing himself as the ‘fuller of Wandsworth’. John Cromwell married his cousin Joan Smyth in the early 1460s and together they had three surviving children: Walter, John, and Margaret.⁷

The Cromwell and Smyth families could not claim to be much in society. A man could call only himself a yeoman if he owned the land he worked. John and Joan’s daughter Margaret Cromwell married William Michell, and they appear to have moved to Sussex to raise their children.⁸ John Cromwell described himself as a beer-brewer and possibly gained himself a part-time job as a cook for the new archbishop at nearby Mortlake Manor, five miles upstream from Putney.⁹ The Wandsworth farmlands went to son Walter around the time of his marriage in 1474, a man whose character has taken multiple turns throughout history.

Walter Cromwell, like most people of the period, is difficult to track. He appears to have been born earlier than his siblings and is likely to have been a blacksmith’s apprentice, as he took his mother’s maiden name of Smyth at times.¹⁰ It would have been a straightforward way for young Walter to be put to work with his relatives. With his father John being a cloth-fuller, this meant Walter could grow up with knowledge of multiple trades. Putney sat on the edge of the Thames, a collection of timber houses with whitewashed walls to hide the tar sealing the homes from the weather. These buildings afforded a basic life, all one-room homes where animals were brought inside in the winter to generate heat. Chimneys began to replace open hearths, but only for those who could afford them. The floor of a Putney home would be covered in rushes and herbs to mask the smell of the muddy lanes and the people who had only basic bathing and laundry facilities. The streets around Putney were not safe, and while London, six miles downstream, was written about with great generosity for its fine walls, cathedrals and bridges, Putney would have felt a thousand miles away from the wealthy city.

Another theory of how the Cromwell family gained land in Putney is a claim Walter and his brother John were granted ownership of the leased land as a reward for fighting for Henry VII at Bosworth.¹¹ It is likely Walter’s brother John turned the main Putney home into an alehouse alongside Walter’s cloth-making business in the mid-1470s, though as owner, Walter was summoned to court forty-eight times for breaking the assizes of ale over the next twenty-six years.¹² The Brewers Company regularly attempted to regulate beer-brewing, leaving already struggling families like the Cromwells at the mercy of the courts. These constant charges have long been assumed to be a result of Walter Cromwell watering down ale, but this is another half-truth made into fact. Beer needed to be checked by ale-testers before being sold, and the regulations changed dramatically over this period, turning what was a basic industry into a heavy-regulated money-spinner for local government in a short period. There is nothing to suggest anything was amiss with Cromwell ale, rather that changes to centuries-old habits were hard on small producers.

In 1477, Walter was again in the courts, after assaulting Thomas Michell, his brother-in-law’s brother, and was fined twenty pence, or roughly two days’ wages.¹³ Between working as a blacksmith, a fuller, and running an alehouse, it was little wonder Walter’s cattle often strayed off their pasture, with Walter also in court multiple times for allowing his cattle to graze on public pasture. All was not bad though, as by 1500, Walter had amassed 240 acres of land around Wandsworth and straightened himself out, working as a constable in Putney, and serving as a juryman.¹⁴ He was likely a man of his time; a hard man forged in a hard life, a world where a man worked or starved, and with little entertainment or diversion other than ale.

The Cromwell alehouse was aptly named the Anchor,¹⁵ on tiny Brewhouse Lane on the shore of the Thames where barges and ferries would cross the river (where Putney Bridge stands today). Beer brewing was predominately the work of women until around the early sixteenth century when government regulations handed the work to men.¹⁶ Walter’s wife was likely one such brewster or alewife, helping to run their business interests. In the late 1470s, Walter married Katherine Meverell, a daughter of Thomas Meverell of Throwley in Derbyshire,¹⁷ and one of the many daughters (legitimate or illegitimate) of Sir John Babington.¹⁸ How Katherine and Walter met remains a mystery. Katherine had been working for lawyer John Walbeck, likely put into his household at a young age, which could help explain how she managed to travel 140 miles from her parents’ home in Derbyshire.

Sadly, the family connections of Katherine Meverell cannot be accurately traced, not even her first name. It is only through cousins such as Arthur and Francis Meverell¹⁹ and John Babington²⁰ that her surname appears, and a mention she had a sister who married a Glossop in Derbyshire.²¹ Even her age is in doubt thanks to an off-hand comment made by her son decades later. Katherine Meverell had daughters Katherine and Elizabeth in the early 1480s, followed by a son, Thomas, in approximately 1485. Baby Thomas would one day grow up to tell Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys his mother was fifty-two years old when she had her son,²² though this may have been a lie Cromwell told while defending Queen Katherine years later. Walter Cromwell would have married a woman thirty years his senior for this to be true, but then he was not the first man to marry in such a manner, particularly if she came from a family of minor gentry with a dowry. It is also claimed Walter was not the actual father of Katherine, Elizabeth, or Thomas, as their mother married multiple times, and yet there is also no evidence of this occurring either. When John Foxe wrote of Thomas Cromwell’s mother marrying several times, he may have simply confused Cromwell’s mother with his mother-in-law.²³

Life at the Anchor cannot have been peaceful or pleasant. The rushes on the floor would have to cover the smell of brewing ale and the customers who drank it while wearing shoes covered in foul pathway mud, not to mention the fishery on Brewhouse Lane. Thomas and his family would have slept on straw mattresses on the floor, perfect for attracting rats and lice, and in summer, the plague drifted upstream from London. Families such as the Cromwells may have had partitions in their open living space, and all bathroom and laundry facilities were outside the house.²⁴ Many of the foods available in London were probably also available in Putney, with the barges going back and forth with goods for the city. Fish was abundant, along with oysters collected on the Thames shore. Beef, mutton, rabbit, deer, and swan were all also available for a price, and the Cromwells had plenty of land to raise cattle and sheep.²⁵ A child such as Thomas would have been sent away as an apprentice in another household by the age of about seven.²⁶ Whether Thomas received any basic education or entered a seven-year apprenticeship is unknown. Thomas may have opted to work fulling cloth for the family, being the only son and unable to be spared. By the time future King Henry VIII was born in 1491, Thomas’ childhood would have been over, put to work in the harsh landscape of Putney.

A possible way to alleviate the manner of living would be to work in a wealthy household. With Thomas’ uncle John just upstream in the kitchens at Mortlake Manor, it could have been advantageous to hope for a position in Cardinal Morton’s country home on the rare occasion he stayed at Mortlake. Yet it seems Thomas did not try to gain favour at Mortlake. Thomas was ‘comfortable with humble beginnings’,²⁷ and never sought to hide or lie about his early life in Putney. He told Eustace Chapuys he had spent time in prison as a teen, the reason or length of the stint unmentioned.²⁸ There is no way to know what happened, nor any record in Wimbledon of a Thomas Cromwell being in jail. Some have claimed a Thomas Smyth imprisoned in Putney is Thomas Cromwell using another surname. Thomas Smyth was a common name, so common there was one either on trial, or on a jury, every year. Sentences for imprisonment varied at the time, and even young people, essentially children, could be in prison for crimes or debts. Fathers could also have their sons imprisoned without cause ‘for correction’, and this theory could hold weight if Walter Cromwell was the brute some narratives suggest. Commentators have laid the claim Thomas and his father were on offensive terms, or that Walter Cromwell was violent, but these also have only a theoretical base. There is no reason for Thomas to have lied to Chapuys about his time in prison, nor for Chapuys to lie, so we can only assume Thomas spent at least a quick spell in prison for unknown reasons. Many crimes were settled with fines, and acts of theft, fraud, deception, and assault would generally carry short penalties, measured in days or weeks. Only serious and violent crimes would receive a full year. Thomas was no innocent babe; by his own admission he was a ruffian,²⁹ a bully or thug in his Putney days.

Around the turn of the century, the Cromwell family was on the move. Paperwork shows Walter and Katherine living in Wandsworth rather than Putney in 1501.³⁰ Husbands were found for daughters Katherine and Elizabeth. Katherine married well in the new century, to an aspiring lawyer named Morgan Williams, a Welsh gentleman well-known and respected in the area.³¹ This became a lifelong link between the Cromwell family and Wales, particularly the Llanishen region outside Cardiff. The Williams and Cromwell families would be ever more intertwined, the marriage excellent for Katherine. Katherine and Morgan soon moved to Wales where their sons were born, before returning to England a little over a decade later.

Elizabeth Cromwell married William Wellyfed, son of a sheep farming family, after the Cromwell family shifted to Wandsworth.³² While this marriage brought no advantages, it appeared to be a happy match for Elizabeth, and Wellyfed worked for the archbishop in his kitchens, mostly in Lambeth Palace in London, but likely started in the kitchens at Mortlake. Wellyfed would be a close member of the Cromwell household, providing loyal service for the rest of his days.

With the changes going on in the Cromwell household, it is entirely plausible Thomas decided he needed something new, especially after his sister Katherine went to Wales. He demonstrated throughout his life a desire to educate himself, being self-taught in every area of his knowledge.³³ At around fifteen, it was time to leave Putney behind. Despite his long absence from home, there are names that originate in Putney that never left Thomas’ life, such as Thomas Megges, the nephew of Archbishop Morton, a boy the same age as Thomas.³⁴ Likewise, another local Putney boy, Thomas Mundy who became a monk at Wandsworth monastery, and Henry Polstead and Thomas Avery, both Putney men who Thomas never forgot as he rose in notoriety. Another boy close to young Thomas Cromwell was Anthony St Leger, nephew to Archbishop Warham, who labelled himself a favourite of Walter Cromwell and remained very close to Thomas for the rest of his life.³⁵ Every important person close to Thomas as a boy would keep strong connections with him later.

The true reason for Thomas’ departure from Putney is unknown. While the ever exaggerating and whimsical novelist Matteo Bandello wrote Thomas ‘fled from his father’,³⁶ the tale woven by Bandello is littered with errors to add flair. Thomas may have simply wished to explore, to travel, to educate himself instead of settling for making cloth or pouring ale. With the family moving, it was the perfect time for Cromwell to shrug off the poor behaviour of his past and try something adventurous.

Leaving England would not have been such a struggle; merchant ships left regularly from London and Dover, primarily carrying wool and fabrics to Calais and Antwerp. Money for such a sea voyage may not have been necessary as ships needed crew, some requiring hundreds of people. Ships were floating villages in need of people to care for every facet of life. It would not have been hard to find someone travelling through Putney, and a cheeky boy with charm could get a tip about finding work in London and beyond. As John Foxe wrote of young Thomas Cromwell, a boy ready to make his fortune, ‘nothing as so hard with which wit and industry he could not compass’.³⁷

Sadly, we shall never be able to track where the young Cromwell travelled to when he left England but following Bandello’s dramatic tale of the boy he called Tommaso Cremonello,³⁸ Cromwell went to France and joined the army. Perhaps the wages of a paid soldier in a temporary militia was the only option available, the promise of a place to eat and sleep too irresistible to a boy living in a foreign country. His father and uncle had done well after the Battle of Bosworth, and perhaps young Thomas thought battle could do the same for him.

France was a few years into Louis XII’s reign, and deep in the Italian Wars. The Italian states formed the League of Venice, or Holy League, to repel the French from Italy.³⁹ Spain had a claim to the vast kingdom of Naples, as did the French, leaving Italians exposed and endangered on multiple fronts. The French had regularly used foreigners or mercenaries in their temporary militias and needed many to fill the ranks, most coming from Switzerland.⁴⁰ An Englishman could join these militias; some in the Low Countries had joined in the past and had men from French-allied kingdoms such as Burgundy. Cromwell may have even landed in these northern countries from England and made his way to the French army from there, alongside other foreigners looking for glory. Most of the French militias were gathered from men in southern France, but some groups were moved from northern quarters of the country as Louis XII signed peace treaties, leaving much of France otherwise safe from any northern invaders.⁴¹ It would be plausible to assume Cromwell travelled south with these northern French militias.

The French army had been supported by multiple Italian rulers, among them Ludovico II del Vasto, Marquis of Saluzzo, who had aided France to take Milan. France wanted the jewel of the kingdom of Naples, and after multiple wins on behalf of the French, Ludovico prepared to take Naples for the French.⁴² France and Spain signed the Treaty of Granada, splitting Naples in 1500, but the peace would not last. By 1502, French and Spanish peace had broken down, and King Louis XII wanted the entire kingdom of Naples for himself,⁴³ sending in extra troops to repel the Spanish.

The only mention of Thomas Cromwell is in a single battle in Italy, the Battle of Garigliano, 75 kilometres north of Naples city. As Bandello wrote, Cromwell claimed to have carried a pike for a foot soldier,⁴⁴ part of an army of 15,000.⁴⁵ Given that Cromwell eventually marched north to Florence after the battle, it is possible he was a foot soldier or a noncombatant page under an Italian-led lances fournies. One such Florentine fighting for the French was Piero de’ Medici, the man who had lost Florence in 1494. Medici had been in exile in Venice but supported the French in their battle in Naples.

What poor Cromwell walked into was more a slaughter than a battle. The French and Spanish were separated by the Garigliano river in late December 1503, a seemingly safe position for the French in the river-side town of Traetta. But the French were suffering from severe illness. On the night of 28 December, the Spanish built a pontoon bridge, allowing 6,000 Spanish troops to flood onto the French side of the river.⁴⁶ The French were ill and under-prepared for the attack, and ordered a retreat to Gaeta, leaving the sick men behind with their cannons to await their fate. A resilient band of French men stayed with the sick and fought for the town of Traetta and its nearby bridge over the Garigliano.⁴⁷ These men held off the Spanish troops long enough for the rest of the French army to escape, though Piero de’ Medici drowned in the Garigliano river.⁴⁸ But even the men who retreated to Gaeta were not safe, as the Spanish laid siege to the port and the French finally surrendered, leaving Naples in Spain’s hands.⁴⁹

Cromwell, only eighteen at the time, had borne witness to a bloody, demoralising, and decisive battle that ended France’s claim to Italy. The French had 4,000 dead to bury on the battlefield, almost five times the losses of the Spanish. Little did Cromwell know that fighting at Garigliano with Piero de’ Medici, seeing what happened, and of Medici’s burial at Monte Cassino, would come in extremely helpful for him more than a decade later. With the war over, there is no record of Cromwell’s march north to Florence, how long it took, who he travelled with or why Florence was his destination. It may simply have been a place to stop and lick his wounds on the 1,900-kilometre journey back to Putney, as Rome was closed off with its own battles.

The Republic of Florence was under the rule of Piero di Tommaso Soderini, a favourite of Piero de’ Medici, who had been voted in as Gonfaloniere in 1500.⁵⁰ Soderini was sympathetic to the French, so soldiers marching from battle could cross through Florentine lands in 1504. Florence too was changing their army, with Secretary of War Niccolò Machiavelli setting up a new system of militia, no longer hiring foreign mercenaries, citing their questionable loyalty.⁵¹ It is again Matteo Bandello who fills in the gaps of Cromwell’s story, as he wrote that Francesco Frescobaldi, a wealthy merchant’s son was at home in Florence when ‘a poor man presented himself before him and craved his charity for the love of God. Frescobaldi, seeing him so ill accoutered and noting signs of gentle breeding in his countenance, was moved to pity, more by token he knew him to be English’.⁵²

Bandello paints the image of Frescobaldi finding the English man begging on the streets, likely, given Cromwell’s state after the battle. But the battle cannot have taken his ability to charm, as Bandello wrote the Frescobaldi family soon took Cromwell into the household, where he remained for almost a decade. While there is proof that Cromwell knew the Frescobaldi family well, and Francesco Frescobaldi was close to Cromwell, he was still young when he found Cromwell begging in the streets. Francesco’s father, merchant Girolamo Frescobaldi, a wealthy banker and merchant based out of Florence, Antwerp, and London, took in the Englishman, and Cromwell grew close to Girolamo’s sons Francesco and Leonardo. Cromwell had found his new home and family.

Cromwell, an uneducated Putney boy, likely humbled out of his childish bully behaviour by a stint in the army, found himself living at the heart of the Renaissance. Florence sat at the centre of all artistic, scientific, humanist, and technological changes going on throughout Europe. The boy who could have looked forward to a lifetime of pouring ale or scouring and carding wool suddenly sat at the centre of the rediscovery of classical texts. The quality and quantity of literature greatly increased, as did the innovations in medicine, architecture, mathematics, arts, and engineering, all within Cromwell’s grasp. The political and financial development in Florence had also had a tremendous overhaul, leaving copious opportunities for Cromwell to aspire to and emulate. The Renaissance humanist beliefs brought science and the arts together for the first time, allowing the pair to be appreciated for their importance. Cromwell, working for the pro-English Frescobaldi family, would learn how to conquer languages, become a lawyer, a merchant, and investor. All these things were suddenly possible in a new world.

In 1504, Michelangelo unveiled his statue of David in Palazzo Vecchio, a symbol of civil liberties, something Cromwell would have walked past on his daily tasks in the civic centre of the city.⁵³ Notions of freedom of thought, of speech and ideas, were something the young man could embrace, his passion of being self-taught allowed open season on a variety of subjects. It is likely the literature of the era, with the rediscovery of the classics, is where Cromwell taught himself his Latin and Greek skills, and the works he collected would end up pride of place in his Austin Friars library later in life. This environment would have undoubtedly changed Thomas Cromwell’s outlook. The freedom, the artistic explosion, the propulsion of new ideas all would have been a feast for a quick, intelligent, and charming young man. While Florence was a city of haves and havenots, like any city of the period, Florence offered hope for Cromwell. England had never given him such possibility.

While Cromwell could not know that he would take on politics in later life, one inescapable influence was Niccolò Machiavelli. While Soderini ruled over Florence, it was Secretary Machiavelli that had a profound impact on the city during his reign, and the timeless influence of Machiavelli’s literary works did not escape Cromwell. He possessed published works by Machiavelli, and likely also handwritten, popular works such as The Prince and Discourses on Livy, both of which would not be printed until 1532. Machiavelli’s blazing new style of government can be directly seen in Cromwell’s later work. Before Machiavelli, political science was almost an alien concept, with rulers only placed into prominent positions by birthright. Machiavelli set out to show how power could be effectively used, crafted by a mind not encumbered with old school thought processes. Men like Machiavelli paved a way for men like Cromwell, showing that a man can be serious and rule effectively while also turning their intellect to more joyous avenues. Machiavelli worked in government but also freely wrote poetry and plays.⁵⁴ He overhauled the Florentine army and worked on diplomatic relations while creating music and literature. Machiavelli showed men like Cromwell how to balance cunning and manipulation with morality and principle. While he likely did not realise it, Thomas Cromwell was standing at the precipice of limitless knowledge. As Thomas Cromwell would one day do himself, Machiavelli sat as a private mind behind the public ruler, establishing new foundations in Florence at a time of immense change in power, thought, art, science, war, and control. Machiavelli did not play by the rules – he rewrote the rules of what a kingdom could or could not do. He did not see issues through traditional means; he saw it as a game of chess, where situations could be manipulated to achieve a new outcome. Machiavelli could remove morality from a situation when a difficult situation arose, and while this may have appeared distasteful or even downright cruel, Machiavelli learned how to stomach these trials.⁵⁵ Cromwell would one day rule in the same manner. But for now, Cromwell was about to find himself at the heart of a clandestine project to help King Henry VII.

Chapter 2

1505–1512: Duplicity

‘more by token he knew him to be English’

It took a quick mind to survive in Florence. The dialect spoken by Cromwell’s master in the army would have been different to those Florentines in the regiment who fought in Naples. Hundreds of variants of languages would have crossed Cromwell’s path as he trekked through France and Italy into Naples and then north to a new life in Florence. Now in the household of the Frescobaldi, communication again would be vital. There is no way to fully ascertain which variants of Italian and French Cromwell had already gathered, though letters in his hand show a traditional form of French understood today, and his