CROMWELL, Thomas (by 1485-1540), of London.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

1523
1536

Family and Education

b. by 1485, o.s. of Walter Cromwell alias Smith of Putney, Surr. m. by 1516, Elizabeth, da. of Henry Wykes of Putney, wid. of Thomas Williams, 1s. Gregory 2da.; 1da. illegit. Kntd. 18 July 1536; KG nom. 5 Aug., inst. 26 Aug. 1537; cr. Baron Cromwell 9 July 1536, Earl of Essex 17 Apr. 1540.3

Offices Held

Member, household of Cardinal Wolsey c.1516-30, of his council by 1519, sec. by 1529; commr. subsidy, London 1524, Kent 1534, for printing of Bible 1539, for sale of crown lands 1539, 1540; Councillor by Jan. 1531; master of King’s jewels 14 Apr. 1532, jt. (with Sir John Williams) c.1535-d.; clerk of the hanaper 16 July 1532, jt. (with Ralph Sadler) Apr. 1535-d.; chancellor, the Exchequer 12 Apr. 1533- d. ; recorder, Bristol 1533-d., steward, Westminster abbey 12 Sept. 1533, jt. (with Robert Wroth) 14 Feb. 1534-May 1535, lordships of Edmonton and Sayesbery, Mdx. May 1535, of Havering-atte-Bower, Essex Dec. 1537, manor of Writtle, Essex June 1536, honor of Rayleigh, Essex Sept. 1539; jt. (with Sir William Paulet) surveyor, the King’s woods by 1533; principal sec. c. Apr. 1534-Apr. 1540; master of the rolls 8 Oct. 1534-10 July 1536; jt. (with Richard Cromwell alias Williams*) constable, Hertford castle, Herts. 1534-d., Berkeley castle, Glos. 1535-d., sole, Leeds castle, Kent 4 Jan. 1539-d.; visitor-gen. monasteries 21 Jan. 1535; steward, duchy of Lancaster, Essex, Herts. and Mdx. 12 May 1535-d., steward, Savoy manor May 1535-d.; chancellor, high steward and visitor, Camb. univ. 1535-d.; j.p. Bristol, Kent, Mdx., Surr. 1535-d.; Essex 1536-d., Derbys., Westmld. 1537-d., all counties 1538-d.; prebendary, Salisbury May 1536-d.; receiver of petitions in the Lords, Parlt. of 1536, trier, Parlt. of 1539; ld. privy seal 2 July 1536-d.; vicar-gen. and vicegerent of the King in spirituals 18 July 1536; dean, Wells 1537-d.; warden and c.j. in eyre, N. of Trent 30 Dec. 1537-d.; gov. I.o.W. 2 Nov. 1538-d.; gt. chamberlain 17 Apr. 1540; numerous minor offices.4

Biography

Thomas Cromwell was the son of a Putney cloth-worker and alehouse keeper but the obscurity of his early life owes less to his humble origin than to the varied and exotic character of his pursuits. While still in his teens he was compelled, in circumstances which remain unknown, to leave the country. Passing through the Netherlands, he is said to have found employment in Italy, first as a soldier (he is reputed to have fought at the Garigliano in 1503) and then with the Venetian banking house of Frescobaldi. He was in Rome early in 1514 but in the course of that year he returned to the Netherlands and soon afterwards came back to England, where he married a widow and settled in London. He was to go to Italy again in 1517-18 to help the town of Boston obtain a bull of indulgence from Pope Leo X. On this journey he is supposed to have learned by heart Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament. His earlier travels had made him fluent in Italian and probably in French; he also knew Latin and perhaps had some Greek.5

Cromwell followed a business career in London, dealing in cloth and lending money, but he also picked up enough law to establish the successful practice which is first glimpsed about 1518. Although by then a servant of Wolsey he continued to have other clients throughout his years with the cardinal and even after he entered the royal service. Who or what brought him to Wolsey’s notice is not known. The intermediary could have been the 2nd Marquess of Dorset, although the only surviving evidence of Cromwell’s connexion with the Grey family dates from 1522, and the dowager marchioness’s description of him as her son’s servant may mean no more than that he was one of Dorset’s lawyers. Another possible agent is the Robert Cromwell who was vicar of Battersea and overseer of works there for Wolsey. It may even be that Cromwell had brought a recommendation on his return from Antwerp, perhaps to the Luccese merchant Antonio Bonvisi, whose friendship he was to share with Thomas More and whose customers included Wolsey. Cromwell, like More, had a talent for friendship and he had already a wide acquaintanceship.6

It was doubtless to Wolsey that Cromwell owed his election to the Parliament of 1523, the only one summoned during the 14 years of the chancellorship. Wolsey could have nominated his servant for almost any seat, but as he held the bishopric of Bath and Wells in commendam until shortly before the Parliament met, when he was succeeded by his chaplain John Clerke, the city of Bath is a distinct possibility, with Cromwell’s interest in the cloth trade an additional recommendation. That Cromwell was a Member appears from his statement in a letter of 17 Aug. that he and others had ‘endured a Parliament which continued by the space of 17 whole weeks’, although this was to ignore its three-week prorogation. He also prepared—the draft survives in the hand of one of his clerks—and may have delivered a speech against the war with France which the Parliament had been summoned to finance; he maintained that France could not be successfully invaded because of logistic difficulties and that the better plan was to conquer Scotland and unite it with England. Strange as such arguments may appear emanating from a servant of Wolsey, they might be explained, as has been recently suggested, if Wolsey himself was sufficiently opposed to the aggressive foreign policy favoured by the King to look to Parliament to frustrate it by refusing supply. Given the country’s hostility to an excessive subsidy, what was needed was to give the Commons its head by means of the liberty of speech claimed by Speaker More. Cromwell’s own epitaph on the Parliament shows how widely the debates ranged:

we communed of war, peace, strife, contentation, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, perjury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemperance, treason, murder, felony, conciliation and also how a commonwealth might be edified. However, in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say, as well as we might and left where we began.7

Later in 1523 Cromwell served on the inquest of wardmote in Broadstreet ward. In the following year he was included in the London subsidy commission, was admitted to Gray’s Inn and at Wolsey’s direction embarked on the suppression of some 30 smaller monastic communities for the benefit of the cardinal’s educational foundations at Ipswich and Oxford. He was to be involved at every stage of this project and according to George Cavendish his continued interest in it after Wolsey’s attainder was the occasion of his access to the King, ‘by means whereof and by his witty demeanour he grew continually into the King’s favour’. After Wolsey’s withdrawal from the court, first to Esher and then to York, Cromwell remained his factotum and partisan. Although he had no option but to assist the crown in preparing the charge of praemunire against Wolsey he did his best for his old master. When a bill of articles was introduced into the Parliament of 1529 condemning Wolsey of treason it was he who ‘inveighed’ against it ‘so discreetly, with such witty persuasions and deep reasons, that the same bill could take there no effect’.8

Cromwell’s return to that Parliament has provoked much discussion, and understandably so, for the circumstances are far from clear. It was not until the end of October, within a few days of the opening, that he seems to have made a bid for a seat. The reason for such untypical slowness can scarcely have been other than his doubt whether, as Wolsey’s right hand man, he could procure one without falling foul of authority. That is why, when he resolved to do so, his first step was to obtain, with the help of his clerk Ralph Sadler, Sir John Gage and the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, the King’s agreement to his election, albeit on condition that he should conduct himself in the House according to royal instructions. That obstacle removed, on 1 Nov., he still had to find a seat. With but two days left the prospect of finding a vacant one was negligible; the only hope was to replace someone already elected who could be persuaded to stand down.9

How this was contrived has to be deduced from two prime pieces of evidence. The first, and more direct, is Cavendish’s statement that Cromwell replaced the son of his friend Thomas Rush; the second is Sadler’s promise to obey Cromwell’s instruction to ‘require’ Sir William Paulet to release a seat for one of the boroughs belonging to Wolsey as bishop of Winchester. The fact that Cromwell did come in for one of these boroughs, Taunton, whereas Sadler seems to imply that the vacancy created by the withdrawal of Rush’s son would be at Orford, has given rise to the impression that these were alternative openings and hence to the conclusion that Paulet was turned to only after the Orford plan failed. The confusion has been thickened by the failure to identify Rush’s ‘so’ as his stepson Thomas Alvard; the eldest of Rush’s sons by the widowed Anne Alvard could have been only in his early twenties at the time of the election, when Alvard was at least 36 and, like his stepfather, a man of consequence in Wolsey’s entourage and a friend of Cromwell.10

That it was not Alvard whom Cromwell might have replaced at Orford is clear from the election there of two other men. Yet one of those men, Erasmus Paston, was such as Rush might have tried to supplant; the seat which he took had probably come by 1529 under the patronage of the Duke of Suffolk, with whom Rush had long been associated, while Rush’s own standing at Orford could have counted for something. Thus if it was at Orford that Rush was expected to intervene it could not have been at the expense of his stepson, who was not elected there, and Cavendish’s statement, if it is to be accepted, must apply to a different borough. The obvious first choice is Ipswich, where Rush’s influence was at its strongest and where he himself was to take the senior seat; but although Rush may well have hoped that his stepson would be his fellow-Member (as Alvard was later to become, by way of a by-election) the issue had been decided three weeks earlier when Thomas Hayward, the Ipswich common clerk, had been elected. With Orford and Ipswich thus ruled out there appears to be only one way of reconciling Cavendish’s statement with the rest of the evidence, namely, by concluding that it was at Taunton that Cromwell replaced Alvard. It is not hard to imagine that if Rush had failed to find Alvard a seat nearer home he should have turned to one of Wolsey’s boroughs, where Paulet as steward evidently handled the nominations; nor would it be surprising if, once Cromwell had gained the King’s consent to his own election, Rush and Alvard had yielded to his superior claim and Paulet had substituted his name on the return. Whether the King or Norfolk brought any pressure to bear it is impossible to say.

Upwards of two years were to elapse before this last-minute scramble into the Commons was to issue in an unprecedented mastery of that assembly. Cromwell was probably admitted to the Council shortly after Wolsey’s death in November 1530: he is first mentioned as a Councillor early in the following January. He soon made himself the Council’s expert on parliamentary matters. It looks as though he assumed this role during the second session (January-March 1531) of the Parliament of 1529. By the summer of 1531 it was commonly believed in London that ‘Mr. Cromwell penned certain matters in the parliament house, which no man gainsaid’, and when the session ended he removed the 29 bills which were then left unfinished to the safety of his counting house. In the autumn Henry VIII directed him to co-operate with members of the King’s legal council in preparing bills for treason, sewers and apparel in readiness for the next session, and at the close of that session in May 1532 he again removed the unfinished bills, 16 in number. His remembrances often include topics to be legislated on and occasionally mention bills in progress, as when in 1534 the bills for faculties and for dairy produce were due to be engrossed. From 1532, at least, he used a group recruited by himself to compile a programme of reform for embodiment in statutes, while others not in his employ, like John Rastell, submitted their own proposals for his consideration. Corporations, monastic houses and private individuals sought his advice and approval for measures they wanted to see enacted, and to that end plied him with gifts. To judge from the requests emanating from these quarters he seems to have been consulted in 1532 mainly as a legal adviser, but later the mounting demands of the crown left him little time for such private business. He took great care over the drafting of bills; corrections in his hand appear at different stages of those for tinworks and harbours in Devon and Cornwall (23 Hen. VIII, c.8), for restraint of appeals (24 Hen. VIII, c.12) and for pewterers (25 Hen. VIII, c.9). In 1536 he had included in the Act (27 Hen. VIII, c.47) making the King heir to the 5th Earl of Northumberland’s lands a proviso protecting an annuity given him by the earl.11

By the spring of 1532 Cromwell was in a position to supervise a sizeable change in the composition of the House. Having first established, by means of an annotated copy of the Crown Office list, the vacancies created by deaths or elevations to the Lords since the Parliament began, he initiated a series of by-elections. This was prefaced by the compilation by Thomas Wriothesley of a further list on which, out of 29 vacancies recorded, 17 were accompanied by the names of those recommended to fill them and a further eight by the names of the personages entitled to nominate, these being the King (for four seats), the attorney-general, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and the lord warden of the Cinque Ports. The fact that for the most part each vacancy is accompanied by two names implies that Wriothesley either took it on himself, or was told, to furnish such a choice. What then befell the document was clearly Cromwell’s doing: it was he who placed a small circle against one out of each pair of names (or when both seats were vacant two out of three) as well as adding six vacancies and in four of these cases entering a single name. This is not to say that Cromwell was alone responsible for these choices, in which the King may have had a hand. Nor in the absence of by-election returns is there much evidence to show whether the persons so designated were successful. Only Sir John Neville II and John Scudamore are known to have come in for their respective shires; Sir Francis Bryan and Sir Henry Long were by-elected, although not for certain as knights of the shire; and the balance of probability is that Sir Thomas Cheyne, Sir Arthur Hopton, Sir John St. John and William Skipwith joined them in the House. On the other hand, Richard Sapcote seems to have been dismayed by Audley’s and Cromwell’s instructions to solicit support for his own election for Huntingdonshire, where Thomas Hall II (q.v.) was already in the field.12

Although this list reflects Cromwell’s interest in the recruitment of Members, it reveals little effort on his part to introduce his own dependants or associates. The great majority of the names are those of men of independent standing in their localities, and Cromwell’s—if they were his own—choices between them are scarcely revealing. But as yet he was standing only on the threshold of supremacy; the year that followed shows him wielding increasing influence on behalf of particular individuals. The loss of so many returns puts out of the question any measurement of his intervention: out of some 40 by-elections known or presumed to have been held from the beginning of 1533 to the close of the Parliament, 16 produced Members whose names have not survived. Yet the names which are known include those of several men who stood close to Cromwell, among them Thomas Alvard, Sir Francis Bigod, David Broke, Sir Roger Cholmley, Thomas Derby, John Goodall and Robert Southwell.

Of Cromwell’s technique for controlling the House only fragments of evidence exist. The most interesting is furnished by two documents believed to date from 1533. The first is a list of 36 names (originally at least 37, the first being lost through the tearing of the paper), all of men known or presumed to have been Members at that time. Against A. F. Pollard’s suggestion that the list was a sounding board of parliamentary opinion it may be urged that from what is known of the outlook of the men concerned the majority of them were unsympathetic to the breach with the pope and that this was why their names were thus brought together on the list. Again, the most likely occasion of its production was the passage through the House of the bill against appeals to Rome, the outstanding measure of the fourth session. Evidence of opposition to this bill is not lacking, and it includes the stand taken, albeit temporarily, by Sir George Throckmorton, whose name heads the list in its present form. That the list is of official provenance is shown by the order in which the names appear; they were clearly derived from a scrutiny of the Crown Office list. If the list may be taken to represent an effort by authority, doubtless in the person of Cromwell, to identify the Members most likely to give trouble, the use, if any, to which it was put remains a matter for speculation. We do not know of any Member other than Throckmorton who was taken to task, but the addition to 18 of the names on the list of the person’s domicile (in some cases seemingly of his diocese) prompts the thought that some local action may have been contemplated.13

Of quite another character is the second list, which contains the names of 50 Members. Unlike those of the first, its names are arranged in no discernible order save that as originally set down they began with five holders of high office, Cromwell himself standing first as ‘Mr Secretary’. This official group is followed by 16 knights of the shire and 22 Members for cities and boroughs, the constituencies of the remaining seven Members being uncertain or unknown. Both the ratio between knights and borough Members, and the wide geographical spread of their constituencies, make this assemblage a fair sample of the House, and this in turn suggests that the names are those of a committee, although whether operative or merely intended remains unknown. In the absence of the Journal nothing can be learned of the use of committees during this Parliament, but it is reasonable to assume that they were resorted to only for bills of importance and then only if these gave rise to difficulty. Outstanding among such bills was the treasons bill passed in the seventh session, and the evident disquiet which it aroused in the House could well have led to its committal to this group of Members. In that event, the chief interest of the list would lie in its apparent counterbalancing of the ‘official’ group by a number of Members likely to be critical, among them seven or eight of those named in the earlier list. Although the names of several of Cromwell’s close associates are to be found on it, the list can in no way be construed as a product of official packing.14

Cromwell’s management of this Parliament doubtless included the timing of its recurrent prorogations, which matched the vicissitudes of the political and religious scene, and of its eventual dissolution. In retrospect this final act was to prove a blunder, for within two weeks of the dissolution a fresh Parliament had to be summoned in consequence of the King’s decision to make away with his second Queen. It was with the intention of making the new Parliament in effect yet another and concluding session of the previous one that the King caused the writs to be accompanied by a request for the re-election of the same Members; the device had been used once before in the reign, in respect of the Parliament of 1515. In theory, therefore, the Parliament of 1536 furnished no opportunity to Cromwell to intervene in the elections, which should have been predetermined. In fact, the outcome was somewhat different. Of the 312 Members presumed to have been returned the names of over two thirds are irrecoverably lost; of the 68 whose names are known 47 had certainly and a further four had probably sat in the previous Parliament, while 15 had certainly not and two had probably not done so. If these Members were roughly representative of the whole, it follows that approximately three quarters of the Commons of 1536 were old Members and one quarter fresh ones, and that the royal request met with less than universal compliance. Some degree of change would have been unavoidable: old age, sickness or death, and in one or two cases appointment to debarring office, must have excluded some former Members from reelection, but the majority of those who did not reappear probably found other reasons or were officially discouraged or eliminated.

Cromwell’s role in the matter has to be gauged from the only two known examples of his intervention. The first is his notorious insistence that the city of Canterbury, which had elected—perhaps in ignorance of the King’s request—two new Members, should set them aside in favour of its previous ones. The second, which has attracted less notice, is his imposition of two nominees in place of the previous Members for Buckingham. This departure from the general requirement is best explained by the presumption that the two men so displaced were unacceptable by reason of their connexion with the doomed Queen. Whether Cromwell took steps to exclude other similar undesirables cannot be known, nor is there more than a hint that he promoted the election of men of his own choosing, although both Richard Pollard and Ralph Sadler owed their nominations to him.15

It is not even clear whether Cromwell’s own election accorded with the royal request. Although there can be little doubt that he was returned for a shire, its identity remains a matter of guesswork, with Kent as the probable favourite in view of his recent acquisition of property there. In that case he could have been re-elected, for the death of Sir Henry Guildford in May 1532 had created a vacancy which Cromwell may have filled by exchanging Taunton for the more prestigious knighthood of a shire. The importance of his presence in the House was to be implicitly recognized by the circumstances of his ennoblement. Although this took place in the middle of the session, his patent exempted him from taking his seat in the Lords for the remainder of the Parliament and he did so only in the afternoon of the day of dissolution. One of the Acts of this Parliament (28 Hen. VIII, c.50) established his title to the manor of Wimbledon and other properties recently granted to him by the King. Throughout the session he was a frequent bearer of bills to the Lords.16

In June 1538 John Hull II, the collector of customs at Exeter, wrote to Cromwell to enlist his support for a bill which the city wished to introduce in the Parliament then thought imminent, but another nine months elapsed before the writs were issued. Cromwell was then to assure the King that he ‘and other your dedicate Councillors be about to bring all things so to pass that your majesty had never had more tractable Parliament’, and went on to describe the work of Sir William Fitzwilliam I, Earl of Southampton, in Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex. The Duke of Norfolk sent the minister a list of the boroughs in his control and ended ‘In all the shires of my commission [as commander in the north], save Lancashire, I have put such order that such shall be chosen as I doubt not shall serve his highness according to his pleasure; and likewise I did in Norfolk and Suffolk before my last coming here’. Only in the instances of the earl and the duke is there documentary evidence to bear out Cromwell’s assertion that other members of the Council played an active part in the period before the elections, but analysis of the men returned to the Parliament and of their connexions suggests that other Councillors were equally diligent. The letters from earl and duke to King and minister, together with Cromwell’s own statement, leave little doubt that the decision to influence the elections was a conciliar one and that the decision was put into effect by the whole Council with Cromwell acting as coordinator.17

Of Cromwell’s own, more direct, part in the election of 1539 there are a few tantalizing glimpses. In Hampshire he seems not to have trusted Bishop Gardiner of Winchester to manage the shire election in the crown’s interest as he himself wrote to the freeholders on behalf of Thomas Wriothesley and John Kingsmill: Kingsmill being sheriff, the election was postponed until the King’s pleasure became known, when Wriothesley was returned with Cromwell’s servant Richard Worsley. On Cromwell’s instructions the cellarer of the Household, Richard Hill of Hartley Wintney, had rallied his neighbours and tenants to ensure the return of the minister’s nominees against opposition from Gardiner. In Norfolk Cromwell obtained the support of Sir Edmund Knyvet in persuading his friends to vote for Edmund Wyndham and Richard Southwell as knights of the shire, but then upset Knyvet who at the election offered himself as an alternative to Southwell. At Norwich the election for the city’s Members had already been held when Cromwell’s nomination of John Godsalve arrived, but the city obliged the minister by asking for a new writ to warrant a second election and then by returning Godsalve. Cromwell also obtained a nomination at Gatton after it had been promised to another. Whom he sponsored there is not recorded, but for such an undistinguished borough it is unlikely to have been Richard Morison, the pamphleteer selected as a government spokesman during the Parliament whose nomination by himself the minister singled out for mention to the King.18

Two weeks before the opening of Parliament Cromwell contracted a fever which still troubled him on 4 May, but he was sufficiently recovered six days later to take his place in the Lords. That when he did so he took his place as vicegerent, with precedence before all save the King, not as Baron Cromwell sitting with the rest of the barons, creates a strong presumption that he delayed his recovery until the bill regulating seating in the Lords had been passed and put into effect. The gravity of his illness can be gauged by his failure to have ready for introduction into Parliament the legislative programme outlined by him in the previous March, in particular ‘a device ... for the unity in religion’. The measure to give proclamations greater effect met with opposition and its passage through Parliament diverted Cromwell’s attention from the committee under his chairmanship to establish uniformity. This enabled Norfolk to accuse him of slothfulness as vicegerent and to present the Lords with six major doctrinal issues in the form of questions so framed as to demand strictly traditional answers. Although outmanoeuvred Cromwell continued to pursue a line of moderation until the King announced his own support for Norfolk’s orthodoxy. The bill introduced in the second session and passed as the Act of Six Articles (31 Hen. VIII, c.14) reflected the beliefs of men unsympathetic towards reform and the vicegerent. Yet despite these setbacks Cromwell remained the King’s chief minister. The Act changing the custom of gavelkind in Kent (31 Hen. VIII, c.3) names Cromwell first among its beneficiaries: this subsumed a private bill settling certain lands on himself and his heirs which passed through both Houses but never received the assent.19

During the prorogation Cromwell pressed ahead with reform of the Household and concluded a treaty of marriage and defence between England and Cleves, but Henry VIII took against his new Queen. After two postponements Parliament reassembled on 12 Apr. 1540. Cromwell opened the session with a speech on the need for unity and concord in religion, but in the event he obtained only a short enabling Act (32 Hen. VIII, c.26) looking to future decisions from two committees of bishops ordered to formulate a definition of doctrine and to draw up a book of authorized ceremonies. The greater part of the government legislation inaugurated by him fared better. On 17 Apr. Cromwell was raised to the earldom of Essex and given the office of chamberlain, resigning his secretaryship in favour of Sir Ralph Sadler and Sir Thomas Wriothesley. The King’s infatuation with Catherine Howard and decision to divorce Anne of Cleves to marry Catherine left Cromwell with the task of putting asunder the union that he had long promoted, and thus reviving the Howard interest at court. In late May he had arrested the deputy of Calais and the bishop of Chichester on charges of intrigue with Cardinal Pole, but on 10 June after a morning in the House of Lords he himself was arrested at a council meeting in the afternoon and accused of heresy and treason. Taken to the Tower and his possessions seized, Cromwell was condemned without a trial. His sentence was confirmed by an Act of attainder (32 Hen. VIII, no.52) but he was allowed to languish in captivity as long as his testimony about the King’s repugnance for Anne of Cleves was of use in the royal divorce proceedings. The divorce completed, Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill on 28 July. A parliamentary bill confirming an exchange of lands between himself and the King was killed by his downfall. Copies of his portrait by Holbein survive but not the original.20

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: S. T. Bindoff

Notes

  • 1. LP Hen. VIII, iii. 3249.
  • 2. Ibid. xi. 34.
  • 3. Date of birth estimated from marriage. This biography rests on the numerous writings of Prof. G.R. Elton and on B. W. Beckingsale, Thomas Cromwell. DNB; CP.
  • 4. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, lxviii. 193; LP Hen. VIII, iv-xiii; Somerville, Duchy, i. 604, 606, 614; Bristol AO, 04026/2/202; Westminster abbey reg. 2, ff. 288, 298; LJ, i. 84, 103.
  • 5. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, lxviii. 193-5.
  • 6. Ibid. lxviii. 194; M. L. Robertson, ‘Cromwell’s servants’ (Univ. California Los Angeles Ph.D. thesis, 1975), 44-45; LP Hen. VIII, ii-iv.
  • 7. LP Hen. VIII, iii. 2958, 3249; R. L. Woods, ‘Pol. and precedent: Wolsey’s Parlt. of 1523’, HLQ, xl. 297-312; Merriman, Cromwell, i. 30-44.
  • 8. LP Hen. VIII, iii, iv; J. Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 27-29; J. E. Oxley, Ref. in Essex, 70-81; G. Cavendish, Wolsey (EETS ccxliii), 112-13, 123-7, 129-32.
  • 9. LP Hen. VIII, iv; A. J. Slavin, Pol. and Profit, 19-20.
  • 10. Cavendish, 112; Slavin, 19.
  • 11. LP Hen. VIII, iv-xi, xiv, xv; Elton, Reform and Renewal, 78-97 passim; Policy and Police, 101; ‘Parlty. drafts 1529-40’, Bull. IHR, xxv. 117-32; xxvii. 198-200; ‘The evolution of a parlty. statute’, EHR, lxiv. 174-94; ‘The Commons supplication of 1532’, EHR, lxvi. 507-34; ‘An early Tudor poor law’, Econ. Hist. Rev. (ser. 2), vi. 55-67.
  • 12. LP Hen. VIII, vii vii. 56 citing SP1/82, ff. 59-62; A. F. Pollard, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s parlty. lists’, Bull. IHR, ix. 31-43.
  • 13. LP Hen. VIII, vii. 1522(ii) citing SP1/87, f. 106v; ix. 1077 citing SP1/99, p. 234; Bull. IHR, ix. 31-43.
  • 14. LP Hen. VIII, vii. 1522(ii) citing SP1/87, f. 106v; Bull. IHR, ix. 31-43.
  • 15. LP Hen. VIII, x. 40(ii) citing Cott. Otho C10, f. 218.
  • 16. Elton, Eng. under the Tudors, 175; LJ, i. 88, 95, 97-101.
  • 17. LP Hen. VIII, x, xiv.
  • 18. Ibid. xiv; Norwich mayors’ ct. bk. f. 152 ex inf. Dr. J. Miklovich.
  • 19. LP Hen. VIII, xiv; LJ, i. 103-25.
  • 20. LP Hen. VIII, xv; LJ, i. 128-43; Elton, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s decline and fall’, Camb. Hist. Jnl. x. 150-85; R. C. Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraiture, 112-14.