Cromwell, THOMAS (malleus monachorum, 'the hammer of the monks'), was born about 1485, the son of a Putney blacksmith, cloth-shearer, brewer, and innkeeper. His youth was turbulent and adventurous. During eight or nine years passed on the Continent (1504-12), he seems to have served as a common soldier, to have been befriended at Florence by Frescobaldi the banker, to have acted as clerk at Antwerp and to a Venetian merchant, to have visited Rome, and to have traded on his own account at Middelburg. Anyhow, by 1513 he was back in England and married; there, step by step, he rose to wealth and importance as a wool-stapler and a scrivener, half usurer, half lawyer, having originally been bred to the law. Wolsey employed him as early as 1514; through Wolsey, probably, he got into parliament (1523); he was Wolsey's chief agent in the unpopular work of suppressing certain smaller monasteries for the endowment of his colleges at Ipswich and Oxford (1525); and finally he became his factotum and secretary. He stepped to greatness over his fallen master. Cavendish tells how on All-Hallows Day, 1529, he found 'Master Cromwell saying of Our Lady matins—which had been since a very strange sight in him'—and bewailing his own misadventure, but intending to ride from Esher to the court, 'where,' quoth he, 'I will either make or mar.' And Pole tells how, a few months earlier, Cromwell bade him take Machiavelli for his guide. Both stories illustrate the very man.
He was cheaply faithful to the cardinal, aiding him not only by quick-witted advice, and by pleading his cause in parliament, but even with £5 out of his own savings. Withal, he made himself friends of Wolsey's enemies; and his fidelity ingratiated him with Henry VIII. Him Cromwell promised to make the richest king ever in England, and counselled him to cut the knot of the divorce by declaring himself supreme head of the church. Counsel and promise were carried into effect by the Act of Supremacy (1534) and by the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-39). To abolish papal authority, break the power of the church, humble the nobility, and make the king absolute, were Cromwell's aims; in their accomplishment he stuck at nothing. At heart, it would seem, still a Catholic—for so late as 1535 he bequeathed £46 for a priest to sing mass for his soul—he yet did his utmost to Protestantise the English Church, whose 'polity,' in the words of Mr Froude, Cromwell's admirer, 'remains as it was left by its creator.' It is often hard to determine whether he was tool or instigator, to disserve his actions from those of Henry; both must be treated under Henry's reign. But here may be noticed his winning manners and ungraceful person, his venality and profusion, his purposeful ruthlessness and ubiquitous industry, his army of spies and vast correspondence—above all, the fact that that English 'Terror,' in which perished More and Fisher and hundreds of lowlier victims, set in with Cromwell's rise, and ebbed with Cromwell's fall. Among the posts and honours showered on him were those of privy-councillor (1531), chancellor of the exchequer (1533), secretary of state and master of the rolls (1534), vicar-general (1535), lord privy seal and Baron Cromwell of Oakham (1536), knight of the Garter and dean of Wells (1537), lord great chamberlain (1539), and finally, on 17th April 1540, Earl of Essex. 'He had,' says Professor Brewer, 'engrossed in his own hands powers such as no subject and no sovereign in this country had ever possessed before or will ever possess again.' But the hand that had so exalted could equally abase him. The hatred all men bore him, the Catholic reaction, and Henry's aversion to Anne of Cleves, the coarse Lutheran consort of Cromwell's choosing, combined to effect his ruin: less than eight weeks after his elevation to the earldom he was arrested and lodged in the Tower. His abject entreaties for 'Mercy, mercy!' availed him nothing; as little did his filthy revelations of Henry's discourse with him touching Anne of Cleves. Condemned under a bill of attainder, his own favourite engine of tyranny, he was bungingly beheaded on Tower Hill, 28th July 1540. See Mr Gairdner's article in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xiii. 1888); Dean Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (vol. vi. chap. 1, 1868); Professor Brewer's article on 'The Royal Supremacy' in English Studies (1881); works cited under HENRY VIII.; and two articles in the Antiquarian Magazine for 1882 by Mr John Phillips of Putney.