versation we may form some conception from the warm expressions used by a business friend, John Creke, writing to him from Spain in 1522. ‘Carissimo quanto homo in questo mondo,’ the letter begins, and in the course of it we meet with the following passage: ‘ My heart mourneth for your company and Mr. Wodal's as ever it did for men. As I am a true christian man I never had so faithful affection to men of so short acquaintance in my life; the which affection increaseth as fire daily. God knoweth what pain I receive in departing when I remember our ghostly walking in your garden. It made me desperate to contemplate. I would write larger; my heart will not let me’ (ib. No. 2394).
We may even catch the flavour of Cromwell's witty conversation in a letter which he addresses to this same correspondent after the session of parliament was over. ‘Supposing ye desire to know the news current in these parts,’ he writes, ‘for it is said that news refresheth the spirit of life; wherefore ye shall understand that I, amongst other, have endured a parliament, which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attempraunce, treason, murder, felony, consylu … (?), and also how a commonwealth might be edified, and also continued within our realm. Howbeit, 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. … We have in our parliament granted unto the king's highness a right large subsidy, the like whereof was never granted in this realm’ (ib. No. 3249).
In 1524 Cromwell became a member of Gray's Inn, and in the same year Wolsey made use of his services in the great work on which he had set his heart—the suppression of a number of small monasteries with a view to the endowment of his two proposed colleges in Ipswich and Oxford. As early as 4 Jan. 1525 he commissioned three persons, of whom Cromwell was one, to survey some of these monasteries (ib. vol. iv. No. 989). On 1 Aug. 1526 an agent writes to Cromwell acknowledging receipt of orders to take down the bells of one of them—the abbey of Beigham in Sussex (ib. No. 2365). Cromwell himself was personally present at the surrender and dissolution of others (ib. 1137 (16), 4117). Necessary as the work was for a really great purpose, the demolition even of these small houses was exceedingly unpopular, and the way in which it was done seems to have been truly scandalous. Complaints were made to the king about the conduct of Wolsey's agents, and the king's secretary, Knight, wrote to Wolsey himself that ‘incredible things’ were spoken of the way in which Cromwell and Allen (afterwards archbishop of Dublin) [see Allen, John, 1476–1534] had executed their commission (ib. No. 3360). Wolsey's influence, it is to be feared, protected them from well-merited censure. Cromwell was addressed by correspondents as ‘councillor to my lord cardinal’ (ib. Nos. 2347–8, 3379). He was receiver-general of Cardinal's College at Oxford, and an equally important agent at Ipswich (ib. Nos. 3461, 3536, 4441). He drew up all the necessary deeds for the foundation of those colleges (ib. No. 5186). We have the accounts of his expenses in connection with both of them. All Wolsey's legal business seems to have passed through his hands, and he was still able to manage the affairs of a good many clients besides—among others of that same guild of Our Lady at Boston in whose behalf he had formerly gone to Rome (ib. Nos. 5437, 5460). In 1527 his wife died at Stepney. In June 1528 we find him staying with Wolsey at Hampton Court (ib. No. 4350). In 1529 Anne Boleyn wrote to him addressing him as ‘secretary of my lord,’ a post previously filled by Gardiner, whom the king had just before taken from Wolsey's service into his own (ib. No. 5366).
In July 1529, being then in very prosperous circumstances, he made a draft will (ib. No. 5772), which remains to us in manuscript, with bequests to his son Gregory, his sisters Elizabeth and Catherine, and his late wife's sister Joan, wife of John Williamson; to William Wellyfed, the husband of his sister Elizabeth, and their children, Christopher, William, and Alice; to Richard Williams (the son of his sister Catherine, who afterwards changed his surname to Cromwell and became ancestor of the great Oliver), who seems to have been then in, or to have just left, the service of the Marquis of Dorset; and finally to his daughters Anne and Grace. His son Gregory, who was summoned to parliament as Baron Cromwell a year before his father's death, was a dull lad, on whose education much pains was bestowed by different masters, and who was ultimately sent to Cambridge in 1528 with his cousin, Christopher Wellyfed. They were both placed, and apparently both at Cromwell's charge, under the care of a tutor named Chekynge, whose letters to Cromwell about their progress are not without interest (ib. Nos. 4314, 4433, 4560, 4837, 4916, 5757, 6219, 6722).
Three months after the making of this
