Tudor style; (i) Sumptuary laws and apparel

Original, the Sumptuary law of 1523, 'excesses in apparel'. (British Library)

The assumption to the Throne by King Henry VIII heralded the beginning of a new
and increasingly-prosperous century. By the mid-1500s many aspects of the Renaissance had begun to influence the customs and culture of the Henrician court, with palaces and homes built in lavish style, and with more of the Italianate motifs. England’s sea-power was rapidly assuming dominance; education for more of the population became available and the openness to foreign ideas and trade combined to enrich the national economy.
Yet until the Reformation’s consequences and the rising importance of  the Parliament (both largely masterminded by Thomas Cromwell, as we shall see) could
begin to alter the fabric of the state it was a society dominated by the monarch, the church, and the nobility; England was in a time of transition from the medieval era.
  

We instantly know that she has become Queen because in sumptuary law the colour purple dictates that she is royalty.
Claire Foy as Queen Anne Boleyn, 'Wolf Hall', BBC/PBS 2014

English society and Henry’s opulent Court was subject to the Royal decree and in 1523 came the proclamation of the Statutes of Apparel, c13, which were enacted as the Sumptuary Laws. The King was occupied with all manner of diverse issues of state, such as building-up a formidable navy, directing the course of internal conflicts with the Scots and the ceaseless
diplomatic posturing with the Pope and Continental rivals and yet overseeing the Sumptuary laws was an important means of maintaining social cohesion within the realm.
These legal acts applied to all levels of society and in many ways including what was deemed appropriate to wear. The motives were both based on a form of class control and as a means of fiscal regulation. Penalties for breaches might include fines, suspension from the Court, imprisonment and in extreme violation even death (Holder).

The laws prevented the newly-rich merchant class dressing more impressively than the blue-bloods, and they stipulated that English fabrics were to be used as a means of boosting the economy by, for example, stipulating that only local wool might be used in various garments.
Only the monarch was entitled to wear cloths of gold and purple, and in Cromwell’s
initial engagement with Henry VIII Thomas was relegated to the fustian black cloth that is seen in Holbein’s portrait. Velvet of crimson or blue was prohibited to those below the position of the Knights of the Garter, and yet, ever-ambitious and largely a result of his experitise as a cloth merchant in Antwerp, Cromwell and his family were able to become somewhat more ‘creative’ and at times daring in their fashions. Holbein’s portrait was completed in 1533 when Thomas had been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer so he sat wearing a fine stole of ermine, though of a russet colour.

At Austin Friars Thomas and his wife were attired in such pieces as silk and velvet doublets, a collection exceeding twenty pairs, and nightgowns adorned with fox fur.
Elizabeth Cromwell’s wardrobe included expensive jewellery such as necklaces, rings and a “coif of Venice gold” that illustrated the Italian sense of flair that Cromwell had acquired in Florence (Holder).

- Holder, N. ‘The Medieval Friaries of London’, Ph.D. diss. University of London, 2011, quoted in Borman, p.54. -
- Hooper, W. ‘The Tudor Sumptuary Laws’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 30, No. 119 (Jul., 1915), pp. 433-449. Published by the Oxford University Press.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/551532
- stills and costume production notes are from 'Wolf Hall', BBC TV/PBS, 2014.

A River in Italy

Cromwell’s experiences in Europe began with his involvement in the Second Italian War, a conflict over the Lombardian states of north Italy that had been re-ignited in 1494 when Louis XII of France had sought control over the prosperous mercantile trading cities of
Naples and Milan, which were kingdoms that were included in the loosely-aligned Italian States. In the first Italian War the forces of France and Spain had been invited to protect
the Duke of Milan’s rule and King Charles VIII of France obliged by invading Italy, but in a dramatic twist the Milanese Duke named Ludovico Sforza suddenly switched his allegiances to the Venetian and Neapolitan sides in a united opposition to both the Spanish and the French.

By 1498 France was under the new monarchy of King Louis XII who allied himself with the Republic of Venice and then seized the Duchy of Milan, overthrowing Sforza after which France established a powerful military garrison in Milan that remained unchallenged there for the following ten years. In around 1500, with the might of Spain finally unified under Ferdinand and Isabella who were anxious that Louis XII might advance east and conversely, he feared that the Spanish forces would invade his French kingdom from the west, thus being forced into a war on two fronts. The Treaty of Granada in 1500 appeared to avert conflict however by 1503 the weak truce had dissolved and  in November of that year the two national armies of the Continent’s strongest powers assembled just north of Naples where the Garigliano River acted as a natural barrier to both sides. Possession of the river’s bridge was crucial to apply strategic advantage. (Mallett, M.and Shaw, C., 65 -68).

The Spanish troops moved by stealth to cross the river and caught their French opponents by surprise. Around 300 Norman crossbowmen in French service, including Thomas Cromwell, were occupied as French mercenaries but they were equally out-flanked and out-numbered. The onslaught by the numerically-superior Spanish infantry and cavalry was unstoppable and the French surrendered, with Cromwell fleeing the battlefield lest he be taken prisoner, for as now, mercenaries can expect a terrible fate, they having no legitimate place involved in the clashes of other warring states than their own.  (Borman, 16).

Thomas had expected to gain some measure of wealth and status in the warrior’s role but was
instead left as a itinerant Englishman in northern Italy, aimless and alone. If fortune had deserted him at Garigliano, in time his precise skills with the bow would unexpectedly present him with a path to the glory and prizes of the inner Tudor court, where Henry VIII and the nobility prized a ‘good eye’. But still in Italy, the picaresque Cromwell’s next recorded appearance was as a poverty-stricken young man in the city of Florence, the epicentre of the Italian Renaissance.

 " You have a good eye". Video clip from 'Wolf Hall'. King Henry VIII was fond of the Robin Hood 'man in green' outfit,1. and Thomas was always quick to seize an opportunity - displaying his skill with the longbow that he had refined in the Italian War. (see notes below)

  - Borman, T. pp. 12 -14.
 - Mallett, M. and Christine Shaw. The Italian Wars, 1494–1559: War, State and Society in      Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge. (2012), pp. 65 -68.
  - Video clip, ‘A King should show himself sometimes’, ‘Wolf Hall, BBC-TV/PBS.
  It was not only an idle pastime to be accurate with the longbow as the Tudors of course prided
  themselves as inheritors of the Norman heritage, and Anne Boleyn among other women joined-in these regal archery tournaments. The scene was included in Wolf Hall to illustrate the humiliation
suffered by the haughty gentlemen after the lowly ‘blacksmith’s boy’ had won the King’s  respect.
 It is uncertain if the sequence shown is factual, however it is recorded that Thomas’ early interviews  with the King took place in November 1523, in the gardens of Westminster with Cromwell “dressed in black with a dark beret”, and given the King’s enthusiasm for outdoor pastimes such as jousting and archery the circumstances are plausible. Wilding, P. Thomas Cromwell. London: William Heinemann Ltd (1935), p.42.

1. The King and Robin Hood. On the first May Day of Henry VIII's married life in 1510 he and his friends indulged in some romantic pantomime, bursting into his wife's bedroom disguised as Robin Hood, in the company of his 'merry men' "...all appareled in short cotes of Kentishe Kendal, with hodes (hoods) on their heddes, and hosen of the same, every one of them, his bowe and arroes, and a sworde and bucklar, like out lawes"  - Hall, E. The Union of two noble and illustre families of Lancastre and York, p. 513, published 1548; reprinted London, 1965. Quoted by David Loades in The Tudor Court, London: B.T. Batsford Ltd (1986), p. 99.

Visions of London in the Sixteenth Century

Archival sources have provided the locations of major landmarks in the London that
Thomas Cromwell knew, including his grand house at Austin Friars, however many maps of the time are impractical, being so compressed that individual streets and buildings are difficult to pinpoint, however the published work of John Stow, The Survey of London is regarded as the classic guide to the City (Putney is nowehere to be found in Stow's world), being a comprehensive description of the central London's wards.

Stow's Survey was published in the reign of Elizabeth, in 1598, some fifty years after the demise of Cromwell, and it is noteworthy that Stow took the time to depict Austin Friars from a different political perspective than in the prevailing environment of Henry VIII's reign. Stow writes of the
great house and garden near Brode (Broad) Street, being the property of the Lord Treasurer
named Sir William Powlet. Cromwell's Austin Friars home had been replaced by a rebuilt mansion because Thomas was no longer deemed a person at all, and all of his properties and assets had been seized by the King after the execution in 1540. Stow makes a disparaging reference to Cromwell as the architect of the Reformation who had stolen some twenty feet of Stow's father's garden in Throgmorton Street and who, rather than provide compensation had instead levied his neighbours a weekly rent! Cromwell had extended his boundary wall on three sides, heedless of his neighbour's rights; as a shrewd lawyer and member of the Henrician court Thomas was impervious to recrimination. Stow continues to write glowingly of the rebuilt Austin Friars in another section where Cromwell's name is omitted.  In the Elizabethan era it may have had a modern parallel with the dismantled, much-hated Berlin Wall and those who built it as being a creation best forgotten.

London in the mid-fifteenth century saw an astonishing population growth from some 40, 000 to over 160,000 a century later. By 1700 it had become the largest city in Europe as well as the wealthiest
city of the kingdom.

Hofnagel's London map of 1572, above, is typically cluttered and has little to offer with its disproportionate street dimensions.  

In 2013 six students of the DeMontfort University, Leicestershire developed an award-winning 3D
recreation of Pudding Lane as it existed in around 1666, again, long-after Cromwell's lifetime however it gives us the smoky, densely-populated atmosphere of central London that would 
have been not too far-removed from the houses, streets and Thames bridge that Thomas knew.
The animatiion begins at 0.29.  Two matters of interest are the interior of the blacksmith's shop at
3.05, and that the 'flight' keeps returning to a church-yard, which in the era represents the
centrality of the local place of worship in the collective and individual lives of the English people.
Thomas, after all, had played the pivotal role in giving everyone the Bible in the English text that
at least a substantial number of people could understand. He had learned about a rebel priest and the doors of a church in Wittenberg. But we haven't been with him in northern Germany and Switzerland - yet. 




- Crytek 3D, Pudding Lane, Recreating Seventeenth-Century London.  Journal of Digital Humanities.
Vol. 3, No. 1 Spring 2014
http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-1/pudding-lane-recreating-seventeenth-century-london/
- Stow, John. The Survey of London. First published 1598. Reprinted and revised edition, ed.
   H.B. Wheatley. London: Everyman's Library (1987). 'Broad Street Ward', pp. 157 -159.

Historiography (i); Macavity the Cat

The years of Thomas Cromwell in power were arguably the most crucial in
the early-modern history of England. The changes he masterminded were vast and resonate to this day and yet, so many details of the man’s life are missing, the narrative is incomplete. We might ask if Thomas Cromwell is the sort of man who we might invite into our apartment for dinner so that we can engage him in interesting conversations?
For historians, playwrights and novelists that remains a difficult question.
Everyone who has taken any interest in the Tudor era will have an instant recollection of Thomas Cromwell,  invariably prompting a range of expressions such as ‘sinister’, ‘scheming’, ‘despotic’, the ‘pragmatic King’s fixer’ and so on. For some he remains simply one of the most hated men who ever held public office in all English history.

The exceptional Cambridge scholar Sir Geoffrey Elton was concerned with Cromwell’s role in the Tudor court, the church and the inchoate English state. Elton sifted through obscure manuscripts and records from the Parliamentary archives as well as the Statutes that were enacted during Cromwell’s later years, whereas no attempt was made to write a biography of the man and that was because to Elton, Cromwell 'the man' was a nightmare. Many historians have attempted to peer behind the screen in the last 50 years, looking more at Cromwell’s life, his mind and motives rather than a minute examination of policies, of ransacked monasteries and a nation that began to distance itself from its Continental neighbours, most of which were then under the all-embracing title of the Holy Roman Empire.
Many cannot tear themselves away from Holbein’s portrait of a portly bureaucrat with podgy hands, emotionless and fussy over the papers he closely clutches. Others have more-recently shown a renewed enthusiasm for a task that is certainly problematic.

I have before me a copy of Loades’ biography published in 2013, and in it he devotes a mere
four pages to Cromwell’s upbringing and his sojourn on the Continent. Loades is swift to return Thomas to England and scrutinise his dealings with the Parliament, with the King, Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More, and although a glimpse of the person begins to focus, Loades does not really introduce us in personal terms.

In 2014 Tracy Borman published her biography in which she ticked-off the list of set topics such as the humiliation of Catharine of Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, the downfall of Anne Boleyn and of course the proverbial Man in Black that Holbein gave us.
This work however is significant in devoting at least three chapters to Cromwell’s life, beginning with his birth, his years as a soldier in Italy and as a cloth merchant in the Netherlands. There are several other biographies that I will oversee in due course.

 Diarmaid MacCulloch is the Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford and at the present time he is writing a new Cromwell biography which we may expect in early-2018. MacCulloch explains that the problem with finding the elusive human character of Cromwell is that, as meticulous he was with papers and letters almost all we have are the contents of his in-tray. When Thomas was arrested in 1540, MacCulloch explains, his loyal household clerks and friends sensed that everything that had been sent out in writing – on any number of subjects, would at any moment be seized and would be used with malicious intent by their Master’s enemies. We picture several nights at Austin Friars with manuscripts and letters being consigned to the hearth and in so doing half of the archives were lost.  The drafts and letter-books (handwritten precis of outward correspondence) were the out-tray and the staff’s reasoning was sound in that any suspect’s writings to others were far more valuable to gain a conviction than what he had received.

It ought to noted that the Professor is generalising here, because a very large archive of Cromwell's papers is extant. I have a copy of Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth: Selected Letters, 1523-1540, edited by A. J.  Slavin who  examined and photographed some 400 letters of Thomas Cromwell that are held in the British Library and the Public Records Office. They are however, replies to what came into his 'in-tray', and are confined to official subjects and so they do not express his subjective opinions to any degree.  

Many are just tersely-officious commands, to put it mildly. For example from April 1535, 'To Pole', a curt directive that bears the tone of regal displeasure, for Cardinal Pole had been linked to Yorkist rebels who had been executed for treason. Cromwell warns Pole, "I require you to have indifferent consideration and so to order yourself therein."(Slavin, p. 74.) It is a brief illustration of MacCulloch's complaint, that the surviving correspondence contains no sentimental reminisces of Thomas' past experiences nor what his personal feeings might have been. (but see elsewhere here, where one letter did at least did reveal a wry sense of humour.) 
There is, continues MacCulloch, the problem with writing a Cromwell biography in that he is a close-relative of Macavity the Cat.  T.S. Elliot’s poem describes an elusive mouser named Macavity:

 

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!

We don’t suspect that a mysterious cat is by-default menacing, nor unworthy of our attention and so there is a purpose for examining Cromwell much deeper, and it is becoming clearer that a clarification of the Lord Chancellor’s momentous actions can be found as much as in the person who he became after he left England’s shores as it is in the Statutes. We can examine the journals, diaries, letters and papers of those who knew him to fill in many of the intriguing gaps. Also, the world he inhabited with  its customs, clothes, household rituals.
Like that cat, we can discern a substantial amount about that personal side to Cromwell
as well as explain just how he achieved momentous changes and what his motives were from his deeds. I am not pursuing a shadow. Holbein’s portrait and two book-covers show only one side of Cromwell’s face but I have just begun to see him much closer, in full-face, a vital step before I open my door and begin the dinner-party. He has extraordinary experiences to share with us and so it will be an entertaining night.

- Borman, ibid.

- Loades. ibid.- MacCulloch, D. Thomas Cromwell review – new biography of the hero of Wolf Hall.  September 3, 2014. The Guardian.   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/03/thomas-cromwell-untold-story-tracy-borman-review
- Eliot. T.S. Macavity: The Mystery Cat,  from Collected Poems 1909-1962.
- Slavin, A.J. Ed. Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth: Selected Letters, 1523-1540. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated (1969).

The boy from Putney

The exact details of Thomas Cromwell’s birth are unable to be confirmed by any trace however the year is given as c. 1485, and the place as the home of his parents in Putney, then considered a lawless backwater around four miles distance from Downing Street. For the young Thomas the rough streets of Putney, in the lee of his alcoholic father’s brewhouse were a world-removed from the splendour of the Chapel of St George. A “Putney barmaid” was a slang term for a woman of lax virtue well-into the 20^th century, and in Cromwell’s era it was a Thames-side village to be avoided by the élite, especially at night, a haven for highwaymen and pickpockets.

 His father, Walter, was a jack-of-all-trades, though best-known as a blacksmith and the owner of a brewhouse (Hornsey). A survey of Wimbledon manor in 1617 referred to “an ancient cottage, called the 'smith's shop', lying west of the highway leading from Putney to the Upper-gate, and on the south side of the highway from Richmond to Wandsworth, being the sign of the anchor." (Cadell and Davies, 1792).  Walter Cromwell's occupation has long-confounded historians - touch the link below to Hughes' article in 2015.


Brewhouse Lane, Putney is now the site of a blue plaque which was unveiled in 2015 by Dame Hilary Mantel, and its site is held to be in the general vicinity of Thomas’ birthplace.

In his youth Thomas was by necessity a street-wise tough, often battered by his father and the future eminent statesman would receive no formal schooling there.

Many years later Thomas seemed to relish boasting about his lowly and shabby origins telling Archbishop Cranmer “what a ruffian he was in his younger days” (Foxe) and the Imperial ambassador Chapuys would record that Thomas was an ill-behaved youth who had been imprisoned at one time. The claim of being a criminal was never substantiated but it probably suited Cromwell to paint an even-bleaker picture of his younger days as a means of illustrating just how far he had come in his remarkable life.

Sometime in his teenage years Thomas took a bold step when he uprooted himself from the back-lanes of Putney and made his way to the Continent.
Again, an exact date is unknown but he was believed to be aged around 19 when he
made his way to the Netherlands either as a crewman aboard a ship of the King’s fleet or as a stowaway aboard a merchant vessel.
From the Low Countries he went to France where he placed himself in the role of a mercenary, ‘carrying a pike’. In the war between France and Spain it was known that Scots were often found in the French ranks as mercenaries, and young Thomas decided to fight alongside them in the bitter conflict that was then raging over the north Italian states (Loades).   It was the beginning of an extraordinary education that no person could have even prophesied.  The question ‘why’ he began so far from England remains one of the many conundrums about Thomas Cromwell, and in that crucial regard he has been equated with a bewhiskered, mysterious cat!

Sources:

-          -  Wimbedon survey of 1617: The Environs of London: Volume 1, County of Surrey.                     Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies  (London, 1792).

- ‘ a rufffian’, Foxe, J.  Actes and Monuments, Book III,  (London, 1563) p. 645.
- Hornsey, I. A History of Beer and Brewing (Cambridge, 2009).
- Hughes, O. The Blacksmith, The Brewer or the Shearman: Who Was Thomas Cromwell’s Father?'
   Olga Hughes’ lengthy historiographical analysis of how Merriman, Chapuys and Foxe’s primary         sources have complicated the historian’s studies of Cromwell’s origins. The article is an excellent      explanation of how contemporary sources are shaded by individual writers’ differing ideologies and    interpretations.   http://nerdalicious.com.au/history/the-blacksmith-the-brewer-or-the-shearman-who-was-thomas-        cromwells-father/
 - Loades, D. Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII. (London: Amberley
    Publishing, 2013), p. 14. Loades claims that Cromwell may have run away  from home as        young as about fifteen or sixteen.