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 20th 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.
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:
- 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.
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.
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