Ir sometimes happens that a remarkable man has a very commonplace history; sometimes that a man whose life has been full of strange events has been a person of a very commonplace character: in the present instance the man and his fortunes were alike extraordinary. The life in all its parts has the colour of a legend or romance; both his rise and his fall were rocket-like; but he was neither carried so rapidly to so great a height solely by the force of circumstances, nor would he perhaps have been thrown down as he was but in some degree through that same irrepressibility, and, as we may say, brilliant

VOL. III.

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wildness of nature which had helped him to mount so far above his original condition.

Thomas Cromwell, best known, both in his own day and in our national history, by his first title of nobility, the Lord Cromwell, was born in or near the village of Putney, in Surrey, where his father, Walter Cromwell, it is commonly said, followed the trade first of a blacksmith, afterwards of a brewer; but, according to another account, was a fuller, though that version of the story may possibly have arisen from the circumstance of his mother after his father's death, which appears to have happened when her son was a boy, marrying a London shearman, or cloth-shearer. The date of his birth is not recorded, but it was probably about the year 1490.

Of his other relations we only know that he had a sister who married Morgan Williams, a gentleman of an ancient Welsh family, whose son, changing his name to that of his uncle and patron, became Sir Richard Cromwell, and was the grandfather of Oliver Cromwell the Protector. From this marriage of Thomas Cromwell's sister, which must have taken place before her brother became a great man, since his nephew, Richard Williams, or Cromwell, was then of mature age, and from other considerations which he advances, Noble, the author of the Memoirs of the Protectoral House,' argues that the blacksmith or brewer of Putney was probably, although a tradesman, a man of substance, and by no means, as he has been sometimes represented, a mere handicraftsman or mechanic. "We may presume," says Noble, "that, as the blacksmith was enabled to change his business, from many favourable circumstances, to that of a brewer, which latter was a much superior one in the reign of King Henry VIII. than at present, it is highly probable that, though he died a brewer, he might leave a very good (perhaps large) fortune behind him: we know of many of the noblest families in England that are descended from persons who were lord mayors and sheriffs of London, and others who were of trades which would disgrace (in the estimation of the illiberal) the families of the middling class of people in this kingdom. If we

suppose that Mr. Walter Cromwell, the brewer of Putney, died rich, as there is the highest probability he did not die poor, there can be no reason assigned why his daughter should be thought an improper match for Mr. Morgan Williams, a Welsh gentleman of an estate of three or four hundred a year, when Mr. Morgan Williams's son and grandson, two of the richest knights and private subjects in the kingdom, married, the one the daughter of a skinner, and the other that of a mercer, or at least of those companies. Lady Ann Bolen, or Bullen, and Lady Jane Seymour, two of the many wives of King Henry VIII., were descended from tradesmen of London." On the whole, then, we may conclude Walter Cromwell of Putney to have been no common blacksmith, wielding his hammer and shoeing horses with his own hands, but a master tradesman, probably employing many workmen, and prospering so as to be eventually enabled to set up as what we may call a capitalist, and the head of what was more of the nature of a commercial establishment than a trade. His widow, too, in this case, may have made a good second marriage, and the shearman may have been a merchant, not, as is commonly assumed, a mechanic. Noble supposes that Morgan Williams, whose father was employed by Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford, uncle to King Henry VII., and also by King Henry VIII., may have made the acquaintance of Miss Cromwell, living with her mother in London, when he and his father came up to give their attendance at court. This connexion among the three families of Cromwell, Williams, and Tudor-the history of each of which is so remarkable-merits the more attention, that it has not been usually noticed. We shall find that the marriage of his sister was not Cromwell's only alliance with the Williamses.

Young Cromwell does not appear to have received what can be called a learned education; but it is admitted that, besides the more ordinary branches, he was taught a little Latin at school; and this may give additional probability to what has been said about his father not having been a mere common blacksmith. The popular