Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/199

 father John Smyth, and of this Thomas Smyth a good deal stands on record. He appears to have been brought up as an attorney and accountant by John Williams, the steward of Wimbledon manor; but his master died in 1502, and in 1503 he was admitted to two virgates (or thirty acres) of land at Roehampton, which had belonged to Williams, to qualify him for the vacant stewardship. Richard Williams, the son of the late steward, surrendered these two virgates at a court held at Putney on 26 Feb. 1504 (19 Henry VII), and Thomas Smyth then and there did fealty for them. But Thomas Smyth surrendered them again to the use of one David Dovy at a court held on 20 May following; at which court the jury presented that Richard Williams had assaulted and beaten the said Thomas against the peace of our lord the king, for which the court fined him sixpence. Mr. Phillips, moreover, finds reason to believe that this had some connection with family quarrels; for Walter Cromwell, the father, soon after takes to tippling, neglects his business, gets into debt, and is pursued by the law courts; is obliged also to part with the family copyhold at Putney to his son-in-law, Morgan Williams, Oliver Cromwell's great-great-grandfather.

Thus, if Thomas Smyth be Thomas Cromwell—a point of which it is said there can be no doubt—it could not have been before the summer of 1504 that he first went to Italy, and the absence of further mention of him in the court rolls for some years agrees well with the supposition that he went at that time. Bandello, therefore, was probably a year or so wrong in point of date. He was right that the occurrence of his seeking relief from Frescobaldi was soon after the battle of Garigliano, but it could have had no connection with the defeat of the French. We know, however, from another source that Cromwell did serve about this time for a while as a common soldier; and how his brief military career fits in with the rest of his biography it is difficult to determine. Bandello informs us further that Frescobaldi not only relieved him, but bought him a horse and gave him money, to enable him to return to his own country; and accepting this account we may believe that he returned, if not to England, at least to Flanders, for we are told that he was clerk or secretary to the English merchants at Antwerp; and it was probably after his unfortunate career as a soldier that he became reconciled to business. How long he continued at Antwerp we cannot tell, but he at length departed for Rome, on what we presume to have been his second visit to Italy. The circumstances are related by Foxe, who is likely to have been well informed in this matter, as it had to do with the affairs of his native town of Boston. One Geoffrey Chambers came to Antwerp on his way to Rome to obtain certain pardons or indulgences for the guild of Our Lady in St. Botolph's Church at Boston. The guild desired leave to choose their own confessor, who might, when occasion required, relax for them the severe rules of diet in Lent. They wished also to have portable altars, whereon they might have mass said in unconsecrated places when they travelled, and other privileges which the pope alone could grant. To accomplish such a mission, Chambers persuaded Cromwell to go with him as an associate. When they reached Rome some address was necessary to gain access to the pope without a tedious amount of waiting, and Cromwell contrived to waylay his holiness on his return from hunting with an English company, offering him some English presents, brought in with ‘a three-man song,’ after the fashion used at English entertainments. The surprise, the gifts, the music, and the unaccustomed language were all highly effective. The pope caused Cromwell and his friends to be sent for, and Cromwell still improved his advantage by presenting his holiness with some choice English sweetmeats, after which the pardons were not difficult to obtain.

In relating this story Foxe tells us that the pope from whom Cromwell thus succeeded in obtaining these indulgences was Julius II, and that he is accurate in this matter we may infer from the list of popes given by himself who confirmed the privileges of the Boston guild. Now Julius II's pontificate began in the end of that year in which the French were defeated at the Garigliano, so that if Cromwell came from the Low Countries to Rome about this matter it was his second visit to Italy. And it is even possible that Foxe may be right that the date was about 1510; but he is certainly wrong in some other statements, especially in saying that Cromwell saved the life of Sir John Russell, afterwards earl of Bedford, when on a secret mission at Bologna (which mission we know to have been in 1524 and 1525), and that he was with the Duke of Bourbon at the siege of Rome in 1527. Long before those dates he had returned to England, and was fully occupied with very different matters.

The late Professor Brewer found evidence (apparently in a letter addressed to Cromwell many years afterwards by a certain George Elyot) that he was a merchant trading at Middelburgh in 1512 (, English Studies, p. 307). If so, it would seem that he returned