Over the last few years, for various reasons, I have had a
chance to read some of the old classics that I had not managed to find time for
earlier in life – Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, or 1 Maccabees in the
Bible. I was expecting that my more
mature skepticism would make them a bit annoying to read, or that I would find
the stylistic genius of some of them captivating. What I did not at all expect was that I would
find them screamingly funny. The reasons
why, I suppose, might be the topic of another blog post one day.
Anyway, the latest example came when I saw the British TV
Series Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell, that underreported figure in the court
of Henry VIII, whose reign has been otherwise mostly covered ad nauseam in
books and on the big and little screen.
I realized that I was curious about just how he related to Oliver
Cromwell, another well-execrated figure a century later in British history. And so, with the aid of Wikipedia, I set
myself to figuring out just how the Cromwell name happened to descend to
Oliver, and what happened to it after Oliver’s death.
The first funny fact I discovered was that while Thomas
Cromwell was indeed a commoner, of no noble descent, he was in fact related to
Henry VIII. This happened because Thomas
Cromwell’s sister Katherine married a Welsh brewer who also lived in Putney and
had dealings with Thomas’ father, a fellow named Williams. It turns out that Master Williams was
actually related to Jasper Tudor, that risqué Welshman who married a previous English
King’s widow, thereby making his son Henry VII eligible for the throne. In effect, Thomas Cromwell was both a common brewer’s
son from Putney and the King’s in-law.
Only in England …
Now the picture gets even sillier. Once Thomas Cromwell started prospering,
Williams changed his last name to Cromwell – so Williams/Cromwell’s son became
Richard Cromwell. The criterion for the
lower nobility was to have a certain amount of income per year, and Richard
Cromwell became a useful employee of Thomas, reaping a fair amount of estates
yielding the necessary cash. Thus, when
Thomas was executed, Richard kept his status in the nobility as well as the
estates he had claimed, not to mention the Cromwell name. Thomas’ direct descendants did all right as
well, but ceased to be noble (iirc) over the course of the next century. In any case, Oliver did not descend from
Thomas, but rather from Richard. Thus,
Oliver the Commoner was in fact an in-law both of the Tudor/Stuart kings and of
Thomas Cromwell – not to mention being descended from Richard’s nobility. Only in England …
Now, England in those days practiced primogeniture, which
meant that Richard’s estates when he died did not pass to Oliver’s ancestor but
to a first-born Cromwell son. As a
result, when Oliver’s father died, Oliver did not inherit enough to qualify him
for the nobility. Later, of course, the
death of a relative in the first-son line gave him enough money to qualify at
the lowest level of nobility – that is, he was eligible for the House of Commons
but not for the House of Lords. Yes, to
be some sort of noble in England in those days all you needed was money. Only in England …
Anyway, by the time of Oliver’s death, he had accumulated a
surprising number of sons and daughters.
His direct heir was Richard (his first son had died during the Civil
War), who was briefly Lord Protector after Cromwell’s death but was widely
viewed as a total incompetent after he failed to solve the split between Army
and Parliament and left the door wide open for Charles II to walk into the
throne. Thus, nothing bad happened to
him after Charles II arrived. Other
Oliver children, especially the daughters, married into high nobility and their
descendants did just fine. But it was
Oliver’s last child, Katherine (iirc), who really made out like a bandit. She married into high nobility and her direct
descendants were high nobility all the way into the 1800s. Really, the high nobility didn’t care that
they were related to Oliver Cromwell.
But by the end of Oliver’s life, he had potloads of income, and the high
nobility wanted some of that income. And
you can bet that the monarchy treated Oliver/Katherine’s descendants as high
nobility, too. Only in England …
Except that it wasn’t quite only in England. I once read a biography of King William
Rufus, that strange Norman figure who succeeded William the Conqueror, and that
biography went into great detail about how some of the terms of today’s English
government came about: They were Norman posts
of trust assigned to the nobility attending the King, corresponding to places
in the King’s dwelling that they were supposed to take care of. For example, the Lord High Chamberlain was
supposed to take care of the King’s bedroom.
The Lord High Chancellor was supposed to take care of the King’s prayer
room, the chancel. And then there was
the extremely important noble responsible for the King’s kitchens and production
of beer, possibly to prevent the King being poisoned. That is, he was the guardian of the stews,
the Stew-Ward or Steward.
Somewhere along the line, these customs got translated to
Scotland, and when the line of Kings ended, they were succeeded by the line of
Stuarts – Scots for Steward. And so,
when Elizabeth Tudor died without issue, the Stuart kings of Scotland became
heirs to the English throne.
Now think about that.
Thomas Cromwell was the son of a common English brewmaster, and an in-law
to an English king. Oliver was an in-law
to Thomas, and opposed his in-law King Charles I, who was descended from a
Scottish King’s brewmaster. You gotta
admit, that’s pretty funny.
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