Thomas Cromwell
Thomas Cromwell was probably the most influential person with close Hackney connections in the 1530s. In local terms he was the new owner of Brooke House and Ralph Sadleir’s employer; nationally he was the king’s most trusted adviser.
Cromwell was a controversial figure during his life and remains so. In plays, novels and films such as A Man for All Seasons, he appears as a cold, cruel villain. The real man was highly intelligent, immensely hardworking and undoubtedly ruthless, but also kind and loyal to the people close to him, and Ralph Sadleir was one of these, joining the Cromwell household in his early teens.
One of the reasons Cromwell was so much resented in his time was that he was a “poor boy made good”. Born in Putney in about 1485, he was the son of Walter Cromwell, a blacksmith, brewer and violent small-time crook who was often before the local courts for a variety of offences including selling bad beer and beating up his neighbours.
Thomas ran away from home at the age of fifteen, and spent the next few years as a soldier in Europe, a banker in Italy, an accountant in the Netherlands and then a lawyer in London – he admitted to having been “a ruffian as a young man”. Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s first chief minister, then talent spotted him, and Cromwell spent the next years as part of his household, remaining loyal to his master even when he lost the king’s favour.
Henry VIII knew a good servant when he saw one, and gave Cromwell a series of increasingly important jobs after Wolsey’s downfall and death. But even as the king promoted Cromwell, he still regarded him as an upstart, once describing him to the French ambassador as “a good household manager, but not fit to meddle in the affairs of kings”.
Fit or not, Cromwell was required to meddle in almost every significant affair of state for several years, from masterminding the dissolution of the monasteries to looking for a fourth wife for the king after Jane Seymour died. He also ran a highly efficient national network of spies.
One of the most difficult tasks ever handed to Cromwell was that of persuading Mary Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, to agree that her parents’ marriage was not lawful, thus putting herself out of the line of succession to the throne. For several years she refused, and her father refused even to read letters from her. The story of how she finally agreed, and how the court came to Hackney, was the focus of one year’s project – Mary Tudor in Hackney.
Most of the established nobility hated Cromwell, and were delighted when the king finally turned against him, blaming him the failure of his fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves.
Imprisoned in the Tower of London and sentenced to death without trial, Cromwell was kept alive for several weeks. The king wanted Cromwell to collect the evidence for his divorce from Anne of Cleves, and there was other work that needed to be finished.
Ralph Sadleir remained loyal to his master, and it was he who delivered Cromwell’s final plea for mercy to the king. We still have the text of the letter (link either to transcription or to image of the original), and we know that the king made Sadleir read it out loud to him three times. The king was moved to tears, but he still had Cromwell executed, only to regret it a few weeks later, when he accused Cromwell’s arch enemy the Duke of Norfolk of plotting the death of the most loyal servant he had ever had.. This story is told as part of this project