A letter from Gregory

The 1527 letters in my studio

Stitching the surviving letters sent to Thomas Cromwell is proving fascinating. I am going through them chronologically and it’s really interesting to see repeat corespondents and to follow their various requests, or see updates on the news they were sharing. I’m starting to recognise individuals’ handwriting, and to know whose letters are legible and whose will prove really difficult to read; who has been given dinner; who knows who; who might be a friend, and who is a stranger wanting a favour.

It’s also an enormous piece of work. I was in the studio today, linking together the letters from 1528, and they have taken hours to string together; and I still haven’t worked out how to hang them up. And the number of letters increases year on year - so if I am struggling with the 1529 in-tray, how will it be when I get to - say - 1536? “It will be fine,” said my husband. “You aren’t stitching all of them are you? Just a selection from each year.” A silence. “Ummm, actually, I am stitching all of them. All the ones that survive.” As I say, an enormous piece of work.

The 1528 letters in preparation.

My 1528 letters include a reference to one of the most beloved characters from Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy: Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory. In Wolf Hall, Gregory writes hilariously uninformative letters (“and now now more for lack of time”), and some of his letters to his father survive. I have stitched what seems to be the earliest surviving letter from Gregory, but it is difficult to be completely sure when it was written.

The date of Gregory’s birth is unclear. For a long time, it was thought that Gregory was born in about 1516; Professor Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, through a careful analysis of Cromwell’s papers, places his birth as most likely in 1520. As he writes in his brilliant biography, Thomas Cromwell: A Life (2018 - highly recommended, and a major inspiration for this Letters to Cromwell project):

Much patronising nonsense has been written about Gregory based on that persistence miscalculation of his age. He has been frequently been denigrated for not having the educational attainment of a teenager at a time when he was in fact ten years old or less.

The archival record remains ambiguous; the dating of this letter - as part of the huge exercise of cataloguing, dating, and reviewing Henry VIII’s State Papers in the 19th and early 20th centuries - is unclear.

In November 1528, Gregory’s tutor, John Chekynge, wrote to Cromwell that “Little Gregory is becoming great in letters”. “Little Gregory” must surely refer to an eight year old rather than a teenager. And, for many years, Gregory’s earliest letter was filed straight after the letter from Chekynge, as though dating from 1528. But - as can been seen from the picture below, it was later re-filed, and re-dated 13 April 1533.

Gregory’s letter has been removed from the Henry VIII Letters & Papers for 1528

Gregory’s earliest letter - 1528 or 1533?

This early letter is hugely uninformative - like those in the Trilogy. Addressing Cromwell as “my dere father”, Gregory asks for his blessing, and declares himself his ‘“bedesman”. He pledges to fulfil his father’s “commandments in the passage of myne erudicion, that yow my good father schall therewith be ryght wel contentyd, by God’s helpe”. It was sent to his ‘right worshipfull father’ ‘at London’.

But was it sent in 1533? I’m not convinced. I have seen some letters from Gregory from 1531. They are written in a much more confident hand - so either his handwriting got worse as he got older, or the ordering of his correspondence continues to be muddled.

This presents me with a problem in my stitchery. Do I include it in the 1528 letters - or do I stitch it into 1533?* At the moment, it is reinstated - as far as my stitching is concerned - into 1528. Perhaps I should include this letter twice, stitching a further version for the 1533 collection. That way, I have acknowledged one of the many archival challenges of Cromwell’s papers. Of which more will follow.

*I’m not seeking advice - I’m just musing to myself…