Letters to Cromwell - 1527

The 1527 letters in my studio

Last week, I was in an art shop with my husband, and we were looking at ink. There is a particular brand of watercolour ink that comes in pretty little boxes, and as a child I used to collect the boxes from the bottles my father used. The designs haven’t changed and now I have my own inks in their boxes arranged in my studio. My husband was asking about my use of them. I was saying that I use them occasionally but I am currently using a lot of Doomesday Ink as it doesn’t tend to bleed on fabric. It would have been nice if we had been allowed to continue our conversation but we were interrupted by a man who started to tell me that I was using the wrong ink for fabric, that I should be using acrylics and so forth. I replied that, in my experience, acrylic made the fabric too stiff for my purposes, and so I was treated to a long monologue about how to use inks. Especially if I were making t-shirts. Apparently. I wouldn’t know, as I don’t make t-shirts. We left the store, I didn’t buy anything, and I made a mental note about being a woman who discusses making art in public.

As we left, my husband asked me why I didn’t argue. I said I couldn’t be bothered. And I genuinely couldn’t (although it clearly bothered me a bit as I am writing about it five days later). Instead I went into the National Portrait Gallery for a chat with Cromwell. Noting the quill and ink on his desk, I decided that he was quite happy with the Doomseday Ink I am using to recreate his letters, and he didn’t seem to mind that I was reading his in-tray.

Thomas Cromwell, after Hans Holbein, in the National Portrait Gallery, London

I last wrote about this Letters to Cromwell project a month ago, and now I am deeper into of it, I can see some of the challenges involved. To start with, there are so many letters. 1527 was fairly manageable - only fifteen letters sent to Cromwell survive. But as his career progressed, the numbers grew and grew. I am halfway through 1528, and there are already more than thirty - and if his correspondence keeps growing at this rate, my records are going to get ever more overwhelming.

Ah yes, records. Everything of course gets logged. There’s a spreadsheet which enables me to keep track of trends - should I want to trace a particular correspondent I should be able to do so. This records senders, dates, subjects, gifts received, and, importantly, whether I have seen the original and when. But I also want a paper record, which allows me to see the text I have inked and stitched around. I don’t attempt to reproduce entire letters. I pick out phrases or words that appeal to me. Like a legate sleeping like a dormouse in his chair, or a promised greyhound. So there’s a notebook to help me think - I hope Thomas Avery would be pleased with my record keeping.

One of the things that intrigues me is the changes of address for Cromwell. Not necessarily where he was - Austin Friars, Hampton Court, Fenchurch Street - but how his correspondents wrote his title. Is he Master Cromwell, or the right worshipful Master Cromwell - in various spellings. Is he an especial good friend, or my master? I can see from my records that the forms of address in 1527 are relatively short. But by 1528, they have started to get longer. I suspect I will be able to trace the growth of power by the length of the form of address.

I’m now in the middle of the 1528 letters. I read, I log, I interpret. I stitch. Just viewing the original correspondence is exhausting. How on Earth did Thomas Cromwell ever have time to sleep?