youth and early
manhood of Thomas Cromwell, through which, only at intervals, we catch
glimpses of authentic facts; and these few fragments of reality seem
rather to belong to a romance than to the actual life of a man.

[Sidenote: His father, one of the Cromwells of Lincolnshire, dies
early.]

[Sidenote: His mother re-marries, and her son becomes a vagabond.]

[Sidenote: Wild story of his journey to Rome.]

[Sidenote: His Italian wanderings.]

[Sidenote: The Florentine banker.]

Cromwell, the malleus monachorum, was of good English family, belonging
to the Cromwells of Lincolnshire. One of these, probably a younger
brother, moved up to London and conducted an ironfoundry, or other
business of that description, at Putney. He married a lady of
respectable connexions, of whom we know only that she was sister of the
wife of a gentleman in Derbyshire, but whose name does not appear.[134]
The old Cromwell dying early, the widow was remarried, to a
cloth-merchant; and the child of the first husband, who made himself so
great a name in English story, met with the reputed fortune of a
stepson, and became a vagabond in the wide world. The chart of his
course wholly fails us. One day in later life he shook by the hand an
old bellringer at Sion House before a crowd of courtiers, and told them
that "this man's father had given him many a dinner in his necessities."
And a strange random account is given by Foxe of his having joined a
party in an expedition to Rome to obtain a renewal from the pope of
certain immunities and indulgences for the town of Boston; a story which
derives some kind of credibility from its connexion with Lincolnshire,
but is full of incoherence and unlikelihood. Following still the popular
legend, we find him in the autumn of 1515 a ragged stripling at the door
of Frescobaldi's banking-house in Florence, begging for help.
Frescobaldi had an establishment in London,[135] with a large connexion
there; and seeing an English face, and seemingly an honest one, he asked
the boy who and what he was. "I am, sir," quoth he, "of England, and my
name is Thomas Cromwell; my father is a poor man, and by occupation a
clothshearer; I am strayed from my country, and am now come into Italy
with the camp of Frenchmen that were overthrown at Garigliano, where I
was page to a footman, carrying after him his pike and burganet."
Something in the boy's manner was said to have attracted the banker's
interest; he took him into