n occupation may have formed a link between him and his
neighbour, Morgan ap William.

The next stage in the story is not perfectly clear. Smith or Crumwell
had a son and two daughters, the son was called Thomas, and the
daughter that concerns us was called Katherine. It is highly probable,
according to modern research into the records of the manor, that
Morgan ap William married Katherine. But the matter is still in some
doubt. There are not a few authorities, some of them painstaking,
though all of them old, who will have it that the blacksmith's son,
Thomas, loved Morgan ap William's sister, instead of its being the
other way about. It is not easy to establish the exact relationship
between two public-house keepers who lived as neighbours in a dirty
little village 400 years ago.

Thomas proceeded to an astonishing career; he left his father's forge,
wandered to Italy, may have been present at the sack of Rome, and was
at last established as a merchant in the city of London. When one says
"merchant" one is talking kindly. His principal business then, as
throughout his life, was that of a usurer, and he showed throughout
his incredible adventures something of that mixture of simplicity and
greed, with a strange fixity in the oddest of personal friendships,
which amuses us to-day in our company promoters and African
adventurers. His abilities recommended him to Wolsey, and when that
great genius fell, Cromwell was, as the most familiar of historical
traditions represents him, faithful to his master.

Whether this faithfulness recommended him to the King or not, it is
difficult to say. Probably it did, for there is nothing that a careful
plotter will more narrowly watch in an agent than his record of
fidelity in the past.

Henry fixed upon him to be his chief instrument in the suppression of
the monasteries. His lack of all fixed principle, his unusual power of
application to a particular task, his devotion to whatever orders he
chose to obey, and his quite egregious avarice, all fitted him for the
work his master ordered.

How the witty scoundrel accomplished that business is a matter of
common history. Had he never existed the monasteries would have fallen
just the same, perhaps in the same manner, and probably with the same
despatch. But fate has chosen to associate this revolution with his
name--and to his presence in that piece of confiscation we owe the
presence in English history of the great Oliver; for Oli