"Williams" in public
less and less and the "Cromwell" more and more. When he died, his sons
after him, Robert and Oliver, had forgotten the Williams
altogether--in public--and in the case of such powerful men it was
convenient for the neighhours to forget the lineage also; so with the
end of the sixteenth century these Williams have become Cromwells,
_pur et simple_, and Cromwells they remain. But still the old caution
clings to them where the law, and especially where money, is
concerned; even Robert's son, who grew to be the Lord Protector, signs
_Williams_ when it is a case of securing his wife's dowry. Of Robert
and Oliver, sons of Henry, and grandsons of the original Richard,
Oliver, the elder, inherited, of course, the main wealth of the
family, but Robert also was portioned, and as was invariably the case
with the Williams' (alias Cromwell), the portion took the form of
monastic lands.

Many more estates of the Church had come into the hands of this highly
accretive family in the half century that had passed since the
destruction of the monasteries. [Thus at the very end of the century
we find Oliver telling the abbey land of Stratton to a haberdasher in
London for L3000.]

The portion of this younger brother, Robert, consisted of religious
estates in the town of Huntingdon itself, and it is highly
characteristic of the whole tribe that the very house in which the
Lord Protector was born was monastic, and had been, before the
Dissolution, a hospital dedicated to the use of the poor. For the Lord
Protector was the son of this Robert, who by a sort of atavism had
added to the ample income derived from monastic spoil the profits of a
brewery. It was Mrs Cromwell who looked after the brewery, and some
appreciable part of the family revenues were derived from it when, in
1617, her husband died, leaving young Oliver, the future Lord
Protector, an only son of eighteen, upon her hands.

The quarrels between young Oliver and old Oliver (the absurdly wealthy
head of the family) would furnish material for several diverting
pages, but they do not concern this, which is itself but a digression
from the general subject of my book.

The object of that digression has been to trace the growth of but one
great territorial family, from the gutter to affluence in the course
of less than 100 years; to show how plain "Williams" gradually and
secretly became "Cromwell"--because the new name had about it a
flavour of nobility, ho