In no other way did coming events cast their shadow before, unless the strange story of “a non-juror” who afterwards inherited the house is accepted, that the room in which Oliver was born was adorned with a tapestry of the devil (the idea presumably being that a strong post-natal influence was exercised for the worse on the new-born baby).2 But at least Oliver was born into a family where a satisfyingly large number of children seem to have escaped the hovering grasp of infant mortality: for although the rate was now beginning to fall, still only ten per cent of the population could expect to reach the age of forty. Out of the ten children recorded as born to the Cromwells, seven survived. It was even more important that six of these were girls and that Oliver grew to manhood as the only boy amidst a large brood of sisters. His elder brother Henry, baptized in August 1595, four years before Oliver’s own birth, died at a date unknown but certainly well before Their father in 1617. Another boy, Robert, was born and died almost immediately, ten years after Oliver. Otherwise there was Joan, born in 1592 and dead before Oliver was two, Elizabeth, some six years older than Oliver, Catherine, two years older, Margaret, two years younger, Anna, born the year following, Jane born another three years later in 1605, and a final daughter, Robina, born at some date unknown. If old Mrs Cromwell was eighty-nine at the date of her death in 1654, then she was already thirty-four when Oliver was born, although the Secretary to the Council of State, Thurloe, actually estimated her to be five years older.3 The fact remains that Oliver was the son of her later years, and the only one to survive to adulthood. It does not need the perception of a psychologist to see that he was therefore born into a position where certain natural family ambitions would be centred upon him, certain natural family responsibilities would inevitably be his when the time came.
We know from later years that the warm embrace of a mother’s love encircled Oliver not only in childhood but in his maturity; indeed one avowed critic was to ascribe Oliver’s “rough and intractable temper” as an adult to the early spoiling of his doting mother. Once more it is not so much fanciful as sensible to see in Oliver’s unchallenged male position within the younger ranks of the family, the initiation at least of this affection. As it happened these little Cromwells were not the first family of the lady who in extreme old age was to excite the admiration of foreign Ambassadors as “a woman of ripe wisdom and great prudence”.4
Oliver’s mother was born Elizabeth Steward. She had been first married to William Lynne, son and heir of John Lynne of Bassingbourn; the tomb of her husband, who died in 1589, together with that of the daughter of this brief marriage, Katherine, who died as a baby, lie together in Ely Cathedral. Elizabeth carried the jointure of this first marriage, worth about .Ł60 a year, with her when she remarried, and it is also possible that she derived from the Lynnes the “brew-house” (for making ale) persistently attached by tradition to the Cromwell household, of which more later. Otherwise the details of Elizabeth Steward’s first marriage have vanished into the mists. Her portrait shows her to be, in middle age at all events, a woman of a downright English cast of countenance, with the unabashed gaze of one who knows her position in society. Her features display the length efface, especially the nose, and the rather heavy-lidded eyes which she handed on to her son. It is a homely face, but not altogether devoid of charm and it has much strength. It is easy to see how Clarendon was able to bring himself to describe her fairly as “a decent woman”.5
The position which Elizabeth Steward occupied in society did in fact need no apology. She was the daughter of a respectable Norfolk family, and her father, “a Gentleman of a Competent Fortune”, farmed the cathedral lands of near-by Ely; it was a profitable labour later performed by her brother, Thomas Steward. Commentators would be excited by the coincidence of Oliver’s mother’s surname; for had not the royal house of Stuart originated as Stewards before passing through a phase of Stewart), a reference to their role at the Scottish Court before the curical marriage of Walter Stewart to Marjorie, daughter of Robert the Bruce? In an age obsessed equally with ancestry and omens, it seemed too happy – or too impressive – a coincidence to be tossed lightly aside without due consideration being given to the surprising ways of fate. It was decided that Oliver was endowed with proper Stewart descent, his lineage being traced back to the shipwreck of a Scottish prince in 1406, on the Norfolk coast. However more sceptical investigation shows the Stewards to have originated as Stywards from Calais, rather than Stewarts from Scotland.6 It was strange for example that the arms granted to the Stywards unaccountably failed to make use of the Scottish descent, which would certainly have been prominent had it then been considered genuine.
Not only that, but there were numerous Stywards of Swaflfham and resident in Wells in Norfolk, long before the date of the alleged landing; even more disconcertingly the original John Styward of Calais seems to have been of comparatively plebeian descent. Perhaps it was hardly surprising that as the Stewards rose in prominence on the basis of monastic lands round Ramsey and Ely, and formed connexions with London, the notion of a royal pedigree should have sprung to their enterprising minds in order to emphasize the fitness of the family for greatness. But it had in fact no basis of reality – nor did Oliver himself in his lifetime give vent to any serious opinion on the subject of his putative relationship to the man he came to regard as England’s chief enemy, Charles Stuart. It was true that when he was in Edinburgh in 1651 he was said to have observed jokingly to the family of the Royalist Sir Walter Stewart that his mother too was a Stewart. But the incident, accompanied by a good deal of wine-drinking, some of it Sir Walter’s Canary wine and some of it Oliver’s own which he sent for, seems to have been more an example of Oliver’s desire to win over the Scots than of any deeper ancestral feelings. It was more significant, and no doubt more satisfactory to the quasiStewart General that at the end of the episode (in which Oliver also allowed Sir Walter’s small son James to handle the hilt of one of his swords and called him “his little captain”) Lady Stewart was said to have become “much less Royalist”.7
Oliver himself would have agreed with the judgement of one of his earliest biographers, the minor poet Robert Flecknoe. His work, despite the fact that he was rumoured to be both an Irishman and a Catholic priest, was highly eulogistic, perhaps because it was published in 1659 before the Restoration. Flecknoe announced: “Whilst others derive him from Principalities, I will derive his Principalities from him, and only say he was born a Gentleman.” It was a point of view Cromwell shared. Many years later, as Lord Protector, he reflected on his paternal inheritance in one of his famous speeches to Parliament, on the grounds that it was “time to look back … I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity”.8 It was a fair estimate of the position of the Cromwells by the end of the sixteenth century, and Oliver’s father Robert Cromwell, by being the second son of a knight, did indeed seem to occupy a perfectly median position in the society of his day; that is to say, there was room for manoeuvre eidier way, in a manner characteristic of the fluidity of England at this period – upwards perhaps into the aristocracy to outstrip his forebears, or down into the ranks of yeomen. As Flecknoe put it, the nobility were “higher” but not necessarily “better than he”. One thing however was clear, and Oliver’s firm words confirmed it. Robert Cromwell and his family did not at this point identify themselves in any way with these yeomen. It was a distinction which those more radical than Oliver would also draw: John Lilburne, captured after the battle of Brentford and brought to trial, refused to plead when named in court as “yeoman” on the grounds that his family were gentlemen, and had been so since the time of the Conquest.9
The longevity of the Cromwellian gentle pedigree was somewhat less than that boasted of by Lilburne. “The very ancient Knightly family” of Cromwell, as even James Heath, author of the most derogatory early life of Oliver,* (* First published in 1663 in the full fervour of post-Restoration hatred.) allowed it to be, was founded in royal patronage
in the reign of Henry vm, only a few generations before Oliver’s birth. Earlier Cromwells had come from Nottinghamshire, where the name originally meant “winding stream”, a poetic concept reduced possibly a little by its derivation from the Old English “Crumb” for crooked. There had been other prominent Cromwells, an ennobled family which had died out at the end of the reign of Henry vi. But when the representative of the new family, Thomas Cromwell, stepped out into the fierce light of the Court as Henry vin’s chief minister in 1520, he specifically refused to claim alliance with the ancient branch on the grounds that “he would not wear another man’s coat, for fear the owner thereof should pluck it off his ears”. His modesty seems to have been well justified since his father Walter Cromwell was variously described as a fuller, smith or a brewer. Walter’s own father, a cloth-fuller named John Cromwell, had come from Norwell in Nottinghamshire to Wimbledon, on the outskirts of London in the fifteenth century, to pursue his trade. Of John’s other sons, one was a brewer and two of this brewer’s own sons in turn followed their father’s profession. Walter Cromwell lived in Putney and had land close to the Thames, with a hostelry in Brew-House Lane; by the time of his death in 1516 he had amassed a fair amount of property in the neighbourhood, not only in Putney but also in Wandsworth and Roehampton. It is noticeable that Walter was twice Constable of Putney, a parochial office performed in turn by the principal householders in the vicinity. If Thomas Cromwell’s origins were lowly, compared with the heights to which he rose, they were none the less solid and, one might fairly say, worthy.10
Oliver however was not descended from the famous – or infamous –Thomas Cromwell but from Walter’s daughter, Thomas’s sister Katherine. It was the marriage of the young Katherine Cromwell to Morgan Williams which brought into the sturdy English Cromwell line that exotic strain of Celtic blood which one likes to think, even at a century’s remove, gave it the peculiar genius which flowered in the mysterious character of Oliver Cromwell. Thus the Cromwells – Oliver’s branch – were not strictly speaking Cromwells at all, but by the rules of English surnames, Williamses. The direct descendants of Thomas Cromwell were in fact ennobled as Earls of Ardglass, and representatives of this branch of the family fought on the Royalist side in the Civil War. It is easy to understand however how the family of an enterprising young Welshman would wish to hitch their own name to the rising star of Thomas Cromwell’s reputation, especially as the Welsh attitude to surnames even as late as the sixteenth century was a totally alien one to our own today.
Morgan Williams had begun life under the guise of Morgan ap William (or son of William) in accordance with the traditional Welsh fashion for identifying the son of a father, whereby the second name tended to change with each generation, unless a son was given the same Christian name as his father, in which case he would be known as “Fychan” or the Younger. The changeover to the English fashion of a stabilized patronymic was only occurring slowly among the Welsh: it was just about this period, for example, that the Welsh family of Sitsyllt settled in England and were henceforth known in succeeding generations as Cecil. Generally speaking, the Welsh merely added an “s” to their father’s Christian name in order to Anglicize themselves, as did Morgan ap William: thus many Anglo-Welsh surnames tended to be based on male Christian names.
Since Williams itself was a concept comparatively new to Morgan, it was not surprising that his son Richard found the change to his mother’s maiden name of Cromwell easy enough. The adoption of the more celebrated English name was perfectly open. The Williams’ arms were used by Richard’s descendants, the family continued to be listed as “alias Williams” for several generations including an Indenture of Sale signed and executed by Oliver’s uncle in 1600, an official query concerning his father’s will, and Oliver’s own marriage contract. In his period as Protector, one of Oliver’s Royalist kinsmen wrote to him frankly that he had had considerable trouble being accepted under the name of Cromwell, and now that Oliver had made it odious it might be time to change it back to Williams again (a course which the eldest branch of this side of the family, the heirs of Oliver’s uncle, did in fact adopt after the Restoration). It could even be said to be poetic justice that Oliver should later be blamed for many of the crimes, especially the architectural depredations, of his great-great-great uncle Thomas:
Much ill cometh of a small note
As Crumb well set in a man’s throat…
So ran a spurious prophecy of Tudor times invented to vilify Thomas Cromwell.11 In the growth of folklore, the coincidence of the Cromwell name was to prove a “Crumb well set” in Oliver’s throat when it came to apportioning blame for the wreck of monasteries and churches. Perhaps it was fate’s revenge on the family which had originally adopted the name for purely opportunist reasons.
It was William ap levan, Morgan’s father, who was the first to make the successful transference from Wales to England. Referred to as “the best archer that in those days was known”, he served Jasper Duke of Bedford, then lord of Glamorgan, having himself been born in the parish of Newchurch near Cardiff. No doubt impressed by the quality of William’s archery, Bedford transferred him to the service of his nephew, Henry VH, newly King of England, and at the English Court William married, picking up sufficient profits in posts or grants from the Crown to acquire property in England. Thus the descent of Morgan and his father upon English pastures paralleled the general Welsh descent upon England of Henry vn and his entourage. To some Welsh bards the accession of Henry Tudor to the English throne fulfilled the ancient prophecy that a Welsh conqueror would one day take over England, it being an essential tenet of bardic history that the Welsh were descended from the ancient Britons, and as such were the rightful rulers of Britain, cruelly deprived of their inheritance by the Saxons. These prophecies were to be revived in Oliver’s favour at the time of his Protectorate by certain of his admirers.12
It is certainly possible to trace Oliver Cromwell’s Welsh ancestors with some exactitude, since the Welsh custom referred to earlier of tacking the father’s name to that of the son facilitates genealogical research.* (*The Welsh took much care with their pedigrees, because of the way their legal system worked; land belonged within certain groups and fines were liable to be paid within these groups for crimes such as murder, all of which necessitated keeping a close grip on family alliances. For this reason Welsh pedigrees, although a matter for pride, were not necessarily proof of wealthy status, as English ones might be.) Oliver Cromwell’s forebears were a very typical minor Welsh gentry family, the estate of the last actual dweller in Wales being worth between two and three hundred pounds a year. It is true that once Cromwell had reached fame, and more particularly when he became Lord Protector, with the need for personal arms and seals, the temptation to escalate the princely magnificence of his Welsh ancestors proved stronger than the call of historical accuracy. Fortunately a detailed family tree known as the Llyfr Baglan or Book of Baglan was compiled between 1600 and 1607 by one John Williams of Monmouthshire. Although this Williams was clearly interested in the connexion with Thomas Cromwell, he could have had no possible vested interest in magnifying the descent of Oliver, then scarcely more than a baby.13
The line stretches back through names which Cromwell’s eighteenthcentury biographer the Reverend Mark Noble was to dismiss with English condescension:* (* Noble’s Memoirs of the Protectoral-House of Cromwell, first published in 1787, is nevertheless a valuable source for the intimate details of Cromwell’s life because the author was in a position to sift and gather up many of the legends concerning him before they had been altogether lost by the passage of time. In this he was assisted by his friendship with the Misses Eliza and Letitia Cromwell of Hampstead, descendants of the Protector, and guardians of many family traditions as well as actual relics and portraits.14) “their history” he wrote “could afford no pleasure and but little knowledge”. The modern genealogist may take a more enlightened view. The main point of interest is that the original male line of this tree,
if traced back sufficiently far, sprang not after all from Wales but from England, and from one Sir Guyon le Grant, a late eleventhor early twelfth-century Norman adventurer, part of that group known as Advenae who came to Wales and settled there. Sir Guyon’s arrival would coincide with that period when the Normans, mainly from the area of Gloucester, were invading South Wales, especially Glamorgan; many of them did marry locally and adopt the Welsh system of nomenclature. Thus, to pursue the matter of Oliver Cromwell’s surname still further back it would be possible to make a case, by strict English rules, for Grant, not Williams, having been his rightful name: it was after all only after the time of Sir Guyon’s son, Sir Gwrgenau le Grant, that his descendants began to change their name with each generation according to the Welsh custom (Gwrgenau Fychan or the Younger was followed by Goronwy ap Gwrgenau, and so forth through several centuries down to levan ap Morgan, father of William ap levan, and grandfather of Morgan Williams).