The probable identification of not one but two portrait miniatures of Gregory Cromwell, only son of England's only vice-gerent in spirituals, cannot fail to be of interest to ecclesiastical historians. It is for art historians to take this identification further, but here is presented the historical evidence, which has hitherto remained unconnected because of some historical misunderstandings and also thanks to the unexpected modern locations of the two relevant miniatures, which are by Hans Holbein the Younger.

The first task in making the identification must be to establish that Gregory Cromwell was of the right age to be the young man portrayed in the two miniatures, respectively of the late 1530s and of 1543. This is a subject bedevilled by past mistakes. In publishing Gregory's first extant letter in 1846, Sir Henry Ellis correctly stated that the date of his birth ‘could hardly have been earlier than 1520’.Footnote ¹ In spelling, orthography and style, Gregory's dutiful holograph letter to his father is patently from a boy in his early teens, as Ellis realised, though he did not express a precise opinion about its date. J. S. Brewer, in editing the volume of Letters and papers Henry VIII which appeared in 1872, unfortunately assigned the letter to the year 1528, following its then positioning in a volume of the state papers devoted to papers of that year.Footnote ² He had clearly already communicated his opinion to Dean Walter Hook, who in publishing a volume of his Lives of Reformation archbishops of Canterbury in 1868, acknowledged his debt ‘to the researches of Dr Brewer’ in producing a birth date for Gregory of 1515 or 1516.Footnote ³

Subsequently, however, Brewer realised his mistake in dating Gregory's letter, and reassigned it to a much more plausible 1533, giving it a new place in volume vii of Letters and papers, published in 1883. Evidently in consultation with Brewer, the staff of the Public Record Office took the unusual step of moving the original letter to a later State Papers volume, comprising papers of 1533.Footnote ⁴ By then, however, it was too late for Gregory's age to be corrected in the literature. The difference between 1515–16 and 1519–20 may not seem great; but try telling that to a ten-year-old who has been accused of being fourteen. Much condescending nonsense has been written about Gregory, based on this persistent miscalculation of his age; he has frequently been denigrated for not having the educational attainments of a teenager at a time when he was in fact ten years old or less.Footnote ⁵ His handwriting steadily improved from that clumsy letter of 1533, so that by the late 1530s, he wrote a decent and careful secretary hand, though like many gentlemen of his time when they did not employ their clerk to write their letters, he was never very good at making his lines move across the page in disciplined horizontality.Footnote ⁶

The stereotype of the backward son seems to be derived solely from the testimony of the evangelical London merchant Richard Hilles, writing an account of Thomas Cromwell's fall and execution a year after the event to his correspondent in Zürich Heinrich Bullinger: he then referred sarcastically to Henry viii's grant to ‘Cromwell's son Gregory, who was almost a fool, [of] his father's title and many of his domains, while he was yet living in prison; that he might more readily confess his offences against the king, at the time of execution’.Footnote ⁷ This is no more than stale public gossip, and there seems no other comparable evidence, apart from the common misapprehension that Gregory was born in the mid-1510s. In fact his letters at the end of the 1530s to his father contain attempts at stylistic elegance and even wit which are not at all those of a fool.Footnote ⁸

Quite apart from the progress of Gregory's handwriting as a key to establishing his age is the chronology and progress of his education, meticulously planned by his always meticulous father. Until the early 1530s it was under the supervision of Margaret Vernon, prioress of Little Marlow, a sure sign that Gregory was not yet a teenager.Footnote ⁹ A generous run of Vernon's letters about Gregory's education survive, most of them difficult to date precisely, but fortunately one can be assigned with reasonable certainty to 1529, when she was arguing against Cromwell's choice of a priest to teach Gregory in favour of her own candidate, William Inglefield.Footnote ¹⁰ Inglefield would need to obtain a year's leave from Lincoln College, Oxford, she said, ‘for he is a Master of Art and felow of Lyncoln Colegg’. In fact Inglefield had obtained his MA on 22 July 1528, and Vernon does not suggest that this was a particularly recent event.Footnote ¹¹ Equally to the point, in the same letter she writes (in a forthright style characteristic of her correspondence with Thomas Cromwell) as if her young charge is nowhere near the age of twelve years:

On any reckoning, then, Gregory was significantly younger than twelve in 1529, and the nature of his educational programme projects the date of his birth back to 1519 or 1520. While still under Vernon's ‘governance’, during 1528–32, he was beginning Latin with older cousins under the supervision of two Fellows of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, John Chekyng and John Hunt.Footnote ¹² This regime was not without its tensions, and it ended in summer 1532, with Gregory's older and more academically-inclined cousin Christopher Wellifed writing to Thomas Cromwell from Bartlow near Cambridge in November 1532 that Gregory ‘prosperse more at his boke in a weke in my mynd then he dyd afore in a month’.Footnote ¹³ Margaret Vernon was now dropping out of Gregory's supervision, indicating that the agreement for governance till Gregory's twelfth year had reached its end that year, and his care was transferred to Thomas Cromwell's intimate friend Roland Lee, ecclesiastical lawyer and future bishop.Footnote ¹⁴

Lee had benefices at Banham in Norfolk and Ashdon in Essex, and it was in rural East Anglia that Gregory passed much of the next few years. He first spent what sounds like an enjoyable Christmas with young relatives under Lee's amused supervision in the redundant priory buildings of Bromehill in Norfolk, recently dissolved by Cardinal Wolsey, but now belonging to Christ's College, Cambridge (a college in which Thomas Cromwell was taking a sudden new interest). On 9 December 1532, as Lee set out for Bromehill from Ashdon with Gregory, he let Cromwell know that ‘yowr littell man is mery, thankyd be Godd, and not only well and clenly kepyd, but alsoo profettes in hys lerning’.Footnote ¹⁵ He wrote greetings to Cromwell on New Year's Day 1533, with news of ‘your littill men’, signing off ruefully ‘at Bromehyll among a husfull of chyldren, God help’.Footnote ¹⁶ All this pleasant domestic detail confirms that Gregory was not then a hulking late teenager born in 1515/16, nor was he free of schooling and supervision of his personal hygiene.

It was perhaps understandable that commentators were reluctant to accept such a late date for Gregory's birth as 1519–20, as it suggested a remarkably late date of marriage for Thomas Cromwell, a man born around 1485. It is possible that he had already been married before he wed Elizabeth Wykys, or that earlier children by her had died before Gregory's birth. The arrangements for Gregory's education described so far were against the tragic background of first the death of his mother and then two sisters (Anne and Grace) during 1529.Footnote ¹⁷ So Gregory went on to adulthood alone; his sisters had probably been younger than him.Footnote ¹⁸ According to a confident tradition in Cheshire, recorded in an Elizabethan heraldic visitation, Thomas Cromwell is said also to have fathered an illegitimate daughter: ‘Jane base d. to Thom^s Cromwell, Earl of Essex’. She later married into a Cheshire gentry family, and long after Thomas's death became a firm Catholic recusant, but the circumstances of the liaison which lay behind this are not clear.Footnote ¹⁹ A reference on 23 May 1539 to money sent by Henry Dowes to Gregory Cromwell's wife for ‘apparel for Mrs. Jane’ suggests that Jane was then a child living in their household, and that might imply that actually Gregory was her father and not her half-brother.Footnote ²⁰ Thomas and Gregory were, after all, both successively Lord Cromwell, and Tudor genealogy was often slipshod: a family tradition of ‘Lord Cromwell’ could easily have morphed in the mind of Somerset Herald into the sometime earl of Essex.

The loss of all Thomas Cromwell's children apart from his son and heir obviously concentrated his affection on the boy. Roland Lee, who also showed every sign of being genuinely fond of Gregory, called him ‘your treasure’ when returning him to his father's care at the end of 1534, and Lee also suggested that Gregory was delicate or at least small in stature: ‘although nature workith not in bodily strenght, yet it surmountith in goode gentle and vertuouse conditions’.Footnote ²¹ Year by year the calibration of Gregory's education as a potential nobleman continued. There was hunting and schoolwork in East Anglia with Lee during 1533, the year to which Gregory's first letter, written from Lee's house, can properly be assigned. One letter to Cromwell from Lee at Bromehill that summer comments with affectionate sarcasm on the boy's fumbling efforts at using his bow to kill deer in the duke of Norfolk's nearby park at Lopham: ‘he shott at buke and doo at hys plesure, but the skynnys where soo harde that the fleysshe whold not be hurte’.Footnote ²²

Between July and Christmas 1534 came Gregory's first lesson in courtly life and royal governance in a setting nevertheless safely away from Henry viii's court, when Roland Lee moved to the Welsh borders, newly promoted thanks to Cromwell as bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales; they progressed around the western shires from the Lord President's own miniature court at Ludlow Castle. 1535 brought Gregory a long summer and autumn at Rycote House in Oxfordshire, hosted by a Cromwell cousin, John Williams (the future Lord Williams of Thame): the time was devoted to immersing Gregory in the life of an unfamiliar county society and in his now proficient enthusiasm for hunting.Footnote ²³ 1536 saw a move back to East Anglia, in default of Roland Lee under the supervision of Sir Richard Southwell, brother of one of Thomas Cromwell's most trusted servants.Footnote ²⁴ The emphasis this year was by contrast on more humanist academic polish: as Gregory's long-term and no doubt long-suffering tutor Henry Dowes said with prim satisfaction from Southwell's home at Woodrising, ‘Wheras the laste somer was spente in the servyce of the wylde goddes Diana, this shall (I truste) be consecrated to Apollo and the Muses.’Footnote ²⁵

All this was preparatory to the dynastic marriage which raised the Cromwells astonishingly high: on 3 August 1537 Gregory was married to Queen Jane Seymour's sister, Elizabeth Seymour, at Thomas Cromwell's newly-acquired mansion at Mortlake.Footnote ²⁶ Gregory thus became King Henry viii's brother-in-law, as well as brother-in-law to Edward Seymour the future Protector Somerset, not to mention uncle to the future King Edward vi. At least his father was by now a peer of the realm, as Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon (of which Mortlake was the capital mansion), and it was not a coincidence that two days after Gregory's wedding, Lord Cromwell was created a Knight of the Garter: the status of the king's ‘uncle by marriage’ needed all the boosting that it could get.Footnote ²⁷

Gregory's bride was the very young widow of Sir Anthony Ughtred, of Kexby, Yorkshire, and sometime governor of Jersey, who had been a business acquaintance of Thomas Cromwell at least since the latter entered Thomas Wolsey's service in the mid-1520s.Footnote ²⁸ Since Elizabeth was married to Ughtred by January 1531, and since soon after they had one son (named Henry), she must have been a little older than Gregory, but the age difference was not as grotesquely disproportionate as in her first marriage (Sir Anthony died in 1534, in his fifties).Footnote ²⁹ Gregory's and Elizabeth's first child, also Henry, was born in May the following year at Lewes Priory in Sussex, by then a Cromwell family property; he was clearly named after his uncle-by-marriage the king.Footnote ³⁰ A second son, Edward (whose godfather was presumably his uncle Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford), was born in 1539, and a third, Thomas, in 1540.Footnote ³¹ A daughter, Katherine, arrived in about 1541 (if so, and if therefore the name was a compliment to King Henry's then wife Katherine Howard, it represented unfortunate timing) and their last child, Frances, around 1544.Footnote ³²

In 1903 Sir Richard Holmes identified a miniature in the collection of the queen of the Netherlands as the work of Hans Holbein the Younger (see fig. 1).Footnote ³³ This miniature, hitherto described as an ‘Unknown youth’ aged around sixteen, is approximately one-and-one half of an inch (3.8 centimetres) in diameter, and painted in water-colour on vellum, probably intended to fit into a wooden or ivory box or pendant locket. It forms one of a collection of some four hundred miniatures, of which fifty were of English origin, in the royal collections at The Hague.Footnote ³⁴ Roy Strong dated the portrait to between 1535 and 1540.Footnote ³⁵ On a bright blue background only the head and shoulders are shown, turned three-quarters to the viewer's right, the eyes cast down. The light brown hair is close cropped, and the sitter is wearing a brown doublet, trimmed with black, with a small, open falling collar with white strings attached. There is no inscription in the background. With the exception of slight discolouration of the collar through oxidization of the pigment, this miniature is in faultless condition. Holmes suggested that it was a portrait of a member of a family of one of the German merchants of the Steelyard. Footnote ³⁶ Frits Lugt, who found the portrait to be reminiscent of Rembrandt's Jeune homme assis et réfléchissant, also considered that the sitter might have been associated with the Steelyard.Footnote ³⁷

Figure 1.

Hans Holbein the Younger, Unknown youth (c. 1535–40) © Koninklijke Verzamelingen, Den Haag

Arthur B. Chamberlain observed, however, that the facial characteristics of the Unknown youth ‘appear to be more English than German, and that it probably represents the son of some personage about Henry viii's court’.Footnote ³⁸ Thomas Cromwell was such a personage, and Hans Holbein was known to him from around 1533, when Holbein first painted his famously unflattering portrait (see fig. 2).Footnote ³⁹ Gregory was aged around seventeen or eighteen at the time of his marriage in August 1537, the same month that Cromwell was made a Knight of the Garter. A miniature depicting Cromwell wearing the Garter collar was probably painted in late 1537 after he had been installed as a Knight of the Garter; it is a more sympathetic depiction of a resolute statesman than the portrait of 1533 (see fig. 3).Footnote ⁴⁰ What is more, the features of the young man in The Hague's miniature have a distinct resemblance to those of the Lord Privy Seal, though they are more delicate, as for a youth in whom ‘nature workith not in bodily strenght’: he has the same characteristic Cromwell upturned nose.

Figure 2.

Hans Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell (1532–3). © The Frick Collection, New York

Figure 3.

Hans Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex (c. 1537). © National Portrait Gallery, London

There is every likelihood that a miniature of Thomas's son Gregory would have been painted around the time of his marriage, when both father and son had so much to celebrate. It is of interest to note that, in Cromwell's accounts for 1538, there is a payment on 4 January to ‘Hanns the painter, 40s.’.Footnote ⁴¹ Hans Holbein arrived in London for the second time in 1532, probably after his former patron Sir Thomas More resigned from office. He was employed by his fellow countrymen, members of the German merchant community in the Steelyard. Cromwell himself had long-standing connections within the merchant community in the Steelyard: for instance, he proved a major patron for the goldsmith John of Antwerp.Footnote ⁴² The miniature may have been a gift from a proud father to a friend, or paired with his own likeness, and could even be ‘the liberal token’ presented to his prospective daughter-in-law for which she thanked him in summer 1537.Footnote ⁴³ The two portraits are approximately the same size, which suggests that they may have once formed a pair. When they are placed facing one another, the rapport between the miniatures is touching (see figs 1 and 3).Footnote ⁴⁴

This identification of an unknown youth with Gregory Cromwell might still seem arbitrary, were it not for the existence of another, later, portrait miniature of the same individual with a date and a year of age exactly corresponding to those already discussed. This remarkable nexus has been overlooked in the literature because of the tangled history and currently disputed ownership of the second little picture, which has taken it far from its origins in Tudor England. In 1913 Georg Habich identified a miniature portrait in the Danzig Stadtmuseum then in West Prussia (now the Gdansk National Museum in Poland) as the work of Hans Holbein (see fig. 4).Footnote ⁴⁵ It holds a special significance as it was one of the last works, perhaps the last, undertaken by Hans Holbein during the final year of his life, for it is dated 1543. Footnote ⁴⁶ Claimed by the Soviet Red Army from a stricken Germany as spoils of war in 1945, it is currently at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.Footnote ⁴⁷

Figure 4.

Hans Holbein the Younger, Man aged 24 (1543). Reproduced from Habich, ‘Ein Miniature Bildnis von Hans Holbein’, by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

This miniature, approximately two and one-eighth inches (5.4 centimetres) in diameter, is painted in tempera on parchment.Footnote ⁴⁸ The contemplative sitter is a young man aged twenty-four, wearing distinctly English clothing. His features appear more English than German, and he is clearly the same as the Unknown youth in the earlier miniature (see fig. 1); their pose and expression is identical, with due allowance for the six years or so which separate them in age. On a blue background, the young man's head is painted in pink and white with grey shadow. He is wearing a deep black velvet cap and a black silk gown, a shade lighter, with a finely embroidered white shirt showing at the neck and wrist. The eyes are lowered, half covered by the lids, the arms folded. He is wearing two rings on his left hand and holding leather gloves. There is a flanking inscription in gold at head height: ‘ANNO ETATIS / SUÆ 24.1543’: the sitter was thus born in 1519 or 1520.

It is not surprising that, writing in Prussia in 1913, Habich assumed a German identity for the sitter, albeit with English associations, ‘like so many others in the Steelyard in London’, while he noted the peculiarities of clothing, such as the pointed, tasselled shirt collar, which is found on English portraits by Holbein in this period. Habich spoke of a tradition in Danzig that the subject was ‘a member of the old, prosperous, West Prussian patrician Schwarzwald family’. This assumption was probably based on the provenance of the piece: already in 1708 it was in the possession of a member of the Schwarzwald family, and together with a library and coin collection, formed part of a legacy to the Lutheran parish church of St Peter in Danzig. Habich admitted that the evidence for the sitter being from Danzig relied on a tiny detail: the ring on the index finger of his left hand. On this signet ring, there is a Z or very widely placed N, which can only be seen under magnification. Habich considered that this mark might be a ‘house mark’ or merchant's mark that was used, together with the signature, as a unique identification for a merchant's business.Footnote ⁴⁹ He claimed that ‘by tradition’, the sitter was identified as Heinrich von Schwarzwald, but Heinrich's birth date of 8 July 1517 rules him out as the sitter, and in any case his merchant's mark does not correspond to the mark on the ring. A different claim was made at the same time by Hans Secker, who said that ‘by tradition’, the sitter was known as Johann von Schwarzwaldt, but if this was Heinrich's son, he too can be ruled out.Footnote ⁵⁰

In fact the Z or N detail on the signet ring can be accounted for by Gregory Cromwell's heraldry, if it is seen as a zig-zag, or in heraldic terms, a fess indented. This was literally central to Gregory Cromwell's coat of arms, for the coat that he adopted when restored in blood and newly created Baron Cromwell by Henry viii in 1540 was that previously borne by his father Thomas as earl of Essex: quarterly, per fess indented, azure and or, four lions passant counterchanged.Footnote ⁵¹ This coat features, for instance, on Gregory's splendidly modish Renaissance funerary monument of 1551 in the chapel of his final home, Launde Abbey in Leicestershire. (see fig. 5) The identification of the sitter of 1543 with the earlier miniature, so closely linked to England, renders a German identification redundant.

Figure 5.

Gregory Cromwell's coat of arms.

By 1543 Gregory Cromwell was a peer of the realm, having been restored to an honourable place in the kingdom by a monarch who had quickly regretted the destruction of his great minister; the young man was still also uncle to the heir to the throne, who indeed at his coronation in 1547 was to create Gregory a Knight of the Bath. What more natural, then, that in 1543 Holbein should paint a portrait of this living symbol of England's evangelical Reformation when undertaking his last round of English portraiture in the circle of Henry viii's last queen, herself a convert to the evangelical cause? It is a reminder that Gregory Cromwell retained his proper place in Tudor political life after Thomas's execution; indeed, the baronial line which he founded lasted until the end of the seventeenth century. Despite his continuing conscientious attendance at meetings of the House of Lords up to his death in the reign of Edward vi, the fact that Gregory Cromwell chose to avoid high politics in later life and spent his time as a perfectly worthy provincial peer was, given his heritage, not the mark of a fool.