Finally, the Dissolution of the religious houses strengthened the squires in the mere machinery of the constitution.  Before that Dissolution the House of Lords was a clerical house.  Had you entered the Council of Henry VII. when Parliament sat at Westminster you would have seen a crowd of mitres and of croziers, bishops and abbots of the great abbeys, among whom, here and there, were some thirty lay lords.  This clerical House of Lords, sprung largely from the populace, possessed only of life tenure, was a very different thing from the House of Lords that succeeded the Dissolution. That immediately became a committee, as it were, of the landed class; and a committee of the landed class the House of Lords remained until quite the last few years, when the practice of purchase has admitted to it brewers, money-lenders, Colonial speculators, and, indeed, anyone who can furnish the sum required by a woman or a secret party fund.  A concrete example is often of value in the illustration of a general process, and at the expense of a digression I propose to lay before the reader as excellent a picture as we have of the way in which the Dissolution of the monasteries not only emphasised the position of the existing territorial class, but began to recruit it with elements drawn from every quarter, and, while it established the squires in power, taught them to be careless of the origin or of the end of the families admitted to their rank.

For this purpose I can find no better example than that of the family of Williams, which by the licence of custom we have come to call “Cromwell”; the most famous member of this family stands out in English history as the typical squire who led the Forces of his Order against the impoverished Monarchy, and so reduced that emblem of Government to the simulacrum which it still remains.

Putney, by Thames-side, was the home of their very lowly beginnings.

Of the descent of the Williams throughout the Middle Ages nothing is known.  Much later they claimed relationship with certain heads of the Welsh clans, but the derivation is fantastic.  At any rate a certain Williams was keeping a public-house in Putney in the generation which saw the first of the Reformers.  His name was Morgan, and the “Ap William” or “Williams” which he added to that name was an affix due to the Welsh custom of calling a man by his father’s name; for surnames had not yet become a rule in the Principality.  He may have come, and probably did, from Glamorganshire, and that is all we can say about him; though we must admit some weight in Leland’s contemporary evidence that his son, Richard, was born in the same county, at a place called Llanishen.  Anyhow, there he is, keeping his public-house in the first years of the sixteenth century by the riverside at Putney.

There lived in the same hamlet (which was a dependency of the manor of Wimbledon) a certain Cromwell or Crumwell, who was also called Smith; but this obscure personage should most probably be known by the first of these two names, for his humble business was the shoeing of horses, and the second appellation was very probably a nickname arising from that trade.  He also added beer-selling to his other work, and this common occupation may have formed a link between him and his neighbour, Morgan ap William.