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 Oliver, as will be presently seen, and all his tribe were fed upon no other food than the possessions of the Church.  Cromwell, in his business of suppressing the great houses, embezzled quite cynically—­if we can fairly call that “embezzlement” which was probably countenanced by the King, to whom account was due.  Indeed, it is plainly evident from the whole story of that vast economic catastrophe which so completely separates the England we know from the England of a thousand years—­the England of Alfred, of Edward I., of Chaucer, and of the French Wars—­it is evident from the whole story, that the flood of confiscated wealth which poured into the hands of the King’s agents and squires was a torrent almost impossible to control; Henry VIII. was glad enough to be able to retain, even for a year or two, one half of the spoils.