We know, for instance, that the family of Howard (which was then already of more than a century’s standing) took everything they could lay their hands on in the particular case of Bridlington—­pyxes, chalices, crucifixes, patens, reliquaries, vestments, shrines, every saleable or meltable thing, and the cattle and pigs into the bargain, and never dreamt of giving account to the King.

With Cromwell, the embezzlement was more systematic:  it was a method of keeping accounts.  But our interest lies in the fact that the process was accompanied by that curious fidelity to all with whom he was personally connected, which forms so interesting a feature in the sardonic character of this adventurer.  It is here that we touch again upon the family of Morgan ap William, the public-house keeper of Putney.

When Cromwell was at the height of his power he lifted out from the obscurity of his native kennel a certain Richard Williams, calling him now “cousin” and now “nephew.”  We may take it that the boy was a nephew, and that the word “cousin” was used only in the sense of general relationship which attached to it at that time.  If Cromwell had been a man of a trifle more distinction, or of tolerable honesty, we might even be certain that this young fellow was the legitimate son of his sister Katherine, and, indeed, it is much the more probable conclusion at which we should arrive to-day.  But Cromwell himself obscured the matter by alluding to his relative as “Williams (alias Cromwell),” and there must necessarily remain a suspicion as to the birth and real status of his dependant.

In 1538 this young Richard Williams got two foundations handed over to him—­both in Huntingdon, and together amounting in value to about L500 a year.

We have seen on an earlier page how extremely difficult or impossible it is to estimate exactly in modern money the figures of the Dissolution.  We have agreed that to multiply by twenty for a maximum is permissible, but that even then we shall not have anything like the true relation of any particular income to the general standard of wealth in a time when England was so much smaller than our England of to-day, and in an England where wealth had been until that moment so well divided, and especially in an England where the objects both of luxury and expenditure were so utterly different to our own:  where all textile fabric was, for instance, so much dearer in proportion to food than it is now, and where yet a man could earn in a few weeks’ labour what would with us be capital enough to stock a small farm.

It is safe to say, however, that when Cromwell had got his young relation—­whatever that relationship was—­into possession of the two foundations in Huntingdon, he had set him up as a considerable local gentleman, and whether it was the inheritance of the Cromwell blood through his mother, or something equally unpleasant in the heredity of his father, Morgan, young Williams ("alias Cromwell”) did not stick there.