He built it, extended it by moving his neighbours’ houses twenty-two feet without asking, and was beheaded five years later
Austin Friars is a wine bar on the site of an Augustinian friary, and Thomas Cromwell built his house on this ground.
Five hundred and two reviews, a 4.1, ten to sixty pounds.
The house
It was enormous. Cromwell, at the height of his power, built himself a mansion here with gardens – and when he decided he wanted the gardens larger, he did something that people have not stopped talking about for five hundred years.
He had his neighbours’ houses moved.
Not demolished. Moved – lifted on rollers and shifted back twenty-two feet, to give him more garden.
The chronicler John Stow records it, and he records it with feeling, because one of the houses was his father’s. Stow says nobody was warned, nobody was consulted, and nobody was compensated – his father simply came home and found the house had been shifted and the rent was unchanged.
The Prat’s planning desk regards this as the single most eloquent illustration of what unrestrained power looks like in practice, and notes that it is not the executions that stay with you. It is the twenty-two feet.
What he did
He was a blacksmith’s son from Putney. He had no birth, no land, no university, and no connections, and he went abroad as a young man and came back speaking Italian and understanding money.
And he rose to be the most powerful man in England under the King.
He engineered the break with Rome. He drafted the legislation – and it is legislation, that is the point, he did it through Parliament rather than by decree, and the constitutional consequences of that are still with us.
And he dissolved the monasteries: the largest transfer of property in English history, a quarter of the cultivated land in the country, executed in about five years, with an efficiency that his enemies found genuinely frightening.
We have written about the consequences across four postcodes – the Mitre, which is a bishop’s badge on land the bishop lost; the Cross Keys, which is the Pope’s emblem still hanging over a Protestant pub. That whole landscape is Cromwell’s work.
The end
Fast, and without warning.
He arranged the King’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. The King disliked her. He was arrested at the council table in June 1540, stripped of his titles, and attainted without trial.
He was beheaded on 28 July 1540 – and the accounts say the executioner made a mess of it.
Henry married Catherine Howard the same day.
What is left
The friary church survived the Dissolution because it was given to Dutch Protestant refugees, and it has been the Dutch Church ever since – and it is still here, rebuilt after being destroyed in the Blitz, and it is one of the oldest congregations in Britain.
Of Cromwell’s house, nothing. A street name.
Verdict
Good wine bar. Go, drink, and consider that a blacksmith’s son ran England, moved a street to make his garden bigger, and was dead within five years.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The exhaustion here is the point. Not rage. Earned exhaustion.