On 28 July 1540, Thomas Cromwell, the son of a Putney blacksmith and the man who dissolved England’s monasteries, was beheaded on Tower Hill.
On 28 July 1844, 304 years later to the day, Gerard Manley Hopkins was born. He would enter a religious order, as a novice at Manresa House in Roehampton, two miles from the village where Cromwell was raised.
One man emptied the monasteries. The other joined one. Both are commemorated with Putney plaques. Today is 28 July.
Cromwell went down fast. He was arrested at a council meeting on 10 June 1540 and condemned by a bill of attainder, the device that let Parliament find a man guilty without the inconvenience of a trial. His enemies had every reason to skip that part. He was the most formidable lawyer in England, and a courtroom was the last place any of them wanted to meet him. From the Tower he wrote to the King, and the last of those letters ends with a postscript that has outlived nearly everything else he ever put on paper: “Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.” Henry had it read to him three times. Then he did nothing.
On the morning of 28 July, Cromwell was walked out to Tower Hill and handed to an executioner a contemporary described as “ragged and butcherly”. It took three blows. His head went up on London Bridge, came down again, and was buried with the rest of him in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, alongside Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, both of whom he had helped to destroy. That afternoon, at Oatlands Palace in Surrey, Henry VIII married Catherine Howard.
Hopkins’ life could not have been more different. Born at Stratford in Essex, eldest of nine in a comfortable Anglican household, he went up to Oxford, was received into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman, and in September 1868 walked up the drive of Manresa House to become a Jesuit novice.
He wrote “The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur”, invented his own way of writing poetry he called sprung rhythm — instead of a steady, evenly-ticking beat like a hymn, he counted only the words you’d naturally lean on if you read the line aloud, and let the rest of the sentence move at whatever pace it needed — failed his final theology exam, and died in Dublin in 1889 at 44 with almost nothing of his work in print.
Manresa went up in the 1760s as Bessborough House, a Palladian villa for an Anglo-Irish earl. The Jesuits bought it in 1861 and renamed it after the Spanish town where Ignatius of Loyola worked out his spiritual exercises. Three centuries after Cromwell shut the religious houses of England, a religious order moved into a nobleman’s mansion two miles up the hill from where he grew up and filled it with novices. It is Parkstead House now, part of the University of Roehampton. Hopkins came back twice, to teach and to take his final vows.
Two plaques, two claims
The Hopkins plaque is precise about all of it. Put up by the Greater London Council in 1979, it reads “Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ, 1844 to 1889, poet, lived and studied in Manresa House”, and it is bolted to the gatepost of the house it names, which is still standing behind it.
The Cromwell plaque is a different proposition. Erected by the Putney Society and unveiled by Hilary Mantel in October 2013, it reads “Thomas Cromwell, Chief Minister to Henry VIII, born c.1485, executed 1540 Tower Hill”, and it is fixed to 3 Brewhouse Lane, a few doors up from the river. It does not say he was born there. It does not say anything about the site at all. The press at the time noted that he had been born “in the vicinity of Brewhouse Lane”, which is a doing a lot of work. And the oldest surviving description of the birthplace points somewhere else entirely.
Cromwell is commemorated in at least four places, and together they make an instructive league table. Top of it, Tower Hill. The memorial in Trinity Square Gardens lists the men beheaded on that spot, Cromwell among them, between the Earl of Devon in 1538 and the Earl of Surrey in 1547. Every word of it is right. It helps that being executed somewhere is the one biographical fact that leaves no room for argument.
Bottom of the Cromwell plaque list comes Melton Mowbray. A plaque at 12 Burton Street, on a Grade II* building that trades today as the Anne of Cleves pub, reads: “From 1538 until his execution in 1540 this house was owned by Thomas Cromwell 1485-1540. Lord Chancellor of England to Henry VIII.”
Cromwell was never Lord Chancellor. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1533, Principal Secretary and Master of the Rolls from 1534, Lord Privy Seal from 1536, and Lord Great Chamberlain for the final eight weeks of his life. The Lord Chancellorship in those years belonged to Wolsey, then to Thomas More, then to Thomas Audley. Melton Mowbray has handed Cromwell the one great office he never got, and of all the offices available it has handed him the one that belonged to Thomas More, who is buried next to him. The error has since been copied into the national plaque catalogue and into the town’s own visitor guides, which is how a mistake in brass turns into a fact on the internet.
Putney sits in the middle, and the middle is a perfectly respectable place to be. Ours claims no building. It claims a man and a town, and it is right about both.
Back to Brewhouse Lane
Where it is on shakier ground is the spot. The earliest description of the birthplace dates from 1617 and survives in the Victoria County History: “an ancient cottage called the Smith’s shop”, west of the highway running from Putney to the upper gate, on the south side of the highway from Richmond to Wandsworth, at the sign of the Anchor. Those are two roads meeting up the hill, not a lane by the water. Historic England says the birthplace has not survived and that nineteenth-century sources pointed to an old smithy west of what is now the South Circular. Others put the family home out towards Putney Heath, with the Green Man occasionally named as the likeliest candidate, a mile from where the plaque now hangs.
The Putney Society’s own guide points that way too, gently. Its page on Cromwell has him spending much of his childhood playing on Putney Heath. The Society’s separate history of Putney has him spending most of his early life at the brewery on the east side of Brewhouse Lane.
None of which makes Brewhouse Lane a bad guess. Walter Cromwell was a blacksmith, but he was also a brewer, an innkeeper and a fuller of cloth, and the family had held the lease on a fulling mill since 1452. A brewhouse stood on the east side of that lane from at least the fourteenth century. There is no surviving building and no documentary address for a man born around 1485, so anybody putting up a plaque has to choose a wall and live with the choice.
And what a day they chose it for. On a Friday afternoon in October 2013, Hilary Mantel, two Booker Prizes to her name and Cromwell restored to the nation on her account, pulled the cover off in Brewhouse Lane. Ben Miles, cast as Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of her novels, stood beside her, with his director Jeremy Herrin alongside. She then talked about Cromwell and about Putney to a packed St Mary’s at the foot of the bridge, and signed books until the queue gave out. There was a reception at the Putney Pantry. It made the BBC.
Melton Mowbray got a wrong job title. Putney got the novelist, the actor who played him, and a full church. We will take that.
Putney’s layers of plaque schemes have been mapped here before. Standing in front of one and asking whether it is telling the truth is a newer exercise. On 12 August it is George IV’s birthday, and a Putney plaque that puts him in a house that had not been built yet. More of that next month.
What you can do
Both plaques are on public streets and free to go and look at. Cromwell’s is at 3 Brewhouse Lane, SW15 2JX, a minute from Putney Bridge. It also has three pubs and a lovely view right next to it, so it’s easy to make an excuse to go see it. Hopkins’s is on the gatepost at Manresa House, Holybourne Avenue, SW15 4JD, up the hill from the entry to the Alton Estate. Less lovely thanks to council inaction and poor maintenance but Manresa House is still grand.
The Putney Society takes nominations for new plaques, and its published policy sets the test: the person must have been dead at least five years, the building must be visible from the public highway, and the subject must have lived or worked in Putney for a significant period. Proposals go to secretary@putneysociety.org.uk. The full guide [pdf] to all eleven plaques is on the Society’s website.
Excellent humorous well researched well written article. Thank you for making me think again about both these great men and their connection to Putney.