Cromwell, the malleus monachorum, was of good English family, belonging to the Cromwells of Lincolnshire.  One of these, probably a younger brother, moved up to London and conducted an ironfoundry, or other business of that description, at Putney.  He married a lady of respectable connections, of whom we know only that she was sister of the wife of a gentleman in Derbyshire, but whose name does not appear.[582] The old Cromwell dying early, the widow was re-married to a cloth-merchant; and the child of the first husband, who made himself so great a name in English story, met with the reputed fortune of a stepson, and became a vagabond in the wide world.  The chart of his course wholly fails us.  One day in later life he shook by the hand an old bell-ringer at Sion House before a crowd of courtiers, and told them that “this man’s father had given him many a dinner in his necessities.”  And a strange random account is given by Foxe of his having joined a party in an expedition to Rome to obtain a renewal from the pope of certain immunities and indulgences for the town of Boston; a story which derives some kind of credibility from its connection with Lincolnshire, but is full of incoherence and unlikelihood.  Following still the popular legend, we find him in the autumn of 1515 a ragged stripling at the door of Frescobaldi’s banking-house in Florence, begging for help.  Frescobaldi had an establishment in London,[583] with a large connection there; and seeing an English face, and seemingly an honest one, he asked the boy who and what he was.  “I am, sir,” quoth he, “of England, and my name is Thomas Cromwell; my father is a poor man, and by occupation a cloth-shearer; I am strayed from my country, and am now come into Italy with the camp of Frenchmen that were overthrown at Garigliano, where I was page to a footman, carrying after him his pike and burganet.”  Something in the boy’s manner was said to have attracted the banker’s interest; he took him into his house, and after keeping him there as long as he desired to stay, he gave him a horse and sixteen ducats to help him home to England.[584] Foxe is the first English authority for the story; and Foxe took it from Bandello, the novelist; but it is confirmed by, or harmonises with, a sketch of Cromwell’s early life in a letter of Chappuys, the imperial ambassador, to Chancellor Granvelle.  “Master Cromwell,” wrote Chappuys in 1535, “is the son of a poor blacksmith, who lived in a small village four miles from London, and is buried in a common grave in the parish churchyard.  In his youth, for some offence, he was imprisoned, and had to leave the country.  He went to Flanders, and thence to Rome and other places in Italy."[585]