Thomas Cromwell—Richard Williams

Thomas Cromwell’s relationship with Richard Williams is a bond of care and chosen kinship formed amid bereavement. After Richard’s father, Morgan Williams, dies, Cromwell takes Richard and the younger Walter into his household. He becomes a father to them in practical and emotional terms, while Richard’s decision to take the Cromwell name turns their attachment into an explicit claim about family, inheritance, and belonging.

A household formed by bereavement

Morgan Williams and Kat Cromwell die during a year of losses that has already taken Cromwell’s daughters. The deaths leave Richard and the child Walter orphaned, and both are added to Cromwell’s household at Austin Friars. Cromwell remembers Morgan as a hard-working man, shrewd despite his talkativeness, and Kat as a sister who could not quite understand the brother who had taught her to count and reckon a tradesman’s bill. Their absence is not an abstract change in family circumstances: it reshapes the household and places the two boys within Cromwell’s care.

Cromwell’s grief for his own children gives this new responsibility particular emotional weight, though the narrative does not present Richard as a replacement for them. Instead, the bond emerges through shared domestic life and acts of attention. When Richard comes to Cromwell late at night with a question, Cromwell recognizes the seriousness beneath it and invites him to sit. Their intimacy is conveyed not by a formal declaration but by the ease with which Richard approaches him and by the affection with which they part.

Richard’s name and inheritance

Richard asks whether he and Walter should change their name to Cromwell’s. His question makes the relationship’s stakes plain: he is considering not only what to be called, but whether to identify himself with the man who has become his guardian and father. Cromwell initially answers with a joke that, given his fortunes, the Cromwells might soon wish to become Williamses. The humor does not diminish the importance of the question; it lets the two men approach a serious choice without turning it into a demand.

Cromwell then asks whether Richard’s dead father would have approved. Morgan had believed that he descended from Welsh princes and, when drinking, joked about who would pay a shilling for his principality. Richard’s own ancestry, Cromwell explains, also reaches into the Tudor line: Richard’s grandmother was Joan, one of Jasper Tudor’s two illegitimate daughters. The discovery complicates the family name with royal descent, but it does not provide Richard a reliable path to court. Richard asks what being the king’s cousin—and Stephen Gardiner’s cousin—could do for him when he and his family are not at court and the cardinal’s position is failing.

Cromwell’s account is careful rather than triumphant. He tells Richard that the genealogy is not as profound as Morgan made it sound, and Richard pleads with him not to dwell on it. The exchange holds together two kinds of inheritance: a possible royal connection that offers little practical advantage, and the immediate relationship built through care. Richard’s strongest assertion is not about a prince in his ancestry but that, if he had Cromwell’s name, he would never disown it.

Fatherhood, grief, and comfort

The conversation turns from ancestry to mortality when Richard asks whether Cromwell ever thought he would die while travelling. Cromwell answers that he did, and describes the prospect as seeming a waste after crossing so far. Richard, by contrast, says that he lights a candle for his father every day. He does not claim the ritual relieves his grief; he continues because it is what he does. Cromwell asks whether Morgan knows about the candles, and Richard admits that he cannot imagine what the dead know.

Cromwell answers by locating comfort among the living. Richard’s candle does not establish certainty about an afterlife; the consolation lies in the care that passes between those who remain. Richard calls Cromwell his comfort, rises, and kisses his cheek. His Welsh farewell, “Cysga'n dawel,” is described as language used by those close to home—as fathers and brothers speak to one another. In this moment, the family relationship is not simply bestowed by Cromwell: Richard names and enacts it.

The narrative links that exchange to Cromwell’s concern that Morgan’s line should not disappear with his death. The dead ordinary soldier may lose even the public signs of lineage, but Cromwell believes Morgan’s bloodline will endure. Richard’s proposed adoption of the Cromwell name therefore does not erase his birth family. The conversation lets him carry both inheritances: the Welsh father whose memory he honors and the living guardian whose name he chooses.

Kinship under political pressure

The family’s Tudor connection becomes a point of friction when Cromwell invokes it to confront Stephen Gardiner. He sends Richard’s greetings as a cousin’s, then clarifies that he means Richard Williams, not the king. Gardiner rejects the old genealogical story, disclaims kinship with Richard, and refuses to help him. Cromwell replies that Richard now calls himself Richard Cromwell, and adds that Gardiner may be related to Richard but is not related to him.

The encounter shows the difference between blood descent and lived affiliation. Richard’s distant Tudor ancestry can be denied or dismissed by a courtier; his connection to Cromwell is visible in the name he has adopted and in Cromwell’s willingness to defend him. The exchange is also political: Cromwell uses kinship to unsettle Gardiner, whose own maternal connection runs through Helen, another of Jasper Tudor’s daughters. Richard is not present in the confrontation, but his identity has become part of the contest over who may claim family ties and what those ties are worth.

The relationship is grounded, finally, in practical care rather than courtly privilege. Richard’s ancestry does not place the family at court, and Cromwell does not promise that the new name will secure advancement. What he offers is a household, a place within the family, and the assurance—sealed by Richard’s kiss and their familiar Welsh farewell—that grief need not leave the living without one another.