7 - The Ely Petitioners
from Part II
Summary
What else can be said about Cromwell's time in Ely? As has already been mentioned, just about the only facts known about this are that the cathedral chapter granted him some leases and that he served as one of the feoffees of the town's most important charitable trust, the Charity of Thomas Parsons. This seems unpromising material. In fact, the full implications of both these bits of information have been overlooked by historians. The leases have usually been considered only for what they reveal about Cromwell's improved financial position, while his involvement in Parsons Charity, if mentioned at all, has merely been used to stress his new social standing within the town. The one person who saw that there was more to these than this was the late Reginald Holmes, a fine amateur historian from Ely who located and published many of the relevant records, but even those professional historians who have known of Holmes's work have made almost no use of it. This is partly because Holmes himself underestimated the full significance of what he had discovered.
The most obvious point about Ely in the late 1630s is the one which, although invariably mentioned, has remained undeveloped. In 1638 Matthew Wren was translated from Norwich to become the new Bishop of Ely. By then he had already earned himself a reputation as the staunchest of all Laud's supporters on the bench of bishops.
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- Information
- Electing CromwellThe Making of a Politician, pp. 97 - 114Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014