Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T08:35:24.205Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

7 - The Ely Petitioners

from Part II

Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Electing Cromwell
The Making of a Politician
, pp. 97 - 114
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×