In the early sixteenth century London’s foreign trade was dominated by Italians to an extraordinary extent, until the Reformation and a changing dynamic in international commerce virtually wiped out this ancient and flourishing community within a few decades of Cromwell’s death.40 So every leading London merchant had much to do with Italians. What is striking about Cromwell is that he chose to make this relationship unusually close and personal. Few of his contemporaries bothered to learn Italian with anything approaching his own fluency.
