The boy’s Christian name is also worthy of note. The oddness of the name Gregory in early Tudor terms has not been the subject of much comment, and yet not only Thomas’s son but in the same generation one of his nephews, who must be a younger son of his brother-in-law Morgan Williams, was also called Gregory.69 Is it too fanciful to see the baby son born around 1520 as named after Cromwell’s visit to Rome in 1518–19, in honour of Pope Gregory the Great, who sent Augustine to the Anglo-Saxons and hence was known as ‘the Apostle of the English’?70 Once more, we have to remember the fluidity of
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