Particularly indicative is the heraldry Cromwell chose for himself, probably in the late 1520s when his rising position in society began to require it.80 A lesser man might have invented a gentrifying link for himself to the medieval Barons Cromwell; they had taken their title from a Nottinghamshire village which was presumably also the original home of other Cromwells, and the last Lord Cromwell had died long ago, in 1455, without male heirs to cause a fuss over any later appropriation. Yet that grandly simple heraldry from Plantagenet days, or a chief gules, over all a bend azure (a blue
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