This chapter continues the story of the jewel house from the time of Thomas Cromwell's appointment as master, but it also brings together two other institutions, the mint and the Goldsmiths’ Company. In terms of their functions, these three organisations were quite separate, but when we look at the people that ran them a different picture emerges. The principal Tudor mint, at the Tower of London, was nominally headed by a courtier, but was in practice run by goldsmiths; equally the jewel house was a department of the royal household but was supplied by goldsmiths and for part of the reign was headed by one too, Robert Amadas. In addition to that, the Goldsmiths’ Company acquired a role as independent quality controller of the coinage, its members performing the assay and providing the jury at an annual event called the trial of the pyx. To add to the mix, the involvement of certain members of the company with the mint and jewel house went in both directions. Amadas and Martin Bowes had both been prime wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company, suppliers of royal plate and deputies at the mint. But, independent though the company might have sought to be as an institution, it, no less than the jewel house or the mint, frequently felt the compelling authority of the king through his principal servant, Thomas Cromwell.

The 1532 jewel house inventory

Cromwell was not yet ‘master of everything’ when he succeeded Amadas at the jewel house in 1532 and his appointment was another stepping stone towards the almost unlimited power he enjoyed towards the end of his life. His arrival in office was marked by the taking of a new inventory, showing us exactly what was in the jewel house at the time or was on its books and allocated to the household. The inventory follows the order of the previous one, omitting items no longer present and adding new ones at the end of each section. But it is very different from the other. The 1521 inventory, as we have seen, was a working copy, full of additions and annotations showing movements of plate from one place to another.