It is probable that the terrible sweating sickness which ravaged England from 1527 to 1528 carried off Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth, as there is no further mention of her in his later papers and correspondence, except in his will of July, 1529, where she is referred to as his ‘late Wyff[78].’ She left him one son, Gregory, who appears to have been a dull and plodding lad, and who, after his mother’s death, was sent with his very precocious cousin, Christopher Wellyfed, and several other boys, to be put under the care of a tutor at Cambridge, John Chekyng by name, whose correspondence with Cromwell about the progress of ‘his scolers’ is very interesting and entertaining[79]. Chekyng seems at the very outset to have been unfavourably impressed with Gregory’s talents, declares that he has been so badly taught that he could hardly conjugate three verbs when committed to his care, and reports that he is now studying ‘the things most conducive to the reading of authors,’ and spends the rest of the day in forming letters; while Christopher does not require ‘much stirring up.’ A little later he sends word that Gregory is getting on well in learning under his care, and desires his father to send five yards of ‘marble frieze,’ for his winter ‘galberdyne’; and again, in 1530, he declares that he has been so successful in his teaching, that Gregory will be ‘loadyd with Latyne’ before he comes home again; but it is evident throughout that Chekyng considers every step in advance to have been due to the excellence of his own tuition, rather than to the aptitude of his pupil. If the tone of Gregory’s letters to his father be taken as a criterion of the boy’s character, he must indeed have been stupid and slow beyond belief[80]. But Cromwell was too much occupied with his own affairs, to pay much attention to the remarks of honest John Chekyng. Indeed there is reason to think that his grasping disposition showed itself in small ways to such an extent that he did not always pay the very moderate bills that the tutor sent in for Gregory’s board, lodging, and tuition; but instead taunted Chekyng with not having done well with his ‘folks.’ To these insults Chekyng replied that he had brought up six M.A.’s and fellows of colleges, and that the least Cromwell could do was to pay for the furniture which his scholars had ruined; he then goes on to tell how Christopher ‘dyd hynge a candel in a playt to loyk apone hys boyk and so fell ascleype and the candell fell into the bed strawe’ and there were burnt the bed, bolster, ‘three overleydes and a sparver[81].’