Translating 18th century prose

[igenlode]

Having stumbled across the Wikipedia page for Thomas Cromwell's nephew out of mild curiosity as to how he acquired the surname 'Cromwell' despite being descended from the sister of Henry VIII's minister, I ended up spending eight hours or so in 'translating' virtually the entire page into 20th-century English prose out of the original text by an 18th-century antiquarian, which had been cut and pasted virtually verbatim to create the initial article. (I do not aspire to 21st-century prose: 'glow-up', 'call out' and 'problematic' are not in my vocabulary :-p)

Original 'untranslated' version

We shall see how much of it survives; I ended up having to do a good deal of research in order to check the validity of the various references I was trying to repurpose, and found at least two apparent errors in the original in the process. I also now know a great deal more about the said nephew than I did previously, my prior acquaintance being limited to the background of "Wolf Hall" -- but I am *not* an expert of any kind on the era, and limited myself to the existing sources already cited in the article.