The official website for BBC History Magazine
Thomas Cromwell's death – a rapid descent from the pinnacle of power
Thomas Cromwell’s final six months were a Greek tragedy of hubris and political venom, all presided over by a tyrannical king. Diarmaid MacCulloch charts Cromwell’s rapid descent from the very pinnacle of power to the executioner’s block
As downfalls go, it was spectacular – and brutally swift. On 10 June 1540, Thomas Cromwell arrived at court for what should have been a routine meeting of the Privy Council. As this son of Putney was soon to discover, the meeting was anything but routine. On entering the council, Cromwell – Henry VIII’s immensely gifted chief minister and among the most powerful men in England – dressed in his formal splendid attire as Knight of the Garter, was arrested and humiliated by his old enemy the Duke of Norfolk. The duke ripped the collar of St George from Cromwell’s neck, while the Earl of Southampton, not to be outdone in malice, untied the garter from his knee. Cromwell was then bundled off to the Tower of London down the Thames by barge from Westminster. He would never see the king again. Cromwell’s anguished plea to Henry – “Most gracious prince: I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!”, written in desperation in his Tower cell – was met with a stony silence. On 28 July, Cromwell was led out to the scaffold on Tower Hill to face his executioner. On that very same day, the king distracted himself by marrying a new wife, Catherine Howard. How had it come to this? How had a man who that April had reached the pinnacle of his success by being appointed 16th Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain suffered such a vertiginous fall? What led to Thomas Cromwell’s death? For once, the picturesque traditional story deserves priority. That story is the personal disaster of physical repulsion that destroyed the marriage of Henry VIII to his hapless wife, Anne of Cleves. The marriage had seemed such a neat idea to Cromwell – for it was his idea. Anne’s chief virtue for Cromwell as he sought to secure the king a fourth bride was that she was not the daughter of an English nobleman, and so as queen consort, she would not disturb the uneasy balance in English court politics between leading aristocrats. Diplomatically, advantages stacked up. Anne’s family had carried out their own Reformation in their ducal territories in western Germany, while not decisively breaking with the pope. They were also one of the counterweights to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V inside his empire. Read more | Europe's holy war: how the Reformation convulsed a continent There’s another element to these negotiations that have for centuries been overshadowed by the Cleves debacle. Cromwell was actually orchestrating an international ‘Two-Princess Deal’, twinning the Cleves match with negotiations to marry Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, the Lady Mary, to Philip Duke of Bavaria, a German prince with similar credentials to those of Cleves. Remarkably, when Anne of Cleves arrived in England, Duke Philip was already there, discreetly making the right marital overtures to Mary. He even gave her a kiss in the garden of the abbot of Westminster in front of witnesses. Nothing came from this promising start, which was caught up in the unfolding nuptial disaster that was the Cleves marriage, and Mary would have to wait another 14 years before securing the hand of a continental royal: the prince (later king) of Spain. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/RV14286-9-2-5af1d26-e1731579620822.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The debacle of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves (depicted in a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger) heaped sexual humiliation on the king – and Thomas Cromwell took the blame (Photo by Roger-Viollet/TopFoto)" title="The debacle of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves (depicted in a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger) heaped sexual humiliation on the king – and Thomas Cromwell took the blame (Photo by Roger-Viollet/TopFoto)" /> The symmetry of the diplomatic moves with Cleves and Bavaria made it all the more devastating when Henry departed from Cromwell’s script and loathed the Lady Anne at first sight at Rochester as she journeyed up to court, on New Year’s Day 1540. The reasons are locked for ever in the mystery that is Henry VIII; no one else could see much wrong with her. Henry’s efforts to find a legal way out of the marriage were all futile, and so from January 1540, he was trapped humiliatingly in Cromwell’s project. That revealed the minister’s vulnerability: from his first rise to power in 1532, he was always at the mercy of the king’s moods and demands. Like his predecessor and patron, Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell would be high in favour only as long as he delivered a successful result for the king. But the Cleves debacle was more than just a diplomatic failure: it also heaped personal sexual humiliation on Henry VIII. From the first night that the ill-starred couple had shared a marital bed, the king found himself repelled at the thought of any physical intimacy with her. Now those who hated Cromwell simply for being Cromwell could play on the king’s emotional impulses, just as Cromwell himself had done in sealing the downfall of Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, back in 1536. Cromwell had never been close to Boleyn, despite their common interest in religious Reformation. More important to their relationship was her central role in destroying his beloved master, Wolsey, whose memory Cromwell had ostentatiously commemorated in his heraldry even while Anne consolidated her position as Henry VIII’s bride. Anne’s execution in May 1536 brought Cromwell his first public honours that summer, which she had probably blocked previously: not just a knighthood but a peerage, Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. He also acquired the very senior legal office of Lord Privy Seal: third-ranking office of state after the Lord Chancellor and Lord Treasurer, with control over a crucial stage in the production of documents for sealing after the initial royal signature on any grant or decision. Those promotions were galling for the existing nobility, led by the biggest snob in Tudor England, the Duke of Norfolk (whose peerage titles were all of six decades older than Cromwell’s new title). Thomas Cromwell's early brush with death In the crisis of autumn 1536, during the northern risings known as the Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, this nearly brought ruin to the upstart. The pilgrims saw Cromwell as their chief enemy, and in their fury at the destruction of northern monasteries (which they blamed on him), they were not intimidated by the royal armies sent against them under Norfolk’s generalship. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-464427341-fa27132-e1731579829101.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A c1539 portrait of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. “The biggest snob in England” revelled in Thomas Cromwell’s fall from grace (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A c1539 portrait of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. “The biggest snob in England” revelled in Thomas Cromwell’s fall from grace (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> There was a terrifying moment for Cromwell in the first week of November 1536, during which the king hesitated, pondering whether to sacrifice his minister as the centrepiece of sweeping concessions to the rebels. Henry changed his mind after retreating to his then rarely used Palace of Richmond, which happened to be significantly near a newly acquired Surrey country house of Cromwell’s at Mortlake. That vital element of face-to-face contact, which Cromwell’s enemies succeeded in preventing when he did eventually fall from power, brought Henry second thoughts. Instead of being destroyed by the king, Cromwell now enjoyed his increasing favour. Indeed, in summer 1537, Baron Cromwell celebrated a spectacular dynastic triumph. His teenage son, Gregory – much-loved, charming but otherwise not exceptionally talented – married Elizabeth Seymour, slightly older than him and already widow of a Yorkshire knight. More importantly, she was the sister of Henry’s current queen, Jane Seymour. The genealogical results of this wedding were intriguing: in an informal sense, they made Cromwell the king’s uncle by marriage, and in a specifically formal sense, Gregory Cromwell became uncle by marriage to the heir to the throne who was born that autumn (the future Edward VI). It was a formidable alliance: newly ennobled Seymours and a potential new English noble dynasty of Cromwells. That marked the Lord Privy Seal as a future danger to everyone else vying for power under the king, particularly those who felt that the greater antiquity of their noble titles was a sign that God singled them out for rule under Henry VIII. Thomas Cromwell played a dangerous game Parallel to that dynastic complication was the polarising effect of religion. With Anne Boleyn removed, Cromwell was the chief promoter of evangelical reformation amid the uncertain theological future of Henry VIII’s newly created Church of England. His quasi-religious office as ‘Vice-Gerent in Spirituals’ replicated the power that Cardinal Wolsey had enjoyed, but was now exercised under the king’s authority, not that of the pope. By 1538 it would be obvious to the politically well-informed that the Vice-Gerent was not always following initiatives from the king, but instead using the ill-defined power of an ill-defined office to push his own reformist agenda in such matters as enforcing circulation of the Bible in English or attacking traditional cults of saints and pilgrimage to shrines. There was much more activity of the same character behind the scenes. Read more | The dissolution of the monasteries: mindless violence or planned precision? Cromwell was playing a dangerous game if anyone chose to draw the king’s attention to what was happening – or more precisely, if the king chose to listen to that information. Henry always decided which noises rang most loudly in his ears at any one time, and during the 1530s the opposed voices had taken on a poisonous religious resonance. Around Cromwell gathered gentry and nobility (including the Seymours) who sympathised with his reformist aims in religion, in contact with Reformations in mainland Europe. Ranged against them was a wide spectrum of those who might feel any combination of dynastic or religious hostility towards the Vice-Gerent, and who would be alert to any opportunity to discredit him. Cromwell’s love for his only surviving child pushed him into ever more reckless confrontations with more established politicians. In late 1537, Gregory and his near-royal bride were sent to Sussex to constitute a local power for king and Cromwell on the south coast. The young couple were provided with the beginnings of a stately mansion that the Lord Privy Seal planned to convert from a major monastery in a fine spreading valley site below the hill-town of Lewes. It needed an accelerated surrender of Lewes Priory to make this rehousing work in time for the already pregnant Elizabeth Seymour. During autumn 1537 the haste was evidenced by a new departure in policy during the monastic dissolutions: for the first time all the Lewes monks were offered a pension if they co-operated with the surrender. Read more | Q&A: Where did the monks go after the dissolution of the monasteries? Then a year after all was safely settled, in late autumn 1538 Gregory committed some scandalous exploit in Sussex, the details of which are now obscured but were probably sexual in nature. That required his hasty removal with Elizabeth and son from Sussex to a conveniently vacant royal castle at Leeds in Kent. Lewes lost its chance to be the ancestral home of a great Cromwell dynasty. The prompt arrival of Gregory and his wife in the splendour of Leeds Castle in March 1539 was politically necessary to provide minimum propriety for one of Cromwell’s riskiest moves yet. That spring, the government carefully managed new parliamentary elections for the House of Commons county by county, to balance local political forces and produce an assembly that would co-operate with the king’s various plans. In Kent, however, the pairing of the leading representatives, the two ‘knights of the shire’, was bizarre. One was indeed the sort of eminent knight one might expect, Sir Thomas Cheyney. The other was Gregory Cromwell: a rackety teenager who within about a month of taking up residence in Kent, now occupied a place normally reserved for most respectable county gentry. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/2F2D995-e2a0a70-e1731579461245.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A Holbein miniature, long without an identification, but now said to depict Gregory Cromwell in 1537. That same year, Thomas secured his son possession of Lewes Priory (Photo by Maidun Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A Holbein miniature, long without an identification, but now said to depict Gregory Cromwell in 1537. That same year, Thomas secured his son possession of Lewes Priory (Photo by Maidun Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The oddity of that choice for parliament is emphasised by the fact that at no stage in 1539–40 can Gregory be found named as a justice of the peace in Kent. Whatever had happened in Sussex probably made that seem unwise for the moment, but to make Gregory a knight of the shire was the first sign of what became increasingly apparent over the next 12 months: Cromwell was losing his grip on his previously acute sense of what was not just politically possible but also politically sensible. It is significant that the trigger for this corruption of Cromwell’s judgment was dynastic: his love for the erratic, energetic boy who was his only legitimate heir. Why the Duke of Norfolk pushed for Thomas Cromwell's downfall The sheer scale of the problems facing any would-be reforming minister in Tudor England, Wales and Ireland, let alone the increasing political turmoil, would have stretched anyone’s powers of management, even someone with Cromwell’s exceptional talent and energy. From spring 1539, events revealed his deteriorating sense of discretion and control, and even what at first seemed a smart move, the Cleves marriage, proved the most toxic of mistakes. Cromwell’s bravura improvisations in politics and policy enraged traditionalist leaders in national politics, moving them towards the conclusion that he must be stopped. Most fatally for the minister, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk was now prepared to lead the charge. Read more | Thomas Cromwell: the best Italian in all England Over the previous few years Norfolk had normally been careful to cast the appearance of bluff friendship over his relations with Cromwell, even under the considerable provocation represented by the Cromwell/Seymour marriage in 1537. Now he was pushed over the edge by a move offensive in both religious and dynastic terms: the dissolution of a Cluniac priory at Thetford in Norfolk that served as mausoleum for the Howard family and their noble predecessors as earls and dukes of Norfolk. Howard had made plans to save the mausoleum by turning the priory into a non-monastic collegiate church, as happened to a number of other monasteries (most to become cathedrals) during the monastic dissolutions. In the end, the complete suppression of Thetford Priory in February 1540 was one of the very last to take place, postponed with surely deliberate delay to a few days after the duke had left England on a hastily organised embassy to France. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BMNFD7-a36d9de-e1731579777920.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Thomas Cromwell’s decision to dissolve Thetford Priory enraged the Duke of Norfolk, who would soon relish the opportunity to exact retribution (Photo by Pictures Colour Library/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Thomas Cromwell’s decision to dissolve Thetford Priory enraged the Duke of Norfolk, who would soon relish the opportunity to exact retribution (Photo by Pictures Colour Library/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> It was a direct blow to Howard’s always brittle family pride: later he and his stepmother went to the extraordinary length of moving Howard tombs and their occupants from Thetford Priory to two parish churches in Suffolk and at Lambeth. Whatever nuances we may now find in Cromwell’s supervision of monastic closures through the 1530s, his old enemy would see Thetford’s dissolution without a collegiate future as yet another calculated insult to Howard honour. Hence the prominent part that the Duke of Norfolk played in the dissolution of Cromwell in spring and summer 1540: not merely the drama in the Privy Council chamber, but much quiet priming of ambassadors to spread the right narrative quickly across Europe. Thomas Cromwell’s fall from grace Perhaps it was always inevitable that great ministers of Henry VIII would fall from grace, defeated by his impossible and incessant demands. That was accentuated by the fact that early Tudor England was always disadvantaged in European politics, not nearly as powerful or important as Henry thought it should be. For both Wolsey and Cromwell, the trigger for downfall was failure in foreign policy. Wolsey had found it impossible to persuade a pope intimidated by Charles V to annul the long-standing marriage of Charles’s aunt Catherine of Aragon to a selfish king of England. In Cromwell’s case, the problem was his understandable inability to deal with Henry VIII looking a gift horse from Cleves in the mouth. After that, with the king characteristically looking for a reason to blame someone else for his own decision, the jackals were free to gather. Any charge would do: treason or heresy. Cromwell was lucky not to be burned at the stake for heresy in 1540, instead suffering a comparatively swift (albeit still gruesome) death by the executioner’s axe. Maybe the tide was already ebbing on King Henry’s malice. How Thomas Cromwell got his revenge The minister’s enemies would suffer dearly for the role they played in his death Thomas Cromwell’s death did not immediately end the killing. Two days later a notorious event embodied Henry VIII’s idiosyncratic notion of ‘middle way’. Six priests were executed: three evangelicals burned for heresy, and three papalist Catholics hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. The evangelical clerics Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrad and William Jerome were clearly identified with Cromwell, and their clashes with the conservative bishop Stephen Gardiner had sparked much political turmoil in Cromwell’s last months. What is extraordinary is how little Cromwell’s friends suffered after that. From the moment that Henry was satisfied in his urgent quest not to be married to Anne of Cleves – through the legal pronouncement that the marriage was null because of non-consummation – his rage against Cromwell began cooling. In fact, by winter 1541 he was ranting at his councillors that “upon the pretexts of trivial faults that [Cromwell] had committed, they had laid several false accusations on him, by which [the king] been made to put to death the most faithful servant he ever had”. The king’s new mood soon benefited Gregory Cromwell. As early as December 1540, Gregory was granted a new barony in his own right, after his wife (Jane Seymour’s sister) had skilfully written to the king for mercy. After Henry VIII’s death in 1547, Cromwell’s Seymour allies, such as Sir John Dudley and Henry Grey Marquess of Dorset, formed an evangelical government for Edward VI. In effect, the opening weeks of the new reign saw a coup of Cromwellians against Thomas Cromwell’s enemies: a reversal of the debacle of 1540. The new regime spearheaded a religious revolution that followed the Protestant trajectory of Cromwell’s policies. It also marginalised or imprisoned some of the chief actors in his fall: Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk; Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner. Cromwell’s posthumous revenge was a dish inevitably but still satisfyingly served cold. Diarmaid MacCulloch is emeritus professor of the history of the church and fellow of St Cross College and Campion Hall, University of Oxford This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Thomas Cromwell on screen: is Wolf Hall the best depiction of the Tudor statesman?
Move over Thomas More – Tracy Borman argues that it was Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's 'faithful servant' who was truly the man for all seasons
This weekend sees the release of the long-awaited BBC dramatisation of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final instalment of her globally bestselling and Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall trilogy that traces the meteoric rise and dramatic fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. Here, historian Tracy Borman looks at five of the most famous screen portrayals of Henry’s trusted adviser – and makes the case for which comes closest to reality. Wolf Hall (2014 & 2024) The late Hilary Mantel’s compelling portrayal of Henry VIII’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, (traditionally one of history’s greatest villains) so fired the public imagination that scriptwriters scrambled to translate it to stage and screen. The RSC’s production, starring Ben Miles, attracted sell-out crowds in the UK and US. The BBC’s screen version followed hot on its hills, a lavish six-part dramatisation starring Mark Rylance in the lead role and Damian Lewis as his royal master, Henry VIII. Rylance gave us an altogether different Cromwell to the ruthless schemer who masterminded Anne Boleyn’s fall, destroyed the monasteries and lined his own pockets in the process. The screen version was both more sympathetic and attractive: a tender husband and father, charming and self-deprecating, a self-made man and – as Mantel put it – “clever as a bag of snakes”. Rylance’s Cromwell was quiet and watchful, his expression conveying a thousand words without his lips uttering a single one. There was a dazzling supporting cast. Damian Lewis was just as charismatic, mercurial and, at times, psychopathic, as the Tudor king himself. Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn was masterful: capricious, magnetic and vulnerable, with a hint of a French accent (‘Cremwell’) that was both condescending and entirely authentic. Jonathan Pryce gave us a charming, clever and humorous Cardinal Wolsey; Mark Gatiss was suitably snide and sinister as Cromwell’s archenemy Stephen Gardiner; and Saskia Reeves played his love interest with a gentle, heartbreaking touch. Some – notably Rylance, Lewis and Pryce – will return for the new series, while others, such as Tom Holland, who played Cromwell’s hapless son Gregory, has since been catapulted to Hollywood superstardom when he bagged the part of Spiderman. The Mirror and the Light will also feature new stars. I, for one, cannot wait to see Timothy Spall as the villainous Duke of Norfolk. Read more | What was Princess Mary and Thomas Cromwell's relationship – did they plan to marry? A Man for All Seasons (1966) Every film needs a hero and a villain, and in most screen portrayals of Henry VIII’s reign, Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell adopt these roles. Diametrically opposed on everything, from the king’s divorce to the Reformation, these two arch-enemies provide ideal fodder for film makers. But until Wolf Hall, it was patently clear who the hero really was. The villainous Cromwell here is played by Leo McKern (later famous for playing the title role in TV’s Rumpole of the Bailey). It is not such a one-dimensional portrayal as others, however. McKern’s Cromwell may be an untrustworthy schemer, but he has humanity, humour and warmth. He also brings out Cromwell’s formidable intelligence, as well as a certain amount of chubby uncouthness to represent his humble origins. But overall – and particularly as the film makes it way towards its climax – McKern’s Cromwell is undoubtedly the embodiment of evil. He preys upon the weakness of Richard Rich in an almost diabolical manner in order to secure the condemnation of the saintly Thomas More, played by Paul Schofield. The audience is left in no doubt who they should be rooting for. What is the best historical movie of all time? Sword-and-sandals epic or soulful period piece? Gritty war drama or muddy medieval caper? HistoryExtra asked 22 historians to nominate the best historical movies of all time | Read more Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) A more extreme version of Cromwell the villain is found in Anne of the Thousand Days. Here, Thomas Cromwell is played by John Colicos (more famous for playing the Klingon commander Kor in Star Trek) in a manner more chilling in its depiction of the king’s minister than any other. Described in the film as “entirely without scruple”, Colicos uses a monotone voice and piercing eyes to portray Cromwell as almost devoid of any humanity whatsoever. This is seen most vividly in his cool indifference to the torture of Mark Smeaton, whom he frames for adultery with Anne Boleyn. In fact, the only point where any sense of humanity is allowed to emerge in Colicos’ Cromwell is when, having suggested the break with Rome to Richard Burton’s Henry VIII, he retreats through a doorway to breathe a huge sigh of relief at the apparent success of this risk. Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972) Yet another Cromwell appears in Henry VIII and His Six Wives. Cromwell is played by Donald Pleasence (later to play the Bond villain Blofeld in You Only Live Twice), alongside Keith Michell’s celebrated Henry. In contrast to the choleric McKern and the icy Colicos, Pleasence’s Cromwell is more weasel-like, mumbling through a nasal voice and insincere smile in his constant efforts to ingratiate himself with the king. Unlike Anne of the Thousand Days and A Man for All Seasons, Henry VIII and His Six Wives continues long enough to depict Cromwell’s alienation of the nobility and his resulting arrest as he is led away from the council in dazed indignation at the sudden accusation of treason. Odd, and somewhat too quirky to be convincing, Pleasence’s Cromwell has the virtue of portraying the over-confidence that preceded the minister’s dramatic fall and his failure to anticipate the fickle indifference of the king to his fate. The Tudors (2007–10) While much of the credit for Cromwell’s rehabilitation in recent times is given to the novels of Hilary Mantel, the major revision in terms of the screen actually preceded Wolf Hall. James Frain’s portrayal of Cromwell in The Tudors gave us an altogether more rounded and human figure. One of the key factors here was the much longer running time of the lavish production, which appeared to liberate it from the need to provide the more one-dimensional hero versus villain portrayals of shorter films. Rather than being depicted in sharp, unflattering contrast to the Thomas More of Jeremy Northam, Frain’s Cromwell is allowed to possess a conscience and very obvious convictions alongside being extremely clever and hard working. Examples of this are the distaste that he shows during the torture of Mark Smeaton; the affection for his son Gregory, and the genuine Protestant convictions that shaped much of his service to the king. But this is no whitewash: Cromwell’s ruthlessness is displayed alongside the high handedness towards the nobility that later proved his undoing. Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the entire four seasons of The Tudors is its depiction of Cromwell's gruesome execution in 1540. Even if some of the details of this are largely imaginary, such as the executioner being plied with drink so that he botches Cromwell’s beheading, it is a very effective portrayal of the hatred felt for him by his opponents. So which of these portrayals comes closest to the real Cromwell? In researching his extraordinary life for my biography, I discovered a character at once warm, affectionate and humorous, but one who did not flinch from acts of astonishing ruthlessness and cruelty. In truth, Cromwell defies typecasting, and instead combines elements of all five portrayals. He, rather than More, was truly a man for all seasons. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives Wolf Hall: Author Hilary Mantel talks Tudors and Thomas Cromwell The Mirror & The Light book review: Hilary Mantel's epic finale "lives up to the hype" Thomas Cromwell: the best Italian in all England Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers
Thomas Cromwell’s life before Henry VIII
Much has been written about Thomas Cromwell, the self-taught ‘Putney boy’ who went on to become the henchman of Henry VIII and who brought down Anne Boleyn, only to suffer the same fate. But long before establishing himself as the king’s trusted adviser, Cromwell spent much of his early adulthood in Europe, namely Italy
Little is known about this period in his life – what exactly was the son of a London brewer doing on the war-torn peninsula? Here, Dr Catherine Fletcher, a lecturer in public history at the University of Sheffield, explores Cromwell’s ‘Italian years’, and reveals how his time in Rome influenced his views on religion… As far as we can tell, after leaving England early in the 16th century Thomas Cromwell joined the French army and found his way south. There had been war in Italy since 1494. In this period the peninsula was divided into numerous different states: Florence, Naples, Venice, Milan, the Papal States and many smaller territories. In alliance with the big European powers – France on one side, the holy Roman empire on the other – they fought to expand their influence. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Borgia family held the papacy, while the Medici [a very powerful family] were in exile from Florence. Shortly after the death of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) in 1503, Cromwell fought with the French against a Spanish army at the battle of Garigliano. The Italian wars were notorious for the extensive use of mercenary troops, and Cromwell would have been one of many foreigners – Swiss pikemen, German landsknechts – fighting on Italian soil at this time. Niccolò Machiavelli famously described mercenary armies as “disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal... they have no fear of God, they keep no faith with men”. We don’t know whether this was Cromwell’s experience: we do know that he ended up on the losing side. The French were defeated at Garigliano. Cromwell made his way to Florence, where he met Francesco Frescobaldi, a banker. Frescobaldi took the young Englishman into his household, providing him with clothing and money. The tale of Cromwell at Garigliano and his subsequent encounter with Frescobaldi is told in a series of rather romanticised stories by the Italian writer Matteo Bandello. It shouldn’t be taken at face value, but the connection between Cromwell and Frescobaldi is substantiated by a letter of 1533. Florence had a very different political system from England’s. There was no monarch. The city was ruled by a series of councils and committees, though in practice government was dominated by a fairly small number of leading families. The most famous of its civil servants was Machiavelli, whose name became a by-word for political cunning and duplicity. (That isn’t a fair depiction of Machiavelli’s political thought, but since the later sixteenth century it has been a popular image.) There is no evidence that Cromwell and Machiavelli met, but the timing of Cromwell’s stay in Florence has long invited speculation. From Cardinal Reginald Pole in the 16th century onwards, critics of Cromwell accused him of being ‘Machiavellian’. In the play A Man For All Seasons [written by Robert Bolt in 1960], where Cromwell is very much the villain, he’s supposed to be familiar with the doctrines of Machiavelli’s famous little book, The Prince. (For debate about The Prince and Wolf Hall, see David Rundle’s blog with comment from Hilary Mantel.) There is better evidence for Cromwell reading other great works of Italian literature. He agreed to loan Edmund Bonner, who, like Cromwell, was one of Cardinal Wolsey’s protégés, a copy of Petrarch’s Triumphs. In 1530 Bonner wrote to Cromwell asking if he might also borrow a copy of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Castiglione was a courtier and diplomat, and his book, which enjoyed international success, was a kind of guide to operating at court. His courtiers were advised to cultivate an air of nonchalance (the closest word we have to the Italian sprezzatura), to hide their skill and effort behind a facade of ease and grace. After his stint in Florence, Cromwell spent time in the Netherlands, a centre for the textile trade, where many of the Florentine banks maintained branches. Their international networks facilitated all sorts of transactions for Henry VIII and fellow European rulers, importing and exporting everything from artworks to textiles to weapons. Antonio Bonvisi, who features in Wolf Hall, was a London-based banker and merchant from another Tuscan city, Lucca. Cromwell also went back to Italy. In 1514 he stayed at The English Hospice in Rome, which provided accommodation to visiting pilgrims. It exists to this day as the Venerable English College, a seminary for the training of priests. Cromwell was far from the only member of Henry’s administration to have spent time in Italy: the peninsula’s universities – Padua, Bologna, Perugia and others – attracted numerous English students, particularly aspiring churchmen. Cromwell was in Rome again in 1517–18 to secure indulgences for the guild of Our Lady in Boston. By now, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici had been elected pope, taking the name Leo X. Cromwell is supposed to have won Leo over with a gift of sweetmeats, quickly obtaining the paperwork he needed. He might also have picked up some political tips. In the spring and summer of 1517, Leo moved ruthlessly to secure his own power. He packed the College of Cardinals with friends and supporters, and arrested three cardinals on charges of plotting against him. One of them, Alfonso Petrucci, was sentenced to death, and was executed by strangling. Historians still debate whether the plot existed or whether Leo framed his enemies, but certainly the incident would have been well-known to their fellow cardinal Thomas Wolsey. More generally, Leo’s worldly papacy drew the wrath of religious reformers. It was on his watch, also in 1517, that Martin Luther famously pinned his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Luther and his followers caricatured Leo as the Antichrist, denouncing the wealth of his church and contrasting it with the poverty of the early Christians. Did Cromwell’s time in Rome influence his views on religion? But perhaps the Italian connection we’re meant to be thinking of is not so much a link to the 16th century as to the 20th. As Hilary Mantel noted in an interview, Cromwell does have “something of that dark glitter of the mafia boss about him”. I’ve been fascinated by the way the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall plays on the subliminal association between ‘Italianness’ and intrigue. It draws minds not just to the Borgias and Machiavelli, but to more recent images of Italy too. For some Mafia-style ‘offers you can’t refuse’, in short, look no further than the Tudor court. Dr Catherine Fletcher was a historical adviser on the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall. A lecturer in public history at the University of Sheffield, Fletcher specialises in early modern British and European history, and the Italian Renaissance and its reception. You can follow her on Twitter @cath_fletcher
‘What did a Tudor coffin look like?’: the weird and wonderful world of a Wolf Hall adviser
Starring Homeland’s Damian Lewis, Wolf Hall follows the meteoric rise of Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court, from his lowly start as the son of a blacksmith to becoming Henry VIII’s closest advisor. We caught up with Dr Catherine Fletcher, a historical adviser on the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novels. Here, she shares some of the more unusual elements of the job…
Q: How did you become involved with the making of Wolf Hall? A: I was recommended by a colleague. The production team was looking for someone who knew about the ceremonial world in Tudor times, and I had written about Henry VIII’s relationship with the court of Rome. We remember Henry for his break with Rome, but we forget that all the way up until that point Henry took his role as a Catholic prince seriously, paying close attention to what the papacy thought. I was available to talk to the set dressers and prop designers during filming – from April to August last year – so that they could ask questions and make sure what they were doing was historically accurate. It was not all that glamorous – sadly I wasn’t hobnobbing with Damian Lewis [who plays Henry VIII] or anything! But it was fascinating. The production team were very keen to ensure that, as far as possible, what they were doing was correct. Of course, there are not sources to answer every question, but we do our best. Q: What was the most bizarre or memorable question you were asked? A: ‘What shape was a Tudor coffin?’ was a particularly unusual one! The team wanted to know for the scene where Catherine of Aragon dies. Thankfully I managed to find a watercolour of the vault under St George’s Chapel in Windsor, where Henry VIII and Jane Seymour are buried. Jane’s coffin was shaped around the head. So I was able to suggest that to them. Another moment that was quite wonderful was a scene featuring Franciscan monks carrying a cross, when they bump into another group – I can’t remember who. Of course, for health and safety purposes you couldn’t have actors ramming into one another with a large, wooden cross! So the team instead designed a soft cross, and they asked me what it should look like. I tracked down an image from the 1530s, to give them an idea. I was also asked what sort of hats the characters should be wearing. The wide cardinals’ hats you see on coats of arms were reserved for ceremonial purposes only. Wolsey would more often have worn a small, red cap. It was a challenge getting the scenes to look right at times. We can turn to Hans Holbein’s portraits for inspiration, but he did not paint entire interiors. It was extraordinary trying to piece together all these little pieces of evidence. All credit to the team, they made a serious effort to engage with all the expertise available: they sought advice on Latin pronunciations; on the music – I was one of many people they consulted. Q: Do you think the emphasis on historical accuracy resulted partly from the great attention to detail author Hilary Mantel paid to it in the novels themselves? A: Yes, I think it’s because the books drew on such a lot of historical research. This effort was continued in the making of the BBC series. Q: You’ve read the final scripts but are yet to see the series on screen. How are you feeling? A: As a historian I often find it really hard to get on with historical TV, but I am genuinely looking forward to watching Wolf Hall. I think it will be a wonderful piece of drama. Dr Catherine Fletcher is a lecturer in public history at the University of Sheffield. Wolf Hall is available to stream on BBC iPlayer. To find out more, click here.
Wolf Halls: take a look inside the properties where the new BBC series is filmed
Hilary Mantel fans are eagerly awaiting a major TV adaptation of her award-winning Wolf Hall, set to be broadcast on BBC Two this week.
The six-part serial, featuring Homeland star Damian Lewis and Olivier Award-winning Mark Rylance, will follow the meteoric rise of Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court, from his lowly start as the son of a blacksmith to becoming King Henry VIII’s closest advisor. Filming began earlier this year at six National Trust properties across the South West. Here, we take you on a historical tour… Montacute House Situated in southern Somerset, Montacute House is a classic example of Elizabethan Renaissance architecture. The house was completed in 1601 by Sir Edward Phelips, who would later become known for his role as opening prosecutor at the trial of the Gunpowder plotters. Within the mansion is a Long Gallery, which features more than 60 Tudor and Elizabethan portraits, including the works of Francis Bacon. The property also boasts rooms of portraiture dedicated to Elizabethan England, the Jacobean Court and – of most interest to fans of Wolf Hall – the court of Henry VIII. The intricate stonework was crafted under the instruction of William Arnold, a master mason. However, Montacute House’s honey-coloured glow can be attributed to the hamstone used in its construction. Sourced just two miles from the property, hamstone features in many of the medieval churches in the area. Barrington Court Just seven miles west from Montacute, across the river Parrett, lies Barrington Court, another Somerset National Trust property – but one that has a more fractious history. The site of the Tudor manor house was occupied from the 11th century, and the estate’s owner, Henry Daubeney, started work on the house seen today in around 1538. It was a time of good fortune for the new Earl of Bridgewater, as he was finally able to develop the property he had inherited in 1514. Unfortunately, however, his lavish spending resulted in bankruptcy, and his political influence waned. He was implicated in the disgrace of Queen Katherine Howard in 1541, and seven years later he died without issue. The estate was bought by London merchant Gervase Clifton, and with the house finally completed by 1559, it was sold to the nephew of Sir Edward Phelips of Montacute, Sir William Phelips. Sir William suffered a similar fate to that of the estate’s previous owner. His financial situation became so dire that in 1620, flanked by an armed gang, he stormed the house of a man who refused to underwrite a £200 loan he required, and challenged him to a duel. Five years later he sold Barrington Court to the Strode family, who managed to maintain and rejuvenate the property. Despite this, it fluctuated between lavish retreat and farmhouse until the National Trust took it on in 1907. The Lyle family have been restoring the estate since the 1920s. The near symmetrical mansion is decorated with intricate stonework and ornamental features at the top of the gables. Surrounding the house is a moat, chestnut avenue and squash court set in grounds influenced by famous garden designer Getrude Jekyll. Lacock Abbey Famous as the home of photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, and for starring in Harry Potter, this former abbey in Wiltshire is a quirky combination of different architectural styles. It began as an Augustinian nunnery in the 13th century, but in the 16th century fell victim to Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. The property was sold in 1539 to Sir William Sharington, who added an octagonal tower with two rooms – the lower room for displaying his treasures, and the upper room, accessible only by walking across the leads of the roof, for banqueting. Later, John Ivory Talbot made alterations to bring Lacock in line with the gothic style of the 1750s. His relative, William, would in August 1835 photograph the famous gothic oriel window. William realised that by producing a negative of the image, multiple prints could be made. This became know as the ‘calotype’ or ‘talbotype’ process. Today, the on-site Fox Talbot Museum displays much of Talbot’s work. Great Chalfield Manor and Garden The manor as we know it today was built for Thomas Tropenell, an affluent and astute investor. Steward for the Lord of Hungerford, he was given much of his master's rents and lands after Hungerford was executed in 1464 for his support of the Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses. Although 19th-century modifications altered it somewhat, the original house was designed to be symmetrical, which was uncommon in the period. It also features oriel windows and gabled porches, and a distinctive parish church, which Tropnell rebuilt, lies nearby. The house fell into disrepair for two centuries until it was purchased by George Fuller MP in the early 1900s. The MP's son, Major Robert Fuller, restored it under the guidance of restoration architect Sir Harold Breakspear and a set of drawings from 1836. The late medieval layout of the interior was reinstated, and the gardens were reworked with the addition of yew houses, an orchard, and upper and lower moats. Written by Benjamin Frith-Salem
Peter Kosminsky, director of the upcoming dramatisation of Wolf Hall, gives an insight into the series, while David Crouch describes a 12th-century clash for England’s throne
As the BBC TV dramatisation of Wolf Hall is shortly due to air, series director Peter Kosminsky reveals the challenges and joys of filming Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed novels. Meanwhile, Professor David Crouch visits Wallingford Castle in Oxfordshire, which played an important role in the 12th-century battle for England’s throne between King Stephen and Empress Matilda.
Wolf Hall: author Hilary Mantel talks Tudors, historical accuracy and winning the Man Booker Prize
Hilary Mantel, author of the Thomas Cromwell novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, talks to Rob Attar about the process of writing historical fiction and shares some of the secrets of her tremendous literary success
When did you first think of writing about Thomas Cromwell? The idea first came to me about 40 years ago but I put it away on a shelf, if you like, tabulated under ‘good idea – might do it sometime’. I swung into action in around 2005 when I realised that the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession was coming up soon [in 2009]. I thought to myself that if there is a time to do it, this is the time. The idea had been lying at the back of my mind but I hadn’t really been thinking about it or studying it. I was very much an 18th-century person: that was what deterred me and made me hold off. I felt so comfortably situated in the 18th century that I wondered if I had it in me to go and live in another era. But eventually I took courage, spurred on by knowing about that big anniversary. How important do you think it is to be historically accurate when writing a novel set in the past? I can’t see the point of doing it otherwise. Of course nobody can guarantee 100 per cent accuracy – you are never going to be completely free of mistakes. But I think you have to take your research seriously, otherwise there is no point in it at all. You can’t speculate emptily about the personal reality of people’s lives. It has to be grounded in time, place and context. If you don’t like research and don’t consider it important then it’s better, in my view, to leave the historical novel alone. I am not trying to prescribe for other people, but that is the way that I do things. I’m not really interested in writing about imaginary people against a historical backdrop, which is of course what many historical novelists do. I’m interested in real people against a historical backdrop and there I think you have to respect the complexity of their stories. You have to know that history isn’t tidy and that it doesn’t do what you as a novelist want it to. It doesn’t conform to your dramatic instincts. It often has a really awkward shape and so you have to make your fiction flexible to bend around it. I don’t knowingly ever falsify a date or a place or any item of information, but where I do operate is in the vast area of interpretation. How do you fill the gaps where sources don’t exist? This is the whole business of a historical novelist: the world of intention and motivation. We know what people did but often we don’t know why they did it and as a biographer or a historian you can only explore that to a certain degree. I think that as a novelist you are freer, in a way, to move closer to the reality of a human being. You can offer some glimpse of this moment-by-moment complexity: the incredibly rich texture of life. How you do that, in my view, is by applying yourself intensely to the study of what is there, what is on the record. You look at the words so hard that eventually they begin to jump off the page. It’s the trick of animating what seems dead, reading the lines and intuiting what lies between them. This is a fundamental of the novelist’s craft. All you do as a novelist is apply yourself to imagining what it is like to be someone else and as a historical novelist you do that for a person who is dead. What aids you is understanding their cultural context: the reasons why they may have thought as they did – what might have actuated them. You discover that by understanding their system of thought: the way they express emotion; the language they use; their whole context. Of course you can’t do this simply by studying documents. You also need to listen to music, look at pictures and learn about everyday things. You need to explore the texture of everyday life: food, gardening, tastes and morals and the whole panorama of human existence, as far as you can. You try to put yourself inside their century, inside their era. It’s a question of really burrowing down into the detail – as far as research is concerned – but it’s also a matter of seeing the big picture, standing back and getting a feel of the age. When writing your historical novels, how did you decide the level to pitch the dialogue at? How closely did you want to reflect how people actually spoke at the time? When writing the Cromwell novels and my book about the French Revolution [A Place of Greater Safety, published in 1992], if I could get hold of contemporary sources that quoted people’s words, I would use them. It’s fascinating when you have, say, a contemporary quoting Wolsey or Cromwell, even though you know he may be paraphrasing. I think, for example, of the things Anne Boleyn said when she was under observation in the Tower of London. These were written down by the ladies around her and sent through the constable of the Tower straight to Cromwell. There you can hear Anne talking herself to her doom. If you have these real words you can take them as your starting point and then the challenge is to make your invented dialogue smooth in and out of that unnoticeably. One thing you have to do is privilege the clarity of communication because you don’t want to be driving your readers to footnotes or dictionaries. Everything must be clear from the context, and so what you are after is a suggestion of the language of the time. You don’t want pastiche, which can be grim, false and very often embarrassing. You want what you write to be accessible, and while I do pay a lot of attention to individual words and when they were first used, I’m not as much concerned with every single word as I am with thoughts and with habits of thought. The basic question is not ‘Did they say this?’ but ‘Could they have thought this?’, and I think that’s what you use as a guide. So many words have changed their meaning or taken on different nuances, that it’s impossible to be authentic. That is why I favour an idiom that has a suggestion of the era rather than trying to imitate it slavishly. Do you believe that what you are writing are still traditional historical novels, or have you have moved beyond that in some way? Today any historical novel is also a historiographical novel because we can’t write in the unselfconscious way that people perhaps did in the 19th century. We have to be self-questioning, always holding our own fiction up for examination. You put layers into your book. On the top layer you create a story that you hope is fast moving, dramatic and immediately accessible. Then you dig another layer where the narrative questions itself. My third Cromwell novel is going to be called The Mirror & the Light because it holds up a mirror to its own workings and to what has gone before. It casts a searching light and is very consciously examining its own processes. We don’t have the bold 19th-century confidence when we try to write a novel these days and while I wouldn’t like to go back to that place, it is important not to get too tricksy if you want to give your readers the satisfactions of narrative. So you do question your own workings but not always overtly and on the page. How did it feel to win the Man Booker Prize (twice)? It was an astonishing thing, because as far as I was concerned I had just gone on doing what I did. I wasn’t conscious of having adopted a new persona as an author or trying to make myself over in any way. When I wrote the first few pages of Wolf Hall, I thought it was the best thing I had ever done – but on the other hand I’ve had that feeling before. I’ve always had critical success but I’ve never had much of a readership until these books came along, and it just seemed that somehow my time had come. It was extraordinary because everything about my life has changed. Perhaps the biggest change has been my recent involvement in the theatre [both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were recently dramatised by the Royal Shakespeare Company] because this is possibly taking things in a new direction for the future. I have a lot more novels to write but I might have some plays to write as well, and it’s possible that some of the things I’ve been thinking about in terms of historical fiction might well become drama. I won’t get ahead of myself though because the main thing is to finish The Mirror & the Light. Will you continue to write about the Tudors in future books? I don’t think so. I might be inclined to go a little backwards through the Wars of the Roses though. There is an after-Cromwell story to be told but I can’t quite find the shape of it at the moment. And then I’m not really interested in Elizabeth I. I don’t know why but I haven’t ever quite found a story there that engages me – but on the other hand these things can happen in an instance. The material lies about you and suddenly you see a shape in it. So I don’t want to tie myself down for the future. Hilary Mantel is a novelist, best known for her acclaimed Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Her latest book, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, has just been published by Fourth Estate.
For most of the five centuries since Henry VIII sent his chief minister to the scaffold, historians have cast Thomas Cromwell as a scheming, rapacious vulture. But does this characterisation really do him justice? Diarmaid MacCulloch investigates
Poor Thomas Cromwell. He has rarely been given a good press – even in the triumphant island story as told by the champions of Protestant England, in which the pope’s deluded followers were repeatedly put in their place so the British empire could flourish and spread Christian civilisation far and wide. In that telling, Henry VIII receives all the credit for leading Tudor England in walking tall – and he had the glamour that his most effective minister notoriously lacked. The various surviving copies of Hans Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell – showing him as pudgy and watchful, expensively but plainly dressed – are distinctly unflattering to this busy royal minister, to the extent that I wonder if vengeful Catholics in Queen Mary Tudor’s reign destroyed any pictures that presented him in a kinder light. Cromwell has long been unpopular among many Roman Catholics. Curiously, he has also been derided by many Anglicans who have turned away from their Protestant Reformation heritage and waxed sentimental about England’s monastic ruins – Cromwell’s central role in the destructive Dissolution can’t be denied. In his days, many politicians and notables hated him out of sheer snobbery: how, they must have felt, could talent and efficiency possibly be allowed to snatch power from good breeding and ancient pedigree? So, from several different points of view, Cromwell ends up being seen as a thug in a doublet, doing the bidding of Henry VIII, the Tudor Stalin. Learning from letters In two brilliant novels, with another to come, Hilary Mantel has worked to alter this dismal picture. She has done in semi-fictional style what I seek to do, first in an hour-long television documentary, then in a full-scale historical biography: recapture the complexity of this fascinating, self-taught man. Cromwell emerged from the back alleys of rural Putney (his father really was a thug) to become Earl of Essex, one of the oldest noble titles in the realm – yet in the moment of this greatest triumph, he was destroyed. There is a difficulty in ever writing Cromwell’s life story properly. His papers survive in abundance, thanks to a political accident: at his arrest they were seized from his filing system, and have stayed in government hands ever since – but they amount to the contents of his in-tray, rather than letters he wrote himself. I suggest that this is the result of a quick decision made by his household when he was arrested: they burned the out-tray because that is where the incriminating material would be. It would, they believed, be much harder for Cromwell’s enemies surrounding the king to build an accusation on letters written by others. Once we try to penetrate the silence, a rather different Cromwell emerges. His intimate friendship with thoughtful, carefully candid Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, is telling: I have deduced from surviving archives that in the 1530s they were so much a team that Cranmer kept a special file just for their exchanges of letters, separate from other correspondence. During his service to Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s, Cromwell became a quiet friend to the Thames Valley Lollards, a group of religious dissenters that questioned the established church. Over the following decade, when Henry VIII effectively granted him Wolsey’s powers in the church, he became a busy and effective promoter of the new religion and its enthusiasts. And in his latter years, he became a discreet organiser of contacts with the most radical European mainstream Reformations, in Zurich and northern Switzerland – far beyond anything the king could have approved, and highly dangerous for him. That was not the action of a political cynic. Talented upstart When members of the Catholic aristocracy persuaded Henry VIII that Cromwell should die, the clincher for the king was the accusation that Cromwell was a heretic. So in Henry’s mind, Cromwell was executed for the right reason – heresy. But he also died because members of the English nobility were affronted that this talented upstart usurped what they regarded as their natural place in government. By 1539–40 Cromwell was increasingly unwell and his political judgment faltered, giving his enemies the opportunity that they had lacked in his brief period of unrivalled power just a couple of years earlier. Cromwell made four terrible mistakes in his last year of life. One is very well known, two are less so, and one has previously been missed altogether. First, and famously, it was Cromwell’s idea to marry the widower king to the German princess Anne of Cleves, believing that it would draw England closer to the German Reformation – religion again! But it would also stop Henry marrying an English nobleman’s daughter – and the upstart feared the toffs. If only Cromwell had listened to Archbishop Cranmer’s opposition, and not placed his faith in over-ingenious portrait-painters and the arts of the Tudor advertising industry, who had exaggerated the bride-to-be’s charms. As it was, when the king met Anne of Cleves, it was a disaster: he could not bear the sight of her (couldn’t get an erection, his lawyers claimed). Fatal mistakes That was a ghastly error, but worse was to come – the element in the story previously forgotten. Thetford Priory in Norfolk was the family burial place of the dukes of Norfolk. Thomas Howard, the third duke, was a crusty old religious traditionalist who wanted to save the priory from dissolution and refound it as a college of priests, singing masses for his family’s souls for ever. Thetford hung on longer than almost any other monastery in England but eventually, in February 1540, it closed – and there was no college in the offing. Cromwell, absurdly over-confident, had made sure that the priory was simply shut down, and the duke’s plans were frustrated. Howard had to move some of his family tombs and ancestral bones 35 miles to Framlingham in Suffolk. Imagine the feelings of England’s senior nobleman at this insult to his family. Two dark coincidences then made matters even worse. First, in March 1540, came the death of Henry Bourchier, 15th Earl of Essex – an aristocrat of equal standing to the Duke of Norfolk. Cromwell decided that it would be agreeable if he himself became Earl of Essex, one of the oldest titles in England – and so, within a few weeks, he was. A week after Bourchier’s death came that of John de Vere, the 15th Earl of Oxford, another ultra blue-blood who had been hereditary Great Chamberlain of England, one of the oldest royal offices in the land – which Cromwell hoovered up, too. Again, imagine how the Duke of Norfolk felt – that Putney boy does it again! So the Duke of Norfolk had both the motive and, with Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, the opportunity to strike back. The king felt humiliated, and Cromwell was to blame. Henry was always easy to influence, if one knew how, and became very ready to listen to those who gave him a reason to cut Cromwell down to size – not least the fact that his chief minister had pushed ahead with religious change behind his back. The king was easily persuaded that Cromwell was a heretic and a traitor. It was a time of wild swings of fortune, with religious conservatives and Protestants both being imprisoned in turn. The wildest swing of all came on 10 June 1540 when Cromwell was arrested as he turned up for a routine meeting of the Privy Council. (The arrest was performed with relish by the Duke of Norfolk, who personally tore the Garter badge of St George from Cromwell’s clothing.) A timeline: from rags to riches to the scaffold c1485: Cromwell is born in Putney. His father is a tradesman – a pub landlord – and an aggressive drunk c1501: Cromwell travels to France, Italy and the Low Countries, from where, after a strangely hidden 10 years, he returns with as good an education as any nobleman, plus a handy ability to get things done 1524: He enters Cardinal Wolsey’s service full-time. Among his many duties is dissolving monasteries to fund Wolsey’s educational projects 1530–31: Wolsey falls from power, and Cromwell is notably loyal to his old master. After Wolsey’s death he enters the king’s service, offering his experience of parliament as the means to gain national consent for a break with the pope so that Henry can marry Anne Boleyn 1535: Henry grants Cromwell a unique title: ‘Vice-Gerent in Spirituals’ – royal deputy in the church, effectively re-creating Wolsey’s power without the pope. He plans the first major monastic dissolutions Spring 1536: Increasingly at odds with Anne Boleyn, Cromwell ensures her arrest and execution 1536–7: Cromwell secures royal approval for publication of a Bible in English. His power reaches its height Late 1539: Cromwell (in the face of Cranmer’s opposition) arranges Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. It leads to a royal humiliation – she sexually repels the king Early 1540: Ill and losing his political instincts, Cromwell infuriates the Duke of Norfolk by closing Thetford Priory, Norfolk’s family mausoleum, and angers other nobles by taking the ancient title Earl of Essex June–July 1540: Cromwell is arrested as a heretic and traitor. On 28 July he is executed before he can plead his case before the king The upstart’s legacy Cromwell was sent to the Tower of London and never saw the king again. If he had, he might have been saved, but his letters begging for an audience were ignored – perhaps Henry never saw them. Parliament voted him legally dead (even Cranmer voted for that), and soon he was actually dead, executed on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. Within a few months, Henry was lamenting that his courtiers had deceived him, saying, according to the French ambassador, that “on pretexts of some trivial faults… they had made several false accusations to him, as a result of which he had put to death the most faithful servant he had ever had”. Too late for Cromwell the man, but not too late for his legacy. The young Protestant bureaucrats that he had trained in the 1530s went on to rule Reformation England: Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil lived until 1579 and 1598 respectively, becoming the statesmen who steered the triumphant Protestantism of Elizabethan England. That is the measure of Cromwell’s greatness, and of the way in which he shaped the future of these islands. We need to put Cromwell back in the centre of Tudor England’s picture. We should question if he really was “an ambitious and totally corrupt statesman… an opportunistic jack-the-lad, a ruffian on the make,” as his recent biographer, Robert Hutchinson, labelled him. I must emphasise that, though there’s much that seems modern in Cromwell’s story – high political infighting in a Tudor version of the satirical comedy The Thick of It – we should realise that the Tudors viewed politics through two lenses that have been removed from the eyes of modern British politicians. We don’t do God, while they did God all the time. And we don’t worry too much about family trees and heraldry; Cromwell’s story illustrates that the Tudors were obsessed by them both. So Cromwell died first for being a man of the Protestant Reformation, and second for not having an ancient pedigree – effectively insulting and upstaging those who did, just because he existed and flourished. He was the victim of the blue-bloods who found it insufferable that a man should govern just because he had talent. So I present to you Thomas Cromwell: a cool, self-contained idealist who wanted to shape the kingdom of England in the name of a new religion – the remaker of this realm. I have given you a taste of some of the revelations to be found in the archives, but you will discover many more in my BBC Two documentary. And you may be most surprised by some of the locations at which we chose to shoot. For example, did you know that a complete Tudor palace hides in the middle of Croydon? Well, you do now! Diarmaid MacCulloch is professor of the history of the church at Oxford, and an author and TV presenter. His History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Penguin, 2010) won the 2010 Cundill Prize This article was first published in the March 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine