Thomas Cromwell: the man who made modern England

Visitors to the Frick Collection in New York will be familiar with the confrontational curation of the museum’s two famous portraits by Hans Holbein. Thomas More, wearing the grand Collar of Esses that denoted personal service to Henry VIII, gazes nobly into the middle distance. Across a fireplace, Thomas Cromwell stares back: squat, squinty, red-nosed and double-chinned.

Popular history insists on the polarity of More and Cromwell in our imagining of the English Reformation: More the scholarly lawyer who went to the scaffold rather than accept Henry VIII as head of the Church of England; Cromwell the self-made Protestant rival who sent him there, inventing parliamentary supremacy along the way. The playwright Robert Bolt cast More as martyr for private conscience and Cromwell as murderous Machiavel; novelist Hilary Mantel flipped the roles with equally Manichaean duality, sketching More as theocratic extremist and Cromwell as proto-Enlightenment sceptic.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, as befits one of the most scrupulous academic historians of our age, uses more subtle brushstrokes in Thomas Cromwell: A Life, a substantial new biography of Henry VIII’s most efficient minister (728 pages in total, including the densest academic footnotes imaginable in a work for the general market). Nor does he waste much time on easy comparisons with rivals; More is a peripheral figure, as are most of the other major players in Tudor politics. Instead, MacCulloch appraises Cromwell’s life and even his Holbein portrait alongside those of his life-long commoner friends. In his social humility, one of his great political skills, Cromwell “had a virtue which his master Cardinal [Wolsey] wanted”.

This biography is a major work of scholarship of the type that will reset academic understanding of Tudor politics for a generation. For even the most educated general reader, it may prove hard work — although MacCulloch’s dry donnish humour lifts each page. (Thus we learn that the Duke of Suffolk, although a favourite of the king, left little political footprint as “he lacked the administrative abilities required for celebrations in a brewery”.) Yet the Mantel phenomenon surely underpins the publishers’ confidence in this tome’s commercial potential. And for all MacCulloch’s critical distance from his friend, the author of Wolf Hall looms large as godmother of this book — not least in her lengthy blurb.

Being a scholar of religious history, MacCulloch credits Cromwell with a greater religious commitment than Mantel’s agnostic hero. It is a convincing reading, if the apt product of an age in which religious terror has reminded us again that ideas have consequences. He also deftly discredits the tradition of Cromwell as the abused child of a criminal blacksmith — a myth lifted by Mantel from the Victorian sensationalist John Phillips — pointing out that Walter Cromwell owned a handful of small businesses, while his appearances in court rolls likely refer not to criminal charges but to “routine” negotiations over the renewal of his licence to sell ale.

His routine subjugation of the judicial process to the will of the crown left plenty of blood on his own hands

Still the personality that emerges here recalls Mantel’s Cromwell: astonishingly self-taught, heavily shaped by the Italian friendships of his youth and constantly nurturing the mafia of protégés and correspondents through which he infiltrated almost every network in the kingdom. He dissolved monasteries — initially for a reformist Wolsey — and reshaped river drainage with equal administrative efficiency.

Much ink has been spilled in Tudor historiography on questions of where and how power operated. MacCulloch is generous to his mentor Geoffrey Elton, yet a central thesis of this book is that Elton’s vision of a “Tudor revolution in government” overstated the extent to which Cromwell formalised a central bureaucracy of power.

Certainly, Cromwell and Henry VIII understood that parliamentary approval, however enforced, was essential to legitimising the monarch’s increasing claim on Rome’s privileges. But until 1536, Cromwell “thrived on indeterminacy in government”, freelancing happily without the scrutiny imposed by defined job titles. That year, MacCulloch notes, the Privy Council was not established by Cromwell as an instrument of his own power but imposed on Henry VIII by public protest precisely to ensure that the hated Cromwell would be counter-balanced by other men. Cromwell did not develop a formal civil service. Where the French government relied on 40,000 to 50,000 official clerks, the business of the English state flowed through the hands of the private employees of Cromwell’s personal household.

Such academic spats may seem dry, but part of MacCulloch’s skill is to introduce even the general reader to the thrill of a historian’s process. This is not so much a chronological biography as a chapter-by-chapter explanation of the archival evidence for each stage of Cromwell’s career — and golly, can MacCulloch make a Tudor paper-trail seem exciting. We lack copies of most drafts of letters Cromwell ever sent — MacCulloch posits that his household burnt most of them following Cromwell’s arrest in 1540. Where drafts survive, he guides us through Cromwell’s alterations and corrections, as when diplomatically toning down a letter advising Thomas Wolsey to trim his lifestyle.

Cromwell survived Wolsey’s fall and transferred to the king’s service thanks to a characteristic combination of references from the right people and marketable Europhile skills. MacCulloch also demonstrates, for the first time, the significance for Cromwell’s career of a year in the service of the Marquess of Dorset, through which he introduced the future father of Lady Jane Grey to the “Reformed” Protestantism of Zurich.

Throughout this career, MacCulloch insists, Cromwell was a committed “evangelical”. Yet one of his earliest major clients as a lawyer and business agent was a religious guild that sent him to Rome to lobby for the ultra-controversial right to sell indulgences, so loudly denounced by Martin Luther.

It was perhaps a fitting beginning for a man who cut his cloth to suit his purse and his employer and whose religious inconsistencies even the sympathetic MacCulloch struggles at times to justify. Unlike More, he had no personal thirst for heretic burning. But Cromwell’s routine subjugation of the judicial process to the will of the crown left plenty of blood on his own hands. MacCulloch, paraphrasing Ecclesiastes, calls this moral corruption “touching pitch”. And when they came for Cromwell, there was no one left to speak for him.

Thomas Cromwell: A Life , by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 728 pages

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