Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell, A Life (Allen Lane, London, 2018), pp xxiv + 728. £30.
In 1540, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s second chief minister, was arrested, attainted and executed for treason on Tower Hill. His papers were confiscated by the crown on his arrest and finished up in the National Archives and the British Library, where they were used by modern historians to write a series of studies about different aspects of King Henry’s reign. Sir Geoffrey Elton knew more about Cromwell than anyone else and made his reputation as the leading Tudor historian of his generation by drawing on Cromwell’s papers to construct meticulous accounts of administrative, constitutional and governmental change under Henry VIII. Asked to write a biography of Cromwell, however, Elton declared that Cromwell was ‘not biographable’. Other biographies have been attempted, but to the general public at least, Cromwell’s life and career have more recently become better known through Hilary Mantel’s historical novels, especially Wolf Hall. Now, however, this gap in biography has been convincingly filled by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s hugely impressive and detailed account of Thomas Cromwell, a life. Fittingly, too, the book is dedicated In Memoriam G.R. Elton.
MacCulloch is certainly well placed to write this biography, having previously written an award-winning biography of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, Cromwell’s religious ally in steering the Henrician Reformation, as well as other major books on related topics. This latest work is, if anything, on an even grander scale than the Cranmer biography, especially considering that Henry VIII had Cromwell’s life and career cut short rather earlier than his daughter, Mary, had Archbishop Cranmer burned to death for heresy. Based on extensive archival work, especially the in-tray of Cromwell’s correspondence, and engaging critically with the secondary literature, MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell balances a wealth of particular detail about Cromwell with a sure grasp of the wider story. The book is also lavishly illustrated, with six maps, eighteen text illustrations, twenty-five pages each of bibliography and index, and forty-five colour plates, although the publisher’s decision to relegate the footnotes to one hundred and twenty pages of endnotes is less welcome. Each page of endnotes has a running title referring to the relevant text pages, but the reader has to keep moving backwards and forwards to follow significant comments in the endnotes.
As the author explains in the introduction, he has deliberately given here a much more detailed account than in previous biographies of Cromwell’s earlier life before 1532-3 and his time as Henry VIII’s chief minister. This is partly to rectify previous confusion and misdating of earlier events in Cromwell’s career, partly because his sudden rise has seemed remarkable and has puzzled contemporary observers, and partly because aspects of Cromwell’s later career are perhaps best understood by what can be gleaned from his earlier life. This strategy is on the whole successful, but there is a price to be paid in the book’s initially slow pace. The opening chapters still look decidedly thin on Cromwell’s upbringing, education and early life, even though the author has in fact managed to extract significantly more from the sketchy documentation about Cromwell’s background. Later chapters move much more briskly. For instance, in describing Cromwell’s role in the removal of Queen Anne Boleyn in 1536, MacCulloch provides a really gripping account, a highlight of the book, in fact, very well narrated, and offering a convincing interpretation of the partial evidence. The chapter narrating Cromwell’s downfall is equally high drama.
What do we learn here about Cromwell’s rise and influence at court? MacCulloch describes a Tudor court with King Henry very much in charge of the key decisions of his reign (none more so than those concerning his marital relations), but by the mid-1530s Cromwell was at least able to some extent to influence these decisions. In part, this was because, like the King’s first chief minister, Cromwell’s old master, Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell understood the King’s personality and was able to read his mind better than other courtiers and councillors; but he never enjoyed the same freedom under the king that Wolsey had enjoyed. King Henry later told the French ambassador that Cromwell ‘was a good manager, but not fit to meddle in the concerns of kings’ (p. 443). Earlier, Wolsey had employed Cromwell chiefly in arrangements for his funeral monument, especially dealing with his Italian craftsmen, and also in dissolving small monasteries for the endowment of Wolsey’s Cardinal Colleges at Ipswich and Oxford. By the late 1520s Cromwell had also developed connections with some Lollards and many evangelicals, notably Miles Coverdale and Robert Barnes; but MacCulloch characterises Cromwell’s religion at this time as Nicodemite (72) – a quiet decision to hide his religious views and practice amid some degree of conformity. This may explain the strikingly traditionalist will which Cromwell made in late 1529 when he felt under threat following Wolsey’s fall.
The King left Cromwell in charge of Wolsey’s Colleges, as the man who knew them best, and also in dealing with Italians in charge of Wolsey’s tomb, but typically Henry appropriated the bronze images for himself. In January 1530, Cromwell became the King’s servant; but his only official business for the king at that time was legacy issues concerning Wolsey, with whom he had also become the king’s line of communication. By 1531, Cromwell’s role had extended slightly; but in his early dealings with the king concerning the royal divorce, his role was ‘turning theory into practice at the King’s bidding, using his genius for improvisation and command of detail to achieve a practical result’ (145). Cromwell was given two relatively minor royal offices in 1532, as Master of the Jewels and Clerk of the Hanaper, though the duties of both offices were capable of significant extension, as Cromwell realised. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1533 (not then a major office), but it was only in 1534 that Cromwell finally replaced Stephen Gardiner as the King’s principal secretary, his first major office, even though he had long been acting secretary. He was a hard-working civil servant who got things done and skilfully managed parliament.
As MacCulloch argues, Cromwell’s initially slow promotion in the King’s service reflected his cool relations with Queen Anne. Despite their common interests in evangelical reform, Queen Anne and Cromwell did not get on. Cromwell held the queen responsible for the fall of his old master, Cardinal Wolsey, and eventually exploited the king’s paranoia in 1536 to engineer Queen Anne’s fall and save himself: she ensured that Cromwell, the ‘behind-the-scenes impresario’ of her coronation, for long enjoyed only a ‘very partial visibility in government’, for which he received ‘not even a knighthood’ (221). Cromwell was, by contrast, close to and supportive of Princess Mary, persuading her to submit to her father: his reward for this was a peerage and the office of Lord Privy Seal.
Later, particularly in matters of less concern to the King, Cromwell had more room to shape Tudor policy. One example, as MacCulloch demonstrates, was policy for Ireland, where he placed a number of key servants who were involved in planning and implementing the Cromwell-inspired Tudor centralisation policies of the mid-1530s which brought Ireland, Wales and the English far north more firmly under royal control. In part, the opportunity to bring Ireland’s government more into line with arrangements for other Tudor borderlands was provided by the major rebellion there in 1534; but Cromwell’s supervision of Tudor Ireland was quite different, more bureaucratic than Wolsey’s (although no more successful), and policy changed again after his fall. In the English north, Cromwell’s initiatives were largely responsible for sparking what MacCulloch describes as ‘a northern civil war’ (376), the Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, between those suborned by Cromwell to implement southern policies and those opposed. The early stirrings of rebellion in Dentdale were ‘the first outbreak of real English resistance to the Reformation of Cromwell and Henry VIII to resemble the Irish rebellion of summer 1534’ (379). Briefly in November, it looked as if the King might abandon Cromwell and Cranmer. In both theatres, MacCulloch deploys to good effect his formidable knowledge of Cromwell’s connections, acquaintances and friends in assessing his influence on policy, and he also displays an unenviable grasp of Tudor administrative procedures.
Even in matters of religion, so MacCulloch argues, Cromwell was eventually able to manoeuvre the King’s policies in directions which reflected his own personal preferences but of which the King disapproved. King Henry had in 1535 granted Cromwell the peculiar title of ‘Vice-Gerent in Spirituals’, allowing him to exercise the King’s powers as Supreme Head of the Church, and so conferring on Cromwell a title to match the all-pervasive part he had in practice been exercising in ecclesiastical administration. At one level, the title also recreated for a layman Cardinal Wolsey’s legatine powers; but Cromwell’s use of these powers was later far more sweeping and radical. Initially, he engineered the impressively detailed record of the Church’s financial assets known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus; but his preference in dissolving the monasteries was for continued piecemeal closures (an acceleration of Wolsey’s strategy). He was defeated in council by Lord Chancellor Audley and Sir Richard Rich who in 1536 promoted parliamentary legislation for a general closure of lesser monasteries, based on landed income. Cromwell was also unsuccessful in his manoeuvrings to push Henry VIII closer to Wittenberg and the Schmalkaldics: Philip Melanchthon, whom the King respected, would not come to England, and the English Reformation shortly moved away from Lutheranism.
In August 1536, however, Cromwell issued on his own authority as Vice-Gerent a set of injunctions for King Henry’s church which marked an extension in his use of these powers. The parish clergy were to teach the children the Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Commandments, and by the next August they were to provide Bibles in Latin and English for their congregation to read. No legally permitted English Bible was then available, but in August 1537 the King authorised the use of the so-called Matthew Bible. This remained ‘one of Thomas Cromwell’s greatest achievements in sneaking evangelical reformation past the King’ (416). The fictitious Thomas Matthew was actually King Henry’s bête noire, William Tyndale, whose work remained the basis of every English biblical translation until modern times, including the King James Bible of 1611, nine-tenths of which was in fact Tyndale’s work nearly a century before. Concurrently, Cromwell’s role in forging relations with Zürich moved the course of religious reform towards a strand of the Protestant Reformation which the King undoubtedly considered heretical. The initiative was originally Cranmer’s, and did Cromwell no good at the time, but it eventually bore fruit under Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth’s Church came to resemble Zürich’s church much more than Geneva’s.
Cromwell’s promotion of evangelical Reformation reached its height in 1538, with the attack on images, the dissolution of friaries and a second set of injunctions; but by then his deteriorating sense of discretion and control in managing events was becoming increasingly apparent. Seeking to promote an alliance with the Schmalkaldic League, he manoeuvred the King into marriage to Anne of Cleves which the King was unable to consummate. Cromwell then became the scapegoat as his conservative rivals persuaded the king that his chief minister was a heretic whose initiatives in religion ran far ahead of the King’s intentions. Cromwell duly went to the block, but typically the King soon shifted the blame for his execution, telling his council that upon light pretexts and false accusations he had been ‘made to put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’ (537).
This is a very fine biography, written in a lively imaginative style, with deep insights into key events of the reign. MacCulloch’s portrait is by no means Eltonian. Cromwell emerges as a remarkable hard-working politician who was a wily operator. He was a pragmatist, with some weaknesses, but no heartless bureaucrat, nor bloodthirsty. He tried to mitigate the King’s cruellest intentions; but in the end, he was destroyed by the man who had raised him up.
Steven G. Ellis
NUI Galway
49.3.10
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