Thomas Cromwell: A Life

"I suppose, when it comes down to it, there isn’t really anyone better than Diarmaid MacCulloch . He is someone who is capable of reaching that Holy Grail of serious scholarly material, but who can also communicate it to a wider audience. He’s done it several times before. He did his history of Christianity and a history of the Reformation . Both are major scholarly books—syntheses I suppose—but what I think he’s absolutely brilliant at is the historical biography. He did two that really won him followers. One was a biography of Thomas Cranmer , who was so important to both the religious and literary life of this country with his Book of Common Prayer . He was a complex, sometimes quite unlikable figure, but hugely important to this country’s history. Then he wrote what I regard as one of the best history books of the last few decades, which was his Tudor Church Militant . It’s about Edward VI who (at least in the popular view) had been seen as the bit that happens between Henry and Mary and Elizabeth. What Diarmaid MacCulloch did was refocus on this brilliant intellectual child and his milieu, the people around him, whereby radical Protestantism came to Britain. We can’t really talk about Henry VIII as being a Protestant in any real sense. He remained pretty much a Catholic in terms of his beliefs, despite his battles with the Pope. That’s not true of Edward, who was a militant Protestant and transformed the country in his very, very brief reign. It could never quite return to being the Catholic country it was during Henry VIII’s reign. Although you had the Marian reaction to that and then Elizabeth’s more pragmatic view of religion, those seeds had been sown and they would remain there for centuries. So that was a really important book. Then the next thing he wrote was this greatly anticipated biography of Thomas Cromwell. Diarmaid MacCulloch was influenced by Geoffrey Elton, who wrote The Tudor Revolution in Government , which depicted Thomas Cromwell as this reformer and bureaucratic genius. I’m not sure if, when MacCulloch started writing the book, he was aware that Hilary Mantel was writing her novels. Suddenly, Thomas Cromwell became a figure that was widely known, perhaps more widely known than he has been for centuries, because of Mantel’s fictionalization of him. So MacCulloch’s book couldn’t have been better timed, because we are now familiar, at least in part, with the story of Cromwell. Now we have this scholarly but very accessible biography which will be the definitive life of Cromwell for many years to come. It has all the qualities that we’ve come to expect from MacCulloch: it’s rigorous in terms of its scholarship, but it’s also beautifully written and it does, I think, make a change. It transforms the character of Cromwell from this brilliant bureaucrat we saw with Elton into a slightly shadowy figure. Cromwell is a person who is very real in his Protestant faith and conviction, but he’s also given opportunities because of Henry’s crises over succession and a male heir, his serial marriages and adulteries. He seems to navigate between the gaps. Also, as Peter Cook said about David Frost, “he rose without trace.” He was quite lowborn—the son of a yeoman who was a brewer and a tavern keeper in Putney—although, because of the Wars of the Roses, a lot of the people who were part of the aristocracy were themselves new in that position. So this was a period when a bright young man could make an impact and take advantage of the flux and fracture and fragmentation that was still part of this world. And he was an absolutely brilliant linguist. He seems to have mastered several languages. He was an autodidact, but very well-travelled. Yes, because Henry is dealing with the church in Rome. He’s also dealing with Francis I in France. England is very much part of Europe, of Catholic Christendom at this time. So it’s extremely useful. Cromwell rides on the back of Cardinal Wolsey, whom he is loyal to even when Wolsey meets the crisis that ends in his execution. What you see in this ‘rising without trace’ is that people underestimate him. He’s rather cunning. I always think of the famous Holbein painting of Cromwell which is in the Frick Collection in New York. He’s facing a portrait of Thomas More across a fireplace . He’s More’s nemesis, in a way. More looks very confident. He’s totally at home in the robes of state, whereas Cromwell looks slightly furtive, slightly anxious or even paranoid. It’s a brilliant study of the two men. By the time Cromwell has risen, it’s almost too late to do anything about him. It’s only when his son marries the queen, Jane Seymour’s sister, and he’s given a title, that suddenly the resentment really comes out. Then he’s on quite slippery ground and it all goes horribly wrong between the death of Jane Seymour and the arrival of Anne of Cleves. That’s a disaster for him and he ends up having the same fate as Wolsey, his mentor. It’s a real problem. I think about half of the letters and correspondence are available in the National Archives, so considering what a letter-writer he was, there’s an enormous amount that’s missing. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and Diarmaid MacCulloch acknowledges that fact and is very open about it. “Even in death, he is loyal to the king.” It’s brilliant that it doesn’t appear to affect the book. Even though he’s hamstrung in terms of the correspondence, probably the best thing about the entire book is the way he constructs the network Cromwell builds up. Cromwell has no official title for much of this period; he has no specific position someone can point to like chancellor or chief minister—and yet he is able to build this network. This is where you see the genius of bureaucracy, the mastery of information. And, of course, he’s also helped by the fact that we’re living through this period of flux. When the dissolution of the monasteries comes, he suddenly has this vast resource with which he can bribe, or pay people off, or convince doubters to be on his side, to support him and the king. Because he’s also very loyal to Henry VIII. That’s the other thing that you find: even in death, he is loyal to the king. I think people in this period tend to choose between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, and I’ve always been sympathetic to Cromwell. There is something admirable about this working-class boy made good and one has to admire his skill. Countering that, he doesn’t seem to be particularly well-liked. Take his relationship with Anne Boleyn, for example: he supports Anne because she is on the right religious side. She is an evangelical Protestant, like he is. She’s part of that circle of young, modern people who seek to transform the country with these new ideas. But she doesn’t warm to him at all, and there’s something approximate to cruelty in the way he makes sure Anne is destroyed. I think it’s always been there in the background, but that’s something that emerges from the book. He’s quite vengeful. “There’s something approximate to cruelty in the way Cromwell makes sure Anne Boleyn is destroyed” But that, again, might mirror the paranoia, the furtiveness, the fragility of his situation because he’s a new man. I’d urge anyone who’s interested in Tudor history to read this book because it is magnificent. Like everything Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, it’s beautifully written. It’s the third in a trilogy, in a sense, with Cranmer, Edward VI and now Thomas Cromwell."

"That’s a complete no-brainer. Of all the books you could turn to, Diarmaid MacCulloch ’s 2018 biography, Thomas Cromwell: A Life , is the place to start. The book got rave reviews, including from Hilary Mantel. (Indeed, they have both spoken admiringly of each other’s work and and have even done a double act interview, talking about Cromwell .) Previously MacCulloch has written histories of the Reformation and of Christianity , and a biography of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer . He’s particularly good on Cromwell’s religion and the religious dimension of his statecraft. That is an aspect of the story that earlier constitutional historians, like Geoffrey Elton, underplayed, or saw as a subordinate aspect of the story. He’s also fascinating on how Cromwell’s early career, working for Cardinal Wolsey, provided the perfect apprenticeship for his career as chief minister in the 1530s. It’s a very scholarly book but highly readable. Yes, you do, and, no, it won’t. The politics of the Reformation are extremely complex. It’s easy to read a book like MacCulloch’s on Thomas Cromwell, enjoy it, put it down and then, when someone asks you to explain how Cromwell achieved what he achieved, or why he fell from power, to find oneself completely stumped. It’s not a shortcoming of the book, but it’s helpful to break the story down into its component parts. If you’re going to understand Thomas Cromwell’s statecraft, you need to understand the structure of the state and how that was changed. You also need to understand the Church, both how the pre-Reformation Church fitted in with the secular structures of the state and how the Reformation changed that, and also a bit about the theological and ecclesiological disputes of the Reformation. On top of all that you need to understand the domestic and international politics of the Reformation. They were often very closely linked. The rest of my book choices deal with these different aspects of the story."