Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485-1540) was Henry VIII's de facto chief minister during the decisive years of the English Reformation. A man of very humble origins, adventurer and merchant in Italy and Flanders, a brilliant and ruthless lawyer, he was the architect of the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, before ending on the scaffold at the will of the very king he had served.
From the Putney blacksmith to Italy
Cromwell was born around 1485 in Putney, then a village on the Thames near London, the son of Walter Cromwell, a violent-tempered blacksmith, brewer and innkeeper. As a boy he ran away from home and, according to contemporary accounts, ended up in Italy as a mercenary soldier in French service, perhaps fighting at the battle of the Garigliano in 1503. He then worked in Florence for the Frescobaldi bank, travelled to Rome and settled as a merchant in Antwerp and the Low Countries. In these years he learned Italian, French and Latin, came to know the world of finance and trade and probably read Machiavelli. Back in England he became a lawyer and Member of Parliament.
In the service of Wolsey and the king
In the 1520s he entered the service of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, becoming his right-hand man, managing his affairs and the closure of small monasteries to fund his colleges. When Wolsey fell in 1529, Cromwell stayed loyal to him, yet managed to pass into the king's service. Within a few years he won Henry VIII's trust by offering the solution to the annulment problem: if the Pope would not grant it, England must free itself from papal authority.
Architect of the Reformation
Between 1532 and 1540 Cromwell, appointed the king's Principal Secretary, Lord Privy Seal and Vicegerent in Spirituals, led a real revolution through Parliament:
- the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) banned appeals to Rome, allowing Archbishop Cranmer to annul the marriage to Catherine of Aragon;
- the Act of Supremacy (1534) proclaimed the king Supreme Head of the Church of England;
- the survey of Church wealth (Valor Ecclesiasticus, 1535) prepared the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-1540), which transferred a quarter of the kingdom's land to the Crown and then to the gentry;
- from 1538 every parish had to keep registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, still a precious source today;
- in 1539 he had an English Bible, the Great Bible, placed in every church.
Cromwell was also an administrative reformer: he strengthened central government, the Privy Council and control over Wales and the North. But he crushed all opposition without mercy: he was among those responsible for the execution of Thomas More, the fall of Anne Boleyn in 1536 and the repression of the Catholic rising of the Pilgrimage of Grace.
The fall
In 1540 Cromwell arranged the king's marriage to the German princess Anne of Cleves, to tie England to the Protestant princes. The marriage was a fiasco, and Cromwell's enemies, led by the Duke of Norfolk, seized their chance. In April 1540 the king had just made him Earl of Essex, but in June he had him arrested at a Council meeting on charges of treason and heresy. Without trial, he was condemned by an Act of Attainder and beheaded on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540, the same day Henry married Catherine Howard. A few months later, it is said, the king regretted losing his ablest servant.
Cromwell today
Long portrayed as a cynical bureaucrat, Cromwell was rediscovered in the 21st century thanks to Hilary Mantel's trilogy, Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), the first two winners of the Booker Prize, which present him as a modern, intelligent and complex man, and to the BBC television series adapted from them. He should not be confused with his distant relative Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the 17th-century republic. See also Henry VIII, Jane Seymour and the history of the Church of England.