Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

This learned, readable biography is really four books. It is a history of the years from 1528 to 1540, the start of the English Reformation; it is a Who’s Who for the regime of Henry VIII; it is a masterclass in Tudor history, with a veteran researcher carefully handing documents across the seminar table. And it is the story of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s loyal, able, amoral right-hand man.In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, splendid historical novels which Diarmaid MacCulloch compliments, Thomas Cromwell was a bold, attractive figure. (“He can draft a contract,” Mantel wrote, “train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury . . . He knows new poetry and can say it in Italian”—and, on-screen, Mark Rylance has played Cromwell as memorably as Paul Scofield played Sir Thomas More.) In this biography, Cromwell shows the same qualities, but they are clouded by a courtier’s ruthlessness and a fixer’s lack of scruple.MacCulloch’s 1996 biography of Henry VIII’s other great servant, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, drew eloquently on a wealth of records, memoirs, and correspondence. For Cromwell, the record is sparer. His early life must be reconstructed from stray lines in friends’ letters and a long, laudatory entry in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. His loyalty to Cardinal Wolsey is reflected in the coat-of-arms he chose, which borrowed from the Cardinal’s escutcheon. A host of records survive from his work in crushing the English monasteries, fewer from his last years in power. Many of his outgoing letters have vanished—quietly removed by loyal clerks who feared their master’s words would be turned against him, Macculloch believes.Cromwell was a diligent servant of the crown—often more forward than his royal master knew. Covertly, he fostered the Protestant faith. “In effect he used Archbishop Cranmer as a front-man to create permanent links with Zürich. That Reformed city-state, leader of Swiss evangelical expansion, symbolized everything his master Henry VIII loathed most in the Reformations across the Channel, and yet Cromwell persisted in the project. Indeed, to this we can add Vice-Gerent Cromwell’s steady official promotion in the 1530s of a vernacular Bible, the text of which was largely from William Tyndale, the man at whose murder the King had connived and whom he never forgave for heresy . . . . In all these cases, Cromwell for a while got away with the sleight of hand.”As late as the spring of 1540, Cromwell was sending his foes to the Tower. He was managing Parliament skillfully, winning a fresh grant of taxes and passing the landmark Statute of Wills. He held the title, unique in English history, of “Vice-Gerent in Spirituals”: deputy to King Henry as head of the Church of England, with the power to override archbishops. A brewer’s son, he had been raised to the peerage as Earl of Essex. With his own son married to the sister of Elizabeth Seymour, the king’s late wife, he counted as something like the king’s uncle.That spring, Cromwell made a fatal error. With an aide he thought he could trust, he shared a dangerous confidence: that Henry had not consummated his marriage to his new German wife, Anne of Cleves. The Vice-Gerent’s desperate enemies engineered a reversal of fortune. They persuaded Henry that Cromwell had gossiped about the king’s impotence—a treasonous utterance, and an insult that the enraged king would not forgive. On June 10, Cromwell was arrested at a Privy Council meeting; on July 28 he went to the scaffold.The king regretted this. Within a few months, he upbraided his counselors, objecting that by their false accusations, over trivial matters, “he had been made to put to death the most faithful servant he ever had.” “Self-pity has a talent for rewriting events,” MacCulloch observes. But there was a bleak truth to the king’s complaint.Novelists are free to envision and suggest. The historian must give the footnotes. This is a historian’s book, in every sense of the word, and a fine one. MacCulloch has gone through the Tudor archives and pulled out what matters.From my review in The Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter

I can authoritatively add little to what several thoughtful reviewers have written. McCullough's research is as deep and broad as anyone could hope, much less expect. The writing and diction are as at high a level as I’ve read anywhere. One finds many wonderful turns of phrase throughout but few memorable or beautiful sentences. T McCullough's vocabulary is precise, well-honed, a quality I very much admire, though I suspect that many will find themselves resorting to a good dictionary to get a full sense of a given word’s meaning. Certainly, I did.One reviewer comments difficulty in accessing the endnotes in the printed, bound edition, with which I began. I soon purchased the Kindle edition, primarily because of the printed edition’s ungainliness. Besides resolving that issue, it also deals nicely with the endnote issue, for tapping on the note number brings up the note on the page one is reading, and tapping on the page returns one to the body text. McCullough and Mantell clearly respect one another, at least given their printed comments regarding the other, and Mantell has expressed admiration for the six-part television adaptation of her novels, Wolf Hall. I am grateful for Mantell’s novels and their adaptation, but McCullough's excruciatingly detailed account of Cromwell’s actions and strategies provides substantial reason to rethink Mantell’s compelling but romanticized account, not to mention the television adaptation.On balance, however, McCullough's book has given me much more insight into the machinations by which Anglican Christianity came about than into the life and character of Cromwell. I do not intend the foregoing to be a criticism of Diarmaid’s magisterial effort but an affirmation of the view that, after all, Cromwell might not be biographable. Indeed, my present sense is that this volume is more an account of a crucial period of British history than the biography of a man.This book requires dedication and effort. Giving it both is worth the while.

In this superb, exhaustive biography, MacCullough offers the reader a wealth of detail that illuminates the events and experiences that informed Thomas Cromwell's life and personality, but I suspect that there are many readers who have no ambition to become quite so wealthy. Its 550 pages (plus 150 pages of footntes) are written in a style that is both generally engaging but just as often densely complex, and just plain dense at around 500 words per page. I'm a fairly experienced reader, but I often found myself having to re-read (and sometimes subvocalize) a sentence in order to clearly grasp its meaning, if not to avoid actually misunderstanding it. Scholars will appreciate the sheer volume of information, but recreational readers like me may go astray following the copious peripheral detail, which often goes frankly tangential. The anachronnistic interweaving of disparate threads per page does not add to the ease of reading. This book hazards becoming the au-courant biography that everyone has on their coffee table but that no one reads...Martin Gilbert's magisterial Churchill was of an entirely different order at eight volumes, but I found his single-volume more-than-just-a-condensation version of the original far more readily accessible than this Cromwell, despite the significantly greater length of the former.In this vein, I would respectfully suggest that condensation and a lightening of sentence construction, subsequently published as a sort of a "Shorter Cromwell", would bring the Lord Privy Seal to a wider audience. Having said that, I feel compelled to state that I'm going to finish it (while re-reading "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies"), regardless of what I would have done otherwise. Unless a condensed version appears soon...

You provided me a hard to find book, and I was happy with the price and really good condition. Thanks!

Dieses Buch ist ein Geschichtswerk, kein Roman. Was die Geschichte an Cromwell interessiert, ist seine Wirkung sowohl als Reformator als auch als Staatsmann, der die Politik Englands auf Jahrhunderte hin prägte, nicht so sehr seine Person. Dass das geleistet wird, wird besonders im letzten Kapitel deutlich. Wer sich mehr zur Person Cromwell erwartet, sollte die Romane von Mantel lesen, denn so verstandene Biographie trägt meist romanhafte Züge und nicht geschichtswissenschaftliche.Das Werk ist mit ca. 550 Textseiten lang und ausführlich, aber ich empfinde den Stil als angenehm und durchaus nicht langweilig oder langatmig. Natürlich ist das kein literarisches "fast food", das Buch liest sich nicht an drei Abenden, aber dafür beleuchtet es die Aspekte, mit denen Mantel, besonders in ihrem letzten Band, nicht zurechtgekommen ist, nämlich die Gründe für den Fall Cromwells und warum sich einige seiner engsten Mitarbeiter gegen ihn wandten, aufzuzeigen.Ich habe sehr vieles über die Zeit Heinrichs des Achten gelernt, was ich bislang nicht wusste. Es korrigiert einige sehr populäre (Vor)Urteile gegenüber Heinrich und seinen Motiven.Ein Interesse an Geschichte und nicht nur Geschichten vorausgesetzt, ist das ein äußerst wertvolles Buch.

This was a marvellous biography of Cromwell, who was such an important figure in English History. I ordered the book after hearing a podcast with the author. When I got it, I had my doubts. It’s a thick book and gets into a lot of detail. However, the author is really engaging and his analysis thought provoking. If you love English history, this books for you.

I suspect this book will become the premier biographical work from the pen of Diarmaid MacCulloch. Which in some ways I regret, as for me, although his biography of Cromwell is a better read, the subject of his earlier biography (Thomas Cranmer) was even more interesting and the representation of Cranmer is, I suspect, more honestly sympathetic than MacCulloch’s representation of Cromwell.The reason I believe that ‘Thomas Cromwell: A life’ will transcend any other MacCulloch biography owes much to Hilary Mantell’s elegant portrayal of a fictional Cromwell that has captured the popular imagination. Making the subject of this biography far more popular than the other reformation icons in the MacCulloch niche. Mantell points out on the flyleaf of ‘Thomas Cromwell: A Life’ that this is the most comprehensive biography of her hero that has yet been produced. A generous complement given that MacCulloch’s Cromwell differs greatly from Mantell’s, albeit with one defining feature in common: they are both master tacticians and political manipulators in the name of the reformed church.MacCulloch portrays Cromwell in far more detail, although less intimately and somewhat more ambiguously than he was portrayed in Wolf Hall, as would be expected from a biography in comparison with a novel. For me MacCulloch’s Cromwell is also a far less sympathetic character, although equally heroic. A position given to him at the expense of a somewhat hapless Henry Tudor: Cromwell is given credit for all the vision and planning. Which in my opinion is a little unfair on both Cromwell and Henry. Henry was by all accounts psychotic, but probably not as easily manipulated as MacCulloch would have us believe. Thus, perhaps, Cromwell was at times more the tool than the driver of events and so deserves a little less of the credit and a little less of the blame.In MacCulloch’s earlier Tudor biography, the eponymous Cranmer hogs the limelight, in this later work Cranmer is (of course) a bit player, but nevertheless even in what may prove to be Cromwell’s definitive biography, the politician comes across as a far more unpleasant character than the Archbishop. This is despite some quite blatant spinning in Cromwell’s favour.MacCulloch is always meticulous in use of his sources, but thankfully is not beyond extrapolation. At such a distance in time and in the study of per force private beliefs of politically vulnerable people, it is impossible to know with certainty what the protagonists in this book really thought and therefore it is necessary to make certain assumptions. It would make for a very tedious read if each contention came with a disclaimer that ‘clearly this is only a possibility’. One such contention presented as a fact, is that Cranmer was a Nicodemite. MacCulloch uses this term in the sense of an Italian religious movement (on a par with Calvinism or Lutheranism). I am not so sure that anyone ever self-identified as a Nicodemite and I feel that surreptitious evangelism was always more a pragmatic response to oppression rather than a coherent reformist movement.MacCulloch is not the first to label Cromwell as a Nicodemite, but he is unusual in doing so in a positive way: using the label to excuse Cromwell for his very evident dissimulation in the face of pressure from powerful patrons, first Wolsey and then Henry. Another interpretation is that Cromwell never really had highly principled religious beliefs and was more interested in power, albeit leaning towards an evangelical position, perhaps influenced more by Cranmer than the other way around. This interpretation sits awkwardly with McCulloch’s wish to emphasize the positive elements of the Anglican tradition and distance it from the more unattractive elements associated with Henry VIII, much easier to represent Cromwell as heroically trying to steer the nascent church in its eventual course than to admit that Anglican doctrine was the product of evolution rather than intelligent design.Cromwell the arch politician, conspiring and working in the shadows is a familiar figure. The distinctive element of MacCulloch’s presentation of the man is the genuine loyalty to Cardinal Wolsey and the consequent depth of animosity towards Anne Boleyn. MacCulloch convincingly shows that Cromwell was probably the driving force behind Anne’s downfall, motivated by revenge for his previous patron, disagreements with Anne regarding foreign policy (he leaned towards the empire of Charles V while she leaned in the other direction towards France) and finally (according to MacCulloch) religious disagreements, with Anne taking a more conciliatory position towards the monasteries. The last of these is the least convincing for me, I think the disagreement may well have been real, but I am not sure this was so important for Cromwell the politician and I believe Cromwell was far more politician than reformer.The idea that Cromwell was genuinely and consistently faithful to the (basically) traditionalist Wolsey is well presented and credible. I am convinced and I believe this is a major factor in the downfall of Anne Boleyn. I would argue that this contradicts another basic tenet of MacCulloch’s book; that Cromwell was a convinced and ardent reformer from the start and worked behind the scenes to manipulate Henry VIII towards an English Reformation. I would argue that MacCulloch’s own research brings this into question and suggests the drivers of the Reformation were Cranmer (for purely ideological reasons) and Henry (largely for political motives but also from genuine belief). Cromwell in this scenario was merely a willing facilitator and ultimately a fall guy.Elizabeth I is also labelled as a Nicodemite by MacCulloch, in the image of her mother’s nemesis. While it is undoubtedly true that both Elizabeth and Cromwell had periods when frank and open declaration of their religious beliefs would have been a potentially fatal error I suspect Cromwell would have extended his dissimulation to the grave and died happily if his more secular goals had been met. My suspicion is therefore that Elizabeth was actually the more strategic player in support of her faith (a true Nicodemite), but this is only a suspicion.

The author's meticulous research into original documents, combined with his racy style, bring to life one of the under-appreciated movers & shakers who in the 16th century did so much to bring the modern world to birth.

Now that Hilary Mantel has so wonderfully raised the profile of Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII, Sir Dairmaid MacCulloch allows us to delve into the documented history of Cromwell in this impeccably researched, beautifully written and timely book.