It is dependent on seeing how his early service to the second Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset in the 1520s created links into the Kentish upper gentry and a common disposition not just towards Protestant religion, but to the crystallizing identity of that form of Protestantism later called Reformed. Quietly, with extraordinary discretion, Cromwell put friends and household to support an enterprise of international theological matchmaking with no immediate strategic relevance, and which would have aroused the suspicion and rage of King Henry if he had fully known about it. No cynical,
...more
