In the fraught period after Anne Boleyn’s death, religious divisions increasingly mapped themselves on to family alliances. That accelerated in summer 1537 around a dynastic marriage that has been seriously underplayed in previous accounts of events: Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory, now around seventeen and ready for adulthood after his long and careful education, married Elizabeth Seymour, the King’s sister-in-law. This signalled the construction of a Seymour/Cromwell bloc which, but for the premature death of Queen Jane Seymour, might have carried all before it and radically reshaped the last
...more
