The evidence for Cromwell’s involvement in England’s networks of early evangelicals and even Lollards in the 1520s is thus inescapable. It is true that in his years of power under Henry VIII, while he steadily promoted his own dynamically evangelical agenda, he went on being capable of publicly making apparent gestures towards traditional religion. In 1517, at the dawn of the Reformation, Cromwell’s service to the Gild of Boston promoted the very indulgence trade which in the same years sparked Martin Luther’s wrath. Then he made his greatest career move so far on the basis of a spectacular
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