Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

establish a carefully static version of her half-brother’s dynamic Protestant revolution; in the words of her favourite royal minister Sir Christopher Hatton to a not over-sympathetic House of Commons, the Queen ‘placed her Reformation as upon a square stone, to remain constant’.35 Elizabeth had good reason to detest the nexus of politicians with Cromwell at their centre who had first destroyed her mother and then tried to divert the succession from herself and her half-sister; yet she was irreversibly tied to them in her role as Europe’s leading Protestant monarch; and, like Cromwell, she was a Nicodemite who had kept quiet about her Protestantism in her sister’s return to Roman Catholicism. At least some of the old resentments fell away when she was drawn into an intimate and indeed passionate relationship with John Dudley’s son Robert, but quite apart from his place as favourite and leading Councillor, much else bound her to the Protestant elite of her father’s Court.