Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

alignment of forces in Cromwell’s favour continued to crystallize in a last tragedy of England’s medieval monasticism: the execution in late autumn of three abbots of great and venerable Benedictine monasteries, Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester.8 Their turnaround in fortunes was remarkable: the Abbots of Reading and Colchester actually attended Parliament in spring and summer. The sudden catastrophe may be explained by their bleak realization that summer that there was no likely future for their houses: that despair led them into varied and unconnected indiscretions, all of which provoked sudden retaliatory action from Cromwell’s agents at a time when he knew that conservative forces were marshalling against him. Was the final flurry of dissolutions from late autumn 1539 a reaction to the discoveries and the consequent executions? It is by no means clear that even Cromwell had any plan to make a clean sweep of all monasteries until that moment. Indeed in one sense, the clean sweep never happened.