The irony is obvious. Cromwell the future architect of English reformation was agent in advancing the indulgence trade in the very years when Martin Luther was denouncing it, though it was equally ironic that his employers’ rivals in indulgence-peddling, the English Austin Friars, were actually part of Luther’s order. John Foxe was himself born in Boston around a year before Cromwell’s expedition to Rome; when he came to construct a glowing account of Cromwell’s career in his classic Protestant narrative, he felt very uncomfortable about this story.
