Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Cromwell also understood the universal European language of power: the self-consciously elegant Latin written and spoken by Renaissance ‘humanists’, those ardent explorers of a re-emerging classical past. Over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Western Church used but also much adapted the Latin language for the purposes of Christian conversation and liturgy, transforming even its grammar and sentence construction. Humanist scholars, writers and poets modishly reached back across the centuries to classical Latin idioms, and tried to sound as much as possible like great orators of ancient Rome such as Cicero, or poets such as Virgil. They learned their Latin from a mass of ancient texts newly appearing in print. Cromwell loved and avidly collected books. He would recognize that humanism was a practical skill: good expression and forceful rhetoric were essential tools of effective politics. As a good humanist, he also had enough acquaintance with Greek for scholars occasionally to flatter him with a learned tag.