Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Cromwell’s evangelical religion had included a strange sort of Nicodemism, which ran alongside and contributed to the Reformation that he promoted openly and aggressively in the name of Henry VIII during the 1530s: it was hidden in plain sight. Its permanent results became apparent only after his death, in the Reformations under Edward VI and Elizabeth.36 These later developments of the English Reformations fulfilled many venerable Lollard hopes, including the destruction of sacred imagery and the promotion of a Reformed sacramental theology which the old King had murderously loathed. Because of this posthumous result, Cromwell’s religious programme must count as the most successful Nicodemite enterprise of the whole Reformation. While the Italian Reform of the Spirituali and their Nicodemite fellow-travellers was in the 1540s and 1550s exposed, crushed and scattered abroad by the Counter-Reformation, to diffuse into central European Reformed Protestantism and into varied Unitarianisms in eastern Europe, Thomas Cromwell’s Nicodemite version of Reformed Protestantism endured. Under the tutelage of his most accomplished imitator, Queen Elizabeth I, it became the Church of England.37