Because of Cromwell’s sensitivity to the grand bargain in Tudor government between monarch and magistrate, he elaborated on Wolsey’s agenda by hugely developing Parliament’s role in both England and Ireland, confirming it as the instrument of government when elsewhere its role was dwindling; woe betide any later English monarch who tried to dispense with it. In fact he extended Parliamentary participation to the vast majority of the Tudors’ possessions, in the course of building a Church independent of Rome and creating new institutions in the realm. The process was never complete, for
...more
