Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

By summer 1532, there was no doubt that Anne Boleyn was on her way to marrying the King.

The Act of Supremacy was background to the greatest expansion of Cromwell’s power so far: his appointment to perhaps the most important and far-reaching office he ever held, despite his later promotions. In early 1535 the King granted him a peculiar title, which in English usage had no precedent and saw no successors, ‘Vice-Gerent in Spirituals’.

The Anabaptists were a nightmare for Master Secretary and Archbishop Cranmer in more than one way.

On 14 April 1536, as this third component of government reorganization took its shaky course in Ireland, the Westminster Parliament drew to an end. By then alert members would be aware that some very odd things were going on at Court.

On the day the Queen’s brother Rochford was executed, Henry VIII was officially informed by his Archbishop of Canterbury that he had for a second time inadvertently entered a marriage which had never existed.

On 30 May 1536, eleven days after Anne Boleyn’s execution, King Henry married Jane Seymour: in his own eyes this was his first proper marriage. The new Queen had an easy task in creating a new atmosphere of unity, after the public confrontations and partisanship which had been the product of Anne Boleyn’s temperament.

Other rewards were marginally less disreputable. As he was now the Queen’s brother, Edward Seymour needed a boost in status, so within a week of her marriage he became Viscount Beauchamp, a suitably grand title which the heralds managed to resurrect for the King’s consideration from an extinct barony enjoyed by one of his family name nearly two centuries before.

Mary’s gratitude to Cromwell for her decision was profound, but so was his to her, and he expressed it in a remarkable way: commissioning a commemorative gold medal, edition of one, specifically for presentation to her. Such personalized medals were still exotic in Tudor England, a culture on the fringes of European sophistication, but they had been regular objects of display in Renaissance Italy since the late fifteenth century.

It is of course an irony that Cranmer, the champion of evangelical reformation, should be the first victim among incumbent bishops of what over the next two decades became an accelerating royal policy of stripping the episcopate of much of its prime estates.

After this run of luck, Cromwell may have felt that the atmosphere of studied religious neutrality in which the King’s marriage to Jane Seymour had opened was ripe for manipulation in the evangelical cause.

From now on, Cromwell became far more single-minded in pursuing evangelical reformation.

After the Pilgrimage, religion could make old friendships grow cold: at Court, no one was more identified with the evangelical cause than Cromwell.

In the fraught period after Anne Boleyn’s death, religious divisions increasingly mapped themselves on to family alliances.

Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory, now around seventeen and ready for adulthood after his long and careful education, married Elizabeth Seymour, the King’s sister-in-law.

This signalled the construction of a Seymour/Cromwell bloc which, but for the premature death of Queen Jane Seymour, might have carried all before it and radically reshaped the last years of King Henry’s reign. As it was, the results were dramatic enough, both immediately and in the long term.

As Cromwell moved close to the Seymours, with political results satisfactory for everyone concerned, Elizabeth Seymour, younger sister of Jane, emerged as significant. Probably in 1530 she became second wife to a rather older Yorkshire gentleman, Sir Anthony Ughtred, while in her early teens.1 Such unions were not uncommon in the higher reaches of Eng...

Elizabeth and Gregory went on to have a large family who carried on the Cromwell family name into the baronage for another century and a half. Their first child (a son and heir, loyally named Henry, her second son of that name) was christened just seven months after their marriage, which suggests some enthusiastic anticipation by the young couple.12 Later letters to her from her formerly wild young spouse suggest real affection. It may have been for the wedding that Thomas Cromwell commissioned a portrait miniature of his son as a present for his wife, though its natural pairing is another Holbein miniature, of the Lord Privy Seal himself. Put side by side, the pride of the father in his son is palpable (see Plates 24–5). The boy has the same looks, the same long turned-up nose and a slightly odd, hooded cast to the eyes, though it all looks rather more appealing in a teenager.

On the day of Cromwell’s execution, 28 July 1540, the King took his mind off it by getting married to Katherine Howard. One doubts whether he reflected on his previous diversion with a young lady while disposing of Anne Boleyn. Just as in Anne’s case, Cromwell could with full legal propriety have been burned at the stake, and maybe his enemies sought that.

His body did not have far to travel: buried in the Tower’s chapel of St Peter-in-Chains (ad Vincula).

His own death did not end the killing. Two days later a notorious event embodied the King’s idiosyncratic notion of the ‘middle way’. Six priests were executed: three evangelicals for heresy, and three papalist Catholics for treason. They suffered the respective customary punishments: in the former case burning, in the latter hanging, drawing and quartering. Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrett and William Jerome were clearly identified with Cromwell, and their clashes with Gardiner had sparked the six months of violent political turmoil. Barnes, who unlike Cromwell had no family to worry about, gave the sermon of his life, vigorously affirming a clear Lutheran faith to ward off charges of radicalism with which his trio were being smeared.

Elizabeth Seymour always inspires admiration; in 1537 she had likewise shown herself past mistress of timing in her overtures to Cromwell.

Protestant England endured, gradually outstripping the great powers which in the Tudor age had made it seem marginal in Europe. It took a new and steadily more dominant place on the world stage.

Cromwell’s enemy: Anne Boleyn (c. 1501–36).

Catholic martyrdom: the executions in the Tower of London of John Fisher and Thomas More in 1535 and of Margaret Pole Countess of Salisbury in 1541 are here conflated in Richard Verstegan’s Catholic polemic Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum (1587).