Thomas Cromwell's View of History

THE NAME OF Cromwell is indissolubly associated with political upheaval, religious radicalism, and regicide. Thomas Cromwell, an ancestor of Oliver, was a faithful servant first to Cardinal Wolsey, and after the Cardinal’s fall, to Henry VIII. Wolsey, as Cardinal, had failed to get Henry’s twenty-year marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled, and paid the price for that failure. By a series of legalistic maneuvers and dubious depositions, Cromwell, a smart lawyer with no ties to Rome, achieved the annulment, leaving Henry free to marry Anne Boleyn. He also—when the King tired of her and, his first wife dead, aimed for respect­ability—secured Anne’s downfall, trial, and execution (the main subject of Bring Up the Bodies). But Cromwell’s most lasting achievement, by taking advantage of the obvious corruptions in the wealthy monastic system of the Catholic Church, was to engineer the near-total dissolution of Britain’s religious houses. This both solved Henry’s second nagging problem—a chronic shortage of cash—and placated the nobility, many of whom benefited from royal largesse in the form of land-grants when the great religious estates were broken up.