Henry was angry at their presumption — how dare his ignorant subjects rebel and then tell him how to run the country! And he continued to listen to Cromwell. For example, the movement began in Louth, in Lincolnshire, and began with the murder of two tax collectors, one of whom was hanged and the other sewn into a sack and thrown to a pack of hungry dogs!
So the common people might grumble somewhat but they were ultimately more influenced by practical matters. But not only did Henry enjoy good weather, he had a brilliant servant. The king declared that Rome had no authority in England and Cromwell instituted the reforms which would make it so.
The king declared that all monastic lands were forfeit and Cromwell set out to close the monasteries, assess their value, and sell them to the highest bidder. For a decade, this partnership worked marvelously. Also, Henry and Cromwell both recognized a fundamental truth of the English people; the government could do what it liked as long as traditional religious views were not upset too much.
Certainly, Henry did not upset his own. The name of the pope was omitted in their prayers but not much else. England practiced Catholicism without a pope and, in his place, was their king. This situation suited Cromwell. Like many, he recognized that the Church had lost its way, remaining a ponderous medieval institution concerned with wealth and influence. But Europe was no longer medieval; countries were becoming nation-states, patriotic and immune to the cultural unity which Rome promoted.
The pope envisioned a collection of nations joined beneath the cloak of Christendom with him at its head; but, particularly in xenophobic England, there were mutterings that the church was dominated by other nations. Also, the church claimed authority over its subjects; no priest or cleric could be tried by their sovereign nation. They would answer only to Rome.
Also, as king, he believed himself ruler of all his subjects, priest and commoner alike. One must also mention the corruption of the church, sadly evident to everyone. Certainly there were Godly men who struggled to enforce the tenets of their faith. But there were also bishops and cardinals more interested in business and finance than theology.
The church preached that the surest path to heaven was through good works, particularly at a monastery or abbey, but every Englishmen knew that only the wealthy could afford to endow or board at them. Furthermore, an increasing number of churchmen were absent from their posts. Cardinal Wolsey embodied this avaricious streak; he was bishop, archbishop, abbot, and cardinal yet the affairs of state kept him from his duties.
Instead of tending to his flock, he tended to his purse. He sired illegitimate children and collected nearly 50, pds a year from his vast holdings. Wolsey represented the church as it had become; certainly such abuses may not have turned most Englishmen from their faith. But when confronted with the forces of Protestantism, the church found precious few willing to die for their beliefs. When the king styled himself head of the church, many were perhaps relieved.
Henry made no claim to a holy life, not like the churchman Wolsey; he also was shrewd enough to endow his monarchy with papal apparatus. From the s on, the Tudor dynasty was even more divine and the machinery of state could enforce its divinity. Cromwell entered royal service in early and, from then on, rose rapidly.
His career progressed as follows:. As the above list shows, Henry never forgot the fallen Wolsey. He had heaped honors upon him with extravagant generosity and had written to the pope recommending religious promotion. In the end, Henry believed himself betrayed. Not only had Wolsey accumulated obscene wealth, but he had grown arrogant and eventually treasonous.
And so Cromwell, despite his years of diligence and genius, was eventually rewarded with an earldom but only a short time before his execution. His influence upon the s, one of the most influential and vital decades in English history, was enormous. One needs only to study the s to realize how the loss of Cromwell affected Tudor government. Cromwell supported Anne until she, like Wolsey, became a liability.
Among his immediate accomplishments were the following:. In the s, he had instituted reforms of the English government which earned enmity from the nobility. Cromwell recognized the basic inefficiency of feudal government and, from it, struggled to create a more logical system. Instead of offices held solely because of birth, he wanted trained servants with expertise in their field.
He built a bureaucracy of professionals outside the royal household. He began the first era of parliamentary control of England, using the institution to dissolve the monasteries which made up a quarter of all arable land and validate his other decisions. Like his predecessors in government ministry, Cromwell needed to provide secure and regular income.
Cromwell also developed a novel, and very unpopular idea — in the past, taxes were created to support warfare; in , he developed a new tax. Of course, Henry would use the entire windfall to finance his increasingly complicated foreign policy. In , however, Henry was prepared to reap the benefits of his new anti-clerical policies. He had appointed his friend Thomas Cranmer to the venerable and powerful position of Archbishop of Canterbury.
Like Cromwell, Cranmer benefited directly from the fall of Katharine of Aragon and the Imperial alliance and the rise of Anne Boleyn and her Norfolk relations. During the accumulation of these honors, however, Cromwell began to recognize the flaws in his success.
First, he had accompanied Anne Boleyn on her rise to power; yet, in , he helped engineer her disgrace and execution on charges of adultery, incest, and witchcraft. Tiring of his wife, he wanted to be rid of her. Divorce was only briefly considered before being pushed aside. To rid himself of Anne, he turned to the ever-ready Cromwell.
Soon enough, Anne was on trial with her brother and two male servants. They were all executed, despite spirited defenses and the widely-held belief that it was judicial murder. In the rough world of Tudor politics, friendships were lost in the struggle for prestige and survival. And now Cromwell turned to Mistress Jane Seymour and her relatively obscure family for support.
Cromwell busied himself with auctioning off church properties to various noblemen and further reforming the archaic machinery of Tudor government.
When the council did meet, Cromwell dominated the meetings and disregarded most suggestions. To his credit, he was right on most counts; the nobility was quite distanced from the changing nature of government.
And while many of the nobles benefited from the sale of clerical lands, many others had relatives dedicated to religious service. Also, reverence for the church and its servants was as deeply-held as reverence for the monarchy.
Henry VIII, who relished his popularity, allowed his faithful servant to be impugned. Thus, Henry could meet with his nobles, listen to their complaints, and even agree with them since many were his dearest friends.
The king remained popular while his chief minister became increasingly despised and isolated. Moryson eventually became a member himself. It is also important to note that years of listening to anti-Cromwell gossip eventually affected Henry.
Even the king did not exist in a vacuum and, as his temper became increasingly erratic, he was easily swayed by inflamed opinion. The perfect opportunity arrived when Queen Jane died two weeks after childbirth, in October Henry VIII was genuinely bereaved at her death but almost immediately the search began for a new queen.
After all, Jane had delivered a son but one male heir was not enough in the sixteenth century. For Cromwell, this was a chance to further extend his influence while thwarting the English nobility.
The influence of these families naturally troubled Cromwell. As their influence rose, his own suffered — so he was opposed to the idea of another English wife. Henry was always easy to influence, if one knew how, and became very ready to listen to those who gave him a reason to cut Cromwell down to size — not least the fact that his chief minister had pushed ahead with religious change behind his back.
The king was easily persuaded that Cromwell was a heretic and a traitor. It was a time of wild swings of fortune, with religious conservatives and Protestants both being imprisoned in turn. The wildest swing of all came on 10 June when Cromwell was arrested as he turned up for a routine meeting of the Privy Council.
Cromwell was sent to the Tower of London and never saw the king again. If he had, he might have been saved, but his letters begging for an audience were ignored — perhaps Henry never saw them.
Parliament voted him legally dead even Cranmer voted for that , and soon he was actually dead, executed on Tower Hill on 28 July Too late for Cromwell the man, but not too late for his legacy. The young Protestant bureaucrats that he had trained in the s went on to rule Reformation England: Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil lived until and respectively, becoming the statesmen who steered the triumphant Protestantism of Elizabethan England.
So Cromwell died first for being a man of the Protestant Reformation, and second for not having an ancient pedigree — effectively insulting and upstaging those who did, just because he existed and flourished. He was the victim of the blue-bloods who found it insufferable that a man should govern just because he had talent. So I present to you Thomas Cromwell: a cool, self-contained idealist who wanted to shape the kingdom of England in the name of a new religion — the remaker of this realm.
I have given you a taste of some of the revelations to be found in the archives, but you will discover many more in my BBC Two documentary. And you may be most surprised by some of the locations at which we chose to shoot. During episode 3. While Jane was disgusted by such an underhand policy, Edward despite seeing Cromwell as a rival in power remarks to her, "You have to appreciate how clever he is. Cromwell's private life is seldom delved into, as he has no noble background; he mentions to Charles Brandon that he served as a mercenary soldier during continental wars in Italy, demonstrating that he still holds military skills when he beats Brandon in an archery contest.
In Season Two he states that he is currently married and has a son, Gregory , although his two daughters died in the sweating sickness outbreak of episode 1. However, historically Cromwell's wife Elizabeth died in the same outbreak as their daughters. In Season 3, Gregory Cromwell is married and becomes a father himself in the season finale, making Thomas Cromwell a grandfather before his death. In contrast to his ruthless, unpredictable court persona, Cromwell is shown to be an affectionate father and a genuine believer and promoter of a more liberalized, Protestant church; Gregory reciprocates his father's love and tearfully attends his execution.
He was somehow able to afford an education at Cambridge University, most likely thanks to his father's merchandise. Cromwell traveled abroad serving as a mercenary in several wars on the continent; it is likely there that Cromwell first encounterd and developed an interest in Lutheranism.
On returning to England, he set himself up as a merchant and lawyer which were considered appropriate posts for a well-educated commoner and later married; he had a son, two daughters and an illegitimate daughter. Cromwell's intellect and efficiency was eventually noticed by Thomas Wolsey, and he was taken in as the Cardinal's protege.
His meteoric career began when he was appointed the King's secretary of state; after Wolsey's fall, Cromwell was able to escape the disgrace of his former mentor and enter the King's household. After he successfully manipulated Parliament in favor of the Royal Supremacy, Cromwell became King Henry's most favored advisor, amassing a huge fortune and great political power through the various offices Henry gave him. His most significant acts of Reform included the authorization of the Bible in English, the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries, and the break with Rome.
Unlike in The Tudors , Cromwell did not become Lord Chancellor after Thomas More's resignation he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, which essentially made him Treasury Minister ; however, the new Chancellor Thomas Audley was an ally of Cromwell's and usually deferred to him. Ultimately, however, Cromwell made many enemies while in power like his initial allies the Boleyns, whom he turned upon when they lost King Henry's favor.
After Henry's disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves which Cromwell had arranged he was arrested by the Court on Henry's authority and charged with treason under a bill of Attainder that accused him of sheltering heretics. Unsurprisingly, Cromwell was found guilty of treason and executed, with his vast fortune- like those of the monasteries he had attacked- going to the Royal exchequer. Nonetheless, Henry later expressed regret for the loss of his "most faithful servant", and subsequently restored some of Cromwell's property to his son Gregory- five months after Cromwell's death, Henry ennobled Gregory as Baron of Oakham, and he was later knighted by Henry's successor Edward.
In the show, his downfall is largely caused by Anne and Edward Seymour , however this is not the case in real life. The Hertfords and Cromwell were on good terms, and Cromwell was namee godfather to their third daughter Jane, shortly before his downfal. The Tudors Wiki Explore. Wiki Content.
Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Thomas Cromwell. Edit source History Talk 0. Cromwell is a great man? Cromwell interrogates a scapegoat of Anne Boleyn's 'adultery'. Cromwell argues with Queen Anne Boleyn about his Reformation policies. Cromwell discusses new alliances with King Henry Season 2.
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