Allen Lane (London). 2018. Hbk. 752 pages. £30.
Thomas Cromwell has become a more significant figure in the public consciousness since he was a key character in the novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, runaway success and winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009. In that book he is portrayed as a very ambitious man, a charmer but also a violent bully. Not really likeable. In this book, Diarmaid MacCulloch invites us to find the true Thomas Cromwell of history, through his surviving papers.
Cromwell emerges as a bright boy from yeoman stock (his father was a brewer), who doesn’t access university education but draws on a broad European experience. He is a man with generally excellent judgement of those around him. He is shown as pragmatic but also loyal, not casting off those with whom he disagrees, if he has formed a strong bond with them. The first such bond was with Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, whom he served faithfully from 1524, even though his own sympathies became steadily more influenced by Protestant perspectives and the views of Renaissance ‘humanists’. He defended Wolsey even when it was not in his own best interests.
MacCulloch argues that place and family mattered profoundly to Cromwell. Aged 50, the boy from Putney becomes Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon – thus returning triumphant to his roots. He was apparently happily married, and seems to have sincerely mourned his wife when she died. He never remarried, though that would have been usual in the circumstances. He had one son by birth and another effectively by informal adoption – and for each provided both property and powerful links.
A significant area of Cromwell’s activity, which MacCulloch unpacks, is his influence on the processes of government in England. Cromwell made much more intensive use of Parliament to take forward significant legislation than had hitherto been the case. He focused on policy in relation to sewers, land drainage and waterways, and saw systems put in place which would tend to protect the weak and vulnerable. He also expanded the common law and, as Chancellor, influenced the selection of local Sheriffs.
Cromwell is known for his impact in advising and guiding King Henry through the divorce of Catherine of Aragon and the Boleyn affair – and in facilitating reform – what turned out to be the early phases of the formation of the Church of England. We see that he promoted the Bible in English, and the education of ordinary people in the basic tenets of their faith. He worked closely with Cranmer.
It was another queen who caused his end – Anne of Cleves. MacCulloch shows that Cromwell had encouraged the liaison as, amongst the European candidates remaining, she was one of the few with a Protestant background. However, he did not pay enough attention either to the feelings of an ageing and impotent King, or to the circling vultures who resented him. He had been ill and was perhaps tiring of an unrelenting workload and missed clues that a few years earlier he would not have done.
This book is very clear and well presented. MacCulloch pulls together his evidence into what is – certainly if your previous ideas were based on Mantel’s work – a surprisingly sympathetic story. It is well worth reading.
Pauline Pearson is Professor in Nursing at the University of Northumbria and a non-stipendiary minister in the Church of England.