Thomas Cromwell(c. 1485–1540)

Thomas Cromwell was born at Putney on the south bank of the Thames around 1485, son of Walter Cromwell, a Putney blacksmith, fuller and brewer, and Katherine Meverell. The family was of modest yeoman standing; the boy had no formal grammar-school education and left home in his teens for reasons that the contemporary sources do not preserve. He spent the next fifteen years on the Continent: enlisted as a mercenary in the French army that fought the Italian Wars (he was present at the French defeat at Garigliano in 1503), took service in Florence under the banker Francesco Frescobaldi, learned Italian and acquired a working command of accounting and commercial law in the Frescobaldi household, and worked his way back through Antwerp where he learned Dutch and the practical commercial law of the Hanseatic trade. He returned to England around 1512 in his late twenties as a fluent linguist, an experienced commercial lawyer, and a man with a working knowledge of the Italian and Burgundian courts that no other Englishman of his generation possessed.

He set up at London in the wool-export trade and in the law, joined Gray's Inn around 1517, and through the 1520s built one of the most successful commercial-and-equity practices in the City. He came to the attention of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey around 1520 and took service in the Cardinal's household from 1524 as a confidential legal-and-financial agent. He handled for Wolsey the legal-and-financial management of the dissolution of the small monastic houses (around twenty-nine houses suppressed across 1524 to 1529) whose revenues funded Wolsey's Cardinal College at Oxford (the foundation of the present Christ Church) and Cardinal College at Ipswich. The work gave Cromwell the detailed working knowledge of the English monastic system that became the foundation of the great Dissolution he would later carry through on a national scale.

On Wolsey's fall in 1529 Cromwell took a Commons seat at Taunton in the Reformation Parliament that opened in November 1529 and through the next four years emerged as the leading parliamentary manager of the King's measures. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1530, was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1533 and Principal Secretary in 1534, and from 1534 to his fall in June 1540 served as the King's Chief Minister, the senior administrative office of the English state. Across those nine years he drafted and carried through the Reformation Parliament the constitutional architecture of the modern English state: the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533, the foundational statement of the imperial sovereignty of the English Crown), the Act of Supremacy (1534, making the King the Supreme Head of the Church of England), the Treason Act (1534), the Act for the Submission of the Clergy (1534), the Act of Annates (1534), the Suffragan Bishops Act (1534), the First Act of Succession (1534), and the Act of Six Articles (1539).

His Dissolution of the Monasteries, carried through in two stages by the Suppression of Religious Houses Act of 1536 (smaller houses) and the Second Suppression Act of 1539 (the great abbeys), was the largest single transfer of land in English history. Over eight hundred monasteries and religious houses were dissolved; their lands (approximately one-fifth of the cultivated land of England) reverted to the Crown and were sold across the next decade to the rising gentry class, the proceeds funding the navy and the Royal coastal-defence works that secured England against the Catholic counter-Reformation powers. He commissioned in parallel the translation of the Bible into English: the Coverdale Bible of 1535 (the first complete printed English-language Bible), the Matthew Bible of 1537, and the great Cromwell-supervised Great Bible of April 1539, the official English-language Bible placed by his royal injunction in every parish church in the country.

He was created Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon in 1536, Knight of the Garter in 1537, and on the eighteenth of April 1540 Earl of Essex, the highest English peerage rank below royal blood. His fall, three months later in June 1540, followed the King's repudiation of the Anne of Cleves marriage that Cromwell had negotiated; he was arrested at the Council table on the tenth of June 1540, attainted without trial, and executed at Tower Hill on the morning of the twenty-eighth of July 1540, the same day the King married Catherine Howard. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy (Wolf Hall 2009, Bring Up the Bodies 2012, The Mirror & the Light 2020, two Booker Prize wins) put him at the centre of contemporary English-language historical fiction, and the BBC adaptation of 2015 reached an estimated four million viewers per episode. The constitutional architecture he set in place across 1533 to 1540 is at the foundation of every subsequent statement of the English (and from 1707 the British) state. The Cromwell name in modern English constitutional history carries the weight of the nine-year Chief Ministership.