CROMWELL, THOMAS

Cromwell, Thomas: translation

(c. 1485-1540)

   Lord Chancellor who helped establish Protestantism in England

   As a top government official, Thomas Cromwell helped advance the Protestant cause in England during the reign of Henry VIII. Cromwell was born in London around 1485 and raised in a humble environment as the son of a blacksmith. of limited education, he moved to France, served in the French army, and made a small fortune as a moneylender.

   Back in England around 1513, he worked as a lawyer and was eventually taken as adviser by Cardinal Wolsey. After Wolsey's untimely death in 1530, Cromwell ran for Parliament, where he attracted the attention of the king.Following the fall of Thomas More, Henry tapped Cromwell as the new Lord Chancellor.

   As the close adviser/confidant of Henry, he was able, in concert with Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, to push for a variety of reforms. He supported Henry in his move to break with the pope and have the king declared the head of the Church of England. He was also responsible for the report to Parliament that led to the 1536 law that allowed Henry to sell 376 monasteries to replenish state coffers. Two years later, Cromwell helped close down a number of shrines, including one honoring St. Thomas à Becket, which occasioned Henry's formal excommunication by the pope in 1538.

   Cromwell's great mistake was supporting Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1540, as part of a push to align England with the German reformers. In his anger, Henry turned on Cromwell, charged him with treason, and had him beheaded on July 28, 1540.

   Further reading:

   ■ B. W. Beckingsale, Thomas Cromwell, Tudor Minister (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978)

   ■ A. G. Dickens, Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation (London, English Universities Press 1959)

   ■ G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: the Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972)

   ■ Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)

   ■ John N. King, English Reformation Literature, the Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Cromwell, Thomas: translation

(ca. 1485-1540)

   English politician who rose from humble origins to become a trusted servant of King Henry VIII's most powerful government minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. After Wolsey's fall from power in 1529, Cromwell replaced him and became even more powerful. His efficiency and decisive personality soon made him the dominant person in political life. He arranged the divorce of the king from Queen Catherine of Aragon; the acquiescence of both Parliament and the clergy in declaring Henry head of the English church and abolishing papal authority; the suppression of the monasteries and the confiscation of their properties by the crown; and the publication of the first English-language Bible to appear with the approval of the government and clergy.Modern historians have often regarded the administrative agencies that he created to administer the former monastic lands and establish royal control over the church as a decisive step away from the personal administrative structure of the medieval monarchy to a more impersonal and institutionalized administration that foreshadows modern English government. Cromwell's own religious views leaned toward Protestantism, but as a servant of a king who continued to favor Catholic doctrine even after his break with Rome, he had to move slowly and cautiously. He collaborated with the new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to authorize the official English Bible, to modify some of the doctrines of the medieval church, and gradually to introduce the doctrines of Continental Protestantism. In these efforts, Cromwell employed the services of a number of writers with humanist backgrounds and arranged for the publication of English translations of works of Erasmus and other humanists who had favored reform of the church and had sharply criticized ecclesiastical corruption.

   Cromwell was raised to the peerage as earl of Essex, but his foreign policy of close relations with the German Protestant princes, culminating in the marriage of the king to the German princess Anne of Cleves, whom the king found unacceptable, led to his sudden fall from power in 1540. He was arrested, attainted by act of Parliament, and executed. Yet both his administrative reforms and his transformation of the English church into a national institution under the control of the monarch endured.