Thomas Cromwell
by Robert Hutchinson
360pp, Weidenfeld, £20
A brutal and suspicious tsar with a tendency to megalomania, a corrupt court where conspiracies flourished, torture chambers and treason trials in which the accused confessed to crimes which in many cases they had never committed, networks of spies and "agents provocateurs", a peasantry subjected to dispossession of their land, attacks on the church and seizure of church property. Stalinist Russia? Yes, of course; but also Tudor England. All that was lacking was the gulag.
Robert Hutchinson has already written two fine books on the period: The Last Days of Henry VIII, a title echoing - deliberately, I suppose - Trevor-Roper's account of Hitler's end, and Elizabeth's Spy Master, a study of Francis Walsingham. Now he has turned to Thomas Cromwell, described in the subtitle as "Henry VIII's most notorious minister". He was that, certainly. He was also unusual, even perhaps unique, among Henry's ministers, in being competent. Indeed, no one in the 16th century did more than Cromwell to shape the course of English history.
Cromwell was a self-made man. That was not so unusual. The first two Tudor kings distrusted the old nobility and selected as ministers men who owed everything to royal favour. Cromwell was the son of a quarrelsome and not very prosperous brewer and ale-house keeper. He became a merchant, trading in Italy, and a money-lender. He acquired some knowledge of the law - once in power he would be a notably adept drafter of parliamentary statutes - and caught the attention of Cardinal Wolsey. This brought him into public life, and he had the wit to abandon the cardinal as soon as he fell into disfavour with Henry. Wolsey fell because he had been unable to find the means of ridding Henry of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Cromwell managed to do so. First he subdued the church in England, initially by encouraging anti-clerical feeling, then by threats of punishment for its obedience to Rome.
Having done that, he associated parliament with the measures which first made it illegal to pay taxes to Rome (a popular move), then forbade appeals from English church courts to the Pope, declared Henry supreme head of the church in England, and passed an act which made denial of the royal supremacy treason. In little more than three years Cromwell destroyed the work of centuries - even before he turned his attention to the dissolution of the monasteries, and the seizure of their lands, which Hutchinson calls "the greatest single act of privatisation in the history of Britain's governance".
He had made it possible for Henry to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. When the king tired of her temper and her inability to provide him with a male heir, Cromwell manufactured evidence, secured by torture, sufficient to have her found guilty of adultery - which was construed as treason. So off with her head. Henry was free to marry again. The new wife, Jane Seymour, gave him the son he wanted, and then died. Cromwell meanwhile had married his own son to a member of the Seymour family.
His policies provoked the most dangerous rebellion of the century - the Pilgrimage of Grace. He survived it. The rebels were bought off with promises, and, after they had dispersed, their leaders were condemned and executed as traitors. Had Cromwell read Machiavelli? Hutchinson isn't sure. One may surmise that he had no need to.
Meanwhile he accumulated offices and great wealth. Nothing was done, nothing granted, without gifts of gold and silver to the minister. His income in 1537 was over £12,000. Hutchinson suggests this was equivalent to more than £4.5m today. The minister was, he says, as corrupt as hell. But so, one might add, was everyone else. Cromwell was only more successfully rapacious.
Henry's matrimonial troubles had given Cromwell the opportunity to rise in the world. Now they destroyed him when he seemed at the very apogee of his power: Earl of Essex, vice-regent and high chamberlain of England, keeper of the privy seal and chancellor of the exchequer. Having failed in an attempt to secure a French princess for his master - Marie de Guise, who married James V of Scotland instead, sensibly remarking that she might be a big woman but had only a little neck - he blundered by selecting a German princess, Anne of Cleves, for whom Henry felt an immediate distaste. Cromwell's enemies saw their chance. The king, incapable of gratitude for all that his most capable minister had done for him, listened to them. Cromwell, strangely unsuspecting - rather like Beria when Khrushchev and company moved against him after Stalin's death - was arrested in the council chamber. There was no trial. He was condemned by an Act of Attainder, a procedure he had himself, if not devised, refined. He went to the block to which he had sent so many, confessing his faults and sins and proclaiming his love for the king. By doing so he safeguarded his son, Gregory, perhaps the only person for whom he felt affection. Though the earldom was lost, Gregory became a baron a few months later.
Hutchinson tells the horrible story admirably and compellingly, acknowledging Cromwell's rare abilities, while making no excuses for his character and conduct. If he feels some reluctant admiration for the minister, he has nothing but contempt for Henry, the "old ogre" and "royal brute". The last years of his reign were almost uniformly disastrous.
Characteristically, the king gave way to self-pity, moaning that "upon light pretexts", his councillors "by false accusations ... made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had" - the most faithful perhaps, the most able certainly.
· Allan Massie's The Thistle and the Rose: Six Centuries of Love and Hate Between the Scots and the English is published by John Murray
