Tudor Talks - Thomas Cromwell

I ask Robert Hutchinson, whose biography of Thomas Cromwell was recently released to much acclaim, whether the subject of the book had any saving graces. Hutchinson will be giving a talk on Cromwell in Michelham Priory to mark St George’s Day. “They’d be difficult to find,” he says. “In an already corrupt age he took sleaze to new levels. He was a bit of a Jack the Lad, a self-made man who rose to power when Wolsley fell by arranging the divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and then the execution of Ann Boleyn. Henry - who was mad, bad and dangerous to know, and ran the country like a Stalinist state, had a low boredom threshold, so Cromwell became the most powerful minister the country had ever seen. He dissolved the monasteries - a Tudor form of privatisation and asset stripping - and became a money-lender to the aristocracy, charging 15% interest. He was not the sort of man you failed to make a repayment to. By the end of his days he was personally earning the equivalent of £14 million a year from his corrupt activities.”
Cromwell came to the grisly end he deserved. He fell from favour in 1540, and was arrested for heresy. Henry showed mercy for his former right-hand man by deciding to have him beheaded instead of burnt at the stake. “But Henry’s last little joke was to hire an inexperienced executioner, who took over half an hour to cut off his head. Remarkably the man responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries died professing himself a Roman Catholic.” AL