That Monster: Thomas Cromwell
At the Frick Museum in New York City, a painting of St. Jerome (El Greco) over the fireplace separates two portraits of important Englishmen: Sir Thomas More on the left and Thomas Cromwell on the right. Both were painted by Hans Holbein the Younger, the court painter during the reign of Henry VIII. Since the paintings were painted (1527 and 1533), More has become “the saint,” and Cromwell “a monster” in popular thinking. You can see a hint of this even in these paintings. Roger Merriman, an obviously unfavorable historian, described Cromwell as "a short, stoutly built man, with a large face, smooth shaven, with close-cropped hair, and a heavy double chin, with a small and cruel mouth, an extraordinary long upper lip, and a pair of gray eyes set closely together, and moving restlessly under his light eyebrows.” Cromwell was beheaded July 28, 1540 by order of King Henry after refusing to support Henry’s divorce of Anne of Cleves, the German princess mail order bride that Henry found unattractive. Henry married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, the very day his longtime trusted friend was killed.
Thomas Cromwell was not the villain he is sometimes made out to be, and in fact, it is impossible to imagine the English Reformation without him. Cromwell was Henry VIII's principle legal advisor, Lord Privy Seal, from 1532-1540 who used his considerable influence to gently steer England in the direction of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. There were lots of "causes" in the caldron of Reformation in England, including the intellectual impulses of the Renaissance and the rise of Humanism that led to the availability of the Bible in English, the religious movement that begun two hundred years earlier by John Wycliffe (the Lollards) to return the church to its biblical roots, the pitiful corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and its popes, the writings of Martin Luther and other continental reformers that were arriving in the British Isles like food for hungry people, the rise of Nationalism, and the personal and political machinations of a king obsessed with having a male heir to the throne at any cost. Thomas Cromwell helped navigate this complex situation towards what, in the end, became a settled Protestantism of the Church of England that is thoroughly biblical, pastorally generous, and liturgically beautiful. Cromwell is best known and blamed for the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541. In fact, the monasteries controlled a great deal of wealth that was, for the most part, being channelled to secular landlords instead of to the Lord’s work. In addition to the corruption of many of the religious houses they remained bastions of Roman Catholicism after Henry disassociated from the pope in 1534. What had started as houses for healing and care for the poor had become enemies of church and state, and Henry needed their assets to support his army against foreign invaders.
The inscription on the border of Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell reads "To our trusty and right well, beloved Councillor, Thomas Cromwell, Master of our Jewel House.” More than anyone else, it was Cromwell who kept a mentally erratic and disturbed king functional, while helping the Church of England towards a definition that, within a decade of his death, would be grounded in the Anglican formularies: the Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the first Book of Homilies.
Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life, Diarmaid MacCulloch