Thomas Cromwell: A Life
by Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Allen Lane, 730pp, £30
This new biography is so prodigiously thorough and clever that it is difficult to imagine there will ever be more than titbits added to this portrait of the man who did much to change the life and face of Britain.
Of course, decades ago Cambridge historian Geoffrey Elton showed how Thomas Cromwell transformed England’s government and masterminded Henry VIII’s religious revolution. Not a few scholars have since landed serious blows on “Eltonism”, as McCulloch carefully shows – and he adds an astute blow of his own by suggesting that the final establishment of the Privy Council in 1536, for Elton a crucial step in taking government out of the royal household, was not Cromwell’s masterstroke but a device of his opponents to “contain” an increasingly over-mighty minister.
