Thomas Cromwell - Diarmaid MacCulloch

A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR

'This is the biography we have been awaiting for 400 years' Hilary Mantel
'A masterpiece' Dan Jones, Sunday Times

Thomas
Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in
English
history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for
Cardinal
Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted
him to a
series of ever greater offices, and by the end of the 1530s he
was
effectively running the country for the King. That decade was
one of
the most momentous in English history: it saw a religious break
with
the Pope, unprecedented use of parliament, the dissolution of all
monasteries. Cromwell was central to all this, but establishing his
role
with precision, at a distance of nearly five centuries and after
the
destruction of many of his papers at his own fall, has been
notoriously
difficult.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography is much
the most
complete and persuasive life ever written of this elusive
figure, a
masterclass in historical detective work, making connections
not
previously seen. It overturns
many received interpretations, for
example that Cromwell was a cynical,
'secular' politician without
deep-felt religious commitment, or that he
and Anne Boleyn were allies
because of their common religious sympathies
- in fact he destroyed
her. It introduces the many different
personalities of these
foundational years, all conscious of the
'terrifyingly unpredictable'
Henry VIII. MacCulloch allows readers to feel
that they are immersed in
all this, that it is going on around them.

For
a time, the
self-made 'ruffian' (as he described himself) - ruthless,
adept in the
exercise of power, quietly determined in religious
revolution - was
master of events. MacCulloch's biography for the first
time reveals his
true place in the making of modern England and Ireland,
for good and
ill.