Thomas Cromwell (1485-28 July 1540) was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1533 to 1540, Principal Secretary from 1534 to 1540, Master of the Rolls from 1534 to 1536, Lord Privy Seal from 1536 to 1540, Governor of the Isle of Wight from 1538 to 1540, and Lord Great Chamberlain in 1540. He was an important chief minister under King Henry VIII of England during the Tudor period in England, but he was executed in 1540 for suggesting Anne of Cleves as a wife for King Henry.
Biography[]
Thomas Cromwell was born in Putney, Surrey in 1485 to a family of obscure stock. Cromwell fought as a mercenary in the Italian Wars, fighting for the Kingdom of France at the Battle of Garigliano in 1503. He later lived in the Low Countries, learning several languages while living among the merchants there. Cromwell became involved with the Catholic Church as a minor official, leading to Cromwell leading an embassy to Rome in 1517 and 1518. By 1520, he was well-established in the mercantile and legal circles of London, and he entered the House of Commons in 1523 as a burgess. From 1516 to 1530, he was a member of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey's household, and he became his secretary in 1529. Despite serving a Catholic cardinal, he secretly held reformist views. He gave the William Tyndale book The Obedience of a Christian Man to Anne Boleyn, and King Henry VIII of England used the book as rationale to justify his split from the church.
After Wolsey's downfall, he was elected to Parliament and entered King Henry's favor; King Henry appointed him to various positions at his court during the 1530s, and he served as his chief minister. Cromwell helped to engineer an annullment of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could lawfully marry Anne Boleyn, and he charted an evangelical and reformist course for the Church of England in reaction to the breakdown of relations between Henry and the Catholic Church. During his rise to power, Cromwell made several enemies, including Anne Boleyn, a former ally. He played a prominent role in her downfall, and he soon found himself becoming an enemy of Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. In 1536, he oversaw the brutal suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising in Yorkshire, ordering for the Duke of Suffolk to be more brutal. The occurrence of the uprising was one of the causes of Cromwell's fall from grace, as his failure to detect hostility towards his anti-clerical reforms led to the bloodbath.
Downfall[]
Cromwell's execution
Cromwell faced his downfall during Henry's period of seclusion following the death of his wife, Jane Seymour, as he insisted that he be given loco parentis over Henry's young son, the future King Edward VI of England. He made a further error when he suggested the unattractive Anne of Cleves as a wife for King Henry, who divorced her not long after she arrived in England. Cromwell was arraigned under a bill of attainder and was executed for treason and heresy on 28 July 1540, a decision that King Henry later came to regret due to Cromwell's importance at his court. The beheading was botched, as the executioner was hung-over from drinking with Sir Francis Bryan the night before; he was hacked away at several times before he was finally beheaded. The great-grandson of Thomas' nephew Richard, Oliver Cromwell, would later lead England himself.