He was a genius of the first order, and fortune allowed him to play a part of the first magnitude. He is the true creator of the English Reformation….What adds to one’s estimate of Thomas Cromwell’s intellectual stature, and one’s corresponding detestation of the harm he proved capable of doing, is the fact that he was the sole architect of his own fortunes. Alone of the principle Reformation figures, he started from nothing: no birth, no money, no classical or clerical education, no friends — nothing. He was the son of a petty beer-house keeper in Putney. When he had grown famous and powerful, stories grew up about him, of course, as they always will about such people, but when you look into them you find that the only certain fact is what I have just stated: his coming from this beer shop on the south bank of the Thames, a little above London.

He went off as a vagabond in early youth, and th every little we know of him seems to show that he took what was then the best chance for an adventurous tramp — military service. He seems to have hired himself out to some one of those captains who went about gathering fighters for hire and then striking a bargain with various princes and powers at war….The best field for this kind of thing was Italy, and thither young Cromwell drifted. Probably he got some loot out of the fighting; he also pretty certainly picked up some Italian, for he read Machiavelli and in later life would quote his maxims. With whatever little capital he had got together in this dangerous trade he appears in the house of some big Italian money-lenders of the day; later on he returned to England and started in his own as a money-lender, on quite a large scale.

But Thomas Cromwell was much more than a money-lender, even in those first years of his advancing manhood. He had got hold of a good deal of law, and he had a fine grasp of detail in all business, remarkable industry, lucidity of judgment and rapidity of action. It was these which recommended him to the notice of the great Wolsey….Anyhow, he appears as a sort of manager for Wolsey in important affairs, and so gets richer and richer. Unfortunately for Cromwell’s soul, and for the Catholic Church in England, and indeed throughout Christendom, he happened to come into Wolsey’s employ just at the moment when the gret Cardinal was planning his new and splendid college at Oxford. In order to found this College, Wolsey had got the Papal authority to suppress a certain number of small decayed monasteries and use their revenues for this great new establishment of his. In visitin gthe monasteries, whose wealth was thus transfered to another kind of clerical use, Wolsey employed Thomas Cromwell. And it was these visitations that Cromwell learned the technique of visitation and enquiry and inventory, and all the rest of it.

When Wolsey fell, after Henry’s failure to obtain a divorce from Rome, Thomas Cromwell played a very clever game. He boldly sought an interview with the King, the details of which are, of course, hidden, but the results of which are clear, and of which Henry’s cousin Cardinal Pole has told us the essentials. He seems to have urged upon the King the policy of threatening the Pope with schism unless the divorce were ultimately granted. And perhaps at the same time he made the first suggestion of looting the Church.

…Cromwell continued through the successive years of the divorce movement — that is, 1531, 1532 and 1533 — to frame and urge the governmental policy and to increase the pressure on the Pope. He was, for instance, the author of that special piece of policy called the Annates Bill. ….The object was, of course, to put an increasing strain upon the Papal policy. If the Annates had been confiscated, the Papal treasury would have had no cause to bargain, but with the threat of confiscation hanging over the Pope’s head, it was hoped that he would prove amenable to Anne Boleyn’s desire and pronounce Henry’s marriage with Catherine null and void.

In the same way it was Thomas Cromwell who pushed through the final steps of the schism, ending with the decisive act of November, 1534, when Henry was declared Head in all things, spiritual and temporal, of the Realm of England, with power to judge in all spiritual cases and to define doctrine and the rest of it. Cromwell made of his master Henry a local lay Pope….Thomas Cromwell by the time all this was accomplished — that is, by the time Cranmer had pronounced the divorce between Henry and Catherine of Aragon, by the time Henry had married Anne Boleyn, by the time Anne Boleyn’s child, Elizabeth, had been born and declared heir to the throne — was completely master of England and whoilly controlled and managed Henry himself.

Within a year of Cromwell’s having worked the schism with Rome (1535) he began two things side by side. One was a reign of terror, which was inaugurated by the arrest and at last the execution of very highly placed people, laymen and clerics, who withstood the schism; the other was the dissolution of the monasteries. It is with the last activity that Cromwell’s name will always be chiefly associated. He was the direct author of the great orgy of loot which follows thenceforward for the better part of a lifetime, and his motive in this move was personal gain. The whole of his life had been devoted to acquiring wealth, usually by the basest means, and that sufficiently accounts for all that he did in the matter of the religious houses.

…It is one of the commonest things for such of the so-called Reformation families as remain — that is, the English families whose wealth is founded on the loot of the Church in the 16th century — to boast that they paid for their land honestly, but when you look into the details you continually find that they got it for an average of ten years’ rent, a sum that was about half the market prices of the estates. Cromwell’s motive in the gigantic economic revolution, which made about one-fifth of the upper-class surplus incomes of England change hands, was merely loot. But the ultimate effect, which he did not directly intend, was to create a strong vested interest against reconciliation with Rome….Even when Mary Tudor, long after Cromwell’s death proposed reconciliation with the Papacy, the English upper classes refused to consider the idea unless the Pope would solemnly promise they could keep the stolen lands. Even so, it was their possession of the Abbey lands which determined all the position of the English gentry for a lifetime and made them determined to prevent the return of the Mass to England….

Thomas Cromwell thus ruled England (becoming one of the richest men of the country in the process) right on till 1540. His power was, of course, very offensive to the old nobles, and even the new upstarts were jealous of him. But he feared nothing from them so long as he could manage the king…. Cromwell’s foreign policy was not Protestant in any religious sense; he was during all his active life indifferent to religion altogether; but it paid him to tie Henry up with the Protestant princes of Germany if he could, so that there could be no going back upon the schism, and so that also his own vast fortune, built out of confiscated Church lands, could be secure….

Then on the scaffold a strange thing happened. Cromwell had the reputation of being perfectly indifferent to religion, an atheist concerned only with this world and therefore utterly without scruple. He had supported the anti-Catholic movement with all his might because it made his loot secure. Now that he was about to die, he declared himself, to the astonishment of everybody, a firm adherent of the national and traditional faith….Whether this last repentance saved him or not we cannot tell. But his work was accomplished before his head fell; he had effected the breach with Rome, and by his loot of the Church he had made possible all the further steps by which England was transformed to a Protestant from a Catholic country, at the same time giving the whole governing class of England a strong financial motive for never allowing the Mass to return to England if they could help it.