CROMWELL, THOMAS

Earl of Essex and chief agent of henry viii in establishing the King's position as Supreme Head of the English Church and in organizing the dissolution of religious houses; b. Putney, England, 1485?; d. Tower Hill, London, July 28, 1540. Cromwell was the son of Walter Cromwell, a tradesman. In his youth Thomas served as a soldier with the French in Italy; became accountant to a Venetian merchant; and returning to England about 1512–13, began to practice law in London. In this capacity he was employed by Cardinal Thomas wolsey in the dissolution of some small monasteries and in supervising the new educational foundations to be built from their revenues.

Upon Wolsey's fall (1529), Cromwell attracted the favorable notice of the King by his ability and wit. He was soon given high office, including vicar-general in things spiritual and visitor general of the monasteries. He was ambitious, skillful, grasping of power, and prudent in affairs, knowing his own advance to be dependent on his capacity for increasing the King's power and wealth. His ideal was a popular one among the intelligentsia of the Renaissance world—the ideal of a prince whose despotism was benevolent, making for order and prosperity by the imposition of his own will. The concentration of all authority, religious and civil, in the hands of the reigning prince was an alternative to the papacy and an expression of this ideal. The Defensor Pacis by Marsilius of Padua, a 14th-century Italian humanist, was an exposition of this thesis; Cromwell had caused it to be translated for Henry's benefit. It is known too that Cromwell was a student of Niccolò Machiavelli's treatise Il Principe. This manual of statecraft advises unscrupulous action, when necessary, provided it succeeds, and every kind of dissimulation used to ensure success. These principles certainly underlay much of the policy of Henry and his ministers, notably in the achievement of the dissolution of the monasteries and the suppression of the pilgrimage of grace.

Bibliography: r. b. merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2 v. (Oxford 1902). p. wilding, Thomas Cromwell (London 1935). a. g. dickens, Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation (New York 1960), with bibliog. g. baskerville, English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (New Haven 1937). g. r. elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, England 1953). p. hughes, The Reformation in England, 3v. in 1 (5th, rev. ed. New York 1963) v.1, 2. j. gairdner, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900, 63v. (London 1885–1900; repr. With corrections, 21 v., 1908–09, 1921–22, 1938; suppl. 1901–) 5:192–202. g. r. elton Policy and Police (Cambridge 1972). g. r. elton Reform and Renewal (Cambidge 1973). a. j. slavin, Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth (New York 1969).

[h. st. john]