Among those painted was Christina, Duchess of Milan and niece of the Holy Roman Emperor; she famously remarked that she would be happy to marry Henry – if she had two heads! At one time he was credited with supplying Henry with a complete plan of action as early as 1529; later it became usual to see in him nothing but the king’s most competent executive agent. From the above list, one will note that most of the ‘accomplishments’ were motivated by financial need. The Pilgrimage of Grace was largely motivated not by religious concerns but by Cromwell’s determination to dissolve the monasteries and improve the royal tax collecting methods. It is also important to note that years of listening to anti-Cromwell gossip eventually affected Henry. These men had pushed Wolsey from favor after years of effort and were determined to do the same to his protégé. Cromwell was the man responsible for the Henrician reformation while Wolsey fell because he served two masters, the king of England and the Pope. Also, the church claimed authority over its subjects; no priest or cleric could be tried by their sovereign nation. His friend Cromwell ‘travailed on him [Henry] to pass the matter over’; he hoped that once Henry was married to Anne, the king would resign himself to the marriage. Thus, Cromwell suffered from a lapse in Henry’s temper and one which the king almost immediately regretted. Marie, however, chose to marry Henry’s nephew, James V of Scotland, thus creating a French-Scottish alliance along Henry’s troublesome northern border. And while many of the nobles benefited from the sale of clerical lands, many others had relatives dedicated to religious service. This was a full month before the marriage was nullified. He proposed to destroy Rome’s power in England and to replace it by the royal supremacy in the church. When Wolsey fell from grace in 1529, Cromwell was hurriedly elected burgess for Taunton so he could remain in government service. After a few months had passed, the French-Imperial alliance showed signs of cooling and Henry’s natural boldness had returned. The Mirror & the Light, the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, focuses on the final four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life, from 1536–40. It was the fulfillment of Cromwell’s domestic and foreign policies. The Pilgrimage of Grace had made Henry more sensitive to popular sentiment. No doubt he was lonely; also, his court needed a queen to be complete. He was titled earl of Essex by Henry VIII on 18 April 1540 after the marriage treaty was finalized. At the time of Henry’s death, all the wealth Cromwell had accumulated was gone and Edward VI was left with debased currency and massive debts. A king was not meant to be a bachelor, as every European monarch knew. Despite serious opposition, especially in the north, the task was carried out relentlessly. Henry was never a Protestant and he wrote treatises vilifying Martin Luther for which he was titled ‘Defender of the Faith’ by the Pope. Unlike his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell was not a priest or a papist. However, Wolsey was to fall out of favour with Henry for failing to secure him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. In order to annul the marriage, Henry had to give humiliating evidence of its failings in a church court. Henry also considered Marie de Guise, a widowed cousin of the French king. Cromwell was distraught – not just for the death of his friend and mentor, but for the looming end of his own career. Cranmer had come to Henry’s attention by first suggesting a solution to the divorce problem – petition learned churchmen for their opinion, assuming they agreed with Henry. He was well-rewarded - Henry personally appointed him to the Order of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry, and then created him Earl of Essex in 1540. That would allow the public opportunity for them to dispute the false charges. And with each year, more Englishmen were born who were further and further away from the old days of Roman domination. Wolsey employed him in 1525 in the dissolution of some lesser monasteries, in which work he earned a good deal of dislike. The last office was combined with a peerage, and he took the title of Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon. The king declared that Rome had no authority in England and Cromwell instituted the reforms which would make it so. Cromwell’s rise to power was extraordinary and occurred just when Henry needed a minister of great administrative imagination and genius, uninterested in the squabbles of his council and determined to empower the machinery of state. In the main, this resulted from difficulties abroad. Henry, in a fit of temper and pique, complained bitterly that his minister had betrayed him while trying to further his own influence; the nobility were only too happy to encourage such thoughts. Henry made no claim to a holy life, not like the churchman Wolsey; he also was shrewd enough to endow his monarchy with papal apparatus. For several years after 1510 he was resident in the Low Countries, and he seems to have been closely connected with the London Merchant Adventurers. Like so many ambitious men, he was in Wolsey’s service in the mid-1520s. Cromwell’s destruction had been engineered on ‘light pretexts’ and against the king’s wishes. Cranmer and Cromwell liked one another and became friends, though Cranmer was careful to distance himself once Cromwell’s ruin was assured. Thus, Henry could meet with his nobles, listen to their complaints, and even agree with them since many were his dearest friends. These articles attempted to stamp a more conservative gloss on the Henrician reformation, thus placating conservative European nobles – and the Catholic nations in Europe, now forced to concede Henry was not so great a heretic after all.

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