PREVIEW： Epochs #177 ｜ Thomas Cromwell： with Luca Johnson
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of This Epochs, we discuss the life and career of Thomas Cromwell, not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell (the man who had Charles Stewart's head cut off), who is much earlier, during the age of Henry VIII.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, and welcome to this Epochs, where I should be talking all about the life and career and times of Thomas Cromwell, not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell, and I'm joined by Luca Johnson. How are you, sir?
00:00:12.380
Great. Good morning, as always. And yeah, this is going to be, I've got a feeling this will be a good one.
00:00:19.140
So just to stress again for anyone, there are two important Cromwells in English history.
00:00:23.520
There's Oliver Cromwell for the Civil War in the 17th century, who had Charles Stewart's head cut off.
00:00:31.400
We're talking about Thomas Cromwell, who's much earlier. It's during the age of Henry VIII.
00:00:37.780
So a good couple of hundred years earlier. A bit more even, isn't it?
00:00:48.640
But just get Oliver Cromwell out of your mind. We're talking about Thomas Cromwell.
00:00:52.860
Now, I want to let you lead the conversation, and I'll be more peeking your brain than the other way around, if anything.
00:00:59.240
However, the first thing I wanted to say, a bit of an overview first, a few opening comments and thoughts.
00:01:07.700
There are two different ways to view Thomas Cromwell.
00:01:13.800
I think largely in history has been thought of as something of a baddie, particularly by Catholics.
00:01:23.560
So, for example, there are some characters in history, aren't there, that people's perception of them are heavily influenced by how they're portrayed in fiction.
00:01:31.020
So for Thomas Cromwell, the two big ones, there's a film, A Man for All Seasons.
00:01:44.620
And there's loads of characters in this, and we'll try and pick our way through them.
00:01:48.460
And in that film, Thomas More is the goodie, the absolute immaculate saint, literally a saint.
00:01:53.580
And Thomas Cromwell is cast as really sort of slimy and evil and just horrible, horrible person.
00:02:02.820
Then there's Wolf Hall, much more later, Hilary Mantle novels that the BBC made into some TV shows with Mark Rylance.
00:02:08.840
And in that, Thomas More is painted as a freak, sort of weirdo, horrible, untrustworthy, dark person.
00:02:23.860
So I thought, hopefully, what we might be able to do in this conversation is try and drill down, if we can, to the real Thomas More.
00:02:32.080
Was he that horrible baddie from the Man Full Seasons, or was he the goodie, the Mark Rylance, Wolf Hall version, or probably somewhere in between?
00:02:44.760
So if you've only seen one of those two things, because if you watch them both, it is remarkable how it's supposed to be the same guy.
00:02:56.300
It's interesting how you can do that with history.
00:03:01.260
I mean, Sir Geoffrey Elton, you know, famous historian of the 20th century, he was responsible for really pushing Cromwell into being, he said that he was an underappreciated figure in terms of actually what he did to the British state as a whole and the sheer transformation that happened to the apparatus of the state during Cromwell's management of it.
00:03:25.220
But as regards to the moral question of him and what he did and his motives in life, yeah, those things even now are really hotly debated.
00:03:36.340
And, yeah, obviously, it's only natural that the Catholics would hate him.
00:03:41.100
And it's only natural that the Protestants might sort of think, well, he's kind of our guy.
00:03:46.780
But, you know, for me personally, I'm an atheist, not in like an obnoxious sort of way, but I don't have like a theological dog in the fight.
00:03:57.040
You know, I'm just trying to see his actions and see, you know, who it harmed, who it did good for and, yeah, take it from there, really.
00:04:06.560
Yeah, it's interesting you say about his overall impact on British politics.
00:04:13.440
I was reading History of English-speaking people just the other night and one of the things Churchill stressed was that he sort of came up with the idea of departments of state in a way that during the reign of Henry VII, Henry Tudor, and the earlier reign of Henry VIII,
00:04:29.720
still it was the household, the royal household, that really did nearly all of government.
00:04:36.440
And it was under Thomas Cromwell that he sort of brings in what we might call, well, I suppose it is just a bureaucracy or they wouldn't have called it a civil service or anything at the time, but...
00:04:49.820
Starting up departments, really, so that all the work of government isn't done by just the royal household and friends, basically friends,
00:05:03.100
And as we've hinted out there, if anyone doesn't know anything about the man in time,
00:05:11.700
So one of the headlines, perhaps the headline, is that Henry VIII abolished lots and lots of monasteries
00:05:23.340
He was the chancellor at the time, which is something like a prime minister.
00:05:35.280
You look at the list of titles on, you know, just like in a book or on Wikipedia, it's really lengthy.
00:05:43.880
So the thing of just quickly say, the thing of having a reformation, having the king become head of the church in England,
00:05:55.360
not being loyal to the Pope in Rome anymore and abolishing lots and lots of monasteries.
00:05:59.920
So if you're a Catholic, you're going to hate all of that and you're going to see, you're going to hate Henry VIII
00:06:06.080
and you're going to really hate someone like Thomas Cromwell and lots of other people in Henry's court.
00:06:11.600
There are lots of figures that we'll get to, like Archbishop Craminer, for example.
00:06:17.320
So have you got any sort of general remarks or do you want to just start sort of chronologically with his life?
00:06:26.200
And then just address the big things as they come up naturally.
00:06:30.140
So it's one of those things that Cromwell had a very, you'll know this, but Cromwell had a very lowly birth.
00:06:39.480
You know, his father, Walter Cromwell, was both owned an inn and a brewery.
00:06:48.720
And at one point in his life, he'd also been a blacksmith as well.
00:06:52.260
So he had several businesses and also a fuller at some point.
00:06:57.480
So he had his dipping into lots of different types of work.
00:07:01.900
And he actually became, was elected constable of Putney, where Cromwell was born, in 1495.
00:07:12.680
And he clearly, it's funny, in Wolf Hall, he's depicted as a really abusive oaf of a father.
00:07:24.360
Well, this is what I was going to say about the larger point,
00:07:27.500
that because of Cromwell's birth and the sort of unimportance of his upbringing,
00:07:33.340
a lot of his early life is just sort of, you have to fill it in with conjecture,
00:07:40.420
And obviously, because of his lower birth, it wasn't something that Cromwell himself
00:07:45.580
really personally liked to talk about at court, because it's not something,
00:07:50.960
they all resented him anyway, for not being one of them and for not being an actual nobleman
00:07:56.980
and, you know, not coming from the aristocracy.
00:08:00.220
And so it's not something that you really blab about.
00:08:04.200
But we do know that his mother was called Catherine,
00:08:09.860
and we know very little more about her than that.
00:08:12.740
And that Cromwell himself was born in around 1485.
00:08:16.220
So it's, and one thing he does say, recounting his own youth,
00:08:26.300
So I think that lends to the idea that perhaps his dad was a bad, bad guy,
00:08:32.940
because I don't think if he was, if his father was an upstanding member of society,
00:08:38.480
that he maybe would have necessarily had a son who would have gone on to be of that character
00:08:47.040
so early on in his life, if he'd have had a strong father figure.
00:08:50.900
So I would just sort of suggest that that might be the case.
00:08:56.420
Even in the 19th century, occasionally even in the early 20th century,
00:09:01.520
we just don't know any of the details of someone's early life.
00:09:06.900
Like, one thing that nearly always springs to my mind is we don't know the exact year,
00:09:11.300
or it's not clear anyway, the exact year that Stalin was born.
00:09:15.900
So it's only like the 19th century, and we're talking about the late 15th century.
00:09:20.060
So no wonder, especially if you're not of any real importance,
00:09:30.860
But then you're left with having to sort of fill in the gaps yourself.
00:09:37.660
Because in Wolf Hall, they depict that he essentially ran away from home
00:09:49.120
he absolutely did leave England at a very early age,
00:09:57.680
where he was enlisted as a mercenary in the French army.
00:10:04.980
It's actually much more common, that sort of thing, than you might think.
00:10:18.820
But one of the things to say is that, obviously, in becoming a mercenary,
00:10:23.420
the good thing about that sort of work in around 1500 is there's plenty of work to go around.
00:10:29.900
And so, from signing up for the mercenary company in France,
00:10:36.160
Cromwell very quickly found himself fighting in northern Italy.
00:10:40.760
In 50, we have the reports and documents confirming that he was at the Battle of Gringliano in 1503.
00:10:58.280
who are all trying to chip away and take Italy, little bits of Italy, for themselves,
00:11:05.540
for their own expansion and empires, which is, of course, partly where Machiavelli's prince
00:11:13.060
and the idea of Machiavelli's dream of a united Italy,
00:11:16.920
so that these foreign powers can't just start randomly attacking us whenever they feel like it
00:11:23.220
and dipping into the wealth of the Italian states.
00:11:28.700
So, it's the age of, well, nearly, sort of, the age of Leonardo and Cesare Borgia
00:11:33.420
and all sorts of fascinating, interesting people.
00:11:37.820
It would have been an interesting time to be alive, for sure.
00:11:49.860
Or is it just, we know that he was there and that's it?
00:11:53.920
There are contemporary stories, but they are just stories written at the time by an Italian writer,
00:12:01.640
whose name escapes me, who actually says that he was just a page.
00:12:06.160
But there are others who say that, yeah, he saw action, proper action.
00:12:12.020
But whether he did or didn't, the point was that at that particular battle,
00:12:17.780
it seems it's a long recorded battle that we've got of his war record.
00:12:22.940
And, you know, to quote Blackadder, he was on the wrong bloody side.
00:12:26.440
You know, and the French lost that confrontation, as they do.
00:12:30.360
But, yeah, so, but that actually, for Cromwell personally, was catastrophic,
00:12:35.920
because that left him, the battle had been lost.
00:12:41.040
And now all of a sudden, he's a foreigner, just wondering about Italy, homeless, penniless,
00:12:49.740
with no seeming prospects of how to dig himself out of this predicament that he's in.
00:12:58.220
And so, but the way that it does happen is that he's in Florence,
00:13:02.520
and he meets the head of one of the Florentine banking families,
00:13:11.200
Francesco Frescobaldi, who is actually a bit of an Anglophile.
00:13:24.660
But so he actually, off the back of finding this, you know,
00:13:28.640
young, down-on-his-look Englishman, just middling about in Florence,
00:13:32.120
he takes him in and gives him a position as a clerk within the apparatus of the banking family.
00:13:46.900
because that thing of knowing the inner workings of finance,
00:13:52.420
and, you know, just getting that little bit of experience,
00:13:54.920
and very quickly because of what will be seen as a lifelong, just ridiculous,
00:14:07.800
And he, yeah, so he does very well for himself,
00:14:11.120
whilst for a few years in Florence, building up actually, yeah,
00:14:14.660
some money for himself and making important connections in Florence,
00:14:19.740
So that is a very interesting transition in his life.
00:14:22.800
Lots of people in history, sometimes you're born to something,
00:14:31.140
fairly recently did a thing all about U.S. S. Grant,
00:14:34.820
and he was sort of a bit of a loser in life for most of his life,
00:14:38.920
and then the war happens and his career just goes astronomical.
00:14:45.860
And so, I mean, Thomas Cromwell's a little bit like that,
00:14:48.780
like he finds himself, he's run away from home,
00:14:51.300
he's been on the losing side of a mercenary war.
00:14:54.240
He's sort of, you can imagine, a very, very low ebb.
00:15:04.500
He catches the eye of a very, very important Italian banker.
00:15:10.760
like the sliding doors nature of life and reality,
00:15:19.320
he ends up being one of the most powerful men in Europe,
00:15:28.300
and I think it's true in the early 16th century,
00:15:35.260
power doesn't reside where a lot of people think it does.
00:15:44.420
You think it's your prime minister or your chancellor
00:15:47.860
No, it's some banker dude that you've never heard of.
00:15:51.440
Your leaders are actually in hock to some bankers somewhere.
00:16:03.500
Yeah, you can only imagine that if that hadn't happened,
00:16:11.020
and almost certainly wouldn't have ended up where he ended up.
00:16:20.000
But, no, so that's because the big Italian banking families of Florence,
00:16:27.180
but preeminently of Florence in the early 16th century,
00:16:32.660
they are one of the most important centers of power
00:16:38.180
in the whole of Europe, the whole of the world, really.
00:16:43.200
an unbelievable, quote unquote, education for him to get.
00:16:47.840
But also something that once he did finally return to England,
00:16:54.520
Really, it was something that made him stand out
00:16:56.800
amongst his peers who weren't as well traveled.
00:17:05.820
is that he also spent some time going around on business.
00:17:15.640
he also picks up a competent level of Latin and French
00:17:27.780
because it's still not an enormously well-documented part of his life.
00:17:35.120
whether he was self-taught or found someone to teach him the ropes,
00:17:51.960
for people to come to him if they needed a solicitor.
00:18:40.360
it's sort of the centre of the world in all sorts of ways.
00:18:47.620
the last piece of the puzzle would have to be at court.
00:18:55.880
And you don't necessarily have to be born to a blue-blooded family.
00:19:01.420
You've actually got influence and power and knowledge
00:19:10.260
I think it's interesting when you get historical figures
00:19:12.380
where you don't know exactly what happened in their youth,
00:19:16.040
in their childhood, their youth, or their early years.
00:19:20.840
I think Thomas Cromwell was a brilliant example of that.
00:19:23.660
But you have to infer that he was a remarkable person
00:19:36.440
Yeah, it must have been a very, very good work ethic
00:19:43.980
Again, I was in the history of the English-speaking people.
00:19:47.540
Churchill describes him as he does say Machiavellian,
00:19:50.320
but he doesn't just list off a reel of bad descriptive words.
00:19:57.380
Some of them are, yeah, things like that he was charismatic
00:20:07.020
Because in A Man of All Seasons, he's not likeable.
00:20:10.020
He's really, really horrible, obnoxiously horrible.
00:20:15.540
Because at some points in his life, we'll get to it,
00:20:17.540
but he essentially plays the role of not an actual Roman inquisitor,
00:20:22.140
but an inquisitor-type, prosecutor-type person.
00:20:25.220
So he's got a gear to go into where if you're his enemy
00:20:44.400
He's one of those guys you would want to go back
00:20:52.460
So on his return to England, yeah, he's also inherited
00:21:03.020
that sort of had come from his family's background.
00:21:11.360
And eventually further in, he also takes up work
00:21:17.800
So the cloth trade is the least profitable of those
00:21:27.320
That was just sort of the past of his family's trade.
00:21:31.900
But those other things, the profitability of land
00:21:42.160
in his own right, long before he's ever touched
00:22:02.160
before you can be considered any sort of lawyer.
00:22:07.000
Or that you have to have all sorts of qualifications.
00:22:12.280
There's all sorts of bureaucracy you have to jump through
00:22:15.920
in order before you can become a buying and trading
00:22:26.760
So it's sort of a much more simpler world then.
00:22:29.900
But still, you need all sorts of qualities to do that.
00:22:34.780
And one of the things that people accused him of,
00:22:48.400
Not that interested in accruing a fantastic fortune.
00:23:04.980
well, again, I think of him as maybe someone like,
00:23:08.180
I think there's a tipping point once you get enough money.
00:23:13.600
You can just then start speculating in loads of different things.
00:23:20.940
So if I've got one company that does very well,
00:23:27.180
I can then just take a bunch of it and invest in wool,
00:23:37.400
And I just become richer and richer and richer.
00:23:49.220
but just a normal kid from Putney that left home.
00:23:58.220
One great anecdote from around this time as well
00:24:08.320
And he goes on a business trip to Rome for them
00:24:16.140
I don't know something that will become important later,
00:24:38.700
it's just an example of the sheer individuality
00:24:44.600
no, I'm not waiting in the queue like everybody else.
00:25:16.480
And so this is something that you find that Cromwell,
00:25:21.720
but it's also something that he later picks up from Wolsey,
00:25:24.940
and it's one of his ways to get his way with Henry as well,
00:25:29.320
that you sort of bring something up in conversation.
00:25:32.460
And, oh, by the way, I'll have this nice thing for you.
00:25:45.120
And Cromwell was authorized to have the indulgences
00:25:50.280
purely by getting to know how to work people, right?
00:26:03.060
And he's a master of this for much of his life.
00:26:07.020
I mean, it's sort of the delicate art of manipulation, really.
00:26:26.620
yeah, like raising something at just the right moment,
00:26:46.600
so then the whole ball game is getting their say-so.
00:27:00.180
manipulating their mind and their mindset in a certain way,
00:27:19.220
But there's a delicate, subtle art to that, isn't there?
00:27:29.160
England, and I suppose this feels like the appropriate time
00:27:46.460
and they also have, yeah, two daughters, Anne and Grace.
00:27:50.780
And I suppose I should probably just mention it all in one go
00:27:56.840
But one quite devastating thing that happens in Cromwell's life
00:28:03.120
so they've been married for about, I want to say,
00:28:08.040
Cromwell loses his wife to the sweating sickness
00:28:15.940
that just sort of comes and goes around, you know,
00:28:20.860
and then in very short succession loses both of his daughters as well.
00:28:41.500
So he actually loses all of his immediate family
00:28:49.240
The Tudors, they called it, yeah, the sweating sickness.
00:28:53.840
I don't think we really know exactly what it was.
00:28:57.280
It's something that seemed to come on very, very quickly,
00:29:09.160
and you sort of obviously have to lay down or go to bed,
00:29:34.860
So although we're going to skate over it, really,
00:30:09.060
Someone loses someone very, very close to them,
00:30:32.600
we can only speculate on the psychology of things,