The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread which focuses on Thomas Cromwell.

Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch (no photo)

Synopsis:

The long-awaited biography of the genius who masterminded Henry VIII's bloody revolution in the English government, which reveals at last Cromwell's role in the downfall of Anne Boleyn

"This a book that - and it's not often you can say this - we have been awaiting for four hundred years." --Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

Since the sixteenth century we have been fascinated by Henry VIII and the man who stood beside him, guiding him, enriching him, and enduring the king's insatiable appetites and violent outbursts until Henry ordered his beheading in July 1540.

After a decade of sleuthing in the royal archives, Diarmaid MacCulloch has emerged with a tantalizing new understanding of Henry's mercurial chief minister, the inscrutable and utterly compelling Thomas Cromwell.

History has not been kind to the son of a Putney brewer who became the architect of England's split with Rome.

Where past biographies portrayed him as a scheming operator with blood on his hands, Hilary Mantel reimagined him as a far more sympathetic figure buffered by the whims of his master.

So which was he--the villain of history or the victim of her creation? MacCulloch sifted through letters and court records for answers and found Cromwell's fingerprints on some of the most transformative decisions of Henry's turbulent reign.

But he also found Cromwell the man, an administrative genius, rescuing him from myth and slander.

The real Cromwell was a deeply loving father who took his biggest risks to secure the future of his son, Gregory. He was also a man of faith and a quiet revolutionary.

In the end, he could not appease or control the man whose humors were so violent and unpredictable. But he made his mark on England, setting her on the path to religious awakening and indelibly transforming the system of government of the English-speaking world.

How was 2018 as a year for history books?

Segment of interview with Paul Lay - "From female spies during the English Civil Wars to the enduring distinctiveness of Iran, there is much left to be understood about history globally. Editor of History Today Paul Lay recommends the best history books that hit the shelves this past year."

I wouldn’t say it’s been a vintage year. You get cycles, and there’s been a fair amount of repetition. You still see a lot of periods overdone while some, like the seventeenth century, are barely reaching a mainstream audience. There’s a lot of talk about global history and there has been some change with more Chinese history, more African history, but in terms of reaching a wider audience, I don’t think there’s been that much.

There’s no shortage of specialist books, but what we look at here—and it’s one of the things we do with our prize, the Longman-History Today book prize—are books that have real scholarly rigour, books that are really serious history, but are well-written and engaging enough that they can reach a wider audience. That’s the Holy Grail, and there aren’t that many books this year that have done that.

There have been a few benchmark books in the last couple of years.

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads was important: it sold a million copies globally, which is absolutely astonishing for a book of that nature and on that subject. You also see people like Mary Beard, Tom Holland and Bettany Hughes reach a wide audience. On the whole there haven’t been many of those kinds of books this year, with one or two exceptions, which we might talk about.

Yes, so which book do you want to start with, which of your choices do you think most fits the bill of that kind of book?

I suppose, when it comes down to it, there isn’t really anyone better than Diarmaid MacCulloch. He is someone who is capable of reaching that Holy Grail of serious scholarly material, but who can also communicate it to a wider audience. He’s done it several times before.

He did his history of Christianity and a history of the Reformation. Both are major scholarly books—syntheses I suppose—but what I think he’s absolutely brilliant at is the historical biography.

He did two that really won him followers. One was a biography of Thomas Cranmer, who was so important to both the religious and literary life of this country with his Book of Common Prayer. He was a complex, sometimes quite unlikable figure, but hugely important to this country’s history. Then he wrote what I regard as one of the best history books of the last few decades, which was his Tudor Church Militant. It’s about Edward VI who (at least in the popular view) had been seen as the bit that happens between Henry and Mary and Elizabeth.

What Diarmaid MacCulloch did was refocus on this brilliant intellectual child and his milieu, the people around him, whereby radical Protestantism came to Britain. We can’t really talk about Henry VIII as being a Protestant in any real sense. He remained pretty much a Catholic in terms of his beliefs, despite his battles with the Pope.

That’s not true of Edward, who was a militant Protestant and transformed the country in his very, very brief reign. It could never quite return to being the Catholic country it was during Henry VIII’s reign.

Although you had the Marian reaction to that and then Elizabeth’s more pragmatic view of religion, those seeds had been sown and they would remain there for centuries. So that was a really important book.

Then the next thing he wrote was this greatly anticipated biography of Thomas Cromwell.

Diarmaid MacCulloch was influenced by Geoffrey Elton, who wrote The Tudor Revolution in Government, which depicted Thomas Cromwell as this reformer and bureaucratic genius.

I’m not sure if, when MacCulloch started writing the book, he was aware that Hilary Mantel was writing her novels.

Suddenly, Thomas Cromwell became a figure that was widely known, perhaps more widely known than he has been for centuries, because of Mantel’s fictionalization of him. So MacCulloch’s book couldn’t have been better timed, because we are now familiar, at least in part, with the story of Cromwell.

Now we have this scholarly but very accessible biography which will be the definitive life of Cromwell for many years to come.

It has all the qualities that we’ve come to expect from MacCulloch: it’s rigorous in terms of its scholarship, but it’s also beautifully written and it does, I think, make a change.

It transforms the character of Cromwell from this brilliant bureaucrat we saw with Elton into a slightly shadowy figure.

Cromwell is a person who is very real in his Protestant faith and conviction, but he’s also given opportunities because of Henry’s crises over succession and a male heir, his serial marriages and adulteries. He seems to navigate between the gaps.

Also, as Peter Cook said about David Frost, “he rose without trace.” He was quite lowborn—the son of a yeoman who was a brewer and a tavern keeper in Putney—although, because of the Wars of the Roses, a lot of the people who were part of the aristocracy were themselves new in that position.

So this was a period when a bright young man could make an impact and take advantage of the flux and fracture and fragmentation that was still part of this world. And he was an absolutely brilliant linguist. He seems to have mastered several languages. He was an autodidact, but very well-travelled.

That seems to be part of the reason for his rapid rise—his knowledge of Italy and Italian.

Yes, because Henry is dealing with the church in Rome. He’s also dealing with Francis I in France.

England is very much part of Europe, of Catholic Christendom at this time. So it’s extremely useful.

Cromwell rides on the back of Cardinal Wolsey, whom he is loyal to even when Wolsey meets the crisis that ends in his execution. What you see in this ‘rising without trace’ is that people underestimate him. He’s rather cunning. I always think of the famous Holbein painting of Cromwell which is in the Frick Collection in New York. He’s facing a portrait of Thomas More across a fireplace. He’s More’s nemesis, in a way. More looks very confident. He’s totally at home in the robes of state, whereas Cromwell looks slightly furtive, slightly anxious or even paranoid. It’s a brilliant study of the two men.

By the time Cromwell has risen, it’s almost too late to do anything about him. It’s only when his son marries the queen, Jane Seymour’s sister, and he’s given a title, that suddenly the resentment really comes out.

Then he’s on quite slippery ground and it all goes horribly wrong between the death of Jane Seymour and the arrival of Anne of Cleves. That’s a disaster for him and he ends up having the same fate as Wolsey, his mentor.

I saw Diarmaid MacCulloch at a talk at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford the other day. He said that not many of the letters Cromwell wrote survive, which might also be why he seems a bit shadowy, because you don’t see what he’s written—only what others have written to him.

It’s a real problem. I think about half of the letters and correspondence are available in the National Archives, so considering what a letter-writer he was, there’s an enormous amount that’s missing. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and Diarmaid MacCulloch acknowledges that fact and is very open about it.

“Even in death, he is loyal to the king.”

It’s brilliant that it doesn’t appear to affect the book. Even though he’s hamstrung in terms of the correspondence, probably the best thing about the entire book is the way he constructs the network Cromwell builds up.

Cromwell has no official title for much of this period; he has no specific position someone can point to like chancellor or chief minister—and yet he is able to build this network.

This is where you see the genius of bureaucracy, the mastery of information. And, of course, he’s also helped by the fact that we’re living through this period of flux.

When the dissolution of the monasteries comes, he suddenly has this vast resource with which he can bribe, or pay people off, or convince doubters to be on his side, to support him and the king. Because he’s also very loyal to Henry VIII. That’s the other thing that you find: even in death, he is loyal to the king.

So on balance, after reading it, did you like him?

I think people in this period tend to choose between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, and I’ve always been sympathetic to Cromwell. There is something admirable about this working-class boy made good and one has to admire his skill.

Countering that, he doesn’t seem to be particularly well-liked.

Take his relationship with Anne Boleyn, for example: he supports Anne because she is on the right religious side. She is an evangelical Protestant, like he is. She’s part of that circle of young, modern people who seek to transform the country with these new ideas. But she doesn’t warm to him at all, and there’s something approximate to cruelty in the way he makes sure Anne is destroyed.

I think it’s always been there in the background, but that’s something that emerges from the book. He’s quite vengeful.

“There’s something approximate to cruelty in the way Cromwell makes sure Anne Boleyn is destroyed”

But that, again, might mirror the paranoia, the furtiveness, the fragility of his situation because he’s a new man. I’d urge anyone who’s interested in Tudor history to read this book because it is magnificent.

Like everything Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, it’s beautifully written. It’s the third in a trilogy, in a sense, with Cranmer, Edward VI and now Thomas Cromwell.

Source: Five Books

The Reformation: A History

by Diarmaid MacCulloch (no photo)

Synopsis:

At a time when men and women were prepared to kill—and be killed—for their faith, the Protestant Reformation tore the Western world apart.

Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch's award-winning history brilliantly re-creates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars, and politicians—from the zealous Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses to the polemical John Calvin to the radical Igantius Loyola, from the tortured Thomas Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II.

Drawing together the many strands of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and ranging widely across Europe and the New World, MacCulloch reveals as never before how these dramatic upheavals affected everyday lives—overturning ideas of love, sex, death, and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.

Literary Awards:

National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (2004), Wolfson History Prize (2004), Hessell-Tiltman Prize Nominee (2004), British Academy Book Prize (2004)

Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain

by Nadine Akkerman (no photo)

Synopsis:

It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of civil strife in Britain can escape the historiographer's gaze, then how many more like her lurk in the archives?

Nadine Akkerman's search for an answer to this question has led to the writing of Invisible Agents, the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies, demonstrating that the allegedly-male world of the spy was more than merely infiltrated by women. This compelling and ground-breaking contribution to the history of espionage details a series of case studies in which women--from playwright to postmistress, from lady-in-waiting to laundry woman--acted as spies, sourcing and passing on confidential information on account of political and religious convictions or to obtain money or power.

The struggle of the She-Intelligencers to construct credibility in their own time is mirrored in their invisibility in modern historiography. Akkerman has immersed herself in archives, libraries, and private collections, transcribing hundreds of letters, breaking cipher codes and their keys, studying invisible inks, and interpreting riddles, acting as a modern-day Spymistress to unearth plots and conspiracies that have long remained hidden by history.

This is an excerpt from an interview that Five Books had with Paul Lay who is the editor of History Today:

Let’s talk about your next book, which is about female spies. It’s called Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth Century Britain and it’s by Nadine Akkerman.

I read this as much out of duty as pleasure because this is my period, the mid-seventeenth century, the Civil Wars, the Protectorate.

I probably would say this, but this is one of the most important periods in English and indeed British history and it’s not very well known by the wider public. I’ve wondered why that’s the case because it has such extraordinary characters.

A theory I’ve always had is that one of the reasons why the mid-seventeenth century is not popular among readers is the absence of women in major roles.

In Tudor times, with Henry VIII, you have Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, Mary and Elizabeth.

There are prominent female figures, whereas during the seventeenth century, with Charles and Cromwell, men dominate. There’s an absence of strong women, at least to the layperson.

What Nadine Akkerman does is concentrate on these invisible women. That’s why it’s such a good title—because women are so invisible in this period in the public sphere. Men literally couldn’t imagine that women were capable of being spies or intelligencers.

There are some great stories in the book. There’s one about Alexandrine, Countess of Taxis. She has a house in Brussels, and a Stuart agent who’s there is having his letters intercepted. He talks to her and says something like, ‘Who is doing this? It couldn’t be you, because of your honesty, your dignity and your sex. You just wouldn’t be capable of doing it.’

But Alexandrine has this commercial network and she’ll sell this stuff to the highest bidder. She’ll sell to Catholics; she’ll sell to Protestants. She has no real loyalty to anyone. It’s very amusing. It’s a classic lesson in what so many historians have overlooked—which is not just what historians have overlooked, it’s what people at the time overlooked as well.

This world is a little bit like the world of Thomas Cromwell.

It’s quite fragmented. It’s a place where you can step through the cracks. There are some great details in the book about spying in general.

We’ve tended to concentrate in the popular imagination on spies in the Elizabethan world, but in the period of the Civil Wars, there’s some great stuff. The book talks about Oxford, which is Charles’s capital at the time.

The parliamentarians would put little pieces of paper in holes and they’d be picked up by ‘gardeners’, brought back and left in a ditch just outside the city where they’d be picked up. The book is very good on tiny, fascinating details, and also at conveying the high stakes. Being a spy was incredibly dangerous.

There’s one particularly gruelling episode recounted by Akkerman which begins with a man called Anthony Hinton. Hinton is a member of the Sealed Knot, a clandestine organization—largely incompetent, it should be said—that tries to build a network of resistance to Cromwellian rule and the Protectorate.

It’s not very good at this: many of its people are louche, drunken or just not very able figures. Anthony Hinton is arrested for carrying correspondence from Susan Hyde, who is quite highly placed within the circle.

Eventually, at the Restoration, her brother, Sir Edward Hyde, becomes the chief minister of Charles II. She’s investigated and although it’s claimed that there’s no torture during the Cromwellian period—which I think is right—it’s nevertheless a very brutal episode. She is stripped; she’s interrogated; she has an almost complete mental breakdown. She’s left catatonic. It’s an appalling experience, and she dies a week later.

Although one of the things she points out is that women quite often get off scot-free because nobody can believe that they are spies.

Yes, it’s safer than it is for the men. The example with Susan Hyde is atypical in terms of brutality towards a female spy. Coming back to the title, ‘invisible agents,’ it simply wasn’t thought that women were capable of doing this, though they were at it all the time.

It’s quite a scholarly work. Perhaps more could have been done to give it a narrative thrust, but it’s so revelatory in terms of scholarship that it’s worth persisting. Maybe now this groundbreaking work has been done, others will carry on.

You were saying this is your period, and people aren’t generally that familiar with it. If somebody were looking for a popular history or introduction to it, what would you recommend?

There’s a small book by Blair Worden called The English Civil Wars which is quite good.

But if you just concentrate on the Civil Wars, you don’t see how we got there and you don’t see what the consequences are.

So the best book if you really want to understand this period, I would say, is probably by Austin Woolrych. It’s called Britain in Revolution.

It’s a well-written, really brilliant overview of the whole period. It explains how it began. It’s a very good chronological narrative of the war. You also get the idea of the Cromwellian Settlement and the problems there were and why the Restoration happened.

It’s also quite good on the idea of ‘revolution’ because it has two meanings, really. We tend to think of it in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration. It is literally the revolution of a wheel.

“We tend to think of ‘revolution’ in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration.”

So is it a revolution that happens when Cromwell comes to power? It’s very difficult to argue that it’s a revolution in the modern sense—like the French Revolution—because it’s so imbued with religion.

Or is it a revolution when Charles II comes back? I suppose you do have a turning of the wheel, but it’s never quite the same again. The king never has the power that Charles I was trying to find in his personal rule.

The other thing that is misunderstood about the Civil Wars is that we tend to view Charles as the reactionary and Parliament as the radical, progressive force.

Actually, I think it’s the other way round. It’s Charles who’s trying to build something new, because he’s seen European absolutism and wants to build that kind of absolute monarchy in England. That was a modern thing.

It’s the Parliamentarians who want to return to what they constantly call ‘the ancient constitution’; the Levellers want to get rid of ‘the Norman yoke.’ It’s much more ambiguous than we tend to think, from our twenty-first-century perspective.

Source: Five Books