Thomas Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell separated England from Rome by statute, dissolved the monasteries, and was beheaded on the day the king married the wife Cromwell had chosen for him. He was a blacksmith's son from Putney who left England as a teenager, fought as a mercenary in Italy, worked in the Frescobaldi banking house in Florence and for English merchants in Antwerp, and came back a lawyer with commercial languages and no connections. He entered Cardinal Wolsey's service, survived Wolsey's fall in 1529, and was in the king's council within two years. The solution he built to the divorce problem was constitutional rather than theological: the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 declared that England was an empire whose king had no superior on earth, and the Act of Supremacy the following year made him head of the church. That is the legal basis of the English state's independence from Rome and it was drafted to solve a marriage. He then valued and dissolved some eight hundred religious houses, transferring perhaps a fifth of the land in England to the crown and then to buyers whose loyalty to the settlement was thereafter financial. He also reorganised the royal administration into departments with their own staff and records, which historians have argued about for eighty years under the heading of a Tudor revolution in government. Thomas More and John Fisher were executed under his acts. He arranged the marriage to Anne of Cleves, which Henry loathed, and his enemies used it; he was attainted without trial and beheaded in July 1540 by an inexperienced axeman. Henry is said to have regretted it within months.

• Lived: 1485 CE – 1540 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: politician