Thomas travels to Antwerp and becomes a trader in his own right. He starts to practise law. He is now fluent in French and Italian and has good knowledge of Latin. Cromwell tempts the Pope with sweetmeats. Cromwell returns to England and marries Elizabeth Wykys a widow from a gentry family. They have three children Gregory, Anne and Grace. His plan works and Cromwell returns to England with a growing reputation as a fixer.
Wolsey is preparing a gargantuan tomb for himself using top Italian sculptors. Wolsey comes from humble beginnings too and recognises something of himself in Cromwell. In he becomes a Member of Parliament. We communed of war, peace, strife, contentation, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty However… we might as well have left where we began…. Diarmaid MacCulloch explains how Cromwell was devastated by the news of his mentor's fall. Egged on by Anne, Henry loses faith in Wolsey who is arrested and charged with acting against the King.
Even when others turn against Wolsey, Cromwell remains loyal to his master. Fearing the worst, Cromwell writes his will and divides his estate amongst his family, relations and loyal servants. I am like to lose all that I have laboured for all the days of my life, for doing of my master true and diligent service. After suffering numerous family and career setbacks, things start to turn round for Cromwell. Ever an ambitious man, he knows service to the King can bring ample rewards.
During the accumulation of these honors, however, Cromwell began to recognize the flaws in his success. First, he had accompanied Anne Boleyn on her rise to power; yet, in , he helped engineer her disgrace and execution on charges of adultery, incest, and witchcraft. Tiring of his wife, he wanted to be rid of her.
Divorce was only briefly considered before being pushed aside. To rid himself of Anne, he turned to the ever-ready Cromwell. Soon enough, Anne was on trial with her brother and two male servants.
They were all executed, despite spirited defenses and the widely-held belief that it was judicial murder. In the rough world of Tudor politics, friendships were lost in the struggle for prestige and survival. And now Cromwell turned to Mistress Jane Seymour and her relatively obscure family for support.
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Cromwell busied himself with auctioning off church properties to various noblemen and further reforming the archaic machinery of Tudor government. When the council did meet, Cromwell dominated the meetings and disregarded most suggestions. To his credit, he was right on most counts; the nobility was quite distanced from the changing nature of government. And while many of the nobles benefited from the sale of clerical lands, many others had relatives dedicated to religious service.
Also, reverence for the church and its servants was as deeply-held as reverence for the monarchy. Henry VIII, who relished his popularity, allowed his faithful servant to be impugned.
Thus, Henry could meet with his nobles, listen to their complaints, and even agree with them since many were his dearest friends. The king remained popular while his chief minister became increasingly despised and isolated. Moryson eventually became a member himself. It is also important to note that years of listening to anti-Cromwell gossip eventually affected Henry. Even the king did not exist in a vacuum and, as his temper became increasingly erratic, he was easily swayed by inflamed opinion.
The perfect opportunity arrived when Queen Jane died two weeks after childbirth, in October Henry VIII was genuinely bereaved at her death but almost immediately the search began for a new queen. After all, Jane had delivered a son but one male heir was not enough in the sixteenth century. For Cromwell, this was a chance to further extend his influence while thwarting the English nobility.
The influence of these families naturally troubled Cromwell. As their influence rose, his own suffered — so he was opposed to the idea of another English wife. Also, as an intelligent statesman, he recognized the diplomatic power of royal marriages. Kings were meant to marry other royalty and Cromwell immediately searched for possible candidates.
While searching, he was careful to avoid Catholic candidates. Naturally, his gaze turned to the Protestant states of Germany, birthplace of the Lutheran revolution. 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!
Henry also considered Marie de Guise, a widowed cousin of the French king.
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Their only surviving child is famous in history as the tragic Mary queen of Scots. Cromwell was well aware that if France and the Holy Roman Empire ended hostilities, as seemed likely, England would be left out in the diplomatic cold. He was quite happy when the French and Imperial marriage negotiations fell apart. But as the search wound on, Henry became increasingly desperate for a wife.
No doubt he was lonely; also, his court needed a queen to be complete. A king was not meant to be a bachelor, as every European monarch knew. Finally, Cromwell found a Protestant ally with two available sisters — the duke of Cleves, whose lands were strategically located and wealthy.
He had two sisters not yet wed called Anne and Amelia. As the eldest, Anne was chosen as the possible bride and Holbein immediately went to Cleves to paint her portrait.
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This painting would become of paramount importance in the coming year. Henry was determined to have a beautiful wife and specifically asked his various ambassadors probing questions — does Marie de Guise have wide hips for childbearing? Anne set sail for England, little realizing what lay ahead. The king, meanwhile, was ecstatic that after almost three years as a widower he would be a husband again, able to play one of his favorite roles.
The entire country was thrilled at the news, in fact, and after Anne arrived, Cromwell finally secured his greatest ambition — an earldom. During this time, he also attempted to placate the nobility by redistributing lands to the great magnates, providing them with near-autonomous controls of great sections of land. For example, the duke of Suffolk traded East Anglian lands for lands in Lincolnshire — the duke of Norfolk already held lands in Anglia while Lincolnshire needed a strong leader. She rebuffed his attention, largely on religious grounds.
Two years of marriage-brokering were often interrupted by rumors of rebellion. The Pilgrimage of Grace had made Henry more sensitive to popular sentiment. While Cromwell searched for a wife, rumors spread that the king planned new taxes. Also, the last remnants of the legitimate Plantagenet line — the Nevilles, Poles, and Courtenays — were suspected of encouraging rebellionn and Henry used this convenient excuse to order more executions.
But popular unrest needed to be assuaged in some manner so Cromwell engineered the passing of the Six Articles at Parliament in April 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.
Finally, on 6 October , the marriage treaty with Cleves was finalized just two months after Holbein delivered his portrait. Princess Anne, once betrothed to the duke of Lorraine, was now destined to be queen of England. On 11 December, Anne was at Calais waiting for a favorable wind to carry her to Dover. She was there for almost two weeks while Henry waited at Greenwich.
Finally, on 27 December she landed at Deal and then traveled to Dover and Canterbury before arriving at Rochester on 1 January Their comical first meeting is described at the Primary Sources section. The New Year gifts Henry had brought for Anne were delivered the next day by a courier with a brief note of welcome. The next day, his betrothed arrived in Greenwich and the marriage, scheduled for that day, was delayed for two days while Henry sought escape.
But there was none to be had — the Holy Roman Emperor was in Paris meeting with the French king and Henry, locked out by those two great powers, could not risk offending the German princes who approved the union with Anne. They were, after all, his only allies at the moment. Poor Anne of Cleves — barely able to speak English, in a foreign land, and despised by her intended husband! The confused woman was led to a private marriage ceremony at Greenwich and, then, to her equally humiliating marriage-bed.
The union was not consummated, a subject upon which Henry never wavered. They lay together for the entire length of their marriage but were never physically intimate. In the main, this resulted from difficulties abroad. While hostility between France and Spain had prevented foreign intervention during the critical years of the Reformation, —36, there seemed a danger of an alliance against England after that date. In Cromwell made the mistake of trying to force the king to his side by compelling him to marry Anne of Cleves. The king from the start hated his fourth wife, and by February it was clear that the alliance with the German princes that she represented was unnecessary.
He fought back for a few months, being created earl of Essex and lord great chamberlain in April , but early in June his enemies persuaded Henry that his vicegerent was a heretic and a traitor. He was arrested on June 10, condemned without a hearing, and executed on July In his conception of the English state and monarchy , his central idea was that of the supremacy and omnipotence of statute, or as it came to be called the legislative sovereignty of the king in Parliament. In other words, he wanted to establish unlimited sovereignty in the hands of a monarchy limited by dependence on consent.
His work in Parliament—managing elections, drafting statutes, piloting legislation—makes him the first of a long line of English parliamentary statesmen. He also demonstrated his awareness of the need to provide practical management of a new kind. No minister before him had exercised such pervasive influence over every detail of administration.
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Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Jul 24, See Article History. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: In both countries, the monarchy extended its influence over the government of the church. The unrestricted ability to make law was established by the….