Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, Vol. 1 of 2: Life, Letters to 1535

This book is an attempt to present the life of Thomas Cromwell as a statesman, and to estimate his work without religious bias. Though it would certainly be difficult to overrate his importance in the history of the Church of England, I maintain that the motives that inspired his actions were invariably political, and that the many ecclesiastical changes carried through under his guidance were but incidents of his administration, not ends in themselves. Consequently any attempt to judge him from a distinctively religious standpoint, whether Catholic or Protestant, can hardly fail, it seems to me, to mislead the student and obscure the truth. I cannot agree, on the other hand, with those who have represented Cromwell as a purely selfish political adventurer, the subservient instrument of a wicked master, bent only on his own gain. It seems to me as idle to disparage his patriotism and statesmanship, as it is to try to make him out a hero of the Reformation. He merits a place far higher than that of most men of his type, a type essentially characteristic of the sixteenth century, a type of which the Earl of Warwick in England and Maurice of Saxony on the Continent are striking examples, a type that profoundly influenced the destinies of Protestantism, but to which theological issues were either a mere nothing, or else totally subordinate to political considerations. It has been justly said that Cromwell’s correspondence is our chief source of information for the period immediately following the breach with Rome. To transcribe in extenso the letters he received would be almost the task of a lifetime; for they form the bulk of the enormous mass of material with which the editors of the Calendars of State Papers for the years 1533–1540 have had to deal. But the number of extant letters he wrote is, comparatively speaking, extremely small; it has therefore been possible to make full copies of them in every case, and I trust that the many advantages—linguistic as well as historical—that can only be secured by complete, and as far as possible accurate transcriptions of the originals, will be accepted as sufficient reason for editing this collection of documents, twenty-one of which have neither been printed nor calendared before. The rules that have been observed in transcription will be found in the Prefatory Note (vol. i. p. 311). The Calendar references to the more important…