Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex

b. circa 1485; d. 1540

English statesman and courtier, born at Putney of humble parents. He served in the French army in Italy but returned to England about 1513 and engaged in cloth-dressing, money-lending, and legal practice. By 1520 he had entered the service of Cardinal Wolsey, serving him faithfully and speaking in his defence in the House of Commons in 1529. He had entered Parliament in 1523. He became a privy councillor in 1530 and Henry VIII's chief minister after Wolsey's fall, being one of the King's chief agents in effecting the English Reformation and in strengthening Tudor absolutism. He advocated Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon by exercise of the royal supremacy and hence the repudiation of papal authority over the Church of England.

In 1533 he was chancellor of the Exchequer; in 1535 vicar-general to enforce the implementation of the Act of Supremacy passed in 1534. To him was largely due the suppression of the monasteries and confiscation of their property and treasures as a means of securing revenue: this earned him the nickname Malleus monachorum (hammer of the monks). To him was also due a reorganisation of the means of government, transforming the personal, medieval structure, dependent upon the monarch and household into a more 'modern' departmental and bureaucratic system. Cromwell became lord privy seal in 1536; lord chamberlain in 1539; and earl of Essex in 1540. He was anxious to link England with the Protestant states of Europe, and to this end arranged the marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves. The failure of this marriage was partly responsible for his downfall. In 1540 Cromwell was accused of treason, an Act of Attainder was rapidly passed and he was beheaded, protesting that he died a Catholic.

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