The Four Thomases Of The English Reformation (With One Bonus Thomas)

It’s time for another of my favorite blog topics, a digression into obscure points of history!

I mentioned before that WOLF HALL (both the TV show and the book) is a lot easier to understand if you are passingly familiar with the key figures of the English Reformation.

But who were those figures?

I had a history professor who said that to understand the English Reformation, you need to know about The Four Thomases of the English Reformation – Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer, since each one of them altered events in a major way.

Fun fact: only one of the four died of natural causes, and right before he was about to go on trial for treason which would have likely ended with his execution. The English Reformation was a tumultuous time, and the Tudor court was not a place for the faint of heart (or the morally scrupulous).

So let’s talk about the four Thomases (and one bonus Thomas) today, but first we’ll look at three background trends that converged and boiled over during their lifetimes.

1.) Henry VIII Needs An Heir.

Henry VIII was quite famously married six times (and executed two of his wives) in his quest for a male heir.

To the modern ear, this sounds odd and chauvinistic, but one of the errors of studying history is assuming that the residents of the past had any interest in 21st century standards of behavior. By the standards of Henry’s time, having a male heir to assume the kingdom after his death was absolutely vital. In fact, an argument could be made that Henry was attempting to act responsibly by going to such lengths to father a male heir, though naturally he went about it in a spectacularly destructive and self-absorbed way. Remember, Henry’s father Henry VII came to the throne after a thirty year civil war, and there were noble families that thought they had a better claim to the throne than the Tudors and would be happy to exercise it.

A good comparison is that the lack of a male heir for Henry VIII was as serious a crisis as a disputed presidential election in 21st century America. You can see evidence for this in Henry’s famous jousting accident in 1536. For a few hours people were certain that he was dead or was about to die, and the incident caused a mini constitutional crisis. If Henry died, who would rule? His daughter Mary, who he had just declared a bastard? His young daughter Elizabeth from Anne Boleyn? His bastard son Henry FitzRoy? A regent? One of the old families who thought they had a claim?

These are the sorts of questions that tend to get decided by civil wars.

So Henry needed a male heir, and it weighed on him as a personal failure that he had been unable to produce one, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons he concluded that several of his marriages had been cursed by God and needed to be annulled. One of Henry’s defining traits was that his self-absorption was such that nothing was ever his fault, but a failing of those around him.

2.) The Reformation Is Here.

At the same time Henry was beginning to have his difficulties, the Protestant Reformation exploded across Europe.

The reasons for the Reformation were manifold. There was a growing feeling across all levels of society that the church was corrupt and more concerned about money than tending to Christ’s flock, a feeling not helped by the fact that several 15th and 16th century popes were essentially Renaissance princelings more interested in luxury, money, and expanding the power of the Papal States than in anything spiritual. Many bishops, archbishops, abbots, and other high prelates acted the same way.  The situation the early 16th century church found itself in was similar to American higher education today. Many professors and administrators go about their jobs quietly and competently, but if you want to find examples of corruption, folly, and egregious waste in American higher education, you don’t have to try very hard. Reformers could easily find manifold examples of clerical and papal corruption to reinforce their arguments.

Additionally, nationalism was beginning to develop as a concept, as was the idea of the nation state. People in England, Scotland, and Germany began to wonder why they were paying tithes to the church that went to build beautiful buildings in Rome and supported the lavish lifestyle of the papal court when that money might be better spent at home.

For that matter, the anti-clericalism of the Reformation was not new and had time to mature. At the end of the 14th century, Lollardy was a proto-Protestant movement that challenged clerical power in England. In the early 15th century, the Hussite wars in Bohemia, following the teachings of Jan Hus, were a preview of the greater Reformation to come. Papal authority had been severely damaged by the Great Schism at the end of the 14th and the start of the 15th century, when two competing popes (later expanding to three) had all tried to excommunicate each other and claim control of the church. In the aftermath, Renaissance humanists had begun suggesting that only the Bible was the proper source and guide for Christianity, and that papal authority and many of the church’s practices were merely human traditions had been added later and were not ordained by God. A lot of the arguments of the Reformation had their earliest form in the writers of the 15th century.

Essentially, the central argument of the Reformation was that the believer’s personal relationship with God is the important part of Christianity and doesn’t need to be mediated through the ordained priests and the official sacraments of the church, though such things were still important. Of course, all the various reformers disagreed with each other about just how important and of what nature that relationship was, how many sacraments there should be, and what the precise relationship between the individual, the church, and the state should be, (and that argument got entangled with many other issues like nationalism) but that was the central crux of the Reformation.

So all these competing pressures had been building up, and when Martin Luther posted his statements for debate on church reform in October 1517, it was the equivalent of lighting a match in a barn that had been stuffed full of sawdust and was suffering a natural gas leak.

3.) The Printing Press.

So why did Luther’s action kick off the Reformation, and not the other proto-Protestant movements we mention?

I think a big part of that is the printing press, perhaps the biggest part. The printing press did not exist during the earlier proto-Protestant movements, which meant it was a lot harder for the ideas of reform to spread quickly. The Lollards in particular wanted to translate the Bible into English instead of Latin, but the Bible is a big book and that is a lot of copying to do by hand. In 1539, after a lot of encouragement by Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII decreed that an English Bible should be placed at every church in England. In 1339, that would have been an impossible amount of copying by scribes. In 1539, thanks to the printing press, it was essentially on the scale of the government embarking on a mid-sized industrial project – perhaps a bit of a logistical and organizational challenge, and you have to deal with contractors, but by no means impossible.

The printing press made it possible for the various arguments and pamphlets of the reformers to spread quickly throughout Europe. Luther published tracts on a variety of religious and political topics for the rest of his life, and those tracts were copied, printed, and sold throughout Europe. (In fact, he had something of a flame war with Thomas More over Henry VIII’s “Defense of the Seven Sacraments.) Kings and governments frequently tried to suppress printers they didn’t like, but the cat was out of the bag, and the printing press helped drive the Reformation by spreading its ideas faster than had been previously possible.

(AI bros occasionally compare LLMs to the printing press as an irreversible technological advancement, but one should note that the printing press of the 16th century did not require an entire US state’s worth of electricity and an unlimited supply of water.)

So those were some of the undercurrents and trends leading up to the English Reformation. With that in mind, let’s take a look at our four Thomases!

1.) Thomas Wolsey

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was Henry’s right-hand man during the first twenty years of his reign, and essentially the practical ruler of England during that time. He started his career in Henry’s reign as the almoner (essentially in charge of charity) and ended up become Lord Chancellor of England. Since Henry was not super-interested in actually doing the hard work of government, Wolsey ended up essentially running the country while Henry turned his full enthusiasm more towards the ceremonial aspects of kingship.

Wolsey was an example of the kind of early 16th century church prelate we mentioned above – more of a Renaissance princeling than a priest. However, as Renaissance princelings went, you could do worse to have been ruled by someone like Wolsey, and if you were a king, you would be blessed to have a lieutenant as diligent in his work as the cardinal. Granted, Wolsey did amass a large fortune for himself, but he frequently patronized the arts, education, and the poor, pursued some governmental reforms, and deftly maintained England’s position in the turbulent diplomacy at the time. He was also much more forgiving in questions of religious dissent than someone like Thomas More. Wolsey was the most powerful man in England at his apex, and the nobility hated him for it because his origins were common.

So long as he had Henry’s favor, Wolsey was untouchable, and the nobility couldn’t move against him. But this favor came to an end as Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was unable to produce a son. Since Catherine had previously (and briefly) been married to his older brother Arthur before Arthur’s death, Henry became convinced (or succeeded in convincing himself) that his marriage was cursed by God for violating the prohibition against sleeping with your brother’s wife in the Book of Leviticus. His eye had already fallen on Anne Boleyn, and Henry wanted an annulment and not a divorce in his marriage with Catherine. In the eyes of God, he would never have been married at all, and then he could marry Anne Boleyn with a clear conscience.

Here Wolsey’s gift for diplomacy failed him, but perhaps it was an impossible task. Catherine of Aragon was the aunt of Emperor Charles V, who at that time was the most powerful man in Christendom. All of Wolsey’s efforts to persuade the pope to annul the marriage failed, partly because the pope had already given Henry VIII a dispensation to marry his brother’s widow.

Wolsey’s failure eroded his support with the king. Anne Boleyn likewise hated Wolsey partly because she believed he was hindering the annulment, and partly because he had blocked her from marrying the Earl of Northumberland years ago before she had her eyes set upon Henry. Finally Henry stripped Wolsey of his office of Lord Chancellor, and Wolsey retired to York to take up his role as archbishop there. Wolsey’s popularity threatened Henry and Anne, so Henry summoned him back to London to face treason charges.

Perhaps fortunately for Wolsey, he died of natural causes on the journey to London.

His replacement as Lord Chancellor was Thomas More, the next of the major Four Thomases.

2.) Thomas More

More was an interesting contrast – a Renaissance humanist who remained a staunch Catholic, even though Renaissance humanists in general tended towards proto-Protestantism or actual Protestantism. He was also in some ways oddly progressive for his time – he insisted in educating his daughters at a time when it was considered pointless to educate women about anything other than the practical business of household management.

Anyway, More’s training as a lawyer and a scholar led him to a career in government. He held a variety of posts under Henry VIII, finally rising to become the Lord Chancellor after Wolsey. In the first decades of his reign, Henry was staunchly Catholic and despised Protestantism, in particular Lutheranism in general and Martin Luther in particular. In 1521 Henry published “Defense of the Seven Sacraments” against Luther, and More helped him write it to an unknown degree.

In their dislike for all forms of Protestantism, More and Henry were in harmony at this point. More was involved in hunting down “heretics” (ie, Protestants) and trying to convince them to recant. During his time as Lord Chancellor, More ended up sending six people to be burned at the stake for heresy, along the arrests and interrogations of numerous others. This rather clashes with his “humanist man of letters” aspect, but More was undoubtedly convinced he was doing the right thing, and while he might have believed in education, he most definitely did not believe in freedom of conscience in several areas.

To be fair to More, in the view of many at the time, Protestants, especially Anabaptists, were dangerous radicals. Likely More viewed hunting heretics in the same way that some modern politicians view hunting down covert terrorist cells, or surveilling potential domestic terrorists. Harsh measures, true, but harsh measures allegedly necessary for the greater good of the nation.

However, the concord between More and Henry would not last. Henry wanted to set aside Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, which More staunchly opposed. More especially opposed Henry breaking away from Rome and becoming head of an independent English Church. At first More was able to save himself by maintaining his silence, but eventually Henry required all his subjects to take an oath affirming his status as head of the church. Thomas Cromwell famously led a deputation to try and change More’s mind, but he failed.

More refused, and he was tried on specious treason charges and beheaded in 1535.

Later the Catholic church declared him the patron saint of politicians. This might seem odd given that he oversaw executions and essentially did thought police stuff against Protestants, but let’s be honest, it’s rare to see a politician even mildly inconvenience himself over a point of principle, let alone maintain it until death when he was given every possible chance to change his mind.

Probably the most famous fictional portrayals of More are A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and WOLF HALL. I would say that A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS was far too generous to More, but WOLF HALL was too harsh.

3.) Thomas Cromwell

After Wolsey’s fall, and More’s refusal to support Henry’s desire to either annul his marriage to Catherine or to make himself head of the church so he could annul the marriage, Thomas Cromwell rose to become Henry’s new chief lieutenant.

Cromwell is both a fascinating but divisive figure – for a long time he was cast as the villain in Thomas More’s saga, but Hilary Mantel’s WOLF HALL really triggered a popular reevaluation of him. (Like A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS was too generous to More, I would say WOLF HALL was too generous to Cromwell.) Nonetheless, I suspect he was and remains so divisive because he was so effective – he got things done on a scale that the other three Thomases of the English Reformation never quite managed.

Cromwell’s origins are a bit obscure – it seems he was either of non-noble birth or very low gentry birth, and his father Walter Cromwell was a local prosperous tradesman and jack-of-all-trades with a reputation for litigiousness. For reasons that are unclear, Cromwell fled his birthplace and spent some time in Europe, possibly as a mercenary soldier. He eventually made his way to Italy and started working for the merchant families there, gaining knowledge of trade and law, and then traveled to the Low Countries. When he returned to England, he became Cardinal Wosley’s right-hand man. After Wolsey’s fall, Cromwell went into Parliament, and defended his master whenever possible. This loyalty, combined with his significant talent for law and administration, caught the eye of Henry, and he swiftly became Henry’s right-hand man. (Amusingly, he never became Lord Chancellor like More or Wolsey, but instead accumulated many lesser offices that essentially allowed him to carry out Henry’s directives as he saw fit.)

Unlike More or Wolsey, Cromwell had strong Protestant leanings, and he encouraged the king to break away from the Catholic Church and take control of the English Church as its supreme head. Henry did so, his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was annulled (the rest of Europe never accepted this until Catherine died of illness and it became a moot point), and in 1533 he married Anne Boleyn. Like Cromwell, Anne had a strong Protestant bent, and began encouraging reformers to take various offices and began pushing Henry to make more reforms than he was really comfortable doing. (For example, Cromwell was one of the chief drivers behind the English Bible of 1539.)

This, combined with her inability to give Henry a son, contributed to Anne’s downfall. Unlike Catherine, she was willing to argue with Henry to his face, and was unwilling to look the other way when he wanted a mistress. Events are a bit murky, but it seems that Henry ordered Cromwell to find a way he could set aside Anne, and Cromwell complied. Various men, including her own brother, were coerced into confessing to adultery with Anne on charges that were most likely fabricated, and Anne’s “lovers” and Anne herself were executed for treason in 1536. Cromwell had successfully used a technique that many modern secret police organizations and dictatorships employ – if you want to get rid of someone for whatever reason, accuse them of a serious crime, coerce them to a confession, and then have them executed. (Joseph Stalin basically did the same thing when he purged the Old Bolsheviks.) Henry married Jane Seymour shortly after Anne’s execution, and she finally gave Henry his long-awaited son, though she died soon afterward of postpartum complications.

Cromwell also oversaw the dissolution of the English monasteries in the 1530s. Monasticism had become quite unpopular even before the Reformation, especially among humanist writers, and the concentration of property in the hands of monasteries made for a ripe target. Using Parliament and with Henry’s approval, the monasteries of England were dissolved, the monks and nuns pensioned off, and the various rich properties held by the monastery were given to the king and to his friends (Cromwell profited handsomely). This was essentially legalized theft, but there was nothing the monasteries could do about it. Cromwell pushed for more religious reforms, but that combined with the dissolution of the monasteries caused the “Pilgrimage of Grace” in 1537, a rebellion that Henry was able to put down through a combination of lies, stalling, outright bribery, and brutal repression under the Duke of Norfolk (more about him later).

Cromwell was at the zenith of his power and influence, but his reformist bent had made him a lot of enemies. For that matter, Henry was increasingly uncomfortable with further religious changes. He wanted to be head of his own church, but essentially his own Catholic church, not his own Reformed or Lutheran one. Cromwell’s alignment with the reform cause gave his more traditionalist enemies a tool to use against him.

Cromwell’s foes had their chance in 1540 when Henry married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Cromwell had heavily pushed for the match, hoping to make an alliance with the Protestant princes of Germany against the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. For whatever reason, Henry took an immediate dislike to Anne and never consummated the marriage, which was swiftly annulled and Anne pensioned off.

Henry blamed Cromwell for the failed marriage, and Cromwell’s enemies, particularly the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, we able to convince Henry to move against him. Cromwell was arrested, stripped of all the titles and property he had amassed, and executed in July of 1540. The sort of legal railroading process he had employed against Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers and numerous other enemies of Henry was used against him.

This was one of the very few executions Henry ever regretted. Within a year the French ambassador reported that Henry was raging that his counselors had misled him into putting to death the most faithful servant he had ever had. (Once again, nothing was ever Henry’s fault in his own mind.) The fact that Henry allowed Cromwell’s son Gregory to become a baron and inherit some of his father’s lands shows that he likely changed his mind about the execution.

For once in his life, Henry was dead-on accurate when he called Cromwell “his most faithful servant.” He never again found a lieutenant with Cromwell’s loyalty and skill, and the remaining seven years of Henry’s reign blundered from setback to setback, and all the money Henry obtained from the dissolution of the monasteries was squandered in indecisive wars with France and Scotland.

I think it is fair to say that the English Reformation would not have taken the course it did if not for Cromwell. As ruthless and as unscrupulous as he could be, he nonetheless did seem to really believe in the principles of religious reform, and pushed such policies whenever he could do so without drawing Henry’s ire.

4.) Thomas Cranmer

If Thomas Cromwell did a lot of the political work of the English Reformation, than Thomas Cranmer wrote a lot of its theory.

Cranmer was a scholar and something of a gentle-minded man, but not a very skillful politician, and he seemed happy to leave the politicking to Cromwell. I think Cranmer would have been a lot happier as a Lutheran pastor in, say, 1950s rural Nebraska. He could have married a farmer’s daughter, had a bunch of kids, and presided at weddings, funerals, and baptisms where he could talk earnestly about Jesus and Christian virtues, and he probably would have written a few books on obscure theological points.

But instead Cranmer was destined to play a significant part in the English Reformation.

He started as a priest and a scholar who got in trouble for marrying, but when his wife died in childbirth, he went back to the priesthood. Later he became part of the team of scholars and priests working to get Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. While he was at university and later in the priesthood, he became fascinated by Lutheran ideas, and became a proponent of reform.

As with Cromwell, Henry’s desire to marry Anne Boleyn gave Cranmer his great opportunity. Anne’s family were also in favor of reform, and they arranged for Cranmer to become the new archbishop of Canterbury. The new archbishop and like-minded clerics and scholars laid the legal and theological groundwork for Henry to break with Rome and become head of the English church, with Cranmer and the rest of the reform faction wanted to use to push for church reforms.

He survived the tumults of Henry’s reign by total loyalty to the king – he mourned Anne Boleyn, but didn’t oppose her execution (though he was one of the few who mourned for her publicly), did much the same when Cromwell was executed, and personally sent news of Catherine Howard’s adultery to the king.

Because of that, Cranmer had his great chance to pursue the cause of reform when Henry died and his twelve-year-old son Edward VI became king. Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour acted as the head of the king’s regency council, and Seymour and his allies were in favor of reform. Cranmer was at last able to steer the English church in the direction of serious reform, and he was directly responsible for writing the Book of Common Prayer and several other key documents of the early Anglican church.

But Cranmer’s luck ran out in 1553 when Edward VI died. Cranmer was part of the group that tried to put the Protestant Lady Jane Grey on the throne, but Henry’s daughter Mary instead took the crown. Mary had never really wavered from her Catholicism despite immense pressure to do so, and she at last had the chance to do something about it. She immediately brought England back to Rome and started prosecuting prominent reform leaders, Cranmer among them.

Cranmer was tried for treason and heresy, and sentenced to be burned, but that was commuted if he recanted his views in public during sermon, which he did. However, at the last minute he thunderously denounced his previous recantation and asserted his reformist faith, and vowed that he would thrust the hand that had signed the recantation into the flames first. Cranmer was immediately taken to be burned at the stake, and just as he promised, he thrust his hand into the flames, and his last words were that he saw heaven opening and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Cranmer had spent much of his life trying to appease Henry while pushing as much reform as possible, but in his final moments he had finally found his defiance.

When Mary died and Elizabeth took the throne, she returned England to Protestantism. Elizabeth was much more pragmatic than her half-siblings and her father ever were, and so she chose the most expedient choice of simply rolling back the English church to as it was during Edward VI’s time. Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and religious articles, lightly edited for Elizabeth’s sensibilities, became the foundational documents of the Anglican church.

So these four Thomases – Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer – were central to events of the English Reformation.

However! We have one bonus Thomas yet.

5.) Bonus Thomas: Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, was a powerful nobleman throughout the reign of Henry, and he was frequently Henry’s lieutenant in waging various wars and putting down rebellions. He also was the uncle of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, Henry’s 2nd and 5th queens. He was involved in nearly every major event of Henry’s reign.

Why isn’t Norfolk as remembered as well as the other four Thomases of the English reformation?

Sometimes a man would be considered virtuous by the standards of the medieval/early modern age, yet reprehensible in ours. For example, for much of the Middle Ages, crusading was considered an inherently virtuous act for a knight, whereas in the modern age it would be condemned as warmongering with a religious veneer.

However, by both modern standards and Tudor standards, Thomas Howard was a fairly odious character. For all their flaws, Wolsey, More, Cromwell, and Cranmer were all men of conviction in their own ways. More and Cranmer explicitly died for their faith. Cromwell’s devotion to the Protestant cause got him killed since he insisted on the Anne of Cleves match. Even Wolsey, for all that he enriched himself, was a devoted servant of Henry, and after his downfall never betrayed the king.

By contrast, Norfolk was out for Norfolk. This wasn’t unusual for Tudor noblemen, but Norfolk took it to a new level of grasping venality. He made sure that his daughter was married to Henry’s bastard son Henry FitzRoy, just in case FitzRoy ended up becoming king. He used both his nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to gain power and lands for himself, and then immediately turned against them once it became politically expedient. (In fact, he presided over the trial where Anne Boleyn was sentenced to death.) After the failure of the Anne of Cleves marriage, Norfolk made sure to bring his young niece Catherine Howard to court to catch Henry’s eye and to use the Anne of Cleves annulment as a lever to get rid of Thomas Cromwell. Both stratagems worked, and he attempted to leverage being the new Queen’s uncle to bring himself new power and riches, as he had with Anne Boleyn. Once Henry turned on Catherine Howard, Norfolk characteristically and swiftly threw his niece under the bus.

However, as Henry aged, he grew increasingly paranoid and vindictive, and he had Norfolk arrested and sentenced to death on suspicion of treason. Before the execution could be carried out, Henry died, and Norfolk spent the six years of Edward VI’s reign as a prisoner in the Tower of London. When Edward died and Mary took the throne, she released Norfolk, since she was Catholic and Norfolk had always been a religious traditionalist suspicious of reform. He spent the remaining year of his life as one of Mary’s chief advisors before finally dying of old age.

CONCLUSION

As I often say, history can be a rich source of inspiration for fantasy writers, and the English Reformation is full of such inspiration. Wolsey, More, Cromwell, and Cranmer could all make excellent inspirations for morally ambiguous characters.

For that matter, you can see why the reign of Henry VIII has inspired so many movies, TV shows, and historical novels. The Real Life events are so dramatic as to scarcely require embellishment!

-JM