Thomas Cromwell: Understanding his rise and fall Diarmaid MacCulloch
Event details
Thomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offices, and by the end of the 1530s he was effectively running the country for the King.
As portrayed in the BBC hit-series Wolf Hall, that decade was one of the most momentous in English history: it saw a religious break with the Pope, unprecedented use of parliament, the dissolution of all monasteries. Cromwell was central to all this, but establishing his role with precision, at a distance of nearly five centuries and after the destruction of many of his papers at his own fall, has been notoriously difficult.
Join historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Thomas Cromwell: A Life, as he examines the legacy of this elusive figure, revealing important new insights. Discover Cromwell’s true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
You may also be interested in 'The Thistle and the Rose: The extraordinary life of Margaret Tudor' on Tuesday 10 June.
Portrait image credit: Barry Jones
About the speaker
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor Emeritus of the History of the Church at Oxford University, Fellow of St Cross College and of Campion Hall, Oxford and a prize-winning author, who has written extensively on the 16th century and beyond it. His History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Penguin/Allen Lane) and the BBC TV series based on it first appeared in 2009; the book won the Cundill Prize, then the world’s largest prize for history, in 2010. His three-part TV series for BBC Two, How God Made the English, aired in 2012, and Sex and the Church in 2015. He has written Silence: a Christian History (2013) and his collected essays on the Reformation appeared as All Things New: Writings on the Reformation in 2016. His Thomas Cromwell: a Life appeared in 2018, and his Lower than the Angels: a History of Sex and Christianity in 2024. He was knighted in the UK New Year’s Honours List of 2012.
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