The most important family in British history…no – it’s not the royals

Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, used to recount how, when she told people she was writing a novel about Thomas Cromwell, they would shoot back, ‘don’t you mean Oliver Cromwell?’ The two men often get confused and sometimes even conflated.

Thomas was the Tudor courtier who became Henry VIII’s ruthless fixer, obtaining the annulment that allowed His Majesty to marry Anne Boleyn in 1533. His reward was to be sent to the Tower and executed. Fast-forward a century, and Thomas’s great-great-great nephew Oliver arranged for Charles I to be sent to the scaffold so that he could step into his shoes as ‘His Highness Lord Protector of England’.

Thomas Cromwell painted by Holbein 

You could call it revenge, served very cold indeed.

In this masterly book, historian Miranda Malins sets out to show how the two Cromwells, Thomas and Oliver, were the product of a unique family culture that propelled them to dizzying heights before hurling them into the gutter. Thomas lost more than his head in 1540: his reputation immediately plunged to that of a ‘false churl’ and ‘arch-traitor’.

Oliver, by contrast, died peacefully in his bed and was granted a grand burial in Westminster Abbey. Yet two years on, and with Charles II now restored to the throne, the former Lord Protector was dug up, decapitated and his head stuck on a spike as a warning to anyone who might be tempted by a spot of regicide.

What was it about the Cromwell DNA, Malins wants to know, that turned these two men into political adventurers who flew too close to the sun? And how should we assess their achievements now that the dust of nearly five centuries has been allowed to settle?

Thomas was the son of a Putney blacksmith who ran away to Europe as a soldier-for-hire before picking up valuable experience as a clerk in a wealthy Italian merchant household.

He taught himself several foreign languages, learned some law, and observed carefully how money and power operated in the highest circles.

Armed with these essential skills he returned to England and began his climb up the greasy pole of Tudor court politics.

Oliver, by contrast, was born into the landed gentry, although on its lowest rung. He was obliged to leave Cambridge when his father died, in order to support his seven sisters. For a while, young Oliver was so poor that he was reduced to digging his own fields and milking his own cows.

Thanks to this early labour on marshy farmland, he contracted malaria, the disease that would eventually kill him. Only a lucky inheritance from a childless uncle in 1636 enabled Oliver to get back on the property ladder and into Parliament as MP for the prestigious seat of Cambridge.

‘His Royal Highness the Lord Protector of England’ Oliver Cromwell 

Both Cromwells were canny operators who built up a power base of useful contacts by placing their sons, nephews and cousins in high official positions.

Affection came into it too. Both men saw themselves as paterfamilias, responsible for looking after all those younger sons and unmarried daughters who were in danger of falling into poverty.

Austin Friars, the magnificent London house where Thomas lived, was filled with young people whose education he paid for before placing them in key posts and advantageous marriages. Oliver also ‘delighted in gathering waifs and strays’, even inviting the family of his devoted deceased French manservant to live with his own.

Malins argues that Thomas’s politicking in the 1530s bequeathed a set of intractable problems to his great-great-great nephew. It was on Thomas’s watch that England broke with the Pope, which allowed Henry VIII to rule as an autocrat, answerable to no-one. A century later, Charles I tried to recreate this state of affairs by dissolving Parliament and declaring that he now ruled as an absolute monarch. It was only a matter of time before the Parliamentary Party, led by Oliver Cromwell, took up arms against the king and his supporters. The English Civil War had begun.

Oliver was 43 by this time, a late developer. Much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, he emerged as a brilliant military strategist, eventually defeating the king’s men at Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645). Charles I was eventually executed in 1649, leaving the way clear for Cromwell to take his place, in all but name, as the Lord Protector.

In telling this complicated double story, Malins busts some deeply entrenched myths. Thomas Cromwell, for instance, was no-one’s idea of a cold fish in the manner suggested by Mantel in Wolf Hall.

In the late 1520s, when the ‘sweating sickness’ carried off his wife and daughters, Thomas collapsed in a severe nervous breakdown, which had his friends worrying for his sanity. Oliver Cromwell, in turn, was far from being a dour puritan. He may have instructed his portrait painter to capture him ‘warts and all’ (he was famously knobbly) but he had a sharp eye for fashion. A 1649 portrait shows him in a silver suit embroidered with gold thread and tassels with fashionable bucket-topped boots. In his giddier moments, he had even been known to dance.

Both Thomas and Oliver Cromwells’ lives have been told many times before, so it is surprising that Malins decides to repeat them in such detail (this chunky book is getting on for 500 pages). She also chooses to switch between the two narratives in a way that could be confusing for anyone coming to this material for the first time. What this ‘compare and contrast’ method does do, though, is allow us to see, perhaps for the first time, the fascinating echoes, rhymes and rhythms between these two great men of history, linked by a famous name and an enduring family connection.