Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant

A woman with a good education was compared to a madman with a sword: she would be a danger to herself and to others.

Without pausing to seek permission, Cromwell proceeded to move the fences of his neighbours’ gardens back by twenty-two feet, and offered neither warning nor compensation.

Cromwell explained that the single most useful art of the politician was to see through the disguise that sovereigns tend to throw over their true desires, and to devise the best way to satisfy these desires without upsetting morality or religion.

Throughout the world if it were sought, Fair words enough a man shall find; They be good cheap, they cost right nought, Their substance is but only wind; But well to say and so to mean, That sweet accord is seldom seen.

73. Cromwell’s love of all things Italian was highly unusual for a Londoner. Andreas Franciscius had been aghast to discover on his visit to the capital that its inhabitants ‘not only despise the way in which Italians live, but actually curse them with uncontrolled hatred’. This was corroborated by another Italian visitor of the period: ‘The English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world than England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say that “he looks like an Englishman” … They have a great antipathy to foreigners, and imagine that they never come into their island, but to make themselves master of it, and to usurp their goods.

An evill name once gotten will not lightly be put away.