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Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, ( or ; 28 July 1540), was an English lawyer and statesman who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII of England from 1532 to 1540. Cromwell was one of the strongest and most powerful advocates of the English Reformation. He helped to engineer an annulment of the king's marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon to allow Henry to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. After failing in 1534 to obtain the Pope's approval of the request for annulment, Parliament endorsed the King's claim to be head of the breakaway Church of England, thus giving Henry the authority to annul his own marriage. Cromwell subsequently plotted an evangelical, reformist course for the embryonic Church of England from the unique posts of vicegerent in spirituals and vicar-general. During his rise to power, Cromwell made many enemies, including his former ally Anne Boleyn; he played a prominent role in her downfall. He later fell from power after arranging the King's marriage to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. Cromwell hoped that the marriage would breathe fresh life into the Reformation in England, but because Henry found his new bride unattractive, it turned into a disaster for Cromwell and ended in an annulment six months later. Cromwell was arraigned under a bill of attainder and executed for treason and heresy on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. The King later expressed regret at the loss of his chief minister. Until the 1950s, historians had downplayed Cromwell's role, calling him a doctrinaire hack who was little more than the agent of the despotic King Henry VIII. Geoffrey Elton in ''The Tudor Revolution'' (1953), however, featured him as the central figure in the Tudor revolution in government. Elton portrayed Cromwell as the presiding genius, much more so than the King, handling the break with Rome, and the laws and administrative procedures that made the English Reformation so important. Elton says that he was responsible for translating Royal supremacy into Parliamentary terms, creating powerful new organs of government to take charge of Church lands and largely removing the medieval features of central government. Subsequent historians have agreed with Cromwell's importance, although downplaying the "revolution" that Elton claimed. Leithead (2004) says of Cromwell: :Against significant opposition he secured acceptance of the king's new powers, created a more united and more easily governable kingdom, and provided the crown, at least temporarily, with a very significant landed endowment. ==Early life== Thomas Cromwell was born around 1485, in Putney, Surrey, as the son of Walter Cromwell, a blacksmith, fuller and cloth merchant, and owner of both a hostelry and a brewery. Thomas's mother, Katherine, was the aunt of Nicholas Glossop of Wirksworth in Derbyshire. She lived in Putney in the house of a local attorney, John Welbeck, at the time of her marriage to Walter Cromwell in 1474. Cromwell had two sisters: the elder, Katherine, married Morgan Williams, a Welsh lawyer; the younger, Elizabeth, married a farmer, William Wellyfed. Katherine and Morgan's son Richard was employed in his uncle's service and changed his name to Cromwell. Richard's great-grandson was Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector following the English Civil War. Little is known about Thomas Cromwell's early life. It is believed that he was born at the top of Putney Hill, on the edge of Putney Heath. In 1878, his birthplace was still of note: The site of Cromwell's birthplace is still pointed out by tradition and is in some measure confirmed by the survey of Wimbledon Manor, quoted above, for it describes on that spot 'an ancient cottage called the smith's shop, lying west of the highway from Richmond to Wandsworth, being the sign of the Anchor'. The plot of ground here referred to is now covered by the Green Man public house.Putney Heath was a noted haunt of highwaymen and only a few brave souls ventured across it at night. A successful merchant and lawyer, Thomas Cromwell was a self-made man of relatively humble beginnings whose intelligence and abilities enabled him to rise to become the most powerful man in England next to the king. His own father, Walter Cromwell, had been a jack of all trades—a blacksmith, fuller, and brewer—who had, from time to time, come to the attention of the authorities. Thomas Cromwell was sent to school as a boy, where he learned to read and write and was taught a little Latin. Cromwell declared to Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer that he had been a "ruffian … in his young days". As a youth, he left his family in Putney and crossed the Channel to the continent. Accounts of his activities in France, Italy and the Low Countries are sketchy and contradictory. It is alleged that he first became a mercenary and marched with the French army to Italy, where he fought in the battle of Garigliano on 28 December 1503. While in Italy, he entered service in the household of the Florentine banker Francesco Frescobaldi. Later, he visited leading mercantile centres in the Low Countries, living among the English merchants and developing a network of contacts while learning several languages. At some point he returned to Italy. The records of the English Hospital in Rome indicate that he stayed there in June 1514, while documents in the Vatican Archives suggest that he was an agent for the Archbishop of York, Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge, and handled English ecclesiastical issues before the Roman Rota. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Thomas Cromwell」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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