Thomas Cromwell, Diarmaid MacCulloch

The long-awaited biography of the genius who masterminded Henry VIII''s bloody revolution in the English government, which reveals at last Cromwell''s role in the downfall of Anne Boleyn "This a book that - and it''s not often you can say this - we have been awaiting for four hundred years." --Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall Since the sixteenth century we have been fascinated by Henry VIII and the man who stood beside him, guiding him, enriching him, and enduring the king''s insatiable appetites and violent outbursts until Henry ordered his beheading in July 1540. After a decade of sleuthing in the royal archives, Diarmaid MacCulloch has emerged with a tantalizing new understanding of Henry''s mercurial chief minister, the inscrutable and utterly compelling Thomas Cromwell. History has not been kind to the son of a Putney brewer who became the architect of England''s split with Rome.

Where past biographies portrayed him as a scheming operator with blood on his hands, Hilary Mantel reimagined him as a far m