Thomas Cromwell went from a troubled youth in Putney to mercenary, banker’s employee in Florence and cloth merchant, then rose to become the most powerful man in Henry VIII’s England. This episode examines how a commoner fundamentally re-engineered English government and religion before losing his head on the day Henry married his fifth wife.

We look at what he learned about finance and leverage abroad, how a 1517 trip to Rome and his reading of Erasmus changed his view of the papacy, his loyalty to the fallen Cardinal Wolsey, and the use of statute law to break with Rome. We also cover the dissolution of the monasteries, the Court of Augmentations, parish registers, his clash with Anne Boleyn, the Anne of Cleves fiasco, and his execution by act of attainder.

• How a brewer’s son learned credit, bookkeeping and international finance in Italy and the Low Countries
• Why seeing the Vatican as a bureaucracy convinced Cromwell its power was man-made
• Elevating statute law over canon law to make Henry supreme head of the Church of England
• The Court of Augmentations, mandatory parish records, and the birth of the modern administrative state
• The Anne of Cleves marriage, the Duke of Norfolk, and the act of attainder that ended his career