Diarmaid MacCulloch: ‘I got very irritated with Henry VIII’

From The Guardian: 

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s vast and exhaustive Thomas Cromwell: A Life, published in 2018, was described by Hilary Mantel – no slouch when it comes to the book’s subject – as “the biography we have been awaiting for 400 years”. Delving deeply into Cromwell’s private papers, MacCulloch argues for Cromwell’s central position in the supercharged power-politics of Henry VIII’s court.

MacCulloch studied under the great Tudor historian Sir Geoffrey Elton. He has written extensively on ecclesiastical history, and was ordained a deacon in the 1980s. He declined ordination to the priesthood because of the church’s attitude to homosexuality, but remains “a candid friend of Christianity”. He is now professor of the history of the church at Oxford University.

read interview here @ The Guardian

Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Review by Dan Jones for The Sunday Times:

Minutes before his head was struck off with an axe, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s disgraced former minister, made a speech. “I have been a great traveller in this world,” he said, “and being but of a base degree, was called to high estate and [since] the time I came thereunto, I have offended my prince.” He asked God for mercy, made some disingenuous remarks about the king’s grace, then went calmly to his death. Accounts vary as to the efficiency of the headsman, but as Diarmaid MacCulloch writes with the dry wit that characterises this triumphant and definitive biography, “even botched beheadings are soon over”.

For a time, the self-made 'ruffian' (as he described himself) - ruthless, adept in the exercise of power, quietly determined in religious revolution - was master of events. MacCulloch's biography for the first time reveals his true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill.

read more @ Penguin Books and @ Publishers Weekly