Yesterday evening's viewing and reading

I spent the latter part of yesterday evening watching Diarmaid MacCulloch's BBC4 television programme (first broadcast in 2013) on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the second of King Henry VIII's great ministers and the architect of the English Reformation. It was an extremely skilful presentation of the case for Thomas Cromwell as an evangelical statesman capable of untying the Gordian knot of the divorce of the King from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries. One of the appeals of the programme was its skilful editing and the flawless delivery of MacCulloch's commentary. But there was no reference to the earlier argument advanced by the late G.R.Elton for a Tudor Revolution in Government apart from a very oblique reference to the future constitutional implications of the passage of the 1533 Statute in Restraint of Appeals.


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