#15: Thomas Cromwell
Thomas Cromwell served Henry VIII with efficiency, arranging royal marriages, dissolving monasteries, and helping destroy opponents. His victims experienced him as ruthless, and admiration should not hide that machinery. Yet Cromwell also expanded recordkeeping, strengthened Parliament’s role in constitutional changes, reorganized administration, and promoted religious reform. He helped move English government away from household improvisation toward bureaucratic systems. The same talents modernizing the state made royal power more capable of reaching, rewarding, and ruining individuals.
