MacCullogh on Cromwell

Last Monday, BBC repeated Sir Diarmaid MacCullogh‘s excellent documentary Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell, from 2013. Please watch it soon as you can it is only available until mid-January. Actually, excellent is rather an understatement as it is better than others you may see.

In telling Cromwell‘s story from “the sort of pub you don’t go to twice” in Putney to his sudden arrest and beheading, possibly bodged, eighteen days later, McCullogh visited many of the (mostly) East Anglian sites associated with his life: Wolsey‘s statue in Ipswich, Ipswich School (which he helped Wolsey to establish), what is now Wolsey’s Gate, Christ Church College in Oxford (originally Cardinal College), Thetford Priory (which he dissolved, having the late Mowbray and early Howard Dukes of Norfolk disinterred) and St. Michael’s Framlingham (where they were reburied). His insight, as the son of the Rector of Wetherden, near Gipping Chapel (the Tyrrell private church) was obviously useful and lends weight to the suggestion that Cromwell was the Wolsey secretary who worked in what is now Pickwick’s cafe, Ipswich.

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