The House of Cromwell

Blurb

The House of Cromwell is an innovative new history that brings together Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell for the first time.

A century apart, two extraordinary men from the same family – Thomas and Oliver Cromwell – transformed Britain beyond recognition. In the 1530s, Thomas, a brewer’s son from Putney, roseto become Henry VIII’s most powerful minister, architect of the English Reformation and inventor of modern government. Oliver, his great-great-great nephew, helped lead Parliament’s armies to victory in the Civil Wars and ruled three kingdoms as Lord Protector, together with his son Richard the only commoners ever to hold the power of a king. Thomas made England, Oliver made Britain. Together, they changed the course of history and left a global legacy.

In this landmark work, Dr Miranda Malins traces the extraordinary arc of the Cromwell dynasty across two centuries – from obscure origins in a Putney brewhouse to the throne of England and back again. Along the way she introduces a remarkable cast of characters: the glamorous jousting knight Sir Richard Williams who reinvented himself as a Cromwell; the brilliant polymath Catherine Tollemache, Thomas’s great-granddaughter and one of England’s first empirical scientists; Oliver’s daughter, the spirited Bridget Ireton who stood at the heart of revolution; the exiled Richard Cromwell who lived quietly into the age of Queen Anne; and the fiery Bridget Bendish who challenged a critic of her grandfather, Oliver Cromwell, to a duel.

Drawing on new research and a wealth of fresh sources, Malins reveals the hidden family dynamics that shaped public events. She shows how Thomas’s dynastic ambitions contributed to his fall from Henry VIII’s favour; how Oliver’s conflicted loyalties between his soldier sons-in-law and sons destroyed Richard’s brief Protectorate; and how Cromwell women repeatedly proved more formidable than the men who bore the infamous name.

Spanning the Wars of the Roses to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, The House of Cromwell is a gripping, intimate and revelatory history of Britain’s only non-royal ruling dynasty – a family who modernised Britain, whose blood still quietly runs through the nation’s veins, and whose astonishing story has never fully been told until now.