Born in obscurity in Putney, Thomas Cromwell became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offices, and by the 1530s he was effectively running the country for the King. That decade saw a religious break with the Pope, the dissolution of all monasteries and the coming of the Protestantism. Cromwell was central to all this, but establishing his role with precision has been notoriously difficult.

This book reveals this elusive figure as never before, making connections not previously seen and revealing the channels through which power in early Tudor England flowed. It overturns many received interpretations, for example that Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were allies because of their common religious sympathies, showing how he in fact destroyed her. It introduces the many different personalities contributing to these foundational years, all worrying about the 'terrifyingly unpredictable' Henry VIII, and allows readers to feel that all this is going on around them. 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. Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography for the first time reveals his true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill.