House of Cromwell: Britain’s Forgotten Dynasty

THOMAS MADE ENGLAND. OLIVER MADE BRITAIN. Within a century, the Cromwell family produced two of the most powerful, impactful and controversial commoners in British history. Thomas served the Tudors, helping to forge Henry VIII’s autocratic state and the Church of England; Oliver led a revolution that executed a king, abolished the monarchy and established a republic, before founding a ruling dynasty. Each rose from obscurity to the very centre of power. From a Putney brewhouse to the throne and back again, their rise was improbable, their fall dramatic. Both changed Britain forever. In The House of Cromwell, Miranda Malins brings these two giants blazingly to life alongside the remarkable cast of family members who shaped them – the ambitious wives and mothers, the loyal siblings, the scheming allies and the forgotten children whose stories illuminate everything we thought we knew about Thomas and Oliver, and about early modern Britain itself. Ranging across two centuries of history, from the Wars of the Roses to the Hanoverian succession, this is history at its most intimate and most sweeping – a book to captivate everyone who loved Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy and who wants to go further, deeper and wider into the world that made and unmade the Cromwells. Family mattered above all else to the Cromwells. To understand them, we must understand that family. This is their story.