Diarmaid MacCulloch: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you well know, if we look at Henrician England, some key figures like Cromwell, Cranmer, Wolsey — they don’t come from very exalted backgrounds, right? They started off as quite common. There’s something meritocratic about the society. How does that happen? Or where does that come from? How do they climb? They climb by being clever, and they climb by the fact that the first two Tudor monarchs did encourage them to do so because Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs, was the most unlikely person in English history to become a monarch. His claim to the throne was laughably weak. There were very many people among the English nobility who had far more royal blood than he did. He frankly didn’t trust many of these people, virtually none of whom he’d ever met before he came to the throne, the English throne. He’d been in exile for a very long time. So, he’s going to look around for those people to lead his government who are not necessarily aristocratic at all. They are there by merit. His son, Henry VIII, did inherit that thought. Henry did like doing aristocratic things with aristocrats, like jousting, for instance. That impulse began to weaken under Henry VIII rather than Henry VII. You see in Henry VIII’s quite long reign, an alternating pattern between the capable man of affairs who has made his way up with royal encouragement, and the nobleman who feels entitled to have his position in government. Henry’s always slapping down one and then slapping down the other. Poor Wolsey didn’t deliver the goods, so he was slapped down. Cromwell famously also lost the plot, failed to deliver a marriage which Henry liked, in fact, created a humiliating marriage, and he lost his head. Cranmer survived, remember. He survived by loyalty to King Henry VIII, and I think he genuinely loved Henry VIII, and so served him with a good conscience. Trouble about that is that a man like Henry VIII is a narcissist. I think we may have seen some in modern politics. The thing about narcissists is that they make good people do bad things. Henry VIII was talented at making good people, such as Cranmer and, I would say, Thomas Cromwell, do bad things. How does William Byrd survive as a Catholic? Is that also meritocracy?…

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