June 29

The Heretic: Thomas Cromwell's Act of Attainder

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On this date in 1540, the English Parliament passed a Bill of Attainder against Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex—condemning the most powerful commoner in England to death without the formality of a trial, on charges that included corruption, treason, and, perhaps most strikingly of all, heresy. The Latin entry in the House of Lords Journal records it plainly: “Billa Attincture Thome Cromwell, Comitis Essex, de Crimine Heresis et Lese Majestatis.” Heresy and lèse-majesté. The crime against God, and the crime against the king. Both leveled against the very man who had spent the previous decade deciding, with terrifying authority, exactly what counted as either.

There is a bitter, almost theatrical irony in this charge, and it is worth sitting with before we get to the man’s final weeks in the Tower. Thomas Cromwell had built his entire career on identifying, prosecuting, and destroying what he and his king deemed heretical, idolatrous, and superstitious. He tore down shrines that had stood for centuries. He emptied the coffers of relics he judged fraudulent. He sent men to the scaffold and the stake for believing the wrong things about the Eucharist. And on July 28, 1540—the same day Henry VIII married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard—Cromwell knelt on Tower Hill and was beheaded for, among other things, being precisely what he had spent his career hunting in others.

The Architect

As Henry VIII’s chief minister and the Crown’s Vicegerent in Spirituals—effectively the king’s deputy over the entire English church—Cromwell orchestrated the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536 and 1540: the systematic closure, plundering, and destruction of roughly eight hundred monasteries, priories, and religious shrines across the country.

This was not simply an act of royal greed, though the Crown profited enormously—pure gold alone seized from the shrines totaled over fourteen thousand ounces, with silver gilt and plain silver running into the hundreds of thousands of ounces beyond that. It was explicitly framed, in the official language of Cromwell’s own commissioners, as a war on “superstition.” Pilgrimage sites that had drawn the faithful for centuries—Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, Shaftesbury—were investigated, their relics seized, their miracles debunked with the gleeful specificity of men who had already decided what they would find. The famous Blood of Hailes, venerated for generations as a literal relic of Christ’s own blood, was publicly exposed under Cromwell’s direction as a mixture of honey and saffron. Images of the Virgin were hauled from their shrines at Ipswich, Walsingham, and Caversham, carted to Smithfield, and burned. Even the crypt of Alfred the Great was not spared the searching hands of Cromwell’s investigators.

Cromwell was, by any reasonable definition of the term available in 1538, a man actively engaged in stamping out what the official Church considered heretical practice on a national scale. The accusation that would eventually kill him asked, in effect: what if the hunter had been one of the very things he was hunting all along?

The Heretic

The specific heresy attributed to Cromwell concerned the doctrine of the Eucharist. He was accused of Sacramentarianism—the belief, considered dangerously radical by the religious conservatives still powerful at Henry’s court, that the bread and wine of communion did not literally transform into the body and blood of Christ, contrary to both the established Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and even the somewhat softened Lutheran position of the Sacramental Union. Cromwell’s attainder accused him of corruptly and damnably suppressing accusations against known heretics, releasing accused men from custody through “crafty and subtle Means and Inventions,” and circulating “false erroneous Books” that he persuaded others to accept as “good, true, and best standing with the most Holy Word.”

His chief rival, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had despised Cromwell for years over precisely this tension—condemning him for introducing the English Bible into common circulation and for his relentless campaign against the monasteries and their shrines. Where Cromwell saw corrupted superstition ripe for reform, Gardiner and the religious conservatives saw a man whose reformist sympathies had curdled into outright doctrinal heresy. The accusation that finally destroyed Cromwell was, in this sense, simply the conservative faction winning an argument that had been simmering at court for the better part of a decade.

In January 1540, Cromwell had personally arranged Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves—a German princess selected partly on the strength of a flattering Hans Holbein portrait and partly on Cromwell’s own exaggerated reports of her beauty. When Henry actually met his intended bride, he was reportedly appalled. The marriage proceeded regardless, lasted a humiliating six months, and ended in annulment—a personal and political catastrophe that historians widely agree did as much to seal Cromwell’s fate as any genuine theological concern. As one assessment puts it with admirable bluntness, Cromwell “may have been arrested for his promotion of religious reformation, but few could doubt that Henry was also punishing Cromwell for the humiliation of his latest marriage.”

Cromwell was executed on the same day as Walter Hungerford, Baron Hungerford of Heytesbury—a man whose own charges included consorting with sorcerers and witches, alongside accusations of treason and sodomy. Historian Retha Warnicke has argued that information gathered about Hungerford’s associations with magical practitioners may have directly influenced the decision to formally add heresy to Cromwell’s own bill of attainder, given the period’s persistent rhetorical linkage between sodomites, heretics, and those who consorted with sorcery. Cromwell’s case and Hungerford’s, in other words, may have contaminated one another in exactly the way accusations of magical and religious deviance so often did across this entire period—guilt by proximity, heresy by association, the same logic that would later fuel witch panics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Cromwell was seized at a Council meeting at Westminster on June 10, 1540, with a theatrical cruelty that his enemies seemed to relish. The Duke of Norfolk personally snatched the St George’s collar—the insignia of the Order of the Garter—directly from Cromwell’s shoulders, declaring, “A traitor must not wear it.” Cromwell’s own former friend, Sir William Fitzwilliam, untied the ceremonial garter from his leg. Cromwell, by his own account, responded with genuine, furious disbelief: "This then is my reward for faithful service!" He was taken by barge to the Tower of London before the bill of attainder had even formally passed.

What followed was not a trial in any meaningful sense. As the country’s most renowned legal mind—a man who had personally engineered the legal architecture of the English Reformation—Cromwell was simply too dangerous and too capable to risk in open court. His enemies instead pushed a bill of attainder through Parliament, a legislative mechanism that allowed Parliament to condemn a man to death and seize his property without the inconvenience of evidence being formally tested or cross-examined. Cromwell wrote increasingly desperate letters to the king from his cell, the final one ending with a postscript that needs no embellishment: “Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.” Henry did not answer.

On July 28, 1540, Cromwell climbed the scaffold on Tower Hill. His final words have been debated by historians for nearly five centuries. He opened plainly: “I am come hither to die, and not to purge myself.” He then declared, “I die in the Catholic faith, not doubting in any article of my faith, nor in any sacrament of the church”—a statement that, on its surface, reads as a final renunciation of the very Sacramentarian heresy that had helped condemn him. His biographer, John Schofield, among others, has argued for a different reading entirely: that Cromwell, a man known for his command of language and his fondness for irony even under the gravest pressure, was engaging in a final, carefully coded act of gallows humor—deliberately using the word "Catholic" not to mean the Roman Church his accusers wished to hear, but in its broader, more universal theological sense, while privately maintaining the reformist convictions that had defined his career. If Schofield is right, Cromwell’s scaffold speech was less a confession than a final piece of subtle, deniable theater—a necessary public disavowal delivered specifically to protect the family and property he was leaving behind, while quietly preserving the truth of what he actually believed.

The execution itself was botched. The headsman, described in Edward Hall’s contemporary chronicle as “a ragged and Boocherly miser, whiche very ungoodly perfourmed the office,” required multiple strokes of the axe to complete the task. Cromwell’s severed head was set on a spike on London Bridge, a fate he had, in his years of power, arranged for a great many other men.

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(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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