‘The lord Cromwell’, said Foxe, was ‘a man whose worthy fame and deeds are worthy to live in perpetual memory,’ and his eloquence moved Michael Drayton to assist in a long and tedious poem on ‘great Cromwell’. By and large, the memory of Foxe's hero remained alive into the nineteenth century when a combination of king-worship and hatred of the Reformation reduced Cromwell's stature and allowed the voices of his enemies, especially that of Reginald Pole, to dictate historians’ assessment of him. He became at best the servile instrument of his master's policy, at worst a ruthlessly unscrupulous promoter of a secular despotism; and it is particularly noticeable that his lowly origins, aggravated by the fact that he actually went into trade and – horror of horrors – lent money, came to be used against him even by American scholars supposedly free of such snobberies. In general accounts he virtually vanished from sight as the history of the reign was increasingly seen as the history of the king, a development sealed for two generations by A. F. Pollard's biography of Henry VIII. Then came the revaluations of the last twenty-five years, the rediscovery of Thomas Cromwell. I think now that in England under the Tudors (1955), attempting to restore him to view and show him in a truer light, I made some rather extravagant claims for him, though I stand by the essence of my opinions there.