Here's Thomas Cromwell at New York's Frick Collection, trapped in canvas by the Tudor court painter Hans Holbein: thick fingers gripping a secret missive, thin lips curled into a truculent frown, shrewd little eyes seeming to bore into the portrait of Saint Thomas More, who is sitting just across the other side of a mantelpiece.
More, the humanist scholar and short-lived Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, famously martyred himself on the scaffold at Tower Hill for refusing to sign the Oath of Supremacy, which would have been an intolerable concession by him that king, not Pope, was God's vicegerent on Earth. Less well-known is that as early as 1563, long before the late Hilary Mantel embarked on her own rehabilitation of the tough-minded Tudor statesman, Cromwell too was named a martyr by the influential Protestant theologian John Foxe, who in his "Actes and Monuments" described him as one whose "worthy acts and other manifold virtues" engineered the restoration of the "true church of Christ" in England.
