With outbreaks of rainfall sharp showers developing rather close the elsewhere and the chance of the odd shower but most areas thankfully wore a main draw I guess it's. Been 5 lives just in the U.S. So this sends it it's. Amazing story this is this year the championship is being held at the stunning Pebble Beach leaks on the California coast as the biggest say in the Gulf in line to take on this legendary cools the best place in the world of the China any U.S. Open just pushes. US coverage starts Thursday on 5 Live. On. The U.K. On digital and online I'm Raj Shah. I'm so glad that unicorns are still rampant in the about nations of the nation's children or at least those hundreds. Of submitted stories to Radio $500.00 words contest I'm on board already for a story and titled The cat to solve. No matter how good a story it is a brilliant title when you think about it imagining the leadership candidates or scats really helps easiest so obviously apparent why Michael Gove might be a Siamese I see Rory Stewart as more of a rangy tabby and the others are more difficult but which can console I wish I knew . How to benefit a biographer when a subject has been brought out of the cheater gloom so convincingly by the raw and watchful for. Google ads through Hillary Mann tells novels and is then brought to T.V. By all the acting skill of Mark Rylan ths Thomas Craughwell for it is he is a subject of a biography by the professor of the history of the church at Oxford Dermot McCulloch Fessor McCulloch makes the high claim that his Henry the 8th supreme fixer Crum well shaped a great revolution in his own country's affairs which hasn't turn shape much of the modern world so important but such a challenge for the biographer perhaps then better subject for a novel. It's I think it is because there's a lot missing from the historical record I mean the archive I used in spent 5 years of my life with is really awkward because 5 years it's huge but it's very skewed it's all the things that people wrote to him not the things he wrote to other people and in other words if you're looking at a desk in your office it's the in train not the outré what's happened to the other trader Well the thing is that he would have had what would constitute the tray in his own files he would have had the letters out in the very last draft that his clock had prepared before he took to it and said Write to a fair copy now and send it out so he kept the drafts that would have been as big in a tray as there was an there is an interest I think what happened was that when he was arrested in 1540 for treason and then in executed his household heard of having heard about this and the king's men turned up they spent several nights burning the tray because of on the grounds that it's the things that you write to other people that incriminate you not what other people write to you you know it was a good try it didn't actually save Thomas Cromwell but they made their best effort and what that means is you can't hear his voice there are about 300 letters of his surviving but they're in other people's archives how annoying for you not to be able to hear him does he come across to you. As that sort of. Rather resent figure that Mark Rylan sports. Well I think that the cleverness of runts his performance and in fact Hillary Mann tells novel behind it is that she's picked up on that she's heard the fact that you're constantly getting the voices of other people and he sits in the middle of this I know exactly how she she felt because as I read these documents thousands on thousands of letters from other people at the end of the day I was just didn't act with exhaustion because all these voices wheedling and complaining and telling him bad news just occasionally good news you get the sense of a man sitting there watching and that's exactly what Hilary Mantel provided you know novels and that's what Mark Rowlands gave us on the television that those of inscrutable weary look outwards to the world. Very difficult for you he we know came from Putney the home of yuppies and. Board race regular But but in those days Putney wasn't really very much was it no but it was more like it was a motorway service station because because the Thames the River Thames on which it sat was the great highway from the city of London up river to all the royal palaces so the good folk of Putney would see all the great man and great ladies of the land passing them occasionally stopping to have a beer or something like that and so they'd be in the presence of greatness and probably literally was that it was a place we had taverns half way up the river to Hampton Court sort of thing and so that's the atmosphere in which Thomas Cromwell would have grown up he would have seen great people there himself he was from a comparatively humble background his father was a brewer and had a mill ones worth that sort of thing right showing home would not have been a place where the great and the good refresh themselves or are passed by he would have seen them from a foreign press bowed to the great man when he was a boy. So was partly in itself of any value to him I mean that the the use the Putney when he later became a great man in the way that some people do these days when they are a normal go to the house of law he did exactly that night and that's one of the reasons why I have to confess I like him he made no bones about coming from this relatively humble background he wasn't a gentleman and he wasn't going to allow the snobbish nobility of England to forget that and the proof of that is that when he was made a baron another was a member of the House of Lords he took the title Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon now Wimbledon was the the great manner in which Putney lay. And the nobility of England would know that so every time he was annoyed announced as Milord Krummel of Wimbledon they think are his that he whippersnapper from Putney that jumped up minister of the king and it's really a gesture of defiance against the old blue bloods who think that they ought to ruling land and yet in the 1530s when he was the King's great minister he was ruling England this is a story of a rise in RA and in the in the 1st place young crumb well leaves home and turns up in Antwerp and then later on in Italy air takes him to all those places he amassed or something well I think divine restlessness he got fed up with me and ultimately also got fed up with England which we have to remember was a fairly marginal place in 16th century Europe it was a 2nd rate power it wasn't one of the big boys so going to Italy was to put him right at the center of European culture great cities like Rome and Florence So that's why he went I think and there's no other explanation why why should he go otherwise he had no formal education that we know about he went abroad to become educated and he certainly did in spades and your called him the best Italian in England was was he really that good he spoke fluent Italian and read it early in all through his career so people would give him books in Italian in his years of greatness cleared to please him and one of the books was actually Machiavelli's great work home on the prints on politics I don't think Kamel actually needed it by that stage but he would clearly be interested and the man who gave him that book was a lot more one of the more cultivated Kratz in England said to him in the letter of giving him the book I've often heard you talk about Florence and the ways that of the florin times so there's a fair. Nation there he did he spoke fluent Italian He spoke French she spoke a bit of Spanish a bit of German and most crucially apart from the a tally and he spoke with Latin good cultured Latin and you need that if you get really going to be a man of power in the 16th century and were you able to work as a young man on the mic did he have a mentor that he have somebody who helped him on as a way yes in Italy he did there's a story which is the main thing we know about him in his a very very obscure teenage years he turned up in Italy turned up in Florence and he was penniless You know so it's not like a gap year student it's own with no background no money desperate but he attracted the attention of a young Italian merchant and we got this vital name Francesco fresco Bali and fresco Bali Turkey a mark and put him in the family firm and that they were a great international firm there they still exist actually the risk is still in the wine trade in the 16th century they'd been trading for 300 years wind to Northern Europe and cloth from northern Europe and the place in the middle of them to work where they had one of their offices so Frisk is the key and we know that that's right because in correspondence we've got letters from Francesco Bali later on when crime was becoming a great man so he set himself up and tree that's that's essentially as his 1st way of making a living yeah he's in the cloth trade and when he joined a guild in the city of London in the $156.00 in the 15 teens that it was a cloth guild that he joined so it's close to start with and that's what you sell to foreigners is the is the main thing that the English make rink cloth decent cloth and after that a bit of lore that's quite extraordinary clearly taught himself English law in enough to do conveyancing that sort of thing that the the English gentry need a lot you know getting. Land transactions done so it's a mix and there's so many people in early tutoring tonight that and the interesting thing then is why Thomas Cromwell Why does he emerge from this life to become the extraordinary figure he did and very late on in his career he's really for nearly 40 by the time anything interesting happened to him but he's had a long way to come hasn't he I mean and it's a real indictment of professional education when all these rich kids were sitting around getting a bit of Latin drilled into them and he's he's often proving himself yeah up there with that you could do that in those days but the normal way you do it would be by going into the church quite humble people could do that as long as they found a patron to send them to a good school and then to university but Kamel didn't do that this this start is extremely unconventional and yet it blossoms into this great career. He's deep into the trade and then Dalton says before very long isn't he tells us this marvelous business that we always hear associate with Canterbury Tales and the partner but it's still going strong Oh very much so that the trade was really flourishing on the eve of the Reformation in a sense because the Reformation it's all about how you get through that 3rd State of the afterlife purgatory towards going to heaven and one way of doing it is by speeding up the process by getting an indulgence from a leading clergyman to say that if you do the right things you will have several 1000 years of purgatory and there are guilds associations which are devoted to selling indulgences and that's what Thomas Cromwell did he became associated with a super Guild which was run from Boston in Lincolnshire and they wanted a renewal of their indulgence from the pope and this would take a lot of resources a lot of money and of course what you really need them would be an Englishman who spoke Italian and so Cromwell was employed by them on a sort of consultancy basis sent off to Rome and the great Protestant historian John Fox in his act Book of Martyrs tells a story of great relish of Cromwell taking a group of singers 3 singers and some English jellies and getting the Pope when it was out hunting somewhere in the Italian countryside and the singers struck up an English 3 part melody and the jellies came out in the poets are charmed he signed the documents and hey presto the Boston guild had got their indulgence renewed It's a funny story because the great thing about Thomas Cromwell was he would be become the leading figure in engineering the Protestant Reformation in tutoring in a Henry the 8th England but you know we all start with unexpected story craft and I expect that he sounds like like a typical. Young English dealmaker doesn't if you get one good deal under your belt the world opens up to you the whole career was about we're dealing seeing opportunities again that's why I think he's so fascinating he could just see the the moment and in the end the end of his career it would all go wrong but for so long that the secret of his genius was to create things from just random opportunities with the money he's able to build and sell a big hole in Austin Friars where where is Austin fryers on and why the peculiar name well the Austin Fry's is the precinct of the Union friars who had a big house in the city of London and if you're thinking in the modern terms of central London you're thinking of Liverpool Street it's not near there that the street name is still there and the descendant of the Church of the Austin for us is still there but the point is that they rented out bits of their property was prime city real estate to have a house in Austin Fry's you doing very well indeed and interesting only the people who very frequently live there were foreigners and Italians so Cromwell actually bought part of his house from a great Italian merchant dynasty who were allied GUESS WHO to the old Fresco dynasty that he'd known before. So he is knocking on 40 as you say and he decides that it's time. To enter Parliament you enter Parliament now rather different way and 1520 years you'd find a patron and the patron would get you some each by the borrowers who return members department he had all had to and in this case it's likely that his patron was a very great heiress to cry at the Marcus of Dorset because we know that in 1523 the year that parliament met. Cromwell had entered the service of the Marcus of Dorset 1st great patron trouble is we don't know which Barra of the hundreds of borrowers who returned them Police Department at the time. And that's fascinating that's one of the mysteries or didn't solve something for someone else to do and he joins cardno was. This point is that of his power as what. Are well poached from the markers of Dorset for a very special purpose to set up and organize a tomb a tomb for the cardinal plus all the things you need for a big tomb in the early 16th century which is a fleet of priests to pray for your soul around the tomb any great man wants this and a fleet of priests you call it a call a game a college so Cardinal Woolsey set up the 2 colleges with the 2 men quite didn't quite know where the tomb was going to go but the point of all this is that the best people to make tombs are Italians the competition into making the time had been king Henry the 7th with that magnificent to me you can still see in Westminster Abbey So Carmel he wanted something even better than that and so a talent craftsman you get the most Italian Englishman you can find Thomas Cromwell That was his special skill out of all the sort of jobbing lawyers and commercial people that's what he had to offer the cardinal my goodness and of course ultimately the tomb project Stahl's because it was his career stalls it doubly stalled because yes Woolsey fell from power because he couldn't solve an insoluble problem which was how to get rid of a marriage King Henry the marriage to Catherine of Aragon and then King Henry and his fury against Woolsey and his spite took that room for them to taking all the card or leave bits off the card in all caps and that sort of thing and confiscated the bits which were in a warehouse in Westminster but that's the secret of why Thomas Cromwell could go into the King's service after cardinals the service because he was the man who could then go with the same Italian craftsman about the 2 so tombs did come along a good course it did. That Crum well managed to keep out of the whole divorce mess No he he found his way into it clearly the the what he did 1st for King Henry the 8th when common was he felt was to act as a sort of secretary for Woolsey related affairs because not just the tomb had gone the king's way but all the states that will the had gathered for his colleagues G.'s around the tomb lots of land transactions which Cromwell had set up so who better than to transform them transfer them to the king but after that then the big business around is the King's great problem they called it the King's great matter how to get rid of Catherine of Aragon and make their way for the lady with whom the king was genuinely passionately in love and Berlin. Wall and your call not. So I think it there because you see it in the spelling at the time it's all use is spelt be you double L E N So I'm rather snobbish about this as prancing is to people to spend every hour on plants I think Cromwell might very well be Cromwell or you Krummel Cromwell because all the letters addressed to virtually all of them are addressed to master Cromwell with Hugh actually if you try and pronounce that you find yourself dropping the W. So it's much easier with all my sound and so I think the END UP and Cromwell and that's sounds very like the way that 2 people spoke so when does he get his reputation that a scourge of the modest. Well the fascinating thing was that it was Cardinal Woolsey who dissolved ministries to start with to create those hugely expensive colleges around the tomb so that was Thomas Cromwell 1st experience of dissolving ministry and he found it difficult he found it people were very angry in various localities about it that taught him a lesson and when it came when he came to suggest to Henry the 8th that a good way of getting money was dissolving ministry he said he must do it very slowly and partially because otherwise we trouble and he was overruled but the thing was he was absolutely right because as monasteries word is old in systematic ways it was a huge rebellion in the north of England the pilgrimage of grace which was the most dangerous rebellion that the early to the regime faced in nearly brought Henry the 8th government down. How about his own career and our Cromwell's career after he falls into disfavor must been a very difficult time for us it was and it's a mark of his subtlety that he was loyal genuinely loyal to carnivals when virtually no one else was but he also gained the trust and interest of Henry the 8th he was a man who could get things done. But the the the other person in this. Various relationships is ample in who clearly came to loathe him and the loathing was mutual The reason was that Ann had seen the cardinal as the chief obstacle to her rise and she had me try to she had deserved in effect destroyed the cardinal and that's one of the geniuses of Hillary Mantell in her novels that she spotted that this hatred of and born in and Woolsey and then Cromwell also hating and bull and that's that goes against all the way that history is being told in the early to the period they loathed each other it's a very greasy pole that he's climbing and yet he claims it was a startling success even becoming a royal counsellor by $1531.00 and so it went on he made himself indispensable The only thing that Henry the 8th wouldn't allow him which he learned was he was controlling foreign policy why that is why the difference I'm not sure was something about the personal chemistry there so he never quite achieved the mastery that was you know had but he went to a very long way and he gets got the same power in running the church that cardinals he had had a different title coddles him being the pope's REPRESENTATIVE Well Kamel was the king's representative in the church. Although I'm weary of the powerline there's something about Henry that rather does remind you of Donald Trump he does bestride the world in a rather similar way but does Cromwell whisper in his ear the way that Steve Bannon whispers and trumps here. Yes. And also had his own agenda and I suspect