Thomas Cromwell destroyed most evidence of Black Rule in Britain?

Thomas Cromwell: The Tyrant Behind the Curtain of Reformation

While Thomas Cromwell has been lionized in recent years—particularly through Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and its television adaptation—it’s crucial to peel back the romanticized façade and confront the historical wreckage he truly left behind. Entertainment should never be confused with truth, nor costume drama with historical fidelity. There is a vast difference between dramatizing real events and fabricating a past that never was. And in that difference, a great deal of distortion—and danger—lurks.

It is worth noting that Oliver Cromwell, the infamous Lord Protector who would later plunge England into republicanism and brutal campaigns in Ireland, was not directly descended from Thomas Cromwell himself. Rather, Oliver traced his lineage through Katherine Cromwell, Thomas’s sister, who married Morgan Williams. Their descendants adopted the Cromwell name in homage to Thomas, whose rise to power had cast a long and dark shadow across English politics, religion—and most crucially—its cultural memory.

Because at the heart of Thomas Cromwell’s legacy lies not reform but eradication. And what was targeted for eradication may have been far more than “Catholic superstition.” Many signs point to the erasure of a deeper history—one that includes the rule and presence of Black nobility in medieval Britain.

Cromwell’s regime coincided with a sweeping effort to destroy the tangible evidence of England’s diverse and indigenous Christian heritage. As Eamon Duffy documents in The Stripping of the Altars, up to 97 percent of English religious art was destroyed under Cromwell’s legal and ideological machinery. What survived his henchmen is but a ghost of a once-vibrant, deeply symbolic, and likely multicultural legacy.

They hacked down statues, crushed frescoes into dust, pulverized mosaics, shredded illuminated manuscripts, burned wooden carvings, melted centuries-old metalwork, and ransacked shrines. What they could not carry, they razed. This was not mere iconoclasm for theological purity—it was state-sanctioned cultural genocide (Simpson, Under the Hammer). One must ask: what was so threatening in the images Cromwell obliterated? Were these sacred objects only Catholic relics—or did they also depict a forgotten presence of Black and Afro-Semitic rulers, saints, and martyrs, whitewashed from English memory?

This fury of destruction mirrors the cultural warfare we see today. The Taliban’s demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. ISIS bulldozing ancient Assyrian heritage. It is no exaggeration to say that Cromwell’s iconoclasm bears haunting resemblance to modern religious extremism. The ideological justification may differ, but the goal is the same: to erase memory, identity, and inconvenient truths.

European courts of the time, such as Louis XIV’s Versailles, can provide comparative insight into what might have been lost in England. For example, the French court hosted Prince Louis Aniaba of Assinie—an African prince educated and baptized in France—along with the mysterious Louise Marie-Thérèse, the “Black Nun of Moret,” believed by some to be of African descent and possibly related to French royalty (Doyen, The Black Nun of Moret). Portraits and manuscripts from Versailles document the presence of Black individuals not merely as servants, but occasionally in noble or symbolic roles. As Olivette Otele writes in African Europeans: An Untold History, the presence of Africans in noble courts was not rare. If this was possible in France, why not England? What relics, images, or texts of similar presence might have been destroyed during Cromwell’s purge?

And yet, Wolf Hall paints Cromwell as a noble underdog—a sharp-witted commoner turned statesman, stoic and strategic. This rebranding seduces the modern mind, but dangerously distorts reality. The real Cromwell was a “ruffian” in his own words—a man of humble beginnings who clawed his way upward with cunning and brutality (Schofield, The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell).

He did not advise the king toward restraint. He fueled Henry VIII’s most destructive tendencies. When Anne Boleyn discovered that the seized Church funds—promised for charity—were being hoarded and misused, Cromwell orchestrated her execution with mechanical cruelty. Charges of adultery, likely fabricated, sent her to the scaffold. No mercy. No justice. Just political necessity.

Under Cromwell’s direction, the Dissolution of the Monasteries commenced—the greatest land grab in English history. Ancient abbeys and priories dismantled stone by stone. Their lands confiscated. Their treasures looted. The Church’s wealth was divided among the king’s favorites. The poor, once cared for by monastic charity, were left destitute. Schools, hospitals, and almshouses disappeared (Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars). This was not reformation—it was institutional robbery.

Cromwell’s reign of terror extended beyond institutions to ideas. New “treason” laws were so broad they criminalized thought. Hundreds were executed for expressing religious dissent. The machinery Cromwell built ultimately consumed him. When the tides turned, he begged Henry for mercy. He received none—the same fate he had delivered to so many.

But perhaps most sinister of all was Cromwell’s war against culture itself. In an age when art was theology made visible, his destruction of images was a psychic assault on the English soul. Christianity in Britain had been expressed for over a millennium in forms that bore the influence of African, Semitic, and indigenous artistry (Gerald Massey, A Book of the Beginnings). Forms that Cromwell deemed dangerous.

This was more than Protestantism cleansing idolatry. It was a calculated removal of any visual connection to a past that may have included Black and Moorish monarchs, Hebrew roots, and Afro-Christian sanctity (Runoko Rashidi, Introduction to the Study of African Classical Civilizations). It was a cultural reboot—a purge of visual memory. A forced amnesia.

Today, scholars such as Imtiaz Habib (Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677) and Peter Fryer (Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain) are uncovering neglected records of Black presence in Tudor England. From Black musicians and scribes to servants and free citizens, their existence was real—albeit inconvenient for the sanitized version of English identity that Cromwell helped construct.

What replaced this legacy? Stark whitewashed walls. Cold stone. A politically convenient religious homogeneity. The sacred tapestry of English spirituality, once multicolored and multidimensional, was reduced to monochrome.

So as we look around the modern world and decry the destruction of ancient temples, churches, manuscripts, and artwork, let us not forget that England endured the same fanaticism. And that it was homegrown. Cromwellism is not foreign—it is a pathology that arises wherever power meets ideology, wherever memory threatens myth.

It is, indeed, a good thing that people are thinking about Thomas Cromwell again. But let them think clearly. Let them think historically. Let them reckon not with the fiction, but with the fact: Thomas Cromwell may well have destroyed the clearest evidence of Black rule in Britain—erasing faces from walls, names from scrolls, and kings from memory.

Recommended Reading / Works Cited:

• Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars

• James Simpson, Under the Hammer

• John Schofield, The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

• Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History

• Dominique Doyen, The Black Nun of Moret

• Runoko Rashidi, Introduction to the Study of African Classical Civilizations

• Gerald Massey, A Book of the Beginnings

• Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677

• Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain