The question whether Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell supplied the ideas and the policy which underlay the break with Rome is of more interest than may be imagined. Until it is answered neither the men nor the event can really be understood. The English Reformation gave to England, the English monarchy, and the English Church a character quite their own: this makes it important to know just how and why and through whom it happened. It may perhaps be thought strange that so well-worked a part of English history should be supposed to retain some mysteries still. Yet the last full-scale accounts of it are, on the Protestant side, Froude's great but partisan work published in 1862–70 on the Anglo-Catholic side, Canon Dixon's weighty, condemnatory, and sometimes misleading volumes (1878–1902), or James Gairdner's even more hostile and unreliable writings (1902–13); and on the Catholic side the much briefer recent book by Dr Hughes. To take the accounts more commonly used, there is Fisher's, written in 1913, Professor Mackie's which after forty years adds nothing in interpretation and the overpraised work of Constant, now also some twenty years old. The standard lives of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell appeared in 1902. On the face of it, a new study of those critical years in the 1530s might, to say the least, not be without reward. Here I shall attempt only to elucidate the true relationship between the two leading personalities of that age, for the prevailing notions seem to me to do scant justice to the genius of the minister and vastly to overrate the genius of the king.