Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch | Cambridge Union

WANT TO KNOW MORE: SUBSCRIBE for more speakers:    / @cambridgeunionsoc1815   Find out when our next event is on FACEBOOK:   / thecambridgeunion   ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Professor Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch discusses his landmark biography of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister and enforcer. Professor MacCulloch, a Wolfson Prize-winning historian, guides the audience through his new archival discoveries, and reveal an image of Cromwell which has never been seen before. Rising from obscurity under Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell oversaw the break with Rome, the fall of Anne Boleyn, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. At the height of his power, he was Henry's Chancellor and Vicegerent in Spirituals – a layman in charge of the Henrician church. Cromwell's fall was as swift as his rise – attacked by his enemies and executed in 1540. Despite his notoriety, the subject of Mantel's "Wolf Hall" trilogy, recently played by Mark Rylance in a critically acclaimed TV adaptation, remains an elusive historical figure. ABOUT THE CAMBRIDGE UNION: From its small beginnings as a debating society, the Cambridge Union is the oldest debating society in the world and the largest student society in Cambridge. The Union remains a unique forum for the free exchange of ideas and the art of public debate.