England can be otherwise
Wolf Hall“England can be otherwise” is Thomas Cromwell’s declaration that England’s political and social order can be changed. It connects his efforts to place lawmaking within the kingdom to a broader promise: authority need not remain with Rome or the clergy, and the lives of the common people need not be governed by inherited arrangements alone.
The phrase and its political setting
In spring 1532, the narrative frames Cromwell’s work through two compacts: ruler and ruled, husband and wife. Each is described as an arrangement sustained by duties to the other, under God’s authority. The discussion widens from those household and political bonds to the question of what England is—not merely its borders and defences, but its capacity for self-rule, and the protection a king owes his people from foreign intervention and restrictions on how they worship.
That question has immediate legislative consequences. Parliament is considering measures that would restrict revenues sent to Rome and make Henry’s supremacy in the English Church effective rather than merely formal. A Commons petition challenges the jurisdiction of the Church courts. Cromwell works through its wording with Rafe Sadler and Call-Me-Risley, while Stephen Gardiner leads resistance among the prelates. The phrase’s promise therefore arises amid a contest over which institutions may make and enforce rules in England.
Law, Parliament, and rival jurisdictions
The conflict is not simply between reform and tradition. It concerns competing claims to legal authority. When Katherine of Aragon confronts Cromwell, she argues that Parliament’s laws attack the Church and points to the demand that the clergy pay a large sum under the praemunire laws. Cromwell calls it a benevolence; she calls it extortion. Their disagreement exposes how the same measure can be represented as an exercise of royal jurisdiction or as an unjust seizure of ecclesiastical power.
Cromwell’s argument to Henry draws on Marsiglio of Padua. He presents Christ as having come into the world as a subject, not as an earthly ruler who gave the Pope authority to legislate or tax. On this account, priests are subjects too, while the prince governs temporal matters, including marriage and legitimate birth. The king’s authority, Cromwell argues, comes through a legislative body acting for the people: Parliament. He reassures Henry that this account does not authorize rebellion against a lawful monarch, even as it relocates the source of kingship away from papal authority.
The limits of that argument become clear in Thomas More’s distinction between temporal and spiritual jurisdiction. More accepts that Parliament could make Richard Riche king, because kingship is a temporal matter, but argues that Parliament cannot make God cease to be God or claim spiritual authority beyond its realm. When Riche reports this exchange, Cromwell recognizes the political danger: a refusal to acknowledge Parliament’s power over the Church might be treated as a denial of the king’s title. The phrase’s confidence in change thus exists alongside a sharp dispute over which changes Parliament may legitimately make.
Succession and the common people
The political program reaches beyond the jurisdictional conflict. In presenting a succession bill to Anne Boleyn, Cromwell explains that the proposed oath would ask subjects to uphold a settlement passed by Parliament. He rejects the idea that only bishops’ oaths count: one Christian’s oath is as good as another’s. The law, in this account, is not solely a matter for ecclesiastical authorities or elites; its legitimacy is to be endorsed across the country.
Cromwell connects that claim to economic hardship. He describes people driven from their land as sheep farmers expand their holdings, leaving ploughboys without homes. When Gardiner mocks the practical difficulty of getting ordinary people to swear the oath, Cromwell answers that they are not brutes and insists that people who cannot yet read may learn to take up a book. His declaration that England can be otherwise joins political participation to the prospect of literacy and relief from displacement. The phrase is not a report that these problems have been solved; it is an argument for a different possible order.
Meaning and limits
The phrase gathers the book’s political tensions into a compact assertion. England’s independence from Rome is presented as a question of who may govern, legislate, and define the Church’s place in the realm. But Cromwell’s language also invokes duties between ruler and people, and the possibility that people excluded from power can become participants in public acts such as the oath of succession.
Its promise remains contested rather than settled. Parliament’s authority is defended against Rome, while More’s objection insists that temporal law cannot decide spiritual jurisdiction. The succession bill itself shows law working upon personal and dynastic circumstances, including the exclusion of Mary from the line of succession. “England can be otherwise” therefore names both a program of institutional change and the unresolved question of whose interests that change will serve.
