He left a large swath ...

Thomas Cromwell served as English King Henry VIII's councilor -- a sort of chief of staff. He lost his head, literally, in 1540. So did an awful lot of notables of the volatile monarch's court, as a consequence of the deadly mix of greed, jealousy, state formation, wealth accumulation, international enmity, and religious Reformation in which they swam. 

Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of the most successful and lastingly influential of these men (and a few women including Henry's six wives) is delicious fun, worth 21 hours of listening.

The historian credits Thomas Cromwell's machinations and his convictions with preparing the ground from what became the Anglican Church. Henry's daughter, Queen Elizabeth I built on Cromwell's foundation, avoiding trumpeting its source. MacCulloch identifies the woman who became head of the Church of England, like Cromwell himself, as what reforming Protestants called a "Nicodemite" -- someone who dissembled about their religious convictions for political reasons.

Elizabeth had good reason to detest the nexus of politicians with Cromwell at their centre who had first destroyed her mother and then tried to divert the succession from herself and her half-sister; yet she was irreversibly tied to them in her role as Europe's leading Protestant monarch ... Cromwell's evangelical religion had included a strange sort of Nicodemism, which ran alongside and contributed to the Reformation that he promoted openly and aggressively in the name of Henry VIII during the 1530s; it was hidden in plain sight. It's permanent results became apparent only after this death ... These later developments of the English Reformations ... [included] destruction of sacred imagery and the promotion of a sacramental theology which the old king had murderously loathed. Because of this posthumous result, Cromwell's religious programme must count as the most successful Nicodemite enterprise of the whole Reformation. 

Thomas Cromwell most likely could not recognize the belief structure of contemporary Anglican Christianity, but he would certainly recognize its unwieldy polity and shape, as well as its internal conflicts. Churches -- living human expressions a human yearning toward God -- take the shape of their time and place. We're human, bounded in time, after all.