But Cromwell was also a ruthless killer who served a cruel tyrant. Which makes him an apt choice, even if Mantel does not intend it, to embody the secularizing forces that triumphed over Protestants as well as Catholics — because Cromwellism, mass murder in the service of secular power and commercial wealth, has just as strong a claim as liberty or individualism to define the world that succeeded Christendom’s collapse.

Here the objection will be that, yes, the road to modern liberalism was a bloody one, but it all could have been much worse. And indeed, worse could be imagined. It is possible to imagine a world where Western Christendom remained united but Europe refused the gifts of science and the church sank into permanent corruption, with Ottoman armies delivering a coup de grâce. It is also possible to imagine a world where an undivided Roman church harnessed science and technology to its own sort of religious-totalitarian ends, and became a theocratic boot stamping on a human face, forever.

So perhaps the modern world as we know it was the best we could do, the only path to liberty and pluralism and mass prosperity, however many Cromwells it required to get here.

But my own (biased, Catholic) guess is that given the technological and social changes already at work in early modern Europe, the great new modern powers, the state and the commercial interest, would have come to bestride the world no matter what happened to Christian unity. So a church that remained undivided probably wouldn’t have been able to strangle modern science or capitalism in the crib even had it wanted to. But it might have served as a stronger moral check on the new powers, a stronger countervailing force against greed and secular absolutism, than the divided churches that Europe had instead.

It is hard to read the history of Western colonial ventures, in which for hundreds of years it was mostly the intensely religious (as compromised and corrupted as their churches often were) that remonstrated against mass murder and enslavement, that sought to defend natives and establish norms for their protection, and not suspect that a still-united Western church would have found it easier to turn its moral critiques into more effective practical restraints. And it is harder still to read the history of the 20th century and have any kind of confidence that the world made by Thomas Cromwell and his successors was better than a world where Protestants and Catholics did not divide.

Indeed in secular liberalism there is an implicit tribute to this possibility, a kind of yearning for a vanished Christendom, that arose in part as a response to the horrifying place where secular politics ended up last century. What are our pan-national institutions, our United Nations and European Union, all our interlocking NGOs, if not an attempt to recreate a kind of ecclesiastical power, a churchlike form of sovereignty, on the basis of thinner, less dogmatic but still essentially metaphysical ideas — the belief in human dignity and human rights?