ABSTRACT
On the secretarial organisation the author have nothing new to say; work done since 1953 has underlined the transformation which came over the office of secretary in consequence of Thomas Cromwell's tenure. Thus the author adhere to view that Cromwell deliberately set about reforming the administration, that he proceeded on the principle of expanding the 'national' element at the expense of the strictly royal, and that despite setbacks after his day he redirected the development of English government. He had a view of God, the Church and the faith which must be called religious; it is wrong to think of him as a fully secular person. What marks him was a freedom from instinctive conventional reactions, a freedom probably obtained in his peculiar adolescence and confirmed by the essential rationalism of his mind. Having discarded the gifts of the New World as neither measureable nor discernible in England, they fall back on another unmeasurable and inferential change—the rise in population.
