"Far from being the ruthless Machiavellian of legend, Cromwell was a man possessed of a high concept of the 'state' and national sovereignty, and a deep concern for Parliament and the law; an administrative genius; one who may have lacked profound religious sense (though instinctively favourable to some kind of Erasmian Protestantism), but something of an idealist nonetheless. That the 1530s were a decisive decade in English history was due largely to his energy and vision. He was immediately responsible for the vast legislative programme of the later sessions of the Reformation Parliament – a programme not rivalled in volume and moment until the nineteenth or even twentieth centuries. He oversaw the breach with Rome and the establishment of the Royal Supremacy. He effected a new political integration of the kingdom and imposed upon it a new political discipline by making war on local franchises and the entrenched bastard feudalism of the northern and western marches, handling the final incorporation of Wales into English political life and giving Ireland a foretaste of determined English overlordship. He directed the immense operation of the dissolution of the monasteries.... Indeed, he left a deep mark on much of the machinery of central and local government. Finally, he was the first royal servant fully to perceive the power of that young giant, the printing-press."