It could be ascertained through the investigation of university theologians in England and on the Continent.
To Gardiner and Foxe, Cranmer said, “The true question is this, What says the word of God? If God has declared a marriage bad the pope cannot make it good. Discontinue these interminable Roman negotiations. When God has spoken, man must obey..“Consult the universities, they will discern it more surely than Rome.” Cranmer’s opinion reached the king the next day directly through Foxe and Gardiner. When he heard it he
expressed himself in the opening words of this chapter.
Cranmer was born in Aslacton, in Nottinghamshire, July 2, 1489. He came from a family that traced its beginnings to the period of the Conquest. He was the second son of Thomas Cranmer and Ann Hatfield. Since the father’s chief interest consisted in military sports, the chase, and racing, his sons came to excel in sports and horsemanship, too. Thomas
particularly was a skilled horseman, and he was known to ride with grace the most unruly steeds during the time he served as archbishop.
His pleasing manner, modesty, and nobility of bearing made it easy for him to win friends. Such a man perhaps would have been more at home as a preacher or a schoolman, but it was Cranmer’s fate to step suddenly into outstanding national and international prominence when he was forty-four years of age.
Early in life he went to school to “a marvelously severe and cruel schoolmaster.” At the age of fourteen he entered Cambridge, to remain eight years studying logic, philosophy, the classics, and the opinions of Erasmus. In 1510 he was elected a fellow of Jesus College, but his marriage forced his resignation.
The following year he taught at Buckingham and afterward at Magdalen College. Upon the death of his wife, about a year later, popularity again won him a place as a fellow of Jesus College. By 1515 he had earned both bachelor and master of arts degrees, and his thoroughness in intellectual pursuits brought him both friends and foes.
At the appearance of Luther’s writings he decided to know the truth of the disputed questions, and therefore he directed himself to three years of
Bible study unhampered by commentaries. It is this period of learning that dates his gradual separation from the Roman Church.
After his ordination in 1523 Cranmer took the degree of doctor of divinity.
Subsequently, he received in turn the appointments of university preacher, professor, and examiner. In the last position he had the opportunity, which he did not neglect, of insisting that candidates for graduation from the theological course know the Scriptures as well as the classics and the church fathers. Irksome and arduous as this procedure was to some, it did produce men who had studied the word of God.
Not long after his meeting with the king at Waltham he received
appointment as archdeacon of Taunton and also became one of the king’s chaplains. In January, 1530, he went to Italy as a member of the royal commission to confer with the pope and Charles V regarding the status of the king’s case for divorce.
He remained on the Continent until September of the same year. When he returned to England other honors came to him at the hand of Henry VIII.
In the summer of 1531 he called on Charles V as sole ambassador from England, with the hope of improving trade relations and of obtaining a closer political affiliation with the German princes.
He was in Europe again in January, 1532, to confer with the emperor.
During this trip he married a niece of Osiander, a Lutheran theologian, some time before the death of Warham, the archbishop of Canterbury, in August of that year. Almost immediately Henry VIII appointed Cranmer as Warham’s successor.
Hoping for a change in the king’s intention, Cranmer delayed his return to England for weeks. It may be said, however, that even before Warham’s death, Cranmer had virtually become the pope of England, so much had Henry honored him with power and influence.
There still remained the formality of obtaining the pope’s permission for Cranmer’s elevation to the archbishopric of Canterbury. On March 30, 1533, when Cranmer was consecrated in Westminster, he took the oath of obedience to the pope, a procedure which he later claimed to be a mere formality. He had no intention of permitting that oath to keep him from making corrections in anything he considered wrong in church doctrine or
organization. From that time forward he ruled that the bishops and archbishops in England would be appointed without papal sanction.
Because he believed that royal power superseded papal power in the realm in all matters, Cranmer held court on the divorce case and summoned Catherine to appear. When she disregarded the order, he declared her action a contempt of court and forthwith, on May 23, 1533, declared her marriage with Henry illegal from the beginning.
Henry had won his case! Five days later the archbishop pronounced valid the marriage of Ann Boleyn and Henry VIII, which had been secretely celebrated on January 25. On June 1, Henry’s second spouse received her diadem. Paradoxically, almost three years later, on May 17, 1536, Cranmer ruled that this marriage with Ann Boleyn had never been legal. “The grounds for both decisions were never made public.”
As the gulf between royalty and papacy widened, and continual changes developed in the order of service, Cranmer was the first to make a denial of allegiance to the papal power, after which the bishops made their
abjurations singly.
When the Reformation was permitted to grow in England after the papal rule had been cast off, it was Cranmer, as archbishop of Canterbury, who determined which of the many religious views clamoring for recognition should be accepted or rejected. He was “perhaps the only fit man in the whole kingdom, for superintending the ecclestiastical affairs at a crisis so peculiar.”
A Lutheran at heart, he naturally leaned toward fitting that doctrine into the circumstances and environment of English law. He followed the middle of the road, rejecting the tenets of Catholicism as well as those of
Puritanism. He took the position that whatever the Bible did not specifically forbid should remain; and remain it has, even to this day, in the Church of England.
One of Cranmer’s most far-reaching acts for the cause of the Reformation was the encouragement he gave to the translation and sale of the Bible. To this project he gave unstintingly of his time. In 1538 he obtained a
parliamentary order that every church should have a copy of the English Bible, placed so as to be easily accessible for those who desired to read it.
In spite of this action the papal party still had great powers, and it must be remembered that Henry VIII was not a Protestant. The papal partisans promoted a bill, partially against Cranmer, which passed and became known as the Act of the Six Articles. Cranmer, like another Luther before the Diet of Worms, had opposed the bill almost singlehanded for three days. All the articles of the bill counteracted the ideals of the Reformation.
They re-established the Catholic view concerning the eucharist, the manner of giving the Communion, celibacy, the doctrine of purgatory, and
auricular confession.
Cranmer particularly felt the blow, for he had married a second time, and now he would have to put away his wife. The penalties for ignoring these acts were severe in the extreme. Denying transubstantiation branded one as a heretic and paved the way to fagot and stake; ignoring any of the rest meant confiscation of all lands and goods, and death on the gallows, as well as being stigmatized as a traitor.
The archbishop escaped only because the king protected him constantly, regardless of the articles or the intent of his enemies. In fact, Cranmer was one of the few individuals to whom Henry was known to remain
consistently loyal.
On January 6, 1540, Cranmer officiated at the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, and less than a year later the primate’s official position called him to declare another divorce. Between 1540 and 1543 he directed a royal commission to revise and produce various works relating to church affairs. His litany, written in a beautiful, rhythmical style, and published in 1545, is practically the same as the one in use at the present time.
The death of Henry VIII on January 28, 1547, cleared the way for further expansion of Protestant ideas. Cranmer had been instrumental in winning the young Edward to Protestantism, and became, by the will of the king, a member of the council which governed during the nonage of Edward VI.
Now came Cranmer’s high day. During Edward’s kingship, he invited outstanding scholars and clergymen from all over the Continent to help clear the church of the practices and beliefs of Rome. Among these were Pietro Virmigli (Peter Martyr) to teach theology at Cambridge; Bernardino Ochino, who wrote and preached in London; John Laski, a Polish
nobleman, who preached to Italian, French, and Geman congregations in London; Emmanuel Tremellius, a Jew of Ferrara, who taught Hebrew; and Martin Bucer, Paul Fagius, and John Knox to preach and teach.
In the course of time Cranmer’s influence gained strength among political and church leaders, and they looked to him to work out the details of ecclesiastical development. Before the end of the year 1547 he published the Book of Homilies and Erasmus’s Paraphrase of the New Testament, translated into English. From the convocation, a group of religious leaders dealing with ecclesiastical problems, he obtained a vote favoring marriage by the clergy, and thus made it possible for his wife to return from Germany. The first Parliament of Edward VI repealed the laws against heresy, set aside the Act of the Six Articles, reinstated Communion in both kinds, promoted Bible reading and preaching, and instituted other
measures to free the church from political and papal bondage.
By November the First Book of Common Prayer appeared, possibly without the approval of the convocation. Cranmer’s Catechism, a
translation out of the German of Justas Jonas, reached the public in 1548;
and in 1550 he published his views on the sacraments under the title of Defense of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament. The Forty- Two Articles, a constitution and ritual for the Anglican Church, drawn up by Cranmer in 1552, were based on an earlier work of English and
Continental churchmen. These articles were distinctly conciliatory in tone, but basically Lutheran in sentiment.
The accession of Mary to the throne, however, meant a reversion to Catholicism, and perilous times to the friends of the Beformation.
In September, 1553, Cranmer was committed to the Tower. He could have escaped, but he did not feel that flight would be fair to the cause he
represented. In November came his trial for treason, at Guildhall, where he was condemned, but the queen saved him to stand trial for heresy on the charge that he had written against the mass. In March, 1554, his place of imprisonment was changed from the Tower to the common jail at Oxford.
Because he was an archbishop, a special procedure obtained in his case. He received a technical summons to come to Rome; but when he did not
appear there, the pope pronounced him guilty of contempt of court, excommunicated him, and appointed a commission to degrade him.
He went on trial for heresy, and received his sentence September 12, 1555.
His degradation, a ritual by which the accused successively loses all the offices held in the church, occurred February 14 of the following year, after which he was remanded to the secular power.
For some time he parried all efforts aimed at obtaining his renunciation of Protestant views; but, once he had made his first recantation, he did not stop until he had abjured his heresy six or seven times. None of these recantations, however, saved him from the stake. Then, as the time of his execution neared, he made the bold assertion that he decried all his
weaknesses, and took his position courageously for the Reformation and against the papal power.
He approached the stake calmly, clad only in a long shirt. When the flames rose, he held his right hand to the fire, saying that since that hand had signed the recantation it should be the first to suffer. He held it there until the flames consumed it. He died March 21, 1556, at Oxford, at the same spot where Ridley and Latimer had preceded him in martyrdom by five months.“If the martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer lighted the torch, Cranmer’s spread the conflagration which in the end burned up the Romanist reaction and made England a Protestant nation,” historians have said.
Historians and biographers naturally vary in their estimate of a man of as many facets as Cranmer. Some maintain that his literary ability as
demonstrated in his liturgical works overshadows him as a Reformer and a theologian. Blunt says that he had “an almost unspotted character.” To arrive at an objective evaluation, one needs to weigh many of his acts in the light of the high favor he had obtained from Henry VIII. This pre- eminence does not excuse his vacillations, but it does indicate that, since he continually accepted royal favors, there was little left for him to do but to kiss the hem of Henry’s garment. He made mistakes; but, withal, he lived in the main a praiseworthy life.