Thomas Cranmer

homas Cranmer was the architect of the English Reformation. For more than twenty years he was Archbishop of Canterbury, and through those years he put the English Bible into every parish church, gave the English people their Book of Common Prayer, wrote the Homilies and the Forty-Two Articles, and defended the Reformed doctrine of the Lord’s Supper against the best minds of Rome. He was also a cautious and sometimes pliant man, and in prison he signed recantations that seemed to undo all he had built. Yet in his last hour he recanted those recantations before a crowded church and held the hand that had signed them in the fire. Mark Galli writes that his final decision, “as much as his most famous and lasting work, Book of Common Prayer—settled the matter of where he really stood on the Reformation.”¹

Cambridge and Waltham

He was born on July 2, 1489, at Aslacton in Nottinghamshire, the second son of Thomas Cranmer and Agnes Hatfield, of an old family of the lesser gentry.² He later blamed a “marvelous severe and cruel schoolmaster” for his slowness at his books, but he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, at fourteen in 1503 and became a fellow about 1510. He lost the fellowship when he married Joan, a relative of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn; when she died in childbirth within the year, Jesus College took him back. He was ordained, threw himself into study, and in 1523 became a Doctor of Divinity and a lecturer in his college.³ As an examiner he would admit no one to a divinity degree “unless they were substantially seen in the story of the Bible,” so that friars trained only in the schoolmen were turned away.⁴ About 1520 he was among the Cambridge men who met to discuss Luther’s books, the circle nicknamed “Little Germany” that also drew in Bilney, Barnes, Latimer, and Frith.⁵

In the summer of 1529 the sweating sickness drove him from Cambridge to the house of a Mr. Cressy at Waltham Abbey, where he was tutoring two sons. The king was hunting nearby, and two of his councilors, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox, lodged in the same house. Over supper they asked the Cambridge doctor what he thought of the king’s marriage. Foxe gives his answer:⁶

There is but one truth in it, which the Scripture will soon declare, make open & manifest, being by learned men well handled, and that may be as well done in England in the Universities here, as at Rome or else where in any foreign nation, the authority whereof will compel any Judge soon to come to a definitive sentence.⁷ Thomas CranmerWaltham Abbey, 1529

When the remark reached Henry VIII, the king exclaimed, “This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear,” and summoned him.⁸ The principle Cranmer had stated, that the question must be settled by Scripture and not by the pope, was the seed of much that followed.

The King’s Matter

Cranmer was set to write a treatise on the case from Scripture, the Fathers, and the councils, and to defend it at Oxford and Cambridge. He went with the Boleyn embassy to Rome, where Pope Clement gave him the empty title of Grand Penitentiary of England, and in 1532 he was sent as ambassador to the Emperor Charles V.⁹ In Germany he came to know the reformers, and at Nuremberg in 1532 he married Margaret, the niece of the Lutheran pastor Andreas Osiander. It was a priest’s marriage and a secret one, and it revealed, as one writer puts it, “an inclination towards the Protestant faith.”¹⁰

When the aged Archbishop of Canterbury died in August 1532, Henry named Cranmer to Canterbury. He delayed his return in the hope that the king would choose another, but he was consecrated on March 30, 1533. Before he took the customary oath to the pope, he signed a protest that he would not bind himself to anything “contrary to God’s law, or against His Majesty the King of England.”¹¹ On May 23, 1533, his court declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon void from the beginning; he then pronounced the king’s secret marriage to Anne Boleyn valid, crowned her queen, and stood godfather to the infant Elizabeth.¹²

Archbishop under Henry VIII

With Thomas Cromwell he labored to bring the gospel into an English church that had broken with Rome but not yet with Rome’s doctrine. The Ten Articles of 1536 and the Bishops’ Book that followed moved the nation, in Galli’s words, “in a Protestant direction.”¹³ Cranmer welcomed the Matthew Bible of 1537, prepared by John Rogers from Tyndale’s work, and with Cromwell he saw the English Bible ordered into every parish church in 1538. To the second edition of the Great Bible in 1540 he wrote a prologue, so that the book came to be called “Cranmer’s Bible.”¹⁴ His prologue pleads with the reader:

I would marvel much that any man should be so mad, as to refuse in darkness, light: in hunger, food: in cold, fire: for the Word of God is light … In the Scriptures be the fat pastures of the soul, therein is no venomous meat, no unwholesome thing, they be the very dainty and pure feeding.¹⁵ Thomas CranmerPrologue to the Great Bible, 1540

Strype describes how the people received it: “Everybody that could bought the book, and busily read it, or got others to read it to them; and divers more elderly people learned to read on purpose.”¹⁶

The tide turned in 1539, when Henry pressed the Six Articles on Parliament, upholding transubstantiation, private masses, and clerical celibacy on pain of death. Cranmer, usually content to reason with the king in private, opposed them openly. Foxe records “his earnest defense in the Parliament house above three days together, in disputing against the six articles of Gardiners device.”¹⁷ When the Act passed he submitted and sent his wife to Germany.¹⁸ When Cromwell fell the next year, Cranmer alone wrote to the king for him: “I loved him as my friend, for so I took him to be; but I chiefly loved him for the love which I thought I saw him bear ever towards Your Grace.”¹⁹

His enemies plotted against him at least three times in Henry’s last years. When the Privy Council at last won leave to send him to the Tower, Henry called Cranmer to him the night before and gave him his ring. Produced at the council table, it threw his accusers into confusion, and the Earl of Bedford, as Foxe names him, said, “Do you think that the king will suffer this man’s finger to ache?”²⁰ In 1544 Cranmer gave the church its first English service, the Litany.²¹ When Henry lay dying in January 1547, it was Cranmer he asked for, and it was Cranmer’s hand he held when he died.²²

The Reformation under Edward VI

Under Edward VI, Cranmer’s godson, the archbishop’s time had come. In 1547 he issued the first Book of Homilies, sermons to be read in every parish where the clergy could not preach, which taught “the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture as well as justification by faith.”²³ In 1548 the cup was restored to the people, and soon priests were free to marry.²⁴ He invited Peter Martyr Vermigli to Oxford and Martin Bucer to England, and with their help, and that of his chaplain Nicholas Ridley, his own mind moved decisively on the Lord’s Supper. At his trial in 1555 he said so plainly:²⁵

I grant that then I believed otherwise then I do now, and so I did until my Lord of London D. Ridley did confer with me, and by sundry persuasions and authorities of Doctoures drew me quite from my opinion.²⁶ Thomas CranmerExamination at Oxford, September 1555

In 1550 he published A Defence of the True and Catholike Doctrine of the Sacrament. He saw that the Reformation would be lost if it stopped at abolishing beads and pilgrimages:

But what availeth it to take away beads, pardons, pilgremages, and such other like Popery, so long as .ii. chief roots remain vnpulled up … the very body of the tree, or rather the roots of the wedes, is the popish doctrine of Transubstantiation of the real presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament of the alter (as they call it) and of the sacrifice & oblation of Christ made by the priest, for the salvation of the quick and the dead.²⁷ Thomas CranmerDefence of the Sacrament, 1550

Christ, he taught, is bodily present in heaven, and “sacramentally and spiritually he is here present in water bread and wyne, as in signs and sacraments, but he is in deed spiritually in the faithful Christian people.”²⁸ When Gardiner replied, Cranmer answered him at length in 1551; it was this book that he would name at his death.²⁹

Cranmer longed for the Protestant churches to speak with one voice. On March 20, 1552, he wrote to Calvin:

Our adversaries are now holding their councils at Trent for the establishment of their errors; and shall we neglect to call together a godly synod, for the refutation of error, and for restoring and propagating the truth? … You have now my wish, about which I have also written to masters Philip [Melancthon] and Bullinger.³⁰ Thomas CranmerLetter to John Calvin, 1552

The synod never met, but in 1553 Cranmer gave the Church of England its own confession, the Forty-Two Articles, which set the church in a Reformed direction and became the basis of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Null notes that they “distinguished saving truth, which served as the basis of church unity and had to be clearly established by Scripture, from ecclesiastical traditions and ceremonies.”³¹ He also drafted a reformed code of church law, the Reformatio Legum, which was never enacted and was published by Archbishop Parker in 1571.³²

The Book of Common Prayer

Cranmer’s most enduring gift was the Book of Common Prayer. He took the cumbersome Latin service books of the medieval church and reduced them to a single English volume for the whole nation, “clergy and laity alike.”³³ The first book was required by the Act of Uniformity in 1549. Its preface explained that the Latin service had been read “to the people, which they understood not, so that they have heard with their ears only, and their hearts, spirit, and mind have not been edified thereby,” and it arranged the lessons so that the people, “by daily hearing of holy scripture read in the Church should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God and be the more inflamed with the love of His true religion.”³⁴ His collect for the second Sunday in Advent still teaches the church how to hear the Bible:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.³⁵ Book of Common PrayerCollect for the Second Sunday in Advent, 1549

The second book of 1552 went further, setting aside the old vestments and rejecting both the Roman and the Lutheran views of the Supper.³⁶ The change can be seen in the words spoken as the bread was given. In 1549 the minister said, “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.” In 1552 he said, “Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.”³⁷ Every Lord’s Day the congregation confessed together, “We have erred and strayed from thy ways, like lost sheep. … and there is no health in us,” and heard the promise of pardon “in Christ Jesus our Lord.”³⁸ Beckwith judges that no later liturgy “has equalled Cranmer’s, either for biblical content or for power and grace of expression.”³⁹ The Prayer Book also carried the short catechism that every child was to learn before confirmation; see The Catechism of the Church of England.

Prisoner at Oxford

When Edward lay dying in July 1553, Northumberland and the king pressed Cranmer to sign the settlement of the crown on Lady Jane Grey. He resisted, knowing it was contrary to Henry’s will, and signed very reluctantly.⁴⁰ Nine days later Mary was queen. Cranmer would not flee. When it was rumored that he had offered to say Mass at Canterbury, he denied it in a written declaration, and copies were soon being sold in the scriveners’ shops.⁴¹ He was sent to the Tower and condemned of treason at the Guildhall in November 1553.⁴² In March 1554 he was moved to Oxford with Hugh Latimer and Ridley, and in April the three were made to dispute against the Mass before Dr. Weston and the doctors of both universities.⁴³

On September 12, 1555, he was tried at St. Mary’s before Bishop James Brooks for the pope and Doctors Martin and Story for the queen. He acknowledged the queen’s commissioners but refused to own the pope’s. Brooks complained, “We come to examine you, and you, me think examine us.”⁴⁴ Cranmer’s long belief in the authority of the king over the church left him exposed. When he held that every king is supreme head in his realm, Martin asked whether Nero had been head of Christ’s church; Cranmer could only answer, “Nero was Peter’s head.”⁴⁵ He was cited to Rome, which he could not reach from a prison cell, and the pope condemned him. On February 14, 1556, Bishops Bonner and Thirlby degraded him. Bonner mocked him with the refrain, “This is the man, this is the man,” until Thirlby pulled at his sleeve. Cranmer clung to his crosier and drew from his sleeve an appeal from the pope to a general council.⁴⁶

The Recantations

In prison, before his trial, he had written to Peter Martyr of the comfort God gives his people in affliction:

God never shines forth more brightly, and pours out the beams of his mercy and consolation, or of strength and firmness of spirit, more clearly or impressively upon the minds of his people, than when they are under the most extreme pain and distress, both of mind and body … I pray God to grant that I may endure to the end!⁴⁷ Thomas CranmerLetter to Peter Martyr, 1555

Yet he did not at first endure. In October 1555 Latimer and Ridley were burned outside the walls near his prison. Now he was moved to pleasant lodgings, and Spanish friars worked on his conscience. His lifelong conviction that a Christian must obey the sovereign drew him step by step to submit to a Catholic queen. Under “insistent solicitations and delusive promises of deliverance,” McCrie writes, “he signed no fewer than six recantations, each being ampler, more abject than the previous.”⁴⁸ In the fifth he anathematized “every heresy of Luther and Zwingli” and owned the pope as supreme head of the church.⁴⁹ The government meant to burn him all the same.

March 21, 1556

The morning was foul with rain, so the sermon was moved into St. Mary’s. Cranmer was set on a low stage before the pulpit in a ragged gown and an old square cap, while Dr. Henry Cole preached that the queen had reasons to put him to death even though he had repented. More than twenty times, Foxe says, the tears “dropped down marvelously from his Fatherly face.”⁵⁰ Cole then called on him to make open profession of his faith. Cranmer knelt and prayed aloud: “The great mystery that God became man, was not wrought for little or few offenses. … I crave nothing for mine own merits, but for thy names sake, that it may be hallowed thereby, and for thy dear son Jesus Christ’s sake.”⁵¹ He exhorted the people to love God more than the world, to obey their rulers, to love one another, and to care for the poor. Then he came, as he said, to “the great thing” that troubled his conscience more than anything he had ever done:

And for as much as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefore: for may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned. And as for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine. And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester, the which my book teacheth so true a doctrine of the sacrament, that it shall stand at the last day before the judgment of God, where the Papistical doctrine contrary thereto, shall be ashamed to show her face.⁵² Thomas CranmerSt. Mary’s Church, Oxford, March 21, 1556

The church was in uproar. When they accused him of falsehood he answered, “Always since I lived hitherto, I have been a hater of falsehood, and a lover of simplicity, and never before this time have I dissembled.” Cole cried out, “stop the heretic’s mouth, and take him away.”⁵³ He was hurried to the ditch outside Balliol where Latimer and Ridley had died, and the friars could hardly keep up with him.⁵⁴ At the stake he gave his hand to old friends in farewell. When the fire was kindled

stretching out his arm, he put his right hand into the flame: which he held so steadfast & immovable (saving that once with the same hand he wiped his face) that all men might see his hand burned before his body was touched. … his eyes were lifted up into heaven, and oftentimes he repeated his unworthy right hand, so long as his voice would suffer him: and using often the words of Stephen, Lord Jesus receive my spirit, in the greatness of the flame, he gave up the Ghost.⁵⁵ John FoxeActes and Monuments, 1583

Foxe counts him the last of the learned martyrs burned under Mary, and his verdict is gentle and true: whom “least by evil subscribyng he should have perished, by well recantyng God preserved.”⁵⁶ As McCrie says, he “died, at once the penitent and the martyr.”⁵⁷

His Contributions

• He insisted from the first that the king’s cause, and every cause of the church, be judged by Scripture rather than by the pope.
• He secured the English Bible for every parish church and gave the Great Bible its prologue.
• He wrote the first English service, the Litany of 1544, and the Book of Homilies of 1547.
• He composed the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and its Reformed revision of 1552, which with the Prayer Book catechism shaped the worship and teaching of the English-speaking church for centuries.
• He gave the Reformed doctrine of the Lord’s Supper its English defense in his Defence and Answer to Gardiner.
• He framed the Forty-Two Articles, the parent of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and drafted the reform of church law.
• He brought Bucer and Martyr to the English universities and sought a common confession with Calvin, Bullinger, and Melanchthon.
• He sealed his testimony with his blood. Galli observes that after Elizabeth came to the throne the Church of England revised his Forty-Two Articles to thirty-nine and adopted his Prayer Book.⁵⁸

Other Reformers   Hugh Latimer