Thomas Cranmer, a middle-aged Catholic scholar/priest, was plucked from the academic woodwork at Cambridge University by Henry Tudor—King Henry VIII, to be precise—and put to work on what was called The King’s Great Matter.
Henry wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, so he could marry Anne Boleyn, whom he thought more likely to give birth to a male heir. The reigning pope, Clement VII, would decide the matter. Grounds for annulment were found in the biblical book of Leviticus, and Cranmer was put to work drafting the King’s argument. He was then sent across the Channel to recruit support from Continental scholars. Then he was made ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in the vain hope of winning the emperor to Henry’s cause.
None of this availed. The pope slow-walked the application.
Henry got tired of waiting.
In October 1532, the obscure Cranmer was recalled to England and appointed archbishop of Canterbury, the highest Catholic church official in England. The pope—who had thus far avoided ruling on Henry’s request—approved Cranmer’s appointment as archbishop.
Thereupon, King Henry did a remarkable thing: He withdrew England from the Roman Catholic Church.
Technically, what he did was name himself head of the church in England, in place of the pope. But it comes down to the same thing, because the pope could not recognize a part of the Catholic church that did not answer to him. He excommunicated Henry and Cranmer and other English officials who supported the king in the matter.
This left the bookish, mild-mannered Cranmer with a quandary: What kind of a church should England have? Of course it would be a national church, officially established by the state. In those days, there was no other arrangement.
King Henry, bless his heart, probably had no intention of changing anything about the church except who it reported to. He might have been content to let it go its old, Romanesque, popish way—only without the pope. But that could not be.
Henry had bolted the Catholic church at the one time in all history when it was suddenly possible to think another pattern could exist. Only a few years earlier, in 1517, Martin Luther had launched the Protestant revolt in Wittenberg, Germany. Suddenly, all Europe was in turmoil, with not just two but numerous templates of God’s One True Church contending for supremacy all across the landscape. Although the principal battles were being fought on the mainland of Europe, the plurality of possible outcomes was not lost on the English.
Many radical Protestant bishops, priests, and laypeople wanted to throw out sacraments, saints, holy days, smoke and incense, priestly vestments, and anything that smacked of a hierarchy: no more Roman mass, only the three Ps—preaching, prayers, and psalms. However, many others longed to restore the old order—get back to a Catholic church with the pope in charge, with or without King Henry.
A few clever souls, and Cranmer was one of them, could envision a middle ground. However, it was impossible from the outset that sweet reason and the gentle art of compromise would bring it about. Religion was a blood sport. While Cranmer and other bishops sparred over the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, royal politics tilted the playing field in contrary directions.
During Henry’s lifetime, only modest changes could be made in the church. Upon the accession of his son, King Edward VI, a thoroughgoing Protestant, Cranmer pushed reforms at a faster pace. These reforms included replacement of Latin by English as the official language for worship services and rites—a process aided by the 1549 publication of The Book of Common Prayer, an English-language liturgy manual sponsored, edited, and largely written by Cranmer himself.
The judgment of history has been that Cranmer’s rhythmic cadences and concrete words were made for the ages. Phrases from Cranmer’s pen include: land of the living, a tower of strength, till death us do part, weigh the merits, all my worldly goods, give up for lost, at death’s door, make haste, peace in our time, at their wits’ end, fire and brimstone, softer than butter. No doubt the archbishop enriched our common store of speech.
During Edward’s brief reign, radical Protestants made great strides in changing the Church of England. But Edward died young and was replaced by his Catholic half-sister Mary, who sought to return the realm to the Roman fold. Over the five years of her reign, more than 280 forward-leaning Protestants were burned at the stake. The most famous were the Oxford Martyrs—Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Archbishhop Cranmer himself.
Cranmer was separated from Latimer and Ridley owing to his higher station. Queen Mary needed clarification from the pope that Cranmer was no longer considered a Catholic official. Meanwhile, the outspoken Latimer and his close associate Ridley were burned. They were tied to the same post, back-to-back. Just before the flames were set, Latimer said, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
Cranmer was forced to watch their burning from a nearby tower.
As his own appointment with the flames neared, Cranmer wrote and signed six recantations, each more abject and apparently contrite than the last. The final two were especially sweeping, condemning the reforms he had instituted and embracing the Catholic doctrines he had rejected. It was customary for those who sincerely repented to be spared the death penalty. But Cranmer had been too high up, bore too much responsibility for the whole Protestant movement in England during Henry’s and Edward’s reigns. Mary would not relent.
On 21 March 1556, the day scheduled for his death, Cranmer was allowed to make a final, public recantation. He stood at the pulpit of Oxford’s University Church, began according to the expected form but then went off script. He repudiated in no uncertain terms all his previous recantations; he condemned his right hand as the instrument which had signed them, and he pledge to thrust it first in to the flames as punishment. He was dragged down from the pulpit, tied to the stake, and set ablaze. He did place his right hand into the heart of the flames, as promised.
After Queen Mary died in November 1558, her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn’s Protestant daughter—whom Cranmer had baptized—ascended the throne and ruled with iron determination and political skill for more than forty-four years.
Elizabeth was not the hot sort of Protestant that the Oxford Martyrs were; that would not do. The Church of England had to be a tool of state. She could not allow England to return to the Roman Catholic fold, for then her own birth and reign would be illegitimate. But what she required was a stable church that conducted its affairs in unison with the sovereign’s will. Her Act of Uniformity did not give radical Protestant reformers any space in the realm to practice their faith. This set the stage for the exile of put-upon Congregationalists to Massachusetts in the reign of her successor, James I.
Elizabeth’s reign did establish the Church of England once and for all as the official state church of England, which it remains to this day—part Protestant, part Catholic, a monument to the cautious, middle-of-the-road churchmanship of Thomas Cranmer and the pressing needs of Queen Elizabeth.
And what are we to make of Cranmer?
He was ill-suited to the challenge he was given. Scholarly to the point of pedantry, scrupulous on small points but malleable on large ones, willing to be used yet marching to an internal drum of breathtaking scope, he quietly revolutionized the practice of the Christian faith in the United Kingdom and was rewarded, at the end of his life, with a martyrdom that held more of bathos than of sublimity.
Cranmer was not born great. He did not achieve greatness. Even Henry VIII was not able to thrust greatness upon him. But by years of persisting and surviving, comporting himself with squeamishness, compromise, and flexibility, he left behind a legacy that greatly changed the Anglo-American world.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
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