Apart from his recantations, the charges against him relate to his conduct as Archbishop, in which capacity he did many things, it is said, at variance with his private convictions. He continued to say mass for instance, under Henry VIII., long after he had ceased to believe in the doctrine of Transubstantiation.² The fact does not admit of doubt, and the offence was perhaps not less than that of reciting the Athanasian creed or subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles after one’s faith has outgrown the bounds of these formularies. But Cranmer’s official position and the constitutional views of his age afford a justification which cannot be pleaded to-day by private persons. Voluntary resignation of an office on the ground that the holder’s conscience could not put up with its duties was then a thing unknown. Men believed with a fervour never since equalled that next to the service of God they were created to serve the State, while the claims of individual conscience were as dust in the balance. Unless the King desired to relieve a minister of office, that minister was bound to retain it; he had little voice in the matter himself. Ministers then, like civil servants of to-day, had to carry out the orders of Government without any regard to their own predilections. They were no more allowed to relinquish an office of State or a seat in the House of Commons¹ than a man would to-day be permitted to resign his duty to serve on a jury or his obligation to pay rates and taxes. Hence we find the same men in office under Henry VIII. and Edward VI., under Mary and Elizabeth. Even so upright a man as Sir Thomas More remained Lord Chancellor while Henry was pushing his divorce from Catherine of Aragon—a measure which More abhorred. The principle was likewise applied to the Church when the King became its Supreme Head; Bishops, whether Catholic or Protestant, give effect to legislation whatever its character. Heath, afterwards Mary’s Chancellor, Tunstall, Day, Thirlby, and other Catholics administered the First Act of Uniformity; they might be deprived or forced to resign, but to resign of their own free will would have been considered a dereliction of duty to themselves and to their King. Their action involved at least as great a sacrifice of conscience as Cranmer was required to make under Henry VIII., and he held higher views than they did of the duty of subjects to their King.

Even from modern ideas it does not follow that Cranmer was wrong. For to maintain that a public man is to take immediate action on every conviction is to set up a standard which would make all rule impossible. Every Government and especially a reforming government, whether it be an individual or a committee, must perforce wear a mask in public behind which it gradually forms its own convictions; and it must wear this mask not merely until such convictions are formed but until the time has come for attempting to carry them out. This wearing a mask may seem hypocrisy in religion, but it is a necessary part of the price which a Church has to pay for connection with the State; and even in the freest of Churches it cannot be completely discarded. Moreover, if Cranmer could have resigned, the step would have made things worse for the cause of Reform; and he chose the better part when he remained at his post and successfully laboured to change a system of which he disapproved. The argument against him is an instance of that bondage to logic and abstract ideas which often unfits men of the pen to deal with public affairs.

A similar failure to realise the difficulties of practical administration has led to another misconception in treating Cranmer’s career and that of his associates. It has been truly remarked that the knowledge of after events has spoiled the writing of history. To the man in the study, with a few recorded facts before him, things seem vastly plainer and simpler than they do to the ruler who has to estimate the weight of a number of forces with nothing but his own insight and very imperfect knowledge to guide him. It is easier to condemn a statesman for trusting a force that failed than to foretell its failure beforehand; and the man of books is apt to forget that to every man of affairs the future is a blank and horrible darkness, and that, however much he looks before he leaps, he peers into the night. He goes farthest, said Oliver Cromwell, who knows not whither he goes; and the great Napoleon warned his subordinates against taking fancy pictures and plans as guides in a country that was really unknown. Never can the future have seemed more dim and uncertain than it did to the men who guided the Reformation, for they were travelling in a country unknown and unlike any that man had traversed before; and to assume that they had a clear and definite goal before their eyes and a straight and easy path at their feet is to sterilise all the teaching of history. Yet this is the way in which Cranmer has sometimes been treated; he is represented as having under Henry VIII. not merely the First Book of Common Prayer in his mind’s eye, but the Second, and even a third, of which time forbade the production; and then he is accused of dissembling, because he did not resign or secure the immediate adoption of reforms which had not yet entered his head. In truth it would be as reasonable to accuse the Americans of dissimulation in 1765 because they had not published the Declaration of Independence before they resisted the Stamp Act. Nations and statesmen do not as a rule jump to conclusions, but reach them under the slow and painful pressure of circumstances. Convictions thus obtained are lasting; and the fact that Cranmer’s work has stood the test of time almost unchanged is astonishing evidence of the fidelity with which he reflected the deepest feelings of the English people. Unless he had struck real chords in English hearts, his Prayer Book would not be in the mouths of millions to-day.

This quality, of course, had its defects, and Cranmer represented some of the worse as well as the better views of the age. He had not abandoned the theory that heresy was an offence to be purged in the fire. He took an official part in the condemnation of heretics, and in his Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum prescribed for the offence all the penalties known in the Middle Ages. At the same time no one was more loath to draw the sword than Cranmer. The “importunity for blood” with which he is charged in the case of John Bocher, has been disproved; and the gentleness of his nature made him a hater of rigour and cruelty. His lenience towards the Romanists was often criticised by his friends. “What,” he answered, “will ye have a man do to him that is not yet come to the knowledge of the truth of the Gospel, nor peradventure as yet called, and whose vocation is to me uncertain ? Shall we perhaps, in his journey coming towards us, by severity and cruel behaviour overthrow him, and as it were in his voyage stop him ? I take not this way to allure men to embrace the doctrine of the Gospel.”¹ On another occasion Edward Underhill, the “Hot Gospeller” and servant of Edward VI., brought before him the Catholic Vicar of Stepney “for that he disturbed the preachers in his church, causing the bells to be rung when they were at the sermon, and sometimes began to sing in the choir before the sermon was half done, and sometimes challenged the preacher in the pulpit.” Cranmer, he says, was “too full of lenity; a little he rebuked him and bade him do no more so. ‘My Lord,’ said I, ‘methinks you are too gentle unto so stout a papist.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘we have no law to punish them by.’ ‘We have, my Lord,’ said I, ‘if I had your authority I would be so bold to unvicar him or minister some sharp punishment unto him and such others. If ever it come to their turn, they will show you no such favour.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if God so provide, we must abide it.’ ‘Surely,’ said I, ‘God will never con you thanks for this, but rather take the sword from such as will not use it upon His enemies.’”¹

More characteristic of the age and more repugnant to modern ideas was the respect which Cranmer paid to the State and the King. “This is mine opinion and sentence at this present,” he once wrote to Henry VIII., “which nevertheless I do not temerariously define, but do remit the judgement thereof wholly unto your Majesty.”² That Cranmer should have expressed such a sentiment is now pronounced to be strange and almost incredible; but it is only strange to those who have failed to read the signs of that time, and Cranmer, as usual, only blurted out a thought which possessed all minds and admitted a practice which all pursued. His attitude towards the State was not an idiosyncrasy, but a common feature, nor was it merely due to the weak man’s fear of the strong; it had in his case a logical and conscientious basis, which can scarcely be alleged for a similar compliance on the part of Bonner and Gardiner. The Renaissance was a many-sided movement, some of the aspects of which have been unduly neglected. It not only turned men’s attention back to the literature and art and religion of classical times, but to the political theory of the primitive Church; and of that political theory Cranmer’s views were an exact reproduction. To St. Paul the “powers that be” were of divine ordination, and disobedience was not so much a political offence against man as it was a sin against God. St. Peter proclaimed the Christian’s duty of submission “to every ordinance of man,” and even in the seventh century Gregory the Great described himself as “dust and a worm” before the Caesar at Constantinople.¹ These views were the natural outcome of the political conditions of imperial Rome²; they disappeared before the growing influence of the Church and before the onslaughts of the barbarians who made as great inroads upon Roman political theory as they did upon Roman territory. There was little room for such views in polities governed by Teutonic common law or feudal principles; and the increasing power of the Church imposed another check upon the despotism of the State. But after the Renaissance, when men’s eyes had been opened to the scientific precision of Roman law, to the beauty of classical literature, and to the primitive purity of the Church, Teutonic common law and feudal theory seemed as barbarous as scholastic theology and mediaeval Latinity; and the decadence of the Church weakened the only possible rival of the “New Monarchy.” The jurisdiction of the Pope was regarded as a “usurped” authority,¹ and the State stood forth as the one great divine institution. Hence the profound veneration paid to its behests, and hence in comparison the view which Cranmer took of the Church appears to be low. It was not so much that he took a low view of the Church as that he took a high view of the State; not so much that he wanted to make the Church secular as to make the State religious. Papal theorists had been apt to regard the State as the work and sphere of the Devil, and the Church as the only institution and temple of God. Cranmer saw God in the State as well as in the Church, and thought that He manifested Himself in every good work of man and not merely in religious observances. He would have agreed with Burke’s words, that the State “is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature,” but “a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.” He would have added “a partnership in all religion and in all godliness.”

That ideal, impressive though it was, commands to-day less sympathy than other of Cranmer’s mental traits. If his humility, when exhibited in relation to the King, can be interpreted as subserviency, it can hardly be regarded as anything but a Christian virtue when made a rule of life by an Archbishop of the sixteenth century. It was by example as well as by precept, in conduct as well as in doctrine, that Cranmer enjoined a return to the greater simplicity of the age of the Fathers. He alone of Henry’s Court stood aloof from the scramble for wealth and the struggle for power, and after Wolsey it was well to show that a prelate could eschew pride, ambition, and vainglory. Wolsey exacted¹ a deference beyond that accustomed to princes; he was believed by Campeggio in 1528 to stand between the Church and her ruin,¹ but it may be doubted whether the Church would not have been wiser to rely on examples like Cranmer’s. He has been reproached with officiating in St. Paul’s “with no vestment, nor mitre, nor cross,”² and these things were indeed indifferent to him.

To this profession Cranmer strove to be faithful throughout; and the simplicity of his life was the outward sign of the simplicity of his character. He amassed no wealth and received no grants from the King except one which Dr. Butts solicited for him without the Archbishop’s knowledge; and in 1552 he told Cecil he had more trouble to live as Archbishop than he had when a scholar at Cambridge; he feared “stark beggary” more than the temptations of wealth.¹ Greedy courtiers, anxious to see episcopal lands go the way of monastic endowments, accused him of avarice; they earned for their pains a stinging rebuke from Henry VIII.,² and were only pardoned through the intercession which Cranmer was always happy to make on behalf of his personal enemies. On one occasion Cromwell had up a priest from the country for slandering Cranmer as an ignorant ostler. The Archbishop refused to have him punished; the priest, he told Cromwell, was not the first by five hundred who had called him such, and he gently brought the man to a better mind by showing him his own ignorance, and then sent him home in peace.³ There was no trace of rancour in Cranmer; his friends spoke of his “incredible sweetness of manners,” his enemies commended his courtesy,⁴ and his forgiving disposition became a proverb. “Do my Lord of Canterbury a shrewd (i. e., an evil) turn,” writes Shakespeare, “and he is your friend for ever.”¹ “My Lord,” said Heath to the Archbishop one day, “I now know how to win all things at your hand well enough.” “How so?” asked Cranmer. “Marry,” replied Heath, “I perceive that I must first attempt to do unto you some notable displeasure, and then by a little relenting obtain of you what I can desire.”Cranmer was a little nettled at this dissection of his character. “You may be deceived,” he said to Heath, “yet I may not alter my mind and accustomed condition, as some would have me do.”²

Therein at least Cranmer read himself aright; he was utterly incapable of assuming that sphinx-like impenetrability which Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not to speak of later statesmen, found so valuable an asset. He did not exactly wear his heart on his sleeve, for Morice tells us that he could put on a cheerful countenance when really sick at heart; but this reserve broke down in intimate circles, and few were misled. In him there was no guile; his variations were not calculated, but the faithful reflex of developing convictions. He was never a victim of that infirmity which leads men to pretend that they have always held the same inflexible principles. “This I confess of myself,” he wrote in his published answer to Dr. Richard Smith, “that … I was in that error of the real presence, as I was many years past in divers other errors, as that of transubstantiation, of the sacrifice propitiatory of the priests in the mass, of pilgrimages, purgatory, and many other superstitions and errors that came from Rome. … For the which, and other mine offences in youth I do daily pray unto God for mercy and pardon, saying Delicta juventutis meæ et ignorantias meas ne memineris, Domine. Good Lord, remember not mine ignorances and offences of my youth.”¹

Assuredly Cranmer spared no pains to remedy the “ignorances” of his youth. “Commonly,” says Morice, “if he had not business of the Prince’s or special urgent causes before him, he spent three parts of the day in study as effectually as if he had been at Cambridge.”² He was one of the most learned theologians of his age; and when it was hinted to Ridley that he and not Cranmer was really the author of the answer to Gardiner on the Eucharist, Ridley replied that it was beyond his capacity to write such a book and that Cranmer “passed him no less than the learned master his young scholar.”³ His theological learning was one of his titles to Henry’s favour. “For at all times when the King’s Majesty would be resolved in any doubt or question he would but send word to my Lord overnight, and by the next day the King should have in writing brief notes of the doctors’ minds, as well divines as lawyers, both ancient, old and new, with a conclusion of his own mind; which he could never get in such a readiness of none, no, not of all his chaplains and clergy about him, in so short a time. For being thoroughly seen in all kinds of expositors, he could incontinently lay open thirty, forty, sixty or more somewhiles of authors, and so, reducing the notes of them altogether, would advise the King more in one day than all his learned men could do in a month.”¹

Indisputable evidence of Cranmer’s theological attainments is afforded not merely by the testimony of friends and foes, but by the extent of his library, his writings and his commonplace books.² His collection of books was broken up at his death, but no fewer than three hundred and fifty printed books and a hundred manuscripts have been traced; his library was more extensive and vastly more valuable and select than that of Cambridge University when Cranmer was there as an undergraduate. Roger Ascham says he found among Cranmer’s books “many authors which the two universities could not furnish”¹; and they were no mere ornaments or furniture of his rooms, but furniture of his mind. There were two Hebrew Bibles, and one of them is interleaved with a Latin translation made by Cranmer with his own hand. There was an almost complete set of the Greek and Latin Fathers and the best of the mediaeval schoolmen. With modern writers such as Erasmus he was, as a matter of course, familiar; “I have seen,” he writes in 1537, “almost everything that has been written and published either by Œcolampadius or by Zwinglius,”² and with the writings of Luther and Melanchthon he was yet more conversant. His commonplace books in the British Museum Library also contain extracts from Calvin, Bucer, Bullinger, Brenz, Eck, and Pirckheimer—divines of all shades of opinion, ancient and modern, Latin and Greek. Latin, of course, he spoke and wrote with ease; Hebrew we know that he read, from his translation of the Hebrew Bible; Greek he may have acquired after he left Cambridge, and the discovery that εἴδωλον, whence came idolatry, meant the same as imago, made a great impression on his mind. When Robert Estienne published his great Greek Testament at Paris in 1550,¹ Cranmer made haste to acquire this Editio regia, as it was called, and used it with effect against Gardiner in his work on the Eucharist, published in 1551.² Besides these three ancient tongues, all indispensable to a Reformer whose one test of truth was the Scriptures, Cranmer knew French and Italian. He translated Italian newsletters into English for Henry VIII.’s benefit,³ and it is scarcely possible that he could have wooed Osiander’s German niece without some knowledge of the German tongue.

A lover of learning himself, Cranmer was a patron of learning in others. He continued Warham’s beneficence to Erasmus, and procured a living and a canonry for John Leland, one of the greatest of English antiquaries. Erasmus repaid him with a letter and Leland with one of his well-known encomiums in verse, in which he styles the Archbishop eximium decus piorum.⁴ Through him John Sleidan, the German historian,¹ was granted a pension by Edward VI.; and Tremellius, the Hebraist, described Lambeth under Cranmer’s rule, as “a house of public entertainment to all people of learning and piety.”² No foreign divine of note came to England in Edward VI.’s reign without being lodged under Cranmer’s roof until established elsewhere.

Nor was his patronage and zeal for education limited to eminent scholars; he would extend the benefits of education to every child of ability, whether he were a ploughman’s son or a peer’s. When the Cathedral school at Canterbury was being refounded, some of his fellow commissioners³ maintained that none but gentlemen’s sons should be admitted. Cranmer denounced the idea; “for,” said he, “poor men’s children are many times indued with more singular gifts of nature, which are also the gifts of God, as with eloquence, memory, apt pronunciation, sobriety, with such like, and also commonly more given to apply their study than is the gentleman’s son, delicately educated.” The ploughman’s son, it was argued, should follow the plough; only gentlemen’s sons were meet to “have the knowledge of government and rule in the commonwealth”: there was as much need of ploughmen as of other classes, “and all sorts of men may not go to school.” “I grant,” replied Cranmer, “much of your meaning herein, as needful to a commonwealth; but yet utterly to exclude the ploughman’s son and the poor man’s son from the benefit of learning, as though they were unworthy to have the gifts of the Holy Ghost bestowed upon them as well as upon others, is as much as to say that Almighty God should not be at liberty to bestow his great gifts of grace upon any person, nor nowhere else but as we and other men shall appoint them to be employed according to our fancy and not according to his most godly will and pleasure; who giveth his gifts both of learning and other perfections in all sciences unto all kinds and states of people indifferently; even so doeth he many times withdraw from them and their posterity again those beneficial gifts if they be not thankful. If we should shut up into a strait corner the bountiful grace of the Holy Ghost, and thereupon attempt to build our fancies, we should make as perfect a work thereof as those that took upon them to build the tower of Babylon; for God would so provide that the offspring of our best born children should peradventure become most unapt to learn and very dolts, as I myself have seen no small number of them very dull and without all manner of capacity. … To conclude, the poor man’s son by painstaking for the most part will be learned when the gentleman’s son will not take the pains to get it. … Wherefore if the gentleman’s son be apt to learning, let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man’s child apt enter his room.”¹ Cranmer carried his point with regard to Canterbury school, but the views he contested still flourish among the backward classes in England. And another theory has not disappeared against which Cranmer protested when he sought to save the schoolmaster of Ludlow from being deprived of his school on abandoning holy orders; “the man’s priesthood,” he said, “was no furtherance but rather an impediment to him in the applying of his scholars.”¹

The same generosity of disposition appears in Cranmer’s relations with his dependents and friends. “There never was,” says Morice, “such a master amongst men, both feared and entirely beloved; for, as he was a man of most gentle nature, void of all crabbed and churlish conditions, so he could abide no such qualities in any of his servants.”² He always retained a grateful recollection of the kindness shown him by his old college at Cambridge, and endeavoured to repay it in after years when his influence was useful to the society and to its individual members.³ When Welbeck Abbey was dissolved, the Archbishop purchased its tithes of Aslacton and Whatton and gave them to his nephew,Thomas, who had inherited the family estates; and he has been accused of nepotism in promoting his brother Edmund to the Archdeaconry of Canterbury. But therein he was only following his predecessors, Chicheley, Bourchier, and Warham,¹ and his conduct compares favourably with that of Warham and Wolsey. For Warham bestowed the preferment on a nephew who was not in priest’s orders and therefore required a papal dispensation from the canonical prohibition to enable him to hold the office; and Wolsey endeavoured to obtain the rich Bishopric of Durham for his illegitimate son while he was yet a minor; he failed in this, but secured for the youth in his teens a deanery, four archdeaconries, five prebends, and a chancellorship.² Beside this flagrant example Cranmer’s conferment of one archdeaconry on a brother who fulfilled all the canonical requirements seems harmless enough, and it is the only charge of the kind that was ever laid at his door.

A different accusation was that he wasted the lands of his see by granting them away on easy leases, but Morice has successfully vindicated his master’s conduct. It was really designed to preserve the cathedral endowments, for unless he had turned the edge of the lay appetite for ecclesiastical property, courtiers would probably have secured permanent grants instead of temporary leases. He did, indeed, yield to Henry’s demand for the manor of Otford by way of exchange; but to resist in such a case was clearly out of the question. “For,” writes Morice, “as touching his exchanges, men ought to consider with whom he had to do, especially with such a prince as would not be bridled, nor be against-said in any of his requests.”¹

With respect to his family life, we have but the scantiest details. There is no doubt that his relations with his domestic circle were as happy as external conditions would permit. Scandal was busy with one of Cranmer’s sisters²; but it never touched the Archbishop himself, except in so far as to tell that his affection for his wife drove him to curious expedients to retain her company during the dark days of the Six Articles.³ It has been thought strange that nothing is heard of her during Cranmer’s troubles under Queen Mary, and that the only efforts on his behalf appear to have been made by his sister; but the reason is that his wife was far away in Germany. The Archbishop had warned his friends to flee early in the reign, and his natural affection would ensure that his wife and children should be the first to be placed out of the reach of danger. His wife was a heretic like himself and might well have been joined to the army of feminine martyrs who were sent to the stake by Queen Mary.

That the Archbishop himself stood his ground is one among many proofs of deliberate courage. He used to tell Morice that the brutality of his early schoolmaster had destroyed the “audacity” with which he had been by nature endowed, and that he had never been able to repair the loss. The explanation is not convincing. Cranmer was undoubtedly of that shrinking, sensitive nature which usually acts like a red rag on bullies, but every now and then touches a finer chord in the strong man’s heart, as it did in that of Henry VIII. But he was no coward; he had, indeed, none of the hardihood which ignorance breeds, nor the courage which springs from an incapacity to realise danger and suffering. Sensitive nerves, imagination, and a somewhat slow and hesitating mind gave Cranmer at times the appearance and feeling of weakness; but when once his mind was made up his courage was not found lacking. He alone, so far as we know, tried to save the monks of Sion from the block; he alone interceded for Fisher and More, for Anne Boleyn and for the Princess Mary, for Thomas Cromwell and Bishop Tunstall. He told Henry VIII. that he had offended God, and Cromwell that the Court was setting an evil example. He maintained almost unaided a stubborn fight against the Act of Six Articles and resisted longer than any one else the Duke of Northumberland’s plot. He refused to fly before danger at Mary’s accession; and for two and a half years withstood without flinching the pressure of a sixteenth-century prison. If then for a month he wavered between his duty to the State and that to his conscience; if finally, he tried to concede that impossible change of belief which his inquisitors required, he redeemed his fall by a heroism in the hour of death to which history can find few parallels.