Important, however, though the divorce was as the occasion of the Reformation, no theory could be more shallow than that which seeks to represent Henry’s desire to put away an unattractive wife as its one and only cause. Before the faintest whisper of any such project as the divorce could have reached him, an Imperial officer, writing from Rome to Charles V. on 8 June, 1527, alluded to the possibility of the King of England’s turning the English Church into a separate patriarchate and denying obedience to the Papal See.¹ He thought such a development probable, if the Imperialists who had just sacked Rome retained the Pope in their custody; and, indeed, nothing could be more natural than that England should repudiate a spiritual jurisdiction which moved at the will of a secular foe. The papal claims were tolerable only so long as the mediaeval ideal of the unity of the civilised world under one spiritual and one temporal head remained intact; but they could not survive the growth of the spirit of nationality and the effect of the impression that papal powers could be made to serve particular interests. This abuse first attained flagrant proportions when Charles VIII. crossed the Alps in 1494 and made Italy the cockpit of Europe. The Vicar of Christ might have looked on with comparative unconcern, had he been content with spiritual pre-eminence; but his efforts to grasp the shadow of temporal power involved him in the fray, and forced him to side now with one and now with another secular prince in order to extend the bounds of his petty Italian domains. In this struggle his lack of material resources compelled resort to spiritual arms; and the weapons, wielded of yore in the cause of the faith, became pawns in a game which was played with Italian acres for stakes. Temporal princes were branded as “sons of perdition and children of iniquity,” not because their morals were bad or their creeds unsound, but because they stood in the way of papal greed. The Catholic Emperor, Charles V., told Clement VII. that the sack of Rome was the just judgment of God ¹; and one of his envoys proposed that the Pope should forfeit his fiefs as the root of all the evil.² The Pope’s spiritual influence contracted as his worldly possessions expanded; and his estimation and credit have never increased so fast as in the generation which followed the loss of his temporal power.

England, however, was not particularly moved by papal subservience to secular interests so long as it was merely a question of the increase or decrease of the extent of the Papal States, or even of the relative preponderance of French and Spanish influence in Italy. But as soon as a matter of decisive importance to England arose, she discovered a striking grievance. Spain and France might put up with the prostitution of papal prerogatives in the interests of temporal princes, because the kings of Spain and of France were precisely those who benefited by the process. If the Pope was a Spaniard to-day, he might be a Frenchman to-morrow; but it was safe to say that in no case would the Pope be English. Even Wolsey and Pole were unable to break down the hostile barrier. It was, indeed, admitted that there should as a rule be one English Cardinal, but what was one in a body of forty ? and it is little wonder that the nation repudiated the jurisdiction of a court in which its influence was measured on such a contemptible scale.

Such were the conditions that were first brought home to Englishmen’s minds by the question of the divorce of Catherine of Aragon. That question was not the cause, but only the occasion of the permanent breach with Rome. Had it been the only ground of difference there would have been no obstacle to reconciliation after the death of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn in 1536. Henry VIII. had no love for heresy; he had been brought up in strict adherence to the Catholic faith, and for nearly twenty years he had distinguished himself by his defence of the Papal See. He had launched into war against Louis XII. because that king attacked the Pope’s temporal States; he had written a book to confute Luther’s denial of papal prerogatives; and papal blessings had followed him all his life.¹ The importance of the divorce lies in the fact that it changed this friendship into enmity, and alienated the only power which might have kept in check the anti-papal and anti-sacerdotal tendencies then growing up in England.

But great as Henry’s power was, its exercise was attended by such potent effects only because it decided a balance of other forces: alone it would have been powerless against the Pope and the priests. No ruler can effect anything except by utilising forces which exist independently of his own individual will, and it is idle to deny that such anti-ecclesiastical forces existed in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1512, when Englishmen wished to insult the Scots, they called them “ Pope’s men,”¹ and at the same time the people of London were said to be so hostile to the Church that any jury would condemn a cleric though he were as innocent as Abel. ² In 1515 petitions were presented to Parliament against clerical exactions, and they gave rise to stormy debates³; prelates wrote in alarm of a party which was bent on the subversion of the Church, and bitterly complained that that party found favour at Court.⁴ Wolsey sought to save his order by urging the speedy dissolution of Parliament⁵ and by refusing, with one exception⁶, to call another for the remaining fourteen years of his rule. Henry VIII. knew perfectly well that if he chose to quarrel with Rome he would find abundant lay support.

While his divorce was not the sole cause of the breach with Rome, it is equally clear that Henry’s passion for Anne Boleyn was not the sole cause for the divorce or the origin of the doubts respecting the legality of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. When Julius II. was first asked in 1503 to grant a dispensation for Henry’s marriage with his brother Arthur’s widow, the Pope replied¹ that it was a great matter, and that he did not know whether it were competent for him to grant a dispensation in such a case. His dispensing power had, indeed, been denied by a General Council, and it was by no means universally admitted that the Pope was superior to General Councils. There was no doubt that such a marriage was canonically forbidden as sin; Catherine’s father, Ferdinand of Aragon, felt it necessary to remove scruples which Henry might entertain on the subject²; her confessor was deprived of his post for venturing to suggest doubts in her mind,³ and Archbishop Warham held similar views.⁴ These objections were overridden by Henry’s faith in the Pope and desire for Catherine’s dower. The marriage was consummated, and in all probability nothing more would have been heard of its doubtful validity but for the extraordinary fatality which attended its issue. Four children came to the pair before the autumn of 1514; but every one was still-born or died soon after birth, and in that year it was reported in Rome that the lack of heirs was leading Henry to contemplate the divorce of his Spanish wife.¹ His relations with Spain were strained at the time; but presently they mended, and the birth of the Princess Mary in 1516 revived the King’s hopes of a son and successor. They were doomed to disappointment; Catherine had more miscarriages and still-born children, but not one that survived, and by 1525 it was perfectly certain that if Henry remained married to Catherine he must relinquish all hopes of a male heir to the throne.

It is difficult to realise what that meant to Englishmen of the early part of the sixteenth century, for three glorious reigns have long ago banished any prejudices that may have been entertained against female sovereigns. But in 1531 a well-informed foreign ambassador could solemnly declare to his government ment that the laws of England did not permit a woman to mount the English throne.¹ There was, of course, no such law; nevertheless, that seemed to be the theory on which the succession had been regulated. The Empress Matilda, the only woman who had tried to grasp the English sceptre, had been driven from the land after a bloody civil war. John of Gaunt had maintained in Parliament that the crown descended only through males, and the Lancastrian kings had in practice made good the claim that Henry IV., the son of Edward III.’s younger son, had a better title than Philippa, the daughter of an elder. In 1485 Margaret Beaufort was the Lancastrian heir to the throne, yet she was passed over in favour of her son Henry VII., who had no jot of hereditary right which he did not derive from her. Why should the Princess Mary’s title be any better than that of Margaret Beaufort ? and if the attempt of one Queen to mount the throne had kindled the flames of civil strife, would not the attempt of another fan the barely extinguished embers of the Wars of the Roses? Other fears reinforced this theory of the succession. Englishmen throughout the century had a dread of being brought by marriage under a foreign yoke; by that means Brittany had lost its independence, the Netherlands had been fettered to Spain, and Bohemia and Hungary to Austria. If a Queen ascended the throne she ran the risk either of rousing internal strife by marrying a subject, or of promoting external dominion by giving herself and her realm to an alien prince.

The divorce of Catherine of Aragon was only one of the mearls suggested for avoiding the difficulty. Campeggio, who came to try the case in England, at one time entertained the idea that the Princess Mary might be married to her half-brother, the Duke of Richmond, Henry VIII.’s illegitimate son.¹ He appeared to see nothing unnatural in such a union, nor did he anticipate that the Pope would make any difficulty about granting the dispensation. Clement VII. himself proposed more than once that Henry should take a second wife without troubling about the divorce of his first²; and, indeed, there were precedents for such a course not merely in Scripture, but in more recent times. It was not so very long since a pope had allowed a king of Castile to take a second wife on account of the sterility of his first, under the condition that, if he had no children by the second within a specified time, he should return again to the first.³ After all, it was not the Reformation which first introduced curiosities into the law of marriage.

The expedient, however, which found most favour with Henry VIII. and his advisers was that of setting up the claim of the Duke of Richmond. The patent of his creation in 1525 gave him, much to Queen Catherine’s disgust, precedence over the Princess Mary; he was endowed with titles and offices which legitimate children of Henry VII. had enjoyed, and in 1527 the Spanish ambassador reported a scheme for making him King of Ireland.¹ In various negotiations for his marriage it was broadly hinted that he might safely be regarded as the heir presumptive of England,² and Charles V. believed that the betrothal of Mary to a French prince in 1527 was mainly designed to remove her from England and from the Duke of Richmond’s path to the throne.³ Some years later it was thought that the provision in the Act of Succession empowering Henry to leave the crown by will was intended to facilitate its devolution upon the Duke; and before expressing disgust at so violent an expedient, it is well to remember that a century and a half later a considerable party in England preferred the claim of an illegitimate but Protestant son of a king to that of his legitimate but Catholic brother.⁴

This solution of the difficulty had, however, two defects in Henry’s eyes. It did not satisfy his conscience in the matter of his marriage with Catherine, and it brought him no nearer a union with Anne Boleyn. Now, there is no need to assume that Henry’s scruples were entirely fictitious. He is not the only figure in history who has possessed the useful faculty of really convincing his conscience that what is personally desirable and politically expedient must therefore be morally right. He was, moreover, in some respects a superstitious man, and he could hardly fail to be impressed by the unique coincidence of which he was the victim. Never before had there been such a mortality among the children of an English king; never before had an English king married his brother’s widow. In that theological age men less superstitious than Henry might easily have seen some connexion between these circumstances and the Scriptural prohibition against marriages such as his¹; and it is one of the ironies of history that writers who maintain most sincerely that Henry’s marriage was null in the sight of God and man have sometimes been his severest judges for having dissolved it. The basis of such a position lies, of course, in equitable considerations. Quod fieri non debuit factum valet was the common-sense view of the Lutheran divines on the point, and no court of equity would have granted a divorce, for its injustice to Catherine was flagrant and unredeemed. But, unfortunately, Catherine’s case, like all great political issues, was judged, not by equity, but by law and expedience. The political advantages of a divorce were patent, and if the Pope’s dispensing power was denied, it was also clear that the marriage was null in point of law.

At first Henry VIII. was by no means inclined to deny the papal dispensing power. He was, on the contrary, relying on it to remove an impediment to his marriage with Anne Boleyn arising from his illicit relations with her sister Mary.¹ He experienced no difficulty in obtaining a dispensation to that effect, and he had some grounds for expecting an equally favourable reply to his demand for a divorce. Within his own family circle he saw ample precedents for such a course. His younger sister, Mary Tudor, had been twice married, first to Louis XII. of France, and secondly to the Duke of Suffolk; both husbands obtained divorces from previous wives without the least difficulty. Louis’s first wife had been sent to a nunnery solely because he wanted to marry the Duchess of Brittany and offered the Pope his support in return for the boon. The Duke of Suffolk’s case was still more to the point, for he obtained a divorce on the identical ground on which his brother-in-law was seeking one, namely, the invalidity of a previous dispensation.² Then, too, at the same moment that Henry’s envoys were pressing his divorce, representatives of his sister Margaret, Queen of Scotland, were urging the Pope to annul her marriage with Angus for reasons much more flimsy than those which Henry VIII. put forward.³ Yet her demand was granted without much trouble, and surely, Henry might think, a powerful king like himself was entitled to as much consideration as his sister and brothers-in-law.

His petition then did not seem altogether unreasonable, nor did Clement VII. treat it as such; but the Pope was still in the grip of the Imperialists who had pillaged his capital and kept him in ignominious confinement in the castle of S. Angelo. He could hardly be expected to court ruin by divorcing his gaoler’s aunt; but if the French, now in alliance with Henry, would only advance and deliver him from the hands of his enemies, he would see what he could do.¹ Meanwhile he endeavoured to gain time by granting commissions which turned out to be worthless. They succeeded, however, in their object, for in 1528 the French commander, Lautrec, marched down through Italy, captured Melfi, and shut up the Spaniards in Naples. Spanish dominion in Italy seemed doomed to perish. Clement felt himself something more than the Emperor’s chaplain, and an ample commission was granted to Wolsey and Campeggio to try the case.² Even if one were unwilling, the other might proceed and pronounce sentence by himself, and all appeals from the jurisdiction of the legatine court were forbidden. The Pope also gave a written promise that he would not revoke nor do anything to invalidate the commission, but would confirm the Cardinals’ sentence.³ This was tantamount to a verdict in Henry’s favour, and he might well think that his case was won.

But no sooner had Campeggio started than the fortune of war was reversed. The French were defeated, and the Pope’s secretary wrote off in hot haste to Campeggio that as the Emperor was victorious the Cardinal must not on any pretext pronounce a decision without a fresh commission from Rome. He must protract the matter as long as possible, for, in view of Charles’s predominance, the granting of Henry’s divorce would mean the utter ruin of the Church “as it is entirely within the power of the Emperor’s servants.”¹ Clement himself assured Charles that nothing would be done to the prejudice of his aunt. Campeggio’s proceedings in England were therefore merely a farce intended to divert the English until the final event of the war in Italy should make up Clement’s mind. On 21 June, 1529, hostilities were brought to an end by the crushing defeat of Landriano. The Pope, with an intelligent anticipation of coming events, had declared a few days before that he meant to become an Imperialist and to live and die as such,² and early in July he concluded a family compact with Charles at Barcelona.³ Clement’s nephew was to marry Charles’s illegitimate daughter; the tyranny of his family was to be reimposed on Florence, and all towns wrested from the Papal States were to be restored. The Pope in return was to quash the proceedings against Catherine of Aragon. Campeggio was informed beforehand of the Pope’s intentions; the case, had, however, made considerable progress, and on 23 July Henry, ignorant of the understanding between Clement and Charles, expected Campeggio to pronounce his sentence. The court was crowded, Campeggio stood up and began to speak, but instead of delivering judgment he adjourned the case.¹ “By the Mass,” burst out Suffolk, giving the table a great blow with his hand, “now I see that the old saw is true, that there was never a legate or cardinal that did good in England !”

The effect of this blow on a man of Henry’s choleric temper and boundless self-will may well be imagined, but with all his passionate egotism the King combined a notable power of self-control. No furious outburst on his part seems to have followed the legate’s decision, and friends of the Queen vainly flattered themselves that the affair would blow over. But early in August the King made arrangements for summoning Parliament,² and then started on a progress in the country. On the 4th he was at Waltham, on the 6th he was hunting all day at Hunsdon. Thence he moved to Tyttenhanger, and three days later returned to Waltham; he was accompanied by Dr. Edward Fox, his almoner, and by Stephen Gardiner, his secretary. The harbingers quartered Fox and Gardiner in Cressy’s house, where Cranmer was staying with Cressy’s sons. Both were old acquaintances of Cranmer’s, for Fox was educated at King’s College, of which he was now Provost, and Gardiner was Master of Trinity Hall. Nor was this the first occasion on which Cranmer had been in the precincts of the Court. Nearly a year before, he had been sent to London by the Master of Jesus, apparently to negotiate some business with regard to the property held by the college in Southwark, and he returned, bringing letters from Cromwell, even then well known as Wol-sey’s factotum.¹

Naturally the three friends, meeting at dinner in Cressy’s house, fell to discussing the great question of the divorce. Cranmer was asked his opinion; he professed that he had not studied the matter, but being a theologian and not a lawyer (the statutes of his college forbade the study of canon law), he had little patience with the law’s delays, and suggested the more speedy method of taking the question out of the hands of the lawyers and submitting it to the divines of the universities.² No one to-day would think of appealing to such an arbitrament, but, as Ranke says, “we must recollect that the universities were then regarded not only as establishments for education, but as supreme tribunals for the decision of scientific questions”³; and when the Elector Frederick of Saxony founded Wittenberg in 1502 he declared that he and all the neighbourhood would resort to it “as to an oracle.” To these oracles Cranmer now proposed an appeal. They were indeed the only tribunals apart from the Papacy to whose verdict any respect would be paid. The Popes of a previous generation had practically destroyed the authority of General Councils, and the Papacy was now the handmaid of Charles V. The anarchy in Christendom inevitably encouraged separatist tendencies, but it would at least give an appearance of moral justification to individual action on the part of the English Church if the universities of Europe approved of the grounds on which it acted.

So Fox and Gardiner eagerly welcomed Cranmer’s suggestion,¹ and a day or two later, after the Court had removed from Waltham, they mentioned the matter to Henry. The King was no less pleased with the idea. He thereupon, says Morice, “commanded them to send for Dr. Cranmer. And so by and by being sent for, he came to the King’s presence at Greenwich.” If Morice is correct as to the place, Henry certainly acted with no undue precipitation, for he did not return to Greenwich until November,² when the meeting of Parliament rendered his presence in London necessary. He had other matters to occupy him, and the interval saw the fall of Wolsey and the preparation of those parliamentary measures which began the subjection of the Church in England to the royal supremacy and its consequent separation from Rome. “And,” continues Morice, “after some special communication with the said Dr. Cranmer, the King retained him to write his mind in that his cause of divorcement, and committed him unto the Earl of Wiltshire, Queen Anne’s father, to be entertained of him at Durham Place, where the Earl did lie, until he had penned his mind and opinion concerning the said cause.”

With this task Cranmer was busy during December and January, and he is no doubt the “wonderfully virtuous and wise man,” by whose counsels the King then described himself as being encouraged. Other steps were promptly taken to carry out his advice, and in November Dr. Richard Croke, the great Greek scholar, was sent to Italy to ransack libraries for writings which would tell in Henry’s favour, and to secure the adhesion of noted doctors in the universities. As soon as Cranmer’s book was completed, it was circulated, apparently in manuscript, among the leading dons of Cambridge, and he was himself sent down to reinforce by word of mouth the argumerits of his pen.¹ Both methods met with success; in one day he is said to have converted six or seven learned men who had hitherto been opposed to the divorce; and when, in February, Gardiner and Fox were urging the nomination of a committee of university scholars to determine the question, objection was raised to many of their nominees on the ground that they had already expressed approval of Cranmer’s book.²

It does not appear that Cranmer had any part or lot in the manœuvres of the King’s agents to obtain a favourable vote in Senate-house at Cambridge. He had been selected to accompany the Earl of Wiltshire,³ Stokesley, afterwards Bishop of London, and Lee, afterwards Archbishop of York, on their embassy to the Pope and to the Emperor; and, though the ambassadors did not start, as has often been asserted,¹ in December, they left England late in January or early in February, 1530, before the matter came to a decision in the University. Soon after their departure the verdicts of Cambridge and Oxford in Henry’s favour were sent after them to be laid before the Pope in the hope that some impression might be made upon his mind. The envoys utilised their presence in France to urge the French King to obtain similar decisions from the Sorbonne and other learned bodies in his dominions. Eventually, Paris and Orleans, Angers, Bourges, and Toulouse adopted Henry’s view against the papal power to dispense; these votes were not obtained without some manipulation, but to represent them all as due to bribery is to accuse the pre-Reformation universities of a degree of corruption which the most zealous Protestant would scarcely believe to be possible. The truth is that the power of the Pope to dispense in such cases was, as Julius II. admitted, really a matter of doubt; and while individuals may have been bribed by Henry’s agents on the one hand or by Charles’s on the other, there is no more reason to question the honesty of the mass of the opinions given in Henry’s favour than of those given against him.

Meanwhile the ambassadors proceeded by slow stages through France—it was beneath their dignity to travel “in post,”—and they were too late to wirness the occasion on which for the last time in history a Holy Roman Emperor received his crown from the hands of a Pope. That ceremony took place at Bologna on 24 February, but it was the middle of March before Cranmer and his colleagues reached the city.¹ The Emperor was still there negotiating with Clement, and, appalled by the din of the Imperial arms, the Pope had no ears for requests from a distant king. Even when Charles was gone, his power remained : and though Clement repeatedly declared that he wished Henry would marry Anne Boleyn without further ado, and so relieve him of the responsibility for what might happen,² he would take no step which might expose him to the Emperor’s wrath. So Wiltshire and Lee returned in the early summer to France, while Stokesley was left at Bologna to deal with the university there, and Cranmer joined Croke with a similar object at Venice. In view of the fact that the Emperor and the Pope had just rearranged the political map of Italy after their fancy, and that Clement had drawn up a bull prohibiting all doctors, notaries, and others, from maintaining the invalidity of Henry’s marriage,³ it is surprising that the English agents should have met with any success. Yet Ferrara, Bologna, and Padua determined in their favour, and in June Cranmer is said to have offered to debate the question with any doctor in Rome. Thence he wrote on 12 July, admitting that their success was small; they dared not attempt, he says, to know any man’s mind, because of the Pope.¹ He did not escape the effects of the July climate at Rome, and lay there ill for a fortnight. On his recovery he returned to the charge with no better success than before. He wanted a papal brief in Henry’s favour, but whenever the Pope made the slightest concession in the way of postponing an adverse decision, the Emperor’s envoys made such an outcry, and so terrified him that the concession was quickly withdrawn.² Cranmer declared that he had never known such inconstancy; but this, we must recollect, was his first experience of Clement’s diplomacy. Personally he seems to have made a favourable impression on the Pope, who paid him the compliment of appointing him Penitentiary for England. Finally Cranmer left Rome in September, bringing with him to England little result of his mission, except the votes of the Italian universities, the credit for which was disputed by Stokesley and Croke. The latter had been an old Cambridge friend of Cranmer’s, and it is worth noting how highly Croke thought of Cranmer’s influence with the King. He hopes that Henry will believe only Cranmer’s version, and even sends his reports open to Cranmer, that he may determine whether or no they should be delivered to the King; he left “everything to Cranmer’s discretion and friendship.”³

There was now an apparent lull in the matter of the divorce. Parliament did not sit at all in the year 1530, and at Rome Henry contented himself with placing obstacles in the way of a decision which now could only be adverse; two years were consumed in discussing whether his agent should be admitted to plead that Henry could not be legally cited before the court. The time was not wasted in England; “nothing else,” wrote a Florentine in London, “is thought of every day, except arranging affairs in such a way that they do no longer be in want of the Pope, neither for filling vacancies in the Church, nor for any other purpose.” ¹ While the Curia was debating technicalities, Henry VIII. was undermining the foundations of the papal power in England, and taking measures which would render the Pope’s sentence a brutum fulmen whenever it might be given. Cranmer, however, had no share in the proceedings which ended in the King’s being acknowledged by Convocation in 1531 as Supreme Head of the Church in England; he was not a member of that body, but seems to have been quietly employed in further probing the intricacies of the divorce case. Reginald Pole’s treatise on the subject was submitted to him for examination in that year, and Cranmer reported that Pole’s arguments were so skilfully marshalled and plausibly put that if the book were published, the minds of the people would be incontrovertibly fixed in hostility to the King’s cause.² For his services he appears to have been rewarded with the Archdeaconry of Taunton,¹ a town which by a curious coincidence was represented in Parliament by his friend and ally, Thomas Cromwell.² How far either of these two heroes of the English Reformation influenced the King at this time by private advice it is not possible to ascertain. Both were in frequent communication with their sovereign; but on the other hand, Henry VIII.’s policy after Wolsey’s fall was mainly his own, and the general course of the Reformation was a perfectly natural development from existing circumstances, which it is idle to attribute to the influence of any one man.

Cranmer’s quiet studies were soon interrupted. His colleagues in Italy had spoken very highly of his diplomatic abilities, and early in 1532, Henry, who was a shrewd judge of men, selected him for the post of ambassador to the Emperor Charles V.³ He was expected to do his best to present the Divorce in as favourable a light as possible to the Emperor and his ministers, but more especially to the Princes of Germany, whom he was secretly to sound with respect to a possible alliance between them and England; and he was to endeavour to obtain the repeal of some restrictions on trade between Englishmen and Charles V.’s subjects in the Netherlands. He joined the Imperial Court at Ratisbon, and soon found himself helpless as regards the last part of his instructions, because Charles left the determination of commercial affairs in the Low Countries in the hands of his prudent sister, Mary the Regent. In July he quietly repaired to the Court of Saxony, where the Elector, John Frederick, had recently succeeded his father; he was commissioned to assure the Elector and the Dukes of Lüneburg and Anhalt of assistance from Henry VIII. and Francis I. in their opposition to Charles V. Suggestions had also been made in the previous year that the two kings should extend similar protection to the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, the ablest of the German Protestant princes.¹ When these projects were formed the prospect of civil war in Germany seemed imminent; the Protestants had been condemned at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, and Charles V. was threatening to reduce them by force of arms to obedience to himself and the Catholic Church, while they, in self-defence, had formed the Schmalkaldic League. But before Cranmer arrived at Ratisbon the situation had altered completely. The Turk was on the point of overrunning not only Hungary, but Germany; and the pressure of this peril forced the two parties together. To purchase the aid of the Protestant princes Charles made them such concessions at Nürnberg as to ensure, at any rate for the time, the peaceable exercise of their religion; and they were now more eager to show their zeal in defence of the fatherland than to turn their arms against their sovereign.¹ There were other obstacles to an understanding between Henry VIII. and the German Protestants : Henry disliked their view of the mass, and they disapproved of Henry’s matrimonial conduct.

But if Cranmer brought away from Germany no advantageous alliance for England, he formed there a bond which, however much it may have increased his domestic felicity, proved a serious embarrassment at more than one stage in his public career. During the discussions with dukes and divines at Nürnberg, he was naturally thrown into contact with the eminent pastor of that Lutheran city, Osiander,² who, although he may be roughly described as a Lutheran, differed in several respects from the great Reformer, and favoured a definition of the doctrines of the Eucharist and Justification by Faith which would tend to reconcile them to some extent with Catholic views. His arguments were probably not without effect upon Cranmer’s theological development; and in his turn the English divine was able to convince Osiander of the invalidity of Henry’s first marriage; he also persuaded the German to prosecute the labours on which he had long been engaged for the harmony of the four Gospels, and the volume was published in 1537 with a dedication to Cranmer.¹ In the course of his visits to Osiander’s house Cranmer became attached to his host’s niece, Margaret,² and he had apparently married her before he left the city. The step was a strong one, for Cranmer was now in priest’s orders, and the canons of the Western Church strictly imposed upon priests the obligation of celibacy.³ The authority of those canons was at the time being rudely shaken in England, but there was no indication that they would be so far overthrown as to permit the marriage of priests. On the other hand, neither Popes nor Kings had been in the habit of inquiring too closely into the private affairs of high-placed ecclesiastics. Wolsey had formed far less defensible unions, and Clement VII. himself was said at the time to have taken “two wives” with him to his interview with Francis I. at Marseilles.⁴ The worst that Cranmer had to fear was that his morality might be likened to that of the Pope and the Cardinal.

Another of Cranmer’s ambassadorial duties was to arrange with the Emperor the form which Henry’s assistance against the Turks should take. Both the English and French kings were bound by treaty to join in the defence of Christendom, but there was usually an easy method of escape from such obligations. Henry and Francis would only offer men, and Charles would only take money; and before the difference was adjusted the retreat of the Turks and the disbanding of the Emperor’s army relieved the immediate necessity. Cranmer followed the Imperial forces from Ratisbon to Vienna in September, and from Vienna to Villach in October. On the way he visited the scene of the battle between the Turks and the Imperial forces, and he noted in his letters¹ many things which might enlighten his master on the condition of the Emperor’s power in Germany and the prospect of his becoming a dangerous foe. His Italian and Spanish troops did more damage, says Cranmer, than the Turks themselves; they spread desolation far and wide along their march; and so disgusted were the “boors” that they gathered in the mountains and fell upon the troops and killed them whenever opportunity offered.² Neither Charles nor his brother Ferdinand³ was beloved in the country, and the Emperor had lost the esteem of military men by his failure to prosecute his advantage over the Turks and free his brother’s kingdoms from their ravages.

Cranmer dated the last of these letters on 20 October from Villach in Carinthia, whence the Emperor was to cross the Alps and again interview Clement VII. on his way to Spain. He got as far as Mantua, but before that second meeting at Bologna took place he had received his recall to England. Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, had died in August, and Cranmer was destined to be his successor. Gardiner, perhaps, might have had the office but for his opposition to Henry in the parliamentary session of the previous spring; and the knowledge embittered the relations between the two men for the rest of their lives.

Much has been made of this sudden promotion to the archbishopric of Canterbury of one who had at best only held an archdeaconry; but the fact has been overlooked that the preferment of many of the greatest primates of England has been equally rapid.¹ Of Cranmer’s predecessors, Becket,Winchelsey, and Islip were only archdeacons; Langton and Meopham were only canons; Kilwardby and Peckham were only priors; Brad wardine was chancellor of St. Paul’s, and Wethershed of Lincoln, when they were raised to the Metropolitan See. It had been the exception rather than the rule for a bishop to be translated to Canterbury; and so far as his previous preferment was concerned, Cranmer’s promotion could be justified by numerous precedents. Nor does it appear that a better choice could have been made with regard to personal qualities; the only living churchman with whom Cranmer could be compared in intellect was Pole, and Pole, who had already refused the archbishopric of York, was out of the question. The real objection was not to Cranmer’s person, but to the policy which he pursued.

Warham is said to have foretold that Cranmer would step into his shoes,¹ but to the new archbishop himself the nomination came as a somewhat unpleasant surprise. A man of strong domestic affections, he feared separation from the wife he had recently married; and there is no reason to doubt his assertion that he protracted his return journey to England in the vain hope that Henry would in the meantime change his mind.² Henry, however, soon had private reasons for hastening on Cranmer’s election, confirmation by the Pope, and consecration. As Queen Elizabeth was born on 7 September, 1533, Anne Boleyn’s pregnancy was no doubt known to the King in January of that year. It was important to save her character as far as was possible, and still more important that her issue should be legitimate according to England’s laws, which by hook or by crook must be made to suit the circumstances. On or about St. Paul’s Day, 25 January, Henry and Anne were privately married; but that was not enough without an authoritative declaration of the nullity of the King’s previous union with Catherine of Aragon. It was hopeless to expect such a favour from Clement VII., but it might be obtained from an Archbishop of Canterbury. Even that was not sufficient without a legal recognition of the Archbishop’s Court as the supreme and final court of English ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

These were the objects which Henry VIII. pursued in the spring of 1532 with consummate skill and audacity. Cranmer reached England in January, 1533; the usual practice of leaving rich bishoprics vacant for at least a year in order that their revenues might in the interval accrue to the Crown was abandoned, and Cranmer became Archbishop-elect of Canterbury. To meet his expenses Henry lent him a thousand pounds, and intimated pretty forcibly to the Pope that he must grant Cranmer his bulls at once and without the usual fees. Clement must have known the purpose for which the bulls were wanted, and it seems amazing that Henry should have made such demands, and still more so that they should have been granted. But the English King knew his business; in the previous year he had with some difficulty induced Parliament to leave it to him whether the Act of Annates should be put in force or not¹; and the persuasive he now applied to the Pope was the hint that refusal would cost him the First-fruits of all English benefices. The Pope and the Cardinals sighed, but after all it was better that they should go without some of their perquisites for Cranmer’s bulls; it was better that sentence should be given by him against Catherine of Aragon than that the Roman curia should forfeit all the wealth it drew from England. So on 21 February, in spite of the efforts of Chapuys, who sent an envoy to the Pope to warn him against Cranmer, the bulls were sped with unwonted celerity.

The lever placed in Henry’s hands by the Act of Annates was used for other purposes. It served to make the Pope and his ministers adopt an attitude of apparent friendliness to England, aad it was actually under this appearance of concord that the Act forbidding appeals to Rome was passed in 1533. Henry was pleasing the Pope, not only by withholding his consent to the Act of Annates, but by opposing a General Council which Clement feared above everything else,¹ and which Charles V. was demanding as part of his compact with the German Protestants. Clement, moreover, was bribed by the French offer of marriage between his niece, Catherine de Medici, and the future Henry II., and he seemed about to desert the Emperor’s cause.² Catherine of Aragon’s friends in England were furious; they cursed Charles for being so slack in her defence, and they cursed especially the Pope for expediting Cranmer’s bulls and delaying the sentence in Catherine’s favour. Henry took the papal nuncio down to Parliament to advertise the excellent terms upon which he stood with the Holy See¹; and he even told the unsuspicious priest that, although his studies on the subject of papal authority had caused him to retract his early defence of the Pope, yet Clement might perhaps give him occasion to probe the matter further still and reconfirm what he had originally written !² Of course this was all a piece of clever and not very scrupulous bluff, but political morality has always been a tender plant, and it was frail indeed in the sixteenth century. The means were none the less successful; the appearance of concord between Henry and the Pope disheartened the opponents of the Act of Appeals and its passage left the King master of the situation in England. Clement had confirmed an Archbishop who would assuredly decide the divorce case in Henry’s favour, and Parliament had made it illegal to appeal from his decision.

On 30 March Cranmer was consecrated. Four days before, he had drawn up a formal protest to the effect that he considered the oath of obedience to the Pope, which he would take at his consecration, a form and not a reality, and that he did not intend to bind himself to do anything contrary to the King and commonwealth of England, or to restrain his liberty in things pertaining to the reformation of the Christian religion and the government of the Church of England.¹ At his trial this protest was represented as a scandalous act, amounting to perjury.² It was due rather to an excess of scruple on Cranmer’s part. Most men would have taken the oath without question, thinking that any future Act of Parliament repudiating the papal jurisdiction would be a sufficient release from its obligations.³ Cranmer was not satisfied with this; he foresaw that England would throw off its allegiance to Rome, and he determined that there should be no misconception as to his own action. It was, however, necessary that he should take the oath, because it had been the law, or at least the custom, so to do, and it was doubtful whether he could be regarded as a properly constituted Archbishop unless he fulfilled all the prescribed formalities. The contention that all who had sworn obedience to the Holy See should always and in all circumstances be bound by their oath was a convenient weapon in the hands of Popes,¹ but no one had done more to weaken the force of oaths by their frequent grants of absolution. Such a contention would indeed tend to stereotype political and ecclesiastical conditions, and the state of the world would present a curious aspect to-day if at any period in its history oaths of allegiance had become perpetually binding. They are, in fact, feeble expedients which in public affairs are considered binding only so long as convenient; they never alter the course of events, and under the circumstances the counsel of perfection is undoubtedly “Swear not at all.” Cranmer, however, had no alternative, and while his conduct afforded his prosecutors too good a forensic opportunity to be lost, it need not materially affect his judgmentat the bar of history.

Twelve days after his consecration Cranmer wrote to the King, humbly begging for licence to proceed with the trial of the question between him and Catherine.² He gave as a reason for haste the murmurs of the people, but the real reason was the condition of Anne Boleyn. The way had been already prepared by Convocation, which had assented to two propositions: first, that as a matter of law the Pope had no authority to permit marriages between a man and his deceased brother’s wife when the previous union had been consummated; and, secondly, that as a matter of fact the marriage between Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon had been so consummated.¹ All Cranmer had to do was to act upon the decision of the Church in England, and Convocation must share with him the responsibility. He opened his court in May at Dunstable, some four miles from Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, where Catherine was then residing. She was duly summoned to appear,² but she refused to recognise Cranmer’s jurisdiction, and was declared contumacious. That suited the court very well; the case was quietly hurried on, and sentence was given on the 23rd.³ It was a mere repetition of the decree of Convocation; the marriage of Henry and Catherine was declared to have been void from the beginning, because the Pope did not possess the dispensing powers he claimed.

Five days later Cranmer pronounced, at Lambeth, that the King’s marriage with Anne Boleyn was valid. Assuming the correctness of the previous decision, that Henry had never been married to Catherine, there was no reason for this second declaration except to quiet the popular mind. But the vagueness of the Archbishop’s sentence spoilt its effect; it afforded no information as to the date or manner of the marriage, and to this day it remains a matter of mystery.¹ Almost immediately afterwards, on Whitsunday, the first of June, Cranmer crowned Anne Boleyn as Queen in Westminster Abbey,² The coronation feast was celebrated with no little splendour, but Anne’s enjoyment of it was sadly marred by the state of her health.³ Three months later she gave birth, at Greenwich Palace, to the future Queen Elizabeth, and it accorded well with the fitness of things that the first Metropolitan of the Reformed Church of England stood as godfather⁴ to the infant under whose guidance the cause of the Reformation finally triumphed.