Chapter IV. Cranmer and Reform

“THAT our said Sovereign Lord shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offences, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be, which by any manner spiritual authority or jurisdiction are or may lawfully be reformed, repressed … most to the pleasure of Almighty God, the increase of virtue in Christ’s religion, and for the conservation of the peace, unity, and tranquillity of this realm.” Such were the objects, as defined in the Act of Supremacy, which the King, armed with his two-edged sword of temporal and spiritual authority, now set out to accomplish. They were as vague as they were ample; the Supreme Head might think that he had been girt with these weapons to reform abuses which heretics cast in the teeth of the Church, or he might imagine that he had been called to extirpate heresies which feebler Popes had failed to crush. Cranmer looked for the one consummation, and Gardiner hoped for the other; and the parties which followed their lead fought a twelve-years’ fight for the control of the royal supremacy and the direction of England’s ecclesiastical policy. Henry held the balance, inclining now to this side, now to that, as his political or personal ends made it desirable to cultivate friendship with Protestant or Catholic powers. When, in 1539, the King threw his whole weight into the scale against the New Learning, he did so partly because, as Bishop Stubbs has said,¹ he “symbolised consistently with Gardiner and not with Cranmer,” but partly, perhaps, because he saw that unless he redressed the balance the Protestants would predominate, and the equilibrium, on which his power was based, would be destroyed; and, as a matter of fact, the balance did turn decisively in their favour as soon as Henry VIII. was removed from the scene.

The growth of the Protestant party and the development of its religious principles in England during the reign of Henry VIII. have been somewhat obscured by modern attempts² to minimise the influence of Protestantism in England, and to emphasise both the continuity of Catholic doctrine in the Church, and the identity of the mediæval Church in England with the modern Church of England.³ The Church is of course the same Church before and after the Reformation, but then Saul and Paul were the same man before and after conversion, and proof of the identity does not refute the change. Men do not change their bodies when they change their minds, and an institution may preserve its outward form while its spirit is altered. Except for the substitution of the royal for the papal supremacy, the Church retained its organisation almost intact, but the intention which underlay its forms and its formularies was profoundly modified by Cranmer himself, and by the influence of the new doctrines which are conveniently if not quite accurately described as Protestant.¹

The origin of these new doctrines or heresies in England is not correctly ascribed to Luther; the spread of Lutheranism on the Continent undoubtedly gave impetus to the movement in England, but the views of the English Reformers approach so much more nearly to those of Wycliffe than to those of Luther, that the Englishman rather than the German must be regarded as the morning star of the Anglican Reformation. Even as Wycliffe had done, so Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper looked to the State to reform a corrupt Church; like him they regarded the wealth of the clergy as an impediment to the exercise of spiritual influence, and, like him, they gradually receded from the Catholic doctrine of the mass. Most of the English Reformers were acquainted with Wycliffe’s works; Cranmer declares that he set forth the truth of the Gospel,¹ Hooper recalls how he resisted “the popish doctrine of the mass,”² Ridley how he denied transubstantiation,³ and Bale how he denounced the friars⁴; and it is not perhaps without significance that Henry VIII. himself in 1530 sent to Oxford for a copy of the articles on which Wycliffe had been condemned.⁵ The control of the press exercised by the authorities prevented his works being printed, but numbers of them circulated in manuscript, and Bale records⁶ with triumph that, in spite of the efforts to suppress them, not one had utterly perished.

“It is certain,” says Dr. Rashdall, “that the Reformation had virtually broken out in the secret bible-readings of the Cambridge reformers before either the trumpet-call of Luther or the exigencies of Henry VIII.’s personal and political position set men free once more to talk openly against the pope and the monks, and to teach a simpler and more spiritual gospel than the system against which Wycliffe had striven.”⁷

It is not probable that all the cases of heresy which occurred in the early years of Henry VIII.’s reign were due to the lingering subterranean influence of Wycliffe, and the popular tract, Wycliffe’s Wicket, the possession of which was frequently made a charge against their victims by the clerical courts, was not from the Reformer’s pen. But of the prevalence of heretical opinions in England before Luther’s revolt against Indulgences there is ample evidence. Foxe recounts the martyrdom of ten men and women between 1509 and 1518; many suffered a less extreme form of persecution, and in the year 1517 alone thirty-five persons in the diocese of London were forced to abjure their opinions.¹ Nor does Foxe’s witness stand alone; occasionally instances of heresy are mentioned in the State papers,² and on 8 November, 1511, Ammonius, Henry VIII.’s Latin secretary, writing to his friend Erasmus, attributes the scarcity and dearness of wood to the holocaust caused by the heretics.³ It was a grim and heartless joke, no doubt; but there would have been no point in it unless there had been a notable number of heretics burnt. And the secretary’s letter proceeds to state that his servant’s brother, “lout as he is, has founded a sect and has his followers.” Three months later the movement had become so pronounced that Warham summoned a convocation of his province for the express purpose of extirpating heresy.¹ In October, 1516, More declared that the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, that scathing attack on the clergy, was popular everywhere.² Two months later one Humphrey Bonner was accused of ridiculing the Holy See in his sermons,³ and Henry’s famous book against Luther appears to have been begun in the spring of 1518,⁴ before Luther had attracted any attention outside Germany, and to have been originally directed against heretics among his own subjects.

Under these circumstances Luther’s books and doctrines fell upon fruitful soil in England. In 1521 Oxford was said to be infected with Lutheranism,⁵ and at Cambridge it was even more prevalent. Henry VIII.’s book and the solemn committal to the flames of Luther’s writings in St. Paul’s Church-yard on 12th May in that year, before Wolsey, the Papal nuncio, and other high dignitaries, did little to stop the infection; and during the next ten years the German Reformer’s views gained ever wider acceptance in England. Anne Boleyn and her father were once described by Chapuys as being more Lutheran than Luther himself⁶; and even Henry VIII. was beginning to look with lenient eyes on men who might be useful pawns in the struggle with Rome.⁷

But not every one who was called Lutheran in England adopted the doctrines of Wittenberg; the phrase was a generic term used to express any sort of hostility to Rome or the clergy, and even the possession of the Bible in English was sometimes sufficient to make its owner a Lutheran suspect. The number of Englishmen who were really Lutherans was probably small, and Cranmer at the time of his appointment as Archbishop was certainly not one of them. He may have been affected to some extent by Osiander’s views during his stay in Germany, but it is doubtful whether Osiander himself could properly be called a Lutheran.

The pressing need in Cranmer’s eyes and in those of most reforming churchmen was not a change of doctrine so much as a change of conduct, and the revival of Scriptural knowledge among both clergy and laity. As soon as he had been enthroned at Canterbury (3 December, 1533), he commenced a visitation of his diocese. In 1534 he directed his commissary to visit Norwich, where the Bishop had distinguished himself by the persecution of Bilney¹ and other reformers. Next followed a metropolitical visitation of the southern province. It involved Cranmer, as it had generally involved his predecessors, in disputes with his suffragan bishops. Personal jealousy embittered the quarrel; probably both Gardiner of Winchester and Stokesley of London considered that they had better claims than Cranmer to sit in Augustine’s chair; and they were naturally disposed to resent his visitation, because their own sympathies were conservative and the Archbishop’s were in favour of change. Gardiner objected that his See had been visited not long before by Warham, and in his zeal for the royal supremacy he made the not very scrupulous protest that Cranmer’s assumption of the title “primate” was an infraction of the King’s ecclesiastical prerogative. He seems to have thought that all bishops should be equal under the Crown—at least so long as Cranmer was Archbishop; and indeed a proposal was put forward in Parliament in 1532 for the transference to the King of the primate’s powers over his bishops.¹ Stokesley cavilled at the use of the style legatus natus of the Apostolic See, which had belonged to Archbishops of Canterbury for centuries, and had not yet been legally abolished. The King, however, upheld Cranmer in both cases, and his visitation duly proceeded. Another attempt, instigated, probably, by personal enmity to Cranmer, was made against his primatial dignity. The Archbishop of Canterbury was head of two ecclesiastical courts, the Court of Arches and the Court of Audience, in the latter of which he heard appeals from other dioceses besides his own. It was now asserted that former Archbishops held this court only in virtue of their legatine authority from the Pope, and that, the Papal jurisdiction having been repudiated, the Court of Audience had no legal basis.² Cranmer contested this idea and appears again to have been upheld by Henry; but eventually the other view prevailed, and when, in very recent times, an Archbishop once more held a Court of Audience at Lambeth, the “court” was admitted to be no real court at all, and its decisions to have no legal binding power.¹

Meanwhile, in 1534, Cranmer issued a pastoral in which he enjoined silence respecting masses for the dead, prayers to saints, pilgrimages, and the celibacy of the clergy. These practices were the subject of much denunciation, and Cranmer hoped that within a year an authoritative decision on these points would be adopted. He also persuaded Convocation to petition for an authorised version of the Bible in English. Four years before, there had been a persistent rumour that Henry was in favour of this measure²; but the tendencies encouraged by Tyndale’s translations alarmed the King, and his promise of the boon was made conditional upon the abandonment of unorthodox views.³ So now the petition of Convocation was accompanied by a demand for the suppression of heretical books. Cranmer also, in conjunction with Cromwell and Anne Boleyn, used his influence to procure the promotion of Reformers to the bench of Bishops. He had long befriended Latimer,¹ who in 1535 was appointed to the See of Worcester; Shaxton was made Bishop of Salisbury, Foxe of Hereford, Hilsey of Rochester, and Barlow of S. David’s, with the result that for a few years the episcopal bench was more inclined to reform than the lower house of Convocation. Nevertheless the conservative element on the bench frustrated for the time Cranmer’s projected Bible in English. He divided the task of revision among various prelates, and Gardiner performed his portion, but Stokesley did nothing, declaring that it was “abusing the people to give them liberty to read the Scriptures.”²

The year 1535 was, however, notable mainly for the visitation of the monasteries under the authority of Thomas Cromwell, who, to the derogation of the Church, had been appointed Henry’s Vicar-General in ecclesiastical matters. To facilitate his operations all episcopal jurisdictions, including Cranmer’s, were for the time suspended, and so the Archbishop of Canterbury was relieved of all responsibility for the methods employed to destroy the monasteries. That the monasteries needed drastic reformation Cranmer was no doubt convinced, and he probably had little sympathy with the principle of monasticism; but he can have had no enthusiasm for the way in which their vast estates were used to bribe the laity into supporting Henry’s government. Without denying that the county families and noble houses, founded on the spoils of the Church, have thereby been enabled in the past to do their country some service, it may be doubted whether the permanent results have been beneficial; and it may be admitted that from the point of view of education and of provision for the sick and poor, the dissipation of monastic property was a waste of one of the most splendid opportunities in English history.

Another tragedy, with which Cranmer was more nearly concerned, was enacted in 1536. Whether Anne Boleyn was guilty or innocent of the charges on which she was beheaded is a question with which Cranmer’s biographer is not called upon to deal,¹ for the Archbishop’s part in the matter related not to the Queen’s death, but to her divorce. He was inexpressibly shocked at her fall, and, so far as we know, he was the only man of the time who had the courage to plead with Henry on her behalf. He had never had better opinion in woman, he wrote, than he had in her; and next to the King he was most bound unto her of all creatures living; he ventured to express a hope that she would be found innocent, and even reminded Henry that he, too, had offended God.² Anne was, however, condemned by a court of twenty-six temporal peers, over which her uncle presided, and Cranmer was then called in to pronounce her divorce. The reasons for this extraordinary step are still obscure, and the grounds on which the divorce was declared were kept profoundly secret. Why, if Henry merely wanted to get rid of his Queen, was he not satisfied with her execution? What object could possibly be served by proclaiming the marriage to have been null from the beginning, and by bastardising the Princess Elizabeth as well as the Princess Mary? It may be that Henry had become sensitive to the force of public opinion against the marriage, for his envoys had just failed to persuade the Lutherans of its validity. Anne, moreover, had had at least two miscarriages; similar misfortunes had convinced Henry of the nullity of his marriage with Catherine, and conscientious scruples grow by what they feed on.

However this may be, Cranmer had to decide the question by canon law; and the hopeless confusion into which canon law had fallen now that the Papal jurisdiction, the keystone of the arch, had been abolished, gave rise to the strangest anomalies. Two canonical objections to the marriage were raised. The first was an alleged precontract between Anne and the Earl of Northumberland, which was supported by some circumstantial evidence, although the Earl himself solemnly denied its existence. There was a more valid objection. Henry’s previous relations with Mary Boleyn had created an affinity between him and her sister Anne, which, by canon law, was a bar to their marriage. For this reason Henry had obtained a dispensation from Clement VII. in 1528; but since that date the Pope’s dispensing power had been repudiated, and the old canonical objection was therefore revived.¹ The King in his anxiety to divorce Catherine had denied the power of the Pope to dispense; by so doing he had, probably without realising it at first, invalidated his marriage with Anne, which rested upon the same dispensing power. The realisation of this fact, stimulated no doubt by his failure to obtain recognition for her in any quarter outside England, was probably responsible for her divorce, though not for her death; and, monstrous as it seems from the point of view of justice and equity, the divorce of Anne Boleyn was probably legal. A less opportunist government than that of Henry VIII. would have endeavoured to put the existing canon laws on a firmer and more reasonable basis, but the King had already enough on his hands, and the position of the canon law in England has to this day remained somewhat anomalous.

On the day (19 May) that Anne Boleyn was beheaded, Cranmer granted Henry a special licence to marry a third wife.¹ Jane Seymour was descended on her mother’s side from Edward III., and the stringency of the canon law was still so great that the Archbishop had to grant at the same time a dispensation relieving the parties from the impediment to their marriage arising from consanguinity. They were betrothed on the 20th and were privately married at York Place ten days later.² After sixteen months Queen Jane gave birth on 12 October, 1537, to the future Edward VI., over whose birth, wrote Latimer, there was as much joy as over that of S. John the Baptist. Cranmer was godfather to the infant at his christening on the 15th.³ Nine days afterwards the Queen died. Had she lived she would have saved Henry and the English Church from the serio-comic episode of Anne of Cleves and from the tragedy of Catherine Howard.

From these unsavoury matters of royal matrimony the Archbishop turned with relief to more congenial work. In February, 1536, he had preached a notable sermon in S. Paul’s Churchyard, “and,” writes Chapuys, “of the two hours that he preached one and a half were occupied with blasphemies against His Holiness and his predecessors.⁴ The special object of his discourse appears to have been not, as Chapuys implies, to deny the existence of purgatory, that dim realm in which were laid the unseen foundations of the Roman Church, but to denounce the idea that Popes could release men’s souls from durance. He also sought, according to Chapuys, to prove that all the Scriptural passages about Antichrist referred to the Italian pontiff; and if so, he entered upon a sort of controversy of which the annals of the Reformed churches are too full.

Other doctrines besides that of purgatory occupied the bishops’ attention. “The prelates here,” writes Chapuys on 1 April, “are daily in communication in the house of the Archbishop of Canterbury for the determination of certain articles and for the reform of ecclesiastical ceremonies.”¹ They were, in fact, engaged in debates which resulted in the Ten Articles, the first definition of the faith put forward under the royal supremacy. It was a compromise between the old faith and the new; but it was a victory for the latter, in so far as “no compromise” had hitherto been the Catholic attitude. The matter was, indeed, started in Convocation in June in the form of a complaint preferred by the lower house of sixty-seven Lutheran errors then current in England which the clergy thought should be repressed.² Fuller says these errors contained “the Protestant religion in ore”; and it was not likely that Cranmer and the newly appointed prelates of the upper house would consent to their indiscriminate condemnation. The result seems to have been a deadlock between the two parties, and Henry VIII. took the matter into his own hands,¹ and himself penned a set of articles. These were revised by Cranmer and laid before Convocation by Bishop Foxe on 11 July; and the clergy who in the same session admitted Dr. Petre to the highest seat in their assembly on the ground that he was Cromwell’s proctor, and Cromwell was the Supreme Head’s Vicegerent,² did not venture to reject the royal theology.

The articles were passed, subscribed, and printed.³ Five were devoted to points of faith and five to ceremonies. Three sacraments, baptism, penance, and the Eucharist, were strongly upheld; works of charity were declared to be necessary to salvation, auricular confession was not to be contemned, and justification could only be attained “by contrition and faith, joined with charity.” Images were to stand in the churches, saints to be invoked as intercessors, the usual Catholic ceremonies to be observed, and prayers to be offered for the departed. On the other hand, the Bible and the three Creeds were to be regarded as the standard of orthodoxy, a position from which the Reformed Church of England has never varied; amendment of life was pronounced a necessary part of penance, faith was joined with charity as necessary to justification, and the article on the Eucharist did not go beyond an assertion of the Real Presence; there was to be no censing, kneeling, or offering to images; the invocation of the saints was “to be done without any vain superstition, as to think that any saint is more merciful, or will hear us sooner than Christ”; ceremonies were declared to have no “power to remit sin” nor masses to deliver souls from purgatory. The mention of only three sacraments does not perhaps imply a repudiation of the other four, though the attempt then made to introduce a fourth, the sacrament of holy orders, failed. On the whole, the Ten Articles were a notable advance towards the purification of the Church, and Cranmer and his reforming colleagues had reason to feel satisfied that they had brought the King thus far. Many of the worst abuses had been removed at least from the seat of authority; the whole system of Indulgences, which had provoked Luther’s revolt, was repudiated; the polytheism, into which popular worship of saints and images tended to degenerate, was checked¹; and amendment of life rather than performance of useless penances was held up as the true symbol of repentance. The Articles were, in fact, an excellent embodiment of the practical, as distinguished from the doctrinal Reformation, which was the first and foremost object of the movement.

The same practical object is apparent in the Injunctions¹ issued by Cromwell in August to enforce the Ten Articles. Attention was called to the fact that the Articles distinguished the “real doctrine of Salvation” from the “rites and ceremonies of the Church,” that the people might know “what was necessary in religion, and what was instituted for the decent and politic order of the Church.” Superstition, holy-days, images, relics, miracles, and pilgrimages were to be discouraged, and men were exhorted to keep God’s commandments, to provide for their families, and to bestow what they could afford on the poor rather than spend it in offerings to relics and images or in making pilgrimages to shrines. The clergy were to urge fathers to teach their children the Paternoster, the Articles of Faith, and the commandments in their mother-tongue, and to bring them up in learning or in some honest occupation or trade. A Bible in Latin and English² was to be provided in the choir of every church for every man to read. The clergy were to eschew taverns and alehouses, cards or other unlawful games, and to set an example to others by devoting their leisure to the study of the Scriptures and by the purity of their lives; they were to expend a fortieth of their incomes on the poor, and if they had a hundred pounds³ or more a year they were to provide exhibitions for poor scholars at some school or university. The ecclesiastical government of Henry VIII. has been bitterly, and in some respects, justly, denounced, but at least it set before the Church some ideals which have not yet been attained.

Nor were the reforms which Henry did accomplish allowed to pass without protest. Reaction was gathering its forces, and while Cromwell was denouncing pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints, another sort of pilgrimage was organising from which he and his colleagues had more to fear. It is not, however, quite accurate to represent the rising in northern England in the autumn of 1536, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, as exclusively a religious movement; the first acts of rebellion broke out not against the visitors of monasteries, but against the collectors of taxes; and while the people in the north undoubtedly suffered from the break-up of monastic establishments, they had other grievances and feared other ills. The second article of the Lincolnshire rebels was a demand for the repeal of the recent Statute of Uses. The enclosure movement was responsible for at least as many homeless vagrants as the ejection of the monks from their cells, and evicted tenants had no pensions like the monks to alleviate their sufferings. More prosperous people, too, were alarmed by reports that taxes were to be levied on every baptism, marriage, and burial, and fines on the beasts of the field; that churches within five miles of another were to be destroyed as superfluous, and their jewels and plate confiscated; and that there was to be a rigid inquisition into every man’s property. These seditious rumours did their work, and in the autumn of 1536 Lincolnshire first and Yorkshire next flamed out in revolt. It was a great opportunity for the Pope’s adherents in England, but even the most reactionary of the English Catholics seemed to have little enthusiasm for the Papal cause. His claims to spiritual supremacy were mentioned during the conference at Pontefract, but it was suggested that he should delegate his functions to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, “so that the said Bishop of Rome have no further meddling.”¹ The popular demand in the north, so far as religion was concerned, seems to have been for the restoration of Catholicism minus the Pope, and one of the rebels’ articles went to the root of the whole conflict between mediaeval and modern ideas. It denied the power of any nation to repudiate received canon laws without the consent of a General Council²; that was the old ideal against which England protested by asserting her right to reform her national Church herself. Cranmer was naturally singled out for attack, both as a patron of heretics and because of his sentence against Catherine of Aragon.³ The rebels demanded that he should be handed over to them, or banished the realm, and one of their popular songs ran:

Crim,¹ Cran,² and Riche,³

With three L⁴ and their liche.

As some men teach,

God them amend.

And that Aske⁵ may,

Without delay,

Here make a stay,

And well to end.

South of the Trent, however, the old faith had no such staunch friends as Aske and his followers, and early in 1537 the revolt was quenched, or rather burnt itself out. It may have taught Henry to be cautious in religious innovations, and possibly to its influence may be traced the fact that the four sacraments which had been omitted from the Ten Articles of 1536 were included in the Institution of a Christian Man, published in 1537. This was an exposition of the orthodox faith, as understood in England, on which the Bishops were engaged from February until June; but all their prolonged debates produced no better definition of the Faith than that contained in the King’s Ten Articles. The insistence on the seven sacraments was the only concession made to the reactionary party, and the doctrine of Purgatory was repudiated as emphatically as before. Nevertheless Henry VIII. took no responsibility for the book; he had not had time, he wrote in August,¹ to examine it properly, but he trusted to the wisdom of his prelates and gave his consent to its publication. It was accordingly known as The Bishops’ Book, and the preface written by Bishop Foxe of Hereford declares that it represented the final and unanimous agreement of the assembled Bishops and divines.²

The same year saw the publication of the first authorised version of the Bible in English, a project on which Cranmer had long set his heart. Versions of the Scriptures in vernacular tongues had existed for some time both in England and on the Continent, and with a view to belittling the work of the Reformers, their importance has lately been much exaggerated. For they were made from the Vulgate, which was itself a bad translation of inferior versions of the orginal documents. Tyndale’s was the first English translation from the original Hebrew and Greek, and Tyndale’s has been condemned and burnt not so much because of the errors which it undoubtedly contained, as because of the approaches it made to truth. It was shocking to a generation which believed that Jesus Christ had endowed the Church with the institutions, rites, and ceremonies it possessed in the sixteenth century, to find πρεσ-βύτεροζ translated “elder” instead of “priest,” ἐϰϰλησία as “congregation” instead of “church,” μετανοε̃ιν as “repent” instead of “do penance,” and ἀγάπη as “love” instead of “charity.” Sir Thomas More had no objection to the truth being made known to the select few, but an attempt like Tyndale’s to bring it home to “the boy that driveth his plough” he regarded as “a design to depreciate the authority of an ordained priesthood and of an organised Church.”¹ More’s views in this matter were shared by Henry VIII. and by most of his Bishops; but in 1534 Cranmer had induced Convocation to petition for another English version, and Cromwell encouraged Coverdale to make his translation in 1535. It was much inferior to Tyndale’s, making no pretence to original scholarship, and being derived mainly from the Vulgate, and from Luther’s German translation; but its sale, which had hitherto gone on unauthorised, was licensed by the King in 1537, probably to enable the clergy to comply with the Injunctions of 1536, ordering the provision of an English Bible in every church before August, 1537. This, however, was not the version which Cranmer sent to Cromwell on the 4th of that month, declaring that he liked it “better than any other translation heretofore made,” and urging that it might be licensed for sale “until such time that we Bishops shall set forth a better translation, which I think will not be till a day after doomsday.”¹ This latter version had been prepared by John Rogers, the martyr, who, according to Bradford, “broke the ice valiantly” in Queen Mary’s reign. Rogers had been entrusted by Tyndale with the manuscript of his incomplete translation of the Bible, including the whole of the New Testament and the Old as far as Jonah; he incorporated all the former, and the latter as far as the second book of Chronicles; the rest he borrowed from Coverdale.² The book was originally printed at Antwerp, but Grafton, the English printer, purchased the sheets and sent a copy to Cranmer, who was so pleased with it that he wrote the above letter to Cromwell. The result exceeded his expectations and nine days later he again wrote to Cromwell.¹

“My very singular good lord, in my most hearty wise I commend me unto your lordship. And whereas I understand that your lordship, at my request, hath not only exhibited the bible which I sent unto you, to the king’s majesty, but also hath obtained of his grace that the same shall be allowed by his authority to be bought and read within this realm; my lord, for this your pain taken in this behalf, I give unto you my most hearty thanks, assuring your lordship for the contentation of my mind, you have shewed me more pleasure herein than if you had given me a thousand pound; and I doubt not but that hereby such fruit of good knowledge shall ensue that it shall well appear hereafter what high and acceptable service you have done unto God and the king; which shall so much redound to your honour that, besides God’s reward, you shall obtain perpetual memory for the same within this realm. And as for me, you may reckon me your bondman for the same. And I dare be bold to say, so may ye do my lord of Worcester.”²

A fortnight later he once more wrote to thank the Vicegerent for his services in the matter.

“For the which act, not only the King’s majesty, but also you shall have perpetual laud and memory of all them that be now, or hereafter shall be God’s faithful people and the followers of his word. And this deed you shall hear of at the great day, when all things shall be opened and made manifest. For our Saviour Christ saith in his Gospel that whosoever shrinketh from him and his word, and is abashed to profess and set it forth before men in this world, he will refuse him at that last day; and contrary, whosoever constantly doth profess him and his word, and studieth to set that forward in this world, Christ will declare the same at the last day before his Father and all his angels, and take upon him the defence of those men.”¹

So the “mischievous perversion” of the heretic who less than a year before had been burnt at the stake in Antwerp,² went forth with Cranmer’s blessing to work its way among the English people, and Tyndale’s translation, which had before been condemned, received now the sanction of authority, and permeated all future versions of the Bible in English. The result was not due to the Bishops as a whole, but to Cranmer, Cromwell, and Henry VIII., and of the three Cranmer, whose motives were unmixed with any considerations of worldly policy, deserves the greatest credit. This version was, however, too advanced for the government, and in 1538–9 an expurgated edition was printed in Paris, where finer type was available than in England. It is known as the Great Bible, and also, from the fact that the Archbishop wrote a preface for the 1540 and 1541 editions of it, as “Cranmer’s Bible.” In 1538 Cromwell issued a fresh set of Injunctions,¹ ordering that a copy of this Bible “of the largest volume”² should be set up in every church where the people might most commodiously resort to it and read it, the cost of purchase being defrayed half by the parishioners and half by the incumbent.³ The clergy were “expressly to provoke, stir, and exhort every person to read the same,” but to avoid contention and altercation and to reserve disputed points for “men of higher judgment in Scripture.” In other respects the Injunctions of 1538 were similar to those of 1536; every incumbent was to recite the Paternoster, Creed, and Ten Commandments in English, that his flock might learn them by degrees; he was to require some knowledge of the rudiments of the Faith before admitting candidates to the sacrament of the Altar, to keep a register of births, marriages, and deaths,⁴ and to preach at least once a quarter.

The reasons which led Henry VIII. to permit these instalments of the Reformation were political rather than religious. The reading of the Scriptures, and the growing disbelief in Purgatory, tended to destroy what hold the Papacy still had over the minds of Englishmen and indirectly to reconcile them to Henry’s own supremacy; the way was also paved for a better understanding with the Protestant princes of Germany whom Henry’s political exigencies compelled him then to conciliate. Before the quarrel with the Emperor over Catherine of Aragon, the intense rivalry between Charles V. and Francis I. made England fairly secure; but the policy Henry pursued with regard to the Church involved the possibility of a Catholic coalition, and forced him to look beyond France for friends. These would naturally be found in the German Protestants, who, since 1530, had always been on the verge of war with their Catholic Habsburg rulers. In 1535 and 1536, English agents had been busy in Germany seeking for the basis of a political and theological union between England and the Lutheran states. Two years later the growing friendship of Charles and Francis, promoted by Paul III., threatened both English and Germans, and another effort was made to bring them together. This was Cromwell’s favourite scheme, and Cranmer from very different motives threw himself eagerly into the work. He had since 1532 kept in communication with Lutheran divines, and his own theological opinions were nearer the Lutheran standpoint than those of any other Bishop in England. In 1536 Bucer dedicated to Cranmer his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, prefixing a long letter which expressed the hope of Germany that the Archbishop of Canterbury would succeed in his efforts to reform the Church in England.¹ When the Protestant deputies, headed by Burckhardt, Vice-chancellor of Saxony, arrived in London in May, 1538, they found their chief support in Cranmer, and the Archbishop probably presided at the conferences between them and the English Bishops. The Germans demanded, as a preliminary to an alliance, the concession of the cup to the laity, the abolition of private masses, and permission for priests to marry; but the English Bishops refused to discuss these demands, saying that Henry VIII. was himself composing a reply. They wished to treat of the four disputed sacraments, matrimony, holy orders, confirmation, and extreme unction; but on these points they knew, says Cranmer, that the Germans would not agree with them, “so that I perceive,” he writes to Cromwell, “that the bishops seek only an occasion to break the concord.”² They were, however, better informed of Henry’s mind than the Archbishop. It was not Cranmer, but Tunstall,³ who was asked to assist the King; and his reply asserted the Catholic view of all the disputed questions. The concession of the cup to the laity, permission for priests to marry, and the abolition of private masses were all refused, and in October the Protestant envoys returned home empty-handed.

This rigid adherence to Catholic doctrine did not imply any slackening in Henry’s pursuit of ecclesiastical property, or in his onslaughts on what he called superstitious practices; and in 1538–39 there was a regular campaign against the remaining monasteries, the shrines and relics of the saints, and wonder-working images. Cranmer himself suggested that royal commissioners should inspect the blood of S. Thomas in Christ Church, Canterbury, which he suspected to be but “a feigned thing, made of some red ochre or of such like matter.”¹ The “blood of Hailes” suffered a similar inquisition, and the wonderful Rood of Boxley, an image whose eyes opened and shut, was exposed at Maidstone. These, we are told, were innocent toys never intended to deceive the most credulous folk,² and never put to such uses as the blood of S. Januarius at Naples. But, for innocent toys, their destruction provoked a somewhat excessive jubilation among the reformers. “Dagon,” wrote one,³ “is everywhere falling in England. Bel of Babylon has been broken in pieces”; and it is doubtful whether the Philistines looked upon Dagon and the Assyrians regarded Bel as nothing but innocent toys.

The surrender of the greater monasteries and the destruction of shrines like that of S. Thomas at Canterbury yielded Henry more solid gratifications than the burning of graven images. Rents from thousands of acres of monastic land went to fill the gaping void in Henry’s exchequer, and cartloads of gold and jewels from the shrine of S. Thomas found their way to the royal treasure-house. This last outrage on Catholic sentiment precipitated the issue of the bull of excommunication which the Pope had long held in suspense over Henry’s head. But its force was spent even before Henry’s new treasures, and its main effect was to drive the King into the arms of Anne of Cleves. The Duke of Cleves was not exactly a Lutheran,¹ but he had reforming tendencies, heretical relationships, and claims on parts of the Netherlands; and Cromwell hoped, by marrying the King to Anne, to cement a political alliance between the German princes and England. The Emperor was passing through France on apparently intimate terms with Francis I.; and if, in their interviews at Paris, the two Catholic sovereigns agreed to obey the behests of their father the Pope, the English king would be placed in an awkward position. And so Henry consented, led on by Holbein’s flattering portrait of Anne of Cleves and by Cromwell’s extravagant praise of her charms,² to place his neck once more under the matrimonial yoke; he hoped that his support of Cleves and other German princes would give Charles enough to do at home without troubling to execute Papal censures in England.

The event belied both Cromwell’s and Cranmer’s expectations, and brought their ideas of a religious reformation into violent conflict with those of their masterful sovereign. Cromwell’s religious sincerity has recently been denied, mainly in order to enhance his reputation for unscrupulous political skill.¹ Probably some injustice has thereby been done him; his private friendship with advanced reformers,² and his hostility to Catholic prelates seem inconsistent with the theory that to him all religions were indifferent; his constant efforts to promote a union with Protestant princes give more support to his sincerity than to his sagacity, and one of the counts against him in the Act of Attainder was that he affirmed heretical doctrine condemned by the King to be good. About Cranmer’s attitude there is no doubt; his statesmanship was not of a very high order, and he was little interested in the political aspect of affairs. His mind was bent on religious reform, and his theological opinions travelled slowly but steadily away from the Old in the direction of the New Learning. His zeal for the Reformation and his sanguine temperament sometimes led him to take a more optimistic view of its progress than the facts warranted; and in 1537 he rebuked a Kentish magistrate for asserting that the Ten Articles and the Institution of a Christian Man “allowed all the old fashion and put all the knaves of the New Learning to silence.”

“If,” Cranmer went on, “men will indifferently read those late declarations, they shall well perceive that purgatory, pilgrimages, praying to saints, images, holy bread, holy water, holy days,¹ merits, works, ceremony, and such other be not restored to their late accustomed abuses; but shall evidently perceive that the word of God hath gotten the upper hand of them all.”²

This dispute as to the real intention of Anglican doctrine was the first of a series which is not yet exhausted; and thus early it appeared that the Anglican settlement was to be a compromise between two opposing schools of thought, and a compromise so ambiguously and so skilfully expressed that each party could read into the terms its own individual meaning and turn them to its own purposes whenever it happened to be predominant.

Cranmer, however, still held to Catholic doctrine in its essential details. He, like the Church, recognised no divorce, and set his face against the prevailing lax views on marriage which had been encouraged by the frequency of Papal dispensations from the canon law. He was often pressed by men of influence to grant similar dispensations himself,¹ but always refused. He wrote in disgust to Osiander about the immorality at which Lutheran divines connived when practised by Lutheran princes, and particularly with respect to the bigamous marriage which they, adopting a precedent set by a Pope, countenanced in the case of Philip of Hesse.

“What excuse,” he asked, “can you possibly offer for allowing divorce and remarriage while both the divorced parties are alive, or what is still worse, without any divorce at all, the marriage of a man to more than one wife? By the teaching of the Apostles and of Christ himself, marriage is only of one with one, nor can those who have been joined contract new unions except after the death of one or the other partner.”²

He also still held the canonical doctrine that “such marriages as be in lawful age contracted per verba de præsenti are matrimony before God,” and such solemn betrothals therefore invalidated any subsequent marriage with other persons.

Not less important was his assertion of the Catholic doctrine of the mass. He had already abandoned the Roman dogma of Transubstantiation; it is not affirmed in the Ten Articles of 1536, and in 1558 he wrote to Cromwell that Adam Damlip, the preacher of Calais, “taught but the truth” when he “confuted the opinion of Transubstantiation.” But he was still a firm believer in the Real Presence; and when a Zwinglian, Joachim of Watt (Vadianus), whose acquaintance Cranmer seems to have made in 1532, sent him a treatise against that doctrine, he declared himself much displeased with the argument, and said he wished Vadianus had employed his study to better purpose.¹ Nor did he deny the necessity of recourse, in the last resort, to extreme penalties against obstinate disbelievers in the real presence. Toleration was in the sixteenth century no more a part of the orthodox Protestant creed than it was of Roman Catholicism; Protestants as well as Catholics thought that only one form of truth could be true, and that form must be preserved at all costs; and toleration was not conceded until the impossibility of forcing men to conform to one orthodox standard had been practically demonstrated. But Cranmer’s mildness made him reluctant to persecute, and the tale of his victims is short. In 1538 one Atkinson² was accused before Cranmer of denying the sacrament of the altar; but he recanted and escaped with doing penance. In the same year Cranmer was joined with other Bishops in the proceedings against John Lambert, but Stokesley and Gardiner were the moving spirits, and Gardiner is said to have expressed discontent with the way in which Cranmer at Henry’s command replied to Lambert’s contentions. The King himself presided at Lambert’s trial, and the sentence was read by Cromwell.¹ With regard to Anabaptists he probably felt less scruple; the recent excesses at Münster had shocked the whole of Europe, and the Lutheran elector of Saxony wrote to warn Henry VIII. against members of the sect who were flocking to England. The Archbishop was placed on a commission to deal with them,² but we have no details to show his personal connection with the burning of three Anabaptists on St. Andrew’s Day, 1538,³ and he was soon absorbed in an attempt to stem the tide of reaction which in the following year threatened to involve all reformers alike in a common fate.

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¹ Stubbs, Lectures on Mediæval and Modern History, ed. 1887, p. 299.

² E. g., Canon Dixon’s great work, The History of the Church of England, 1530–1570, 6 vols.

³ The excess to which the practice of exaggerating the independence of the English Church during the Middle Ages, and of laying stress on its modern Catholicism has gone, has led one critic to affirm that some writers believe the Church to have been Protestant before the Reformation and Catholic after it.

¹ The term properly applies only to those who adopted the Protest drawn up by some of the German princes against the decrees of the Diet of Spires in 1529, but the need of some common designation for the religious opponents of Rome led to its use outside Germany, and it began to be applied to English Reformers in the reign of Edward VI. (See the present writer’s Tudor Tracts, p. xxiii., note). It was of course never admitted into the formularies of the English Church.

¹ Cranmer, Works, i., 14.

² Hooper, Works, i., 527.

³ Ridley, Works, p. 158.

⁴ Bale, Select Works, p. 171.

⁵ L. and P., iv., 6546.

⁶ Bale, Works, p. 140.

⁷ Dict. of Nat. Biog., art. “Wycliffe,” lxiii., 218.

¹ Foxe, Acts and Monuments, iv., 206.

² E. g., L. and P., i., 1381; cf. H. E. Jacobs, The Lutheran Movement in England, p. 3; “as late as 1521, the Bishop of London arrested nearly five hundred Lollards, who probably had no connection with the movement then beginning in Germany.”

³ Ibid., i., 1948.

¹ L. and P., i., 4312.

² Ibid., ii., 2492.

³ Ibid., ii., 2692.

⁴ Ibid., ii., 4257. Henry was certainly engaged in writing a book at that time, and its arguments were submitted to Wolsey and to other “great learned men.” Nothing more is heard of it until 1521.

⁵ Ibid., iii., 1193.

⁶ Ibid., v., 148.

⁷ In 1529 he ordered Wolsey to discharge the Abbot of Reading, who was accused of Lutheranism, “unless the matter be very heinous.”—(Ibid., iv., 5925; cf. Ibid., iv., 6325, 6385; v., App. 7.)

¹ See Dict. Nat. Biogr., v., 40.

¹ L. and P., v., 850.

² See the reply to the Archbishop printed by Strype (Cranmer, ii., 714–716); the “order concerning the Proctors of the Court of Arches,” 8 which Strype attributes to Cranmer, seems to have been really due to Warham, and the protest against it which he prints (Ibid., ii., 717–728) to belong to 1532 or some earlier date.

¹ Cf. Canon MacColl, The Reformation Settlement, 10th ed., p. 567.

² L. and P., iv., 6385.

³ Ibid., iv., 6487.

¹ In 1533 all the prelates except Cranmer were said to be demanding Latimer’s suppression. (L. and P., vi., 1249.)

² Strype, Cranmer, i., 48.

¹ I have discussed the point in my Henry VIII., chap. v.

² Works., ii., 324; see also Paul Friedmann, Anne Boleyn, 1884, vol. ii., chap. xvii.

¹ There are some objections to this view. Firstly, the affinity created by Henry’s relations with Mary Boleyn was different from the affinity created by Prince Arthur’s marriage with Catherine; the former was only held to be an obstacle by canon law, the latter by Divine law; and many would have admitted the Pope’s power to dispense with canon law, who denied his power to dispense with Divine laws. Secondly, in the tract on the divorce attributed to Cranmer (Burnet, ed. Pocock, iv., 146), it is asserted that an affinity fatal to marriage is only created nuptiali fædere. On the other hand, the Pope’s dispensing power had been denied altogether, and it is by no means clear that Cranmer’s views (if they were Cranmer’s) on affinity had been recognised as canon law in England in 1536. Chapuys definitely states (L. and P., xi., 41) that the ground of Cranmer’s sentence was Henry’s relations with Mary Boleyn, and not Anne’s precontract with Northumberland.

¹ The expression is not strictly correct; according to Henry’s view, which was endorsed by the Church, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn had never been his wives, so Jane Seymour was the first.

² They are often incorrectly said to have been married on the day after Anne’s execution. It does not appear who officiated.

³ Strype, Eccl. Memorials, I., ii., 1–10; Cranmer did not perform the ceremony.

⁴ L. and P., x., 282, 283.

¹ L. and P., x., 601.

² These are printed in Fuller’s Church History, 1656, bk. v., 209–212, or ed. Brewer, 1845, iii., 128–136.

¹ L. and P., xi., 1110; the King says “he was constrained to put his own pen to the book and conceive certain articles which were agreed upon by Convocation.” Cf. ibid., Nos. 59, 123, 377, 954.

² See Wilkins, Concilia, iii., 803.

³ They are printed in full from the Convocation records (soon afterwards burnt) in Fuller’s Church History, 1656, bk. v., 213–225 (or in 1845 ed., vol. iii., 145–159), and from Cotton MS., Cleopatra, E. v., p. 59, in Pocock’s Burnet, iv., 272–290; an epitome is given in Strype’s Cranmer, i., 58–62.

¹ Cf. Hallam, Hist. of England, 1884, i., p. 87.

¹ Printed in Pocock’s Burnet, iv., 308–313.

² See below, pp. 112–114.

³ It is necessary to multiply sums of money by ten, twelve, or even fifteen to bring them up to their present value.

¹ L. and P., xi., 1182, 1244, 1246.

² Ibid, xi., 1182; this denial does not support a modern theory that canon laws were not valid in England unless confirmed by the English Church.

³ Ibid, xi., 1182.

⁴ Ibid, xi., 786.

¹ I. e., Cromwell.

² Cranmer.

³ Richard, first baron Rich, Solicitor-General and afterwards Lord Chancellor; see Dict. Nat. Biog., xlviii., 123–127; the name was no doubt pronounced as it is in German, Reich, and would rhyme with “liche,” which is simply “like.”

⁴ Possibly Leigh and Layton, the two royal visitors of monasteries, and Latimer; Lee, Archbishop of York, is probably not intended, but Longland of Lincoln might be one, and even Dr. London might have a claim.

⁵ The leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace.

¹ Subsequently, however, he made a considerable number of annotations upon it which Cranmer took the liberty to criticise. Henry’s notes and Cranmer’s criticisms are printed in Jenkyns’ Cranmer, ii., 21 et sqq., and in the Parker Society’s edition of Cranmer’s Works, ii., 83 et sqq.; cf. also ibid., ii., 359–360.

² It was issued in Sept., 1537; the revision of it published in 1543 was known as The King’s Book.

¹ Gairdner, The English Church in the Sixteenth Century, 1902, pp. 190–1. Dr. Gairdner appears to agree with More in considering Tyndale’s translation of the Scriptures as “a mischievous perversion of those writings intended to advance heretical opinions.” Tyndale’s object was to spread the knowledge of the Scriptures irrespective of the question whether that knowledge made men heretics or confirmed their Catholicism. If a knowledge of the Scriptures tended to make men heretics, that was the fault of the Church. And as for the “mischievous perversion,” that surely consisted in enforcing a translation which implied a whole world of ideas not contained in the original. “Priest,” “do penance,” “charity,” and “church” all denoted to the men of the sixteenth century ideas which are not to be found in the New Testament; and no Greek scholar would dispute the fact that Tyndale’s expressions were less of a perversion of the truth than those they displaced. If Tyndale’s translation is a “mischievous perversion,” what is the Revised Version, which for the most part adopts Tyndale’s phrases?

¹ Cranmer, Works, ii., 344.

² See Dict. Nat. Biog., s. v. Rogers, John (1500 ?–1555). The dedication was signed Thomas Matthew, and the Bible was known as “Matthew’s Bible,” but there is no reason to doubt the identity of Rogers and Matthew.

¹ Cranmer, Works, Parker Soc, ii., 345–346.

² I. e., Latimer.

¹ Works, ii., 346–347.

² Dict. Nat. Biog., lvii., 428, where the date of Tyndale’s death is erroneously given as 6 August instead of 6 October.

¹ Printed in Burnet, iv., 341–346.

² This expression may be explained by a letter from Grafton, the printer of this Bible, to Cromwell (Strype, Cranmer, ii., 729–732). Grafton complains that after he had spent 500l. on this edition other men “go about the printing of the same work again in a lesser letter to the intent that they may sell their little books better cheap than I can sell these great”; and the stipulation about “the greatest volume” was probably designed to protect the original printers from this piracy.

³ For these editions see Dixon, ii., 77–79, and authorities there cited.

⁴ Some hint that this invaluable reform was intended as early as 1536 apparently gave rise to the rumour in Lincolnshire that a tax was to be paid on each of these events.

¹ Strype, Cranmer, i., 70.

² Cranmer, Works, ii., 379.

³ Pocock’s Burnet, i., 408; Gardiner seems also to have been consulted. The King’s answer is printed by Pocock, iv., 373. See other documents relating to the German mission in Strype’s Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. i., App., Nos. 94–102.

¹ Works, ii., 378.

² Bridgett, Blunders and Forgeries; Gairdner, Church History, p. 199.

³ “Ruit hic passim Azzotinus Dagon; Bel ille Babylonicus jamdudum confractus est” (John Hoker of Maidstone to Bullinger in Burnet, vi., p. 194–195); cf. Original Letters, Parker Soc, ii., 600–610.

¹ See Merriman, Cromwell, i., 246–247; Cambridge Modern History, ii., 236–237.

² Holbein’s portrait now in the Louvre is here reproduced. Cromwell told Henry that every one praised her beauty, and that she excelled the Duchess of Milan “as the golden sun did the silver moon.” The portrait of the Duchess of Milan, now in the National Gallery, explains how chagrined Henry was when he saw Anne.

¹ Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 1902.

² E. g., with Stephen Vaughan, for whom see Dict. Nat. Biog., lviii., 179; the freedom with which Vaughan expressed Protestant opinions to Cromwell is incomprehensible unless he was sure of their favourable reception.

¹ Cranmer himself complained to Cromwell that these superstitious holy-days were still observed at court (Strype, Cranmer, ii., 729).

² Cranmer, Works, ii., 349–356; in Pocock’s Burnet, iv., 298–299, are printed “some considerations offered to the King by Cranmer, to induce him to proceed to a further reformation,” but he had to wait till the reign of Edward VI.

¹ Cf. Cranmer, Works, ii., 250–251, 329.

² Cotton MS., Cleopatra, E. v. f. III, printed in Strype, Cranmer, ii., 752–756, and Cranmer, Works, ii., 404.

¹ Cotton MS., Cleopatra, E. v. f. III, printed in Strype, Cranmer, i., 94–95, ii., 740–742; Cranmer, Works, ii., 342–344; Original Letters (Parker Soc.), i., II.

² The German envoys interceded in vain on Atkinson’s behalf; cf. Cranmer, Works, ii., 372, and Mason, pp. 106–107.

¹ Cranmer was also concerned in the singular case of Friar John Forest, who is erroneously said (Dict. Nat. Biog., xix., 435) to have been imprisoned in 1534 “on a charge of heresy, the basis of which was denial of the King’s supremacy.” The Act of Supremacy had not then been passed, and when it was, denial of the King’s supremacy was not heresy but treason. The heresies for which Forest was condemned by Cranmer are given in Wriothesley’s Chronicle (Camden Soc.), i., 79; his denial of the royal supremacy also involved him in a charge of treason, and at his execution he had to suffer the penalties for both crimes; he was hanged in chains for treason, and for his heresy a fire was lighted under him. It was not in accord with the refined cruelty of the age that a man should escape with one form of death when he had been condemned on two capital charges.

² Strype, Cranmer, i., 99.

³ Wriothesley, Chronicle, i., 90.

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