This oscillation which has characterised England’s political and religious history affords ground for a convenient generalisation; but it must not be exaggerated, and too much stress has often been laid upon the variations in the ecclesiastical policy pursued by Henry VIII. The changes described in the last chapter did not mean to the King that doctrinal revolution which they seemed to imply to the Archbishop; and it is probable that Henry went no further in this direction “than the more enlightened popes and cardinals would have done.”¹ He had himself, in 1538, drawn up the reply to the emissaries of the Schmalkaldic League, rebutting their arguments against communion in one element, clerical celibacy and private masses, points on which even good Catholics were then inclined to make concessions; and he was at the same time edifying the orthodox by creeping to the Cross on Good Friday, serving the priest at mass, and observing all other “laudable ceremonies.” In spite of the store which he set upon his own private judgment, Protestant theology never made its way into Henry’s heart or mind. He had abolished the Pope, but not Popery, wrote Bishop Hooper.² It would be truer to say that he had taken the place of the Pope in the English Church, and substituted a Royal for a Roman Catholicism.

In this religious conservatism Henry VIII. was at one with the mass of his people. The accumulated force of the habits, customs, and traditions of centuries could not be destroyed at once, nor merely by preaching; and it is probable that the heart of the nation never went out to the Protestant cause until it had been sanctified by the blood of the Marian martyrs. In 1538–9 the majority of Englishmen were Catholic to the core.

In this condition of public opinion a general election took place in March, 1539. Its course was marked by an unusual amount of government interference, for the idea that there was no freedom of election in Tudor times, and that the House of Commons was an assembly of royal nominees, is a gross exaggeration.³ The bribes or threats employed in 1539 were not, so far as the evidence enables us to judge, directed towards securing the return of royal nominees in preference to popular candidates, so much as towards promoting the election of one set of ministerial candidates rather than another; that is to say, Cromwell was nursing a party to overthrow Gardiner and Norfolk. The result was a striking illustration of the difficulty of packing a Parliament against the popular will; for the House of Commons, which Cromwell took particular pains to pack, passed without a dissentient voice the Act of Attainder against him, and left his rivals secure in royal favour. The Protestant policy which he and his adherents favoured received a sudden check, and the Act by which the Parliament of 1539 is best remembered is the ferocious Statute of Six Articles.

That this blow to the cause of religious reformation was severely felt by Cranmer, goes without saying, and his only ground for satisfaction was the knowledge that he had done his best to avert it. He was naturally a member of the Lords’ committee appointed at the King’s instance to devise some uniform standard of faith; but the committee, which represented in fairly equal proportion prelates of the Old and the New Learning, could come to no agreement; and after ten days’ debate the Duke of Norfolk brought the question before the House of Lords itself.¹ There it was fully discussed for three days. Cranmer, assisted by Bishops Goodrich of Ely, Shaxton of Salisbury, Latimer of Worcester, Hilsey of Rochester, and Barlow of S. Davids, maintained the principles of the Reformation against Archbishop Lee of York and Bishops Gardiner of Winchester, Stokesley of London, Sampson of Chichester, Tunstall of Durham, Repps of Norwich, and Aldrich of Carlisle. Opinions among the Bishops were fairly balanced, but in the whole House the Reformers were in a hopeless minority. “We of the temporality,” writes a peer in describing the scene,¹ “have been all of one mind,” and that mind was one of bitter hostility to the New Learning. At length the King himself intervened. There was little doubt as to which side he would take; he attached small weight to the views of his Bishops, whether Catholic or Protestant, when they conflicted with those of the laity; and when the weight of all the lay peers and of at least half the Bishops was thrown into one scale, when even Cromwell and Audley deserted the losing cause, it is doubtful whether Henry could have redressed the balance even had he agreed with Cranmer and been willing to risk his authority in a conflict with Catholic feeling. His object was to compel uniformity, and it was less dangerous to require the few than the many to submit. So, in the words of an admiring peer, the King confounded them all with his learning. Other persuasions may have been used; Cranmer is said to have refused to be confounded with learning, and to have submitted only when ordered by the King to withdraw.²

This submission was in any case only partial, and on some of the points in dispute the Archbishop renewed the struggle in Convocation a few days later. The proposals were introduced not of course by Cranmer, who would never have done such violence to his convictions, but by Cromwell, who, as Vicegerent, took precedence of all the Prelates.¹ The assertion of the doctrine of Transubstantiation and of the perpetual force of vows of chastity seems not to have been challenged again. All the Bishops agreed that private masses might “stand with the Word of God,” and that confession was “very requisite and necessary”; but Cranmer, Shaxton, Latimer, Hilsey, and Barlow reaffirmed that priests might lawfully marry, and Cranmer and Barlow contended that the sacrament should be administered under both kinds. In the Lower House of Convocation there were only two dissentients from the Six Articles, Cranmer’s commissary and marriage-connection, Dr. Nevinson² and Dr. John Taylor, the future bishop of Lincoln.³ The New Learning on the episcopal bench was the result of Cromwell’s and Cranmer’s patronage and of Henry VIII.’s political exigencies; it had taken little root as yet in the church, and the lower clergy were still unmoved by its power.

Rarely indeed has a measure been passed with such manifold signs of general approval as the “bloody whip with six strings.” Henry VIII.’s apologists have cast the whole burden of responsibility upon the Catholic bishops, and clerical historians have retorted it upon Henry VIII. It is idle to exculpate the one or the other, but both put together need not bear all the blame. The Catholic bishops would have been powerless to carry the Act, and Henry VIII. would not have helped, unless the mass of the laity had been on the same side. It is an anachronism to represent the people of England in the sixteenth century as enamoured of either political or religious liberty. Toleration was shocking to the minds of the most enlightened; Sir Thomas More may not have committed the cruelties which Foxe alleges against him, but in theory at any rate he believed in religious persecution. As for the masses, they viewed with the utmost indifference the burning of martyrs for heresy and the torture of priests for treason, and the Act of Six Articles passed without a sign of popular protest.

The Act and the policy it implied involved one or two changes on the episcopal bench. Latimer was made to give up the See of Worcester and Shaxton that of Salisbury.¹ Cranmer, Barlow, Goodrich, and Hilsey were retained in their bishoprics, and so long as that was the royal pleasure they had no option but to remain. The modern practice of resigning distasteful and difficult posts would have consorted ill with the rigorous ideal of duty to the State which prevailed in the sixteenth century. Cranmer, like every one else in that age, admitted the right of the State or the Church to overrule individual conscience; and the tyranny of this political principle was not brought home to his mind till towards the end of his life. The harshness of the theory was, moreover, considerably modified in practice under Henry VIII. The Archbishop was not forced to make any alteration of view with regard to the doctrines laid down by the Act of Six Articles, nor was he required personally to execute its pains and penalties. It is one of the few admirable traits of Henry’s character that, provided his ministers observed the outward form of his somewhat arbitrary laws, he did not seek to put further burdens on their conscience. We have it on Sir Thomas More’s own authority,¹ that all the time that he was Chancellor the King did not employ him on business connected with the divorce of Catherine of Aragon, because he knew that More disapproved of it; and in the same way he did not expect Cranmer in person to handle the whip with the six bloody strings.

Under these conditions Cranmer remained at his post, not without benefit to the cause of the Reformation, for it was doubtless due to his and Cromwell’s influence that the penalties attached to the Act of Six Articles were not put in execution. In October, 1539, Burckhardt, the Lutheran envoy, wrote to Melanchthon, rejoicing that “the papistical faction had nowise obtained its hoped-for tyranny”;¹ they had only secured the statute, he said, and not its execution, and he had no doubt but that it would shortly be abolished. Gardiner and his allies had not yet won the victory; both he and the reactionary Bishop of Chichester were excluded from the Council, and Cromwell was planning that marriage with Anne of Cleves, which it was hoped would wed Henry VIII. indissolubly with the anti-Catholic cause.

Yet the Catholics were leaving no stone unturned to ruin the two protagonists of reform, and the peril in which Cranmer stood is illustrated by a curious tale related to Foxe by the Archbishop’s secretary, Morice.² After the passing of the Act of Six Articles, Henry VIII., who was genuinely interested in theological questions, sent to Cranmer and asked him to give him in writing a statement of the reasons which had led him to oppose the measure. When the manuscript was completed Cranmer entrusted it to Morice, who happened to be crossing the Thames in a wherry, while a bear was being baited in the water. The animal broke loose, capsized Morice’s boat, and the manuscript went floating down the river. It was recovered by the keeper of the Princess Elizabeth’s bears, a strenuous Catholic; he perused the book, and, convinced that he could now put a spoke in the Archbishop’s wheel,¹ refused to surrender his treasure at any price. The next day he went to the Council chamber to deliver what he considered damning evidence of Cranmer’s heresy to Sir Anthony Browne or Bishop Gardiner. But Morice had warned Cromwell beforehand, and Cromwell, summoning the bearward, made him relinquish the manuscript and soundly rated him for withholding it from its proper owner.

The Archbishop, however, was not to enjoy the advantage of Cromwell’s protection much longer. Anne of Cleves landed at Dover in December, 1539, and on the 29th of that month Cranmer met and entertained her at Canterbury. But the lady whose beauty had been extolled by Cromwell and flattered by Holbein was not to Henry’s taste, and he talked of renouncing the marriage. He rudely described his bride as a “Flanders mare,” and sullenly asked Cromwell if he must really put his neck under the yoke.² He affected to doubt whether she really was free from her alleged precontract with the son of the Duke of Lorraine; but Cranmer argued that the engagement had not gone far enough to prevent her marriage with Henry. Fear lest her repudiation should throw her German friends into the arms of Charles V. and Francis I., and leave England without an ally, induced the King to complete the match; and on 6 January Cranmer married the pair at Greenwich.¹ Closer acquaintance only increased Henry’s disgust, while soon an incipient breach between Charles and Francis showed that the plain Anne of Cleves and the distasteful German alliance might both be discarded with safety.

The result was fatal to Cromwell, but it need hardly be said that the failure of the Cleves marriage was not the only cause of the minister’s fall. The non-execution of the Act of Six Articles and the continued immunity which Protestant preachers enjoyed exasperated the Catholic party and braced it to make one more effort. The changes on the episcopal bench in 1539–40 were all in their favour. Two reactionaries, Bell and Capon, took the places of Latimer and Shaxton at Worcester and Salisbury. Stokesley, the truculent Bishop of London, died in September, 1539, but his See was taken by the still more strenuous Bonner. Heath, Queen Mary’s future Chancellor, succeeded the reforming Hilsey at Rochester, and another Catholic, Skip, stepped into Bonner’s shoes at Hereford.² A royal commission was sent to purge Calais of the heresy which Cranmer’s commissary had encouraged there, and fingers were pointed at Cranmer himself. Nor was he more popular in the country than at the Court; when he summoned a popular London preacher, Dr. Watts, to account for his Catholic doctrine, ten thousand citizens are said to have assembled to know the reason why¹; and the popular temper of the time is illustrated by the fact that persecution of heretics was rarely so severe as in 1539–40, when the administration of heresy laws had been largely confided to secular hands.²

All this was of evil omen to Cromwell. Whatever his private religious views may have been, he had become identified with a Protestant policy, and the fight between him and his foes was in effect a struggle between Reformer and Catholic for control of the government. The match was sadly unequal. Cromwell had no real friend but Cranmer, and the Archbishop’s political influence was never very considerable. Melanchthon and the Lutheran princes of Germany might write in Cromwell’s praise, but Henry paid more heed to the opinions of Francis I. and Charles V., who both detested the upstart Vicegerent. During his mission to Paris in February, 1540, Norfolk was warned by the French king of the evil impression produced by Cromwell’s dealings,³ and Norfolk, like every other English noble, hated Cromwell even more than he had hated Wolsey. In this matter, as in that of the Six Articles, the temporal peers were all of one mind. Cromwell’s power had no root except in the royal favour, and Henry was beginning to wonder whether his minister’s great abilities were worth the friction which his retention involved. The struggles in the Council were becoming a public danger; now one and now the other faction gained the upper hand. In April, 1540, Marillac, the French ambassador, wrote that Cromwell was tottering to his fall, and cynically commiserated Cranmer and the other divines who, having taught the lords to spoil the monasteries, were now threatened with ruin themselves.¹ Gardiner had been readmitted to the Council, and there was a plan for making the Catholic Tunstall Vicegerent.² But the end was not yet. A few days later Cromwell was created Earl of Essex, two of his satellites³ were made secretaries of State, his enemy, the Bishop of Chichester, was sent to the Tower, and it was rumoured that Cranmer would begin a course of sermons at St. Paul’s Cross to obliterate the effect of those delivered by Gardiner in the previous Lent. Nor would Cromwell stop there. There were five bishops, he said, who ought to be sent to the Tower like Sampson of Chichester; every day, wrote Marillac, new accusations were discovered, and things were brought to such a pass that either Cromwell’s or Gardiner’s party must succumb. The Bishops were in a state of “envy and irreconcilable division, and the people in doubt what to believe.”¹ The tension was too great to last; if some solution were not speedily found there would be open disruption.

Then Henry struck as “remorselessly and suddenly as a beast of prey.”² On the 10th of June Norfolk accused Cromwell of treason; the whole Council joined in the attack, and the Vicegerent was stripped of the Garter and sent to the Tower. A vast number of crimes were laid at his door. He was “the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver, and circumventor against your most royal person and the imperial crown of this your realm that hath been known, seen, or heard of in all the time of your most noble reign.” He had done innumerable acts without the sovereign’s knowledge or licence, and had boasted that “he was sure of” the King. Being a “detestable heretic,” he had “secretly set forth and dispensed into all shires” a “great number of false, erroneous books,” sowing disbelief in the Sacrament of the Altar “and other articles of Christian religion most graciously declared by your majesty by the authority of Parliament,” and had averred that it was as lawful for every Christian man to be a minister of the said Sacrament as it was for a priest. He had released heretics from prison, saved them from punishment, and rebuked their accusers. He was, in fact, the prime cause of all the heresy and schism in the land; in defence of it he said he would fight the King in person, and he hoped that if he lived a year or two longer, the King would be powerless to resist; finally he had held “your nobles of your realm in great disdain, derision, and detestation.”¹

All this and much more was set down in an Act of Attainder which passed both Houses of Parliament without opposition. The only voice raised in Cromwell’s favour was Cranmer’s. He wrote to the King, “with timidity,” says Lingard, “boldly considering the times,” says Lord Herbert, on Cromwell’s behalf.² It was not of much use to address Henry in hectoring tones, and whether Cranmer’s letter was bold or timid, his was now, as it was in the case of Anne Boleyn, the only plea which any one ventured to urge in favour of mercy. In neither instance did it prove of any avail. Cromwell, like the Countess of Salisbury in the previous year, was not even accorded a form of trial. Parliament condemned him unheard, and on the 20th of July he was beheaded on Tower Hill.³

The last service the King required of him was that he should contribute his share of evidence towards the divorce of Anne of Cleves.¹ That the moving cause in that measure was Henry’s disgust with his wife and dislike of the German alliance admits of no doubt; but neither was a sufficient legal justification, and it is necessary to examine the legal grounds upon which Cranmer, Convocation, and Parliament based the dissolution of the marriage. The law which had to be administered was of course the Roman canon law which had not been abolished with the Roman jurisdiction, but remained in a state of suspended animation, capable of being repudiated or enforced as circumstances might require. According to that law, the validity of a sacrament depends upon the “intention” of the minister; for instance, an Anglican clergyman might administer the Eucharist with all due Roman forms, but unless he believed in Transubstantiation his administration would not be efficacious, because his “intention” would be defective. Marriage is a sacrament which the parties minister to themselves,² and if there is a defective intention on the part of either the marriage may be invalid. Henry VIII. therefore set to work to prove that his “intention” in marrying Anne of Cleves had been defective; that the matrimony was no more than a form which circumstances had compelled him to adopt. Hence the depositions of Cromwell and other courtiers parading Henry’s expressions of reluctance and disgust on the eve of his marriage.¹ Probably the depositions are substantially true, but they do not prove that the pressure of external danger was so great as to render the King’s “intention” sufficiently defective to invalidate his act.² That was a question of state which Henry claimed that he alone could decide.

None the less the divorce was a scandal only rendered possible by the survival of the grotesque requirements of the canon law; and the whole Church and people of England must share the opprobrium which primarily attaches to the King. It was Gardiner and not Cranmer who “explained the cause of the nullity of the marriage in a lucid speech” before Convocation.³ The decree of invalidity was subscribed by Gardiner, Tunstall, and Bonner, as well as by Cranmer; it was signed by nineteen Bishops and by a hundred and thirty-nine other divines,⁴ who apparently thought it a venial offence to strain the marriage law a point or two if by so doing they could get rid of an unpopular Queen and an undesirable policy. In the sixteenth century, when the interests of the State overrode every other consideration, it would have seemed pedantry to take any other course. Happily, so far as Anne of Cleves was concerned, there was more of comedy than of tragedy. There is no reason to suppose that her separation from Henry was a great blow to her affections. She was liberally endowed with estates to the then enormous value of four thousand pounds a year. She was richer and freer than she had been in Cleves; she was probably more happy and certainly far more secure than she would have been as Henry’s wife. She lived on excellent terms with him and with his successors, and when she died in 1558 was buried in Westminster Abbey.¹

While Cranmer must share in the responsibility for whatever illegality there may have been in Anne’s divorce, he is exempt from the blame of having sought to bring it to pass. That rests mainly upon Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk. It was they who deliberately used the charms of another woman to stimulate Henry’s repugnance to Anne and resolve to put her away. The lady selected was Catherine Howard, Norfolk’s niece, and it was under the Bishop of Winchester’s roof that a familiarity first grew up between her and the King.² The Bishop, writes one of Bullinger’s correspondents, very often provided feastings and entertainments for the pair in his palace at Southwark.³ The first official intimation of the favour in which she was held was the grant to her of the goods of two escaped malefactors in April, 1540, two and a half months before Anne’s divorce.⁴ Other tokens followed, and on the 28th of July,¹ nineteen days after Convocation had pronounced the marriage with Anne of Cleves invalid, Henry privately wedded Catherine Howard at Oatlands.

Thus was completed the triumph of the Catholic party. It was not so absolute as some desired, for Cranmer still remained Primate of England, Audley was still Lord-Chancellor, and other statesmen of reforming proclivities, such as the future Protector Somerset, were growing in influence; and it is a common error to suppose that the ferocious penalties of the Six Articles were enforced with any persistence.² Yet enough had been done to show the helplessness of the reformers. Norfolk, who openly expressed a partiality for burning heretics, was the Queen’s uncle and the King’s chief minister, while Gardiner represented Henry’s predominant theological mood. Continental Protestants were aghast at the repudiation of Anne of Cleves, and the burning of men like Barnes, Gerrard, and Jerome; and they likened Henry VIII. to Nero. Englishmen, wrote one of Bullinger’s correspondents, were when subject to the Pope not under such a yoke as they now were, when all their property and life itself was at the King’s disposal; “a man may now travel from the east of England to the west, and from the north to the south without being able to discover a single preacher who, out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned, is seeking the glory of our God. He has taken them all away.”¹

Furiously beat the waves of reaction upon the chief remaining pillar of the Reformation in England, and many were the attempts to procure Cranmer’s downfall. He had foes at Court, foes on the episcopal bench, among the squires of Kent, within the precincts of his own cathedral and the walls of his own house. The prebendaries of Canterbury had a special and private grudge against their Archbishop. For, when the chapter was reconstructed after the dissolution of the monasteries, Cranmer had urged that “not only the name of a prebendary” should be “exiled his Grace’s foundations, but also the superfluous conditions of such persons.” The prebendaries, he said, “spent their time in much idleness, and their substance in superfluous belly cheer”; they were commonly “neither learners nor teachers, but good vianders.” Corrupt themselves, they seduced younger men from “abstinence, study, and learning,” to follow their own appetite and example. St. Paul made no mention of prebendaries, and it would be well for religion, thought the Archbishop, if the four hundred pounds destined to support twelve idle prebendaries were devoted to the maintenance of twenty divines at ten pounds and forty scholars at ten marks apiece.¹ This was in 1539, before the fall of Cromwell and the triumph of reaction; but the new foundation was not established by royal charter until April, 1542. Cranmer’s influence was then under a shadow, and his advice was not taken either with regard to the extinction or selection of prebendaries. He had proposed for dean the Protestant preacher Dr. Crome; but the dean selected was that accomplished trimmer, Dr. Nicholas Wotton²; and among the twelve chosen prebendaries there was only one, the future Bishop Ridley, who made any mark as a Reformer. Cranmer does, indeed, appear to have obtained the King’s permission to appoint three of the New as well as three of the Old Learning to be select preachers in his cathedral.³ But the impartiality of this arrangement did not tend to unity nor improve the Archbishop’s relations with his Catholic chapter; and the diocese was soon rife with recrimination in which clergy and laity both took part. The country gentry and the Justices of the Peace were largely Catholic, and among them was Sir John Baker, possibly the Justice with whom Cranmer had carried on the controversy noticed in the preceding chapter¹; he was also Chancellor of the Exchequer, and apparently hoped to supplant the Protestant Audley as Lord Chancellor of England.² Another Catholic magnate of Kent was Sir Thomas Moyle, who represented the county in the Parliament of 1542, and was chosen Speaker that year. They hoped by means of the Statute of Six Articles to rid the county of heretics; and they as well as the clergy looked to Bishop Gardiner as the champion of their cause.

Returning in September, 1541, from an embassy to the Diet of Ratisbon, Gardiner paid a visit to Canterbury; and while there he seized the opportunity to sound his namesake, William Gardiner, one of Cranmer’s Catholic prebendaries. The prebendary told a grievous tale; he himself was suspect for his preaching, while men like Edmund Scory, the future Bishop of Rochester, and Lancelot Ridley, cousin to the future Bishop of London, disseminated unsound doctrine. One Catholic prebendary and two preachers were already in durance for their maintenance of the faith.³ The bishop listened sympathetically; he rebuked Ridley, and encouraged William Gardiner to send him any further complaints he might have to make against Cranmer. Nor was it long before the bishop heard from his confidant again. Series and Shether, two of the divines imprisoned by Cranmer, refused to plead their cause before him, and were sent back to prison. Prebendary Gardiner at once bespoke the powerful bishop’s aid, but an order had already come from Court to Series to submit himself to his metropolitan’s authority,¹ and “wily Winchester,” as Foxe loved to call the bishop, was too wary to oppose a mandate from the King.

So Series and Shether were left to Cranmer’s mercy; and their punishment, combined with Ridley’s and Scory’s immunity, was declared by another of Cranmer’s enemies to be the origin of the “Prebendaries’ Plot” against the Archbishop.² There were other causes at work in the minds of Series and his friends. Cranmer had threatened to hold them as cheap as they held him and to break their bond of resistance. His see should be godly and quietly governed, and if restraint was put on Reformers by the Six Articles, Catholics at least should not return to the fleshpots which had really been left behind. The Justices of the Peace and the Catholic clergy thought he passed that limit of action, and secretly if not covertly encouraged the spread of heresy. He received, it was said, letters once a month from Germany, and thought German divines good judges of theology; he had maintained that image and idol were but the Latin and Greek for the same evil thing.¹ His commissary at Calais, John Butler, and his commissary in Kent, Dr. Nevinson, were both suspected of doubting the truth of Transubstantiation. Nevinson had, much to the scandal of the orthodox, released a notorious heretic in the person of Joan Bocher,² and although he was married, he had been chosen as proctor in Convocation for the diocese. His wife was daughter of Cranmer’s sister, who was accused of having two husbands alive. Such were some of the tales which found their way into the receptive ears of the Bishop of Winchester.

Series meanwhile was waiting his turn. At last, in March, 1543, he persuaded Dr. John Willoughby, vicar of Chilham, that it was his duty as royal chaplain to bring these Kentish scandals to the knowledge of the King. Willoughby refused to go alone, so the pair rode together to London on Friday, March the 16th, with a list of charges against the Archbishop. It seemed a propitious moment, for a heresy hunt was in full swing in other parts of the kingdom, and the victims were not confined to men of low degree. The Dean of Exeter, two gentlemen of the Court,—Thomas Sternhold, the author of the metrical version of the Psalms, and Sir Philip Hoby, afterwards a statesman of repute,—were sent to prison¹; and Dr. John London, Warden of New College and Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, had made a great impression on the King by detecting the poison of heresy among the royal choir at Windsor.

It was to Dr. London that Series and Willoughby first resorted. They found that prelatical scoundrel puffed up with his Windsor success and eager for further triumphs. He told them to fear not, took their articles, dressed them up, showed them to some of the Privy Council, and then sent Series and Willoughby on to Bishop Gardiner, who also gave them words of encouragement. The next step was to clothe the charges in legal form and to obtain the signature of sufficient witnesses; and with this object Dr. London sent Series and Willoughby back into Kent. But now a fit of caution seized the prebendaries; tale-bearing was well enough, but to set one’s hand to a slander and perhaps be tried on its truth was quite another matter, and Willoughby returned empty-handed. Thereupon the zealous Dr. London bade him tell Sir Thomas Moyle that the Justices of the Peace in Kent would be held liable if such evil practices were not brought to light, and that they would never have occurred had the Justices done their duty. Moyle then set to work with his colleagues to obtain the requisite subscriptions from the prebendaries and parish clergy. When these had been extracted the prebendaries themselves were summoned to London by Dr. Nicholas Wotton, the Dean of Canterbury, about St. George’s Day, the 23rd of April. Moyle was now busy with his parliamentary duties,¹ and the management of the affair was left to Sir John Baker, who had the advantage of Bishop Gardiner’s advice. Gardiner thought the articles “well enough,” and the conspirators were confident that a general commission would be sent down into Kent to deal with the accusations. They now directed their efforts towards excluding Cranmer from the commission; it was hoped that Gardiner himself would be placed at its head and that its members would include the very prebendaries who were specially aggrieved against the Archbishop.² On the 4th of May they had so far succeeded that the Privy Council passed a resolution that “if the King should be so content” a commission should be sent into Kent to examine “generally all abuses and enormities of religion.” It was probably something more than a coincidence that, on the following day, the King’s Book of Religion, which was to confound all heretics, was “read in the Council Chamber before the nobility of the realm.”³

It would have gone ill with Cranmer and the cause of the Reformation in England had that commission with Gardiner at its head, and with Henry VIII.’s authority at its back, been let loose in Kent. But the plotters little knew their King; Henry had many failings, but no monarch had a keener insight into men’s minds or less liking for being made the tool of others. What reception he gave to this demand of the Privy Council and to the accusations against Cranmer is not known. He kept his counsel and his sentiments to himself,¹ until one day, as he was being rowed past Lambeth Palace in his barge, he espied the Archbishop standing on the edge of the steps. Calling to him, he made Cranmer take a seat beside him. “Ha, my chaplain,” he said, “I have news for you; I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent”; and he pulled out of his sleeve the articles against Cranmer and his preachers signed by the Justices and prebendaries. The Archbishop demanded the appointment of a commission to inquire into their truth. “Marry,” said Henry, “so will I do; for I have such affiance and confidence in your fidelity, that I will commit the examination hereof wholly to you and such as you will appoint.” Cranmer demurred because he, being the accused, would not be an indifferent judge. Henry would listen to no objection. “It shall be no otherwise,” he said, “for surely I reckon that you will tell me the truth; yea of yourself, if you have offended. And therefore make no more ado, but let a commission be made out of you and such other as you shall name, whereby I may understand how this confederacy came to pass.”¹

Here was a bolt from the blue; instead of a commission presided over by Gardiner to search out Cranmer’s misdeeds, came one presided over by Cranmer to inquire into the “confederacy” of the plotters! Cranmer, however, was but a poor inquisitor; either unsuspectingly, or with an over-nice desire to be impartial, he nominated as his assessors his chancellor and his registrar, both of them secret “fautors of the papists,” as Morice calls them, and the enquiry made no progress, though the commission sat for six long weeks. Then through the intervention of Sir William Butts, the King’s favourite physician, and Sir Anthony Denny, his favourite gentleman of the chamber, a more expert investigator was appointed in the person of Sir Thomas Leigh, who had enjoyed a long practice as a visitor of monasteries, and was now summoned from York to lay bare the Kentish plot. Under his vigorous hands the tale was soon unrolled. It was in vain that the prebendaries laid their heads together and then separately tried to shift the blame from one to another, or that the Justices sought the help of the clerk of the peace to divert the scent by drawing up indictments against the heretics. Disaster after disaster attended their cause; Dr. London was convicted of perjury and died miserably in prison²; and the Bishop of Winchester’s nephew and secretary, Germain Gardiner, who drew up one copy of the articles against Cranmer, was executed on a charge of denying the royal supremacy. Cranmer’s rebellious clergy were more fortunate. A few weeks’ or months’ confinement was the only penalty they paid; not one appears to have suffered the loss of any preferment, or to have been exempted from the general pardon passed as an Act of Parliament in the following spring. The principal effect of this plot and of the zeal of the heresy-hunters was certainly undesigned; for Parliament in 1544 sought to prevent malicious accusations of heresy by providing that no one should be arraigned except on the oath of twelve accusers, nor for any offence committed more than a year before, and that no one should be arrested for heresy except on the warrant of two of the Privy Council.

Possibly the ease with which the Archbishop’s enemies escaped encouraged further delation. At any rate, in the 1544 or 1545 session of Parliament, Sir John Gostwick complained in the House of Commons of Cranmer’s preaching. Gostwick was probably the mouthpiece of the Archbishop’s old enemies, the Justices of Kent, for he himself represented Bedfordshire and had not heard the sermons of which he complained. Henry was moved to wrath. “Tell that varlet Gostwick,” he said, “that if he do not acknowledge his fault unto my Lord of Canterbury … I will sure make him a poor Gostwick, and otherwise punish him to the example of others” — a threat the force of which Gostwick could well appreciate.¹ He hastened to Lambeth and was so penitent that Cranmer not only forgave him, but interceded with the King on his behalf. Henry was not so easily mollified, and it was with difficulty that he could be persuaded to grant his pardon on Gostwick’s promise never to meddle with Cranmer again.¹

The third attempt to ruin the Archbishop was the most nearly successful, and is the best known because of the dramatisation of the story in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.² On this occasion the Council went so far as to demand Cranmer’s committal to the Tower. The King demurred, but was persuaded to consent by the argument that no one would dare to witness against so powerful a personage unless he were in the Tower. Even so, Henry’s consent was feigned or he soon repented of giving it; he sent for Cranmer about eleven o’clock of the same night, and informed him of what had occurred. Cranmer thanked the King for his warning, and expressed himself only too glad of an opportunity to answer whatever might be laid to his charge; he was very well content, he said, to go to the Tower, “so that he might be indifferently heard.”

By eight o’clock the next morning Cranmer was summoned to the Council, and by a refinement of malice he was made to wait outside the door for nearly half an hour surrounded by serving men and lackeys. His faithful secretary, who tells the story, sped at once to Dr. Butts, who first considerately came to keep the Archbishop company and then informed the King. “What,” exclaimed Henry, “standeth he without the Council chamber door? Have they served me so? It is well enough; I shall talk with them by and by.” Presently Cranmer was called into the Council room and charged with infecting the whole realm with heresy. No plea to be confronted with his accusers could avail; he must go at once to the Tower. Then the Archbishop produced Henry’s ring. Russell swore his customary oath: “Did I not tell you, my Lords,” he said, “what would come of this matter? I knew right well that the King would never permit my Lord of Canterbury to have such a blemish as to be imprisoned, unless it were for high treason”; and they went with fear and trembling into Henry’s presence. “Ah, my Lords,” broke out the King, “I had thought that I had a discreet and wise Council, but now I perceive that I am deceived. How have ye handled here my Lord of Canterbury? What ! make ye of him a slave, shutting him out of the Council chamber amongst serving men? Would ye be so handled yourselves? I would you would well understand that I account my Lord of Canterbury as faithful a man towards me as ever was prelate in this realm, and one to whom I am many ways beholding by the faith I owe unto God; and therefore whoso loveth me will regard him hereafter.” Norfolk tried to make excuses and pretended that their design was only to send the Archbishop to the Tower in order that he might have the greater glory of a triumphant acquittal. “Well,” said Henry, “I pray you use not my friends so. I perceive well enough how the world goeth among you. There remaineth malice among you one to another; let it be avoided out of hand, I would advise you.”¹ And from that time, continues Morice, no man ever more durst spurn against the Archbishop during King Henry’s life.

The confidence which Henry VIII. reposed in Cranmer was, indeed, the envy of the Archbishop’s friends and wormwood to his enemies. “You were,” said Cromwell to him, “born in a happy hour; for do and say what you will, the King will always take it well at your hand. And I must needs confess that in some things I have complained of you unto His Majesty, but all in vain, for he will never give credit against you, whatsoever is laid to your charge; but let me or any other of the Council be complained of, His Grace will most seriously chide and fall out with us. And therefore you are most happy if you can keep you in this estate.”² Henry indeed could not easily afford to dispense with Cranmer; there was no prelate in England who could have filled his place. Gardiner was able enough in worldly matters, and he had hitherto proved sufficiently pliant, but he had not the advantage of Cranmer’s learning nor his simplicity of character. “My Lord of Canterbury,” said Henry to Gardiner, when they were seeking to combat Cranmer’s denial that the “canons of the Apostles” were of as good authority as the four evangelists, “is too old a truant for us twain”¹; and even those who most dislike Cranmer’s later theology are thankful that the task of moulding the English liturgy fell into his hands and not into those of the Bishop of Winchester. Tunstall was perhaps the best alternative, being as mild, respectable, and tolerant as Cranmer himself²; but Tunstall again had spent in the study of law and pursuit of diplomacy the time which Cranmer devoted to scriptural and ecclesiastical learning, and there was nothing to be gained from a personal point of view by his substitution for Cranmer as Primate. Moreover, any unnecessary change was to be avoided; the King was too wise and too conservative to provoke wanton disorder when the essence of his contention was that his measures only effected the restoration of an older, better, and more legitimate form of church government; and the only unnatural changes in the personnel of the episcopate during his reign were the execution of Fisher for treason and the compulsory retirement of Shaxton and Latimer for heresy. Cranmer’s humility no doubt gratified the King’s autocratic temper, but his simplicity and single-hearted devotion to the anti-papal cause enhanced his estimation in Henry’s eyes. There was in him no touch of the self-seeking ambition which ruined Wolsey and Cromwell. Cranmer almost alone of Henry’s advisers refused to join in the general scramble for wealth,¹ and the King was often impressed by virtues he did not himself possess. So, too, the Archbishop’s obvious defencelessness against the wiles of his enemies was a recommendation to the protection of a monarch who loved to put down the mighty from their seats and to exalt the humble and meek. What would they do, he once asked, with Cranmer when he was gone?² And his warning to the Archbishop that he would in the end be sorely tested if he “stood to his tackling,” was emphasised by his substitution of three pelicans for three cranes on Cranmer’s coat-of-arms; for he would have, like the pelican, “to shed his blood for his young ones brought up in the faith of Christ.”¹