A still more trying ordeal was imposed upon Cranmer in 1541. Henry VIII. was satisfied from every point of view with his marriage to Catherine Howard; and on All Saints’ Day, 1541, he ordered his chaplain, the Bishop of Lincoln, to make prayer and give thanks with him to God for the good life he was living and hoped to live with his present Queen.² Twenty-four hours later Cranmer had to communicate to him the news of Catherine Howard’s infidelity. Details of her misconduct before marriage had come to the Archbishop’s ears during Henry’s absence in the north of England ; investigation left no doubt as to the correctness of the charges, and it became some one’s duty to inform the King. Councillors’ hearts quailed at the thought, and with one accord they importuned Cranmer to undertake the task. The King was deeply chagrined; men whose own morality is not above reproach are often the more scrupulous about the prenuptial morals of their wives, and Henry was so overwhelmed by the early indiscretions of his Queen that he shed tears and was thought to have gone mad.¹ Cranmer was sent to obtain her confession and to hold out hopes of mercy, and it is possible that Catherine would have escaped with a divorce, had not proofs of her misconduct after marriage come to light during a later stage of the enquiry. This offence was high treason, and as such it passed out of Cranmer’s jurisdiction. Parliament intervened, and having secured the King’s permission, passed an Act of Attainder to which the royal assent was given by royal commission, professedly to spare the royal feelings.² Thus ends the tale of Cranmer’s share in the matrimonial troubles of Henry VIII., for Catherine Parr, his last wife, albeit a lady inclined to religious reform, was married to the King by Bishop Gardiner.³

The selection of the Bishop of Winchester to officiate at this ceremony, which took place at Hampton Court on 12 July, 1543, may be connected with the circumstances that Cranmer was still nominally suffering under the imputation of heresy brought against him by his prebendaries, and that Henry had been annoyed by the discovery of heresy at Windsor. But the cross-currents in Henry’s Court were so numerous and so fluctuating that it is impossible to construct the history of the time on the theory that any religious or political principle was all-powerful at any particular moment. Individual ministers apparently enjoy the confidence of the Crown as fully when they are hostile as when they are friendly to the main drift of national policy; and, indeed, before the Cabinet system had been evolved, there was no objection to the government’s being administered by men of divergent principles. Hence Cranmer seems to have been as actively employed in the Council during the period succeeding Cromwell’s fall as he had been before. From 1540 to the end of the reign, except during his laborious investigation into the Plot of the Prebendaries, he was a regular attendant at its meetings. In the autumn of 1541, when the King was absent in the north, the Archbishop’s name heads the list of those councillors who were responsible for the direction of affairs in London; and again in 1544, when Henry crossed the Channel to wage war in person against the King of France, Cranmer is first in the Council of Regency appointed to advise the Queen. In July, 1541, he was selected to harangue the French ambassador on the advantages of peace between France and England and on the evil effect which would be produced if the French continued some offensive fortifications they had begun near Calais; and in the following month he remonstrated with Chapuys about the treatment of English commerce in the Netherlands.¹ In November, 1542, after the battle of Solway Moss, the Earl of Cassilis, the chief of the Scottish prisoners, was entrusted to the Archbishop’s care at Lambeth, and his intercourse with Cranmer is said to have induced the Earl to adopt the New Learning and thus to have contributed to the furtherance of the Reformation in Scotland.

To the cause of religious reform Cranmer was, in spite of its official unpopularity, still devoting in private his vast industry and extensive learning. Probably he did not expect much from the prevalent mood of the King and the people, but he believed that the time for a further reformation would come; he knew that the opportunity, when it came, could not be effectively used without previous preparation, and during the latter years of Henry VIII. he was quietly maturing plans which came to fruit in the reign of Edward VI. He drew up at least two schemes of church service which were afterwards used as the basis of the First Book of Common Prayer,² and also drafted a scheme of canon law, for the reform of which three Acts of Parliament were passed in 1534, 1536, and 1544³. But the commission, the appointment of which was then sanctioned, was not actually selected until late in the reign of Edward VI.¹; and the consideration of Cranmer’s other drafts may be conveniently postponed until their connexion with the First Book of Common Prayer has to be discussed.² The same may be said of Cranmer’s labours on the Book of Homilies. He had apparently begun to work on them as early as 1539,³ but it was not till 1543 that the Homilies were submitted to Convocation.⁴ Even then they were not published nor apparently approved, and their issue was one of Cranmer’s earliest measures in the reign of Edward VI.

In some minor questions, however, Cranmer was able to get his way even in the reign of Henry VIII. The modification of the Act of Six Articles already mentioned was doubtless furthered by him. In July, 1541, he drew up, with Henry’s acquiescence, a proclamation abrogating a few superfluous saints’ days and abolishing certain “childish superstitions.”⁵ In the following October he was authorised to enjoin the removal of shrines and relics which were superstitiously revered, and to prohibit the offering of lights and candles “except to the Blessed Sacrament.”⁶ In 1542 he defeated Gardiner’s attack upon the English Bible. Convocation had declared that the version known as “Cranmer’s Bible” could not be retained without scandal unless it were revised and corrected. The task of revision was entrusted to a committee headed by Tunstall and Gardiner, and Gardiner produced a long list of words which should remain in Latin or else be translated in a more Catholic sense. But three weeks later Cranmer came down with a message from the King to the effect that the revision of the Bible should be entrusted to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The bishops all protested, except Cranmer and his brethren of Ely and St. Davids, that Convocation was better fitted for the task than the universities, i. e., that the voice of authority should prevail over that of learning¹; but the protest was unavailing, and as the universities were not after all consulted, Cranmer’s Bible escaped its Catholic revision.

The Archbishop is also believed to have prevented an official recognition of the numerous existing forms of church service. A committee of divines had for some time been engaged in drawing up a “Rationale of Rites and Ceremonies,” in which they contented themselves with commending without amending those in use.² Gardiner’s hand has been traced in this production, which, according to Foxe, was “confuted” by Cranmer. At any rate, it never received the sanction of Convocation, and in February, 1543, Cranmer announced it as the King’s wish that mass-books, antiphoners, and portuises should be newly examined and purged of all mention of the Bishop of Rome and of “all apocryphas, feigned legends, superstitions, orations, collects, versicles, and responses”; and that the names of all saints not mentioned in “the Scriptures or in the authentical Doctors should be abolished and put out of the same books and calendars.”¹

Less successful were Cranmer’s efforts to stamp his individual impress upon the manual of faith, which, published under the title, A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, was known as the “King’s Book” to distinguish it from the “Bishops’ Book” of 1537,² and epitomised the prevailing theology of the latter years of Henry’s reign. The “Bishops’ Book” had been too advanced for many Bishops and possibly for the King himself; and since Cromwell’s fall the episcopal bench had been labouring at its revision. Questions as to the origin, nature, and number of the sacraments, as to the origin and nature of the episcopal authority, of Holy Orders, and of the power of princes in the Church, were submitted to the Bishops and other divines; and various replies have survived. Henry himself took part in the discussion, and we have a document containing the King’s own annotations on some of the conclusions put before him. There is also a copy of the “Bishops’ Book” with numerous emendations in Henry’s hand and answers to them in the Archbishop’s.³ These are interesting as a conclusive refutation of the idea that Cranmer never ventured to express different opinions from those of his sovereign; for in this document it is seldom that the Archbishop agrees with the King; some of the royal phrases, says Cranmer, “obscure the meaning” of the text; others are “superfluous” and “were better out”; some, again, “diminish the goodness of God,” and others are “not grammar.” The “preter tense,” he reminds the King, “may not conveniently be joined with the present.” “I cannot perceive,” he bluntly says of two other suggestions, “any manner of consideration why those words should be put in that place.” And so on throughout the book Cranmer’s comments proclaim the freedom with which he could speak his mind to the King, and remind us of the testimony of Erasmus to the urbanity and unruffled temper with which Henry was in the habit of conducting his theological disputations.

In the result, however, it is fairly clear that, while Cranmer’s literary taste left its mark upon the form of the “King’s Book,” the doctrine it inculcated represented the views of the Catholic rather than those of the Reforming party; and the book may perhaps be regarded as a fair epitome of the Anglo-Catholic faith which most Englishmen of the year 1543 held, and to which, with one important exception, not a few Anglicans would wish to return to-day. That exception is due to the decay of monarchy and the development of democratic views. In 1543 there was no question of an independent Church; the only alternatives were a Church dominated by the King and a Church dominated by the Pope ; and Gardiner and Cranmer vied with each other in zeal for the royal supremacy. All were agreed that the selection of bishops belonged to the prince,¹ and that no ecclesiastic could act without the prince’s permission; the election by chapters was tacitly regarded as an empty form. Cranmer and Barlow went farther than this; they considered that this royal appointment conferred potestas ordinis as well as potestas jurisdictionis, that consecration was not required, and that the King was summus episcopus, from whom the clergy derived the whole of their powers ; and as a logical corollary of this position they denied that Holy Orders were a sacrament.² This was Lutheranism pure and simple; it met with the decided opposition of the great majority of the English divines, and was consequently not adopted in the “King’s Book.”

This “third English Confession,” as Canon Dixon calls it, consisted of an exposition of the Creed, of the Ten Commandments, of the Sacraments, and of the Lord’s Prayer and other select passages from Scripture. It was much more detailed and explicit than the “Bishops’ Book” in its assertions about the sacraments. It uses several of the Latin words which Gardiner recommended in preference to the English translations adopted in Cranmer’s Bible. It is definitely committed to the doctrine of Transubstantiation, to the Invocation of Saints, and, of course, to the celibacy of the clergy.¹ It was carefully revised by Convocation during the spring of 1543, and the King himself wrote a Preface reproving diversities of opinion and the improper use of the Scriptures in much the same terms as he afterwards used in his farewell to Parliament in 1545. On 6 May, 1543, it was read to the Peers in the Council chamber,² and it was issued from the press on the 19th. Parliamentary approval was expressed in the first Act passed that year, and great expectations were entertained of it. The King, said his Council, had “set forth a true and perfect doctrine for all his people.”¹

This much-trumpeted solvent of all religious difficulties has long passed into that limbo which only theological antiquaries explore. But soon afterwards Cranmer in the privacy of his study, and without any of the pomp and parade which ushered the “King’s Book” into the world, was toiling at a document every phrase of which has become a household word wherever the English tongue is spoken. The use of litanies had early grown up in the Western Church, and from the fact that they were sung in procession they were often themselves called processions.² In his later years Henry not infrequently ordered special processions for special occasions. There had been one in 1543 on account of the wet harvest, but owing, complained the King, to the fact of its being in Latin the people “have used to come very slackly to the procession”; and in June, 1544, when he was about to invade France, he ordered a litany to be drawn up in English and to be used frequently “not to be for a month or two observed and after slenderly considered.”³ This litany was issued by the King’s printer on 16 June,and a contemporary chronicler describes it as “the godliest hearing that ever was in this realm.”¹ The important point about it was its appearance in the vernacular tongue, for the use of English in the church services was still suspect; and one of the charges brought against Dr. Ridley by the Kentish clergy was that the Te Deum had been sung in English in his parish church.² There is, however, no evidence that this litany was of Cranmer’s composition,³ nor was it the famous English Litany which has survived. For in October, 1544, four months after its publication, the Archbishop writes to the King⁴ to say that in obedience to Henry’s commands he has translated certain Latin processions into English, using therein “more than the liberty of a translator,” because many of the Latin processions were barren and little fruitful. Some, therefore, he had left out entirely; others he had added, and in many he had made partial alterations. The whole was to be sung or chanted; “but in mine opinion, the song that shall be made thereunto would not be full of notes, but, as near as may be, for every syllable a note; so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly.” The revision of the Litany or the setting of the “devout and solemn note” which Cranmer desired, appears to have taken some time; for it was not till June, 1545, that the Primer containing this litany was published.¹ In the following August injunctions² were sent to the various Bishops to see that it and no other was sung or said in all the churches in their dioceses on Sundays and festivals, and it was first used at St. Paul’s on St. Luke’s Day, the 18th of October.³

Such was the inception of “the most exquisite of English compositions.”⁴ That it was not in all its parts original was natural, for in this as in all his works Cranmer sought not to uproot the old and begin a new edifice upon a different foundation, but to repair, restore, and improve; and he used all the old material that could be wrought into his new and finer Litany. That his Litany was immeasurably superior to the old will scarcely be denied. The Roman Litany consisted largely of the phrase “Ora pro nobis,” repeated afresh after each of a series of saints’ names¹; and even the litanies included in Marshall’s and Hilsey’s² Primers of 1535 and 1539 were bald and unrhythmical. These were all transformed by Cranmer, who, albeit no musician, had a wonderful ear for English prose, into the beautifully smooth and rhythmic cadences of the present English Litany. And apart from its literary charm, the Litany has proved so admirable a vehicle for religious devotions and aspirations that its phrases have won their way into the hearts and minds of millions who do not profess and call themselves members of the English Church. It has stood the test of time better than any other part of the Church Service Book, itself one of the least perishable of human achievements; and it has remained almost unchanged from the day that Cranmer penned it to the present. The petitions to the Virgin, angels, patriarchs, etc., to “pray for us,”³ which Cranmer inserted after the invocation of the Trinity, were left out in all the editions of the Book of Common Prayer; and the prayer to be delivered “from the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities,”⁴ was properly and significantly omitted from the edition of 1559 and was never restored; for the rest, there have been only slight verbal alterations, and those not always improvements.¹

The Parliament which met in the autumn of 1545, soon after the first general celebration of the English Litany, was marked by another blow, if not for the Reformation, at least against the old system. An Act was passed abolishing chantries or the endowments of priests to say masses for the souls of the departed. The measure could scarcely, as Dr. Crome afterwards pointed out, be reconciled with a belief in Purgatory, and incidentally it did not a little to undermine that article of the Catholic faith; but it originated in no more lofty motive than the necessity of meeting the expenses of the war which England waged with France from 1544 to 1546, and the desire of the King to reserve to himself and his friends the profits of a confiscation which the descendants of chantry founders had already begun to effect for their own private gain. There was little opposition, and even Gardiner subsequently expressed his approval of the act; but Cranmer and other friends of education regretted that these funds were not appropriated to some national object instead of going, as they mostly did, to swell the pockets of the landed gentry.

A more singular incident than the continued pillage of the Church distinguished this session of Parliament. A bill for the extinction of heresies, which presumably must have been more ferocious than the Act of Six Articles, was introduced into the House of Lords and read no fewer than five times.¹ This protracted procedure indicates a considerable divergence of opinion among the Peers, but in its final form their Lordships passed the bill unanimously, and it was then sent down to the Commons. Whether it expressed the views of the King or not, we do not know. If it did not, the Lords were curiously independent in passing it; but if it did, the Commons showed a still more significant independence of both King and Lords by rejecting the bill.² This incident can hardly have been anything but a blow to the reactionary party and a foreshadowing of the tendency which the House of Commons, at least, would show in the coming reign. Indeed, the old system was crumbling away before the inroads of the New Learning even while Henry VIII. succeeded in maintaining the principal outworks intact; and this last Parliament of Henry’s reign sanctioned two other small measures quite inconsistent with previous Catholic practice. By the first, the Knights of St. John, whose Order had been dissolved some years before, were released from their vows of celibacy; the second enacted that ecclesiastical jurisdiction might be exercised by married doctors of civil law.¹

Encouraged perhaps by these symptoms and by Gardiner’s absence,² Cranmer seems to have obtained from the King an expression of opinion in favour of the demolition of roods “in every church,” and of the abolition of bell-ringing upon All Hallow night, of the covering of images during Lent, and of creeping to the cross. Cranmer drew up a letter to this effect to be signed by the King,³ but in the interval Henry received despatches from Gardiner averring that any further alteration in religion or in ceremonies would frustrate the negotiations then proceeding between England, the Catholic Emperor, and the King of France. Henry was, in fact, still at war with France and nervous lest his quondam ally, Charles V., should join the enemy. Gardiner’s representations were quite enough to make him change his mind, for the proposed reforms, even in the eyes of a Reformer, must have appeared of slight importance compared with the necessity of preserving the Emperor’s friendship.

They would, moreover, have offended the Catholic party at home, which gave abundant signs of vitality and power during the last year of Henry’s reign. Lord-Chancellor Audley, who with Cromwell and Cranmer had formed a sort of reforming triumvirate at Henry’s Court, had died in 1544, and his place had been taken by Wriothesley, afterwards Earl of Southampton, who, although a protégé of Cromwell and a foe of Gardiner, had on Cromwell’s fall abjured his radical opinions and devoted himself with zest to the task of crushing heresy. He found a worthy colleague in the Solicitor-General, Sir Richard Rich,¹ and the pair, aided by the influence of Norfolk, whose taste for burning heretics ceased only with his death, were responsible for the renewed persecution that broke out in 1546. Gardiner, too, returned in March, and though his memory has perhaps been burdened with an unfair load,² his influence with the King can hardly be regarded as a force tending towards lenity. In April the celebrated preacher, Dr. Crome, delivered at St. Paul’s Cross the sermon above referred to, pointing out the inconsistency of the abolition of chantries with a belief in Purgatory. He was called before the Council and forced to make two recantations. A like fate befell two others, a third was burnt, and Latimer himself was sent to prison.¹ In June followed the trials of Anne Askew and Shaxton, the former Bishop of Salisbury. Shaxton made a pitiful abjuration, but no threats and no torture could shake the constancy of Anne. She was racked in the Tower by Wriothesley and Rich, and then in July was burnt at Smithfield in the presence of Wriothesley, Norfolk, the Lord Mayor of London, and many peers and aldermen. In the same month proclamations were issued for the seizure and burning of all copies of Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s New Testaments and of all the works of Frith, Wycliffe, George Joy, William Roy, Barnes, William Turner, and Richard Tracy.²

It was the expiring effort of reaction in Henry’s reign, and Fortune’s wheel came round once more. Peace was concluded with France in June, and the Emperor was involved in war with the Schmalkaldic League of Protestants. Their envoys besought the King for aid, and Henry was dallying with a proposal for a Christian league against the Emperor, the Pope, and the Council of Trent.³ It was the policy of Cromwell revived, and Henry invited the German princes to send him the names of ten or twelve of their learned men that he might choose a few with whom to confer on religion. A stranger proposition followed. In September, 1546, a French ambassador, the Admiral d’Annebaut, came to England, and he, Henry VIII., and Cranmer discussed the prospects of a further reformation in both kingdoms. The King, says Cranmer, leaning on his and the Admiral’s arms, was

The war of domestic faction was also going ill for the Catholics. In November Gardiner had a violent quarrel with the future Duke of Northumberland² and a dispute with Henry over an exchange of lands. One or the other affair caused his absence from the Council, and there is no record of his attendance between the middle of November and the middle of January, though, according to Foxe’s story, he used to accompany members of Council to the door of the Council chamber to make people think he was in as good credit as ever. Finally, the ruin of Surrey, the poet, and his father, the Duke of Norfolk, decisively turned the balance in favour of the Reformers. “Nor,” wrote one of Bullinger’s correspondents, “is any one wanting but Winchester alone, and unless he also be caught, the evangelical truth cannot be restored.”¹ Gardiner was not yet to be laid by the heels, but the chief influence in the Council had passed to the future Protector Somerset, whose wife had already betrayed her own and her husband’s theological predilections by secret support of Anne Askew; and in the final draft of Henry’s will, which was drawn up on St. Stephen’s Day, 26 December, the Bishop of Winchester was excluded from the Council of Regency appointed to govern the realm during the nonage of Edward VI.

The sands in the glass of Henry’s life were now fast running out, and rumours of his death were rife at the beginning of January, 1547; but the end did not come until the early hours of the 28th. In his last moments the King turned towards him who had been his best friend in life; and feeling that his strength was ebbing he sent late at night to fetch Cranmer from Croydon. When the Archbishop reached Whitehall the King was no longer able to speak; all he could do was to stretch out his hand to Cranmer and reply with an affirmative grasp when the Archbishop urged him to call upon Christ’s mercy and give some token that he trusted in the Lord. So died Henry VIII., and the last support of which he was conscious on earth was the hand of the man whose only support he himself had been in the time of trouble. Faithless to many, to Cranmer the King was true unto death; and from that day to his own last agony the Archbishop left his beard to grow in witness of his grief.