A week after Hertford’s election as Protector, Paget read to the Council a list of honours which Henry VIII. had intended conferring upon the executors of his will.⁵ Only about half of these were carried into effect; but Hertford became Duke of Somerset, Wriothesley Earl of Southampton, and Lisle (the future Duke of Northumberland) was created Earl of Warwick. Preparations were then made for the coronation of Edward VI. The ceremony was performed by Cranmer in Westminster Abbey on Sunday, the 20th of February; and the Archbishop has been blamed for lending his help to an assertion of Tudor absolutist tendencies by presenting Edward as King before exacting the oath to observe the liberties of the people.¹ He seems indeed to have considered the forms of the coronation as somewhat empty and as conveying no privilege or power; but technically, at any rate, popular assent had already been given to Edward’s succession through the mouth of Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII., when the crown had been settled on him by statute.² Edward VI. was therefore the first King of England who came to the throne with a parliamentary title,³ and no dissent in the audience at Westminster could have affected the validity of an Act of Parliament.

The coronation of Edward VI. was speedily followed by the fall of Lord-Chancellor Wriothesley, who was convicted of an unconstitutional and illegal act in issuing a commission out of Chancery without a warrant from the Council. Wriothesley, as we have seen, had been closely identified with the repressive measures of Henry’s last years, and his removal from the Council materially smoothed the path of religious reform. Such a policy was both natural and inevitable considering the constitution of the new Government and the circumstances in which it was placed. It was known before the end of Henry’s reign that the Protector was “well disposed to pious doctrine and abominated the fond inventions of the Papists”¹ He had long “not only favoured, but also furthered the truth of God and his glory in most dangerous times”⁹; and the ruin of Norfolk and Surrey, the exclusion of Gardiner³ and Thirlby from the list of Henry’s executors, and now the degradation of Wriothesley left the Catholic party without a leader. Tunstall and Sir Anthony Browne were respectable Catholics, but neither had the force of character to stem the tide, which even the sluice-gates of the Six Articles had barely enabled Henry VIII. to check.

That ferocious statute and, indeed, all the heresy laws ceased to be operative with Somerset’s accession to power; and the pent-up flood spread tumultously over the land. The majority of Englishmen probably had no keen desire for doctrinal change, but zeal and energy were on the side of the Reformers, and the overwhelming need for a practical reformation was ever before the eyes of the Government. So much minute criticism has of late been expended upon the lives and characters of the leading Reformers, that the forces which made reform inevitable have been completely left out of sight, and the supremely inadequate theory has gained ground that the whole movement originated, first, in Henry VIII.’s desire for Anne Boleyn, and, secondly, in the greed of the laity for the spoils of the Church. Those motives did exist; but great revolutions do not arise from petty causes, and the magnitude of the Reformation measures the strength of the forces which brought it to pass. The state of the Church not only provoked its loss of power and privilege, but threatened the nation with ruin; and the Reformation was an essential condition of the greatness of modern England. There is no need to rely for proof of the wide-spread corruption upon the fervid invectives of Latimer or the strident censures of Foxe; dry and musty records are far more conclusive and eloquent, and the recently published¹ register of the visitation of the Bishopric of Gloucester in 1551 will perhaps be found sufficient for our purpose. Three hundred and eleven clergy were then examined; one hundred and seventy-one could not repeat the Ten Commandments in English, ten could not say the Lord’s Prayer, twenty-seven could not tell who was its author, and thirty could not tell where it was to be found; sixty-two incumbents were absent, and most of them were pluralists who did not reside in the diocese. There is no reason to suppose that the clergy of Gloucester were more ignorant than their brethren elsewhere; and the weakness of the Church is really no mystery. The condition of the clergy thus affords some excuse for a Government which sought to reform them, and helps to explain the contempt in which they were held by a laity growing in knowledge.

In reality the Council of Edward VI. found it necessary to restrain rather than to stimulate the ardour of the Reformers; and one of its earliest acts was to compel the wardens and curate of a London parish church to restore the images they had removed.¹ The new-found liberty of the people, in fact, degenerated into licence, and every parish church was liable to become the scene of religious experiment. The destruction of images proceeded so fast, and was in many districts so popular, that the Council was afraid to enforce a general restoration. Later in 1547 it was driven to issue a Proclamation against the rough treatment which priests experienced at the hands of London serving-men and apprentices,² and to send round commissioners to make an inventory of church goods in order to stay the extensive embezzlement practised by local magnates. In 1548 the Government put forth further Proclamations¹ denouncing unauthorised innovations, silencing preachers who urged them, and prohibiting the eating of flesh in Lent ; and endeavoured to stop the growing practice of divorce. The first Act of Parliament passed in the new reign was directed, not against Catholics, but against those who impugned or spoke “unreverently” of the Sacrament of the Altar. Convocation thought the moment had come for recovering the position from which Henry VIII. had driven it, and petitioned² either that ecclesiastical laws should be submitted for its approval, or that the clergy should be readmitted to their lost representation in the House of Commons.

All this should tend to modify the idea that the new Government under the inspiration of Cranmer or the Protector rushed headlong into a policy of rash religious revolution without the least justification of popular support. Cranmer indeed is reported as saying that it was better to have attempted a reformation in Henry’s reign than during the minority of Edward, for no one would have ventured to oppose Henry.³ The remark is characteristic of the Archbishop’s tendency to rely on a stronger power; but the words that follow show that Cranmer was afraid of the effects of a drastic reformation and not of the middle course which the Protector actually pursued¹; and Gardiner, probably not without some reason, insinuated in his letter² to Somerset that the Protector was encouraged in his measures by the Archbishop himself. The young King’s minority was a great disadvantage, particularly as it gave the opponents of reform a plausible though not a sound constitutional argument against any change. The King, they maintained, was personally Supreme Head of the Church, and during his nonage that authority was in abeyance; it could not be exercised by the Council or Protector in his name. This argument proved too much, for Gardiner, Bonner, Tunstall, Thirlby, and all the Catholic bishops had, albeit reluctantly, taken out new licences for the exercise of spiritual jurisdiction at the commencement of the reign; and if the royal supremacy was in abeyance these licences were all invalid. It was impossible to set up a distinction between the Supreme Head’s power to confer ecclesiastical jurisdiction and his power to effect ecclesiastical changes: if the one could be exercised in his minority, so could the other. Constitutionally, too, the argument was quite unsound. At no period in English history has it been admitted that the royal authority was legally any the less during a minority or during a period of royal insanity than when the King was of full age and sound mind.¹ To countenance such a theory would be to clog the wheels of government and impair the security of the State just when it would naturally be most liable to danger; and a Government could only adopt such a view in a suicidal frame of mind. The Council felt that the question was crucial and fundamental; and its measures against Gardiner and Bonner were mainly directed towards extorting from them an acknowledgment that the King’s authority was as great as if he had reached maturity.²

Fortified by this conviction, by the expressions in favour of further reform which Henry had used in the previous autumn, and by the presumption arising from the fact that Henry had entrusted the education of his son exclusively to men of the New Learning, Cranmer and the Council undertook the task of carrying out those projects which had been suggested or begun under Henry VIII. The tendencies of the Government were not obscurely indicated by the sermons which Bishop Barlow, Dr. Nicholas Ridley, and Cranmer’s commissary, Dr. Glazier,¹ preached during Lent, 1547, at St. Paul’s Cross against images and other ceremonies; and the part that Gardiner would play under the new régime was revealed when he protested that there was no authority for making the changes suggested by Barlow until Edward VI. came of age. But the first avowed indication of the Government’s policy was the publication of Udall’s edition of Erasmus’s Paraphrase² of certain portions of the New Testament, of Cranmer’s Book of Homilies, and of a number of Injunctions which were enforced in a general visitation of the realm.

None of these measures can be described as revolutionary. Erasmus’s Paraphrase was obviously not a Protestant document; Udall’s edition had been prepared in the reign of Henry VIII. and the Princess Mary herself had taken a hand in the translation.³ Gardiner, indeed, attacked it vehemently because the version, like “Cranmer’s Bible,” embodied translations nearer the original sense than the Latin words with their accretion of mediaeval ideas; but on the question of scholarship his authority would hardly be preferred to that of Erasmus, whose “great faults” he denounced. He was on firmer ground when he showed that the Paraphrase and the Homilies did not on some points agree.

The latter production was an old scheme of Cranmer’s. He had been engaged on it as early as 1539,¹ and in 1543 a collection of Homilies had been submitted to Convocation without obtaining its approval.² The present volume consisted of twelve discourses which explained the proper use of the Scriptures and the main points of the Christian Faith, such as good works and charity, denounced the sins of perjury, apostasy, and adultery, and concluded with an exhortation to obedience and a warning against religious contention. Cranmer was probably responsible for the authorship of several and the tone of all, and they were directed, on the one hand, against superstitious practices, and, on the other, against the preaching of the “hot-gospellers.”³ On the whole they were rather practical than doctrinal treatises, and the dogmas of the Six Articles were not directly impugned. They did not on that account escape Gardiner’s censure, and he attacked especially the Homily on Salvation, which, he complained, excluded charity from the work of justification, while Bucer singled it out for special commendation.¹ On this point, indeed, Cranmer seems to have outrun the views of the Council, for in the Injunctions which were issued at the same time it was asserted that the charity which consisted in relieving the poor was “a true worshipping of God, required earnestly upon pain of everlasting damnation.”²

These Injunctions, which were based upon Cromwell’s, were even more largely concerned with conduct than the Homilies. There was to be at least one sermon a quarter in every parish church³; the Paternoster, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments were to be learnt by all people ; children were to be properly educated and trained to some honest means of livelihood; the sacraments duly administered; a Bible and Paraphrase of Erasmus to be provided in every church, and a register of weddings, christenings, and burials kept; every incumbent was to devote a portion of his income to the maintenance of some scholar at school or at a university, and the parishioners were to do their part by contributing to the relief of the poor; the sale of benefices was to be punished by deprivation of the presentee and by forfeiture of the presentor’s patronage. There were also injunctions against the superstitious use of images, the veneration of relics, and the celebration of “feigned” miracles; but the principal innovations appear to have been the abolition of processions, the reading of the Gospel and the Epistle in English, and the saying or singing of the Litany in English by the priests and choir kneeling “in the midst of the church.”¹

There was little in these Injunctions that was not admirable and in keeping with that aspiration for a purging of the practice of the Church which supplied the moral force of the Reformation. They express, in fact, an ideal of conduct to which the Church has not yet attained, and the sale of livings, for instance, has shocked the devout and defied the reformer from that day to this. The halting success which attended these efforts was largely due to the fact that creed and not conduct has ever been the cry of religious parties. Nine parts out of ten in these Injunctions related to conduct; yet with one accord Catholics and Protestants neglected these nine parts, on which they agreed, in order to fight over the tenth, on which they differed.² The detail to which Gardiner objected most strongly was the injunction that every incumbent should obtain and diligently study the recently published Paraphrase of Erasmus. He had, he said, favoured Erasmus before he read this book; but now he agreed with those who said that Luther only hatched the eggs which Erasmus laid.¹ On broader grounds the Bishop of Winchester attacked the Injunctions, the Homilies, and the Paraphrase—in short, the whole policy of Cranmer and the Government—as being unconstitutional; and his letters to the Protector on this question contain one of the most interesting constitutional arguments propounded in Tudor times.² It is in effect a plea that the King’s authority in the Church ought to be and was subject to similar limitations as those which the common law imposed upon his prerogative in the State. These Injunctions, he said, were mere royal commands; they were not based upon statutory authority, and could not have the force of law. Obedience to them might involve him in a peril like Wolsey’s, who found that the royal permission to execute legatine jurisdiction could not protect him against the statute of Prœmunire. There was much plausibility and some force in this argument, and it is a pity that Gardiner forgot his own lesson so conveniently in the earlier days of Queen Mary³; but statesmen in power do not always observe the excellent maxims they enunciate in opposition. Nor, indeed, was Gardiner’s reasoning really sound. Wolsey could legally be condemned to the penalties of Prœmunire, because Henry VIII. had no statutory authority to license his exercise of legatine jurisdiction. But the Act of Supremacy and the subsequent legislation of Henry’s reign had given the King legal authority to reform any ecclesiastical abuses that he thought needed reformation.¹ The Royal Supremacy was in fact to be really royal and not parliamentary. The Popes had not been fettered by common-law restrictions; they claimed absolute authority in the Church, and so far as jurisdiction went, the whole of that authority had been bestowed on Henry VIII. Gardiner, in fact, had welcomed the exercise of these powers when they went to restrain heretics; he viewed them in a different light when they were employed to effect a reformation, and his resistance to authority involved his incarceration in the Fleet prison. Bonner courted a similar fate, but he soon admitted that his protest against the visitation afforded a bad example, and was released in time to take part in the Parliament which met in November.²

Convocation assembled at the same time, and the occasion is remarkable as being one of the few instances since 1529 in which the clerical and lay representatives of the nation have been of one mind with regard to theological questions. Convocation unanimously recommended at Cranmer’s instance¹ the administration of the Communion in both elements,² and by a majority of fifty-three to twenty-two votes it petitioned for the repeal of all enactments prohibiting the marriage of the clergy.³ The former recommendation was embodied in a bill and passed through both Houses of Parliament, having been incorporated in the House of Lords with another bill directed against irreverence towards the Sacrament. The object of this incorporation, which was due to Somerset, was no doubt to conciliate the Catholic bishops; but in this it failed, for the bishops of London, Norwich, Hereford, Worcester, and Chichester all voted against it.⁴ The second measure was not so fortunate; a bill with the singular title, “that lay and married men may be priests and have benefices,” was passed in the House of Commons, but it only reached the House of Lords on the last day of the session (24 December), and proceeded no further.¹

More important was another act of this session, “occasioned,” says Bishop Burnet, “by a speech that Archbishop Cranmer had made in Convocation.”² Therein he had exhorted the clergy to study the Scriptures and consider “what things were in the Church that needed reformation”; to which reply was made that so long as the Six Articles remained in force, it was perilous to express an opinion. The difficulty was reported by Cranmer to the Council, which thereupon is said to have given orders for the drafting of a bill to repeal these Acts. This bill, which produced some lively debates in both Houses of Parliament, and was under discussion nearly the whole of the session, is one of the most remarkable in English history. It not only destroyed at a blow almost the whole of Henry VIII.’s repressive legislation, but established for the first time a considerable measure of freedom of opinion and freedom of the press. Treason was reduced to the moderate definition which was laid down by Edward III. and is still the law with slight modification. All heresy Acts from the days of Richard II. were repealed, all felonies created by Henry VIII. were abolished, and no one was to be condemned for any sort of treason unless he was charged within thirty days of the date of the offence, and either confessed or was accused by two sufficient and lawful witnesses.¹ The Act giving the King’s Proclamations the force of law was also repealed, and that enabling the King to annul laws on reaching the age of twenty-four was modified. With the exception of the Royal Supremacy, which was still to some extent² guarded by penalties of treason, there was to be full liberty to discuss religious questions and to print in English the Scriptures and all kinds of theological treatises. It was, in fact, an attempt to settle the great question of the Reformation by public discussion ; and the only restriction imposed on the liberty of the press was the salutary provision, which was enacted in 1548 and still remains in force, that every publication must bear the name and address of the printer and the publisher.

In two other measures which came before this session of Parliament Cranmer took an active part. On the 15 December, 1547, he with the Bishops of London, Ely, Norwich, Hereford, Worcester, and Chichester, voted against the Chantries Bill¹ on its fourth reading, and his influence is illustrated by the fact that even at that late stage of the proceedings an amendment was introduced into the bill to meet his criticisms. What they were precisely is not known; but Cranmer voted for the bill in its final form, though all the other malcontents persisted in their opposition. To him also the Lords committed a bill for abolishing the pretence of electing Bishops by their Chapters and providing for direct nomination by royal letters patent. This was really nothing more than a recognition of the fait accompli; for Henry VIII.’s Parliament had empowered him to nominate in case the Chapter omitted to elect his candidate within twelve days, and had made rejection of the royal candidate an offence against Prœmunire; nor, in fact, has there been a single instance since the Reformation of successful resistance to the royal dictation. But Cranmer’s emendation of the bill does not appear to have pleased the Lords, and on the following day it was entrusted to a committee consisting of Bishop Tunstall and Goodrich, the chief Baron of the Exchequer, and the Attprney-General.¹

So far as legislation went, the results of Edward VI.’s first year certainly indicated no violent change with the past; to eager Reformers they seemed not only moderate but meagre. The clergy were still in the bonds of celibacy, the change in the method of appointing bishops was only one of form, and even the grant of the cup to the laity was a concession at which the Popes had connived in Bohemia and which many good Catholics had been willing to make in Germany.² For the rest, it might seem that Parliament wished the nation to argue the matter out for itself. But Cranmer and the Government thought it their duty to give the nation a lead, and even on occasion to require that the lead should be followed in the interests of peace and quietness. From the beginning of the reign the Royal Chapel had afforded an example for others to imitate. Compline was there sung in English on Easter Monday, 1547, the sermon was preached, and the Te Deum sung in English on 18 September to celebrate the Protector’s victory at Pinkie over the Scots ; and at the opening of Parliament on 4 November the Gloria in Excelsis, the Creed, and the Agnus were all sung in the vernacular tongue. At the same time Thomas Sternhold,¹ a gentleman of the Court, who had been in trouble in 1543 for advanced religious views, was engaged in composing a metrical version of the Psalms in English, designed both to promote their vogue and to supplant the “lewd” and offensive ballads which found too much favour with reformers of the baser sort.

So, too, Cranmer had no mind to be idle till Parliament met again, and he believed that the vast powers conferred by the Act of Supremacy imposed a moral obligation upon the Government to lead the people along what it considered the strait and narrow way. The services of the Church had not been touched by Parliament, but soon after it rose the Archbishop submitted to his colleagues a series of questions intended to elicit their opinions on the subject of the mass or communion service.² This transformation had been one of the projects considered by Henry VIII. in the last year of his life, and only prevented, according to Cranmer, by his death. Parliament and Convocation had now both enjoined the administration of the Sacrament in both elements, and it fell to the Bishops to draw up some form for the rite. If it had been the intention of Henry VIII. to change the mass into a communion service, that intention was certainly not carried into effect at this juncture, for the result of the deliberations of the divines was the retention of the old mass,¹ with the addition of a communion service for the laity. “It would almost seem,” say two Catholic writers, “that the action of two minds working with different intentions is to be traced in the composition of this Order of Communion.”² Cranmer’s was the mind working for reform, and his answers to the questions circulated³ among the Bishops are, with one exception, in favour of innovation. He objected to the terms “oblation and sacrifice,” declaring that the mass was only a “memory and representation”⁴ of the Sacrifice of the Cross. Its virtue was limited to the receivers of the communion, and the laity derived no benefit from private masses performed by priests; these he thought should cease, and by securing that the laity should only communicate on certain public occasions, of which due notice was to be given, he prepared the way for their abolition.

Cranmer’s propositions were supported in the main by Ridley, now Bishop of Rochester, Holbeach of Lincoln, Barlow of St. Davids, and by Drs. Cox and Taylor; but the majority took the Catholic view, and the Protector was averse to violent measures. The chief point was the language to be used. The Catholics disliked the adoption of English, as separating the ceremony in England from the manner and custom of other countries. That objection would have been fatal to much else in the Reformation; but Cranmer himself doubted the wisdom of using English “in certain mysteries,” and he agreed with Tunstall’s proposal that Latin should be retained in the mass, but that certain prayers in English might be added to instruct and stir the popular devotion. One other cautious change was tacitly admitted under the guise of a warning to Reformers; those who were content with the general confession were required not to be offended with others who practised also auricular and secret confession to the priest.¹ This Order of Communion was printed on the 8th of March, 1548, and issued on the 15th with an injunction that it should be adopted by Easter following. Its object, like that of all the early measures of Edward’s reign, was to open the door to the New Learning without shutting it in the face of the Old, and to carry the whole nation as far as possible slowly and cautiously along the path of Reform.

The same spirit of compromise pervaded the various Proclamations issued during the spring of 1548. On the 16th of January, for instance, a Proclamation appeared lamenting the lax observance of Lent and enjoining respect for the old fast-days; but a few days later the Council resolved to discountenance the burning of candles on Candlemas Day, the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday and of palms on Palm Sunday, as well as creeping to the Cross on Good Friday, and the taking of holy bread and holy water, changes to which Cranmer had nearly obtained the consent of Henry VIII. But again, on the 6th of February, a Proclamation censured innovations begun by parish priests on their own authority, while on the 11th the Council ordered the removal of all images, under the impression that this drastic measure would cause less disturbance than the perpetual contention as to whether they were abused or not.

But the mind of the Government—which, speaking generally of religious matters at this time, means that of Cranmer and the Protector—was not so ambiguous as, in the vain hope of peace and quietness, it was made to appear. It was with the connivance of these two that Latimer, who since his release by Henry’s death had been living with Cranmer at Lambeth, began a course of sermons at St. Paul’s Cross in January, 1548; in them he lashed not merely the “unpreaching prelate” of the Old, but the greedy landlord of the New Learning, against whom the Protector was about to launch his ill-fated but generous crusade. On 12 May at Westminster the whole communion service was said in English; and the fact that the sermon was preached by a royal chaplain suggests that the alteration was not viewed with disfavour in government circles. It is possible, too, that in the Royal Chapel a form of service something like that afterwards enforced by the first Act of Uniformity was in use as early as August, 1548. There is, however, no evidence to prove that the simultaneous exclusion of Latin from the services at St. Paul’s and the cessation of private masses there and in various London parishes was due to any other influence than the zeal of the Protestant Dean¹ and popular pressure. Protestant principles were in fact making rapid strides, and a Government which sympathised with the Reformation could hardly be expected to set its face like adamant against all change, still less to check it by the methods of Henry VIII., when those methods had been made illegal by Parliament. A caution was, however, issued in May to the licensed preachers to restrain them from advocating further innovations and to exhort them to rebuke the innovators.

This popular agitation encouraged or compelled the Government to meditate further projects. Somerset was probably more concerned to keep the peace than to attempt the perfection of religious truth; and the complaint of a reformer that the Protector preferred watching the builders at Somerset House to hearing sermons should do something to relieve his memory of the charge of religious intemperance which it has long unjustly borne. Cranmer had no such worldly distractions; his mind was advancing with the times, and in the great controversy about the Eucharist which was now tending to overshadow all other religious questions he had not only gone as far as Luther, but was beginning to look in the direction of Zwingli. In this he reflected the temper of a large and growing body of English Reformers, and the year 1548 saw a great outburst of Protestant theology. Books poured from the press¹ controverting and ridiculing the Catholic doctrine of the mass, some of them respectable arguments, but most appeals to the crowd couched in coarse and ribald terms. There was a repetition of the ferment which pervaded Germany from 1521 to 1525²; and while Protestant tracts multiplied, scarcely a voice was raised on the Catholic side.³ Cranmer himself joined in the fray by publishing an English translation of the Lutheran Catechism of Justus Jonas, but this book struck dismay into the hearts of those Zwinglians who had begun to entertain hopes of the Archbishop’s conversion.

Another of Bullinger’s correspondents excepted Cranmer and Latimer from the bulk of the learned and the nobility who shared Zwinglian views. “As to Canterbury,” he continued, “he conducts himself in such a way … that the people do not think much of him and the nobility regard him as lukewarm. In other respects he is a kind and good-natured man.”³ These complaints were merely due to the restraint which Cranmer placed upon himself and to his reluctance to enunciate private opinions before he could adopt them in public practice. For in reality at least one phrase in his translation of the Catechism indicated a departure from the Lutheran creed; and he implied in his answer to Gardiner, printed in 1551, that shortly before the publication of the Catechism he had abandoned “that error of the real presence.”¹

This union of Cranmer with the forces of popular enthusiasm and the more interested desires of the nobility made it very difficult for the Protector to hold the balance even between Anglo-Catholic and Protestant. The pressure which he told Gardiner was being put upon him from both sides in 1547 now grew very unequal, and it required some skill and some rigour to prevent dangerous friction between the two parties. The Government was keenly alive to the disruptive effects which disputes over the Eucharist had produced on the Continent; and although the English Constitution enjoyed better guarantees of stability than those of Germany or Switzerland, the fear of religious war was ever present to the minds of England’s rulers in the sixteenth century. In 1548 feeling was so acute that disputes whether there should be mass or not led to blows being exchanged in St. Paul’s and other London churches; and the French ambassador, probably with some exaggeration, declares that there were daily fights on the subject. If unity was to be preserved, there must be some sort of uniformity; and pending the production of one uniform order, a compromise and a standard which all should be persuaded or compelled to observe, the Council imposed silence on the disputants, especially with regard to the doctrine of the mass.¹

Uniformity was the natural outcome of separation from Rome, for in an universal church there is more room for local option than in a national church, especially when that national church was anxious to define the boundaries which marked it off from the Roman church on one hand and the various Protestant churches on the other. If there was to be anything national about the church it was scarcely permissible that one diocese or one parish should approximate to the Roman use, while the next diocese or parish might follow that of Geneva, Wittenberg, or Zurich. There was more latitude in Germany, where a national system could not be said to exist either in religion or politics; but the results of German diversity scarcely recommended its adoption elsewhere. And so the progress towards uniformity began almost as soon as the connexion with Rome ceased. The Ten Articles of 1536 and the Six of 1539 were both assertions of the right, and indications of the intention of England to select her own formularies of faith and make them uniform. So, too, in 1543, Convocation had recommended the uniform adoption of the Sarum Use throughout the province of Canterbury ; and the task of compiling a Book of Common Prayer out of the various service-books in use had occupied much of Cranmer’s time during the later years of Henry VIII. There was need of reform as well as of uniformity; the latter was felt mainly in England, but the defects of the current service-books were patent to Roman Catholics, and the reformed Breviary which Cardinal Quignon dedicated to Paul III. in 1535 anticipated not a few of the changes effected by the first English Book of Common Prayer.¹

The Breviary of Cardinal Quignon and the Sarum Use were the basis of two schemes of Office² drawn up by Cranmer probably between 1543—when Convocation or the King or both ordered a revision of the service-books,—and 1547, when Convocation demanded the production of the results of the labours of those who had been engaged in this task. These two schemes mark two successive stages in the evolution of the First Book of Common Prayer. The first has been described as “Sarum material worked up under Quignon influence,” while the latter “comes nearer to the form of morning and evening prayer in the first printed Prayer Book of Edward VI.” The chief feature of interest about the second scheme is that it marks the transition from the ancient arrangement of the Office to the order adopted in 1549. Compline and the four Hours “prime, terce, sext, and none” were omitted altogether, and it is possible that upon this draft was modelled the form of service, from which Compline was omitted, used in the Chapel Royal in 1548, and recommended by Somerset in a letter of September the 4th to the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge as a model for use in College chapels.

However that may be, there was a considerable step between the second of Cranmer’s draft schemes and Edward VI.’s First Book of Common Prayer. The petition of Convocation in 1547 for the production of the schemes was not conceded, and it was not till September, 1548, that the final stage in the evolution of the Book of Common Prayer was commenced. The work is usually supposed to have been done by a body of Bishops¹ called the “Windsor Commission,” and their names have been variously given by different historians, who in this connexion generally confuse the Order of Communion with the First Book of Common Prayer. But these lists have not been traced to any authentic source, and a thorough search has failed to reveal any trace of a formal commission. It is, however, fairly certain that some Bishops did assemble first at Windsor and then at Chertsey Abbey in September and October, 1548, and deliberate upon the controversies raging with so much fury; and we have their own assertion for the fact that a draft Book of Common Prayer was submitted for their approval. It does not appear, however, that they had much share in drawing up this document, and one of the Catholic Bishops subsequently complained in the House of Lords that the book had been materially altered since he had subscribed to it. The only prelate who refused his assent was Bishop Day of Chichester, but the Catholics subscribed mainly for the sake of unity and not because they agreed with all its particulars. Their subscriptions were much like the “nolens volo,” by which Tiptoft¹ once expressed his concurrence in an Ordinance of the Privy Council.

The Book, in fact, was, in the form in which it came before Parliament, to all intents and purposes the work of Cranmer. Not only was the doctrine of Transubstantiation—in which Cranmer had ceased to believe ten years before—excluded, but that of the Real Presence was implicitly rejected. The elevation and adoration of the Sacrament were left out, the word oblation was studiously avoided, and Bonner asserted that there was “heresy in the book” because the elements were still described as bread and wine after the completion of those ceremonies which implied to a Catholic their transubstantiation. The commendations of the Zwinglian party confirmed the criticisms of the Catholics. “You must know,” wrote Traheron to Bullinger, “that Latimer has come over to our opinion respecting the true doctrine of the Eucharist, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the other bishops, who heretofore seemed to be Lutherans.”¹ “Even that Thomas [Cranmer] himself,” remarks another correspondent, “by the goodness of God and the instrumentality of that most upright and judicious man, master John à Lasco, is in a great measure recovered from his dangerous lethargy.”²

Such were Cranmer’s views in the autumn of 1548, but they are not an accurate indication of the doctrine³ of the First Book of Common Prayer, for the Archbishop’s scheme was subjected to criticism in both Houses of Parliament and emerged from the ordeal a compromise between the two parties. In this work of modification Convocation seems to have had no hand¹; but both Houses of Parliament asserted a voice in the matter. The Commons were urged by Traheron² to tolerate “no ambiguity in the reformation of the Lord’s Supper; but it was not in his power to bring over his old fellow-citizens to his views.” Apparently in this instance the conservative feeling of the Lower House resisted the more radical spirit of the Lords, for there Cranmer and Ridley, we are told by Traheron, argued so well on behalf of the Zwinglian view that “truth never obtained a more brilliant victory. I perceive that it is all over with Lutheranism, now that those who were considered its principal and almost only supporters have altogether come over to our side.”³

A brief report² of this great debate has come down to us, and from this authentic record we learn the gist of Cranmer’s views. “Our faith,” he declared, “is not to believe Him to be in bread and wine, but that he is in heaven ; this is proved by Scripture and Doctors till the Bishop of Rome’s usurped power came in.” Later on in the debate he said, “I believe that Christ is eaten with the heart. The eating with our mouth cannot give us life, for then should a sinner have life. Only good men can eat Christ’s body; and when the evil eateth the Sacrament, bread and wine, he neither hath Christ’s body nor eateth it.” That is to say, the presence in the Eucharist was a spiritual presence conditioned by the faith of the recipient. Ridley was somewhat more guarded in his admissions; the bread, he said, remained bread after consecration, “still the bread of communion is not mere bread, but bread united to the divinity.” The common bread, he explained, is made a divine influence.

Such were the answers which Cranmer gave to the three questions propounded in the debate: whether there was a real presence in the sacrament, whether evil men received “that body,” and whether there was transubstantiation. In each case his reply was in the negative. In the last two questions he carried the majority with him, but, as Peter Martyr indicates, the great point at issue was the real presence, and in regard to that the result did not correspond with Traheron’s triumphant paean over the rout of the Lutherans. The debate described above took place on 14–17 December, 1548, but the Act of Uniformity imposing the First Book of Common Prayer did not pass the House of Lords till four weeks later.¹ The interval was used to modify Cranmer’s draft of the Book of Common Prayer so as to secure a majority of episcopal votes in its favour. This was regarded as of much importance by the Protector, and his success enabled the Government to maintain in its subsequent disputes with Bonner and the Princess Mary that the measure had received the sanction of the Church. A majority of prelates would not, however, have voted for the doctrine laid down by Cranmer, and various alterations were introduced to modify Catholic hostility. The most important, perhaps, was the substitution of the phrases “sacrament of the body” and “sacrament of the blood” for “bread” and “wine” in the last rubric of the communion; and the change was doubtless designed to meet Bonner’s complaint that the use of the words “bread” and “wine” in this conjunction was heresy.

In its final form the First Book of Common Prayer was a blow to the extreme Reformers. “The foolish Bishops,” wrote Traheron to Bullinger, “have made a marvellous recantation.”¹ Hooper described the Book as “very defective and of doubtful construction and in some respects indeed manifestly impious.”² Dryander remarked that with regard to the Lord’s Supper “the book speaks very obscurely, and however you may try to explain it with candour, you cannot avoid great absurdity. The reason is that the bishops could not for a long time agree among themselves respecting this article.” Some concessions, wrote Bucer and Fagius, “have been made both to a respect for antiquity and to the infirmity of the present age”; and they instanced the vestments enjoined for the celebration of the Eucharist, the use of candles and the chrism, and the commemoration of the dead. The Book was, in fact, neither Roman nor Zwinglian; still less was it Calvinistic, and for this reason mainly it has been described as Lutheran. Richard Hilles, a well-informed layman, compared the communion service with that adopted in the Nürnberg churches and in some of the churches of Saxony. But the resemblance was due not so much to conscious imitation as to the common conservatism which characterised the Lutheran and Anglican service-books, and led to the retention in them of many Catholic usages which Reformed churches in Europe rejected. The Anglican was, in fact, the most conservative of all the liturgies produced by the Reformation. The Sarum Use was its basis, but Cranmer’s extensive acquaintance with contemporary liturgies enabled him to select the best from an enormous range of material. His indebtedness to the Breviary of Cardinal Quignon has already been mentioned; with all the more important Lutheran service-books he was familiar; and his correspondence with his wife’s uncle, Osiander, and with Zwinglian divines such as J. de Watt (Vadianus) kept him in touch with the trend of every variety of continental opinion. Perhaps the clearest traces of foreign influence may be found in the similarities between the Baptismal Office of the First Book of Common Prayer and the Pia Consultatio, compiled by Bucer and Melanchthon and published under the authority of Hermann von Wied, the reforming Archbishop of Cologne, in 1543. But Cranmer also laid under contribution the liturgies of the Greek Church, numerous editions of which had been printed before 1548, and possibly of the Mozarabic or ancient rite of Spain.¹

Quite apart from conflicting views in the English Church and Parliament which made compromise essential, it was not likely that a liturgy derived from such various sources would embody or emphasise one clear, definite, dogmatic system; nor is a liturgy the proper vehicle for the assertion of dogma. The value of the English Book of Common Prayer is not to be compared with that of the Augsburg Confession or the Longer and Shorter Catechisms: it was different in kind, but not less in degree. The Prayer Book is not a creed nor a battle-cry, and it provokes the spirit of devotion rather than that of debate; it is religion and not theology. To it the Anglican Church owes the hold she retains on the English people. They are not attracted merely by the fact that the Church is established by law; it may be doubted whether her catholicity allures the bulk of the laity, and assuredly her standard of preaching is not the force which keeps men from joining other communions. But the Book of Common Prayer is unique, a ϰτῆμα ἐς ἀεί. Amid the fierce contentions of the churches it gave the Church of England unity, strength, and a way to the hearts of men such as no other Church could boast. That the English Church survived was due in no small measure to the exquisite charm of her liturgy; and that was the work of Cranmer. He borrowed and learnt and adapted from various sources, but whatever he touched he adorned. Under his hands the rudest and simplest of prayers assumed a perfection of form and expression, and grew into one of the finest monuments of sacred literary art.