6 Invincible Henry, 1538–1540
‘Almighty GOD, which has instructed thy Holy Church, with the heavenly doctrine of thy holy Evangelist Saint Mark: Give us grace to be established by thy holy Gospel, that we be not like children, carried away by every vain Doctrine, Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’1
A Lutheran England?
Thomas Cromwell, as England’s lord privy seal and vicegerent, reached the pinnacle of his powers over Church and state in mid-1538. He pressed forward reforms that changed the landscape and culture of England for all time, in part by taking preeminence over Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. In that year, the next phase of the suppression of the religious houses began as the convents of the mendicant friars were dismantled in towns across the country. Despite the oaths that they had taken to accept the royal supremacy, the friars remained under heavy suspicion for their covert support of the papacy. They were forbidden to wear their habits in public. Their houses and goods were seized, and their properties were gradually redistributed to civic leaders. In the spring and summer, at the king’s order, religious statues that had been revered for centuries were brought to the capital to be destroyed. Bishop John Stokesley of London, then the most powerful opponent of reform, was accused of praemunire and marked for destruction. The long-awaited embassy of Lutheran theologians arrived in England. In September, Cromwell ordered every church in England to set up a copy of the English Bible where parishioners could read it. Many of these achievements represented victories that Cranmer shared.
But paradoxically, 1538 was also a watershed year for Cromwell. Within two years he became the victim of the same kind of collision of imperatives that had unseated Anne Boleyn, destroyed by his enemies as a result of the policies he had worked so hard to achieve. He was overshadowed first by the passage of the Act of Six Articles in 1539, and then by his failure to draw England into an alliance with the League of Schmalkalden. Like Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Katherine of Aragon and Anne, Cromwell was discarded because he too failed to give Henry what the king wanted. Paradoxically, although Cranmer sometimes challenged Henry, he managed to survive the disasters that overtook the others.
Formal contact with the League of Schmalkalden was interrupted in 1536 because of the destruction of Queen Anne, as well as by the risings. Although they had always endorsed Katherine’s marriage, the Lutherans were dismayed by the fall of the Boleyns. Anne had been closely associated with evangelicalism, and they feared that her execution signalled the end of Henry’s grudging support for the gospel. The king was intrigued by what he had learned from Bishop Edward Fox’s negotiations in Wittenberg, but Henry remained profoundly suspicious of Martin Luther’s motives.2 From late 1536 until mid-1537, the king was preoccupied with suppressing unrest in the north, and temporarily, conservatives were disadvantaged. New security for the regime arrived in October 1537 with Prince Edward’s birth.
Cranmer and Cromwell continued to hope that an alliance with the League would permit them to introduce real Lutheran reforms, beyond any that had already been achieved for the English Church. In 1537 Pope Paul III called a General Council at Mantua, and the king feared that the combined forces of the emperor, pope, and the king of France would be pitted against him. Within days of Edward’s christening, Cranmer wrote Martin Bucer of Strasbourg to re-establish their association.3 Cranmer had already written Heinrich Bullinger of Zűrich to reassure him that the uprisings were over.4 In Basel, Simon Grynaeus reprinted Hugh Latimer’s Convocation sermon of 1536, and he praised Henry for bringing the Reformation to England.5
Early in 1538, and without Henry’s knowledge, Cromwell approached Landgrave Philip of Hesse and begged him to send an embassy so that England could be won for Christ and the gospel. Relations between the League and England now entered an intense phase. Henry agreed to exchange ambassadors, and he signalled that he was still interested in entering an alliance with the League.6
As relations between England and the Lutherans warmed, Cranmer began to revise the liturgy. He planned to redraft the Breviary, the book that set out for each day the worship services, or ‘offices’, that all those who were in holy orders were required to recite.7 In his deanery of Hadleigh in Suffolk, curates said the Mass in English.8
In anticipation of an agreement with the Lutherans, many of Cranmer’s friends who were in holy orders married secretly in the 1530s, even though it was still illegal for priests to take wives. His brother Edmund married so quietly that we have no record of his wife’s name. Others included Cranmer’s chaplain Rowland Taylor and his friend Henry Holbeach, the future bishop of Lincoln. At some unrecorded time, Cranmer sent to Nuremberg for his wife Margaret.
A dangerous set of doctrinal problems called for Cromwell and Cranmer’s attention, especially with a possible alliance in the offing. The first was residual loyalty to the pope and the teachings of the Roman Church, which threatened the stability of the realm and Henry’s throne. Another problem was that of heretics who denied the full humanity of Christ in a kind of radical Protestantism known as Anabaptism. A third was the danger posed by those referred to as ‘sacramentaries’ who rejected the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Lutherans defended the real presence against criticism, as Cranmer did at this period of his life. Sacramentaries and especially Anabaptists went far beyond anything that the Lutherans would be willing to countenance in their own regions or in their negotiations with England.
In spring 1538, the archbishop received word that there were heretics in his outpost jurisdiction of Calais. His chief officer there was his commissary John Butler. Cranmer instructed Butler and his chaplain Richard Champion (d. 1543) to investigate. They answered that the rumours were untrue, and whoever had started them should be punished. Nevertheless, within a few weeks similar rumours reached the court, and Cromwell notified the governor of Calais, Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle (d. 1542).9 In July 1538 Butler sent Cranmer the preacher Adam Damplip (d. 1543), whose sermons had caused disruptions. Cranmer examined him, and wrote Cromwell that Damplip ‘utterly denieth that ever he taught or said that the very body and blood of Christ was not presently in the sacrament of the altar’. When pressed, Damplip confessed that he believed in the real presence, but in his sermons he ‘confuted the opinion of transubstantiation’. For the time being, Cranmer was willing to shield Damplip because he did not think his opinions were heretical. Cranmer concluded in his letter to Cromwell, ‘I think he taught but the truth’.10
The Damplip episode is one the best pieces of evidence that Cranmer continued to believe in the real presence in the mid-1530s, even as he rejected the tenet of transubstantiation. His opinion is also revealed in the letter he wrote in 1537 to the Swiss Reformer Joachim Vadian (1584–1551) of St Gallen in Switzerland, another theologian who had been introduced to him by Grynaeus. The Swiss hoped to coax Cranmer away from his Lutheran opinions, and Vadian sent Cranmer a copy of his recent treatise against the real presence. In response, Cranmer wrote that he was familiar with everything Oecolampadius and Huldrych Zwingli had written, and he found Vadian’s Aphorisms ‘altogether displeasing’. Cranmer told him that ancient authors were not on his side, because the real presence had been taught in the Primitive Church by the earliest ecclesiastical writers. Cranmer wished neither to approve nor to contribute to further divisions among Protestants. Rather, he recommended Vadian join him in promoting Christian concord.11
Towards the beginning of 1538, in a series of staged events, Cromwell unleashed a wave of iconoclasm against England’s most famous religious statues and relics to impress, persuade, and frighten the king’s subjects into acquiescence. The statue of the Virgin Mary was removed from the eleventh-century shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk, and it was burnt at Chelsea, near Sir Thomas More’s residence. The Rood of Grace, which Cranmer had removed from Boxley Abbey in 1533, was exposed as a fraud by Bishop John Hilsey of Rochester at Paul’s Cross. At the end of his sermon, the boys in the audience were encouraged to smash it to pieces. The great golden shrine of St Thomas Becket was pulled out of Canterbury Cathedral, and it was carried by the wagonload to the royal treasury. According to rumours current in London, at Cromwell’s orders, the saint’s bones were burned.12
The most sensational event of the early summer was the execution at Smithfield on 22 May 1538 of the Observant Franciscan Friar John Forest, who was burnt with a wooden statue from Wales known as Dderfel Gadarn. At Lambeth Palace, Cranmer and Latimer examined Forest, using the same kind of pressures that had been brought to bear against the Nun of Kent. Forest was accused of believing that the Church of Rome was the one, only Catholic Church and that the fourth-century Council of Nicaea had lacked sufficient authority because it had been summoned by the Emperor Constantine the Great (d. 337), rather than by the pope. Forest at first seemed willing to submit. Then it became apparent that he had been using mental reservation to protect his conscience by leaving his real beliefs unsaid. Unlike Elizabeth Barton, he refused to retract his opinions openly, even though Latimer preached against him at Paul’s Cross. Under the new and rather vague heresy law that was passed in 1534, Forest was condemned as a traitor and a heretic.13 Barton had admitted her impostures, and therefore she had been hanged as a gesture of mercy, but Forest was adamant, so Cromwell decided to make his execution a spectacle. Latimer reluctantly presided from a pulpit set up at the place of execution. A special viewing gallery was built so that the mayor and aldermen and the lords of the king’s Council could lend their authority to the proceedings. Cromwell, Cranmer, and Stokesley attended. Forest was hanged in chains on a gallows, and alternately raised and lowered into the flames. As thousands watched, he suffered in slow agonies.14
Cranmer specially endorsed the idea that in maintaining the authority of the papacy, Forest was both a traitor disloyal to his king as well as a heretical traitor to God, and therefore he deserved his death. We have already noted that Cranmer had first begun to make this argument in 1533 when he exposed Barton as a fraud. As the ecclesiastical historian Peter Marshall has explained, Cranmer defended the idea that the English Church was ‘Catholic’ and orthodox in its teachings. Associating treason with heresy was a powerful weapon that was also used to denounce Reginald Pole, now a cardinal living in Rome, who had written extensively against the royal supremacy and thereby earned the king’s lasting hatred. Although the ferocity of Forest’s execution was unprecedented and it was not repeated, Cranmer never completely relinquished the idea that a papist was an enemy of God’s word who must have ‘a traitorous heart’.15 Ten years later, when the rebels of Devon and Cornwall rose against the first Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer maintained that ‘a papist is also both a heretic and a traitor’.16 Forest’s fate was a potent warning against all who secretly disavowed the king’s authority over the Church. A week after his execution, Stokesley was accused of praemunire for accepting a papal bull at a recent profession of a nun and monks at Syon Abbey.17
The spectacle of Forest’s burning had long-term consequences that Cromwell and Cranmer did not anticipate. In its aftermath Henry showed renewed favour to conservatives. The League’s ambassadors, Friedrich Myconius of Gotha and Franz Burchard, the vice-chancellor to Duke John Frederick of Saxony, arrived in the wake of Forest’s execution. They were received with such kindness that they became optimistic that England would now fully embrace the Lutheran Reformation under the terms of the Confession of Augsburg. But at their first meeting, the king expressed disappointment that Philip Melanchthon had not been sent with them, and he indicated that he would prefer to compromise on points of doctrine that he did not want to accept. In presiding over the negotiations at Lambeth, Cranmer found himself seriously disadvantaged by Henry’s involvement.18
Henry chose those who would participate in the negotiations, and he closely monitored the discussions even though he took Cromwell and the summer court away on a strenuous progress to the south of England. Cromwell had no real opportunity to influence the directions that the discussions took at Lambeth because a new crisis was breaking. In late summer 1538, Henry began to suspect designs upon his throne that implicated Cardinal Pole’s brother and his mother, the countess of Salisbury. The resulting investigations, known to historians as the Exeter conspiracy, absorbed most of Cromwell’s attention. Latimer was not included in the negotiations, perhaps as a sign of Henry’s disapproval of his role in Forest’s execution, and he spent the summer out of the way in his diocese, where he could offer Cranmer little support. Bishop Fox’s presence at the negotiations would have been essential. However, he died in May, and his loss, especially at such a key moment, hurt Cranmer badly.
In the talks, Cranmer was supported by Robert Barnes and Nicholas Heath, who had also gone on embassy to the Lutheran princes, but the king’s other choices were all conservatives: Richard Sampson, bishop of Chichester and dean of St Paul’s; George Daye of St John’s College, Cambridge; and Nicholas Wilson. In 1534 Wilson had refused to take the oath of succession, for which he had been pardoned only the previous year. Completing the group was Bishop Stokesley. Immediately upon Cromwell’s accusation of praemunire, Stokesley threw himself on king’s mercy, who was ‘better to him then he deserved’. His rehabilitation was a signal that Cromwell lacked sufficient support from Henry to topple the most powerful opponent of the reformation of the English Church.19
The discussions at Lambeth were difficult. Despite Cranmer’s best efforts, the participants disagreed in front of their guests. Too often he was forced to make concessions to conservatives that disappointed and confused the Lutherans. In heated debates, they eventually came to an agreement on justification by faith that was a victory for Cranmer and the Lutherans. Yet, the conservatives insisted on the necessity of confession, and Cranmer struggled without success to find an accommodation with which the Lutherans could agree.20
The discussions lasted much longer than the ambassadors anticipated. Eager to return home, on 5 August 1538 they wrote the king to ask about the doctrines that had not been agreed upon during Fox’s negotiations in Wittenberg in 1536: private Masses for souls departed, communion in one kind, clerical celibacy, and monastic vows. The Lutherans considered them lingering abuses, and they asked the king for his immediate attention. This turned out to be a serious misstep, for Henry was far less accommodating to their points of view than they had been led to realize.21
In the south of England, while Cromwell was immersed in the details of the Exeter conspiracy, the king turned for advice to Sir Thomas More’s old friend Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham. At the end of 1537, Cranmer sent Henry the Bishops’ Book, The Institution of a Christian Man, for his belated attention. The king made annotations and corrections which Cranmer commented on in his turn.22 Now, for the negotiations with the Lutherans, bundles of documents were sent to the king on his progress and returned to Lambeth with his comments and Tunstall’s. Henry defended the celebration of private Masses for the souls of the dead, an idea the Lutherans had long since rejected. He refuted their insistence that communion be administered to the laity in both kinds, the wine as well as the bread. He also argued that celibacy was an essential requirement for the priesthood, whose demands were so heavy that they were incompatible with married life.23
This marked a dramatic setback. The cautious measures that Cromwell and Cranmer had been using to turn the king little by little had served them well enough to make some limited progress, but now the king’s exchanges with the Lutherans intensified his natural conservatism. By the end of August, with nothing decided and the king still out of London, the ambassadors were ready to return to the continent. Cranmer begged them to stay another month to get good answers from the king. He asked them to consider the many thousands of souls that could be saved if they delayed their departure. Cromwell suggested that the king was on the point of agreeing with them. But they refused to write any more position papers, and they left England as soon as they made their farewells to the king at the beginning of October.24
The Schmalkaldic embassy of 1538 was disappointing because a lasting commitment was not made with England, although negotiations were not broken off. Henry still hoped that Melanchthon would come to England for the next round of discussions. Cromwell also began an enormous gamble when he suggested that an alliance with the League could be concluded if the king made a marriage with one of the sisters of John Fredrick’s wife, Sibylle of Cleves (1512–1554).
The second Royal Injunctions of 1538
Perhaps as a consequence of the uneasy intermission in the negotiations with the Lutherans, the second set of Royal Injunctions that Cromwell released at the end of September 1538 was not really a new document. Rather than promote fresh changes in the Church that reflected further reforms in a Lutheran direction, they reiterated most of the points that had already been made in the Injunctions of 1536. In its most famous proviso, the Second Injunctions called for ‘a book of the whole Bible’ (in Latin and in English) to be set up in the choir of every parish church before 1 August 1539 where anyone could read it.25
John Lambert
But even as Cromwell issued the Second Injunctions, an unexpected blow came from the Schmalkaldic League as their ambassadors left England. Philip and John Frederick warned Henry in late September 1538 that they had seized a heretic who had in his possession letters that mentioned the spread of Anabaptism in England.
Hesse was experiencing its own disturbing rise in the number of Anabaptists, and the way Philip dealt with the problem was to invite Bucer to Marburg where he engaged in a disputation with Anabaptist leaders. Compared with England’s response, Philip’s was restrained. The Lutheran princes worried about Henry’s reaction to their letter, because their ambassadors were startled by the severity of the measures that were taken against heretics in England. They probably heard how Forest had been killed. Cromwell and lord chancellor Thomas Audley endorsed the burning of the eccentric heretic William Cowbridge at Oxford while the ambassadors were still in England.26 When the case of a London man accused of heresy came to his attention, ambassador Burchard urged Cranmer and Sampson to permit him to make his submission at his own parish church, rather than in front of great crowds at St. Paul’s. But they told him that because error concerning the sacrament of the altar was ‘daily increasing’, it was important that he did his penance where more people might see him punished. Although Burchard’s request was probably granted, the Lutherans were disturbed by the harsh measures they observed in England. In their letter, the princes advised that the best remedy against Anabaptism was to have the word of God truly preached.27
The news from the Lutheran princes about the spread of Anabaptism in England created a sensation at court. The efforts Cromwell and Cranmer had already taken to suppress heresies seemed inadequate in the present crisis, which allowed Henry to fuse Anabaptism and disrespect for the sacrament of the altar into one problem of heresy. Immediately Cromwell named a commission to search out Anabaptists. The commissioners included Cranmer, Barnes, Heath, and Edward Crome among the reformers, and Stokesley and Sampson as the conservatives. Although the full committee was evenly divided, they were united in their disdain for Anabaptists.28 At the end of November, a man and a woman, probably foreign refugees, were burnt at Smithfield for heresy. Another man associated with them was burnt at Colchester.29
Among those who were swept up in the arrests was John Lambert (alias Nicholson), who was already well known as a stubborn and awkward figure of contention. In 1531, Stokesley and Archbishop William Warham had examined him in Convocation for holding heretical opinions.30 In February 1536 Lambert was accused by the duke of Norfolk of saying that it was a sin to pray to saints. Cranmer and Latimer wrestled with him over several days then, and they decided that although they could not say if it was necessary to pray to saints, Lambert had been wrong to say that praying to them was sinful. Latimer was especially astringent in his criticisms, but Lambert refused to give way, and he was imprisoned briefly.31
The trial of John Lambert on 16 November 1538, like Forest’s execution, became one of the greatest pieces of political theatre of Henry’s reign. Clad in white, enthroned in Westminster Hall as ‘the perfect image of kingly majesty’, Henry conducted Lambert’s trial assisted by his bishops. At the same time, Pope Paul was preparing to issue Henry’s long-delayed excommunication, this time for his destruction of Becket’s shrine. Lambert’s trial was meant to enhance Henry’s prestige as the supreme arbiter of orthodoxy in defending Christendom against heresy.32
Lambert was asked if he believed in infant baptism, if Christ was present in the sacrament of the altar, and if Christ was incarnated by the Virgin Mary. He was questioned by Cranmer, Gardiner, Tunstall, and Stokesley, but first and with great harshness by the king, who hectored him for a long time. When Lambert refused to renounce his opinions, Henry condemned him to death. Appalled by the role Henry had forced him to play at Lambert’s trial, Cromwell had the condemned man brought to his house before his execution on 22 November, so that he could ask Lambert’s forgiveness.33
In time for Lambert’s execution, a proclamation drafted by the king denounced both Anabaptists and sacramentaries. The days celebrating Becket’s martyrdom were stricken out of England’s Kalendar of saints. The proclamation also contained a clause warning against clerical marriages, an early indication of a conservatism that would define the rest of the king’s reign.34
Before the end of the year, Tunstall succeeded to Fox’s place in the Council. In late September, after an absence of three years, Bishop Stephen Gardiner returned to England from his embassy to France.35 For the rest of Henry’s reign, Tunstall and Gardiner were able to rally conservatives to their side, and they opposed Cranmer’s plans for the Church.
Act of Six Articles
As the historian Rory McEntegart has noted, when the Lutheran ambassadors asked the king for his immediate attention in their letter of 5 August 1538, they inadvertently focused the king’s mind on the issues he decided were the most pressing for the English Church. They were the genesis of the Act of Six Articles that was passed by the Parliament in June 1539. The Lutherans may not have realized the importance that Henry attached to their letter, and when Burchard returned to England in April 1539 without Melanchthon, they were able to offer the king little in fresh negotiations. The first edition of the Great Bible was completed in time for their arrival. Its title page portrayed Henry enthroned under Christ as the embodiment of the heroic safeguard of his people, and perhaps it was inspired by the king’s appearance at Lambeth’s trial. Cranmer was shown at his right hand, with his gem-encrusted mitre at his feet, as he received from the king a thick volume labelled ‘Verbum Dei’. On the king’s left, Cromwell accepted a similar book. Further down the page, Cranmer was shown again, handing the Bible to a learned preacher. The king’s subjects appeared along the bottom of the page listening to the sermon gratefully as they repeated ‘Vivat rex’ and ‘God save the king’.36
However, England was not permitted to enter the League of Schmalkalden for the time being. Nor were the Lutherans interested in engaging in further theological discussions. Compromise with the king was out of the question because he would not accept the terms of the Augsburg Confession. Henry was deeply disappointed.37
At the same time, fresh revelations reached the king about heresy in Calais. When Henry complained to Audley about the spread of ‘the detestable heresy against the Sacrament of the Altar’, the lord chancellor suggested that an Act of Parliament should be made against it. Because Cranmer had defended the tenet of the real presence during Lambert’s trial, inadvertently he also prepared the way for the Six Articles, which at its inception may have been aimed simply at that most elusive of goals, unity in religion.38 But as Parliament prepared to meet in May 1539, Cromwell fell seriously ill, and he could not control the direction that the new settlement in religion was taking. Once Henry realized that the Lutherans were not willing to negotiate further, he expanded the discussion in Parliament to the issues that remained unresolved in their negotiations: the Real Presence (and transubstantiation): communion in both kinds, private Masses, clerical marriage, vows of chastity, and auricular confession. A draft of the Six Articles was introduced in the House of Lords by the duke of Norfolk. The doctrinal questions that they raised were complex, and Henry received conflicting advice as they were discussed. The proposals for the new Act represented a step back towards positions that had been rejected by the Ten Articles of 1536 and the Bishops’ Book.
In one of the most dangerous episodes in Cranmer’s career, the archbishop led the counterarguments against the proposals, first in the House of Lords, and then in the Upper House of the Synod. In the beginning, Cranmer was assisted by the men he had raised to bishoprics: Thomas Goodrich, Nicholas Shaxton, Hugh Latimer, and John Hilsey. Cranmer made ‘an earnest defense of God’s truth’ over three days. Twice Henry was present in the Lords on 19 and 21 May. Cranmer openly resisted the very doctrinal positions that Henry himself now promoted.39
In an unusual procedure, Parliament was prorogued for a week on 23 May so that the Synod could deliberate. Here too, in the Upper House, Cranmer spoke against the proposed articles in front of the king. Cranmer was able to persuade him and most of his listeners that auricular confession was not required by God in Scripture, which was a small victory. However, the most important articles under discussion concerned the Eucharist. Henry maintained that it was not necessary under God’s law for the laity to receive the chalice with the consecrated bread. The draft also defined transubstantiation as an essential dogma. Cranmer opposed the use of the word ‘transubstantiation’, and he succeeded in having it removed from the final statute. The evangelicals were also able to mitigate slightly the article on Masses for the dead. As we shall see in the next chapter, this article triggered a crisis at the end of Henry’s reign, when Cranmer’s friend Crome denounced the illogic of closing the religious houses, whose main purpose was to say Masses for departed souls. In the Lower House, almost alone, Crome refused to support the Six Articles.40
Cranmer argued that the marriage of priests was allowed by Scripture, although Henry insisted that the law of God categorically forbade such marriages. This was an extreme position that the king seems to have developed by his own eccentric study of the Bible. Similarly, the king argued that vows of chastity or widowhood were forever binding. No pope had ruled that the marriage of priests was inhibited by divine law, but rather, celibacy in the western Church was considered a matter that related to ecclesiastical discipline. Henry, however, refused to be persuaded otherwise.
By the time Parliament reassembled at the end of May 1539, the king had frightened almost all the bishops into acquiescence. According to Morice, Cranmer was deserted by his friends. He stood ‘post alone’ in opposition to the Six Articles.41 Foxe recorded that Henry gave Cranmer permission to spare his conscience, and to stay away from the House of Lords by stepping into the Council chamber so he need not be seen to support the measures he so strongly opposed. But Cranmer did not take advantage of Henry’s offer. With ‘humble protestation’ Cranmer refused to leave. Anyone who had witnessed the debates in the Lords or the Upper House would know how bitterly Cranmer opposed the Six Articles. Yet he chose to obey the will of the king as the supreme head of the Church as the measure passed. Later Cranmer noted that the Six Articles would never have become law if the king had not intervened.42
The penalties that the Six Articles would impose were drafted by Gardiner and the conservative bishops. Anyone who denied the real presence was liable to be burnt as a heretic. To break a vow of chastity was a felony, punishable by hanging. Former nuns were severely disadvantaged under the new law. Although most of them no longer had houses or communities to live in, their marriages were forbidden under pain of death. For married priests, the new law threatened their lives and their families. As Lutheran leaders observed developments in England, the penalties for married priests and their wives seemed the most arbitrary and cruel portion of the new law, which struck at the Cranmers and all evangelical priests who had married quietly. Cranmer sent Margaret back to her family in Nuremberg.
Immediately after the passage of the Six Articles, Cranmer feared imminent arrest and he worried that a widespread attack against evangelicals would ensue. Because Latimer and Shaxton had been particularly outspoken against the Six Articles in the Lords, they were deprived of their bishoprics and imprisoned. Secretly Cranmer sent for Alexander Alesius and advised him to flee. Cranmer told him that he wished he could leave England as well, and he would not mind being deprived, as Latimer had been, if that was the only punishment he was likely to face. Cranmer said he had assented to the new law purely out of fear, and he was sorry that he done so. And because he had no ready money, he gave Alesius as a sign of his friendship, a ring that had once belonged to Wolsey, the same ring that the king had given him when he agreed to accept the archbishopric.43
Bishop Hilsey surrendered the privilege of appointing the Paul’s Cross preachers. He asked Cromwell to return it to Stokesley. All of Hilsey’s preachers no longer dared to speak there for fear of being accused of heresy. He told Cromwell he was almost too frightened to preach at Paul’s Cross himself, and he died in August 1539 only eight days after his last sermon.
The Lutherans felt betrayed by the Act of Six Articles. Alesius arrived in Wittenberg within a month, but the news of the new law had already preceded him. In October 1539, Bucer and Grynaeus wrote Cranmer of their disappointment that the Six Articles had been passed. Luther and Melanchthon warned Duke John Frederick that blindness had fallen on England. In the hope that an international outcry would prevent Henry from killing Cranmer, Crome, Latimer, and Shaxton, Melanchthon denounced the Six Articles and Gardiner in an open letter to the king that reminded Henry of the threat that the pope and Cardinal Pole posed for England.44
Despite Cranmer’s fears, he was not arrested, and he was not deprived. Nor were Latimer and Shaxton executed. Rather, they were held in ward until they were pensioned as former bishops. Afterwards they lived in relative obscurity under Cranmer’s protection. Although Henry unleashed one set of advisors against the others, the king expected amity among members of his Council. During times of unusual stress he sent them to dine together at Lambeth Palace to build fellowship, as he did when the Parliament of 1539 ended, and he instructed the lords to ‘cherish’ Cranmer and assure him of his continued good will. At the dinner, Morice heard Cromwell address Cranmer with words that have since become famous as the epitome of the archbishop’s relationship with the king: ‘You were born in a happy hour, I suppose’, for ‘do or say what you will, the king will always take it well at your hand’. Even when Cromwell had complained against Cranmer to Henry, the king would never believe it. ‘And therefore you are most happy, if you can keep you in this estate’.45
For a previous generation of historians who were influenced by John Foxe’s description of the new statute as the ‘whip with six strings’,46 Cranmer had capitulated by attending the Lords at its passage. In 1962, Jasper Ridley wrote that Cranmer had shown great courage by resisting the king in the Lords and Upper House, but then shamefully compromised his conscience by accepting the law ‘without further resistance’.47 However, Alec Ryrie has argued recently that the Six Articles must be understood in the context of Henry’s negotiations with the Lutherans. Subtle ambiguities in the Act may have provided the evangelicals with some relief, and the new law did not represent a categorical defeat for them because even after its passage, its terms were still open to further negotiation and correction.48 In sending the Council to dine at Lambeth Palace, Henry also indicated that he wished to study the objections that Cranmer had raised. Morice recorded that whenever the king needed advice on difficult questions of doctrine, he would send word to Cranmer overnight, and the next day Henry would have a comprehensive set of ‘brief notes’ on a spectrum of opinions, concluding with Cranmer’s own. No other theologian could answer the king as swiftly as did the archbishop. Such service convinced Henry of Cranmer’s unswerving ‘fidelity to God and him’. The next day after the Council’s dinner the archbishop composed ‘a fair book’ of his positions that cited Scripture and the early doctors of the Church. This was the book that Morice lost in crossing the Thames in a famous episode related by Foxe, when his wherry was upset near the king’s bear baiting at Paul’s Wharf. Although the book then fell into hostile hands, Cromwell and Cranmer made certain that a fresh copy reached the king almost immediately.49
The fall of Thomas Cromwell
If the passage of the Act of Six Articles was one of the bitterest episodes in Cranmer’s career, it proved to be an even a greater disappointment for Cromwell. It revealed once again how limited his influence actually was. By eliminating Anne Boleyn and her brother, Cromwell removed important elements of support that he needed himself to succeed with the king’s Council and other people of influence.50 Like Anne, Cromwell was ruined by the very policies he worked so hard to achieve. So bitter were the struggles that led to the passage of the Six Articles that old enmities between Cromwell and his opponents, like the duke of Norfolk, which before now could be hidden or controlled, flailed into plain sight. The night of the Council’s dinner at Lambeth Palace, a furious argument broke out between Cromwell and one of the dukes that Cranmer could not quell. The renowned historian G. R. Elton traced Cromwell’s increasing vulnerability to 1539.51
In July, under the new law, Cranmer took fresh steps in Calais against Damplip and others who were accused of heresy. Ultimately, Damplip was executed as a traitor for some early contacts he had had with Reginald Pole. Despite the reversal that the Six Articles represented, Cromwell and Cranmer had little choice but to approach the Lutheran princes again in the hope that the conservatives’ gains could be stopped. Secret approaches were made to Bucer, who once again conveyed a plea to Philip of Hesse that Melanchthon should be allowed to come to England to persuade the king. But the Lutheran princes were reluctant to deal any further with Henry, and they did not want to send Melanchthon into possible danger.52
Cromwell’s position was improved in August 1539 when the king agreed to marry Anne, the daughter of the duke of Cleves and John Frederick’s sister-in-law, despite misgivings about the match that Cranmer expressed to Cromwell.53 Then, in an unexpected turn of events, Stokesley died on 8 September, just one month after Hilsey. No bishop had been as relentless in his opposition to reform. His influence had stretched across the entire realm. According to Foxe, on his deathbed Stokesley expressed satisfaction that he had burnt fifty heretics. When Burchard returned to England from Cleves to complete the marriage agreement, Cromwell and Cranmer were now much more confident, and they suggested that the new law was likely to be overturned soon. Cromwell emphasized how great an enemy Stokesley had been to the Gospel.54 His death permitted them to take steps to strengthen the evangelicals’ position again. Gardiner was briefly put out of the Council when he called Barnes a heretic and said it was a disgrace for Cromwell to employ him as an ambassador.55
Anne of Cleves arrived at Dover with a large entourage in the last week of 1539 and she was received at Canterbury by Cranmer. She was in Rochester in time to enjoy the revels of the Christmas season, and according to the chronicle recorded by Charles Wriothesley, at New Year’s Anne became so fascinated by the bull beating that was going on beneath her window that she took insufficient notice of the king, who had arrived in disguise with members of his privy chamber to surprise her. It was an inauspicious start.56
From their first meeting in Rochester, Henry expressed deep reluctance to marry Anne. Although she is best remembered today because Henry announced that he did not find her as attractive as she had been reported to him, many observers noted that the bride had the graceful dignity that befitted a queen. In a brief time she managed to make an excellent impression upon the king’s subjects. In all probability Henry rejected her because he resented being propelled by Cromwell into an alliance that he decided he did not want. At Greenwich on the day before the wedding, he summoned Cromwell, Cranmer, Tunstall, Suffolk, Norfolk, Hertford and the representatives of the duke of Cleves and he inquired about previous agreements for other marriages that had been made on Anne’s behalf. But time was short, and the king concluded that her brother would be driven into alliances with the Emperor Charles V and France should she be rejected.57 Therefore, on the morning of Epiphany, 6 January 1540, the king and Anne were united by Cranmer in a marriage that was already a failure.58
Six months elapsed before Henry repudiated this latest wife, and in that time Cromwell’s enemies noted that the king had become immediately infatuated by Katherine Howard (d. 1542), another niece of the duke of Norfolk, who was brought to court for the first time to wait on Anne. Not yet out of her teens, she captivated the king with her youth and vivacity. Gardiner opened his house so that, away from prying eyes at court, the king could woo her.59
In mid-April 1540, when a new Parliament opened, Cromwell’s position was endangered but not yet desperate. Henry created him earl of Essex and High Chamberlain of England.60 A second edition of the Great Bible appeared with Cranmer’s famous prologue that included long instructive quotations from John Chrysostom (d. 407) and Gregory Nazianzene (d. 390). Cranmer concluded that every man who came to the reading of the Great Bible should fear God and learn how to live a godly life.61
Suddenly, Cromwell was toppled by a crisis that was triggered by the poisonous rivalry between Barnes and Gardiner, who were old enemies from their Cambridge days. Barnes complained against a recent sermon Gardiner delivered at court. Barnes was offended again when Gardiner at the last moment replaced him as the Paul’s Cross preacher on the first Sunday in Lent, when Winchester denounced the essential Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Two weeks later, Barnes told the audience at Paul’s Cross that he and Gardiner were like ‘fighting cocks’ and he cast down his glove from the pulpit in a challenge. In subsequent weeks, Barnes was followed at Paul’s Cross by the preachers Thomas Garrard and William Jerome, who also attacked Gardiner. Gardiner complained to the king, and after lengthy disagreements Barnes and his friends seemed willing to submit to correction. Barnes, Garrard, and Jerome made highly equivocal recantations during Easter week that were meant to satisfy the king’s orders while convincing their audience that they continued to adhere to their original opinions. Barnes again mocked Gardiner from the pulpit. Henry was angered for their sign of disunity, but even now they might have escaped punishment, for Cromwell tried to make peace with Gardiner. Cromwell was again rising in the king’s favour, until word leaked out that Barnes had deliberately disobeyed Henry, with Cromwell’s secret approval.62 Now began the attacks against evangelicals that Cranmer had feared, and some of his deputies in Calais were implicated. Several hundred people were arrested in London.
On 10 June 1540, Cromwell was arrested in the Council chamber. Norfolk and other councillors humiliated him by tearing from him the insignia of his many offices, and he was taken to the Tower. Immediately, Audley announced Cromwell’s arrest in the House of Lords. Cranmer was now in great danger. Morice wrote that many in London were willing to bet that before the present Synod was ended, Cranmer would be sent to the Tower ‘beside his friend’.63 Foxe recorded that when the archbishop knew he was about to be seized, he shot up a private staircase to the royal apartments where he spoke with the king, who gave him his signet ring with the instructions that he should appear before the Privy Council, listen to the charges against him, and then produce the ring as a sign of Henry’s favour and protection.64
Paradoxically, Cranmer escaped the disaster that broke over Cromwell, although he had had shared many of the initiatives that the lord privy seal had advanced. A fragment of a letter Cranmer wrote to the king at this difficult juncture survives, though we cannot be certain that it ever reached Henry’s hands. Cranmer wrote that he was ‘sorrowful and amazed’ to hear in the Council that Cromwell was a traitor, ‘he who so loved your majesty (as I ever thought) no less than God’, who continually set forth Henry’s will and pleasure. Cromwell served Henry ‘in wisdom, diligence, faithfulness, and experience’. No other prince had such a councillor. ‘I loved him as my friend’ and loved him for the love which Cromwell seemed to bear towards the king. ‘But now, if he be a traitor, I am very sorry that ever I loved or trusted him’. Cranmer warned that now he did not know for ‘whom your grace may trust’.65
An important contribution to Cromwell’s fall was Henry’s decision to marry Katherine Howard. Cromwell was blamed for forcing the king into a marriage with Anne of Cleves that was so abhorrent to him he could not consummate it. Late in June, Anne was sent away from court to Richmond, and Cranmer had to prepare both an annulment, and also make adjustments to the list of impediments that would have prevented the king’s marriage to Katherine, who was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin. The king’s annulment was considered by the Synod and then Parliament. Cromwell was kept alive, Elton suggested, only long enough to ensure that Henry’s divorce from Anne of Cleves could be completed. Cromwell was attainted for treason, heresy, and for licensing heretics to preach. On 28 July 1540, the same day that Cromwell was beheaded on Tower Green, Henry married Katherine Howard. Henry lavished on her Cromwell’s lands. On 8 August, she was presented at court as Henry’s queen.66
Two days after Cromwell’s execution, on 30 July 1540, Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrard, and William Jerome went to the stake saying that they did not know why they were about to die. They had been exempted from a general pardon. They received no public hearing. In one fire, they died at Smithfield. Their executions were a scandal that was denounced for many years by evangelical writers. Nearby, three Catholic priests, Thomas Abell, Richard Fetherstone, and Edward Powell, who had been long imprisoned as supporters of Katherine of Aragon, were hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors as a further warning of the king’s ruthless even-handedness.67
In a further paradox, following the executions, Crome began to preach with greater zeal for reform, and he interceded with the king on behalf of the many others who had been arrested. By Henry’s command, at the beginning of August, no further measures were taken against those accused of heresy. Later Parliament adjusted the Six Articles, and removed the death penalty against priests for sexual incontinence.68
Emboldened by the news of Cromwell’s destruction, John Dantiscus re-established contact with Cranmer. Now prince-bishop of Warmia in Poland, in 1532 they had been ambassadors together at Regensburg. Then Dantiscus had listened ‘patiently’ as Cranmer denounced the papacy. Now he lashed out in an attempt to bring about Cranmer’s destruction. In a letter, Dantiscus criticized Henry’s many marriages (he joked that Henry often changed his Helens). Dantiscus denounced the pillaging of the property of the Church in England. He hinted that he knew that Cranmer had married when he was an ambassador. Alluding to the death of Barnes, Dantiscus warned Cranmer to take care lest the same ‘fate of the moth’ befall him. Cranmer dared not keep the letter secret, should the king hear about its insults from another source, and he enclosed it immediately to the king’s secretary, Thomas Wriothesley.69
Cromwell fell because he had pushed the king farther towards the Lutherans than Henry wanted to go. Secretly, Cromwell had encouraged Barnes and others to continue when they had been told to pull back. Within a year, Henry lamented that he had lost Cromwell, and he thought briefly of blaming Norfolk and Gardiner for preparing false accusations against him.70
In Wittenberg, Luther mourned his friend Robert Barnes.
Notes
1The collect for St Mark’s day, 25 April, written by Thomas Cranmer, for the second prayer book: The booke of the common praier and administration of the sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the churche: after the vse of the Churche of Englande (London: Richard Grafton, March 1549, RSTC 16268), 106r.
2R. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (London, 2002), 51, 58–61, 66–73.
3Martin Bucer to Cranmer, 23 October 1538, OL, 2, no. 244; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 93.
4Cranmer’s letter to Bullinger of 3 April 1537 is printed in Johannes Kessler’s Sabbata: Mit Kleineren Schriften und Briefen, eds. E. Egli and R. Schoch (St Gallen, 1902), 463–4. Although their correspondence was probably extensive, only two of Cranmer’s letters to Bullinger are known. See Chapter 8 for the other.
5Hugh Latimer, Oratio apud totum Ecclesiasticorum conventum (Basel: Robert Winter, September 1537) with a foreword by Simon Grynaeus.
6MacCulloch, Cranmer, 214–19; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 74, 83–93, 97–104.
7G. Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies Relating to the Book of Common Prayer, Alcuin Club, 65 (1983), 1–4; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 221–6.
8Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 83.
9LP, 13 (1), nos. 813, 833, 936, 1291.
10Cranmer to Cromwell, 15 August 1538, Miscellaneous, no. 235.
11Cranmer to Vadian, 1537, Miscellaneous, no. 193; P. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (London, 1965), 3–8.
12TRP, 1, 274. Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 74–6, 82–7; S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), 291–2.
1324 Henry VIII, c. 14.
14This method of execution had been used earlier in France. See R. J. Knecht, ‘Francis I, “Defender of the Faith”?’, in Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to S. T. Bindoff, eds. E. W. Ives et al., (London, 1978), 107.
15Richard Morison, An inuectiue ayenste the great and detestable vice, treason (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1539, RSTC 18112), D1r–E1r, F2r–Fv (quotation).
16Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 78–81; P. Marshall, ‘Papist as Heretic: The Burning of Friar Forest’, HJ, 41 (1998), 351–74. Cranmer’s answer to the rebels: CCCC MS 102, 337–405 printed in Miscellaneous, 163–87, quotation at p. 165. McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 97–101.
17Wriothesley, Chronicle, 78–81.
18McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 97–101.
19F. Mykonius, Historia reformationis (Leipzig, 1718), 57–8; LP, 13(1), no. 1096; Wriothesley, Chronicle, 81; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 214–19; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 74, 83–93, 97–104, 116–17; Brigden, London, 282–5.
20Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 472–84; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 103–14.
21McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 115–27.
22CCCC, MS 104, 241–70; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 83–114, and letters no. 211–12.
23In League of Schmalkalden (pp. 109–127), McEntegart considered a large number of documents that passed between Henry and the Lutherans during the summer of 1538 that can only be summarized here in passing. Some of the king’s comments can be read in CCCC, MS 109, especially 13r–17r; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 220–1.
24MacCulloch, Cranmer, 220–1; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 127–30.
25The Second Royal Injunctions (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538, RSTC 10086); Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 85–6.
26T. S. Freeman and S. Royal, ‘Stranger than Fiction in the Archives: The Controversial Death of William Cowbridge in 1538’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), 451–72.
27Cranmer, Miscellaneous, no. 231 (LP, 13 (1), no. 1237); McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 133; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 231–2.
28LPL, Cranmer’s Register, 67r; Wilkins, Concilia, 3, 836; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 133.
29Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 90.
30Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 117–18.
31The details about Lambert were conveyed in Dorset’s letter of 13 March 1536: BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra E. IV, 131r–132v (LP, 10, no. 462). McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 133–40.
32Wilkins, Concilia, 3, 840; LP, 13 (2) no. 1087; Sir Thomas Elyot, The Dictionary (London; Thomas Berthlet, 1538, RSTC 7659), A2r–A2v.
33Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 88–9; Foxe, AM, 5, 227–36; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 232–4; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 133–40.
34McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 138–9; TRP, 1, 274.
35M. E. James, ‘Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England: The Lincolnshire Rebellion of 1536’, Past and Present, n. 48 (1970), 76; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 219, 229–30; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 131–3.
36The Byble in Englyshe (London: Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, April 1539, RSTC 2068).
37McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 131–3, 150–3; The Byble in Englyshe (London: Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, April 1539, RSTC 2068).
38Gardiner, Letters, no. 127 (quotation at 369); McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 150.
39Morice, 248–9; Foxe, AM, 5, 264–5; 8, 23. For this complicated episode, see Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 55–79; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 242–9; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 152–7; Glyn Redworth, ‘A Study in the Formulation of Policy: The Genesis and Evolution of the Act of Six Articles’, JEH, 37 (1986), 42–67.
40Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 101.
41Morice, 248.
42Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 168.
43Alexander Alesius to Elizabeth I: TNA:PRO, SP 70/17, 11v–12r (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 1, no. 1303).
44Bucer to Cranmer, 29 October 1539, OL, 2, no. 245; Corpus Reformatorum: Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider, 3 (Halle, 1836), nos. 1865, 1868.
45Morice, 258–9.
46Foxe, AM, 5, 262.
47Ridley, Cranmer, 178–98.
48A. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 23–39.
49Morice, 249–50; Foxe, AM, 5, 388–91.
50McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 103.
51Foxe, AM, 5, 265, 398; 8, 14; G. R. Elton, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s Decline and Fall’, HJ, 10 (1951), 150–85.
52McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 167–77.
53MacCulloch, Cranmer, 257–8, 271–2.
54Foxe, AM, 5, 232; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 180–5.
55LP, 14 (2), no. 750.
56Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 109–12, 119–20; Edward Hall, The Union of the two noble and illustrate famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1548, RSTC 12721), 237v–240v.
57LP, 15, no. 823.
58Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 109–12, 119–20; Hall, Union, 237v–240v.
59Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 429–30.
60Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 115; Hall, Union, 241v.
61The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content of all the holy scrypture, both of the olde, and newe testament with a prologe therinto, made by the reuerende father in God, Thomas archbysshop of Cantorbury. (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1540, RSTC 2070). Cranmer’s prologue occurs on sigs. ✠1r–✠3v.
62See the dedicatory epistle to Gardiner’s A declaration of such true articles as George Joye hath gone about to confute as false (London: John Herford, 1546, RSTC 11588), reprinted in his Letters.
63Morice, 249.
64Foxe, AM, 8, 43.
65Cranmer to Henry VIII, June 1540, Miscellaneous, no. 270.
66H. A. Kelly, The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII (Stanford, 1976), 261–75; Hall, Union, 243v; Elton, ‘Decline and Fall’, 177–83; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 272–4.
67See Henry Brinkelow’s The complaynt of Roderyck Mors . . . vnto the parliament howse of Ingland [(Strasbourg, 1542], RSTC 3759.5) D2r, F7v.
68Brigden, London, 320–2; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 168; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 274.
69Cranmer, Miscellaneous, no. 261, 401–4.
70LP, 16, no. 590 Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 127.