7 The Privy Council, 1540–1547
‘Merciful father give us grace, that we never presume to sin through the example of any creature, but if it shall chance us at any time to offend thy divine majesty: that even then we may truly repent and lament the same, after the example of Mary Magdalene, and by lively faith obtain remission of all our sins through the only merits of thy son our saviour Christ.’1
After Thomas Cromwell
Thomas Cromwell had no successor as vicegerent in the English Church. Nor was he followed by a chief minister who would direct the king’s policy. Rather, the king’s Council was now renamed and redefined as the Privy Council, in whom executive authority was invested as a body. Its members served at the pleasure of the king. They included the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk; Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley; Stephen Gardiner of Winchester; and Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, the uncle of Prince Edward. Sir William Paget (1506–1563) was appointed clerk of the Privy Council at Cromwell’s death. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had nominal precedence among the privy councillors by virtue of his office, and his attendance at their meetings was recorded from mid-1542.
Until the end of his life, Henry VIII dominated his Privy Council. As a body, or as individual members, the Privy Council had no independence of authority or action. Political parties in the modern sense did not exist, and its members formed loose coalitions, or factions, that responded to specific problems. Ambition and changes in religious policy drove the formation of shifting coalitions. Usually three or more divisions existed amongst the privy councillors at any time, and the rivalries they engendered were intense, sometimes leading to acts of violence and revenge.
John Foxe believed that the period following the passage of the Act of Six Articles was a time of great repression for Protestants, who were living under ‘the whip with six strings’. Although, as we will see, Anne Askew and others were sacrificed under the Six Articles, Foxe’s view was unduly pessimistic. Some of the harshest provisions of the law were modified by subsequent statutes. Despite his conservatism, Henry never intended to re-embrace the papacy nor undo the suppression of the religious houses. After Cromwell was executed, the king permitted further reforms, though not as many as Cranmer wished. In 1541, Henry ordered his bishops to take away any images or shrines that had not already been removed. The only lights still allowed were those that burned before the sacrament of the altar.2 In 1543, the Bishops’ Book was revised in a new formulary known as the King’s Book that was issued with Henry’s approval. Bible reading was limited to the uppermost levels of society under the terms of the Act for the Advancement of True Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary.3 At the end of 1545, Parliament began to suppress the chantries, whose purpose (like the monasteries) was to supplement Masses in the parishes on behalf of the souls of their departed founders. Henry needed money to pay for England’s wars, and the economy weakened. It remained weak in the new reign. Other changes in religion were slow and faced intense opposition.
Henry’s privy councillors were among the most ruthless men ever to serve the king. Some were ready to thwart him, double- cross him, or betray him, if they dared. Many hoped he would die, but they did not say so, for to speak of the king’s death was treason. Henry knew that he could not trust most of them, and he was a past master at playing one set of his advisors against the others.
In addition to the Privy Council, Henry also received advice from the gentlemen who waited on him in his private suite of rooms, known as the king’s privy chamber. Many of its members were evangelicals, especially once he wed Katherine Parr (1512–1548), his last wife, in 1543. The chief figures of the privy chamber were his physician, Dr William Butts (d. 1545), Sir Anthony Denny (1501–1549), and Sir William Herbert (1507–1570), who was married to Anne (d. 1552), Katherine’s sister. As we have already observed, Butts came from Cambridge to enter the king’s service in 1528. He played an instrumental role in protecting Cranmer and other Protestants at court. The members of the privy chamber did their utmost to manage the king and to persuade him to do as they thought best.
From 1540 until the end of the reign, the members of the court and the Privy Council were locked in relentless struggles for power that no one could win. The year 1543 was especially difficult for Cranmer, when he was exposed to his enemies and almost overcome. But Henry refused to give the victory to any side, not until his life ebbed at the close of 1546, when the suggestions and influence of the evangelicals in the king’s privy chamber were vital. Rather surprisingly, the balance of the scales turned towards the evangelicals, and towards Cranmer.4
The Six Preachers of Canterbury
Among the peculiarities of the Reformation in England was the fact that the Church’s administration was not fully changed despite the gradual closure of its greatest intercessory institutions: the monasteries, friaries, and chantries. In contrast, in many Protestant cities on the continent, bishops were demoted. Cathedrals, colleges, and convents were confiscated and they were put to new uses. But in England, cathedrals were preserved and the office of bishop was retained in service to the crown. When the monks were disbanded, the cathedral chapters were refounded for secular canons or prebendaries. Each diocese continued to be important in the administration of the realm. In 1541, several new bishoprics were created as some of the larger dioceses, like Lincoln, were divided into smaller dioceses that were easier to run. When the Benedictines were turned out of their houses, Westminster Abbey, very briefly, became a cathedral and the abbot, Cranmer’s friend William Benson, became the dean of the new foundation.
Canterbury’s Benedictine Priory of Christ Church was also closed and refounded when the cathedral was given a new chapter. The reorganization gave Cranmer the opportunity to promote plans that he had been forced to relinquish when Anne Boleyn was destroyed. Now he wanted to found a college at the cathedral that included a grammar school and a permanent staff of preachers. The original plan for the school called for schoolmasters, lecturers in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as sixty students. But Henry intervened, and the new chapter became more elaborate than Cranmer wished. He wrote Cromwell in 1539 that although the proposed college was ‘a very substantial and godly foundation’, he had his doubts about the advisability of providing for a dozen prebendaries as the cathedral’s chapter, each of whom was to have only light duties and a generous salary. Cranmer suspected that they would spend ‘their time in much idleness’ and their money in ‘superfluous belly cheer’.5 Alongside the prebendaries, a separate staff of preachers was created. Known as the Six Preachers of Canterbury, they formed a college-inside- a-college which continues to the present day, an innovation unique to Canterbury amongst the other cathedral foundations.
Cranmer recommended his friend Edward Crome as dean of the new chapter. Had Crome been appointed, he would have been a staunch protector of Cranmer’s interests. Instead, the promotion went to the diplomat Nicholas Wotton (c. 1497–1567). Moreover, Henry insisted that in creating the new chapter, his policy be followed of making appointments evenly to conservatives and reformers. Although Cranmer was able to place a few of his own men (including his chaplain Richard Champion), several prebendaries were former monks who bitterly resented the injuries they had already endured at Cranmer’s hands. Three of the Six Preachers were evangelicals: John Scory (d. 1585), Michael Drum, and Nicholas Ridley’s cousin Lancelot (d. 1576). The other three, including Robert Serles (originally from Oxford), were conservatives. The members of the chapter disagreed amongst themselves from the start. Wotton was often abroad on diplomatic missions and Cranmer never had complete control over the cathedral foundation. From its inception, the conservative members of the new cathedral foundation conspired to destroy him. Angered by their defensive arguments about devotions, in 1541 Cranmer told the conservative prebendaries that he would break them of their old ‘mumpsimus’: a byword then for wilful ignorance and the obstruction of reform.6 When Champion died in May 1543 his colleagues threw hot coals from the thurible into his grave. They considered him, like Cranmer, a heretic worthy of burning.7
The end of the king’s fifth marriage, 1541
The risings that occurred in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536–1537 were the greatest domestic disturbances of Henry’s reign, and in 1541 the king went on a progress to ensure that the north remained pacified. He travelled with an army of soldiers and horsemen to instil fear. He was also accompanied by a small summer court that included Queen Katherine Howard and her attendants, as well as select members of his Privy Council and privy chamber. They left London at the end of June 1541. On 9 August the king was in Lincoln, and then he proceeded to Stamford and Pontefract. The king spent nearly a week in York because he wanted to hold negotiations with his nephew, King James V of Scotland (1512–1542). Henry was concerned that the Scots might invade England once again in conjunction with their traditional ally France. But Henry was disappointed. James did not join him.
While they were in Yorkshire, the king and his Privy Council were disturbed by the unexpected appearance of Six Preacher Serles, who attempted to present them with a complaint against Cranmer’s destruction of religious images in Kent. Serles badly misjudged the king, for Henry could see on his progress that many images still had not been removed, despite many warnings. From Hull, the king sent a letter to the bishops that ordered them to take down any remaining shrines that still received offerings. Serles was sent back to Cranmer, who expelled him from the Six Preachers temporarily and placed him in prison.8
While Henry was in the north, Cranmer was approached by John Lascelles (d. 1546), one of Cromwell’s many former clients, who made damaging revelations concerning the queen. His sister warned him that Katherine had taken lovers before her marriage, when they had both served in the household of Agnes (d. 1545), the dowager duchess of Norfolk. As a Protestant, Lascelles deeply resented Norfolk and Gardiner for bringing about Cromwell’s destruction. To strike at them, however, was fraught with danger. The information Lascelles’s sister revealed could be used as a weapon against anyone who told the king, who was obviously happy in his present marriage. But Henry had to be told when he returned at the end of October. All who knew of Katherine’s misconduct and did not reveal it were liable to punishment for the crime of misprision of treason.9
The problem called for the greatest delicacy and it placed Cranmer in an unenviable position. Ralph Morice described this as one of the most dangerous episodes in Cranmer’s career, especially because he could not depend upon the support of members of the Privy Council. When he turned to Hertford for advice, the earl told him that only he would know how to break such news to the king. On All Souls’ Day 1541, while the king was at Mass, Cranmer left a letter for him in his seat that conveyed the facts as they were then known.10
Henry refused at first to believe the allegations, which were quickly proved. Katherine had given one of her lovers, Francis Dereham (d. 1541), a place at court, and he confessed. Even now, she might have escaped with her life, if her pre-contact with Dereham could be written off as a valid marriage. Cranmer was given the responsibility of questioning Katherine, who broke down completely. Her plight aroused his sympathies. As he informed Henry, ‘it would have pitied any man's heart’ to see the frenzies she suffered, especially when Cranmer told her that the king was willing to show her mercy.11 Cranmer tried to convince her that her contact with Dereham constituted a valid marriage, but before he had succeeded in helping her, the disastrous affair she had been conducting since her marriage was revealed. In Lincoln or at other stops on the summer’s progress, while Henry was out hunting or meeting with his subjects, Katherine committed adultery with Thomas Culpeper (c. 1514–1541), one of the king’s favourite members of his privy chamber. Culpeper had been let into the queen’s apartments by her attendant, Jane (ex. 1542), the widow of Anne Boleyn’s brother Lord Rochford.
Katherine Howard’s behaviour was completely exceptional for its time. Most young noblewomen were so carefully taught and chaperoned that they would have no opportunity to take lovers before or after their marriages. The dowager duchess (the stepmother of the present duke) had known about Katherine’s affairs. Not only had she failed to stop them, but also she had not given due warning once the king’s attraction to Katherine became apparent. Instead, Katherine had been offered to the king as an inducement to destroy Cromwell. Norfolk and Gardiner hastened to protect themselves from implication in the disaster, and paradoxically they emerged from the catastrophe almost unscathed. To decide how to proceed against the queen, the king held all-night meetings with the Privy Council, first at Hampton Court, and then at Gardiner’s palace in Southwark. Cranmer remained at Hampton Court, charged with safeguarding the king’s coffers and jewels, and he was instructed to interview Katherine again concerning Culpeper.12
The king also ordered Cranmer to admonish his niece, Lady Margaret Douglas (1515–1578) for the warm interest she had shown in Katherine’s brother Charles. Margaret was the half- sister of King James, as well as a possible heir to the English throne as the daughter of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret (1489–1541), the queen of Scotland, who died that autumn. Henry directed Cranmer to tell his niece to beware that she did not to repeat such indiscretions again.13
On 13 November 1541, Katherine’s household was discharged, and the next day she was sent away to Syon Abbey, which had only recently been closed. After a trial at the Guildhall in London, Culpeper and Dereham were executed at Tyburn on 10 December. A new Parliament was summoned to convict Katherine of high treason. The House of Lords commissioned Cranmer to urge her to speak in her own defence, even though her fate was a foregone conclusion.14 Once the news spread that Henry had repudiated his latest marriage, the ambassador of the duke of Cleves approached Cranmer to recommend that Henry receive Anne in matrimony again. His request placed the archbishop once more in an awkward position, because Anne’s cause was clearly impossible.15 Katherine and Lady Rochford were beheaded at the Tower on 13 February 1542.16 At the time of her death, Katherine was no more than twenty-four.
The Canterbury Convocation of 1542
The latest parliament was summoned not only to proceed against Katherine, but to prepare for war. When Convocation began its sessions Cranmer was denied his latest opportunity to take up some of his most cherished plans. The long-delayed revision of canon law was still waiting. The Bishops’ Book, The Institution of a Christian Man, had been released in 1537 without Henry’s full approval. In the intervening years, bishops Nicholas Heath, Thomas Thirlby, John Salcot, and George Daye had prepared the draft of a new version, and Henry took serious interest in their work. Cranmer also wanted to release a new collection of ordinary sermons or homilies that he envisioned would be another collaborative effort that could build consensus and unity in the Church and the realm. He had elicited contributions from a wide spectrum of opinion. From Bishop Edmund Bonner of London (who had succeeded John Stokesley in 1540), he commissioned the homily ‘Of Christian love and charity’. Cranmer also invited Gardiner to contribute. Cranmer saved for himself the homilies on the most important topics: salvation, faith, and works.
But Cranmer was trying to make progress despite severe disadvantages. Cromwell may have overshadowed him, but the vicegerent had possessed the forcefulness to move the king’s business along. Now he was gone, and Cranmer’s greatest allies, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton, and also been ejected from the Upper House when they lost their bishoprics. Gardiner and Bonner seized their opportunity to persuade the king that worship services were being disrupted by laypeople as they read the Bible openly in their parish churches, and Henry ordered Convocation to reconsider the matter. When Cranmer asked the members of the Upper House if the Great Bible could be retained, he was told that it could not. Another new translation was needed to correct it. Thereupon Cranmer once again had both testaments divided into parts for fresh attention. Stokesley had hampered Cranmer’s efforts to translate the Bible in 1535, as we have already observed. Now the opposition was led by Gardiner, who wanted to reintroduce Greek or Latin words into the English text to defeat the New Testament’s intelligibility. In March 1542 Cranmer announced that the work would be taken over at the universities, and we hear little more of any plans to retranslate the Bible then. As Diarmaid MacCulloch noted, Cranmer was able to save the Great Bible, but at a heavy cost.17 His plan for a book of homilies was also sacrificed in favour of the new King’s Book, which came out the following year.
War with France, 1542–1546
Warfare and diplomatic concerns dominated the last three years of Henry’s reign. A dangerous flare-up of the Italian Wars convulsed the whole of Europe from 1542. The king’s relationship with Cranmer and his other courtiers became even more complicated as a consequence. Renewed warfare meant that Henry encouraged conservative doctrinal positions to ensure peace at home, and once again he entered into an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his brother Ferdinand, king of Hungary. In June, Henry sent Thirlby (c. 1500–1570), the bishop of Westminster, to negotiate. The emperor wanted to attack King Francis I, and Henry suggested that France be caught in a pincer movement between invading imperial armies from the east and English forces moving westward from the coast. To forestall the possibility that his nephew James might attack England, in September 1542 Henry sent Norfolk to make an unprovoked raid against Scotland. But in November, when James died unexpectedly following his defeat at the Battle of Solway Moss, Henry lacked sufficient forces to seize further military advantages. Nor was he successful in gaining the infant Mary Queen of Scots for his son.18
Francis renewed his alliance with Suleyman the Magnificent, and the Habsburgs’ territories along the Mediterranean and the Danube became vulnerable once again to the superior Turkish navy. In mid-1542, the Privy Council instructed both archbishops to call for processions and to command that special prayers be said in every parish in England for the success of the ‘Christian Army’ against the Turks. The Anglo-Imperial Treaty was concluded in mid-February 1543, and in June Henry delivered an ultimatum to the French ambassador. Henry sent Charles and Ferdinand a sum amounting to £10,000 to help their defences. To meet part of the costs of the looming ‘calamity’, on 19 July 1543 Cranmer issued a letter of appeal to every bishop in his province for the relief of Christians in Hungary, with an exhortation that urged parishioners to give freely of their own good will. The respectable sum of more than £1900 was raised by Cranmer’s appeal to defend Christendom against the Turk.19
The King’s Book, 1543
The next sessions of Parliament and Convocation began again at the beginning of 1543. Peace at home was absolutely essential now that England was at war. In February, Cranmer announced in Convocation that Henry once again wanted to remove all references to the bishop of Rome from service books, and those of any saints who were not New Testament figures. Cranmer also ordered that every Sunday, curates should read to parishioners one chapter of the New Testament in English, and when they had finished they should begin again with the Old.20
But in this session too, Cranmer’s hopes for further reforms were disappointed as the king continued to rely on conservative bishops. Several members of the court were arrested on the suspicion of heresy. Parliament continued to consider the objections that Gardiner and Bonner raised about the disruptions laypeople caused as they read the Bible during worship services in their parish churches. In May, Parliament passed the Act for the Advancement of True Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary, which prohibited the reading of the Bible by most members of the laity.21 The king decided that a collection of homilies, each by a different author, could not convey the consistency in doctrine that he thought essential, and the homilies were sacrificed in favour of the new King’s Book.
At the same time, Convocation took up the long-delayed revision of the Bishops’ Book. Now, in spring 1543, when Convocation discussed the definition of faith that should appear in the new volume, the prelates rejected Martin Luther’s thinking on justification by faith alone. Once more, they endorsed the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar. The new volume, A necessary doctrine and erudition for any Christen man, known as the King’s Book, opened with a letter in Henry’s name that urged his subjects ‘to live charitably and quietly together’. They were to conform themselves to the new law because it was ‘not so necessary’ for all people to read the Bible for themselves. Remarkably, Cranmer’s order that curates read the New Testament in church every Sunday now became part of the policy that took the Bible out of the laity’s hands. Parishioners were encouraged to accept ‘the doctrine of scripture taught by the preachers’ and to keep the lessons they were taught ‘inwardly in their heart’. They were also warned not to ‘grudge’ if they were not offered the chalice at communion.
The King’s Book also began with a remarkable statement on the meaning of faith that reflected Convocation’s rejection of Lutheran doctrine. Daye, who had started his career as chaplain to Bishop John Fisher, drew upon aspects of Fisher’s writings when the article on faith was composed. The Christian was justified by faith, but ‘neither only nor alone’. Faith was accompanied by hope and charity. Good works, and especially penance, were recommended for salvation, points that were also made in that summer’s exhortation against the Turk. Predestination was rejected, for it could not be found in Scripture or in the writings of the doctors of the Church. The perfect faith of a true Christian man included obedience to the whole doctrine and religion of Christ.22
In later years, as we will see in the next chapter, Cranmer could denounce the compromises that were made in the King’s Book and the ambiguities that encouraged the opponents of reform, but until the end of Henry’s reign, the English Bible was withheld from most members of the laity, and the King’s Book remained the statement that defined the religious settlement for his Church that all of his subjects were required to believe.23
The prebendaries plot, 1543
While the draft of the King’s Book was considered by Convocation, Cranmer was endangered by a series of interlocking threats that involved Canterbury Cathedral’s chapter and the conservative gentry of Kent that reached to Oxford and to Gardiner. The speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Thomas Moyle (d. 1560) was involved. The most famous episode concerned the attack against Cranmer in the Privy Council, recorded for posterity by Ralph Morice.
The attacks opened when Cranmer was accused in the Commons for his heretical sermons. Henry was told that Cranmer and his ‘learned men’ had so infected the realm ‘with their unsavory doctrine’ that three-quarters of the king’s subjects had become ‘abominable heretics’. Henry was urged to send him to the Tower. According to Morice, the king at first refused to listen to the complaints, and for the time being Cranmer’s enemies could not prevail against him. We have already noted that in early 1543 several members of the court were seized at Windsor and they were accused of heresies against the sacrament of the altar. Three were burned.24 Evangelical presses were closed. Thomas Becon (1515–1567), an influential pamphleteer, and the Protestant preacher Robert Wisdom (d. 1568) recanted at Paul’s Cross on 8 July.
At about the same time, the king went rowing on the Thames and Morice recorded that he stopped at Lambeth Palace. Henry received Cranmer into his barge with the words, ‘“Ah my chaplain, I have news for you: I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent”’. He pulled out of his sleeve accusations against Cranmer that were made by Kentish gentleman together with the conservative prebendaries of Canterbury’s cathedral chapter. Henry was about to marry Katherine Parr, whose second husband Lord Latimer had died only four months earlier. The king asked Cranmer if he was still keeping to all the terms imposed by the Six Articles, or whether the privacy of his bedchamber was exempt. So Henry knew Cranmer was married. Cranmer hastened to reassure the king of his obedience, and he requested that the accusations against him be investigated. To his astonishment, the king told him to conduct the inquiries himself. Cranmer replied that any investigations he made would not look impartial, but Henry insisted that he should conduct them so that ‘I may understand how this confederacy came to pass’.25 At the same time, the king seems to have given Cranmer permission to bring his wife Margaret back.
Some of the results of Cranmer’s investigation can be found in a manuscript that survives in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.26 They reveal a diligent and surprisingly even-handed investigation that was aimed at the ‘confederacy’ as well as suspected excesses among members of the evangelical clergy in Kent. In September, Scory and two other Six Preachers were temporarily imprisoned for their sermons. John Bland (ex. 1555), who was sponsored by Cranmer’s commissary Christopher Nevinson, seems to have flirted with radicalism, and he was indicted for heresy. The investigation also revealed how widely hated Nevinson and the Cranmers were for their destruction of religious images. Nevinson later married Cranmer’s niece Anne Bingham, the daughter of his sister Jane. The investigation revealed rumours that Jane was supposed to have married her second husband while her first was still alive, which was unlikely, but the story indicated how bitter feelings were against the archbishop’s family.27
So cautiously had Cranmer proceeded in his investigations that after six weeks Morice began to despair that the full extent of the confederacy would not be revealed. He wrote to Butts and Denny, and they encouraged the king to send Dr Thomas Legh (d. 1545) to help Cranmer. In the 1530s, Legh was one of Cromwell’s most implacable visitors who prepared the closure of many religious houses. He brought his servants to Canterbury and Henry’s ring as a sign of his authority. Legh unleashed his men in a surprise search of the houses, chests, and papers of the prebendaries and of local gentlemen. Many were exposed, including Richard Thornden (d. 1558), formerly a Benedictine monk who was now one of the Canterbury prebendaries as well as the suffragan bishop of Dover. The letters Legh discovered also revealed Gardiner as the hidden instigator of the plot against Cranmer and the protector of the archbishop’s enemies.28
Before the investigations were completed, a fresh disaster occurred when Cranmer’s palace in Canterbury caught fire. While others ran around in panic, Foxe recorded that Cranmer was calm. He walked up and down and warned members of his household not to take risks. But one of his brothers-in-law died.29
In the chaos, as Cranmer’s possessions and papers were retrieved from the burning palace, a fresh rumour was born: hidden in one of the great chests was Cranmer’s wife Margaret. Probably the box contained only documents,30 but according to the notorious fiction told later by the Jesuits Robert Parsons and Nicholas Sander, Cranmer pleaded that a particular wooden chest be rescued because (as they said) his ‘pretty nobsey’ was inside. This story originated after Cranmer’s death in Reginald Cardinal Pole’s household. Its author was probably Nicholas Harpsfield, who became archdeacon of Canterbury in 1554 when Edmund Cranmer was deprived, and his information seems to have come from the family of Archbishop Warham, and the nephew who was pensioned to enable Edmund to take his office. The story was often repeated in Elizabeth’s reign.31 It may be the first (or perhaps the only) story that is told about Margaret. Despite the story’s inherent implausibility, it epitomized the deep repugnance with which Harpsfield, Parsons, and Sander regarded the abandonment of Cranmer’s vow of celibacy, which represented for them an outrageous desecration of the office of the priesthood.32
Just before Christmas, Cranmer was suddenly summoned to court, because the conservatives had marshalled themselves against him once more. Members of the Privy Council persuaded the king that Cranmer would likely make damaging admissions if he were sent to the Tower. In the most famous of all of Morice’s stories, Henry sent for the archbishop and spoke with him privately in the gallery at the Palace of Whitehall. When told of the accusations, Cranmer thanked the king for warning him, and he asked to be heard impartially, as the king no doubt intended. But Henry told him that once he was imprisoned, false witnesses would be procured against him to obtain his condemnation. Then the king gave him his ring as a sign of his protection.
The next day, Cranmer discovered that he was locked out of the Privy Council chamber, and he had to sit among the serving men for nearly an hour while others went freely in and out. Morice was with him. Deeply worried, he went to Butts, who told the king of the ‘strange sight’ of the archbishop of Canterbury, shut out of the very body where he presided as one of its most important members. When Cranmer at last was called in, his colleagues accused him of infecting the realm with heresy, and that it was the king’s pleasure that he should be sent to the Tower. Then Cranmer showed them Henry’s ring. Defeated, together they went to the king, who told them that Cranmer ‘was as faithful a man towards me as ever was prelate in this realm’. Henry said he felt in indebted to Cranmer for the many services he had rendered him. The king warned them against further examples of ‘malice’ aimed against Cranmer or against each other. Afterwards, Gardiner was nearly arrested, but he too escaped by submitting himself to the king. Morice noted that Cranmer ‘delighted not in revenging’.33
Foxe made Morice’s story of the Privy Council a centrepiece in his account of Cranmer’s life in the Actes and Monuments. In the early seventeenth century, Foxe’s account was incorporated into King Henry VIII (or All is True), the last history play that William Shakespeare wrote in 1613 collaboration with John Fletcher, whose grandfather was one of Foxe’s friends. The Shakespeare play presented Cranmer as an uncomplicated figure of heroism, the mild-mannered victim of the king’s wicked councillors. His character is ennobled by his self-effacing loyalty and his faith, as a tacit allusion to his eventual martyrdom, which Shakespeare and Fletcher developed further in the final scene of the play. As Cranmer holds the infant Elizabeth in his arms at her baptism, he declares that England is promised in ‘this royal princess…a thousand thousand blessings’. She will be the ‘pattern to all princes’ living, and the virtuous exemplar to those who those follow her. She is a phoenix from whose ashes new kings will rise, just as, by implication, a new Church will rise from Cranmer’s ashes. All is True established Cranmer as the prophet of England’s future greatness.34
The English litany, 1544
As Henry prepared to leave for France in 1544, Cranmer wrote an English litany to be used everywhere in his province. The litany and public processions played prominent roles in English devotional life before the Reformation, when the laity followed their priests as they carried a cross or monstrance with the consecrated host as they petitioned heaven for blessings. Cranmer was well acquainted with the elaborate processions that were a feature of the University of Cambridge’s religious life in the early part of the century. Now he revised the litany to encourage the English people to pray for their king and to avoid rebellion in his absence. Cranmer acknowledged that he used ‘more than the liberty of a translator’ in revising the litany because the Latin seemed ‘barren’ and ‘little fruitful’, and he seized the opportunity to severely reduce the petitions to the saints which had been one of the great defining features of processions in the medieval Church. Although the litany was only a short piece of text, it marked the true start of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, and it was incorporated into both editions.35
Henry invaded France in mid-1544 at the head of forty thousand men. Cranmer contributed to the war effort, especially in the defence of coastal Kent. In August 1545 he came to Dover armed and helmeted, leading one hundred horsemen.36 At his palace at Bekesbourne, he maintained a hospital for wounded soldiers, staffed with a physician and a surgeon. The wounded were fed from Cranmer’s own kitchens, and when they were well enough to travel, they were given enough money to reach home.37
Henry returned in triumph, but with little in the way of real results to show for his heavy expenditures. Over the next two years his health gradually deteriorated. As he visibly weakened, conservatives and reformers fought to give themselves the best advantage should the king die. The last months of Henry’s life were marked by some of the bloodiest contests of his reign.
The crisis of the sacrament of the altar, 1546
Cranmer was at risk once more when a crisis concerning the Mass developed during Lent 1546, provoked by his old Cambridge friend, Edward Crome. We have already seen that in 1539 Crome supported Cranmer in opposing the passage of the Act of Six Articles in the Lower House of Convocation. Crome was a daring preacher, and he had been in trouble frequently during a turbulent career. Twice before now he was accused of heresy, in the early 1530s and again in 1541, when he became famous for his slippery recantations at Paul’s Cross, made (he always said) with the king’s approval. Each time he equivocated, and he managed to evade a complete retraction of the opinions he habitually expressed. In 1541, he told his listeners that it was superstitious to say Masses for the dead. He taunted his enemies by saying that if the Mass was as important as they said it was, then the king had done wrong when he put down the abbeys. Now in 1546, as the chantries were scheduled for suppression, Crome returned to the same themes. Parliament had done well to bestow chantries as well as the monasteries on the king, he preached, because private Masses did not relieve souls in purgatory. Christ was the only sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Mass was not a sacrifice, but rather it was a commemoration of the death of Christ. Thus Crome impugned the doctrine of the real presence, which meant that again he was in violation of the Six Articles.
Conservatives used the outcry that followed Crome’s sermon to purge reformers at court and in many parts of the country. Cranmer was not at Lambeth during Lent 1546. Rather, he was in Kent seeing to coastal defences as part of the war effort, because England was still under imminent threat from the French fleet.38 New commissions were authorized to hunt for offences against the Six Articles. Pursued by Bishop Bonner, on 20 April Crome promised to appear at Paul’s Cross in three weeks’ time, when he was to declare that he believed that the words of consecration turned the bread and wine into the very body and blood of Christ, and that the Mass was profitable to both the living and the dead. In the interval he was visited by many friends, including members of the court, who encouraged him not to recant. Only one of them warned him to do as the king expected.
On 9 May 1546, Crome entered the pulpit at Paul’s Cross. The royal chaplains Nicholas Ridley and Richard Cox (c. 1500–1581) were assigned to assess his performance. Emboldened by the private advice he had received, Crome refused to recant. He said that he had not been commanded to recant, although that was indeed the king’s expectation. The next day, he was brought before the Privy Council to explain himself before bishops Bonner and Nicholas Heath as well as Gardiner and Cuthbert Tunstall. Eventually he was induced to tell the names of those who had advised him to stick to his own views. In mid-May, when two men and a woman from Essex were found guilty of holding opinions against the real presence, the king approved their executions ‘for the example and terror of others’.39 When peace with France was declared on Whitsunday, Bonner processed through the streets of London when he displayed the consecrated host.40
On 27 June Crome returned to Paul’s Cross to satisfy the king and to endorse the law without further evasions. Under the watchful eyes of the duke of Norfolk and other privy councillors, he told the enormous audience that ‘we have in this Church of England the very true sacrament which is the very body and blood of our Saviour Christ under the form of bread and wine’.41 Crome now did as he was told to do, but there was every reason to doubt his sincerity.
The controversy that Crome aroused in 1546 was one of the key turning points for Cranmer and for the Reformation in England. It led to the burning of Anne Askew in July, and Gardiner’s attempt to destroy Katherine Parr, which are some of the most famous episodes of the end of Henry’s reign. More than a score were investigated for their association with Crome, and nearly one hundred fled abroad. The archbishop was an obvious target for Gardiner and Bonner, especially because many of those who had counselled Crome not to submit were under Cranmer’s protection, including the former bishops Latimer and Shaxton. Since their disgrace, Latimer frequented Cranmer’s library at Lambeth Palace. Shaxton was living in Hadleigh in Suffolk, one of Cranmer’s peculiar jurisdictions, where he was able to hide his illegal wife and children. At the beginning of June, Shaxton came on a mission to London to preach in Crome’s defence, and he also openly rejected the real presence. Ralph Morice’s brother William was questioned by the Privy Council. Cranmer’s chaplain Rowland Taylor was troubled for a sermon he preached in Bury St Edmunds. John Lascelles, who had revealed Katherine Howard’s indiscretions, was sent to the Tower. Arrested also was Anne Askew, the daughter of a Lincolnshire knight, an occasional visitor to the ladies of Queen Katherine Parr’s court, whose brother Edward had been a member of Cranmer’s household.42
The attack on Askew was used as an attempt to purge the most important evangelical members of the king’s privy chamber, including Sir Anthony Denny, and William Herbert, whose wife Anne was the queen’s sister. Askew was told that Lady Joan Denny and Lady Herbert sent money to her in prison. Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley racked Askew in the Tower after she was condemned and Gardiner tried unsuccessfully to implicate the queen in the heresies.
On 16 July, Askew, Lascelles, and two other sacramentaries were burned at Smithfield. Shaxton escaped because he submitted and was pardoned. He preached at their executions, and then again at the beginning of August, weeping for his offence. In late September, books by Frith, Tyndale, and Barnes were burned at Paul’s Cross.43
Some difficult aspects of Cranmer’s opinion about the Eucharist were revealed as a result of the crisis. Crome, Shaxton, and Ridley were among Cranmer’s oldest Cambridge friends, and they had all preceded him in rejecting the real presence. Although Ridley had to testify before the Privy Council about Crome’s stubbornness, in actuality his opinions may have been dangerously close to Crome’s. For several years, Ridley had studied the early fathers of the Church, as well as the writings of the ninth-century monk ‘Bertram’ or Ratramnus of Corbie (d. c. 870), who embraced a mystical understanding of the Eucharist. At some time in the first half of the 1540s, Ridley had also rejected what theologians term a ‘realist’ opinion about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist in favour of the idea that the Mass is a commemoration of the death of Christ.
Cranmer and his colleagues also would have been well aware that John Calvin was making important statements about the nature of the Eucharist in his Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper (1544), as well as in his provocative dedications to King Francis in his Institutes, which became more critical of traditional doctrine in every new edition. Calvin joined Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger’s side of the arguments, and he denounced the idea that Christ’s body could be ‘locally’ enclosed in the bread of the Eucharist, because the body of Christ has ascended into heaven, and resides there. Calvin argued that it was just as mistaken for canon law to rule that the presence of Christ was limited to the bread as it was to deny marriage to the clergy. In the third edition of the Institutes (1543), Calvin wrote that those who imagined that the substance of the bread and wine was transformed when the Lord’s words were spoken over them were mistaken. Rather, Christ was spiritually present in the Supper he had instituted on the night that he was betrayed. The Eucharist was indeed miraculous, but the miracle occurred through the agency of God in the transformation of the souls of those who worthily ate the bread and drank the wine of the Lord’s Supper.44
Luther had died at the beginning of 1546, and although Philip Melanchthon continued to be a strong and well-respected figure, over the next decades, the Lutherans became isolated among Protestants in their own understanding of the Eucharist. In coming years, as the Consensus Tigurinus (or the Consensus of Zűrich) was framed from late 1548, a figurative understanding of the Eucharist emerged as the new agreement for Reformed Protestants, if not all Lutherans. Before the crisis of the summer, Ridley, Crome, and Shaxton probably already believed that Christ was present in the Eucharist ‘truly’ and spiritually, but not ‘really’ or bodily as the Six Articles insisted. Shaxton was so shaken by the dangerous events of 1546 that he abandoned his wife and children and returned to traditional opinions. In contrast, Ridley continued to rise and he became one of the great men of the next reign.
Crome’s predicament was that he carried the logic of the dissolution of the monasteries and chantries further than the king approved. He may have meant to disturb the Six Articles, but instead the immediate advantage went to his opponents. In addition to sending Askew, Lascelles, and the others to the stake, the conservatives printed several powerful defences of the sacrament of the altar in 1546. Most notable among them was Gardiner’s Detection of the Devil’s Sophistry that denounced Luther, Frith, Bucer, Bale, and all the authors of the ‘crooked arguments and counterfeit contradictions’ that robbed the laity of their confidence in the real presence.45 As a royal chaplain, even if Ridley secretly shared Crome’s opinion, he could not be seen to condone Crome’s challenge to the law and the king’s authority. As archbishop, Cranmer also could not condone Crome, especially because he still believed in the real presence. In 1546, Cranmer’s belief in the real presence was his best defence against his enemies.
But as a result of the crisis, Ridley and Cranmer embarked upon the discussions that ultimately persuaded the archbishop to relinquish his Lutheran ideas about the real presence. In that ‘extraordinary’ year 1546, Ridley began to draw Cranmer away from his former opinions.46 Some of Cranmer’s working papers that explore Bertram’s opinions have been preserved.47 Gradually, over the next three years, Cranmer embraced the opinion of a ‘true’ or spiritual presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper.48
The sacramentary crisis of 1546 also highlights the fact that Cranmer was slower to endorse change than were many of his closest colleagues. As archbishop he had to be seen to conform to the law, even if he disagreed with it, just as Crome was forced to subscribe to doctrines that he did not truly believe. Cranmer had made his courageous stand against the Six Articles at the time they were passed, and since then he had not challenged them in any constructive manner. He believed in the value of obedience, as we will see again in the next reign when he and Ridley confronted John Hooper’s objections against oaths and vestments. There were those who believed that Crome should have been willing to die, as Anne Askew and John Lascelles were. The courage with which they went to their deaths brought about new perceptions about the meanings of the Eucharist as well as martyrdom. After they died for the tenet of a spiritual presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, it was harder for English evangelicals to maintain the Lutheran idea that Christ’s body and blood were really present in the consecrated bread and wine. From this time forth, Luther’s opinions were surpassed by Swiss Reformers and their allies, who began to dominate theological thinking in England. The sacrifices of 1546 spelled what the historian Alec Ryrie has called the ‘death’ of Lutheran England.49
The death of Henry VIII, January 1547
When Henry concluded peace with France in mid-1546, the Anglo-Imperial alliance was still intact. England was reconciled with both of its greatest rivals simultaneously. For the first time since Henry repudiated his first marriage, rapprochement with the papacy became a possibility, and a papal agent met Henry in early August to invite English theologians to the Council of Trent.50 Gardiner’s tract defending the real presence was perhaps meant to prepare for the great reversal that would have led England back to Rome.
But for reasons that are not altogether clear, Henry did not heal the breach with the papacy. In addition to Cranmer, the end of the war brought other men of influence back to regular attendance at the Privy Council and the court. John Dudley, Lord Lisle, and Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, acted as counterweights against Gardiner and the duke of Norfolk, and the campaign against heretics stopped.
During his recent embassy to the imperial court, Gardiner had sent Sir William Paget many letters why he thought it was unwise for England to engage with the Lutheran princes. Gardiner’s Detection of the Devil’s Sophistry was so contentious that it unleashed an angry series of exchanges with Cranmer and others in the next reign. Now, in a fresh attack against heretics, Gardiner released an account of the measures he had taken against Barnes in 1540. Barnes’s burning had never been sufficiently explained, and now, for the first time, part of the mechanism that had also destroyed Cromwell was revealed. Although Gardiner said that he had not acted against Barnes out of any sense of revenge, he catalogued the insults he said Barnes had offered him since their days in Cambridge.51 Emotions ran high among members of the Privy Council as they began to position themselves to the best advantage as the king’s health failed. In one of their meetings, Lisle struck Gardiner. Gardiner also offended the king when he refused to exchange some of his property at Henry’s request. In contrast, Cranmer lost both Knole and Otford to the king, even though he would have preferred to keep them for himself.52
In the middle of August, the French admiral, Claude d’Annebaut (1495–1552), arrived with an entourage of over one thousand men to sign the treaty of peace. Henry prepared elaborate receptions that involved the building of new banqueting houses at Hampton Court for the entertainment of the visitors. Anne of Cleves and both of his daughters attended the celebrations. The king was now fifty-five years of age, and so ill and swollen that he had to be moved from room to room in a chair. On the first or second evening, the king made an appearance, leaning with one arm on the admiral, and the other on Cranmer. Henry made an extraordinary suggestion that evening: that the Mass should be abolished in both England and France in favour of a communion service. Francis should banish the bishop of Rome from his realm, and then he should persuade Charles to do the same in Flanders and in all his other territories. The king also told Cranmer to write a memorandum of his suggestion for Francis to consider.53
This episode raises many complicated problems that have been difficult for historians to reconcile. It seems very strange that Henry could have said something of the sort to d’Annebaut and Cranmer in August, while in the previous month he had countenanced the burning of several people who rejected the Mass. Askew and Lascelles would have welcomed his suggestion. The main source for this information was an additional account that Morice gave to Foxe that was not part of his main biographical information about Cranmer. Cranmer seems to have told Morice this story for the first time in 1549.
In the chaotic diplomatic scene of August 1546, Henry may have considered every possible diplomatic feint. At the end of the month, desperately worried ambassadors from the League of Schmalkalden arrived again. Following the Diet at Regensburg in January, Charles decided that the time had arrived at long last to crush the Protestants of central Europe. If he succeeded, Henry feared that the emperor would then attack England, and therefore his suggestion to the admiral was a serious ploy to hold Francis close as the means to prevent England’s isolation. The League could serve as a buffer between England and the emperor, even though, as Henry’s biographer J. J. Scarisbrick observed, ‘Henry wanted troops, not theologians’. Henry offered Landgrave Philip a large pension if he would serve him alone. He told the ambassadors that he was willing to enter an alliance with the Protestants, and that they should have their own theological conference to rival the Council of Trent. But he also suggested that France be permitted to enter the League, which was unlikely to happen quickly.54
The king made his final appearance before Parliament on 24 December 1545, and he delivered a tour-de-force performance that repudiated any return to the papacy. He also attacked excesses on every side of the doctrinal issues: the old stiff ‘mumpsimus’ of the traditionalist and the alarming new ‘sumpsimus’ of those who sowed doubts.55
Henry’s speech was one of the very last times he was seen by anyone except the members of his privy chamber. As his health failed, in the final weeks of his life he was cut off from almost everyone else, including Queen Katherine Parr and Cranmer. Access to his bedside was controlled by Denny. Only a few privy councillors, like Hertford and Herbert, were admitted.56
As he moved towards death, Henry became anxious to control the men he chose to be Edward’s guardians, who would rule England during the minority of his son.57 Henry began to fear that the duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547) would seize Edward and the throne. In mid-December, Surrey was arrested and charged with quartering the royal arms with his own. Surrey was an evangelical and a poet, but he was also a rash and dangerous man. His adoption of the royal arms for his own use became the evidence of his treason. Probably the real target was his father, just as two years earlier an effort was made to topple Winchester that resulted in the execution of his nephew Germaine Gardiner.58
The day after Christmas, Henry lay ill, he called for his will and had it read to him. The last time Henry had prepared his will was before he left for France in 1544. Then Henry had chosen a mixed group of conservatives and reformers as his executors who would rule England, in essence, as a council of regency for his young son. Cranmer’s name was at the head of the list that included Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, with Gardiner, Tunstall, Wriothesley, John Dudley, Viscount Lisle (1540–1553), Paget, Denny, and Sir Anthony Browne (c. 1500–1548), master of the horse. The executors were as evenly balanced between conservatives and reformers as those that Henry insisted to Cranmer were essential to guarantee the peace and unity of the realm.
But now, at the end of his life, Henry ordered that Gardiner’s name be stricken from his new will, along with that of his close associate, Bishop Thirlby of Westminster. We are indebted for our account of what happened next to Foxe, who was told by Morice from information he received from Cranmer, through Sir Anthony Denny, who was in constant attendance at Henry’s bedside. Browne was one of Gardiner’s great friends, and he was alarmed by the directions the king was giving. Kneeling beside Henry’s bed, he spoke of Gardiner’s long service and worthiness to be included in the next government. Henry told him that he intended to leave Gardiner out, for if he were an executor ‘you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature’. When Browne persisted, the king threatened to remove him from the list as well. In the context of Norfolk’s arrest and pending execution, Gardiner’s exclusion meant that for the first time the evangelicals would have a clear advantage in the government that was to come.59
Parliament reopened on 14 January 1547. Cranmer was present when the vote was taken in the Lords to attaint Surrey, who was beheaded on 21 January 1547. His father was to follow him to the block a week later.
But Henry moved against Norfolk too late. He grew steadily weaker at Whitehall, and no one dared to suggest to him he was failing until Denny told him on 27 January that his physicians and the members of the privy chamber all thought that he had not much longer to live. He warned the king to prepare for death and to call upon God in Christ for grace and mercy. When asked if he wanted to open his mind to any learned man, Henry replied that if he wanted anyone, he would want Cranmer, but first he wished to take some sleep and then decide. Still weaker when he awoke, he asked for Cranmer.
The archbishop was staying a dozen miles away at Croydon. By the time he arrived, Henry could no longer speak and he was almost unconscious. But he gave his hand to Cranmer and held him fast. Cranmer exhorted him to put his trust in Christ and call upon his mercy, and he asked him to give some sign with his eyes or hand that he trusted in the Lord. Henry wrung Cranmer’s hand as hard as he could, and shortly afterwards, in the early hours of Friday, 28 January 1547, the king died.60
Immediately Hertford brought Edward into safekeeping at Enfield, where Elizabeth was living. Not until 31 January did a tearful Lord Chancellor Wriothesley break the news of Henry’s death to Parliament. With a fanfare of trumpets, the new reign was proclaimed at the Palace of Westminster and in the City of London. Edward was escorted to the Tower, where Cranmer met him at the head of Privy Council, and their first meeting was held that afternoon. As they swore loyalty to Edward, they pledged to ‘stand to and maintain’ the provisions of Henry’s will to the utmost of their power.
However, in less than two months the evangelicals subverted the old king’s intent to provide for a council of regency to rule until Edward reached adulthood. In his will, the old king insisted that none of his son’s privy councillors should do anything ‘alone’, but rather they should always act with the written consent of the majority. For six-and-a-half years, governance at the highest levels had been effectively stalemated by the rivalries that Henry had energetically encouraged between his privy councillors. Now Cranmer helped to bring that system to an end. The king’s executors chose one ‘special man’ to be ‘preferred in name and place’ above the rest. They made Edward Seymour, the earl of Hertford, the new king’s uncle, Protector of the realm and governor of his nephew’s person.61
The next day, Henry’s will was read in the Privy Council and Edward’s consent was obtained to have Hertford as Lord Protector. Norfolk was spared execution by Henry’s death, and he was kept prisoner in the Tower through Edward’s reign, thus silencing for the time being one of the most powerful voices against the Protestants. The executors divided Norfolk’s and Surrey’s honours and lands between them. They also gave themselves new promotions that they said had always been Henry’s intent, but in reality were a division of the spoils of their rivals’ defeat. Hertford now became duke of Somerset with extraordinary powers as Lord Protector. As an evangelical, he was willing to follow Cranmer’s desires and to introduce further reforms into the English Church.62
On 9 February a requiem Mass was celebrated for Henry’s soul in every parish church in England. Official mourning for the king lasted until after his funeral at Windsor, when Gardiner presided. On 16 February the king’s body was buried in the choir of St George’s Chapel, next to Queen Jane’s.63
Cromwell told Cranmer that the king trusted him, and that he would take well anything Cranmer told him. Henry turned to Cranmer in his final agony. But Cranmer’s private opinion of Henry is less easy to know. He grew a beard, he said, as a sign of mourning for his old master. But Cranmer’s beard may have also been a symbol of his liberation. In time, it reached to his waist, which placed him visually in the company of Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin, whose beards expressed the patriarchal authority they aspired to wield in succession to Old Testament prophets. Cranmer’s beard was the symbol of the new directions he intended to take for the English Church.
The coronation of Edward VI
For the second time in his life, Cranmer presided at a coronation when he crowned the nine-year-old Edward at Westminster Abbey on 20 February 1547. Until recently, historians believed that Cranmer delivered an address then that praised the king as appearing in succession to King Josiah in the Old Testament, who restored Scripture and smashed idols. The sole piece of evidence for his address came from the papers that his biographer John Styrpe assembled in the eighteenth century. Cranmer’s ‘address’ was reprinted in the Parker Society’s collection of Cranmer’s works in 1844, and it obtained a wide currency among historians. It seemed to signal the sharp change in direction, at the dawn of Edward’s reign, towards the reforms that Cranmer intended to lead. However, Diarmaid MacCulloch has recently established that Strype was betrayed by his source, which was a forged document. In actuality, Cranmer made no such clarion call at Edward’s coronation. Moreover, both Gardiner and Tunstall played prominent roles in the ceremonies as the young king was crowned. Only after Gardiner was removed from his positions of influence from mid-1547 could Cranmer and Somerset embark upon substantial reforms of the English Church.64 For the first months of 1547, Henry VIII cast a long shadow over his son’s reign.
Notes
1Cranmer’s collect for the feast of St Mary Magdalen on 22 July from the 1549 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), 113.
2AM, 5, 463; LP, 16, no. 1262.
334 and 35 Henry VIII, c. 1.
4E. W. Ives, ‘Henry VIII’s Will—A Forensic Conundrum’, HJ, 35 (1992), 779–804; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 482.
5Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter to Cromwell, 29 November 1539, no. 265.
6P. Marshall, ‘Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus’, in Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England. (Aldershot, 2006), 157–65, and LP, vol. 18, pt. 2, no. 546, 322, 349, 378.
7CCCC, MS 128, p. 31 (LP, 18, pt. 2, no. 546, 300–1).
8M. L. Zell, ‘The Prebendaries Plot of 1543: A Reconsideration’, JEH, vol. 27 (1976), 241–53; Duffy, Altars, 431–7; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 283–6.
9Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 427–33.
10Morice, 259–60; H. A. Kelly, The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII (Stanford, 1976), 275–8.
11Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter to Henry VIII, November 1541, no. 273.
12S. E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977), 127–9.
13Chapuys to the Queen of Hungary, 10 November, 1541 (LP, 16, nos. 1328, 1331, 1333, 1366). Through the marriage Henry arranged for her in 1544, Lady Margaret Douglas became the mother of Lord Darnley and the grandmother of King James VI & I.
14Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments, 128, 141–8.
15Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter to Henry VIII, 13 January 1542, no. 274.
16Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 130–4.
17Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 163–5; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 289–94; S. Wabuda, ‘“A Day after Doomsday”: Cranmer and the Bible Translations of the 1530s’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700, eds. K. Killeen, H. Smith, and R. Willie (Oxford, 2015), 23–37.
18Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 172; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 434–44, 452–7.
19APC, vol. 1, 15; P. Ayris, ‘Preaching the Last Crusade: Thomas Cranmer and the “Devotion” Money of 1543’, JEH, 49 (1998), 683–701.
20Wilkins, Concilia, 863; Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 184.
2134 and 35 Henry VIII, c. 1; Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 184–8; S. Wabuda, ‘The Woman with the Rock: The Controversy on Women and Bible Reading’ in Belief and Practice in Reformation England, eds. S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (Aldershot, 1998), 40–59.
22A necessary doctrine and erudition for any Christen man (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1543, RSTC 5168), especially A2r–A4r, B1r–B3v, D1r–E5r, K1r; the Act for the Advancement of True Religion: 34 and 35 Henry VIII, c. 1; Ayris, ‘Last Crusade’, 683–701; Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 184–5; Duffy, Altars, 441–4. See also the article on Day in the ODNB.
23Gardiner, Letters, nos. 122, 123, 124.
24Morice, 251–2; D. Starkey, Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII (New York, 2003), 723–5.
25Morice, 252; Parker, 392–3.
26CCCC, MS 128, calendared in LP, vol. 18 (2), no. 546.
27FOR, 27.
28Morice, 253, Foxe, AM, 8, 28–31; Starkey, Six Wives, 727–8.
29Foxe, AM, 8, 41. The brother-in-law who died was not Harold Rosell (married to Dorothy Cranmer) or Edmund Cartwright (the husband of Agnes), as MacCulloch suggested in Cranmer, 322. They were still alive in the mid-1550s, as Cartwright’s will attests.
30MacCulloch, Cranmer, 322.
31A treatise on the pretended divorce between Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon, by Nicholas Harpsfield, ed. N. Pocock, Camden Society, 2nd series, 21 (London 1878), 178, 275, 290–1; E. Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), chapter 8. A man named Warham was questioned by the Privy Council in 1550 at the same time Gardiner was suppressed, APC, 3, 83.
32Ridley, Cranmer, 148–151; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 250–1, 322.
33Morice, 251–8; Parker, 291–6; Starkey, Six Wives, 728–31.
34King Henry VIII (All is True), act five, scene four.
35Cranmer’s letter of 7 October 1544, printed in Miscellaneous, no. 276. See the perceptive comments of B. Cummings in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, (Oxford, 2011), xxiii. Also, Duffy, Altars, 443, 452. In the 1549 Book of Common Prayer the ‘Letany and Suffrages’ appears before the section on Public Baptism. It is not mentioned on the Contents page of the first Prayer Book, whose pagination in every printing is unreliable.
36MacCulloch, Cranmer, 323.
37Foxe, AM, 8, 22.
38Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 455.
39APC, 1, 414, 417–19, 467. Other references for Crome will be found in my article ‘Equivocation and Recantation during the English Reformation: The “Subtle Shadows” of Dr Edward Crome’, JEH, 44 (1993), 224–42. See also Foxe, AM, 5, appx. xvi, document 6.
40Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 163–5.
41Foxe, AM, vol. 5, appx. xvi, document 6; Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 167–70.
42MacCulloch, Cranmer, 352–5.
43Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 167–70, 175.
44‘Locally’ appeared in the second edition of the Institutes: John Calvin Institution de la Religion Chrestienne (Generva: Michel de Bois, 1541), C4v–D1r; A faythful and moste godly treatyse concernynye the most sacred sacrament of the blessed body and bloude of our Sauiour Christ (London: William Hill, 1548?, RSTC 4410); B. A Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: the Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Eugene, 1971), 9–10; and the same author’s ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, in Thinking with the Church: Essays in Historical Theology (Cambridge, 2010), 229–58.
45Stephen Gardiner, A detection of the Deuils sophistrie wherwith he robbeth the vnlearned people, of the true byleef, in the most blessed sacrament of the aulter (London: John Herford for Robert Toye, 1546, RSTC 11591), 5r, 69v, 71v, 91v. Also, William Peryn, Thre godly and notable sermons, of the sacrament of the aulter (London, 1546, RSTC 19786); Richard Smith, The assertion and defence of the sacramente of the aulter (London, 1546, RSTC 22815); Ryrie, ‘Death of Lutheran England’, 77–8.
46The letter to the reader attributed to Cheke in Cranmer’s Defensio Verae et Catholicae Doctrinae de Sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi (Emden: Egidius van der Erve, 1557, RSTC 6005), A5r–A5v referred to the extraordinary year 1546 (‘nimirum anno 46’); Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 218; P. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (London, 1965), 38–43; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 354–5.
47CCCC MS 102, fol. 159v.
48B. A. Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, in Thinking with the Church: Essays in Historical Theology (Cambridge, 2010), 229–58; P. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (London, 1965).
49A. Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH, vol. 53 (2002), 64–92.
50Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 464–78; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 355–8.
51Stephen Gardiner, A declaration of such true articles as George Joye hath gone about to confute as false (London: John Herford, 1546, RSTC 11588, reprinted in Letters, no. 81.
52Morice, 266–7.
53Foxe (1570), 1426–7; AM, vol. 5, 562–4; Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 171–3.
54Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 466–78 (quotation at 466); R. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (London, 2002), 212–13.
55Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 470–1; Marshall, ‘Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus’, 157–65.
56H. Miller, ‘Henry VIII’s Unwritten Will: Grants of Lands and Honours in 1547’, in Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to S. T. Bindoff, eds. E. W. Ives et al. (London, 1978), 87–105.
57Ives, ‘Henry VIII’s Will’, 779–804.
58Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 176–7.
59Ives, ‘Henry VIII’s Will’, 779–804; Miller, ‘Henry VIII’s Unwritten Will’, 87–105.
60Foxe, AM, vol. 5, 689–96; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 495–6.
61Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 178–9, 182; APC, 2, 3–22.
62Ryrie, ‘Death of Lutheran England’, 68.
63Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 181–2.
64Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 126–7. See MacCulloch’s ‘Forging Reformation History: A Cautionary Tale’, in All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation (London, 2016), 321–58.