8 Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, 1547–1552
‘Stir up we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people, that they plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works: may of thee, be plenteously rewarded: through Jesus Christ our Lord.’1
The purge
The opening salvos of Edward VI’s reformation were fired not at his coronation, but in sermons that were delivered in the days that followed it. On Ash Wednesday, 23 February 1547, Nicholas Ridley denounced as papistical the use of holy water and the images of saints when he preached before the king at court. His themes were taken up again on the following Sunday at Paul’s Cross. The first important sermons that were delivered in the young king’s reign indicated that further reforms would be encouraged now.2
The Lord Protector Somerset had already assured Gardiner that there would be no substantial alterations in religion until the king reached full age. Disquieted by Ridley’s sermon, and chafing from his exclusion from the council of executors, Gardiner wrote Somerset to warn him that no changes should take place in the realm, not in its religion, laws, lands, or decrees, until Edward reached his majority.3 But Gardiner was on the wrong side of the decisions that were being made at the beginning of the reign.
On Sunday 6 March 1547, Thomas Wriothesley was overthrown as lord chancellor, and the Great Seal was taken away from him.4 His demotion was a successful coup mounted by the evangelicals in the new king’s government. The council of executors that Henry VIII had established in his will to rule England during the minority of his son lasted only six weeks. Now Somerset emerged as the initial strong man of Edward’s government, with more powers than the dead king had wanted any single person to enjoy.
The last occasion in Edward’s reign when all London parishes were asked to celebrate requiem Masses was in June 1547 to mark the death of the king of France. Francis I had died at the end of March, only two months after Henry. Although their reigns had been marked by the bitter wars they waged against each other, stories were told that the French king was never happy again once he learned of Henry’s death. The international perspective worsened dramatically. On 24 April, at the Battle of Műhlberg, the Emperor Charles V won a decisive victory against the League of Schmalkalden. Duke John Frederick of Saxony was wounded and taken prisoner. Briefly condemned to death, he capitulated and surrendered his government into the hands of a cousin. Landgrave Philip of Hesse was held captive until 1552. Charles imposed a series of restrictions in Lutheran regions, known as the Interim, which threatened the cradle of Protestantism.
Against this troubling backdrop, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer presided over a sumptuous requiem for Francis at St Paul’s, partly as an act of defiance aimed at Charles. Arrayed in full pontificals, he was assisted by the archbishop of York and eight other bishops. King Edward led the French ambassadors and English noblemen in mourning. London’s mayor and aldermen attended at the head of two hundred members of the livery companies. In the funeral sermon, Bishop Henry Holbeach of Lincoln promoted an evangelical message when he praised Francis for releasing a French Bible for all of his subjects to read, which was also meant as an implicit criticism of the late king Henry, who had often withheld the Bible from his own people.5 The requiem for King Francis marked an end of the Henrician era in the English Church.
Within six months of Henry’s death, his memory was insulted by a series of books that praised the courage of those who had gone to the stake in the summer of 1546. John Bale printed Anne Askew’s account of her ordeals, in which he articulated a new understanding of Protestant martyrdom that became the standard for the rest of the century and beyond, especially as it was developed further by John Foxe in his Actes and Monuments. The conservatives who brought about their deaths were also attacked. The open letter Philip Melanchthon had written in 1539 to castigate Henry was printed in an English translation in mid-1547 to insult the ‘shameless bishops’, like the ‘wicked Stephen Gardiner bishop of Winchester’ who used the Act of Six Articles ‘to deceive the eyes of Christian people’.6 Gardiner wrote Somerset in protest that Bale’s books were spreading lies.
Another early target for suppression for his association with the old king was the conservative Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Dr Richard Smyth (1500–1563). When Askew was burnt, Smyth denounced heresy in a book he ostentatiously dedicated to Henry.7 Now in changed circumstances, Smyth became the pursued. In mid-May 1547, the Privy Council ordered him to burn his books at Paul’s Cross, where he made an ironical ‘retraction’ of his opinions of the sacrament of the altar that took as his text Paul’s commentary from Romans, Omnia homo mendax: every man is a liar. This was so unsatisfactory that he had to recant again in Oxford in July. Moreover, he was deprived of his professorship.8 Smyth was the earliest of the stumbling blocks that were removed to make way for Edward’s Church.
The Book of Homilies, 1547
In May 1547, a royal proclamation announced that the entire English Church in both provinces would be visited. Although all current religious legislation was ordered to be obeyed, the proclamation signalled that changes to the Henrician laws should be expected. Gradually, many of the laws and policies that had inhibited further reforms were dismantled. In June, Gardiner was shocked when Cranmer informed him that he was reviving his project for the homilies. In the previous chapter, we observed that Cranmer had spent years of unrewarded effort in preparing a collection of homilies which was sacrificed in favour of the King’s Book of 1543. Now, Cranmer wrote Gardiner in the strongest terms that the King’s Book contained many errors, especially in its article on faith. The letter Cranmer wrote no longer exists, but according to the portions Winchester quoted in his response, Cranmer said that Henry had been deluded or ‘seduced’ when he approved the King’s Book. Cranmer intended to discard the deliberate obscurity that had been made as concessions to traditionalists in the King’s Book. He denigrated its definition of faith as one of its misleading ‘amphibologies’: a dubious ambiguity that was capable of being interpreted in more than one sense. The King’s Book was objectionable, Cranmer told him, because it was ‘such a fountain’ from which ‘both sides may fetch water’.9 Despite Gardiner’s protests, in August, Certain sermons or homilies was released. It was the first of Cranmer’s definitive statements on faith for Edward’s Church.
The Book of Homilies was a collection of twelve sacred addresses that were ‘appointed by the King’s Majesty’ to be read in every parish church in England.10 No individual contribution was signed, but the portions that Cranmer probably wrote were the preface; the first homily, ‘A fruitful exhortation, to the reading and knowledge of holy scripture’; and the three homilies that addressed the most controversial subjects: salvation, faith, and works.11 The preface denounced the ‘manifold enormities’ that had crept into the realm through ‘the false usurped power of the bishop of Rome, and the ungodly doctrine of his adherents’ which led to the destruction of innumerable souls. King Edward, with the advice of his uncle Somerset, now commissioned the Book of Homilies to deliver his subjects ‘from all errors and superstitions, and to be truly and faithfully instructed in the very word of God’. The homilies would teach them how to honour God and to serve the king ‘with all humility and subjection’.12
A homily is a sermon that is read to an audience by a clergyman from a fixed text. The origins of the homily are found in the teachings of the Fathers in the early Church, including Chrysostom and Basil (d. 379). Homilies on a rich variety of subjects survive from the middle ages. The Augustinian canon John Mirk (d. c. 1414) developed an important homiliary known as the Festial which he drew from the famous thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, the Legenda aurea. But Cranmer wanted his Book of Homilies to replace the pulpit fare that conservative clergy still used to teach their audiences. He wanted to prevent clergymen in Edward’s reign from preaching the kind of ‘“foolish lying legends”’ that he argued was the staple of Mirk’s Festial.13 The purpose of the Book of Homilies was to provide standardized direction to the laity concerning belief and behaviour that was consistent with the Protestant doctrines that Somerset and Cranmer were putting in place in Edward’s Church.
The first homily in the volume was Cranmer’s ‘A fruitful exhortation, to the reading and knowledge of holy scripture’ which marked an implicit repudiation of the restrictions against Bible reading that had been imposed on the lower social orders and women in 1543. Like his introduction to the 1540 Great Bible, the homily cited as its authority St John Chrysostom: ‘“whatsoever is required to salvation is fully contained in the Scripture of God”’. There could be nothing more necessary for a Christian man than the knowledge of God’s true Word. To ‘them that be desirous to know God or themselves’, the ‘reading, hearing, searching, and studying of Holy Scripture’ is ‘as drink is pleasant to them that be dry, and meat to them that be hungry’. Holy Scripture ‘is the food of the soul’. For our justification and salvation, we should search the New and Old Testaments, which are the ‘well of life’, and we should ‘not run to the stinking puddles of men’s traditions’.14
It was followed by ‘Of the misery of all mankind’, written by the conservative John Harpsfield (the brother of Nicholas), Oxford’s first Regius Professor of Greek, and it was perhaps prepared for the intended earlier edition of the Homilies. ‘Of the misery of all mankind’ was a powerful warning that ‘from the first infection’ of ‘our great grandfather Adam’, all people should know ‘their vile, corrupt, frail nature’ which was nothing more than ‘dust, earth and ashes’. Humankind was lost when Adam fell. Vainglory and pride should be pulled down whenever they appeared. ‘Let us look upon our feet, and then down peacocks’ feathers, down proud heart, down vile clay, frail and brittle vessels’.15
‘Of the misery of all mankind’ prepared the listeners for Cranmer’s homilies on salvation, faith, and works. They were deeply related to each other and their themes were completely intertwined. Cranmer taught that one depended upon another: Salvation was the gift of God. Faith flowed out of salvation. Good works flowed out of faith. Good works were insufficient in themselves as the means to salvation, but rather they were pleasing to God as the product and sign of a lively faith.
In the ‘Homily of the salvation of mankind, by only Christ our savior’, Cranmer drew from Paul to argue all men are sinners and offenders against God. No man may be justified by his own acts, works, or deeds, no matter how worthy they might seem. Rather, remission, pardon, and forgiveness must be sought and received from God. Man was not justified by works, but rather, ‘freely by faith in Christ’. Justification, or the salvation of the soul, was made possible ‘by God’s mercy and Christ’s merits, embraced by faith’. When ‘all the world’ was ‘wrapped in sin’ for the breaking of the law, God sent his only Son to make a satisfaction for our sins by the shedding of his most precious blood. Out of his great mercy, God delivered us, through the sacrifice of his own Son. Justification comes freely by the mercy of God to those who truly believe in him. A true and lively faith is the gift of God, as St Paul declared. Cranmer wrote that ‘we be justified by faith only, freely, and without works’. Our works are insufficient to deserve salvation at God’s hands. Only Christ and his most precious blood-shedding obtained our justification. Unmerited grace was God’s greatest gift. We must trust only in God’s mercy and in the sacrifice of Christ Jesus, once offered for us upon the cross.16
Faith, as Cranmer defined it in the Homily of Salvation, is to believe that Holy Scripture and the Creed are true; and moreover, faith is to have a sure trust and confidence in God’s merciful promises of salvation from everlasting damnation by Christ, and with a loving heart to obey his commandments.17
The two homilies that followed continued to explore the inter-dynamic between faith and works. In ‘A short declaration of the true, lively and Christian faith’, Cranmer explained that wicked Christians who confess God with their mouths but deny him in their deeds were without the right faith. Faith that was dead was not the ‘sure and substantial faith which saveth sinners’. Rather, quick and lively faith is ‘a sure trust and confidence of the mercy of God, through our lord Jesus Christ’ upon whom we commit ourselves wholly, ready to obey and serve only him. This faith brings forth good works. Without it, no good works shall be acceptable to God. God is pleased by this faith, and its reward was the salvation of the soul.18
In ‘An homily or sermon of good works annexed unto faith’, Cranmer wrote that true faith gives life to the works, and out of such faith come works that are very good indeed. No good work could be acceptable to God without faith. Like Jacques Lefèvre, Cranmer used the example of the penitent thief who was crucified alongside Jesus as an illustration that it was possible to be saved only by faith without any good works at all. ‘“The thief that was hanged when Christ suffered did believe only, and the most merciful God did justify him”’.19
The rest of the homilies, starting with Bishop Edmund Bonner’s ‘Homily of Christian love and charity’, explored the kind of good works that were acceptable to God. The homilies also warned ‘Against swearing and perjury’ and ‘Against Whoredom and Adultery’. They counselled against ‘Declining from God’ and ‘The fear of death’. ‘An exhortation concerning good order and obedience to rulers and magistrates’ and ‘Against Strife and Contention’ were mature statements that argued that obedience was necessary for peace in the kingdom.
The Book of Homilies did not address the nature of the sacrament of the altar, which had to wait until the first Prayer Book of 1549. Cranmer anticipated that ‘the Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Saviour Christ, of the due receiving of his blessed body and blood, under the form of bread and wine’ would appear in the next collection of homilies. A second Book of Homilies would also take up other topics including fasting, praying, alms deeds, and denunciations against idleness; gluttony and drunkenness; covetousness; envy, ire, and malice. Martin Bucer, in his response to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, also encouraged Cranmer to commission homilies on the worthy reception of each sacrament; the lawful care for the needy; holy wedlock; and the education of children.20 Cranmer probably anticipated the release of a second Book of Homilies at some later time, after the 1552 Prayer Book, but in this, as well as much else, he was interrupted by the young king’s untimely death.
At the beginning of Edward’s reign, only a strictly limited number of licensed clergymen were allowed to preach,21 and therefore the homilies were the only approved addresses that were sounded from most pulpits. Bishops were forbidden to preach except in their own cathedrals, a prohibition that especially offended Gardiner.22 Sunday by Sunday, the Homilies were to be read in every parish in England. When the end of the book was reached, they were to be begun again. Bucer complained that in too many parishes only a portion of a single homily was read each Sunday. Short though they were, the laity did not have the patience to listen to an entire address, he thought, but his observation means that the Homilies were indeed being read from parish pulpits.23 In some parishes the full Book of Homilies may have been read through five or six times before the king died in mid-1553. Gardiner admitted that laypeople obtained copies of the Homilies and read them aloud in their households ‘as well as the priest, or better’. He thought they should be instructed to come to church to hear them, but more to the point, the Book of Homilies was so well received that many people wanted to own the volume for themselves.24 The Book of Homilies was more successful than the first Book of Common Prayer in gaining acceptance for the reforms Cranmer wanted to encourage and for instilling in hearts and minds a Protestant understanding of faith.
Gardiner reacted with defiance when the Book of Homilies was released in August 1547. In recently discovered letters, he disparaged the definition of faith that was presented in the Homily of Salvation. Gardiner argued that justification by faith alone was not confirmed in Scripture or by the early Church authors. Faith without hope and charity was imperfect. He maintained that ‘the Homilies be over far out of the way’, and in good conscience he was unwilling to preach them.25
Gardiner was also offended by the royal visitation that started at the end of the summer. Many of the visitors were Cranmer’s closest associates: Ralph Morice, Christopher Nevinson, Nicholas Ridley, Rowland Taylor, and William Benson; and for the northern province, his friend Sir John Markham. The injunctions for the royal visitation were unusually long and stringent. In addition to requiring that every parish church should be supplied with a copy of the newly translated Paraphrases of the Gospels by Erasmus, they also called for all images to be removed from every parish church. Across England, lights were extinguished, crosses were taken down from rood lofts, statutes of the saints were broken into pieces, and holy pictures were openly burnt.26
Gardiner insisted in letters to Somerset that Henry had opposed innovation, and that the doctrines of the Church as they were expressed in the King’s Book should not be changed until Edward reached the age of majority in 1555, a day so distant that Gardiner thought that by then Cranmer might be dead. In September 1547, the Privy Council summoned Gardiner to appear and he was sent to the Fleet Prison for intransigence. After a brief period of release, he was required to preach an examination sermon at court in mid-1548, when he was expected to endorse the idea that Edward’s authority (and thus Somerset’s government) was just as great as if the king had been of full age. But Gardiner evaded many of the subjects that Somerset wanted him to set out in his sermon, and he was committed to the Tower.
Towards the first Book of Common Prayer
While the Book of Homilies moved towards the press, Cranmer and Ridley continued to discuss the meaning of the Eucharist, which (as we have already noted) was a central problem for Cranmer’s career. At the opening of Parliament in November 1547, the Mass was sung in English for the first time.27
As we have observed, the sermons that were delivered at Paul’s Cross, especially when Parliament and Convocation were in session, were important political statements. Ridley was made bishop of Rochester in September, and when he preached at Paul’s Cross at the end of the year, he rebuked ‘evil disposed persons’ who were spreading ‘railing’ handbills that insulted the Eucharist. He had to be careful not to run afoul of the Act of Six Articles, which had not yet been repealed, and yet find a balance that would distance the English Church from the radical views of the Anabaptists, who continued to cause Cranmer regular concern through Edwards’s reign. Ridley tried to summarize the new positions that were still under discussion: that the sacrament of the altar was ‘truly and verily the body and blood of Christ, effectually by grace and spirit’. However, his sermon was not well received, because the doctrine of a spiritual presence was still so new and abstruse that members of his audience fastened upon the novel and shocking aspects of what he said rather than on the substance of his meaning. When he attempted to deflect questions on the nature of the presence of Christ in the sacrament, he left his audience confused. Anyone who asked after sacred things in crude terms, he said, was ‘worse than dogs and hogs’.28
At the end of the year, Parliament abolished the Act of Six Articles and voted to allow the laity to take communion in both kinds, which meant that parishioners were to receive the wine as well as the bread. This was a striking change from traditional practice, because until now, in both the medieval Church and at Henry’s insistence, the chalice had been withheld from laypeople.29 On 8 March 1548, an Order of the Communion was released, an important forerunner of the Book of Common Prayer. It provided a liturgy in English for April’s Easter communion service. Priests were to let parishioners drink once from the chalice ‘and no more’. For the first time, Cranmer’s ‘general confession’ appeared: ‘Almighty God, father of our Lord Jesus Christ, maker of all things, judge of all men: We knowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time, most grievously have committed by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly, thy wrath and indignation against us: We do earnestly repent’. Like the General Confession, for the first time the Order also included the Prayer of Humble Access. In due course, they became some most familiar passages of the Book of Common Prayer.30
However, after Easter, Cranmer’s actual intentions for the English Church became confused when he released a Catechism for the instruction of children. The Catechism had begun as a book that Andreas Osiander prepared in Nuremberg during the brief period in 1532 when Cranmer visited him. First printed there in 1533, it was issued again in 1539 by Martin Luther’s friend Justus Jonas (1493–1555), and it was brought to England by his son, one of the refugees who arrived at the end of 1547. In summer 1548 it was translated, revised, and issued under Cranmer’s name, although it conflicted with the clear instructions just released in the Order of the Communion, as well as with the new law just passed by Parliament. The Catechism assumed the laity would not be given the cup, and it taught children, as the Lutherans did, that ‘we ought to believe, that in the sacrament we receive truly the body and blood of Christ’.31
The Catechism of 1548 marked almost the last time that Cranmer could be said to endorse what might be considered a Lutheran position concerning the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Immediately he was criticized, and the Catechism was revised and then revised again into the autumn. Still, a realist position of the presence in the sacrament was not completely removed from the book. Later Cranmer complained that many ‘ignorant persons’ who were unused to reading ‘old ancient authors’, did ‘carp’ against the Catechism. Cranmer’s positions on the Eucharist were not always clearly expressed for the English Church at the same time that his own private opinions were moving far beyond the new standards he released so gradually.32
Deeply concerned about the repressions that the Emperor Charles unleashed in the Interim, Cranmer extended warm invitations to many Protestant leaders to find refuge in England. Arriving from Strasbourg at the end of 1547 were Peter Martyr Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino (c. 1487–1565). Vermigli rapidly became an important advisor to Somerset’s government, and he was given Smyth’s Regius Chair of Divinity at Oxford in 1548, which he held until the end of the reign despite persistent opposition from Smyth’s friends. Vermigli brought with him a manuscript version of an epistle by John Chrysostom that he had discovered in Italy, which conveyed fresh evidence that the saint had thought that bread in the sacrament remained after the consecration. The new evidence confirmed Ridley’s readings in Ratramnus of Corbie. That, as well as the embarrassment of the problematic Catechism, may indicate that Cranmer was now ready to relinquish his endorsement of the real presence.33
In December 1548, the meaning of the Eucharist was debated over four days in the House of Lords. Ridley spoke vigorously. For the first time, Cranmer openly embraced the doctrine of the spiritual presence. He declared that Christ’s body was taken up into heaven at his ascension when he ‘left the world’, which meant that his body could not be locally present in the consecrated bread and wine. To observers, like the friends of Heinrich Bullinger of Zűrich, who had long hoped to persuade Cranmer to accept their opinions, their delight was unbounded. They said, perhaps optimistically, that at last Cranmer was coming over to Zűrich’s side of the controversies. ‘It is all over with Lutheranism’.34
Dame Margaret Cranmer
Early in 1549, when the laws that prohibited the marriage of priests were repealed, for the first time, Margaret could appear openly as Cranmer’s wife.35 She had lived in eclipse for so long that many assumed that they had married only recently. When Cranmer acknowledged their two adolescent children, Margaret and Thomas, suddenly his enemies perceived that he had been married secretly for many years.
Some modest provisions were made to safeguard Margaret’s future. As long ago as the 1540s, Sir William Butts had made a private appeal to Henry on behalf of Cranmer’s family. As we have already noted, Cranmer had been forced to grant or sell to the king many manors belonging to the archbishopric. Henry promised to grant him properties in exchange, and in early 1547 the rectories of Whatton and Aslockton at his birthplace were made over to him. Cranmer also received lands formerly belonging to Kirkstall Abbey and Arthington Priory in Yorkshire, which were granted to him and to his heirs. They provided Margaret with the only real security she enjoyed in her widowhood.36
The wives of bishops were not readily accepted as ladies of rank, and we know from his will that Holbeach insisted that his wife be called by the title Dame Joan. Margaret did not live at Lambeth Palace, nor did she assume the impressive role that Katarina von Bora enjoyed when she presided as hostess at Luther’s table. Instead, Margaret’s position as the archbishop of Canterbury’s wife remained almost completely undefined, as Matthew Parker and his wife discovered for themselves during the reign of Elizabeth. A married primate remained anomalous well into the seventeenth century. Not until after the Restoration did the wives of the archbishops of Canterbury attain a permanent position in English society.37
The 1549 Book of Common Prayer
At the conclusion of the debate on the Eucharist in the Lords, Parliament appointed a committee to make a new English liturgy. In Chapter 3, we observed that as he arrived in Nuremberg in March 1532, Cranmer was immediately fascinated when he observed Osiander’s liturgy. The Epistle and Gospel lessons were read in German, and every day the congregation was taught a chapter from the New Testament.38 For most of his tenure as archbishop, Cranmer yearned to provide a vernacular liturgy for the English Church, and he had spent years of preparation for his opportunity. We have already noted that his revision of the litany in 1544 marks the true start of the Prayer Book.39
The Book of Common Prayer was a crowning achievement in Cranmer’s career. It is one of the supreme religious and literary masterpieces of sixteenth-century England.
Until recently, it was so familiar to generations of English churchgoers that its contents seemed reassuring and uncontroversial. But at its introduction in 1549, Cranmer meant the Book of Common Prayer to be what the Renaissance scholar Brian Cummings has called ‘an engine of change’. The Prayer Book was not supposed to be set or fixed, but rather, it was an adaptation that was in step with the emerging patterns of worship that Protestant Churches elsewhere had adopted. Like the Homilies, the language of the Book of Common Prayer was full of nervous energy and vivid, urgent expressions. But the Book of Homilies was well received. In contrast, very largely the English people did not want an English Prayer Book, and they resented its imposition.40
Cranmer drew upon an impressive array of sources for the Book of Common Prayer. Several Latin liturgies, or ‘uses’, were current in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The most common was the use of Sarum (or Salisbury), but there were others, including for York. A revised Sarum breviary with the psalms, collects, and readings for the Divine Office was printed in 1541, and it may be seen as an early step towards Cranmer’s greater goal. Large portions of the Sarum Missal were translated for the Book of Common Prayer, and the other English uses were compared. A translation of A Consultation, Archbishop Hermann von Wied’s extensive program to reform the administration of the sacraments in Cologne, was sponsored in 1548 by the godly Katherine, dowager duchess of Suffolk (1519–1580), and it too informed Cranmer’s new Prayer Book.41
The 1549 Book of Common Prayer established the rituals of the English Church.42 It set out a table and calendar for the readings of the psalms and lessons; the order for the services of matins and evensong for the entire year; the introits, collects, Gospels, and Epistles to be used at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion; the communion service itself; the litany; baptism; confirmation (with a catechism for children); the service for matrimony; a service for the visitation of the sick, for burial, and for the ‘purification’ of women (the special service of thanksgiving to be used after a woman gave birth); a service for Ash Wednesday; a list of ceremonies ‘omitted or retained’; and notes of an explanation concerning the ‘decent ministration of things contained in this book’. As we have already noted, the Order of the Communion introduced some of the most important passages that Cranmer used again in the Prayer Book. Much could be said about its contents, but here we will limit our discussion mainly to two topics with which Cranmer was most intimately associated: the collects, and Holy Communion.
A collect is a short petitioning prayer that was recited by the priest on behalf of the people, most notably before the lessons of the communion service. In general, they follow a fivefold pattern: the address or invocation to God the Father; an acknowledgement of God’s power, or of human weakness; the actual petition concerning a specific urgent need; an aspiration of some higher purpose; and a plea. About one hundred collects appear in the 1549 Prayer Book. Most were close translations of the original Latin prayers from the Sarum Missal. Others were adaptations. About two dozen collects were Cranmer’s own unique compositions.
The collects are the best and most emotive examples of Cranmer’s prose. Many of them have become deeply embedded in English cultural life. In adapting them from the Sarum Missal, Cranmer was careful to eliminate any suggestion that good works merited salvation. Thus he replaced almost all of the original collects for saints’ days with his own creations that emphasized the merits of Christ’s sacrifice. Selections from his collects appear at the head of each chapter in this book.43
The most famous of all Cranmer’s collects is part of the communion service, and in the 1549 Prayer Book it occurred after the institution. Known as the Prayer of Humble Access, it was said by the priest in the name of all who were about to receive communion:
We do not presume to come to this thy table (O merciful lord) trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies: we be not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same lord whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore (gracious lord) so to eat the flesh of thy dear son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood in these holy Mysteries, that we may continually dwell in him, and he in us, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood.44
The 1549 Prayer Book called the Eucharist ‘the Supper or the Lord, and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass’. The service marked a dramatic departure from the medieval Mass as well as a fundamental break from the teaching of the Lutherans.
The service of Holy Communion was not a sacrifice. Christ made his one oblation on the cross, but at the Last Supper on the night before he suffered, he commanded that a perpetual memory of his death be celebrated in the Eucharist. The dogmas of transubstantiation and the real presence were implicitly rejected, even as Christ was truly present spiritually. In a long exhortation following the homily, the officiant was to remind the people that ‘the benefit is great, if with a truly penitent heart and lively faith’ they received the holy sacrament, when they ‘spiritually’ ate the flesh of Christ and drank his blood, for ‘then we dwell in Christ and Christ in us’. The Host was not to be elevated or shown to be gazed upon, which, until the Order of the Communion was released in 1548, had been one of the most common acts of devotion. The bread and wine were no longer the focus themselves, but rather, the emphasis of the service was on their reception and on the benefits to the souls of those who received them worthily.45
Just as the new Prayer Book was to provide uniformity for the entire realm by replacing the Sarum and other uses, the Book of Common Prayer was also designed to replace the psalters, primers, and books of hours that still enjoyed flourishing interest among laypeople at every level of society, whose devotions to the saints Cranmer thought distracted their readers from the full meaning of the sacrifice of Christ. In the Book of Homilies, the ‘homily of good works’ ended with a long denunciation of the ‘papistical superstition and abuses’ of traditional devotions, including the recitation of the rosary and the prayers of the psalter of Our Lady, which were still cherished by many people. By removing shrines, Cranmer eliminated numberless objects of local devotion. He intended to reduce the shock of the new especially by his sensitive attention to language, but many people were disturbed by the suppression of the Latin Mass in the Prayer Book. In effect, the appeal to a wide spectrum of opinion that Henry thought essential for the peace of his realm was cautiously abandoned by Somerset’s government.46
The Prayer Book risings, 1549
The Book of Common Prayer was ordered to be placed in all parish churches by Whitsunday, 9 June 1549. It arrived on the heels of the destruction of images and the removal of crosses in churches across England, as well as the dissolution of the chantries, which had begun in 1547. Silver and gold ornaments were confiscated from parish churches to pay for the government’s wars in Scotland and France as England’s currency was devalued. So much land had been diverted into the hands of the gentry from the closure of the religious houses that the economy still had not had time to adapt.
Dissatisfaction was already widespread, and now the new Book of Common Prayer, with its unfamiliar English liturgy, triggered immediate resistance. Risings began first in Cornwall and then spread to Devon. They were the most dangerous domestic threat to the realm since the Lincolnshire Rebellion and Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536–1537. In June 1549, Exeter was besieged, but Somerset was slow to respond. Fleeing Oxford, Vermigli took refuge at Lambeth Palace. Londoners were alarmed. On 21 July 1549, Cranmer came in great state to St Paul’s to pray for an end to the commotions, which he said went against God’s commandments and the true obedience King Edward was owed as the supreme head of the English Church.47 At the end of the summer the risings in the west were suppressed with great violence by soldiers acting under the direction of the Lord Privy Seal, Lord John Russell (d. 1555), whose victory that Cranmer celebrated at St Paul’s. The village of Clyst St Mary near Exeter was burned, and many hundreds were killed.48
Further resistance broke out in East Anglia towards harvest time, where the discontent had been fuelled by Somerset’s agrarian policies. The rebellion was led by Robert Kett (ex. 1549), whose forces occupied Norwich. Here too Somerset’s response left much to be desired, especially as he offered pardons to the insurgents before he secured their submission. Compared with Henry’s energetic repression of the north in 1536, Somerset did not seem sufficiently interested in quelling the revolts. Although he had seen battle in Scotland and France during the last reign, he refused to lead an army into the field now. An initial attempt to retake Norwich failed dismally. In August 1549, John Dudley, now earl of Warwick, led a sizeable force into Norfolk, and he defeated Kett. At least two thousand rebels were killed. The new king of France, Henri II (1519–1559), took advantage of the risings to attack Boulogne, which was in English hands. Thus the threat to the young king’s government intensified.
In the midst of the crisis, Sir Anthony Denny and Cranmer’s friend William Benson (the dean of Westminster) both died.49 By early October 1549, Somerset lost the confidence of many members of the nobility and gentry, and a coup was planned against him by Warwick and other members of the Privy Council. Somerset feared that Edward was at risk, and he issued a summons for the king’s subjects to protect the king from a dangerous plot against his rule. In one of the most dramatic episodes of the reign, on the evening of 5–6 October, Cranmer rode with Edward under the protection of a heavy guard when Somerset suddenly moved the king from Hampton Court to greater safety at Windsor Castle.50 Probably Edward was in no real danger, but he was kept close, almost as a hostage, to protect his uncle Somerset, whose appeal for assistance failed to attract serious support. A few days later, Cranmer, with William Lord Paget, persuaded Somerset to surrender, and on 11 October the Lord Protector was arrested and removed to the Tower. The Protectorship was at an end.51
The king’s privy chamber was reorganized, and the Privy Council began to rule as a body. By the end of the year, out of a period of dangerous disarray, Warwick emerged as England’s real leader on the strength of the military support he enjoyed. In February 1550, he assumed the title of lord president of the Privy Council, and he was made duke of Northumberland the following year. Northumberland was willing to continue the religious reforms that Somerset had sponsored, but as we will see, Cranmer’s relationship with him was difficult. In 1550, Somerset was briefly rehabilitated, but Northumberland saw him as a threat, and in early 1552 he was executed. Northumberland dominated the government until the end of the reign.
Martin Bucer in England
Cranmer invited Martin Bucer to take refuge in England in October 1548, and he arrived with Paul Fagius (c. 1504–1549) the following April, as the Prayer Book disturbances began. Of all the theologians who arrived in England at Cranmer’s invitation, Bucer was undoubtedly the most eminent.52
We have already observed that Bucer had played a major role in the Reformation from its earliest years. In 1518, as a Dominican friar, he had attended Luther’s disputation in Heidelberg. Deeply moved by his message, Bucer left his religious order, and he was among the first of the reformers to marry. From 1523 he was a tireless preacher and writer. Working closely with Wolfgang Capito and other civic leaders, Bucer brought about the abolition of the Catholic Mass in Strasbourg in 1529. At the same time, Bucer became attracted to Zwingli’s thinking, and he accepted Zwingli’s opinion that the Lord’s Supper was a memorial of Christ’s death.53
Through much of his career, Bucer endeavoured to find common doctrinal ground that would lead the Lutherans and the Zwinglians to agree on the meaning of the Eucharist. He took part in a number of colloquies in the hope of building consensus. In February 1536, five years after Zwingli’s death, Bucer and Capito met in Basel to hold discussions with Simon Grynaeus and Heinrich Bullinger, which resulted in the First Helvetic Confession. When they agreed that Christ’s natural body could not be locally present in the Eucharist, they subtly modified Zwingli’s original opinion. Instead, they agreed that the bread and wine were holy and true ‘signs’, offered to believers by the Lord himself, as nourishing food for spiritual and eternal life. Three months later, on the strength of the First Helvetic Confession, Bucer and Capito signed the Wittenberg Concord with Luther and Melanchthon. However, the ultimate prize of Protestant consensus was lost when the Wittenberg Concord was subsequently rejected by Swiss Reformers.54 Undeterred, in the 1540s, Bucer redoubled his efforts by holding talks with Catholic leaders, including Luther’s old foe Johannes Eck. Bucer also assisted Archbishop Hermann with the reformation in Cologne, and we have already noted the influence his Consultation had on the Book of Common Prayer.55 After 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. However, Bucer earned Bullinger’s lasting enmity for his willingness to compromise, and Swiss Reformers observed his arrival in England with deep suspicion.
Bucer and Fagius spend their first six months with Cranmer at Lambeth and Croydon. Cranmer and Bucer were inseparable, which caused Bullinger’s friends to fear that Cranmer was being unduly led by him. He was given the Regius chair in Divinity at Cambridge, the corresponding professorship that Vermigli already occupied at Oxford.56
Before the Prayer Book risings occurred, in early 1549 Vermigli led a formal debate on the meaning of the Eucharist at Oxford, and he summarized his positions in his Treatise on the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Like other Protestants, he rejected transubstantiation, but he was also critical of the views of both Luther and Zwingli. The disagreements between them encouraged ‘contention and strife’, which Vermigli (like Bucer) wanted to avoid.
For Vermigli, Christ reigned in heaven, where he was bodily present at the right hand of the Father, as the Creed taught. Christ did not descend corporally into the consecrated Host and wine. Instead, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was spiritual in nature. Vermigli compared the Eucharist with baptism, the one other true sacrament that was established by Christ in the Gospels. In baptism, the nature or the substance of the water did not change, Vermigli argued. Nor did the bread and wine change into a different substance. Rather, change occurred in the souls of those who worthily received communion. Through Christ’s institution, the priest’s pronouncement of the word of Holy Scripture, and the operation of the Holy Spirit, the sacraments had their strength and efficacy. Baptism was a spiritual birth and a nativity for the soul. Just as the soul of the person being baptized was changed, so too were the souls of those who worthily ate the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, which was spiritual food. Christ’s flesh fed the soul. The bread of the Eucharist was spiritual bread and an allegory of Christ’s unique sacrifice on the cross for humankind.57
Vermigli’s and Bucer’s work provided Cranmer with valuable support in the strides he was making to reform the English Church, and he was able to make more overt statements about the Lord’s Supper in his book, A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine, which appeared in 1550. All sides of the Eucharistic controversies claimed the power of the word ‘Catholic’ for themselves. Using stark language, Cranmer denounced transubstantiation and the idea that the Mass is a sacrifice as the ‘weeds’ of ‘popish doctrine’ that had been sown in the Lord’s vineyard by his adversaries, the devil and Antichrist. ‘Christ is the true and perfect nourishment, both of body and soul’. Our souls are fed by Christ. We feed ‘upon him to our spiritual strength and perfection’. Christ’s body and blood are ‘received with a pure heart, and a sincere faith’. Our sins are forgiven by his sacrifice on the cross.58
Cranmer’s Defence also attacked Gardiner’s belief in the real presence, which he had expressed in his 1546 book, the Detection of the devil’s sophistry. Cranmer noted that Bucer’s idea of a ‘true’ presence of Christ in the Eucharist disagreed with Gardiner’s. As Cranmer described it, Bucer ‘denieth utterly that Christ is really and substantially present in the bread, either by conversion or inclusion’. Bucer’s opinion ‘dissenteth in nothing’ from the views expressed by Oecolampadius or Zwingli. But in the ministration of the Lord’s Supper, ‘he affirmeth Christ to be present, and so do I also’.59
Reading the Defence in the Tower, Gardiner was amazed by the directions that Cranmer’s opinions had taken. They had long been enemies, but a belief in the real presence was one of the few points of seeming agreement that had existed between them. Now Gardiner believed that Cranmer had fallen headlong into heresy. For the rest of their lives, Cranmer and Gardiner were locked in bitter contention about the Eucharist. Gardiner’s response, an Assertion of the true Catholic faith, was smuggled out of the Tower and printed in Rouen in 1551. We have already noted that Gardiner had no theoretical framework beyond obedience to the king as supreme head of the Church for the directions the English Church had taken under Henry VIII. Implacably opposed to the decisions that had been made since the old king’s death, Gardiner began to prepare for his own return to the papacy.60
Cranmer responded to Gardiner’s Assertion immediately in his Answer of 1551, which he also aimed at Smyth, who had fled to Louvain rather than debate Vermigli at Oxford. Cranmer’s Answer conveys some of the direct statements concerning the Eucharist that he ever committed to paper. No one should ‘grossly’ think that we eat Christ with our mouth, but rather we eat him ‘with our faith’. Bodily, Christ is ‘in the eternal life and glory with his father’ in heaven, and ‘we are made partakers with him of his nature, to be immortal, and have eternal life and glory with him’. Christ was not bound to one locality or to a single era, for even before the Incarnation, faithful people had shared in his Supper. Christ is fully present spiritually in his Supper. Christ is present fully in his life, in his sacrifice, and in his resurrection. We ‘are made partakers with him of his nature, to be immortal, and have eternal life and glory with him’.61
In the words of the Church historian Alec Ryrie, the Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist was late in coming to England, but upon arrival in the reign of the young King Edward it ‘seized the reins’ under Cranmer’s leadership.62 During the debate on the Eucharist in the House of Lords in 1548, several bishops had revealed themselves resistant to further change. One by one, Cranmer deprived and imprisoned them. Gardiner remained a prisoner until the end of the reign. In February 1551, after a lengthy process that involved interminable hearings and depositions, Gardiner was deprived of his bishopric. Winchester was given to Cranmer’s protégé John Ponet (c. 1514–1556). Ridley was translated to London to replace Edmund Bonner in early 1550.63 Encouraged by Bucer’s views that a table was more suitable than an altar in calling communicants to the Lord’s Supper (because altars had been misused by the Mass to re-enact Christ’s sacrifice), Ridley ordered that altars be removed from every church throughout his diocese. By the end of the year the Privy Council extended the mandate to the entire realm.64 Altars were replaced by simple tables.
The execution of Joan Bocher, 1550
Waves of refugees continued to come to England as the Interim was imposed, and among them were Anabaptists, whose presence caused the government renewed alarm. In April and May 1549, Cranmer examined several Anabaptists at St Paul’s and at Lambeth. Three men were exposed to humiliation at Paul’s Cross.65
The most notable of those accused was Joan Bocher of Kent, who already had a long history as a heretic. In 1528, she had been questioned, perhaps for Lollard beliefs, by Cuthbert Tunstall when he was bishop of London. In the early 1540s, she had spoken against the sacrament of the altar, but Christopher Nevinson, the archbishop’s commissary, released her without punishment, a fact that was used against Cranmer in the Prebendaries’ Plot in 1543. Now she had been persuaded by Anabaptist refugees that Christ’s flesh was celestial in nature, which meant she denied Jesus’ full humanity. She was condemned before Cranmer on 29 April 1549, and she was held in the Newgate Prison, where many divines, including Bishop Ridley and Hugh Latimer, tried to persuade her to retract her opinions. In her examinations, she associated herself with the same ideas that Anne Askew had expressed in 1546, although it was obvious that her views had become much more radical than Askew’s. Bocher refused to submit, and after a full year in prison, she was burnt at Smithfield on 2 May 1550.66
The Stranger churches and the crisis of non-conformity, 1550–1551
The refugees from the continent joined a substantial number of foreign merchants and workmen who, since the middle ages, had taken up residence in London’s Steelyard. In 1549 Bucer petitioned the Privy Council on their behalf, and in mid-1550, two ‘Stranger’ congregations for French and Dutch refugees were given the extraordinary privilege to found their own churches and to worship by their own liturgies. They were served by John à Lasco (or Jan Laski, 1499–1560). Cranmer wrote to invite him and Melanchthon to England in mid-1548.67 Originally from Poland, Lasco had been acquainted in the 1520s with Jacques Lefèvre in Paris and Erasmus in Basel. More recently, he had been the superintendent of churches in Emden and throughout East Friesland. Upon his arrival in England in 1549, he lived at Lambeth, and in mid-1550 he was made superintendent over the Stranger Churches in London. Lasco was instrumental in gaining the grant of the former house of the Austin friars as a church for the strangers.68
Working closely with him was John Hooper (d. 1555), one of the most dynamic of the English Protestants who had gone into exile during Henry’s reign. Hooper had travelled first to Strasbourg and then to Zűrich, where he studied with Bullinger. There he wrote a denunciation of Gardiner’s Detection of the devil’s sophistry, in which he accused Winchester of manipulations that would blind the laity from the truth.69 Upon his return to England in May 1549, Hooper’s rise was spectacular. He immediately gained Somerset’s favour, and he became an energetic leader among the foreigners. Nothing seemed to impede his progress. In Lent 1550 he delivered a series of sermons at court that stirred Edward to offer him the bishopric of Gloucester, even though Hooper took strong exception to the new Ordinal Cranmer had just released.
Although Cranmer had simplified clerical dress, he considered the surplice and the cope to be essential emblems of the office of a bishop. They were required by the Prayer Book and the Ordinal. Bishops-elect were to present themselves for consecration wearing surplices and copes. The Ordinal also required candidates to take the supremacy oath.70 Provocatively, Hooper argued in his court sermons that clerical dress belonged to the contested category of adiaphora or ‘things indifferent’ that were not required for Church discipline, and he refused to accept the bishopric.
For his recalcitrance, Hooper was summoned before the Privy Council on Ascension Day 1550, when Cranmer spoke against him severely, especially because he criticized the supremacy oath as ‘shameful and impious’ for its reference to the saints. Rather surprisingly, Hooper was granted permission to be consecrated without the vestments, and for a brief moment it seemed as if, against Cranmer’s wishes, he would be the catalyst for an immediate revision of the Prayer Book that would strip away the last vestiges of traditional doctrine.71
But despite the instructions of the Privy Council, Ridley refused to consecrate Hooper except by the ritual approved by Parliament in the Ordinal. A long controversy about Hooper’s ordination ensued. Vermigli and Bucer were canvassed for their opinions, and although they disliked vestments per se, they decided that clerical dress could be defined by the government. Warwick insisted that the king must be obeyed and Hooper must conform. After a period of imprisonment at Lambeth Palace, Hooper submitted. In 1551 he was consecrated wearing the garments he hated.72 Hooper was brought into line because conformity to ecclesiastical rules was essential in the state Church that Cranmer built, though his opposition to clerical vestments opened a controversy whose repercussions would cause trouble to Archbishop Parker and the Elizabethan Church in the Vestiarian controversy in the 1560s.73
Lasco tirelessly supported Hooper even though he risked hurting the cause of the Stranger churches. Like Hooper, the Stranger Churches were aligned with Zűrich, and they worried Cranmer and Ridley for the potential disunity they could encourage when the regime was already faced with unrest. Lasco was more an organizer than a theologian, and while he was in London, he was developing forms of worship that implicitly challenged the Prayer Book. He stressed the performance of the Eucharistic rite as a participatory action, and he did not believe that Christ was present spiritually in the bread and wine. Following the practice of the apostles in the Primitive Church, each congregation was to elect its own elders, deacons, and ministers. The role of the superintendent, as Lasco envisioned it, was even more powerful than the office of a bishop in encouraging strict discipline. Lasco fled England after Edward’s death. In the mid-1550s, first in Emden and then in Frankfort, he was able to bring his vision for ecclesiastical organization to fruition in his book, the Forma ac ratio, which proved to be enormously influential.74 But in the meantime, Ridley kept a watchful eye on the Stranger Churches. In early 1551, George van Parris was excommunicated by the Dutch Stranger Church, and in March at Lambeth he was condemned by Cranmer. He was burnt at Smithfield on 24 April 1551.75 The executions of Joan Bocher and George van Parris, like Hooper’s submission, defined the furthest boundaries of England’s ‘broad Church’ in Edward’s reign under Cranmer.
The 1552 Book of Common Prayer
Another disputation on matters of doctrine was held at Cambridge from June to August 1550, when Bucer defended justification by faith and the sufficiency of Scripture against three conservative fellows, that included Andrew Perne (d. 1589) and John Young. In September, Lasco visited Bucer, and they came to an agreement in every subject except the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Bucer never conceded his position on the true presence.76
Before Bucer died at Cambridge in March 1551, he gave Bishop Thomas Goodrich of Ely a detailed commentary on the first Prayer Book, which Vermigli later saw and approved. The removal of altars from parish churches meant that the communion service had to be adapted once again, and it intensified the understanding of the Eucharist as a memorial of Christ’s death and sacrifice. Now the priest was also a minister, and at the Lord’s Supper, he advised the people to ‘Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving’.77
The new Prayer Book was scheduled to be released at All Hallows Day, 1 November 1552, but in a sermon delivered at Windsor in late September, after the book went to the press, the royal chaplain John Knox (d. 1572) raised strenuous objections against its directions that the people kneel at communion. He complained that kneeling was offensive and reminiscent of Roman practice. Sitting, rather than kneeling, was the correct way to take communion, he said. The Privy Council halted the printing until the matter could be reconsidered. Deeply angered, Cranmer objected that the text had already been approved by Parliament and the king, and therefore the Privy Council had no authority to order changes. He denounced Knox as an ‘unquiet spirit’ and a troublemaker who had to be brought into line. Cranmer drafted an additional rubric that explained that kneeling did not imply adoration of any real presence in the bread and wine. It was hurriedly printed, but not in red, as it should have been, and the ‘black rubric’ was tipped into the Prayer Book as an authorized afterthought.78
On All Hallows Day, Bishop Ridley conducted the first service from the new Prayer Book in St Paul’s Cathedral, and he preached that afternoon at the Cross before the assembled mayor and alderman in a show of authority. The high altar in the cathedral was broken down, and a communion table was set up in the lower choir. The next round of confiscations began in the following spring, and commissioners removed any remaining jewels, plate, candlesticks, chalices, and embroidered vestments from churches across the country.79
A Protestant answer to the Council of Trent
At the beginning of 1552, Cranmer probably occupied the most advantageous position among the Protestant leaders of western Europe. Hermann von Wied of Cologne died in August, and although he had been deprived in 1547, he and Cranmer were in contact until the end of his life. Unlike the misfortunes suffered by so many of his friends on the continent, Cranmer’s place seemed secure and his prince was encouraging. At last he was in position to be able to work towards the realization of his greatest goal: to encourage all Protestant leaders to reconcile their disagreements about doctrine, especially the Eucharist. Cranmer wanted to hold a summit meeting, a ‘godly synod’, to be held in England or in some other safe place, that he envisioned would be the Protestant answer to the Roman Church’s Council of Trent. The Consensus Tigurinus was agreed between Bullinger and Calvin in 1549. Now Cranmer yearned to heal the painful breach that continued to divide the Swiss Reformers from the Lutherans. Once again Cranmer invited Philip Melanchthon to England, now to succeed Bucer in the Regius Chair of Divinity at Cambridge.80
Calvin responded to Cranmer’s invitation immediately with approbation and encouragement. He warned Cranmer about being influenced further by Osiander, with whom Calvin had recently had serious disagreements about justification. Osiander had continued to defend the role of private penance in salvation, which caused Calvin to denounce him in the Institutes.81 Calvin urged Cranmer to persevere with his reforms until something was achieved, even if at first ‘things do not turn out according to your wish’.82
Had a Protestant version of Trent taken place under Cranmer’s leadership, his reputation would have been assured for all time. He was on the threshold of his greatest achievements. His rivals in England had been sidelined. In late 1552, Cuthbert Tunstall was deprived of the bishopric of Durham, and he was sent to join Norfolk and Gardiner in the Tower. Goodrich, one of his oldest friends, was lord chancellor. His ally Sir John Cheke was one of the Privy Council’s principal secretaries. Conformity was upheld in the submission of Bishop Hooper and the defeat of Knox. The doctrines of the English Church were defined in the Forty-Two Articles. The second edition of the Book of Common Prayer was issued, and Cranmer had already begun work on the third. The long-desired revision of the canons of the English Church was approaching completion. Cranmer was recognized across Europe as one of the greatest defenders of the Protestant Church, and he anticipated a meeting among its leaders that would heal the disagreements concerning the Eucharist that had haunted them for the past quarter century. Moreover, his marriage was successful and his daughter and son were nearly grown.
But in a little more than six months, suddenly the hopes and achievements of a lifetime were snatched away.
Notes
1One of the most famous collects Cranmer prepared for the first prayer book, which is read for the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity. Associated with the beginning of Advent, for generations it has served as a reminder to ‘stir up’ for the Christmas feast. The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the sacramentes and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche: after the vse of the Churche of England (London: Edward Whitchurch, March 1549, RSTC 16267), 97–8.
2Gardiner, Letters, no. 117; Duffy, Altars, 449–50.
3Gardiner, Letters, no. 117.
4Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 183.
5Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 184–5, MacCulloch, Cranmer, 370.
6The epistle of the famous and great clerke Philip Melancton made vnto oure late Souereygne Lorde Kynge Henry the eight, for the reuoking and abolishing of the six articles, trans. John Careless? (Wesel [Antwerp], May 1547, RSTC 17789).
7Richard Smyth, The assertion and defence of the sacramente of the aulter (London: John Herford, 1546, RSTC 22815), and A defence of the blessed masse, and the sacrifice therof (London: John Hertford, 22 July 1546, RSTC 22820).
8Psalm 116:2; Romans 3:4; Richard Smyth, A godly and faythfull retractation (London: Reginald Wolfe, 1547, RSTC 22822), and A playne declaration made at Oxforde the 24. daye of July (London: Rayner Wolfe, 1547, RSTC 22824); Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, p. 184; T. Kirby, ‘Public Conversion: Richard Smyth’s “Retraction” at Paul’s Cross in 1547’, in Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, eds. T. Kirby and P. G. Stanwood, Studies in the History of Christian Tradition Series, 171 (Leiden, 2014), 161–73.
9Gardiner, Letters, nos. 122, 123, 124.
10Certayne sermons or homilies appoynted by the kynges Maiestie, to be declared and redde, by all persones, Uycars, or Curates, euery Sonday in their churches, where they haue cure (London: Edward Whitchurch, 20 August 1547, RSTC 13641).
11Gardiner attributed to Cranmer the Homily of Salvation: Letters, no. 124.
12Certayne sermons or homilies, sig. ✠2r.
13Gardiner, quoting Cranmer, in Letters, no. 124, at p. 311. See R. B. Bond, ed., Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and a Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion: A Critical Edition (Toronto, 1987); S. Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), 27–33, and also my ‘Bishops and the Provision of Homilies, 1520 to 1547’, SCJ, 25, 551–66.
14Certayne sermons or homilies, sigs. ¶1r–¶6v, quotations at sigs. ¶1r–¶2r.
15Certayne sermons or homilies, sigs. ¶¶1r–¶¶¶2v, quotations at sigs. ¶¶1r–¶¶4r, citing (among other texts) Psalm 13:3; Romans 3:11–28.
16Certayne sermons or homilies, sigs. ¶¶¶3r–¶¶¶¶¶3r.
17Certayne sermons or homilies, sigs. ¶¶¶¶¶2r; Bond, Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547), p. 86.
18Certayne sermons or homilies, A1r–C1r.
19Certayne sermons or homilies, C2r–E3v, quotation at sig. C4r, and Bond, Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547), 105. For Lefèvre, see Chapter 2.
20Certayne sermons or homilies, U2v; Martin Bucer and the Book of Common Prayer, ed. E. C. Whitaker, Alcuin Club, 55 (1974), 46–9.
21TNA: PRO, SP 10/2, 122r–v.
22Gardiner, Letters, nos. 121, 289; 124, 306.
23Martin Bucer and the Book of Common Prayer, 46–7.
24Gardiner, Letters, no. 135; Foxe (1563), 803–4; AM, 6, 217, 140–2.
25S. J. Weinreich, ‘Two unpublished letters of Stephen Gardiner, August–September 1547 (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. th. b. 2)’, JEH, 67 (2016), 819–33 (quote 833).
26Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 1; Duffy, Altars, 453–4; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 371–2.
27Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 187.
28The works of Nicholas Ridley, sometime lord bishop of London, martyr, 1555, ed. H. Christmas, PS (1843), 265; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 378–9.
29Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 187; Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Parliament and the Reformation of Edward VI’, Parliamentary History, 34 (2015), 383–400.
30The Order of the Communion (London: Richard Grafton, 8 March 1548, RSTC 16456.5), sigs. B4r (General Confession), C1v (chalice).
31Cathechismvs That is to say a shorte instruction into Christian religion for the synguler commoditie and profyte of children and yong people (London: Nicholas Hill, 1548, RSTC 5992.5), 235r.
32Cranmer, Lord’s Supper, p. 226; D. G. Selwyn, ‘A Neglected Edition of Cranmer’s Catechism’, Journal of Theological Studies, 15 (1965), 76–91; P. Wilson-Kastner, ‘Andreas Osiander’s Probable Influence on Thomas Cranmer’s Eucharistic Theology’, SCJ, 14 (1983), 411–25; P. Collinson, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Truth’ in From Cranmer to Sancroft. (London, 2006), 1–14; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 384–92; B. A. Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, in Thinking with the Church: Essays in Historical Theology (Cambridge, 2010), 229–58.
33MacCulloch, Cranmer, 391–2.
34OL, 1, no. 152, 2, no. 186; B. Hall, ‘Martin Bucer in England’, in Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community, ed. D. F. Wright (Cambridge, 1994), 144–75, especially, 149; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 382–3; A. Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH, 53 (2002), 64–92.
352 & 3 Edward VI, c. 21.
36Morice, 263; F. R. H. Du Boulay, ‘Archbishop Cranmer and the Canterbury Temporalities’, EHR, vol. 67 (1952), 19–36.
37Ridley, Cranmer, 146–7; P. Collinson, Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), 37; Collinson, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Truth’, 16; E. J. Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 57–65. See Holbeach’s 1551 will: TNA:PRO, PROB 11/34, 212r–213r at 212v.
38Sir Thomas Elyot to the Duke of Norfolk, 14 March 1532, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius B/XXI, 59r (LP, 5, no. 869).
39Cranmer’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.
40For much of my discussion here, I am indebted to Cummings’s recent edition of The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, xi–xiv; Bond, Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547), 33.
41Hermann von Wied, A simple, and religious Consultation (London: John Daye and William Seres, 1548, RSTC 13214). Katherine’s arms are printed at the beginning of the book.
42Of the many printings of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, I have used the following for my references: The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the sacramentes and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche: after the vse of the Churche of England (London: Edward Whitchurch, March 1549, RSTC 16267); and 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). See also The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings.
43G. Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies Relating to the Book of Common Prayer, Alcuin Club, 65 (1983), 56–62; J. A. Devereux, ‘Reformed Doctrine in the Collects of the First Book of Common Prayer’, Harvard Theological Review, 58 (1965), 49–68; The Collects of Thomas Cranmer, comps. C. F. Barbee and P. F. M. Zahl (Cambridge, 1999), x–xi (which does not, however, reproduce any of Cranmer’s collects for saints’ days).
44The booke of the common praier (RSTC 16268), 130r–130v.
45Duffy, Altars, 91–130, 448–503; Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, 252; Hall, ‘Bucer’, 151.
46Bond, Certain Sermons or Homilies, 104; Devereux, ‘The Collects’, 67–8; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 450–4.
47Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 16–18.
48Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 20; Duffy, Altars, 467–8; E. H. Shagan, ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives’, EHR, 114 (1999), 34–63. Somerset’s brother, Thomas Seymour, Baron Seymour of Sudeley, was executed in early 1549, after he was accused for attempting to gain control of the king.
49Benson’s will was made 10 September 1549 and proved 23 September 1549, TNA:PRO, PROB 11/32, 290r–291v.
50Hooper to Bullinger, 5 February 1550, OL, 1, no. 37.
51Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 25–8.
52Cranmer to Bucer, 2 October 1548, Miscellaneous, letter no. 287; Hall, ‘Bucer’, 145.
53See especially the entry on Bucer in the ODNB by N. S. Amos.
54The First Helvetic Confession of 1536, printed in A. C. Cochrane, Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (Louisville, 2003), article 22; B. A. Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, 229–58.
55See the entry on Bucer in the ODNB by N. S. Amos.
56Hall, ‘Bucer’, 145–50.
57Peter Martyr Vermigli, Tractatio de sacramento eucharistiae (London: Rayner Wolfe, 1549, RSTC 24673) translated by Nicholas Udall as Vermigli’s A discourse or traictise . . . wherein he openly declared his whole and determinate iudgemente concernynge the sacrament of the Lordes supper (London: Robert Stoughton [Edward Whitchurch], 1550, RSTC 24665), especially 19v–21r, 45v, 47r, 68v, 91v–92r, 106r.
58Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the True and Catholique Doctrine (London: Reginald Wolfe 1550, RSTC 6000), *3v, 9v, 11r, 13r, 14r.
59Cranmer, Lord’s Supper, 225; P. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (London, 1965), 72–111; Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, 239.
60Stephen Gardiner, A detection of the Deuils sophistrie (London: John Herford, 1546, RSTC 11591), and An explication and assertion of the true Catholique fayth, touchyng the moost blessed sacrament of the aulter with confutacion of a booke written agaynst the same ([Rouen]: 1551, RSTC 11592).
61An answer of the Most Reuerend Father in God Thomas Archebyshop of Canterburye, primate of all Englande and metropolitane vnto a crafty and sophisticall cauillation deuised by Stephen Gardiner doctour of law, late byshop of Winchester, agaynst the trewe and godly doctrine of the moste holy sacrament of the body and bloud of our sauiour Iesu Christe Wherein is also, as occasion serueth, answered such places of the booke of D. Rich. Smyth, as may seeme any thing woorthy the aunsweryng. (London: Raynold Wolfe, 1551, RSTC 5991), reprinted in Lord’s Supper.
62Ryrie, ‘Death of Lutheran England’, 68.
63Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 24, 33–4.
64Hall, ‘Bucer’, 158; MacCulloch, ‘Parliament and the Reformation of Edward VI’, 391–6.
65Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 10–13.
66LPL, Cranmer’s Register, 74r–79r, Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 37–8.
67Cranmer to Lasco 6 July, 1548, Miscellaneous, letter no. 285.
68Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), 9–31.
69John Hooper, An answer vnto my lord of Wynchesters booke intytlyd a detection of the deuyls Sophistrye (Zűrich: Augustine Fries, 1547, RSTC 13741), sig. X3r.
70The forme and maner of makyng and consecratyng of Archebishoppes Bishoppes, Priestes and Deacons (London: Richard Grafton, March [1550], RSTC 16462), especially I2r.
71APC, vol. 3, 30–1, 42–4; Hooper to Bullinger, OL, 1, nos. 37, 39; Micronius to Bullinger, OL 2, nos. 260, 263–4, 267, 270; Hall, ‘Bucer’, 151–2; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 31–4.
72Hooper to Bullinger, OL, 1, no. 39; Micronius to Bullinger, 2, nos. 260, 263–4, 267, 270; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 37–40.
73Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014), especially Chapter 6.
74Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 73–6; Hall, ‘Bucer’, 153–4; John à Lasco, Forma ac ratio tota ecclesiastici ministerij, in peregrinorum, potissimùm uerò Germanorum Ecclesia instituta Londini in Anglia, per pientissimum principem Angliae &c. Regem Eduardum, eius nominis sextu[m]: anno post Christum natum 1550. (Frankfort and Emden, 1554?, RSTC 16571), among other editions. See also the entry on Lasco in the ODNB.
75See Andrew Pettegree’s entry for van Parris in the ODNB.
76OL, 2, no. 264; Hall, ‘Bucer; 158–9; P. Collinson, ‘Andrew Perne and His Times’, in P. Collinson, D. McKitterick, and E. Leedham-Green, eds., Andrew Perne: Quatercentenary Studies (Cambridge, 1991), 1–34.
77For the second Prayer Book, I have referred to The boke of common praier, and administracion of the sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: Richard Grafton, August 1552, RSTC 16285). The Litany appears on 9v–13r.
78J. Dawson, John Knox (New Haven, 2015), 72–8; Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, 252
79Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 78–9, 82–3.
80MacCulloch, Cranmer, 539–40.
81Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, chapter 15, 3–5; Book 2, chapter 12, 6–7; Book 3, chapter 11, 5–11.
82Cranmer’s letters to Bullinger, 20 March 1552, printed in OL, 1, no. 13; to Calvin on the same date, no. 14; to Melanchthon, 27 March 1552, no. 15; Calvin’s reply, April 1552, OL, 2, no. 337.