9 Oxford, 1553–1556
‘O Lord, which for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights: Give us grace to use such abstinence, that our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may ever obey thy Godly motion, in righteousness and true holiness, to thy honour and glory: which livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.’1
The Forty-Two Articles, 1552–1553
In the same intense period in which the second Prayer Book was produced, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and his commissioners prepared the Forty-Two Articles from the same eclectic selection of sources that he used for all of his compositions. With the Book of Homilies and the Book of Common Prayer, the Forty-Two Articles provided the essential character of the reformed Church that Cranmer built for England.
The Forty-Two Articles began with unusually strong statements on the Trinity. Christ truly rose from the dead, and took again his body, complete with flesh and bones, and he ascended into heaven (article four). Holy Scripture contained all things necessary for salvation (article five). The Creed was warranted by Scripture. In article eleven, Cranmer referred to the homilies as ‘wholesome doctrine’ that explained justification by faith. They were to be read to the people ‘diligently, distinctly, and plainly’ (article thirty-four). Purgatory was denounced as ‘repugnant to the word of God’ in article twenty-three. Similarly, transubstantiation was rejected in article twenty-nine. No faithful man should believe in the real and bodily presence in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The new Prayer Book was ‘in no point repugnant to the wholesome doctrine of the Gospel’, and indeed it was meant to further and beautify the biblical message (article thirty-five).2
Cranmer sent the final text of the articles (originally there were forty-five) to William Cecil and John Cheke, the secretaries of the Privy Council, in September 1552. On their recommendation, the draft was given to the king. The articles were reconsidered by a panel that was once again drawn from across a spectrum of opinion that included John à Lasco, Andrew Perne; Edmund Grindal (1520–1583), one of Bishop Nicholas Ridley’s chaplains; and John Knox (who remained under heavy scrutiny for the objections he raised about kneeling in the second Prayer Book). The articles were approved and returned to Cranmer. Over the course of the considerations, the number of articles in the final version became forty-two.3 They were released hurriedly in 1553, without the approval of Convocation, in the midst of the crisis that was occasioned by Edward’s failing health.
The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum
At the same time, Cranmer completed another new revision of canon law. We have already mentioned that his predecessor Archbishop William Warham had begun a reconsideration of the laws of the Church. However, his efforts met with disaster in 1532 at the time of the Submission of the Clergy. Cranmer resumed that endeavour early in his archiepiscopate, and in the mid-1530s, his efforts produced a body of new laws known as the Henrician Canons. It consisted of some three-hundred-sixty laws that were revised from the large standing corpus of existing legislation, a substantial portion of which had been produced by Cranmer’s predecessors from the thirteenth century. But the Henrician Canons never received approval from Henry VIII, and they were not implemented.
After a long hiatus, in late 1551, Cranmer began a fresh attempt. The Henrician Canons were redrafted into a fresh document, later named by John Foxe as the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (the reformation of the ecclesiastical laws). Gerald Bray, who edited a recent study edition of the Reformatio, noted that the new set of laws maintained considerable continuity with medieval legal matters. At the same time Protestant concepts were introduced, especially as the laws’ titles. The text of the Reformatio was conservative, but its purpose was to improve the speed and fairness of administration in the English Church.4
Cranmer presented the Reformatio for approval in the House of Lords in March 1553, where it was rejected by John Dudley, duke of Northumberland. Bray has suggested that Northumberland realized that there were too many risks in letting the Church control its own affairs without oversight by Parliament. It is not completely clear whether the Reformatio, if passed, could have meant that the Church would have regained relative independence from parliamentary control, or whether it would have created a new relationship between the Church and Parliament that had not yet been defined. In either case, Northumberland did not wish to risk giving the Church the kind of legislative autonomy that would have meant that the bishops could take decisions and pursue policies that affected the laity without parliamentary approval. The royal supremacy may have put the Church under the direct control of the king, but some of the tensions between Parliament and Convocation continued to be so difficult as to be almost irreconcilable.
The rejection of the Reformatio was a bitter disappointment. Later Cranmer told Queen Mary that Northumberland long sought ‘my destruction’.5 Cranmer may have hoped that he could try again for its passage at some future time. However, within a few months he was interrupted and then destroyed by the disaster that overtook him at Edward’s death in July 1553.
Edward’s death and the succession
Edward turned fifteen as the 1552 Book of Common Prayer was released. For some considerable time his health was the cause of concern. In the winter of 1552–1553, he was so ill that observers did not think that he would be able to regain strength easily once the weather improved. Probably the cause of his fatal malady was tuberculosis.6 He was obviously unwell when he opened the next session of Parliament on 1 March 1553, and his health continued to worsen. In May his doctors suggested that he would probably not live into the autumn.7
The king’s precarious health may explain the urgency with which another new catechism, in Latin and English editions, was prepared by Bishop John Ponet (Gardiner’s replacement at Winchester) and issued in May 1553. Ponet’s Short Catechism replaced its disappointing predecessor of 1548, and it was accompanied by the text of the Forty-Two Articles. In June the Forty-Two Articles were printed on their own with the words ‘Articles published by the King’s Majesty’ at the top of every page. The title page proclaimed that the Forty-Two Articles had been agreed upon ‘in the Synod at London’ although they had not, in fact, been approved by Convocation at all. Rather, the endorsements were audacious efforts to strengthen the position of the Church as Edward’s health failed.8
In his weakening condition, as his life and his prospects for all he had hoped to achieve were seeping away, Edward began to brood about the succession. Its terms had been established by the Third Henrician Act of Succession, passed in the 1544 session of Parliament, as well as by the will Henry had prepared at the end of 1546. The statute, which had been written to clarify the succession before Henry went to war in France, stipulated that the crown should pass first to Edward and then to the lawfully begotten children he might one day have. Failing them, the crown would pass to Edward’s half-sister Mary and her children, and in default of them, to his half-sister Elizabeth and her children, subject to certain conditions that Henry specified in his will. As we have seen, his will expanded the succession beyond his three children to his nieces Frances and Eleanor, the daughters of his sister Mary, the French Queen.9
Edward was dissatisfied with the arrangements his father had made. Because Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, he believed that they were disqualified from the crown. He feared that either of his sisters could make a marriage with a foreign prince that would undermine the laws of England (Hugh Latimer had made this explicit point in a sermon he preached before the king in 1549). Moreover, Edward preferred that the crown pass to a man, as soon as feasible, though through an accident of fate, all possible heirs happened to be female.
Edward decided to divert the succession away from his sisters in favour of an eccentric plan that would give a type of regency to his cousin Frances, duchess of Suffolk. She would rule with a council until the crown could pass to an adult male heir who was born to one of her daughters. As his health worsened, Edward changed his mind. He decided to give the crown to Frances’s eldest daughter Lady Jane Grey (1537–1554), and her ‘heirs male’. Jane was impeccably Protestant and an eager scholar. She was esteemed for her learning by Heinrich Bullinger of Zűrich, with whom she corresponded. There had once been plans that Edward and Jane should wed. Edward was probably encouraged to make Jane his heir by Northumberland, whose son Guildford married Jane on 21 May 1553.
Edward, although king, was still a minor, and he probably had no right to change his father’s succession without the approval of the Privy Council and without a new act of Parliament. Historians disagree about the motives of most of those to whom Edward confided his wishes, but he seems to have wanted Jane’s male descendants to occupy the throne forever. Cranmer does not seem to have been involved in the king’s plans, but for many of the Protestants who served the king, the plan to subvert the succession to Jane was a desperate attempt to keep Mary from inheriting the throne. According to the Third Henrician Act of Succession, there was to be no return to ‘the long usurped power authority and jurisdiction of the bishops of Rome’.
Edward spent his waning strength persuading and ordering his officers to accept his wishes, and Cranmer was probably not told of the king’s intentions until mid-June 1553, after many members of the Privy Council had already assented to the plan. Cranmer was surprised by the king’s wishes, and he tried to persuade Edward out of them. At first Cranmer refused to sign the new device of the succession because he had already sworn to obey the terms of Henry’s will, which meant he thought that Mary was Edward’s lawful heir. To do otherwise Cranmer believed would be ‘manifest perjury’. He said he would have to give an account of his own conscience and not those of other men’s. He refused to sign until the dying king spoke with him privately and implored him to give his assent. Edward signed the device of his succession on 21 June, followed by Cranmer, lord chancellor, Bishop Thomas Goodrich of Ely, and other councillors. Signatures were also collected from the mayor and aldermen of London. More than one hundred men of influence signed.10
Edward’s plan to leave the crown to Jane without first obtaining the approval of Parliament was certainly incomplete, if not exactly illegal, as Cranmer and the other members of his government were only too well aware. Writs were prepared to summon Parliament for mid-September. Had a new Act of Succession been passed, and had Edward lived long enough to endorse his cousin publicly, in time, Jane may have been accepted as the next heir. But in mid-1553, Mary’s right to succeed her brother under the law and Henry’s will was common knowledge. She enjoyed a large measure of popularity, especially in East Anglia, where she had been given extensive lands since her father’s death. More than two-and-one-half years of concerted effort by Cranmer and the members of the Privy Council had been required to deprive Stephen Gardiner of the bishopric of Winchester. To detain Mary while her brother was still alive would have required even greater measures, and would have given offense to the considerable affinity she had cultivated ever since her father’s death. Edward’s government lacked enough resources and time to move against her.
Edward’s death came suddenly, before anyone was fully prepared. He was attended at the end by his physicians and by his lord chancellor, Bishop Goodrich, who heard his last confession. He died at Greenwich on the evening of 6 July 1553. Two days later the mayor and aldermen of London were informed secretly. On 10 July, Jane and Guilford Dudley were received in the Tower to prepare for a coronation, and Edward’s death was proclaimed. Jane was not yet sixteen, and it is unlikely that she understood the full import of what she was being asked to do. At the Tower, Jane’s Privy Council opened with Cranmer at its head.
The failure to secure Mary at the time of Edward’s death spelt disaster for Jane’s government. Probably everyone underestimated Mary’s resolve and resourcefulness. She had visited her brother in February, when she was warned that she might be detained if she came to court again. Initially she stayed close enough to London to hear reports of the king’s health, and as his death approached, she withdrew into Suffolk. From Kenninghall she wrote the Privy Council immediately upon her brother’s death demanding that she be recognized as queen. In response, Cranmer and the other councillors informed her that in light of the invalidity of her parents’ marriage, she was illegitimate and therefore ineligible for the crown. Jane was the rightful queen, and they instructed Mary to show herself ‘quiet and obedient’ to the new government.11 On 16 July, Ridley entered the pulpit at Paul’s Cross, and he preached that Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate by God’s law and by acts of Parliament made in the days of their father, ‘which the people murmured sore at’.12
Within ten days, Mary mounted a successful coup against Queen Jane. Not even the Protestants who had the most reasons to be concerned should Mary become queen were certain that Jane had the right to succeed. Bishop John Hooper rallied local gentlemen in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire to turn out their tenants in support of Queen Mary.
Cranmer sent troops northward against Mary, and he held steady for Jane until her government collapsed. Towns across the country proclaimed Mary queen. The conservative gentry rose for her. As Jane’s biographer Eric Ives demonstrated, at Edward’s death, the government sent warships to defend the Suffolk coast. The sailors mutinied, and they delivered their weapons to Mary at Kenninghall. Once it was known that Mary had artillery, Northumberland turned his fighting men back to Cambridge, because it was plain she had invincible support. On 19 July, only thirteen days after Edward’s death, Mary was proclaimed queen in London. The next day, Jane’s Privy Council capitulated. Jane remained in the Tower, now as a prisoner. On 3 August 1553, Mary arrived in the capital in triumph.13
Cranmer’s arrest
Edward’s death and the failure to exclude Mary from the throne were disasters that destroyed Cranmer and threatened the survival of his Church. Mary abominated Cranmer for invalidating the marriage of her mother, as well as for the changes in religion that he had led under her father and brother. But such was the influence of the archbishop of Canterbury that Mary could not afford to proceed against Cranmer hastily. She took no immediate efforts against him. Once she reached London, Cranmer wrote her an abject apology for consenting to Edward’s wishes, and he begged to know her mind concerning ‘the estate of religion, as it is used in this realm of England at this present’.14 Mary refused to see him.
Cranmer was under no illusions about the future. For the time being, the 1552 Prayer Book was the only liturgy that was legal in England. On 8 August, he presided over Edward’s funeral at Westminster Abbey according to its rites. However, at her entry into London, Mary released from the Tower the duke of Norfolk, Stephen Gardiner, and Cuthbert Tunstall. They were restored to their former dignities and admitted to her Privy Council. On the day of the king’s funeral, Gardiner celebrated a requiem Latin Mass for the repose of Edward’s soul in the Tower in the presence of the queen. Before the end of August, Gardiner was made lord chancellor and he was restored to the bishopric of Winchester. Edmund Bonner was also freed from prison, and he was reinstated as bishop of London at Ridley’s arrest. Already it was plain that the queen intended to reverse her brother’s Reformation.
Cranmer knew that his arrest was also likely. In the few weeks of freedom that remained to him, he paid all his creditors. He forgave the many large debts that Sir John Markham and others owed to him. Cranmer also prepared an inventory of his possessions, and his name and title was written onto the first pages of his books.15 His family was in turmoil. At the beginning of September, his brother-in-law Edmund Cartwright of Nottinghamshire, who was married to his sister Agnes, retracted his old will, and he prepared a new one that would protect the leases of his property from the dissolved monastery of East Malling, near Maidstone in Kent, which had been confirmed by the ‘now’ archbishop of Canterbury as well as by the cathedral corporation. Just as Cranmer advised Alexander Alesius to flee in 1539 following the passage of the Act of Six Articles, now he begged his friends take flight ‘into some place where God is most truly served’ to avoid falling ‘into the persecutors’ hands’.16
For several weeks following the king’s death, Edmund Cranmer remained in place as archdeacon of Canterbury. Although it is difficult to know the details, at some time soon, Edmund fled to the continent with his brother’s wife and two children. We do not know if their sister Alice, the former nun, was still alive and if she accompanied Edmund into exile. The arrangements for their journey were made by Reyner Wolfe (d. c. 1574), who was Cranmer’s printer. Margaret could not return to Nuremberg because her uncle Andreas Osiander had been forced into exile by the Interim, and he had died in Königsberg in 1552. Although we cannot be certain, it is possible that the Cranmers made their way to Strasbourg, like so many of the English Protestant exiles. In 1554 Edmund was formally deprived because he was married. His replacement as archdeacon of Canterbury was Nicholas Harpsfield.
From the cathedral chapter at Canterbury came the final series of crises that resulted in Cranmer’s arrest and his ultimate destruction. Richard Thornden, the suffragan bishop of Dover, restored the Latin Mass in the cathedral without consulting Cranmer or obtaining his permission. We have already noted in Chapter 6 that Thornden was implicated in the Prebendaries’ Plot of 1543, when he escaped serious punishment by begging for Cranmer’s forgiveness. Rumours spread in London that Cranmer planned to say Mass at St Paul’s for the repose of Edward’s soul according to the Latin missal as a means to gain the queen’s favour.
Cranmer was grievously offended to have his authority challenged, and he denounced Thornden as ‘a false, flattering, and dissembling monk’. Cranmer devised a bold counterattack: he suggested that if Queen Mary granted permission, a panel five or six Protestant theologians of his own choice would engage in a formal disputation that would prove that Edward had replaced the Mass with ‘Christ’s holy supper’ as the apostles had known it in the days of the Primitive Church. The Book of Common Prayer and the ministering of the sacraments in Edward’s Church were ‘more pure’ than any that had been used in England in the previous thousand years, he suggested. Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, Peter Martyr Vermigli, who had just arrived at Lambeth after fleeing from implacable hostility, would be one of the disputants. Together they would expose ‘the great abuses of the Latin Mass’ for its ‘manifold errors’, which Cranmer attributed to ‘Christ’s ancient adversary’, the devil.17
Probably Cranmer intended this disputation to take place when Convocation met in October, when the latest directions for the English Church would be defined. He intended to exert himself to the utmost so that in the next settlement, Mary’s Church would remain Protestant. In the meantime, Cranmer intended to make a public disavowal of the rumours that he had set up the Latin Mass. In a tacit challenge to the queen’s authority, he prepared a statement that he planned to post under his own seal at St Paul’s and on the doors of parish churches across London. But before he was fully ready to release his salvo, John Scory, recently deprived of his bishopric of Chichester, saw a draft among his papers. Scory begged to have an advance copy. News this provocative could not be kept secret. Scory lent the draft to a friend. Soon copies poured from ‘every scrivener’s shop’ in London. Cranmer’s protest created a sensation that threatened to encourage widespread unrest. He was summoned to the Privy Council on 13 September 1553, the same day that Latimer was sent to the Tower, and he was ordered to appear before the Star Chamber the next day.18
Cranmer spent his final night of freedom at Lambeth Palace. The next day, 14 September, he dined with Vermigli and warned him to flee. Then he crossed the river to Westminster and presented himself before the Star Chamber. Facing him were some of his oldest enemies: Stephen Gardiner, now lord chancellor; Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk; and Cuthbert Tunstall, the aged bishop of Durham. Old friends, some of whom had been members of Jane’s Privy Council with him, now also turned to confront him. His offences were discussed by the ‘whole board’ at great length. They said he had committed treason by rising for Jane against Mary. The protest that was circulating throughout London was deemed seditious. Defiant, Cranmer admitted that he had written it, but he told them that he had intended to release it himself to achieve an even greater effect. Immediately he was committed to the Tower.19
The traitor
Cranmer was given the same prison chamber that had been vacated by Northumberland, who was beheaded on 22 August. Perhaps Cranmer was able to observe a portion of the celebrations that marked Mary’s coronation. The queen with her sister Elizabeth arrived at the Tower on 27 September 1553, and she was saluted with a round of gunfire. Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves rode after the queen from the Tower on the way to the coronation. At Westminster Abbey on 1 October, Bishop Stephen Gardiner placed the crown on Mary’s head.20 A general pardon was issued in her name, from which Cranmer and the other prisoners in the Tower were exempted.
In the unlikely event that Cranmer had been able to maintain his liberty into the autumn, he might have been able to embarrass Mary’s government in the session of Convocation that opened in mid-October. On its first day, his Catechism of 1548 was denounced as ‘full of heresies’, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer was mocked as ‘very abominable’. The next day, as a prelude to re-establishing the Mass, a bill was presented that endorsed the real presence in the sacrament of the altar. But in the debates that followed, a small group of Protestants among the archdeacons, including John Philpot (1516–1555), archdeacon of Winchester under Ponet, defended Cranmer’s achievements, and they asked that Ridley and John Rogers could be allowed out of prison to take part. One after another the Protestants denied transubstantiation. Speaking for Mary’s government was John Harpsfield (1516–1578). The debates became so heated that members of the House of Lords came into the Convocation House to observe, and in December the queen dissolved the session.21 Within a year, Edward’s Reformation was undone by Parliament.
By the time that Convocation was dissolved at the end of 1553, the see of Canterbury was declared vacant because Cranmer was condemned to death for treason. On 13 November, he was led out of the Tower on foot, where he and Lady Jane, with her husband and his brothers, were paraded in a humiliating spectacle through the streets of London to their trial at the Guildhall. Heavily guarded, Cranmer came first, attended by his jailors, and then Guilford Dudley and his guards, followed by Lady Jane with her gentlewomen and keepers. She carried an open book, probably a Bible, from which she read as she walked. At the Guildhall they appeared before the duke of Norfolk and they were charged with high treason. Cranmer was accused of proclaiming Jane queen when her Privy Council met at the Tower, and he was also accused of sending soldiers to Cambridge to oppose Mary. Initially he pleaded not guilty, but then he submitted to the charge. Cranmer was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor. They were all condemned. Then they were marched back the full mile to the Tower on foot.22
Cranmer was still in the Tower when Sir Thomas Wyatt (d. 1554) led an armed uprising early in 1554 that was triggered by the news that Mary intended to wed Philip (1527–1598) of Spain, the son of the Emperor Charles V. Mary’s choice revived fresh fears against the Habsburgs and the papacy, because many people believed her marriage would threaten England’s independence. Wyatt’s revolt almost succeeded. He marched from Maidstone in Kent and reached Fleet Street in London before his rising failed. Mary’s government remained deeply troubled by the spectre of further rebellion. Preaching at court on 11 February 1554, Gardiner asked that the ‘rotten members’ who endangered the health of the commonwealth be cut off. The next day Guilford Dudley and the Lady Jane were beheaded at the Tower.
The heretic
In the aftermath of the Wyatt uprising, Cranmer briefly shared the same cell in the Tower with Ridley and Latimer. Then the queen and the Privy Council decided to move them away from London. In early March 1554 they were sent together to Oxford, where in the following month they engaged in fresh rounds of disputations with theologians from both universities, ostensibly to take up some of the problems that had been initiated in Convocation in the previous autumn. Once more, the debates were meant to establish unity in faith for the entire realm, but now through realignment with the papacy. The questions that were considered again centred on the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, and whether the Mass was a sacrifice that could propitiate for the sins of the dead as well as the living. However, the Oxford disputations were also meant to expose the opinions of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer as heretical. Richard Smyth had returned from exile in Louvain to resume his chair in divinity, and as the university’s vice-chancellor he played a prominent role in their trials.
The Protestant bishops understood that their lives were forfeit. Cranmer was already legally dead as a convicted traitor. But they represented the legitimacy of Edward’s Church and the cause of Protestantism even in defeat, and therefore they took every opportunity to make dramatic spectacles that bore witness to their faith, even though they knew the outcome was already determined against them. They were assisted by John Jewel (1522–1571), the future bishop of Salisbury, who as a student at Oxford had served as Vermigli’s notary during Oxford’s debates on the Eucharist in 1549.
The Oxford disputations were humiliating ordeals that were shams of impartial inquires. Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were required to debate separately. Latimer was ill, and he was unwilling to engage beyond saying that he believed as Cranmer had taught in his 1551 Answer against Gardiner.
Jewel noted that every time Cranmer spoke, the chamber erupted in ‘a clapping of hands, and stamping of feet’.23 He was introduced as a heretic who had cut himself off from the one true Church, and set forth erroneous doctrine, making every year a new faith. Although Cranmer was frequently interrupted, he responded so modestly, and so wittily, that some of his opponents wept as they listened to him. In one of the surreal moments of the proceedings, Cranmer served as an examiner when John Harpsfield was examined for his doctorate, and he was thanked for his participation.
On 20 April 1554, in the university’s church, the outcome of their debates was announced. Everything Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer had said was judged to be false. Then they were condemned as heretics. Immediately Cranmer wrote the Privy Council (in a letter that was probably not delivered) to protest that the purpose of the disputation was to ‘condemn us in post haste’.24
Now they entered a period of almost complete eclipse that lasted more than a year. They were separated. Cranmer was kept in close confinement, usually in the Bocardo, the prison in Oxford’s northern gatehouse. Most of the letters he wrote then have not been recovered, but he was able to revise the Latin version of his Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine.
On 20 November 1554, Reginald Cardinal Pole arrived in Dover. Ten days later, at the Palace of Westminster, he completed England’s reconciliation with the papacy. In December, Parliament restored the old medieval laws against heresy.
Gardiner and the Privy Council conducted the first trials under the revived heresy laws in early 1555, and in a coordinated display of power, executions began across the country. John Rogers, who had helped William Tyndale translate the Bible, was burnt at Smithfield on 4 February. On 9 February, some of the most outspoken members of Edward’s church were executed. Hooper was burnt near his cathedral in Gloucester, and Rowland Taylor, one of Cranmer’s chaplains and a Six Preacher of Canterbury, suffered at Hadleigh in Suffolk. Bishop Robert Ferrar of St David’s was burnt in March. Their deaths marked the beginning of a campaign that by late 1558 resulted in the burnings of nearly three hundred men, women, and young people, many of whom were of humble backgrounds. There was no precedence in Europe at the time for persecutions on this scale, and the number of executions that were conducted during the last three years of Mary’s reign are unparalleled in English history.
In early 1555, Cranmer’s farewell letter to Vermigli was smuggled out of his close confinement, and it reached him in Strasbourg. Later still it was shared with Bullinger in Zűrich. Cranmer wrote that he was under close watch, and he referred to the persecutions that were taking place as the paradoxical sign of God’s nearness and his consolation.25
The burning of Latimer and Ridley, October 1555
Although Pole resided at Lambeth Palace, the archbishopric had entered into a curious state of limbo at Cranmer’s attainder. Because he had received the pallium and papal approval at his elevation in 1533, the queen wanted to be certain that his deprivation was done correctly, which meant that permission had to arrive from Rome before he could be executed. The Oxford disputations in April 1554 were conducted before the medieval heresy laws were revived. Therefore his condemnation for heresy was not truly valid. Nor could he be executed, even as a traitor, without papal approval. Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa, r. 1555–1559) was elected pope in May 1555, and in June permission was granted to call Cranmer to Rome for trial. He was supposed to appear within eighty days.26
In September 1555, the papal summons reached Oxford, and preparations began for Latimer and Ridley’s execution, which involved fresh rounds of examinations and debates leading to new death sentences. On 12 September, Cranmer was once again called to account before James Brooks, the new bishop of Gloucester and papal legate. Brooks sat in the university church near the high altar, beneath a pix that contained the consecrated Host. With him were emissaries from King Philip and Queen Mary. Cranmer refused to recognize the pope’s authority, but he knelt to the royal representatives and he declared his fidelity to the crown. Cranmer’s entire career was scrutinized. Brooks accused Cranmer of falling into open heresy and treason and that he had been used as an instrument to despoil the Church. Among the witnesses who appeared against him were Richard Croke (with whom he worked for the divorce in Italy in 1530), the Six Preacher Robert Serles (who had been punished for his involvement in the Prebendaries Plot), and Vice-Chancellor Smyth himself.
At Lambeth Palace, Pole’s subordinates consulted Cranmer’s Register, and they were taken aback by its record of the protest he had made at his consecration against the traditional oath he was made to swear to the pope. Cranmer was asked to explain himself, and he declared he had had the best legal advice in 1533 that permitted him to spare his conscience, for he refused to consent to the bishop of Rome any more than he would give himself to the devil. His answers stimulated a long discussion about the nature of authority and to whom it was due. His opponents asked him who was supreme head of the Church, and Cranmer responded that Christ was, though every king was supreme head over the Church in his own realm. Was this always so, he was asked, even under the Emperor Nero (d. 68)? Cranmer responded that Nero was indeed the temporal head of the Church and responsible for beheading Peter and the other apostles, just as in the present day Suleyman the Magnificent was head of the Church in Turkey. It is difficult to know what Cranmer meant by an assertion so outrageous that it shocked Foxe as well as recent historians, though it is possible that he wanted to show his accusers that he thought the papacy and Mary’s government belonged in the same category with the most notorious persecutors of the early Christian Church and of many Christians in their own day.27
At the end of this set of proceedings, Cranmer sent a long letter to the queen to explain why he refused papal authority in England, and to warn her of the possible consequences should the pope infringe upon her prerogatives and English law. Cranmer believed that England ‘should ever continue accursed’ if the power and authority of ‘the crown, laws, and customs’ of her realm should be successfully challenged by the papacy. He could not see how he could declare his obedience to two powers who were locked in competition for ascendancy over England. Therefore he continued to refuse to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome.28
Latimer and Ridley were tried, excommunicated, degraded, and sentenced to death in October 1555. Heretics had been burnt in Oxford before, most recently in 1538, when William Cowbridge (a few weeks after the burning of Friar Forest) died for his eccentric denial of Christ as the redeemer of the world. Foxe had attended his death when he was a student at Oxford.29
On 16 October 1555, Latimer and Ridley were brought to the same place Cowbridge died, an open place in Broad Street below the walls of Balliol College, around the corner from the Bocardo. The scene of their execution was immortalized by Foxe as the most important episode in his Book of Martyrs. They were chained to one stake, and after they bid the world farewell with words of mutual encouragement, the fire was lit. Cranmer was brought up on the leads of the Bocardo and made to watch. Latimer was one of his oldest friends. Ridley had led him to his mature understanding of the Eucharist. Latimer died quickly, without seeming to suffer pain, but Ridley suffered grievously for a long time. Cranmer wept in great distress, and he mourned his friends in the full knowledge that the same fate waited for him.
The recantations
Shortly after Ridley and Latimer’s execution, Stephen Gardiner died after a long illness. Pole answered the letter Cranmer had sent the queen, and reproached him in the strongest terms for his disobedience and his perjury when he accepted the archbishopric. He warned Cranmer that his opinion towards the sacrament of the altar was plainly mistaken, and his soul was in danger of eternal damnation unless he repented his sins and errors.30 Pole also sent the Spanish Dominican friars Pedro de Soto and Juan de Villagracia to Oxford to speak with him. Cranmer’s deprivation and condemnation was completed in Rome before the end of 1555. The verdict arrived in England before the end of January 1556.
What followed are some of the most difficult episodes to understand in Cranmer’s life. At Christmas 1555, he was moved from the Bocardo to friendlier accommodations, and he may have heard Mass at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. He was also asked to take up fresh theological questions by the friars, which caused him to examine his opinions in a new light.
Early in the new year, pressed very hard, Cranmer made a recantation: because the king and queen, with the consent of Parliament, ‘have received the pope’s authority within this realm, I am content to submit myself to their laws’ and also ‘to take the pope for chief head of this Church of England’. But a caveat at the end, ‘so far as God’s law and the laws and customs of this realm will permit’ rendered his first recantation valueless, because privately he still believed that God’s law did not permit the supremacy of the pope.31
Once Cranmer began to capitulate, he was pressured further. His next recantation declared that he submitted himself ‘to the catholic church of Christ’, to the pope as its supreme head, and to the king and queen and their laws. This too was considered inadequate. A third recantation followed, in which he promised ‘to live in quietness and obedience unto their majesties’, and to submit his latest book to judgement by the Catholic Church and the next general council. Nor was the third recantation accepted.
On 14 February 1556, in Christ Church Cathedral, Cranmer was degraded from all his orders in the Church. His high promotion as archbishop was symbolically undone, all the way down through the lowest of holy orders. Bishop Edmund Bonner of London, who was acting as metropolitan in Cranmer’s absence, and Thomas Thirlby, now bishop of Ely, were sent to conduct the ceremony. The pope’s commission was read, and Cranmer was dressed in a parody of an archbishop’s garments so that he could be divested of them.32
But when they reached to take the crozier out of his hand, Cranmer surprised everyone when he suddenly pulled a legal document out of his sleeve (in imitation of Martin Luther, who had made a similar protest early in his career). Cranmer made a formal appeal to the next General Council. His document had been prepared even while he recanted three times. Because he had been cited to come to Rome, he insisted that he be heard because he had not been treated fairly during his imprisonment in Oxford.33
Thirlby had been Cranmer’s friend for most of their lives, and, deeply upset, he promised to plead for him to the king and queen, and he wept through the ceremony. Bonner and Thirlby now reached for the simulated pallium, and Cranmer asked them: ‘Which of you hath a pall, to take off my pall?’ As they continued to strip him, Cranmer said ‘I had myself done with this gear long ago’. At the end, he was given a second-hand garment to wear, a cast-off that had once belonged to some humble layman, and a townsman’s cap to cover his bald head.
Two days later, Bonner came to visit him, and Cranmer recanted again for the fourth time. Now he confessed, ‘concerning the sacraments of the Church, I believe unfeignedly in all points’ as the Catholic Church taught, ‘and hath believed from the beginning of Christian religion’.
Cranmer’s seeming willingness to submit as the time for his execution approached placed the queen and Pole in a quandary. Mary had no intention of reprieving Cranmer, even though there were some, like Thirlby, who would have been glad if he were spared. Bonner carried the fourth recantation back to London, where it was released, and it caused a sensation that disturbed the Privy Council.34
Historians still disagree how effectual Mary’s government was in seizing the opportunities that the printing press offered to enhance its rule. If Cranmer could have been made to recant openly, before a large audience, he would have been discredited forever, along with the Protestant Church in England that he symbolized as its architect. But could they have trusted him to make a clear and unequivocal submission? This seems unlikely, especially after his theatrical appeal at his degradation. Other Protestants turned rather than burn. Immediately after Latimer and Ridley’s execution, Edward Crome submitted to Cardinal Pole. He recanted before witnesses, if not at Paul’s Cross, and he was pardoned.
Little was made by the government of Crome’s capitulation. Probably the authorities judged correctly (based on the record of his recantations in Henry’s reign) that they could not count on what he would say or do if he spoke before a sizeable audience. Crome and Cranmer (like Smyth) reached maturity before John Calvin established the concept of the ‘Nicodemite’ from the story in John’s Gospel. Nicodemus was the Pharisee who came to consult Jesus secretly by night, who believed in his teaching but would not confess it openly. From the mid-1540s, at about the same time that Anne Askew was executed, Calvin argued that compromise or backsliding was unacceptable among Protestants. Insincerity was a sign of imperfect faith. Foxe and others were persuaded by Calvin that dissimulation or equivocation was unworthy of Christians under persecution. Their duty was to die as witnesses to their faith in Christ if there was no other recourse. Ridley and Latimer, like Askew, willingly sacrificed their lives.35
Meanwhile, Cranmer indulged in the hope that he would be allowed to live, and the last weeks of his life were full of distress. On 26 February 1556, Villagracia persuaded him to make a more complete recantation. He prepared a document which Cranmer signed that repudiated the teaching of Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli.36
Now Cranmer made a full capitulation. Penitent, he asked for absolution and to be allowed to return to the Roman Church. He attended Mass again. Still, the fifth recantation was deemed inadequate for the salvation of his soul, and on 18 March Cranmer signed an abject submission that repudiated his role in ending the marriage of the queen’s parents. It ended with a reference to the thief who was crucified with Christ, who was promised entrance into paradise.
Why Cranmer was willing to recant is difficult to explain. He knew that the documents he was signing were being collected to discredit him, and that his reputation would be destroyed once they were released. Perhaps he believed that once he was brought back into the Roman Church he would be allowed to live, fully repentant and fully reconciled, though it is difficult to believe, from his own words at his execution, that he was sincere in his submissions.
However, Mary had no desire to allow him to escape punishment as a reconciled penitent, even though she was reminded that he had interceded with Henry for her life in 1536. His execution was briefly postponed, but then he was warned that he must die. Now another comprehensive statement was prepared for him to read at his execution, which he was asked to write out in advance, again and again, for distribution after his death. He was to declare that he was a sinner, ashamed, and in need of prayer. Now was the moment when all of his past life hung in the balance: would he spend eternity with Christ forever in joy, or be in pain forever with the wicked devils in hell? The faith he confessed at his end would determine his future. The statement that was prepared for him concluded with a repudiation of all the books he had written against the sacrament of the altar since the death of Henry VIII. Cranmer’s last utterance before he died was supposed to be: ‘I say and believe that our Saviour Christ Jesu is really and substantially contained in the blessed sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine’. Had Cranmer read these words as his final statement at his death, everything he had built for Edward’s Church would have been discredited.37
The execution
On 21 March 1556, through rainy streets, Cranmer was brought again to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, where the marks of the platform on which he was stood can still be seen on a pillar today. He stood weeping as Henry Cole (d. 1580) denounced him in a sermon that suggested that Sir Thomas More’s death in 1535 had been avenged by the execution of Northumberland. But how could the loss of the incomparable Bishop John Fisher be made good? The burnings of bishops Ridley, Hooper, and Ferrar were insufficient, Cole announced, and now Cranmer was to be added to make the balance even.38
It may be that this outrageous suggestion caused Cranmer to make a decision that he had agonized over in the last hours of his life. He had written out the prepared text that he was supposed to read, but he had also made ready an alternative ending that now, perhaps at the instigation of Cole’s sermon, he decided to read instead. His statement was almost unchanged until the end, when Cranmer announced that he renounced ‘things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be’. Everything he had written since his degradation he repudiated. ‘I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished’. Cranmer said he would hold his hand in the flames and let it burn first. Then he cried out that he refused the pope as Christ’s enemy, and he believed as he taught in the book he had written against Gardiner.39
Before Cranmer finished reading, he was pulled from the platform, and he was brought to the walls of Balliol College, to the same place where Ridley and Latimer had died. As he ran towards the stake, Cranmer explained to Villagarcia that he had made his recantations merely ‘to save my life’.40
If the scene of Latimer and Ridley’s burning was the great centrepiece of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, then Cranmer’s execution was the next most important, and it was essential in vindicating English Protestantism. As promised, once the fire was kindled, Cranmer held his hand steadily in the flames, moving only once or twice to wipe his head, each time, placing his hand back into the fire. He was heard to murmur ‘my unworthy right hand’. He also repeated the words of St Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, ‘lord Jesus receive my spirit’ until he died.41
Cranmer knew St John Chrysostom’s and St Basil’s homilies that recalled how St Barlaam of Antioch (d. 304) went to a martyr’s death. After a long period of imprisonment and torture, Barlaam was brought out of prison to offer a sacrifice, and he was given incense with live coals to scatter on a pagan altar. But rather than drop the burning incense to honour a pagan god, he held it and sacrificed his own hand instead.42 We cannot know if Cranmer thought of emulating Barlaam in his last hour, but certainly his enemies saw the association. Within a few years, as Harpsfield denounced English heresies, he warned his readers not to think of Cranmer as ‘our Barlaam’.43 The power of Cranmer’s final gesture in testifying to his own faith, and in affirming the legitimacy of the English Church, counteracted the impression that was made when his recantations were printed in their original form. His final statement corrected the version of the recantations that were released by Bonner. The manner of Cranmer’s death meant that Protestants could claim him as a martyr. This was a claim that had first been made on his behalf as long ago as 1537, when Osiander wrote in the dedication of his Harmony that Cranmer’s love for the Gospel and true religion was so great, that he was willing to work only for the glory of Christ. Cranmer had ‘a spirit equal to martyrdom’.44
Notes
1Cranmer’s collect for the first Sunday in Lent from the 1549 Prayer Book: 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), 32v.
2O. O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity, 2nd. ed. (London, 2011); S. M. Holmes, ‘The Title of Article 27 (26): Cranmer, Durandus and Pope Innocent III’, JEH, 64 (2013), 357–64.
3Articles agreed on by the Bishoppes, and other learned menne in the Synode at London, in the yere of our Lorde Godde, M.D.LII. (London: Richard Grafton, June 1553, RSTC 10034.2); MacCulloch, Cranmer, 503, 536–7.
4G. Bray, ed., Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, Church of England Record Society, 8 (2000), xxvi–xxix, xxxviii–xliv, lxiv, lxxiii–lxxvi. Also, The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws of England, 1552, ed. J. C. Spalding, vol. 19, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (1992).
5Cranmer, Miscellaneous, no. 310.
6See Dale Hoak’s entry for the king in the ODNB.
7Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 81; E. Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery (Oxford, 2009).
8[John Ponet], A Short Catechisme, or playne instruction, conteynynge the summe of Christian learninge (London: John Day, May 1553, RSTC 4812). fols. 69r–86r; Articles agreed on by the Bishoppes, and other learned menne in the Synode at London, in the yere of our Lorde Godde, M.D.LII. (London: Richard Grafton, June 1553, RSTC 10034.2), MacCulloch, Cranmer, 536–7.
935 Henry VIII (1544), c. 1; S. E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977) 193–4.
10Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter to Queen Mary, no. 310; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 540–1; Ives, Lady Jane Grey, 165.
11Foxe, AM, 6, 385–6.
12Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 88.
13The Chronicle of Queen Jane, ed. J. G. Nichols, CS, 48 (1850), 1–11; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 543–4; ‘The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham’, ed. D. MacCulloch, Camden Miscellany, 28, CS, 4th series, 29 (1984), 181–301; Ives, Lady Jane Grey, 192–224.
14Cranmer’s letter to Queen Mary: Miles Coverdale [and Henry Bull], Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters of such true saintes and holy martyrs of God . . . . (London: John Day, 1564, RSTC 5886), 1–3; and Miscellaneous, no. 310.
15Foxe, AM, 8, 19–20, 44.
16The will of Edmund Cartwright of Ossington, Notts., made 8 September 1553 and proved 30 August 1554, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/37, 56r–57r; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter to Mistress Wilkinson, no. 311.
17Cranmer’s letter setting out his response to the rumours that he would set up the Mass again: CCCC, MS 105, 321–2. It was printed in Latin as an appendix to the Vera expositio disputationis institutae mandato D. Mariae Reginae ([Cologne, 1554, RSTC 19891); Cranmer, Lord’s Supper, 428–30; Foxe, AM, 6, 589–90.
18Foxe, AM, 8, 37–8; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 547–51.
19APC, 4, 345–7.
20Wriothesley, Chronicle, 2, 103.
21[John Philpot], The trew report of the dysputacyon had and begonne in the conuocacyon hows (Basel [Emden], 1554, RSTC 19890), a translation of the Vera expositio disputationis; Foxe, AM, 6, 395–411.
22Chronicle of Queen Jane, 26–59; Ives, Lady Jane Grey, 249–52; Ridley, Cranmer, 367–8.
23The Trve Copies of the Letters between . . . John [Jewel] and D. Cole . . . (London: John Day, 1560, RSTC 14613) 46r, 63r.
24Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 312.
25Cranmer, Miscellaneous, no. 317; reproduced in MacCulloch, Cranmer, 574.
26MacCulloch, Cranmer, 561–4.
27Foxe, AM, 8, 44–7; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 212–24; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 575–9.
28Cranmer, Miscellanous, no. 314.
29T. S. Freeman and S. Royal, ‘Stranger than Fiction in the Archives: The Controversial Death of William Cowbridge in 1538’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), 451–72.
30Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 534–41.
31All the submyssyons, and recantations of Thomas Cranmer, late Archebyshop of Canterburye truely set forth both in Latyn and Englysh, agreable to the originalles, wrytten and subscribed with his owne hande, ed. Edmund Bonner (London: John Cawood [1556], RSTC 5990); Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 563–5.
32Foxe, AM, 8, 71–82; Ridley, Cranmer, 391–3.
33Foxe, AM, 8, 71–82; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 224–8.
34MacCulloch, Cranmer, 595–6.
35John 3:1; and see A. Overell’s forthcoming Nicodemites between Italy and Tudor England.
36Ridley, Cranmer, 394–5; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 594–7.
37Recantations of Thomas Cranmer, B2r.
38Foxe, AM, 8, 85.
39Cranmer, Miscellanous, 563–6.
40Foxe, AM, 8, 89.
41Foxe 1563, 1502–3.
42Basil’s homily 17 on St Barlaam: Patrologia Graeca, 31, cols. 484–90; Chrysostom’s ‘Laudatio Sancti Martyris Barlaam’, Patrologia Graeca, 50, cols. 675–82.
43In the original: ‘nostrum Barlaam’: Nicholas Harpsfield [pseud. Alan Cope] Sex Dialogi contra Summi Pontificatus . . . . (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1566), 743–4.
44See Osiander’s dedication in his Harmoniae Evangelicae; Osiander to Cranmer, 24 January 1538: BL, Harley MS 6989, 80 (LP, 13 (1), no. 140 and also no. 648); MacCulloch, Cranmer, 70–1, 74–5; Ridley, Cranmer, 40–2; G. Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies Relating to the Book of Common Prayer, Alcuin Club, 65 (1983), 72.