10 Thomas Cranmer’s legacy for the English Church
‘O God, the king of glory, which hath exalted thine only son Jesus Christ, with great triumph into thy kingdom of heaven: we beseech thee, leave us not comfortless, but send to us thine holy ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place, whither our saviour Christ is gone before: who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.’1
Cranmer’s family
Thomas Cranmer’s dramatic gesture at his execution was widely accepted as a definitive statement of his faith as well as a proclamation of the legitimacy of the Protestant Church. In 1557, the English exiles released a new edition of his Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine, in which Edmund Cranmer was distinguished as the brother of the martyr.2 John Parkhurst (d. 1575) praised Cranmer in verse for his courage, and spoke of his mind rising to the stars when his body was burnt.3 In 1559 John Bale described Cranmer as another Polycarp, the second-century bishop of Smryna, who was burnt for refusing to make a sacrifice to the emperor of Rome.4
While they were still in exile at the end of 1556, Margaret Cranmer married Edward Whitchurch, the printer of the Great Bible of 1539–1540. Edmund Cranmer died abroad, probably shortly before the unexpected occurred: Mary and Cardinal Pole both died on 17 November 1558. Immediately upon Elizabeth’s accession, John Jewel travelled back to England from Strasbourg, bringing with him the archbishop’s son, the young Thomas Cranmer, and the surviving members of the archbishop’s family. Lands and revenues, including the former monastery of Kirkstall in Yorkshire that had been confiscated at his attainder, eventually were restored to his widow and their son.5 When Sir John Markham died late in 1559, he left the young Cranmer the money he had borrowed from his father, even though the archbishop had forgiven the debt shortly before his arrest.6
Whitchurch arranged a marriage between the archbishop’s daughter Margaret to the lawyer and man of letters Thomas Norton (d. 1584). There were no children from this marriage. Since the archbishop’s son remained childless, Cranmer’s direct line of descent came to an end late in the sixteenth century. But Norton married as his second wife Edmund Cranmer’s daughter Alice, with whom he established a large and flourishing posterity. Although the younger Thomas Cranmer led a troubled life, he and Norton remained close, and when Norton died in 1584, ‘brother’ Thomas Cranmer became the executor of his will. Norton trusted him to dispose of his goods on behalf of his wife Alice and their children.7
Many people had competing claims as Cranmer’s heirs. Matthew Parker, who succeeded Pole to the archbishopric of Canterbury, was an eager collector of books and manuscripts, and he wanted all of Cranmer’s writings that could be recovered. As we have already seen, Ralph Morice’s reminiscences were written for Parker’s history of the archbishops of Canterbury.8 They are preserved in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Facsimiles of its manuscripts are available on the Internet.
Cranmer’s large and varied library was partially broken up upon his arrest, and an untold number of his Protestant books were destroyed. Many of his manuscripts were lost, and despite Parker’s best efforts, they could not be found again. A substantial portion of Cranmer’s printed books went first to Queen Mary’s lord high steward and then to his son-in-law John, first Lord Lumley (d. 1609). After his death they passed to Henry, prince of Wales (d. 1612), and then they entered the Royal Library. The Royal Library was incorporated into the British Library, where Cranmer’s books can be consulted today.9
Parker discovered that some manuscripts in Cranmer’s own hand were kept by his physician, Dr John Herd (1511–1584), who attended him in Oxford. Many of Cranmer’s belongings remained in the hands of his widow and children, and ultimately some of them, like Cranmer’s drafts of canon law, passed to Norton. Whitchurch died in 1562.10 Then Margaret made an unfortunate third marriage to Bartholomew Scott, from whose unkindness she was forced to flee. She took refuge with Reyner Wolfe, who also held on to many of Cranmer’s manuscripts. Margaret’s last years were probably passed in difficult circumstances, and we do not know when or where she died. Late in her life, she still had among her meagre possessions some rings that probably belonged to Cranmer.11
The Elizabethan Church
As archbishop of Canterbury from late 1559, Parker played a substantial role in preserving Cranmer’s legacy in the Elizabethan Church. The new queen needed her Protestant subjects to secure her succession. When her Privy Council was constituted, Mary’s councillors were excluded. The task of making Elizabeth’s Church Protestant was eased by Cardinal Pole’s death, for it is likely that he would have exerted enormous influence against the new queen’s government had he survived Mary. In December 1558, Parker was summoned to wait upon the queen, and despite the reluctance he felt (which he attributed to his own sense of inadequacy), at length he was nominated, confirmed, and consecrated archbishop of Canterbury by the end of 1559.
Fresh compromises were necessary at the establishment of Elizabeth’s Church in 1559. The 1552 Book of Common Prayer was restored but with conservative alterations that brought back the phrasing from the 1549 communion service. The ‘black rubric’ was omitted. Clergymen were again required to wear surplices. Some of the changes created lasting controversies.
Dangerous disagreements had erupted on the continent among the English exiles about the Prayer Book. At Frankfort, most of the exiles wanted to follow the 1552 Prayer Book, and they had strong links with other English churches in Zűrich, Strasbourg, and Emden. John Knox arrived as a minister in Frankfort in 1554, and at Christmas he provoked a crisis when he refused to administer the Lord’s Supper in accordance with the Prayer Book, because he wanted to bring worship services closer to the practices that were followed in southern Germany and Switzerland. He appealed to John Calvin for support. When, on 17 March 1555, Knox openly criticized the 1552 Prayer Book in a sermon that compared the Emperor Charles V to Nero, the safety of the exiles was jeopardized. Knox was banished in a move that was orchestrated by Richard Cox at Strasbourg, who wished to defend Cranmer’s achievement against Knox’s repeated criticisms. He spent the next few months with Calvin in Geneva before he returned to Scotland.12
Like Knox, there were many returning exiles who wished Elizabeth’s Church would accommodate greater changes than were allowed under the Act of Uniformity of 1559 and the 1559 Prayer Book. Problems that began during Cranmer’s archiepiscopate continued to have important long-term consequences in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that go beyond the scope of this study. They helped to create a dynamic tension inside the English Church between those who were willing to conform, and those who were dissatisfied or openly nonconformist, who later became known under the useful label ‘Puritans’. Elizabeth’s settlement represented another new start as a Reformed Protestant Church.
A second book of homilies was released in 1563 to accompany the 1547 book. Although it has been described as less distinguished than its predecessor, Elizabeth valued it for the conformity it encouraged.13 The queen preferred that homilies be read rather than sermons preached in parishes, because she thought the homilies as set texts provided a better encouragement to obedience. The story of Archbishop Edmund Grindal, Nicholas Ridley’s former chaplain and Parker’s successor, whose career was destroyed in 1576 by his temerity in defending continental styles of preaching known as ‘exercises of prophesying’, is familiar through the work of the late Patrick Collinson. Grindal spent the final years of his life in exclusion, all but deprived of the office of archbishop of Canterbury. The disaster that overtook Grindal is another symbol of the extent to which the office of archbishop was demoted by the royal supremacy over the English Church.14
In 1571 the Forty-Two Articles were revised as the Thirty-Nine Articles, and they became definitive for the English Church. They were printed in the Prayer Book, and they were restored with it when the English Church was re-established at the Restoration in 1662. They have been periodically endorsed and frequently invoked to the present day.
Cranmer’s revision of English canon law was consigned to oblivion by Queen Mary, but Cardinal Pole was hardly more successful in revising canon law for England. He had the additional challenge of incorporating changes in the laws of the Roman Church that were being developed by the Council of Trent (1545–1563). The new canons were passed by Parliament in early 1556, shortly before Cranmer’s execution, and they were in force less than three years when Mary and Pole died. How effective they were in that brief time is still not understood.15
Cranmer’s canon law project was revived in the next reign by Norton, John Foxe, and Foxe’s printer John Day as one of the responses that was made to defend Elizabeth after she was excommunicated by Pope Pius V (Antonio Ghislieri, r. 1566–1572) in 1571. Norton was in the House of Commons. Working from Cranmer’s paperwork, he introduced the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum for adoption. An edition of the proposed code was printed by Day with a plea from Foxe that at long last, the new laws should be adopted for the realm. But once again, the measure did not succeed. Elizabeth also had her misgivings about the advisability of allowing the Church to make its own policies without parliamentary supervision, and Cranmer’s law code lost a last real chance to succeed.16
John Foxe and the reluctant martyr
In terms of Cranmer himself, as a man and an archbishop, John Foxe in the Actes and Monuments addressed the complexities and contradictions that his career presented by comparing his life against the daunting standard for bishops established by St Paul in his epistles to Timothy and Titus: ‘A bishop must be blameless’.17 Verse by verse, Foxe measured Cranmer’s actions and achievements against Paul’s exemplars. Foxe could no more reconcile every contradiction he observed in the decisions Cranmer made than have his later biographers. Cranmer’s treatment of John Lambert at his trial in 1539 especially made Foxe uneasy. Within a decade Cranmer believed the same tenets for which he was willing to condemn Lambert to the stake. Was Cranmer truly a martyr? Foxe seemed to have doubts that he was hard-pressed to reconcile, for in his 1570 and subsequent editions of the Actes and monuments he suggested that by ‘evil subscribing’ to his recantations, Cranmer should have perished’ for ever. Instead, ‘by well recanting’, he was preserved by God. Lest Cranmer ‘should have lived longer with shame and rebuke, it pleased God to take him away’. God had fortified the Church ‘with the testimony and blood of such a martyr’. His burning was ‘a cross of tribulation’ that God used to ‘purge his offences in this world’, ‘not only of his recantation’ but also of his standing against Lambert and any others with whose blood or burning Cranmer’s hand had been polluted. Instead, by dying as he did with the utmost courage, Foxe thought Cranmer could be numbered among the martyrs of Christ.18
Notes
1Cranmer’s collect for Ascension 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), 68r.
2Thomas Cranmer, Defensio verae et catholicae doctrinae de sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi (Emden [Egidius van der Erve], 1557, RSTC 6005), A8v.
3John Parkhurst, Ludicra siue Epigrammata iuuenilia (London: John Daye, 1573, RSTC 19299), 183.
4John Bale, Scriptorvm Illustrium maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam uocant: Catalogus. (Basle: Joannis Oporium, 1557, 1559), 691.
5P. M. Black, ‘Matthew Parker’s Search for Cranmer’s “great notable written books”’, The Library, fifth series, 29 (1974), 312–22.
6C. H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles (Cambridge, 1938), p. 136; Zurich Letters, 1, 8; the will of Sir John Markham, made 1 April 1559 and proved 28 October 1559, TNA:PRO, PROB 11/42B, 397v–398v.
7The will of Thomas Norton, TNA:PRO, PROB 11/66, 276v.
8Black, ‘Matthew Parker’s Search’, 312–22.
9D. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer, Oxford Bibliographical Society, third series, 1 (1996).
10The will of Edward Whitchurch, made 26 November 1562 and proved 3 December 1562, TNA:PRO, PROB 11/45, 227r–227v.
11See Mary Prior’s account of Margaret Cranmer’s life in the ODNB.
12Jane Dawson, John Knox (New Haven, 2015), 90–108.
13The seconde tome of homelyes of such matters as were promysed and intituled in the former part of homelyes, set out by the aucthoritie of the Quenes Maiestie: and to be read in euery paryshe churche agreablye (London: Richard Jugge and John Cawood, 1563, RSTC 13663), R. Bond, ed., Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) (Toronto, 1987), 9.
14P. Grindal, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979).
15G. Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529–1947, Church of England Record Society, 6 (1998), xliii–liv.
16Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum ex authoritate primum Regis Henrici. 8. inchoata: deinde per Regem Edouardum 6. Prouecta (London: John Day, 1571, RSTC 6006); G. Bray, ed., Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, Church of England Record Society, 8 (2000), lxxxvii–cv.
171 Timothy 3:1–7; Titus 1:7–9.
18Foxe 1570, 2, 1888.