1 Introduction
‘O Lord which dost teach us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and all virtues, without the which, whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee: Grant this for thy only son Jesus Christ’s sake.’1
The present book is an introduction to the life and career of Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), the sixty-eighth archbishop of Canterbury.2 Although his Book of Common Prayer defined habits of worship for generations of English-speaking people, Cranmer is the most challenging of all the major figures of Tudor England to understand. His career was complicated and his decisions for the reform of the English Church were filled with contradictions that were hard to follow at the time and defy easy explanations even now.
Cranmer struggled against sustained opposition, not just from powerful people who remained satisfied with the Catholic Church in England as it was before he became archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, but he also faced resistance from his greatest benefactor, King Henry VIII (1491–1547). Only during the brief reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI (1537–1553), could Cranmer align the English Church directly with the theology of continental leaders of Protestantism, including Martin Bucer (1491–1551) and Peter Martyr Vermigli of Strasbourg (1499–1562); Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich (1504–1575); and John Calvin of Geneva (1509–1564). The greatest of all of Cranmer’s goals was to encourage the Protestant Churches to reconcile their doctrinal disagreements at meetings which he told Calvin should be a counterweight against the Council of Trent. But although Cranmer was successful, for the most part, in implementing reforms in Edward’s Church, he did not have enough time to bring his full plans to fruition. He could not satisfy those who wanted a more complete reformation of the English Church. Cranmer was interrupted in 1553 when Henry’s elder daughter Mary (1516–1558) took the throne after her young brother’s untimely death.
By Acts of Parliament, Mary restored the Catholic Church in England. Cranmer was arrested and questioned. He was condemned as a traitor. After many months of imprisonment at Oxford, he was tried for heresy and convicted. He was a reluctant martyr and he made several recantations which threatened his legacy for the English Church. At Oxford on 21 March 1556, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was brought to a stake and as he was burned, he made a heroic gesture of his faith. He was succeeded at Canterbury by Reginald Cardinal Pole (1500–1558). Had Mary and Pole lived longer, they would have completed their reversal of the reforms of Henry’s and Edward’s reigns and they would have done their utmost to reinvigorate Catholicism in England. In Mary’s reign, Cranmer’s archiepiscopate was reviled as a grievous mistake, and in time his memory would have been expunged.
But both Mary and Pole died within hours of each other on 17 November 1558. Elizabeth (1533–1603), the new queen, was Cranmer’s god-daughter. A substantial portion of his vision for the English Church was reinstated during her reign, though probably less than what he would have achieved had he been permitted to complete the reformation he began.
Cranmer’s story is important because his achievements transformed England culturally and politically in his lifetime and beyond. In a series of wrenching breaks with the past, he launched a distinctive national Church that was Protestant. He wanted England to have political independence from the papacy, but his greatest ambition, the motivating factor that dominated his career, was to save souls. He believed that salvation could be achieved by faith alone, which came through the spoken and written Word as a manifestation of the love God expressed towards humankind in the life and sacrifice of his son Jesus Christ. Cranmer raised four important pillars for the English Church: an English Bible (1539–1540); a Book of Homilies (1547) that taught faith and obedience; the Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552); and the Forty-Two Articles (1552–1553) that defined essential tenets. They were his greatest achievements for the Church of England.
Cranmer’s life has been difficult to understand not only because of the tumultuous reversals of the Tudor succession, but because great cultural gulfs divide his time from the present day. The importance of the Church as part of the British Establishment has receded since the 1960s. The Book of Common Prayer went through a controversial revision in 1928, and alternatives have replaced it since 1980 in many English parishes. Christianity is not definitive for many people in today’s multicultural societies.
Some major figures of the sixteenth century, like William Shakespeare (1564–1616), have left few records for their lives beyond their printed works. In contrast, the array of sources that relate to Cranmer’s career is unusually large and complex. Portions of his working papers survive, and they are exhaustive in their attention to detail on various questions of doctrine, most especially on the Eucharist.3 His archiepiscopal Register, which recorded the business of the province and diocese of Canterbury, is in Lambeth Palace Library. Cranmer’s correspondence was extensive. Scores of his letters survive in manuscript, and selections of them have been printed in modern editions.4 An investigation he conducted in Kent in 1543 produced a thick bundle of documents that is kept in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.5 Government documents for the reigns of the Tudors are in the State Papers collection of The National Archives (formerly known as the Public Record Office) and they are also in the Cotton and Royal collections of manuscripts in the British Library. Some of the most important have been in print since the early nineteenth century, but only now, through digitization, are many of the manuscripts associated with Cranmer’s career becoming available to anyone who wishes to consult them through the Internet.
The printing press was the new medium in the sixteenth century, and Cranmer wrote or commissioned a large number of books in addition to those that have already been mentioned. Colleagues across Europe dedicated their books to him. Several printers were amongst his closest friends. At the time of his arrest in 1553 Cranmer possessed one of the finest libraries in Europe of more than seven hundred books and manuscripts.6
Cranmer’s life and execution have been studied at length since John Foxe (1517–1587) began in 1556 his initial version of what ultimately became his vast ecclesiastical history, the Actes and Monuments, commonly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. In the reign of Elizabeth, Foxe received information from Cranmer’s secretary Ralph Morice, as well as a ‘Life’ written by a member of the archbishop’s household whose name we do not know.7 The seventeenth-century antiquarian John Strype (1643–1737) compiled a flawed but influential biography of Cranmer.8 At the beginning of the twentieth century, A. F. Pollard (1869–1948) presented Cranmer as a figure of the Establishment, and five decades later Jasper Ridley (1920–2004) examined his career with a more critical eye. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s (b. 1951) magisterial, award-winning Thomas Cranmer: A Life appeared in 1996.9
Every generation asks its own questions about the past, and in the last three decades historians have furthered our understanding of Tudor England and the English Church. The present book will provide an introduction to Cranmer’s life, but it will also advance original points of interest. My book is a fresh study that makes substantial departures from all previous accounts of Cranmer’s career, including MacCulloch’s biography. I give new attention to members of his family, like his brother Edmund (c. 1496–c. 1557), who helped to build the successes that the archbishop enjoyed. Cranmer was helped but also overshadowed by his friend and rival, Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540), who, as the king’s vicegerent, exercised power over the entire English Church on a scale that exceeded anything that Henry allowed to Cranmer. This book will also suggest that while Stephen Gardiner (c. 1495–1555), bishop of Winchester, was one of Cranmer’s most important opponents late in their careers, the archbishop’s early nemesis was the bishop of London, John Stokesley (1475–1539). Cranmer’s greatest enemies aside from Stokesley and Gardiner were the popes of the time as well as the great Habsburg dynast Charles V (1500–1558), Holy Roman Emperor.
Cranmer’s spiritual development has posed difficult problems for his biographers, and they have not always been able to agree on its stages. One of the purposes of this brief study is to provide a nuanced time frame for the theological shifts in the archbishop’s thinking. This will, I hope, contribute to our understanding of the Church that Cranmer sought to build.
For Thomas Cranmer I have found source material that sheds new light on previously obscure portions of his life. The transitions that took place in his opinions had profound consequences for the English Church. We know now for the first time that Cranmer was ordained to the priesthood in 1515. Although he may have been conventionally devout at the beginning, as a theologian at Cambridge, he came under the influence of the writings of the humanist scholars Jacques Lefèvre (c. 1455–1536) and Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1467–1536). Through their studies in Greek and by using critical analysis, they aspired to understand the epistles of St Paul (d. c. 67) as the apostle meant them to be understood. They summoned their readers to the wellspring of the Gospel, and invited them to make deep explorations into the meanings of Scripture that would bring about spiritual renewal from within. Historians still do not completely agree on the best term that should be used to describe the earliest generation of scholars who were persuaded that Scripture defined faith, devotion, and practice, those who responded to Erasmus’s and Lefèvre’s call to biblicism. Although the word ‘evangelicalism’ has been imported from eighteenth-century studies and applied to the sixteenth, the term is not completely satisfactory. Evangelicalism as it is used in this book should not be confused with the fundamentalism of the present day.10 At about the same time that Martin Luther (1483–1546) emerged in 1517 to disturb the stability of the western Church, Cranmer accepted the standards of biblicism that Erasmus and Lefèvre endorsed. However, Cranmer probably did not embrace Lutheran ideas until 1532, when Henry sent him as an ambassador to Nuremberg.
The contributions to Christian thought that Luther made over his long life were so prodigious that most of them cannot be taken up in this present book, but two features of his thinking will be essential to our understanding of Cranmer: the tenet of justification by faith alone, and Luther’s insights about the Eucharist. ‘Justification’ is another word for the salvation of the soul. Luther (like Lefèvre before him) emphasized a strand of thinking that he developed from the epistles of St Paul in the New Testament of the Bible. Luther measured the traditions of the Church against Scripture, and he wished to discard any practices that he thought were distractions from the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice. Luther argued that Christians are justified or saved only by their faith, and that their very faith was itself a gift from God. The tenet of justification by faith alone challenged the teaching of the late medieval Church, which had built an entire economy of salvation on the pillars of faith and good works. Many varieties of good works in the late medieval Church were accredited with powers of salvation. Relieving the poor, supporting monks and nuns, building chantry chapels, or above all, providing for Masses, could help to move a soul after death out of the prison of purgatory into the unending bliss of heaven. People could promote the health of their own souls through good works, and they could also work for the salvation of the souls of departed members of their families or their friends by praying for them and by supplying Masses in their memory. Luther’s criticism of the existing doctrine of works and his insistence that good works did not help the dead suffering in purgatory was an essential break in western thought. Luther believed that works were a sign of faith, and not in themselves the means to salvation. From 1532, Cranmer seems to have agreed with Luther about justification by faith alone.
Amongst the many controversies that Luther unleashed, none were more bitter than disagreements concerning the Eucharist. Luther challenged the tenet of transubstantiation. In the thirteenth century, St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) applied the logic of Aristotle (d. 322 BC) to the Mass. At the words of consecration, the bread and wine were transmuted, through the miracle of God, into the very same body and blood of Christ that had hung upon the Cross. The ‘accidents’ (or the appearance) of the bread and wine stayed the same, but the ‘reality’ of what they were changed at the consecration. Aquinas’s explanation was almost exclusively accepted in the western Church until Luther objected that the Mass could not be a sacrifice. He argued that Jesus’s sacrifice of himself on the cross was completely sufficient for the salvation of humankind. Luther argued that claims that the Mass could save souls were ill-founded and mistaken. Only faith in Christ’s sacrifice saved.
Paradoxically, although Luther disparaged the tenet of transubstantiation, he and the Roman Catholic Church both taught that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was ‘real’: in the sense that the actual body of Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, and the blood he shed when he was crucified, were present in the consecrated bread and wine. The Church taught that the ‘accidents’ of the appearance of the bread and wine, after consecration, hid their true nature as the Body and Blood of Christ. The transformation of the bread and wine through the miraculous intervention of God into the Body and Blood was complete, in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. In contrast, Luther believed that the Body and Blood were present together with the bread and the wine. Although he did not use this term himself, some theologians have referred to Luther’s opinion as ‘consubstantiation’.11
Once Luther succeeded in challenging the papacy, serious disagreements broke out amongst his colleagues especially concerning the nature of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They were deeply divided over the question of the ‘reality’ of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine. Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) of Zűrich believed in justification by faith alone, but he disagreed with Luther, for he argued that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was purely ‘spiritual’ in nature. The Lord’s Supper was a memorial of Christ’s death, in keeping with the words of instruction Jesus spoke to his disciples on the night he was betrayed. The bread and wine remained bread and wine. Christ was present in the Lord’s Supper, spiritually but not physically or ‘corporally’. Both Luther and Zwingli gained numerous followers in the 1520s. Resistance at the Imperial Diet of Speyer in 1529 to the Habsburgs’ plans repress reform eventually established the term ‘Protestant’. But disagreements concerning the meaning of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist divided Protestants, and threatened the survival of Protestantism in the face of the Emperor Charles’s implacable opposition. After Zwingli died in battle in 1531, he was succeeded at Zűrich by Bullinger, who was interested in developing unity amongst Protestant leaders. Calvin in Geneva aligned with Bullinger. Bucer of Strasbourg spent most of his career building agreements across doctrinal lines. But the breach between the Lutherans and the leaders of what came to be known as Swiss or ‘Reformed’ Protestantism never truly healed.
Cranmer was obsessively interested in the Eucharist, and his opinions changed over time. They have been explored for us by Peter Newman Brooks, who has established that in his early years as archbishop, Cranmer believed as the Lutherans did: he rejected the tenet of transubstantiation, but he believed in the real presence. Then from the late 1540s, led by Nicholas Ridley (c. 1502–1555), Cranmer gradually accepted the opinion that the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper was ‘true’ or spiritual in nature. The eventual transformation of his opinions had profound implications for the 1549 and the 1552 editions of the Book of Common Prayer. The miraculous aspect of the Lord’s Supper was not the act that consecrated the bread and wine, but rather, God’s intervention for the souls of those who receive them. Christ was spiritually present with the men and women who received the bread and wine worthily with faith.
In terms of his character, Cranmer was adventurous and bold, yet at the same time he was genuinely self-effacing. When he became archbishop, Henry VIII gave him a new heraldic device that replaced the cranes of his father’s coat of arms with pelicans, a symbol of Christian sacrifice. Cranmer possessed a rare sensibility that allowed him to respect and accommodate opinions that were different than his own. But we cannot call him tolerant in the sense that we now use the term. He was a relentless opponent of those who refused to obey the king, and he hounded members of the religious orders, especially the mendicant friars, who wished to honour their vows of obedience to the papacy. Historians now think that the vast majority of English people did not wish to leave the Catholic Church and they resented Cranmer’s impositions.
Because large portions of the Church’s medieval administrative structure were retained, despite Cranmer’s reforms, competing claims between conformists and various strands of nonconformity began to emerge in the English Church even while Cranmer was archbishop. They were not fully reconciled during his lifetime, nor later in the sixteenth century, and some of them have never been absolutely overcome.12 I have tried to avoid terms like ‘the Anglican Church’ that would be anachronistic for the sixteenth century. Cranmer wanted to establish a Protestant Church in England which would define its doctrine in concert with other Protestant leaders. At their most mature, Cranmer’s aspirations for the English Church can be described as fitting into the Reformed Protestant tradition. Although he established a national Church for England, it is less certain that he intended to create what some authorities have termed an ‘Anglican way’. The ‘moderation’ for which Cranmer tends to be known might be better understood as his desire to create a ‘broad Church’ that was capable of accommodating a spectrum of opinion as part of a coherent whole, under obedience to its king as the Supreme Head of the English Church.
Cranmer was neither a loyal son of the papacy nor a friend to those members of the ‘radical’ Reformation, like the Anabaptists, who raised uncomfortable questions about the humanity and divinity of Christ that far exceeded the kinds of questions Luther and Zwingli posed. Anabaptists were attacked by all sides: the Roman Church, the Lutherans, and the Swiss all executed Anabaptists as heretics. To cite one important instance, in Geneva, Calvin endorsed the burning of the polymath Michael Servetus (c. 1511–1553).
In the rigorous process of severing England’s communion with Rome and implementing the king’s supremacy over the English Church, many people were executed. Cranmer shared in the responsibility for their deaths. Heresy was a capital crime under English law, and for most of Cranmer’s life, it was illegal to deny the real presence in the sacrament of the altar. From the fourteenth century, the Church and the English government were united in their efforts to suppress the Lollard heresy associated with the followers of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (d. 1384). Cranmer’s predecessor Archbishop William Warham (c. 1450–1532) energetically pursued Lollards and Lutherans. Executions had always been a type of theatrical spectacle. Now they were harnessed by the Tudor regime for its own purposes. The theatre of the public scaffold was used to promote the legitimacy and orthodoxy of the English Church and its leaders. John Frith (ex. 1533), Elizabeth Barton (ex. 1534), and John Lambert (ex. 1538) were amongst those executed with Cranmer’s approval and assistance during Henry’s reign for having defied the king’s authority. However, even under Edward, when Cranmer had more latitude to implement the policies he desired, Anabaptists – like Joan Bocher, who was burnt in 1550 – continued to be executed.
Cranmer has a unique status amongst the figures that appeared in the pages of the Actes and Monuments. Foxe noted as he examined the writings of Stephen Gardiner that Cranmer was involved in the trials of Lambert and several others, but he ultimately adopted the same opinions for which they had died. Foxe was therefore conflicted when he considered whether or not Cranmer deserved to be considered a martyr. In prison, under extreme duress, Cranmer retracted the opinions he had worked so hard to establish for the English Church because he hoped that his life might be spared. After his execution, his recantations were printed to discredit him and Protestantism. He was a reluctant martyr. But at the last moment, Cranmer retracted his retractions just before being taken to the stake. His last and most famous gesture, the one by which his life has come to be known, was made at his execution, when he held his right hand in the flames as an act of repentance to punish himself for having signed his recantations. This was his last message to posterity. His gesture has been widely acknowledged as a sign of his outstanding courage, his faithfulness to God and his belief in Protestant teachings. But decades later, Foxe continued to be troubled that Cranmer could be party to the persecution of men like Frith and Lambert while later embracing the same beliefs for which they had died.
This brief book cannot solve all of the problems that Cranmer’s life presents, nor can it rescue his reputation from every detractor. For most of his life, Cranmer knew how deeply he was hated. Just as Virginia Woolf wished that we could follow Shakespeare along the Strand and pluck him by the sleeve to ask him what he meant by Hamlet,13 Cranmer’s biographers from the very first have struggled to make sense of the conflicting aspects of his career and legacy. The intention of this present book is to provide readers with a guide to the life and achievements of one of the most problematic figures who ever presided over the English Church.
Notes
1The collect for Quinquagesima Sunday in Lent, written by Thomas Cranmer, for the second prayer book: 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), 27v–28r.
2Matthew Parker (1504–1575), seventieth archbishop of Canterbury, counted his predecessors in a preface to De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae et priuilegiis ecclesiae Cantuariensis (London: John Daye, 1572, RSTC 19292), in the table preceding p. 1. His account of Cranmer’s life: pp. 381–405.
3BL, Royal MS 7. B. XI and MS 7. B. XII; also CCCC MS 102; and LPL, MS 1108.
4Cranmer’s letterbook: BL, Harleian Manuscript 6148. Many of his letters have been printed in Cranmer, Miscellaneous.
5CCCC, MS 128.
6D. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer, Oxford Bibliographical Society, third series, 1 (1996).
7Ralph Morice, ‘Declaration’ of the ‘lyf and bryngyng upp, of the most Reverent Father in God, Thomas Cranmer, late archbishop of Canterbury’: CCCC, MS 128, 405–36, printed in Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, ed. J. Gough Nichols, Camden Society, first series, 77 (238–40). The ‘Life’: BL, Harley MS 417, from 90, and printed in Narratives, 218–33. MacCulloch suggested in Cranmer, appendix I, that the ‘Life’ was written by Stephen Nevinson, the cousin of the archbishop’s commissary.
8John Strype, Memorials of the Most Reverend Father in God, Thomas Cranmer, Sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1694).
9A. F. Pollard, Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation, 1489–1556 (London, 1906); Jasper Ridley, Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1962); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996).
10Peter Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England, (Aldershot, 2006), 7; Ashley Null, ‘Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Evangelicalism’, in The Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities, eds. Michael A. G. Haykin and Kenneth J. Steward (Nashville, 2008), 221–51 and the same author’s Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford, 2000).
11B. A. Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, in Thinking with the Church: Essays in Historical Theology (Cambridge, 2010), 229–58.
12John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (Oxford, 1976); Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 29–44; Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), 16–24; Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993).
13Virginia Woolf’s desire to meet Shakespeare along the Strand was expressed in her essay, ‘The Strange Elizabethans’, in The Second Common Reader (London, 1932, rpt. 1986), 9–23.