2 Early life, 1489–1526
‘Almighty ever-living God, which for the more confirmation of the faith, didst suffer thy holy apostle Thomas, to be doubtful in thy son’s resurrection: grant us so perfectly, and without all doubt to believe in thy Son Jesus Christ: that our faith in thy sight never be reproved: hear us O Lord, through the same Jesus Christ to whom with thee and the holy ghost be all honour and glory, now and forever, Amen.’1
Aslockton
Thomas Cranmer was born at Aslockton in Nottinghamshire on 2 July 1489, the eve of the feast of the translation of St Thomas the Apostle.2 Cranmer may have been indebted for his name to the Doubting Thomas who had to touch Jesus’ wounds before he would be convinced that Christ had risen, but he also owed his name to his own father, Thomas Cranmer (d. 1501), a gentleman whose family was reputed to have come into England with William the Conqueror (d. 1087).
The family settled in Lincolnshire where they lived in a ‘mansion house’ called ‘Cranmer Hall’. Its windows bore the original Cranmer coat of arms of a chevron between three cranes. An early spelling of the name was ‘Craynmeyr’, and the cranes may have been a canting reference to Lincolnshire’s watery fens. Stained glass with the same arms was once visible in the parish church of Sutterton, a fen village near Boston, leading later generations to assume that Cranmer Hall was nearby. After the Cranmers had been settled in Lincolnshire for many generations, a new branch of the family was created in Nottinghamshire when Edmund Cranmer, the archbishop’s great-grandfather, married Isabella, the heiress daughter of William de Aslockton. Neither Cranmer Hall nor the house where Cranmer was born survived beyond the sixteenth century.
Cranmer’s Norman heritage defined his family as belonging to the gentry in the midlands where the counties of Lincoln, Nottingham and Leicester meet. The Cranmers shared their sense of heritage with the Molineux, Newmarche, Bingham, and Crecy families, and with the more prosperous Markhams of Cotham, with whom, over the generations, they mingled and married. The Cranmers were also aligned with the austere religious order of the White Canons Regular of Prémontré, who had arrived in Lincolnshire from northern France within a century of William’s invasion. Welbeck Abbey, about twenty-five miles to the northwest from Aslockton, was the only house of the White Canons in Nottinghamshire. Welbeck Abbey was the patron of the parish church (dedicated to St John of Beverley) that the Cranmers attended in Aslockton’s neighbouring village of Whatton.
Recent events may have played a part in shaping the Cranmers’ understanding of their background. Following the defeat of Richard III (1452–1485) by Henry Tudor (1457–1509) on the strength of an invasion Henry mounted from France, the Cranmer family’s association with the Norman Conquest probably enhanced their social status. Ralph Morice (c. 1522–1570), Cranmer’s secretary, told of a time during the reign of Henry VIII that Cranmer held a banquet at Lambeth Palace to honour ‘a gentleman being a Norman born’, who accompanied a French ambassador to England and who said his name was the same as the archbishop’s. After dinner they compared their coats of arms. Although the possibility seemed unlikely even to the devoted Morice, Cranmer and his visitor decided that their arms were so similar that there were hardly any differences between them. Thus they were encouraged to believe that they were indeed distantly related. To their mutual satisfaction, this discovery increased each man’s prestige. Glamorous references to a heroic past shaped the identities of many gentlemen’s families, and Cranmer’s references to his Norman origins indicated that by virtue of his inheritance, he was qualified to hold authority over others.3
The Cranmers as a family held certain expectations which were reflected in Cranmer’s own perception of himself. The connections that they enjoyed may have meant that he did not think of himself as belonging to Nottinghamshire or Lincolnshire (or perhaps even England) in the same way that Nicholas Ridley defined himself as a Northumberland man, or that Hugh Latimer (c. 1494–1555) thought of the county of Leicester as his home. The Cranmer coat of arms distinguished his family above their nearest neighbours, the Craforths, Dawsons, Gilbys, and Wrights, who tilled the same soil and left their bones in Whatton’s churchyard.4
Despite their heroic Norman past, the position that the Cranmers actually occupied in Nottinghamshire at the end of the fifteenth century was precarious. Aslockton and Whatton were isolated hamlets twelve miles in any direction from the nearest market towns of Nottingham, Southwell, Newark, Grantham, and Melton Mowbray. Recent generations of Cranmers had not produced any officials of note: no sheriffs, no justices of the peace, and no shire knights to attend Parliament. They enjoyed fewer advantages than did the Markhams, whose lands in the counties of Lincoln and Nottingham were much more extensive.5 Sir John Markham the elder raised his sword for Henry VII at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487, and he was able to marry his son to an heiress of royal descent, a Neville kinswoman of the Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of the king. In contrast, Cranmer’s father managed to place only one of his daughters in a religious order. Alice Cranmer, as a Cistercian nun at Stixwould in Lincolnshire, represented her family’s gentle status, but only barely.6
Cranmer’s mother was Agnes, the daughter of Laurence Hatfield of Willoughby on the Wolds, a village to the south of Aslockton down the old Roman road of the Fosse Way. The Hatfields too were an old, well-established family, and Agnes’s father was a gentleman ‘of like degree’ with Thomas Cranmer. Like the Cranmers also, the Hatfields were sunk in local obscurity. The archbishop knew the history of a persistent ‘unquietness’ in Nottinghamshire that stretched back a half-century or more before he was born. The Hatfields were disturbed by land disputes that involved the Secular Canons of the Collegiate Church of Blessed Mary the Virgin in Southwell. Writing to Thomas Cromwell in 1534, Cranmer explained that his Hatfield grandfather had been caught up in disagreements so bitter that they led to ‘great occasion of manslaughter’ more than once. Although what befell Laurence Hatfield remains obscure, Cranmer indicated that a violent past continued to weigh heavily on his family.7 As archbishop, Cranmer worked steadily to increase his family’s security.
Cranmer was a younger son amongst nine surviving children. As part of their upbringing, his father taught his sons how to shoot and to ride some ‘rough horses’. He also let them hunt and hawk, which in the late fifteenth century were prerequisites of good birth. Cranmer’s elder brother John (named for their uncle, a priest) was their father’s heir.
According to Morice, Cranmer’s father also ‘set him to school with a marvelous severe and cruel schoolmaster’ whose name has never been established, although all of his biographers have wished to know more about this man. The author of the ‘Life’ recounted that Cranmer first ‘learned his grammar of a rude parish clerk’. It seems reasonable to suggest that Cranmer began his lessons in Latin grammar from a local curate. The vicar of their parish of Whatton during his youth was Thomas Wilkinson, the eventual abbot of Welbeck Abbey. Wilkinson was non-resident, and he left parish matters in the hands of curates. William Norton and his assistant George Ehson served the parish in 1501.8
Then, if by being ‘set’ to school, Morice meant that Cranmer was sent away from home, he could have gone to any of the market towns that ringed Aslockton. The best possibility was Southwell, for at the end of the fifteenth century all of Nottinghamshire’s schools were under the jurisdiction of the secular canons of Southwell’s chapter. Cranmer was extremely familiar with the school at Southwell. In autumn 1533, only six months after he became archbishop, he wrote to his brother-in-law Harold Rosell to recommend that his son Thomas be sent to Southwell. But then he heard of an outbreak of sickness so serious that ‘they die there’. So he arranged for the boy to be sent elsewhere.9
Another possibility for Cranmer’s early education was Grantham’s venerable grammar school. Its most famous student, a century-and-a-half later, was Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Many of Cranmer’s lifelong friends came from Lincolnshire: William Benson, alias Boston (d. 1549, the future abbot and dean of Westminster Abbey); Thomas Goodrich (1494–1554, the future bishop of Ely and lord chancellor); Henry Rands alias Holbeach (d. 1551, a Benedictine monk, later bishop of Lincoln) and John Whitwell (d. 1561, ultimately Cranmer’s chaplain). Later we will observe the roles they played in Cranmer’s career. Goodrich’s family held property to the north of Boston in East Kirkby and Bolingbrook. When Goodrich was elected to the bishopric of Ely in 1534, Whitwell spoke to his character in a deposition that was recorded in Cranmer’s archiepiscopal Register. Whitwell and Goodrich had been friends from the age of seven. They were ‘of old familiar acquaintance and have been at school together’ first in the country and then later at Cambridge.10 Although they were about five years younger than Cranmer, it is not impossible that all three were schoolmates in Lincolnshire, before they were at Cambridge at the same time.
What is noteworthy about Cranmer’s unhappy experience at school was the near universality of his experience and the effects that he said that it had on the rest of his life. Students who could not remember their declensions were forced to learn them. Many young boys endured beatings as they were introduced to the rudiments of Latin grammar. Severe punishment was one of the defining features of the history of education then, and well afterwards. Most sons of ambitious parents suffered the same terrors at their schools as did Cranmer. So his references to his ‘marvelous severe and cruel schoolmaster’ was at once typical, and yet quite extraordinary, for Cranmer was able to articulate, better than most, what the effects of punishment had had upon him and his schoolmates. As a result of the ill treatment he had received as a child, Cranmer believed that he had lost forever his natural memory and the ‘audacity’ that had been his. Rather, he had been ‘mutilated and wounded’ by injuries that his classmates had all suffered. His schoolmaster so ‘appalled, dulled and daunted the tender and fine wits’ of his students, that most of them hated learning and good literature as a result (and here Cranmer may have echoed Erasmus’s warning in the Paraclesis against heavy-handed schoolmasters). Cranmer believed himself to have been permanently damaged. The losses that he and the others had suffered were incalculable. He told Morice on many occasions that he could ‘never recover’ the natural abilities that had been annihilated by his teacher’s ‘tyranny’, a loss he mourned because he treasured the independence of his mind and his ability to think things through clearly for himself. The implication behind his story was that he valued making his own decisions based on what he concluded was correct. He believed that he might have achieved much more throughout his life had he not lost what he understood were the keenest of his abilities. Moreover, he believed that others were likely to have been damaged by the same methods. Cranmer won Morice’s sympathy for the suffering he endured as a child, and he excused himself on the numerous (and perhaps unavoidable) occasions when he disappointed his friends, or fell short in his responsibilities towards others.
Many of his biographers have been tempted to see a theme here in Cranmer’s relations to those in authority over him, and especially to Henry VIII. There were paradoxical sides to Cranmer’s character that Morice himself pointed out: that although the archbishop ‘feared not to ride the roughest horse that came into his stable’, in other regards he was cautious to an astonishing degree. To many he appeared ‘subtle’, which was a criticism in the sixteenth century, for it meant he was both hard to understand and calculating. In the privacy of his household, amongst his family and his friends, the archbishop could be open. Yet, as we will observe in this and later chapters, the face he turned to the world was deliberately unrevealing. Cranmer had many secrets.
In 1501, his father succumbed to a fatal malady. He may have been ill for a long time, but his death arrived while he was in the prime of life and his children were still young. He lingered long enough for Wilkinson to be summoned to his deathbed to witness his will on the day he died, 27 May 1501. The bequests he made ‘pro salute animae meae’ (for the health of my soul) were surprisingly modest for a man of his standing. He left one mark (or thirteen shillings and four pence) towards the fabric of Aslockton’s chapel, and a new bell to the church in Whatton.11 His body was interred in Whatton’s church under a limestone slab carved with a rough likeness and his coat of arms.12 In the eighteenth century, the story was told that whenever Cranmer returned to his birthplace, he was fond of sitting out-of-doors in the evening to listen to the ‘tuneable bells’ of Whatton,13 a charming tale that hints of an attachment to his father’s memory, but that has no basis in the facts as Cranmer’s earliest biographers knew them. His father, as Cranmer remembered him later, had done what he could to start him in life.
At the time of his father’s death, Cranmer was not yet twelve years old and his younger brother Edmund may have been six or seven. Now suddenly the Cranmers were even less secure. Perhaps his father had wished to prepare them for uncertain futures, which would help to explain the rough horses and the brutal schoolmaster. John received the bulk of the estate as the heir. Out of the income of his tenements and lands in Whatton, their father left Thomas the slender annuity of twenty shillings, and the same sum to Edmund: the full amount was to go in survivorship to the other should one of them die. Small as they were, their annuities may have been a perpetual drain on their brother’s resources. In the late 1530s, when John Leland (c. 1503–1552) went riding through Nottinghamshire as part of his itinerary through the realm, he was surprised by Aslockton’s meagreness. There was no parish church. The house where Cranmer was born was so insignificant that it was beneath notice. John’s son Thomas (d. 1551) was now the local head of the family, and the Cranmers’ land was worth scarcely forty marks, or a little more than thirty pounds a year.14
The rest of Cranmer’s education he owed not to his father, but to his mother. Following her husband’s death, Agnes Cranmer decided to keep Thomas at the same grammar school for the next two years. Then, although the expense involved must have been considerable, she sent him, and later Edmund, to the University of Cambridge.
Cranmer as an undergraduate
Thomas Cranmer was fourteen years old when he arrived in Cambridge in 1503, the youngest age under the university’s statutes that a student could matriculate. Similarly, Latimer was fourteen when he was sent to Cambridge in 1507 and both Robert Barnes (c. 1495–1540) and Thomas Bilney (c. 1495–1531) also arrived at the university before they could shave. At fourteen, Cranmer may have shown signs of early promise, for most boys who entered university were a year or two older.15 Cranmer had relatives at Cambridge, and they included his ‘near kinsman’, Dr Christopher Tamworth, a fellow of God’s House, the college dedicated to the study of grammar.
As the author of the ‘Life’ recorded, until he was twenty-two, Cranmer was required to devote himself to the study of logic and ‘philosophy moral and natural’, and he was tested against the ‘dark riddles’ of the great scholastic authors, including Duns Scotus (d. 1308), Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141), and Nicholas Dorbell (d. 1475). Most especially, he became immersed in the writings of Peter Lombard (d. 1160) Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), and most especially Augustine (d. 430). Some of Cambridge’s traditions in the study of grammar and logic had been influenced by trends that had come from the University of Paris as long ago as the eleventh century, and they were founded on the study of the Summa Theologica by Aquinas and Lombard’s Sentences. Scholasticism applied a fourfold methodology that examined texts by means of their literal, allegorical (or figurative), tropological (or moral), and analogical (or prophetic) senses. The foundation of Cranmer’s intellectual training, like that of all his contemporaries, owed much to the scholastics.16
But allusions to ‘dark riddles’ imply that Cambridge was still in thrall to a woefully old-fashioned curriculum in Arts, and that Cranmer as a student too often had to wrestle with abridged texts that had been removed from their historical contexts and then contorted under the demands of medieval dialectic. That was not the case, even though not all of the instruction he received was useful. Many years later, Cranmer remembered that he had had to attend the lectures of ‘an ignorant reader’ who used petty excuses to skip the chapters he could not understand.17
Rather, Cranmer arrived at Cambridge at an exhilarating time, when the new intellectual currents of Renaissance humanism in language and literature that had been rising from Italy since the fifteenth century were seized by the university’s chancellors, especially by Bishop John Fisher of Rochester (c. 1469–1535). Study in the Latin west was becoming transformed by a renewed desire to understand Greek as well as Hebrew, trends that were spurred on through the fresh technological triumph of print. Important patrons, including King Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), endowed new colleges. The undergraduate degree course in Arts was revised in 1488 and then it was revised again in 1495. The scholastic foundations of the trivium and quadrivium were infused with the study of languages. Philosophy was partially demoted, and literature was stressed instead. This was the intellectual climate that greeted the young Cranmer at Cambridge.18
His experience of learning as an undergraduate was a stimulating fusion of medieval tradition blended with the new trends. Lectures continued to be the means by which undergraduates were introduced to the higher levels of intellectual engagement. Undergraduates in Arts attended lectures during term times for about four years. Most lectures were delivered in the Schools (some portions its buildings are still visible today behind the Senate House) across the High Street from the University Church (now known as Great St Mary’s). A lecture was what its name implied: a reading in Latin on a specific subject from a set text. The lecture was amplified by explanations and commentary. Learning was presented in the dialectical form that owed much to the Socratic Method and to Platonism. The meaning of texts was investigated by the lecturer’s dialogue through discussion and reasoning. Often lectures began in the early morning. A lecturer or reader was usually a ‘regent master’, a fellow from one of the colleges who had only recently completed his master’s degree in Arts. The regent masters were still young men, and they were amongst the hardest-working members of the university. Many had not yet completed their final degrees. They were post-graduate students who were still attending lectures, and they continued to be tested in their disputations and debates. This meant that while they were teaching the undergraduates, the regent masters themselves were still learning.
In the Schools, the lecturer sat in a position of eminence on a raised platform, enthroned above his students. Lectures fit into two broad categories: cursory or ordinary. Cursory lectures were less demanding. The material was taken up only lightly, mainly to increase understanding. The text was read in Latin and the meanings of the words were explained. In ordinary lectures, the material was examined more closely. Paraphrases of the more difficult passages were introduced. The philological points of the text would move into higher, more abstract realms of the subject.
For the first two years of their curriculum, undergraduates in Arts heard ordinary lectures in humane letters, with an emphasis on Terence (d. 159 BC). Then they spent a year attending lectures in logic, and a fourth in philosophy. As an undergraduate, Cranmer heard Dr Robert Ridley (d. c. 1536), the uncle of Nicholas, when he lectured in philosophy.
Although Cranmer arrived at university in 1503 slightly younger than most students, he proceeded to his bachelor’s degree in Arts rather later than usual. Twelve terms (or four years) were the usual length of time that an undergraduate needed to complete the Arts course, but Cranmer needed longer. He did not go up for his first degree until 1511. Seven years was, as his biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch has suggested, ‘a surprisingly long time’, which fed the assumption that he was always a mediocre scholar.19 For some biographers, Cranmer’s entire career at Cambridge ‘was surprisingly undistinguished’. Patrick Collinson (1929–2011), Regius professor of history at Cambridge, dismissed him as having the sort of mind ‘which would have been awarded an upper second, not a first, in a modern tripos examination’, even though (as he wrote in another context) high levels of originality were not looked for then in undergraduates or even in the highest ranks of society.20 Cranmer’s slow or broken progress towards his first degree meant that when he finally took his degree in 1511 in a group of forty-two, he stood amongst some much younger men, including Latimer and his friends Benson and Goodrich.21
Cranmer’s first marriage
The most probable reason that Cranmer went up for his first degree so late was not due to inability but rather, because he married. Now that I have discovered his ordination records, we can know that Cranmer’s first marriage must have taken place earlier than Morice thought: not after he proceeded to his master’s degree in Arts in 1515, because that was the year Cranmer became a priest. Probably he did not relinquish a fellowship at Jesus College in order to marry. Cranmer probably married before he completed his first degree in 1511.
From Cranmer himself, we learn almost nothing about his first marriage. According to John Foxe, his wife was ‘a gentleman’s daughter’, though that seems doubtful. Neither Morice nor Matthew Parker (1504–1575) recorded her name. More likely, Cranmer wed the daughter of a Cambridge townsman, in the same way, a generation later the young William Cecil (1521–1598) wed Mary, the sister of John Cheke (1514–1557), whose mother ran a wine business on Market Hill. In 1556, Cranmer’s enemies accused him of marrying ‘one Joan, surnamed Black or Brown’. Because their information was incorrect in other regards, we cannot even be certain that her Christian name really was Joan.22
Much remains puzzling about Cranmer’s first marriage. Agnes Cranmer sent both her younger sons to Cambridge. Edmund proceeded to his bachelor’s degree in Arts only two years after his brother.23 We do not know if she wanted them to enter careers in the Church. Cranmer’s marriage suggests that he had not intended to enter the priesthood. Yet he did not altogether abandon his studies, for according to Parker, he went to lectures at the Schools as before. In the early sixteenth century, a married scholar who persisted in staying at university was an anomaly. Cranmer became ‘the common reader at Buckingham College’ which was the Benedictine house at Cambridge (now Magdalene College). Presumably he would have been paid by the monk-students for tutoring them or delivering lectures, and Parker described Cranmer’s married life as being close to destitution.24 He placed his wife in lodgings in the Dolphin Inn in Bridge Street, which was run (according to Foxe) by one of his wife’s relatives (which seems likely) or (according to Parker) by one of his mother’s relatives. This too is difficult to explain, and probably we will never be certain about the details. Cranmer may have married out of a sense of family duty, even though he was inconvenienced by a lack of ready funds. His annuity from his father’s estate, as we have already observed, was only one pound a year, which would have been insufficient to support them. Even a poor person at the beginning of the sixteenth century needed an annual income of at least three or four pounds in order to live a bare sort of existence, and Cranmer would have needed much more than that to establish an independent household with his wife, complete with servants, that would befit his rank as a gentleman.
They were married one year or not even one year (according to Morice) when their first child was expected. Parker said that the marriage lasted at least one full year, probably (as MacCulloch has suggested) to remove any suspicion that they had had to marry hastily. Seen from this perspective, Cranmer’s first marriage looks like a youthful indiscretion. We will never know what really happened. Perhaps his first marriage was not fully anticipated any more than was his second, but if Cranmer caused Joan to fall pregnant, he did the honourable thing and he married her, even if he had to sacrifice his prospects. The simplest explanation for their marriage was that he loved her.
But Joan did not survive the hazards of childbirth. Both she and the baby died in labour. To his friends, Cranmer never hid the fact that he had been married before he became a priest. Morice knew and Parker knew: in fact, it was no secret at either Cambridge or Oxford. What pursued him in his later career was his reputation for having had sexual experience in an era when priests were supposed to be blameless and without a ‘past’. Virginity was the preferred ideal, especially for the priesthood, and matrimony was considered to be a debased state. Opposition to a married clergy remained strong at many levels of society until the latter half of the sixteenth century. Cranmer was not a priest at the time he married Joan, but his desire to pursue his studies despite his marriage was unusual. Much later, after his secret second marriage was revealed, his sexual relations became the subject of comment and envy amongst his colleagues. His first marriage highlights the extraordinary unconventionality that marked his entire career. Cranmer was never ashamed that he had married, and his willingness to marry then, and later, was instrumental in introducing a married clergy into the English Church.
Jesus College
Morice’s confusion about the timing of Cranmer’s first marriage has created considerable difficulties in establishing his earliest affiliation with Jesus College. According to a long-held tradition, Cranmer was first an undergraduate at Jesus, and then a fellow. However, no records were made then to show when he matriculated at Cambridge or at Jesus. The earliest reference to his fellowship dates to 1522.25 Morice wrote that Cranmer was already Master of Arts and a fellow of Jesus when he married, and therefore he was ‘constrained’ to leave his fellowship. But either Morice was mistaken or he deliberately misinformed his readers, perhaps because he too wished to protect the uncomfortable details concerning Cranmer’s first marriage.
Following his wife’s death, Cranmer turned definitively to a career in the Church. He embarked on a fresh round of gruelling endeavour for his master’s degree in Arts. The curriculum here had also been recently expanded, beyond what had been the traditional program in philosophy, centred on Aristotle (d. 322 BC). Now it embraced lectures in mathematics: one year of arithmetic and music, a second in geometry and perspective, and a third in astronomy. The lecturers in mathematics were Henry Bullock (d. 1526) and Humphrey Walkenden. At the same time that they were lecturing Cranmer in mathematics, they were also learning Greek from Erasmus.
In 1515 shortly before he took his master’s degree in Arts, Cranmer went up to the priesthood. He was twenty-five. Every spring, university men returned to their home dioceses where they were ordained. The register of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1471–1530) for the archdiocese of York shows that Thomas Cranmer was admitted to the subdiaconate on Sunday, 24 March 1514/15 in the city of York. His ‘title’ or his guarantee of support (a prerequisite for ordination) came from the Benedictine monastery of St John in Colchester. Then he was ordained to the deaconate on Easter Sunday, 7 April 1515, in York Minster. The ordination list gave his first name now as ‘John’ but that was a simple mistake. Again, his title came from the monastery of St John in Colchester. On 2 June 1515, Thomas Cranmer was ordained to the priesthood at the conventual church of the Dominican friars in York, when once more he was guaranteed by the monastery of St John in Colchester. Later that summer Cambridge’s Grace Book B recorded that Cranmer went up for his master’s degree in Arts.26
Colchester in Essex is only fifty miles from Cambridge. Now Cranmer had his reward for the time he spent while married in instructing the Benedictines. His seriousness must have impressed the monks, and they were willing to invest in his future as a priest. In early 1515, Cranmer was probably not yet a fellow at Jesus, for otherwise the college would have been his sponsor, just as Latimer’s title, when he was ordained in Lincoln that same spring, came from Clare College, where he was already a fellow.27 Three years later, Edmund Cranmer followed his brother’s route, and he was admitted to the priesthood in the same church, Blackfriars in York, on 20 March 1517/18. It is not surprising that Edmund’s title came from the White Canons of Welbeck Abbey.28
When Cranmer went up for his master’s degree in Arts in 1515, after fulfilling his obligations and paying the necessary fees for the mathematics lectures, in a rush of disputations, Masses, dinners, gift-givings and other ceremonies, he was allowed ‘to incept’, which, as the word implied, marked a new beginning of his life as a lecturer.29 It was probably at this point also that he was admitted to a fellowship at Jesus College. When the college was surveyed in 1522 for the purposes of a tax subsidy, his name appeared on the list of fellows.30
Jesus College was the earliest of the new foundations that in Cranmer’s lifetime transformed Cambridge from its medieval beginnings, dominated by its religious houses and student hostels, into a true collegiate institution. The college was founded specifically for the study of Theology, and it represented the greatest advancement for the university until St John’s College was perfected by Fisher in the early 1530s. But in its early years, Jesus College was poor. The fellowship was small, set originally at eight, and in its early years it could probably not afford the full number of fellows that its first statutes allowed. Lady Margaret assisted the college in 1503 with a large gift of twenty-six pounds to be used towards the rebuilding of the parish church that served as Jesus’s chapel. She came to visit the university frequently. If Cranmer was an undergraduate at Jesus, he may have been able to make the acquaintance of James Morice (d. 1557), Ralph’s father, who was Lady Margaret’s clerk of works. Cranmer’s friendship with the younger John Markham (d. 1559), who served in her household, may have started seriously then.31 The generosity of Margaret’s long-time friend Lady Katherine Bray (d. 1506) created special studentships for undergraduates at Jesus. The college’s juvenes, as undergraduate scholars were known, were permitted to study in the faculty of Arts, and they served as organists, sacrists, bible clerks, and gatekeepers. They waited on tables in hall. We might speculate, as others have, that as an undergraduate the fatherless Cranmer could have been introduced into one of these special positions. Later, the college youths were given preference for elections to fellowships. Cranmer’s studentship may have gained him eligibility for his election to a fellowship after the death of his wife and thus prepared his return to Jesus College.
Like all other colleges at Cambridge, Jesus was a religious community. In its chapel, Cranmer sang and prayed. As a priest, he celebrated Mass at its altars. In his early life, he believed as the Church taught: that when the words of consecration were spoken over the bread and the wine, through the miracle of transubstantiation, they changed into the same body and blood of Jesus Christ that had been crucified.32
As a regent master, Cranmer lectured as he studied towards his first degree in Theology, which he gained in 1521.33 He lectured on Lombard’s great standard, the Sentences, and he probably delivered cursory lectures on Scripture at least ten days each term. Already he had begun to gather the books he needed into a collection that ultimately became one of the premier libraries in the Europe of his time. He acquired Latin Bibles and the vast compendium of scriptural commentary known as the Glossa Ordinaria. He had, as David Selwyn, the historian of his library, informs us, commentaries on the Sentences by at least seventeen scholastic authors, including Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), Duns Scotus, Robert Holcot (d. 1349), and William of Ockham (d. 1347). In time Cranmer also collected a large number of books on the liturgy, which he used to develop the Book of Common Prayer. John Bale (1495–1563) was tutored at Jesus, and he remembered later that its fellows represented the true spirit of holiness. He observed that Cranmer stood first amongst them as the most learned of men.34
Cranmer as a biblical humanist
It is crucial for us to ascertain how orthodox or traditional Cranmer was in his thinking at this stage of his career and if he was persuaded before he left Cambridge in 1529 to believe as Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon (1496–1560) of Wittenberg did. The evidence is difficult to interpret, and recent historians have not agreed. His biographer Jasper Ridley suggested that Cranmer was ‘already an incipient heretic’ in the 1520s and that he held no strong views in favour of the papal supremacy.35 MacCulloch argued that the comments Cranmer wrote in the margins of his books proved that he was a ‘papalist’ in the 1520s, and that we cannot see him as evangelical much earlier than 1531.36 Collinson believed Cranmer’s thinking did not move within a Lutheran framework until he was sent on embassy to Nuremberg in 1532.37
But I would like to suggest that we might look again at an important clue that the author of the ‘Life’ provided. Before Luther appeared, when Cranmer was in his twenties, even while he was married so briefly, he devoted himself to the works of ‘Faber, Erasmus, [and] good Latin authors’.38 Faber was Jacques Lefèvre (c. 1455–1536), better known as Faber Stapulensis from his birthplace in the French port town of Etaples, across the English Channel from Lydd in Kent. He taught philosophy and mathematics at the University of Paris at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine at the same time that Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) was a student there in Theology at the Collège de Montaigu. We would be surprised if Cranmer did not know their work very well, especially as Fisher persuaded Erasmus to come to Cambridge in 1511 to re-ignite the study of Greek. Erasmus taught a select group of scholars, many of whom (like Bullock and Walkenden) were at Queens’. Erasmus also spent some months in delivering lectures in the Schools on the Epistles of St Jerome (d. 420), as well as Jerome’s Apology against Rufinus. Cranmer did not learn his Greek from Erasmus (probably he studied with Richard Croke (1489–1558), who succeeded Erasmus as Cambridge’s Greek professor). Nor can we know if Cranmer ever had the opportunity to hear Erasmus lecture, though for two years the great man was a conspicuous presence at the university, and fond of riding on Market Hill just for the exercise.39 But I would suggest that from his reading in the works of Lefèvre and Erasmus, Cranmer imbibed his earliest form of biblical humanism, sometimes called evangelicalism.
Lefèvre and Erasmus are amongst the most famous of the humanists of northern Europe. They insisted that classical texts, and especially the Bible, must be understood in their historical contexts, and through their literal senses, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. They shifted the framework of scriptural study away scholastic commentaries towards close textual analysis. Lefèvre and Erasmus were willing to sacrifice, albeit reluctantly, the traditional fourfold apparatus of scholastic methodology. Scripture’s literal sense was paramount for them. Erasmus and Lefèvre’s approach was an innovation for its time, and it has helped to form the foundation of the study of modern languages.
For Lefèvre, the literal sense of Scripture coincided with its spiritual sense, and its true meaning was the one in which the Holy Spirit spoke through the Psalms. His most influential works were his Quincuplex Psalterium, or The Fivefold Psalter (1509 and 1512) in which he expounded the devotional significance of each Psalm. He established a permanent standard: that Holy Scripture must be understood primarily in its most direct meaning as literal truth.
Lefèvre also issued a commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans concerning the manner in which sinners are saved or justified. Drawing on Psalm 13, Paul noted that when the Lord looked down from heaven to see if there were any people who understood him and sought him, he saw that not even a single person did what was good. Their mouths were full of cursing and bitterness, and their feet were swift to shed blood. Paul used Psalm 13 to illustrate that no one was able to justify himself before God, because no one was just. Rather, justification was not achieved through any human endeavour or good efforts. No good works availed for salvation. Rather, justification was offered freely by God on behalf of a flawed people through his own sacrifice of himself in Jesus Christ on the cross. God’s grace was freely given, but it was not available through any effort on the part of sinful human beings. Redemption was possible, but it was offered only through Christ, who shed his blood for all humankind. Those who believed in him and had faith in the saving power of his blood were justified by their faith. Lefèvre struggled with the implications of Paul’s words, and he used the example of the penitent thief who was crucified alongside Jesus as an illustration that it was possible to be saved only by faith without any good works. The sinner was not justified by his own actions, but solely through the sacrifice of God on behalf of humanity. Justification occurred through God’s grace alone. Salvation could not be earned. No one saved him- or herself by their own actions, though good works were still expected of a Christian as a sign of faith. What the Christian must do was to express faith and love.40
Before Luther appeared, Lefèvre had already highlighted the implications of Paul’s teachings. His Commentaries on St Paul’s Epistles were a landmark and they were recognized immediately as essential. Fisher gave a copy to St John’s College in 1513. Huldrych Zwingli of Basel owned a copy of the Quincuplex Psalterium which he annotated heavily. Luther relied on Lefèvre’s work when he prepared his own exegesis of the Psalms and Paul’s Epistles. Cranmer owned The Fivefold Psalter and many of Lefèvre’s other books.41 Foxe wrote that by reading Lefèvre and Erasmus, Cranmer ‘did daily rub away his old rustiness on them, as upon a whetstone’.42
The kind of evangelicalism that Lefèvre and Erasmus advocated was meant to bring about spiritual renewal from within, as a type of individual spiritual exercise. Their evangelicalism was not an organized movement, but rather it was a private intellectual discipline that allowed scholars to learn from and then to teach sacred texts using fresh methods with language, history, and divine inspiration as their guides. Scholasticism was not completely overwhelmed by humanism. There was nothing to prevent a scholar from being evangelical and a ‘papalist’ at the same time, especially as neither Lefèvre nor Erasmus challenged the authority of the papacy or the role of the sacraments in salvation in an overt or substantive manner. They believed (as Cranmer also did then) in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar, and that the Mass was both miracle and sacrifice. Nothing about this type of evangelicalism was perceived to be at odds with the teachings of the Church or with the papacy, until Luther emerged in late 1517 to challenge the stability of western Christianity in his Ninety-five Theses and thereafter by criticizing the authority of the pope. We will see that Erasmus and Lefèvre permanently impressed Cranmer’s thinking and teaching.
We will also have more to say about Luther’s doctrines in later chapters, but our purpose now is to explore the immediate effects that his appearance had on Cranmer’s career. On 15 June 1520, Pope Leo X (1475–1521) issued his bull Exsurge Domine, which threatened Luther with excommunication unless he submitted before the end of the year. Luther was told that he must repudiate his teachings, burn his own books, and recant within sixty days of the receipt of the bull or else face the penalties of heresy. But Luther did not submit. With the approval of friends like Melanchthon, Luther answered Leo’s sentence by kindling his own fire at Wittenberg. He burnt scholastic texts, copies of canon law, and the papal bull itself. By burning Leo’s bull, Luther denounced the pope as the real heretic. Leo’s sentence of excommunication against Luther was imposed at the beginning of January 1521. Three months later at the Diet of Worms, Luther appeared before the young Emperor Charles V, and he was questioned harshly. But once again he refused to submit. In the Edict of Worms, Charles echoed the pope and declared Luther a heretic.
In England, the news that Luther had been excommunicated was greeted by the king and Cardinal Wolsey. By now, Wolsey was both lord chancellor as well as papal legate. Luther’s books were banned across western Europe. On 12 May 1521, Wolsey came in great state to Paul’s Cross, the pulpit in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. For two hours, Fisher preached in denunciation of Luther as his books were thrown into the flames. To show to the vast crowd, Wolsey held up a draft of a tract that the king had been writing: a preliminary copy of his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, a defence of the Seven Sacraments, that would be finished later that summer and that would win for Henry the accolade from the pope ‘Fidei Defensor’.
Luther’s books were also burned at Cambridge, and perhaps as a response to the threat that he posed, the university elected Cranmer as one of its Preachers in 1520. On occasions that we may regret were not recorded, he was obliged to preach at Paul’s Cross.43
Although Cranmer had delivered cursory lectures on Scripture for a number of years, in the present crisis, he did not think that he was sufficiently equipped to face the challenges that Luther posed. It is not possible to be fully certain of the timing of events, but if we can trust the author of the ‘Life’, Cranmer’s study now took an intense turn. He was struck by the gravity of ‘the great controversy’ that Luther had engendered ‘in matters of religion’. Luther’s criticism of the doctrines of the Church were not ‘trifles’, but rather they concerned ‘the chiefest articles of our salvation’. The truth needed to be discerned, understood, and taught so that souls could be saved. It may be only now, after Luther appeared, that Cranmer’s biblical studies intensified, but as an Erasmian, not as a Lutheran. He became convinced that he could not judge ‘indifferently in so weighty matters’ without greater knowledge of Holy Scripture, and now he may have taken up an innovative lectureship at Jesus College whose founders asked that ordinary lectures be delivered on the New Testament, in preference to the Old Testament, and that the meaning of Scripture should be explained either in English or Latin, which was unusual, for Scripture was usually expounded at the university in Latin, rather than in the mother tongue. As the author of the ‘Life’ noted, Cranmer ‘applied his whole study three years to holy scripture’, and he continued, ‘till he were made doctor of divinity’ in 1526. Cranmer was now thirty-seven years of age, and one of the men who took a doctorate with him at the same time was Edward Crome (d. 1562), who was an important figure in his career, as we will observe later.44
It is curious to note that Cranmer approached the new questions in doctrine impartially. According to the ‘Life’, he decided to ‘try out the truth’ by wrestling with their implications, and to make up his own mind for himself, ‘before he were infected with any man’s opinions or errours’. Thus Cranmer did not take up any controversial questions until he was saturated in Scripture, a method that Erasmus taught was essential for preachers and scholars. Only then did Cranmer give ‘his mind to good writers both new and old’. Although the pope, the king, the cardinal, and the university’s chancellor all spoke with one voice against Luther, Cranmer did not simply accept their prohibitions until he tested them for himself. He proceeded with a remarkable independence of mind, and it was this quality that eventually led him to revise his opinions about the mercy of God, the Eucharist, and eventually, the fundamentals of the English Church.45
In the 1520s, Cranmer was quite evidently a man still on the rise. After he received his doctorate in 1526, he began to take up new responsibilities that spoke to the trust he enjoyed at the university. He was one of the auditors who reviewed annually the contents of the university’s Common Chest, what would be the equivalent today of Cambridge’s main bank account.46 He was a demanding examiner who would allow no man to proceed to a degree in Theology unless he had fully immersed himself in scriptural study. For three years until 1529, all of the candidates for Theology degrees came before him, many of whom, like Bale, Benson and Holbeach, would later play important roles in the Reformation. Cranmer ‘was neither in fame unknown, nor in knowledge obscure’. Amongst his friends was Nicholas Hawkins (c. 1495–1534), the nephew of the bishop of Ely, who later worked closely with him as a diplomat. Another was William Gonell (d. 1560), a local schoolmaster, who had learned Greek with Erasmus and who had returned to Cambridge after tutoring the children of Sir Thomas More (1478–1535).47
But Cranmer was also unusually private and cautious. In the 1520s, Lefèvre and Erasmus were distressed by the possibility that Luther’s condemnation might inadvertently overshadow their legacies. Foxe described Cranmer as a ‘scholar of Pythagoras’ (d. c. 485 BC) who was famous not only for his work in Euclidean geometry but also for his clandestine religious teachings. Cranmer ‘weighed all men’s opinions with secret judgment’.48 Whatever his opinions were, Cranmer did not disclose them. If he respected the prohibitions against reading Luther’s books, there were others at Cambridge who did not. Soon Luther’s friends began to urge English scholars to join them. If we can believe the account supplied to Foxe by Miles Coverdale (1488–1569), Latimer and Bilney were part of a circle of scholars, known privately as ‘the brethren’, who met regularly to discuss matters of religion and news from the continent at Cambridge’s White Horse Tavern near King’s College. Foxe made the White Horse Tavern famous as the university’s ‘Little Germany’.49 But Cranmer does not seem to have been one of the brethren.
More than once, Cranmer was almost attracted into Wolsey’s orbit. His sponsor was William Capon (c. 1480–1550), the cardinal’s almoner, who was elected master of Jesus in 1516. When Wolsey founded Cardinal College at Oxford, he drew men from Cambridge. They included John Frith (1503–1533), who was elected to a fellowship at Cardinal College in 1525. Richard Taverner (d. 1575) left Corpus Christi to join a kinsman at Cardinal College. Richard Cox (c. 1500–1581) and Parker were also invited to Oxford, and so was Cranmer, upon Capon’s recommendation.50
But Cranmer decided not to exchange Cambridge for Oxford. According to Morice, he ‘utterly refused’ to take up the offer because he preferred to stay at Jesus. In 1525 he was only a year away from completing his doctorate, and this fact may have had a bearing on his decision. Cranmer became convinced that there was greater scope for Theology at Jesus than there would be at Wolsey’s new college. But it could have been too that Cranmer was warned that his kind of ideas would not be welcomed in Oxford. Most curiously, Parker noted that Cranmer actually set out for Cardinal College. But then he was warned by a friend to turn back. There is the merest hint from some later evidence that the warning came from a member of the Markham family, who shared Cranmer’s evangelicalism.51 Neither Cranmer nor Parker left Cambridge with Frith.
Perhaps that was just as well. Immediately after Rome was sacked in May 1527, Bilney and a friend set out from Cambridge to make a provocative preaching tour to London. As they travelled through Suffolk they denounced pilgrimages and prayers to the saints. So inflammatory were Bilney’s sermons that he was pulled out of the pulpit more than once. Shocked by their effrontery, English bishops redoubled their efforts to suppress heresy. Few colleges at the universities were spared scrutiny, and early in the following year, Wolsey was embarrassed when more than a score of young scholars at Cardinal College, Frith amongst them, were discovered to have prohibited books in their possession. Held prisoner for many weeks, several died. Frith escaped to the continent. At Cambridge, Capon was empowered to search out heretics as Wolsey’s agent. In 1528, Latimer, already implicated, was sent to London to be questioned by the cardinal himself, but Wolsey was so impressed by his self-assurance and his knowledge in the writings of Augustine that he was quickly released. There is no reason to believe that Capon searched his own college. Cranmer remained undisturbed. No Cambridge man died for heresy in 1528.52
Capon was also responsible for introducing Cranmer to Thomas Cromwell in October 1528. Now that we know that Cranmer was not sent on any diplomatic mission until 1530,53 Capon’s introduction was the first real indication we have that Cranmer’s career was beginning to move beyond the university onto a larger and more important stage. Cromwell was Wolsey’s senior legal advisor. Wolsey refounded a grammar school at his birthplace in Ipswich in Suffolk with Capon as its dean. In 1528, as Cromwell waited for Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio (1474–1539) to arrive in England to hear Henry’s suit against his marriage to Katherine of Aragon at the legatine court at Blackfriars, he came to Ipswich to open the school in September for the cardinal. With his own hands, Cromwell set up benches in the school’s hall and he put up the wall hangings. With him was Stephen Gardiner (c. 1495–1555), the future bishop of Winchester, who was already well known to Cranmer from their days at university. Gardiner had just returned from Rome and acrimonious audiences with the pope about Henry’s suit for an annulment from his marriage. A little later, Capon sent Cranmer to London on matters of business. In October, Capon wrote Cromwell to thank him for a letter that Cranmer brought back to Ipswich. This modest episode marked the start of Cranmer and Cromwell’s long association that ended only with Cromwell’s execution in 1540. Cranmer’s rise could begin in 1529 because his talents were already well known amongst those who had the power to make decisions.54
So it seems that Cranmer’s opinions by the late 1520s were already complicated. Although he was probably not yet a Lutheran, it is likely he was evangelical in the senses that Erasmus and Lefèvre were, and therefore his opinions were sufficiently dangerous in the present climate to call for prudence. Some of his friends, like Latimer and Crome, embraced controversial opinions sooner and with greater openness than did Cranmer. In 1529, at Cranmer’s next known meeting with Gardiner at Waltham, we can see how far he moved away from his former papalism when he was to make a suggestion that would change the course of Henry VIII’s efforts to obtain a new marriage. It was the making of Cranmer’s career.
Notes
1Thomas Cranmer’s collect for the saint’s day of St Thomas the Apostle: The booke of the common praier and administration of the sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the churche: after the vse of the Churche of Englande (London: Richard Grafton, March 1549, RSTC 16268), 100v–101r.
2The date of Cranmer’s birth was recorded in the ‘Life’, 218.
3Morice, 23–40.
4The names of some of the Cranmers’ neighbours in Aslockton are listed in TNA:PRO, SP 1/46, 117r (LP, 4, no. 3819).
5Cranmer and the Markham family: TNA:PRO 1/46, 117r (LP, 4, no. 3819); LP, 18 (2), 334–5; MacCulloch, Cranmer: A Life, 24.
6G. Baskerville, ‘A Sister of Archbishop Cranmer’, EHR, vol. 51 (1936), 287–9.
7Agnes Hatfield: ‘Lyfe’, BL, Harley MS 417, 90; Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, 218. Unquietness: Cranmer to Thomas Cromwell, 28 April 1534, printed in Miscellaneous, no. 107.
8The Register of Archbishop Thomas Savage, BIHR, Register 25, 151v.
9Cranmer’s 1533 letters to his brother-in-law Harold Rosell, printed in Miscellaneous, nos. 41, (12 October 1533) 62; VCH, Nottinghamshire, 2, 189.
10Cranmer’s Archiepiscopal Register is preserved in Lambeth Palace Library. Whitwell’s deposition concerning Goodrich’s character is found on 86v.
11The will of Cranmer’s father, Thomas Cranmer gentleman, of Aslockton, made 27 May 1501 and proved 1 October 1501, printed in Testamenta Eboracensia, 4, Surtees Society, 53 (1869), 194–5.
12The tomb of Cranmer’s father has been pictured as the frontispiece of P. N. Brooks, Cranmer in Context: Documents from the English Reformation (London, 1989), and MacCulloch, Cranmer, ill. no. 1.
13Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire, ed. John Throsby, 1 (London, 1797), 264.
14The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. L. Toulmin Smith, 1 (1964), 97.
15‘Life’, 218.
16‘Life’, 218–19. Cranmer’s scholarship: B. Hall, ‘Cranmer’s Relations with Erasmianism and Lutheranism’, in Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar, eds. P. Ayris and D. Selwyn (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1993), 3–37. For the books Cranmer owned: D. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer, Oxford Bibliographical Society, third series (1996), nos. 38 (Quincuplex Psalterium), 193 (Liber trium), 179 (Nicholas of Cusa).
17Cranmer, Lord’s Supper, 305.
18For the state of learning and the University of Cambridge in general: D. Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, 1, The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1989), 104–5, 170–91; B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (1964); B. Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2007), 69–78.
19MacCulloch, Cranmer, 19.
20J. Ridley, Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1962), 23; P. Collinson, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Truth’ in From Cranmer to Sancroft. (London, 2006), 13, and Collinson’s ‘“A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), 499–525.
21Cranmer took his B.A. in 1511: Grace Book B I, 254–5.
22Morice, 240; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 557.
23Edmund Cranmer went up for his B.A. in 1512–1513, only two years after Thomas took his first degree. Grace Book B I, 15–16. Edmund incepted for the M.A. in 1520: Grace Book B II, 79.
24Matthew Parker, De Antiqvitate Britannicae Ecclesiae et Priuilegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis eiusdem 70 (London: John Day, 1572, RSTC 19292), 387; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 21–2.
25The 1522 subsidy at Cambridge listed the members of the colleges: TNA:PRO, SP 1/233 (LP, Add. 1, pt. 1, no. 357).
26Cranmer’s ordination: BIHR, Register 27 (Wolsey’s Register), 167v, 168v, 169v.
27LAO, Register 25, fols. 112r–115r.
28Edmund’s ordination to the deaconate occurred on 28 February 1517/18 and to the priesthood on 20 March 1517/18: BIHR, Register 27 (Wolsey’s Register), 179v, 180r.
29He incepted for his M.A. (as ‘Granmer’) in 1515: Grace Book B II, 32, 34, 36.
30TNA:PRO, SP 1/233 (LP, Add. 1, pt. 1, no. 357).
31Jesus College: A. Gray and F. Britten, A History of Jesus College (1979), 34–5, 45–7, 51–6. Also helpful has been the website for Jesus College ‘Thomas Cranmer: A Questioning Note’: www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/about-jesus-college/history/pen-portraits/thomas-cranmer/ (accessed 2014).
32Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 217; P. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay in Historical Development (London, 1965), 2.
33Cranmer’s B.Th. (1521): Grace Book Γ, 101, 103, 115, 193–4, 236–7; and Grace Book B II, 95.
34The 1522 subsidy at Cambridge listed the members of the colleges: TNA:PRO, SP 1/233 (LP, Add. 1, pt. 1, no. 357).
35Ridley, Cranmer, 21.
36MacCulloch, Cranmer, 27–33, 59.
37Collinson, ‘Cranmer and the Truth’, 1–24.
38‘Life’, 219.
39For the requirements Erasmus was supposed to perform towards his Cambridge D.Th.: Grace Book Γ, 46; CUL, MS UA, Grace Book B, 238, printed in Grace Book B I, 222. Erasmus and Greek: Leader, Cambridge, 253–4; Grace Book B II, 10; Richard Croke, Orationes duae (Paris, 1520), a2r–a2v, a4v–a5v, c5r, d2v–d3v; R. Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991), 51, 55–6.
40Psalm 13:3; Romans 13:11–28; P. E. Hughes, Lefèvre: Pioneer of Ecclesiastical Renewal in France (Grand Rapids, 1984), 35–7, 75–8, 97. Also, E. F. Rice, ed., The Prefatory Epistles of Lefèvre d’Etaples and Related Texts (New York, 1972); E. Ives, ‘Anne Boleyn on Trial Again’, JEH, 62 (2011), 766–8.
41Selwyn, Cranmer’s Library, lxxv, nos. 38, 188–92, 401, 491.
42Foxe 1563, 1470.
43Cranmer’s election to the office of University Preacher (as Craynmeyr): Grace Book B II, 77; Paul’s Cross, Grace Book Γ, 193–4, 225. Cambridge preaching licenses: Leader, Cambridge, 278–81; S. Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), 116–19.
44Cranmer’s lectures: Selwyn, Cranmer’s Library, lxxiii, no. 29 (Complutensian Polyglot); ‘Life’, 219; Hall, ‘Cranmer’s Relations with Erasmianism and Lutheranism’, 3–37; Theology Lecture at Jesus: Documents relating to the University and Colleges of Cambridge, 3 (London, 1852), 120; ‘vel materno vel Latino sermone interpretandam’; Leader, Cambridge, 273. Cf. MacCulloch, Cranmer, 23.
45Erasmus on study habits: Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, 68–70. For Cranmer: G. W. Bromiley, Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1956), 12–13; Brooks, Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist, xvi, 5; G. Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies relating to the Book of Common Prayer, Alcuin Club, 65 (1983), 77; Hall, ‘Cranmer’s Relations with Erasmianism and Lutheranism’, 3–37.
46Cranmer as university auditor: Grace Book B II, 120 (1523), Grace 139 (1527), 147 (1528), 153 (1529).
47His friendship with William Gonell: See S. F. Ryle’s entry on in the ODNB; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 31–2.
48Foxe 1563, 1470.
49S. Brigden, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the “brethren”’, in Law and Government under the Tudors, eds. C. Cross, D. Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge. 1988), 31–49.
50John Frith: Grace Book Γ, 221.
51LP, 18 (2), pp. 334–5.
52S. Wabuda, ‘Cardinal Wolsey and Cambridge’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), 280–92.
53MacCulloch has corrected his previous account of a diplomatic mission Cranmer was supposed to have made to Spain in 1527: ‘Thomas Cranmer and Johannes Dantiscus: Retraction and Additions’, JEH, 58 (2007), 273–86.
54Cranmer and Cromwell met for the first time: BL, Cotton MS Titus B/1, 281r–282r (LP, 4 (2), nos. 4778 and 4755); TNA/PRO SP 1/50, 203 (LP, 4 (2), no. 4872); Grace Book Γ, 237.