3 The king’s ‘great matter’, 1527–1533
‘Almighty God, which by thy blessed son didst call Matthew from the receipt of custom to be an Apostle and Evangelist: Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches, and so to follow thy said Son: who liveth and reigneth now and forever, amen.’1
Waltham, August 1529
The crisis of what is sometimes referred to as Henry VIII’s ‘Divorce’ from his first wife Katherine of Aragon (1485–1536) was already more than two years old when Thomas Cranmer became one of the king’s theological advisors. Henry’s attempts to gain an annulment that would have permitted him to remarry had become stalemated first in 1527 following the Sack of Rome, and then again in mid-1529 after the meeting of a special legatine court at Blackfriars. Cranmer’s suggestions opened new courses of action that the king pursued so that he could marry Anne Boleyn (c. 1500–1536). By allying himself with Anne and by working closely with Thomas Cromwell, Cranmer became instrumental in encouraging the king to sever England’s ancient allegiance to the papacy.
By chance, in early August 1529, Cranmer met Edward Fox (1496–1538), provost of King’s College Cambridge, and Stephen Gardiner, now the king’s principal secretary, at the house of the Crecy family in Waltham in Essex, where they had all taken refuge during a difficult summer. Heavy downpours threatened the harvest through much of England, and bread was in short supply. Then the plague broke out. When a fellow of Jesus College died suddenly, Cranmer helped to settle his estate.2 He assisted at Cambridge’s annual financial review as usual, but within days one of auditors also sickened and died.3 Two sons of the Crecy family were students at the university, and alarmed for their safety, Cranmer brought them home to Waltham. Their mother was another of Cranmer’s distant relatives. Waltham’s Abbey of Holy Cross was a royal foundation, and when Henry heard about the plague while he was on his way to his summer hunting exercises, he stopped briefly at the abbey. Gardiner and Fox were assigned lodgings in the comforts of the Crecy household, and according to Ralph Morice, they joined Cranmer at the table.4
On their ‘first night at supper’, Morice recorded that the ‘great and weighty cause of the king’s divorcement’ became the topic of conversation. Fox and Gardiner were eager for new ideas because every avenue that Thomas Cardinal Wolsey had pursued to release the king from his marriage had failed. Because Katherine had been married briefly to Henry’s elder brother Arthur (1486–1502), the king had latterly come to believe that his marriage was defective from its beginning under prohibitions recorded in the Old Testament book of Leviticus: ‘He that marrieth his brother’s wife, doth an unlawful thing, he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness: they shall be without children’.5 Although Henry and Katherine had had many sons, all of them died as infants. Their only surviving child was Mary (1516–1558), whom Henry reluctantly considered his heir. In early 1527, when the king first asked Wolsey to take up the question of the validity of his marriage, Katherine was forty-one years old and she had not conceived for nearly a decade. Without a son to succeed him, Henry feared that England would be overwhelmed by its more powerful neighbours.
But the king has been thwarted in his pursuit to be released from his marriage, first by the Sack of Rome in 1527, which meant that Pope Clement VII (Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici, r. 1523–1534) did not dare to render a determination that would offend Katherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V. Prolonged negotiations by Fox and Gardiner with the pope in Orvieto had at last led Clement to allow a special legatine court to meet at Blackfriars in mid-1529. However, the Blackfriars court had just been adjourned on a flimsy technicality without a resolution, and Henry was exposed to open humiliation.
It was with this in mind that at dinner Morice said Cranmer launched into harsh criticisms about the way that the case had been handled. He told Fox and Gardiner that the frustrating ‘delays of these your courts’, had achieved ‘small effect’. They had been ‘beaten’ in their dealings with the pope. Moreover, he did not believe that the papal courts could solve the problem of the king’s marriage, and he rejected the authority they assumed. Rather, Cranmer suggested that theologians at the universities should debate the doctrinal questions that disturbed the king. Their opinions could be ‘soon known’. The king’s uneasy conscience would be quieted and then Henry could do what ‘shall seem good before God’. Assuring the conscience of the king was the goal ‘which we all chiefly ought to consider and regard in this question and doubt’.6
We cannot know how much of Morice’s story was accurate. He was not present at the dinner, and there are difficulties with his account. The views that he said Cranmer expressed to Fox and Gardiner read very much like some of the arguments that appeared in 1532 in A Glasse of the Truthe, a little tract that promoted Henry’s cause to his subjects, which possibly Cranmer helped to write.7 Morice may have also developed his story from documents he saw after he entered the archbishop’s employment. Morice may have borrowed a good deal from information he gained long afterwards when he wrote of the evening that launched Cranmer’s career.
In reality, in August 1529 Cranmer could not know what the king actually wanted. We also do not know if Cranmer had heard the news that had filtered into England that summer from the Imperial Diet at Speyer. In April, the Elector of Saxony, Duke John (1468–1532) and the Landgrave Philip of Hesse (1504–1567), with several other princes and city magistrates, had banded together to defend Martin Luther against renewed opposition by the papacy and the Habsburgs. They called for greater freedom to worship as they thought right. Their petition has become known as the famous ‘Protestation’ that gave its name to Protestantism. Certainly Cranmer envisioned that Henry could also enjoy greater independence from the influence of the pope and emperor as part of the same trends that were taking place on the continent. Morice accurately captured Cranmer’s extraordinary willingness to accommodate Henry at the expense of the papacy. This was the quality that drove Cranmer forward in his career and ultimately to the archbishopric of Canterbury.
Many years later, John Foxe noted that Fox and Gardiner liked Cranmer’s ideas, and Fox brought them to the king’s attention.8 Henry was impressed, and he acted on them straightaway. Before the end of August Wolsey urgently summoned the French ambassador. Henry told him that he wanted him to go to France immediately to gather the opinions of learned men about his marriage and to send their advice back to England.9 Henry also called Cranmer to court, but he had already left Waltham for Cambridge and then Aslockton. A post had to be sent to bring Cranmer to Greenwich in the early autumn.
Cranmer at court and Convocation
Cranmer’s meeting with Fox and Gardiner had only happened by chance, which permitted John Foxe to write in hindsight that Cranmer’s ‘gentle nature’ made him reluctant to enter the king’s service.10 However, Cambridge had prepared Cranmer to play the courtier. He had already seen the king on Henry’s visits to the university, most recently in 1522, when the king spent a day or two at Cambridge accompanied by his secretary, Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) and the future archbishop of York, Edward Lee (1482–1455).11 Henry’s desire to find relief from his marriage and its diplomatic entanglements with the Holy Roman Empire provided new opportunities for evangelicals to enter the king’s service. The physician William Butts (c. 1485–1545) had come to court from Cambridge in 1528, and he was one of a number of men Cranmer already knew who could have advised him.
Cranmer told Fox and Gardiner that he had had no opportunity to study the grounds of the king’s case, and at his first audience, Henry may have confided what he wanted him to know, in the same way that he had startled Sir Thomas More two years earlier, when he abruptly revealed his doubts about his marriage as they were walking privately together in the gallery at Hampton Court. The king laid an open Bible before More and showed him the passages in Leviticus that convinced Henry that his marriage was against the laws of the Church, against Scripture, and also against the law of nature.12
One of the most consistent aspects of the king’s case was his contention that Katherine’s first marriage had been consummated, even though many years earlier Henry had acknowledged that Katherine was a virgin when he married her in 1509. Arthur and Katherine had spent no more than seven nights together. When questioned after Arthur died in 1502, she maintained at great immediate cost to herself that he had not consummated their marriage. For the rest of her life, she vigorously denied that Arthur had known her. In all likelihood, Katherine was telling the truth.13 However, Henry’s predicament was not unprecedented in the annals of Europe’s dynasties. Similar doctrinal problems had been addressed by theologians for centuries. Despite Katherine’s consistent denials, Henry insisted that his brother’s marriage had been consummated, for otherwise he had no legal escape in his application to the pope. His whole case turned on this point. He told his advisors he believed that his soul would be destroyed if he continued in his marriage, and he may have said something to Cranmer along these lines. Henry expected Cranmer to endorse his version of the case and he instructed him to write his opinion. He sent Cranmer to live at Durham Place with the newly made earl of Wiltshire, the father of Anne Boleyn.
We cannot know to what extent Cranmer had been aware of Anne before now. In her youth, from about 1513 to 1521, she received a continental education at the French court, at a time when King Francis I (1494–1547) was interested in shielding evangelical scholars and preachers against the censures of the Sorbonne at the University of Paris. With his sister Marguerite (1492–1549), later queen of Navarre, he protected Jacques Lefèvre. When Anne returned to England in the early 1520s she was a fervent evangelical. Henry became smitten by her from about mid-1526 although she had already been promised in marriage at least once. Persistent rumors linked her with Henry Percy (c. 1502–1537), the heir to the fifth earl of Northumberland, a match that Wolsey forbade. The name of Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503–1542) was also linked with Anne’s. However, we cannot be certain to whom she was privately contracted in marriage. For more than five years she refused to become the king’s mistress. Henry had already engaged in an adulterous affair with her sister Mary (c. 1499–1543), soon after Mary’s marriage to William Carey (c. 1496–1528), a member of his privy chamber.14 Remarkably ambitious and encouraged in her hopes by her father Thomas (1477–1539) and her brother George (c. 1504–1536), as well as her uncle Thomas Howard (1473–1554), third duke of Norfolk, Anne wanted to marry the king.
If Cranmer did not already have a clear idea of what was expected of him, then the period he spent with the Boleyns at Durham Place were definitive. Anne’s enemies dismissed her as a Lutheran, but it would be more accurate to describe her as sharing the evangelical views that she had encountered at the French court. Her patronage became the cornerstone of Cranmer’s rise. Quickly he wrote a long treatise that argued that Scripture prohibited any marriage between a man and his brother’s widow, and that no pope had the authority to offer a dispensation in a matter that was prohibited by divine law. Cranmer accepted the idea that Arthur’s marriage had been consummated.15 In October 1529, Wolsey was indicted on a charge of praemunire, a crime that had long been defined by statute as an offence that trespassed on royal authority. He was deprived of all his royal offices and possessions (including Cardinal College and his Ipswich school). He was replaced as lord chancellor by Sir Thomas More, and Henry sent Cranmer with Fox to brief More concerning the details of his Great Matter.16
Meanwhile, Cranmer’s treatise was circulated in manuscript, and within a few weeks it was used as a preliminary test of opinions at Cambridge even though Cranmer’s university days were at an end. Henry rewarded him with the archdeaconry of Taunton in Devonshire. Because we know that he was not in service to the king before now, this was the first ecclesiastical appointment Cranmer ever received.17 Giving Cranmer Taunton was a strategic decision, for, as archdeacon, he could support the king’s plans when he sat as one of the approximately sixty members of the Lower House of Convocation, the legislative body of the province of Canterbury. Convocation held its meetings at the same time as Parliament, and it served almost as a third chamber in England’s legislative system.
The first session of what has become known as the Reformation Parliament opened on 3 November 1529, and Convocation began meeting two days later with Cranmer in attendance.18 Wolsey’s fall encouraged calls for the reform of perceived abuses in the Church, but Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury, presiding over Convocation, was both fearful and reluctant to implement drastic changes. He was surprised by criticisms rising in the House of Commons that denounced pluralism and non-residency: that in holding more than one benefice, a priest might neglect some of his responsibilities for the cure of souls. Heretical books had been discovered at the universities, and Convocation ordered their examination. Little was achieved in that session, however, and Warham prorogued Convocation on 24 December. But Cranmer had had his first taste of the legislative functions of the English Church.
Impressed by his energy and abilities, in early 1530 Henry sent Cranmer to advance his cause in Rome.
Cranmer in Italy, 1530
Even now, despite nearly three years of delays and setbacks, Henry had not given up hope that Pope Clement could be persuaded to release him from his marriage to Katherine, and the king’s intentions continued to be enormously complicated as a reflection of the difficult diplomatic scene. A new realignment of the great European powers had the potential of leaving Henry exposed, should the Emperor Charles and King Francis invade England together. Henry could not risk the pope’s censure. To exert renewed pressure for a resolution, he sent Wiltshire as his representative at Charles’s coronation in Bologna. Cranmer embarked with Anne’s father towards the end of January 1530, but instead of stopping for the coronation, he proceeded directly to Rome where he took up the post of Penitentiary for England, so that English supplications for papal dispensations would come under his eye. Cranmer became fluent in Italian, and he chose capable servants who continued to keep him informed about events in Rome long after he became archbishop. If Clement had decided to find for Henry, then Cranmer’s presence in Rome would have been essential.
But if Henry expected Wiltshire to make any real gains on his behalf, he was thwarted. After consultation with Charles at the coronation, Clement answered Katherine’s appeal on 7 March by calling her case to the Curia, and he summoned Henry to Rome so a decision could be made there. Concerned that the king might now abandon Katherine for Anne, the pope forbade him from making any new marriage under pain of excommunication, the most fearsome penalty that he could impose. Excommunication represented not only a personal humiliation for the king, but carried with it the threat of dethronement by encouraging domestic uprisings and invasions. Two weeks later, Clement amplified his prohibition when he forbade all theologians to speak or write against the validity of Katherine’s marriage.19 The pope’s threat blasted the most important aspect of Cranmer’s assignment.20
But in the meantime, before the pope’s prohibition reached the English universities, Henry’s agents succeeded in pressuring Cambridge to deliver an opinion in his favour by using arguments from Cranmer’s treatise. In early March Cambridge decided that the law of God prohibited a man from marrying his brother’s widow. However, Cambridge shrank from explicitly denying the powers of the pope, which displeased Henry greatly. Strong measures had to be taken afterwards to make it look as if Cambridge had come out unequivocally for the king.21 Using Cambridge’s decision as a precedent, Oxford also decided reluctantly for Henry. At the same time, the king offered substantial financial inducements to Francis to encourage French universities to support his cause. Most of them did, but members of the Sorbonne were resistant until pressure and bribery gave Henry a small majority decision in his favour.22
At Henry’s request, but with hostile reluctance, the pope allowed the question of the king’s marriage to be taken up by Italian universities in the summer. John Stokesley had already been made bishop of London on the strength of his commitment to Henry’s cause, and he had been sent with Reginald Pole to persuade the French universities. Now Stokesley arrived in Italy as Henry’s ambassador to the imperial and papal courts, and Cranmer began to work closely with him for the first time in their careers. Cambridge’s Greek scholar Richard Croke was also busy in assisting the king’s cause in Italy. Bologna, Padua and a half-dozen other universities in Italy found for the king.23
As a reward for his service, while Cranmer was in Rome, Henry’s agent, the Italian bishop of Worcester, Girolamo Ghinucci (1480–1541) collated him to the living of Bredon, one of the wealthiest in his gift. Ghinucci, like the king’s confessor, Bishop John Longland of Lincoln (1473–1547), believed that Henry’s marriage to Katherine was invalid, and Ghinucci had often interceded with the pope on behalf of the king. Ghinucci’s gift of Bredon probably came at Henry’s suggestion as a reward for Cranmer’s service, and to provide him with a good income to support his new career as a courtier. In addition, Ghinucci probably also moved Clement to grant Cranmer a dispensation that would permit him to hold four benefices at once, or three in addition to Bredon. Ghinucci may have meant this as a gesture of goodwill towards Cranmer, even though Cranmer was well aware that he could not use Clement’s dispensation and he had not asked for it, since he already knew that the new legislation that had been passed while he was attending Convocation forbade pluralism on this scale.24
The appeal to the universities had now run its course, and Cranmer returned to England by the end of 1530.
Promoting the divorce, 1531
In England again, Cranmer returned to court. It is unlikely that he could afford to spend much time as far away as Bredon in Worcestershire, even though, for the first time in his life, he had cure of the souls of his parishioners. Rather, he was expected to employ curates who would conduct the day-to-day work of the living, though we know from a letter that he wrote to the earl of Wiltshire that he maintained considerable interest in his benefice.25
At the beginning of 1531, despite the apparent success of the appeal to the universities, Henry was almost no closer to a resolution to the stalemate. Now a vigorous campaign to promote the king’s cause in the press was advanced by Cromwell. Cranmer also became involved in this work.
From 1527, Wolsey had commissioned written opinions on marriage law to carry the king’s case through the papal courts. When Sir Thomas More became lord chancellor in 1529, he had asked to see what had already been written about it, and he probably read Cranmer’s treatise.26 While Cranmer was in Italy, Edward Fox continued to amass scriptural sources and other texts.
Now, from 1531, the documents were brought together to produce an array of printed tracts that argued that English kings had always enjoyed not only rule over the government but also complete authority over the Church in England. Fox’s documents have become known as the Collectanea satis copiosa, and they became the centrepiece of Cromwell’s efforts to promote the king’s supremacy over the English Church, a difficult and dangerous new initiative that consumed the next four years before it was completely approved by both Parliament and Convocation. Fox articulated a new understanding of royal power, a legal fiction with only the thinnest reality in fact: that England was an empire that had suffered under the usurpation of the popes. The king’s rule over the Church had always existed, but only now was it being expressed.27 The purpose was first to support the king’s cause, and ultimately, to endorse Henry’s supremacy over the Church in England.
In April 1531, Fox’s compilation of the results from the French and Italian universities was released in Latin as the Censurae by the king’s printer Thomas Berthelet (d. 1555) for international consumption. Something similar was necessary for the domestic market. Working closely with Fox and Stokesley, Cranmer translated an English version, which was titled The Determinations of the most famous and most excellent uniuersities of Italy and France and printed by Berthelet in November.28 Now also A Glasse of the Truthe was written to convince Henry’s subjects. It took the form of a dialogue between a lawyer and a theologian that warned of the dangers England faced if the king had no son to succeed him. Cranmer probably also had a hand in preparing it, and in 1532 his friend Nicholas Hawkins was asked to turn A Glasse of the Truthe into Latin to take with him on embassy to the papal and imperial courts.29
Further, in June 1531 Cranmer wrote Wiltshire to inform him about a treatise written by Pole. At this stage of his career, Pole was still in service to the king and his tract was meant as another position paper on the king’s case. It warned Henry about the dangers to the succession, but not about the potential problems should a daughter succeed him. Rather, Pole sounded an alarm about the wisdom of Henry’s efforts to end his marriage, which he thought would jeopardize the stability of the realm. Cranmer thought Pole’s book was eloquent and convincing. Yet, Cranmer advised Wiltshire that if it were released, it would persuade Henry’s subjects against him. Pole’s opinions challenged the efforts that Cromwell, Fox, and Cranmer were already making to promote royal authority. Pole wanted the king to submit his cause to the pope’s judgement, and in this Cranmer thought ‘he lacketh much judgment’.30 In another year, Pole left England to pursue his studies in Italy, where he remained, beyond Henry’s reach, for the rest of the king’s life.
Henry’s appeal to the universities had gained widespread attention and raised important interest amongst Protestants abroad. In mid-1531, the king received a visit from the humanist scholar Simon Grynaeus (1493–1541) of Basel, who arrived with letters of introduction from Erasmus to More and his other English friends. Ostensibly Grynaeus came to England to find rare manuscripts, but the real purpose of his visit was to encourage Henry to protect Protestants from the emperor. In February, at a meeting of Lutheran princes and cities in the market town of Schmalkalden, a defensive alliance was created under the leadership of Duke John and Landgrave Philip. Intrigued, and still eager to gain support wherever he could, Henry warmly received Grynaeus, and a presentation of the doctrinal grounds of his case was made by three or four of his leading theological advisors, one of whom was probably Cranmer.31 Henry commissioned Grynaeus to send him the opinions of his colleagues, and at the same time he solicited Luther for his thinking about his case.
While he was at Cambridge, Cranmer had probably met prominent evangelicals from abroad, including Erasmus, but Grynaeus played an unusually important role as the first eminent evangelical reformer with whom he developed a lasting friendship. The visit of Grynaeus opened opportunities for Cromwell and Cranmer to build common theological positions between English and continental reformers. Once he returned to Basel, Grynaeus wrote to Martin Bucer, Philip Melanchthon, Huldrych Zwingli, and others, including perhaps John Calvin in Paris and he asked them to prepare their opinions on the grounds of Henry’s case. From 1531 onwards, because of the introductions Grynaeus provided, Cranmer had extraordinary access to all of the leading figures of reform on the continent.
Almost immediately, an important split in opinion became apparent that divided the Lutherans from the rest. Zwingli was one of Grynaeus’s earliest patrons.32 They both believed that Katherine’s marriage was invalid and that Henry was already free to marry Anne. However, Luther, Melanchthon and Bucer disagreed. They decided that the prohibitions defined by Leviticus were superseded by other passages in the book of Deuteronomy that commanded a man to marry his late brother’s wife. Therefore they argued that Henry had no grounds for discarding Katherine.33 William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), writing from exile, had already denounced Henry’s cause in his book the Practice of Prelates.34 Therefore the Lutherans concluded that the king’s marriage to Katherine was binding. At the very beginning of England’s approach to the Protestants, the Lutherans were unwilling to support the king while the Swiss proved quite accommodating, a pattern that Cranmer would discover again as archbishop. The English Reformation in Cranmer’s lifetime would ultimately owe more to Swiss Reform than to the Lutherans.
In August 1531, English evangelicals were disturbed when Thomas Bilney was burnt for heresy by the bishop of Norwich, Richard Nix (c. 1447–1535). Bilney was one of the most influential of all of the Cambridge brethren, responsible for persuading Hugh Latimer and others to question traditional beliefs. Bilney had already abjured for the first time in 1527. Then he suggested that kings should assume the role of an Old Testament ruler like Hezekiah (d. 687 BC) and destroy any religious images that detracted worshippers from the sacrifice that Christ had made on the cross. He also admitted then that Luther’s opinions had been justly condemned. But more recently, Bilney repudiated his abjuration. He began to preach against abuses again, and he distributed Tyndale’s banned books.
His second arrest meant that very likely he would be condemned. However, Bilney made an audacious appeal to the king to hear his case as the supreme head of the English Church. The same strategy saved Edward Crome a year later when Warham accused him before Convocation of preaching heresies. But Bilney was hurried to the stake before Henry could intervene. In making an investigation afterwards, Sir Thomas More did not denounce his execution.35 Bilney was killed as a defensive measure on the part of those who wished to defend the Church from royal control. His execution redoubled Cromwell’s efforts to build the king’s supremacy, and once Cranmer was archbishop, he hounded Nix for killing Bilney.
Nuremberg, 1532
Cranmer’s next important appointment came in 1532 when Henry sent him as English ambassador to the court of the Emperor Charles. His assignment then was to win support from persons of influence for the king’s cause. This was a task of daunting dimensions because Henry’s predicament continued to be overshadowed by larger and more dangerous problems. Central Europe was still reeling not only from the Sack of Rome in 1527 but from the devastating defeat that the kingdom of Hungary suffered in 1526 at the hands of the Ottoman emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent (1494–1566) at the Battle of Mohács. The city of Buda was sacked, and King Louis II (1506–1526), the husband of Charles’s sister Mary (1505–1558), was slain. The entire Hungarian nobility and sixteen thousand men died with him. Charles immediately made his brother Ferdinand (1503–1564) king of Hungary to stabilize the region. In 1531 Ferdinand became his brother’s acknowledged heir to the Holy Roman Empire when he was elected king of the Romans. But in 1532 Suleyman threatened to attack again. Cranmer was sent to the imperial court in the midst of the crisis.
Charles knew that he was ill prepared to face a fresh onslaught. He had insufficient money and fighting men to repel the invaders. Thus he summoned the Imperial Diet to Regensburg (Ratisbon) where he was obliged to negotiate with Lutheran members of his own empire that he would have preferred to subdue. Charles also turned to England, France, and Poland for assistance. In March, Cromwell received word that Francis promised some fifty thousand men for the defence of Naples. But Henry had no real intention of giving Charles the money and military aid he requested.36
Cranmer left England in late January 1532 for Brussels to join the previous ambassador, Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546), the author of the masterwork of political theory, The Boke Named the Governour. Together they followed the imperial court as Charles made his way from the Low Countries. The emperor was never willing to abandon his support of his aunt Katherine, and he treated Henry’s ambassadors with icy courtesy. Elyot’s embassy had lasted only a few months and bore little fruit.
As Elyot and Cranmer followed the imperial court from Brussels to central Europe, they passed through a complicated patchwork of semi-autonomous principalities and free cities that belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. Each had their own local rulers, their own customs, their own styles of dress, their own forms of German, and increasingly, their own religious allegiances and liturgies. One region remained loyal to the papacy, while the next town was thoroughly imbued with Lutheran ideas. They were knit together in a loose confederation, united only by their allegiance to their elected emperor and the agreements that were forged during the sessions of the Imperial Diet.
In Worms, Elyot noted in a letter to Norfolk that the town was almost completely ‘possessed’ by Lutherans, as well as by a large Jewish population, while the rest were so ‘indifferent’ that the local bishop did not know how to address the challenges of his situation. In Speyer, the people kept their Catholicism.37
The free city of Nuremberg was different still. On the River Pegnitz in Franconia, Nuremberg was the third largest city of the Holy Roman Empire, and important for its extensive trade and printing industry. Its leaders had been won over quickly to Luther’s theology, and they refused to accept his condemnation as a heretic by Pope Leo X and by the emperor’s Edict of Worms. Nuremberg was so vulnerable to suppression by Charles, however, that it feared political isolation and therefore it could not afford to join the League of Schmalkalden. The Imperial Diet moved to Nuremberg during the summer of 1532. The friendships that Cranmer made there were definitive for his developing theology and for his private life. Nuremberg shaped the ultimate direction of his career.38
Elyot caught Cranmer’s immediate fascination with Nuremberg’s new liturgy. Cohesion in religious worship was lost in the Holy Roman Empire as many imperial cities abandoned the Latin Mass. In 1523, Luther and Zwingli each attempted his own revisions of the Latin liturgy, and then Luther took a bold step in 1526 when he prepared a Deutsche Messe that was influenced by the service Bucer had written for Strasbourg. In Nuremberg, the Mass had recently been revised by Johann Brenz (1499–1570) with Andreas Osiander (1498–1552), the influential chief pastor of the church of St Lorenz.
In March 1532, Cranmer and Elyot observed this new service a year before it was printed. As Elyot wrote Norfolk, the priest sang the Mass in Latin, but he omitted the traditional petitions to the saints. When he read the Epistle in Latin, the subdeacon went into the pulpit and read the text to the people in their own language. Then the priest read the Gospel verses softly in Latin, and as he did so, the deacon went into the pulpit and read them ‘in the Almain tongue’. Immediately intrigued, Cranmer made inquiries, and he told Elyot that the Epistles and Gospels were not kept in the same order as they were in England. Every day one chapter of the New Testament was taught. Then the priest and the choir sang the Creed ‘as we do’. The priest sang the words of the consecration ‘with a high voice’. After the elevation the deacon turned to the people and told them in German (‘a long process’, Elyot observed) how they should prepare themselves to take communion of the flesh and blood of Christ. Then anyone who desired could come up to receive without first going to confession. But Elyot and Cranmer left the church without taking communion, and Elyot joked in his letter to Norfolk that the worshippers perhaps wondered whether their visitors were greater heretics than they were themselves.39 When the time came for Cranmer to devise a new liturgy for the English Church, he drew upon what he learned from Nuremberg.
Over the summer Cranmer became a welcome visitor at Osiander’s house, and they spent hours amongst the books in his study. Osiander was engaged in developing a Harmony of the four gospels, a ‘great labor’ that had never been undertaken before. When Osiander dedicated the book to Cranmer in 1537 he wrote of Cranmer’s great love for the Gospel and his devotion to true religion.40 They went to meetings of the Imperial Diet. Cranmer also wanted to discuss the king’s cause with the new elector of Saxony, Duke John Frederick I (1504–1554), which prepared the groundwork for the later attempts that he made as archbishop to bring about agreements between the Lutheran princes and his own king.41
According to the author of the ‘Life’, Cranmer was remarkably persuasive in convincing members of the imperial court that Henry’s cause was just. Cranmer made an excellent impression. He was gracious to all he met. One of those he persuaded was the theologian Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), who ‘confessed’ to Cranmer that the Aragon marriage was ‘nought’, though he dared not say so openly for fear of both the emperor and the pope.42 John Cochleus (1479–1552) of Meissen also enjoyed Cranmer’s company, though later he repudiated their friendship. Cranmer was also a favourite amongst the ambassadors, and he struck up a friendship in Vienna with the Polish ambassador Johannes Dantiscus (1485–1548), who listened to him patiently when Cranmer told him ‘all my mind concerning the bishop of Rome’. Many times, Dantiscus seemed to agree. He entrusted Cranmer with a student to send back to England for education.43 Almost alone amongst the Lutheran leaders, Osiander was convinced that Henry’s marriage to Katherine was invalid. He urged Luther and Melanchthon to reconsider their opinions of Henry’s case. Later Osiander wrote a pamphlet on the subject, which he told Cranmer at the beginning of 1538 had to be suppressed to avoid giving offence to the emperor.44
When they arrived in Nuremberg in March 1532, Elyot reported to Norfolk that ‘all the priests have wives’ and they were ‘the fairest women of the town’.45 From the mid-1520s, Lutheran clergymen discarded the standard of celibacy that was required in the Catholic Church as part of the special discipline that was expected of all men in holy orders. In redefining the sacraments, the Lutherans argued that marriage was a right for the laity and clergy alike. Their marriages became public acts of defiance against the papacy. Luther married Katharina von Bora (1499–1552) in 1525, and she played a pivotal role in running his extensive estates and in presiding at his table as he entertained important guests.46 Zwingli and Bucer also took wives. Osiander married three times, and he established a dynasty of theologians who were influential well into the seventeenth century.
Cranmer turned forty-three in 1532. Although the details elude us, he probably met Osiander’s wife Katharina Preu when he visited their house. She had a young unmarried niece, Margarete (d. c. 1575), who may have been twenty. We do not know if Cranmer had learned German, or if Margarete knew any Latin. In the course of Cranmer’s visits, Osiander arranged for them to wed. Probably he solemnized their union.
Cranmer’s decision to marry in Nuremberg was so great a watershed in his life that it signals how far he had moved beyond his early evangelical views. Now he embraced Lutheran teachings: that salvation was by faith alone, and that believers were justified by their faith, and not by their works. He accepted that the Mass was not a sacrifice. Like Luther and Osiander, he rejected the dogma of transubstantiation because it could not be proved by Scripture, but for the next fifteen years he continued to believe, with the Lutherans, that Christ’s body and blood were really present in the sacrament of the altar.47
Under canon law in the Catholic Church, Cranmer’s marriage was illegal, and offensive to the imperial court to which he was accredited. We cannot know if his marriage became widely known, but in Vienna Dantiscus knew or suspected that Cranmer had a wife. His marriage was also disrespectful to his own king. Cranmer’s second marriage, even more than his first, complicated his career. He had reason to believe that he would serve as Henry’s ambassador for a long time to come. Perhaps he would not have married again had he anticipated that Henry and Anne Boleyn might want him to become archbishop of Canterbury.48
Most of his biographers have emphasized Cranmer’s willingness to enhance Henry’s powers, but few have recognized that Nuremberg provided him with the strategies to maintain his own opinions despite the hostility of his prince. Osiander and Nuremberg’s other leaders protected its Lutheran identity despite the emperor’s repeated threats to the city’s independence.49 Others wrestled with the problem of how to place their loyalty to God ahead of their duty to their prince. Luther was protected from the wrath of the papacy and the emperor by the electors of Saxony. In contrast, Cranmer did not enjoy Henry’s unconditional protection. From Canterbury, Cranmer carefully observed the career of Hermann V von Wied (1477–1552), archbishop of the free city of Cologne. In the 1530s and 1540s Hermann emerged as that greatest of rarities: a Protestant archbishop in the Catholic Church. He invited the advice of Melanchthon and Bucer. Despite the emperor’s opposition, Hermann instituted evangelical reforms in Cologne until he was deprived in 1546.50 Remarkably, at many junctures, Cranmer chose, like Osiander and Hermann, to accommodate his prince without relinquishing his own private opinions and purpose.
Cranmer wrote Henry regularly with diplomatic news. In the autumn, he followed Charles and Ferdinand from Regensburg to Vienna and to southern Austria, where he witnessed a frightening military disaster, as he reported in October 1532. The Italian troops that Charles had taken such great measures to marshal mutinied because they had not been paid. They turned their anger against the unprotected towns of southern Austria. Cranmer told Henry that many of the townspeople fled to the mountains in fear. Villages were burnt, women raped, and many were killed. The harvest was destroyed. ‘Thus is this country miserably oppressed by all parties, but much more by them that came to defend this country, than it was by the Turks’. Cranmer passed through a battlefield strewn with bodies, where as many as two thousand lay dead, by his estimate. Although he was in real danger, he was fully prepared to follow the emperor into Italy and then to Spain.51
While Cranmer was writing to the king, he could not know that Henry was sending Hawkins as his replacement. Cranmer had not yet heard that Archbishop Warham had died in August. In the following month, Henry raised Anne to the marquisate of Pembroke and settled on her a substantial income. In November, she accompanied Henry to Calais for a meeting with King Francis. On that visit, now certain at last that the king would marry her, Anne became pregnant. When her condition became apparent early in the new year, immediately the king wanted to ensure that her child would be recognized as his legitimate heir. So secretly was their marriage solemnized in the third week of January that Cranmer did not learn for a fortnight that they had wed.52
When Cranmer remembered in 1555, six months before his execution, how he had been suddenly recalled to England, he told his examiners that no candidate had ever been more reluctant to take up an archbishopric than he. He did not wish to leave his studies, and he said he delayed his return by half a year or ‘seven weeks at the least’ in the hope that he would be forgotten.53 But this was not what actually happened. Cranmer wanted to become archbishop, and when summoned, he travelled to London as quickly as the icy winter conditions allowed. Only a few weeks elapsed between the time he was recalled and his arrival around 10 January. According to Charles’s highly capable ambassador Eustace Chapuys (c. 1492–1556), many people were astonished when they learned that Cranmer was the king’s choice to succeed Warham as archbishop of Canterbury.
As his very first act as archbishop elect, Cranmer continued the pension Warham had granted Erasmus. On 7 February 1533, Erasmus wrote Sir Thomas More (who had resigned the lord chancellorship in the previous year) that his pension from the living of Aldington in Kent had been extended. Although it is doubtful that Erasmus knew who Cranmer was beyond the fact that he had succeeded Warham, Cranmer’s generosity earned the great man’s gratitude and a stream of compliments in his letters. Cranmer’s decision was an open sign of his intent to continue to associate the English Church with evangelicalism.
Cranmer’s consecration, 1533
In the first weeks following his return, Cranmer met with Henry’s lawyers to consider the political implications of his consecration. This was the first time in a generation that there would be a new archbishop of Canterbury; Warham had occupied the throne of St Augustine since 1503. For centuries, bishops and archbishops had customarily sworn oaths of fealty to the pope as well as to the king. In March 1532 Henry had raised objections against the oaths the bishops made to the pope. During a furious argument in the House of Lords, Henry had accused Warham of praemunire. A few weeks earlier Warham had publicly repudiated anything that had been done since the start of the Reformation Parliament in 1529 that violated the rights of the papacy or the privileges of his metropolitical see. He decided that he would rather run the risk of punishment for misprision of treason under the praemunire charge than be guilty of perjury for breaking his oath to the pope. Only his death on 22 August spared him further consequences.54
Cranmer did indeed want to be archbishop, but not at the cost of praemunire if he swore obedience to the pope. Nor did he wish to accept the pallium, the narrow woollen stole that popes bestowed upon their metropolitans as the greatest symbol of their office, which Luther had denigrated as an empty extravagance.
But in 1533 the king could not afford to insult the pope openly. There was still an extremely small chance that Clement might, even now, make a determination in Henry’s favour. Now that he had married Anne, the threat of excommunication hung heavily over him. England was awash with rumours that Charles was preparing to invade. Strong domestic support continued for Katherine and Mary. Henry had to pursue conflicting policies to safeguard the realm. The fourth session of the Reformation Parliament opened on 4 February 1533. Convocation began its meetings the next day without Cranmer. Until the full agenda of legislation that Cromwell was planning could be passed, Henry would not be sufficiently secure to repudiate the papacy completely. The king wanted Cranmer to receive all of the necessary approvals from the pope that would make him generally accepted as the legitimate archbishop of Canterbury, and he was even willing to pay the substantial expenses for the papal bulls that would be required. The king also wanted Cranmer to have the pallium.
Left to his own devices, Cranmer would have accepted the archbishopric from the hands of the king without invoking the papacy. Cranmer dismissed the papacy as an intrusive foreign power. Paradoxically, Henry’s efforts to end his marriage to Katherine reinforced the idea that the king, as well as everyone else, was bound by the law of God as it was now interpreted by Scripture. Although he was not always successful, Cranmer endeavoured to hold Henry to this standard, as much as he was constrained to obey the king as the chosen agent of God. Cranmer did not have a lawyer’s perspective (as we will note again), but at length they came to an agreement: at his consecration, Cranmer would protest against the authority of the pope but without jeopardizing his installation in the eyes of Rome. The king called several civil lawyers to devise the means to bestow the archbishopric upon him without ‘enforcing me nothing against my conscience’. As was the usual practice, a proctor was sent to the pope to swear oaths on Cranmer’s behalf.55 When he gave him the archbishopric, Henry presented Cranmer with a ring that had once belonged to Wolsey.56 This was the first ring of several that played symbolic roles in Cranmer’s career as signs of promise, reward, and protection.
Henry’s application for the bulls for Cranmer’s consecration was hurried along, much to the distress of Chapuys, and he warned Charles that once Cranmer was consecrated he would dissolve Katherine’s marriage. In a state of anxiety, Chapuys recommended that the bulls be delayed, but they were not. An unusually large number of papal bulls were sent to England in early March to allow Cranmer to be consecrated, and one of them specifically absolved him, as archdeacon of Taunton, for an unspecified problem, which may have been related to the early steps Convocation had taken, in conjuncture with Parliament, against papal rights.57
Cranmer’s consecration as the sixty-eighth archbishop of Canterbury occurred on 30 March 1533. In a semiprivate ceremony in the chapter house of St Stephen’s College in the old Palace of Westminster, Cranmer made a formal protestation in the presence the canon lawyer Richard Gwent (d. 1543), dean of the Court of the Arches, and other witnesses, that it was not his intent to be bound by any oaths that were contrary to the law of God or against the king and his laws. No oath that he was about to take would prevent him from reforming those things in the Church of England that seemed to him in need of reform. Whatever had been sworn by a proctor in Rome on his behalf he declared null and invalid. He also promised to pursue heretics, schismatics, and rebels.58
Then Cranmer entered St Stephen’s Chapel, a royal space par excellence whose walls were illuminated with portraits of the family of King Edward III (1312–1377) kneeling in devotion to Christ and his mother. St Stephen’s Chapel was lost when the Houses of Parliament burned in 1834, but there can be no doubt that Cranmer’s consecration was held in a sacred space dedicated to the power of England’s kings.59 He was consecrated by the bishops of Lincoln, Exeter, and St Asaph. Longland of Lincoln was the king’s confessor, to whom Henry had confided his first doubts about his marriage to Katherine. In 1532, the pressure of consecrating Henry Standish (d. 1535) of St Asaph had triggered the catastrophic breakdown between Archbishop Warham and the king. Longland read the oath, and Cranmer declared he would take it only according to the protest he had just made. Then he swore. Before he accepted the pallium, Cranmer again referred to his protest. A third time, he asked all those present to bear witness that he took his oaths in accordance with his protestation, which was duly written into his Register following the papal bulls, although it did not become widely known at the time.60
Historians have struggled to reconcile the inconsistencies concerning Cranmer’s consecration and many have concluded that his actions were unethical. He benefited substantially by accepting the primacy of all England from Pope Clement VII even though he had no intention to abide by papal law. Twenty-two years later, Reginald Pole, now a cardinal and poised to succeed him as archbishop of Canterbury, angrily accused Cranmer of ‘a double perjury’ because he had ‘forsworn afore you did swear’.61 When he was examined at Oxford before his execution, some of his opponents thought Cranmer had no conscience at all.
Some of the problems that Cranmer’s consecration presented were addressed in 1534, when the Act Restraining the Payment of Annates was passed by Parliament, which disallowed papal bulls for a bishop’s consecration. Cathedral chapters were now to elect the man that the king chose to be the next bishop, and candidates had to swear their loyalty to the king and to no other authority. As we will see in future chapters, other inconsistencies were raised at his consecration that Cranmer had to address in due course.62
Dunstable
In April 1533, after Parliament and Convocation were prorogued, Cranmer once again acknowledged that he owed his office to the king when he made a formal request to address the ‘uncertainty of the succession’ and to provide a ‘final determination’ in the king’s Great Cause.63 The most important piece of legislation, the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome, had been passed by the Reformation Parliament in the previous month. It asserted that England had always been ruled by its king as the one supreme head who held authority over all people, laity and clergy alike. It denied the power of the papacy and criticized its interference in the king’s marriage. The new law also disallowed Katherine’s appeal to the papal courts.64
Two days after his consecration, Cranmer began to preside over Convocation in the chapter house of old St Paul’s Cathedral, and the theological grounds of the king’s case were discussed. Under heavy pressure from the king, both houses agreed that it was unlawful for a man to marry his brother’s widow if the first marriage had been consummated, and that such a marriage was forbidden by divine law.65
The way was now clear for Cranmer to pass a final sentence. He summoned Henry and Katherine to his court at Dunstable Priory. On 10 May, assisted by Longland and Gardiner, Cranmer opened the proceedings. Katherine refused to recognize the legitimacy of his court and she had no intention of appearing. Cranmer declared her contumacious and he made the business as brief as he could because Anne’s coronation was ‘so near at hand’. On 23 May 1533 he passed sentence that the king had never been lawfully married to Katherine.66
Coronation of Anne Boleyn
Anne was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Whitsunday, 1 June 1533, the feast of Pentecost. The finest account we have of her coronation comes from Cranmer’s letter to Hawkins when he described the great show the livery companies of London made on the Thames with decorated barges, music and tableaux, and how Anne rode through the streets of London in a horse litter with her hair streaming down her back. That she expected a child was plain for all to see. Supported by Stokesley and Gardiner, Anne approached the high altar of the Abbey, where ‘I did set the crown on her head’.67
Thomas Cranmer had been created by the king’s Great Matter and by Anne Boleyn. He had been instrumental in resolving a dynastic predicament that had threatened the king and the realm since the beginning of Henry’s reign. To the queen he crowned he owned his promotion to the archbishopric of Canterbury even more than to the king whom he had sworn to serve. At the coronation banquet, as the king watched from a gallery, Cranmer alone sat on the dais with the queen, with the nobility and bishops of England and Wales at their feet. Together they represented a new future that would ultimately become a fundamental and permanent break from the papacy and its centuries of tradition.
Notes
1Cranmer’s collect for the feast of St Michael in 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), 115v.
2Mr Ashton’s death at Jesus College: CUL, University Archives, VC Probate Wills I, fol. 49r.
3Cranmer as university auditor in 1529: Grace Book B Part II: Containing the Accounts of the Proctors of the University of Cambridge, 1511–1544, ed. M. Bateson (Cambridge, 1905), 153 (1529). George Stavert of Pembroke was the auditor whose death prompted Cranmer to leave Cambridge for Waltham. CUL, University Archives, VC Probate Wills I, fol. 49v.
4The comforts of the Crecy household are indicated in the will of Margaret Crecye of Waltham Holy Cross made when she was a widow on 9 November 1553 and proved 18 October 1554. TNA:PRO PROB 11/37, fols. 68v–69v. Morice, 241–2. John Foxe incorporated Morice’s story of Cranmer’s meeting at Waltham in his 1570 edition of the Actes and Monuments (London: John Daye, RSTC 11223), at pp. 2033–5.
5Leviticus 18:16, 20:21.
6Morice, 241–2.
7See especially the comment ‘And yet there is but one truth in this matter’, which Morice ascribed to Cranmer at dinner: A Glasse of the Truthe (London: Thomas Berthlet, 1532, RSTC 11918), sig. B3r; Morice, 242.
8Foxe 1570, 2033. Gardiner made no references to Cranmer in his letters to the king in 1529.
9LP, 4, no. 5862.
10Foxe 1570, 2034–5.
11Grace Book B I, 219–20, 223; and B II, 108; S. Wabuda, ‘Receiving the King: Henry VIII at Cambridge’, in Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, eds. T. Betteridge and S. Lipscomb (Farnham, 2013), 163–78.
12More to Cromwell, 5 March 1534, printed in Correspondence, no. 199 (493–4).
13H. A. Kelly, The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII, (Stanford, 1976), 60, 213–15, 219–21.
14Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 16–17; M. Dowling, ‘Anne Boleyn and Reform’, JEH, 35 (1984), 30–46; R. J. Knecht, ‘Francis I, “Defender of the Faith”?’ in Wealth and Power in Tudor England: essays presented to S. T. Bindoff, eds. E. W. Ives et al., (London, 1978), 106–27.
15John Bale listed the two-volume ‘De non ducenda fratria’ amongst Cranmer’s works in Scriptorvm Illustriu[m] maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant: Catalogus. (Basel: Joannis Oporium, 1557, 1559), 691.
16More to Cromwell, 5 March 1534, printed in Correspondence of More, no. 199.
17Morice, 243. MacCulloch has corrected his early supposition that Cranmer had been sent on embassy to Spain in the late 1520s: ‘Thomas Cranmer and Johannes Dantiscus: Retraction and Additions’, JEH, 58 (2007), 273–86.
18S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), 69, 76–89, 100–1.
19LP, 4, no. 6256, 6279, also Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, 4, nos. 315, 396; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 255–8.
20LP, 4, no. 6531.
21Lamb, 20–4.
22Knecht, ‘Francis I’, 115. Scarisbrick noted that the University of Angers found for the queen. Henry VIII, 255–8. LP, 4, no. 6370.
23LP, 4, nos. 6428, 6446.
24I am indebted to the late Maria Dowling for this information. See also Morice, 243; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 49–50. Pluralism statute: 21 Henry VIII c. 13; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 93. Cranmer’s letter to Wiltshire, Miscellaneous, no. 1.
25Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter, no. 1 (from 1531); MacCulloch, Cranmer, 53.
26More to Cromwell, 5 March 1534, printed in Correspondence, no. 199 (495–6).
27Graham Nicholson, ‘The Act of Appeals and the English Reformation’, in Law and Government under the Tudors, eds. C. Cross, D. Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge, 1988), 19–30.
28Grauissimae, atque exactissimae illustrissimarum totius Italiae, et Galliae academiarum censurae . . . . (London: Thomas Berthelet, [1531] RSTC 14286); The determinations of the moste famous and mooste excellent vniuersities of Italy and Fraunce . . . . (London: Thomas Berthelet, 7 November 1531 RSTC 14287).
29A Glasse of the Truthe (London: Thomas Berthlet, 1532, RSTC 11918); MacCulloch, Cranmer, 55–9. See also D. G. Newcombe’s account of the life of Hawkins in the ODNB.
30Cranmer to Wiltshire, Hampton Court, 13 June 1531, Miscellaneous, letter no. 1.
31LP, 5, nos. 145, 287; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 60–7; R. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (London, 2002), 39.
32Simon Grynaeus, Epistolae, ed. G. T. Streuber (Basel, 1874), 48, 57, 60.
33Deuteronomy 25:5–10: ‘When brethren dwell together and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry another: but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother’.
34Melanchthon: OL, 2, 556–7; [William Tyndale], The practyse of prelates ([Antwerp, 1530, RSTC 24465), H4v–K1v. M. Dowling, ‘Humanist support for Katherine of Aragon’, Historical Research, 57 (1984), 46–55; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 39–41.
35The confutacyon of Tyndales answere, ed. L. A. Schuster et al., in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 8, pt. 1 (New Haven, 1973), 22–5.
36MacCulloch, Cranmer, 74–5; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 11–14.
37Sir Thomas Elyot to Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, 14 March 1532, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius B XXI, 58r–59r (LP, 5, no. 869).
38G. Seebass, ‘The Importance of the Imperial City of Nuremberg in the Reformation’, in Humanism and Reform: The Church in Europe, England, and Scotland, 1400–1643: Essays in Honour of James K. Cameron, ed. J. Kirk, SCH, subsidia 8 (Oxford, 1991), 113–27.
39Elyot to Norfolk, 14 March 1532, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius B XXI, 58v–59r (LP, 5, no. 869); G. J. Cuming, A History of Anglican Liturgy (London, 1969), 39–41, 326; B. A. Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Eucharist’, in Thinking with the Church: Essays in Historical Theology (Cambridge, 2010), 229–58.
40See the dedicatory epistle in Andreas Osiander’s Harmoniae Evangelicae Liber IIII Graece et Latine (Basel: Johannes Froben, 1537). His remarks were quoted by John Bale, Illustrivm Maioris Britanniae Scriptorvm . . . Summariu[m]. (Ipswich: John Overton. [Wesel: Dirick van de Straten], 1548, RSTC 1295), 238v–239r.
41Cranmer to Henry VIII, 20 October 1532, printed in Miscellaneous, letter no. 3.
42‘Life’, 221.
43MacCulloch has corrected his early supposition that Cranmer and Dantiscus met in Iberia as early as 1528. ‘Thomas Cranmer and Johannes Dantiscus: Retraction and Additions’, JEH, 58 (2007), 273–86. See also his Cranmer, 72–3. H. de Vocht, ed., John Dantiscus and his Netherlandish friends as revealed by their correspondence 1522–1546 in Humanistica Lovaniensia, 16 (Louvain, 1964), 280–3, 325–6. See also Cranmer’s 1540 letter to Wriothesley, Miscellaneous, no. 271.
44Osiander to Cranmer, 24 January 1538: BL, Harley MS 6989, 80 (LP, 13 (1), no. 140 and also no. 648); MacCulloch, Cranmer, 70–1, 74–5; G. Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies relating to the Book of Common Prayer, Alcuin Club, 65 (1983), 72.
45Elyot to Norfolk, 14 March 1532, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius B XXI, 59r (LP, 5, no. 869).
46I owe this suggestion to Susan C. Karant-Nunn.
47Cranmer to Joachim Vadian, 1537, OL, 1, no. 7; AM, 5, 54; P. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay in Historical Development (London, 1965), 3–37.
48Cranmer to Henry VIII, 20 October 1532, printed in Miscellaneous, letter no. 3; Ridley, Cranmer, 46–7.
49Seebass, ‘Nuremberg in the Reformation’, 113–27.
50Hermann and Cranmer: Cuming, The Godly Order, 68–90; MacCulloch, Cranmer 385, 393.
51Cranmer to Henry VIII, 20 October 1532, printed in Miscellaneous, letter no. 3.
52Cranmer’s letter to Hawkins, 17 June 1533, Miscellaneous, no. 14.
53Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 223; Foxe 1583 (1880); AM, 8, 55.
54J. M. Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2013), 100–5; see also J. J. Scarisbrick’s entry on Warham in the ODNB.
55Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 223–4.
56Alexander Ales to Elizabeth I: TNA/PRO, SP 70/17, 11v (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 1, no. 1303); MacCulloch, Cranmer, 84.
57LPL, Cranmer’s Register, 1r–5v.
58LPL, Cranmer’s Register, 4v, translated in Gray, Oaths, 102.
59Roy Strong, Lost Treasures of Britain (London, 1991), 203–8.
60LPL, Cranmer’s Register, 4r–5v; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 224; Gray, Oaths, 103.
61Pole to Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 538.
62Gray, Oaths, 105.
63Cranmer to Henry VIII, Lambeth Palace, 11 April 1533, Miscellaneous, no. 5.
6424 Henry. VIII c. 12 (1533).
65Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 176–8; Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 198–203;
66Cranmer’s letters to Henry VIII, Cromwell and Hawkins, Miscellaneous, nos. 10–14.
67Cranmer’s letter to Hawkins, 17 June 1533, Miscellaneous, no. 14.