4 The new archbishop, 1533–1535
‘Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us perfectly to know thy son Jesus Christ, to be the way, the truth, and the life, as thou hast taught Saint Philip, and other the Apostles: Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’1
The office of the archbishop of Canterbury
When Thomas Cranmer was made archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, he became the beneficiary of an array of powers and privileges that had accrued to his office ever since the sixth century, when the mission Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) sent to the British Isles made Canterbury a metropolitan see. Cranmer’s title was Totius Anglie primas: Primate of all England. He exercised extensive jurisdictional powers over Canterbury and thirteen dioceses in England and another four in Wales that made up the southern province. When a diocese fell vacant at the death or deprivation of the bishop, Cranmer administered it until a new bishop could be elected. He had the power to inhibit the business of bishops in their own dioceses during his visitations.2 The French diocese of Thérouanne had been granted to Canterbury in the fourteenth century, so Cranmer’s authority also extended over the English Pale of Calais. The province of Canterbury, as we have already observed, had its own bicameral legislature, known as Convocation, over which he presided. Its meetings were held at the same time as Parliament. So extensive was Cranmer’s authority at the start of his archiepiscopate that some scholars have been tempted to think that he was as powerful as the prince-archbishops that ruled over cathedral cities on the continent, like Hermann V von Wied of Cologne.3
Cranmer was also the ‘ordinary’ bishop over his own diocese of Canterbury, which was located in eastern Kent, where no other bishop exercised any rule. Canterbury also enjoyed several jurisdictional ‘peculiars’ or deaneries of immediate jurisdiction beyond Kent that were exempt from the local bishops’ control. They included the deaneries of the Arches in London; Croydon in Surrey; and Hadleigh in Suffolk. Cranmer administered several courts: the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, where the wills of the wealthiest men and women of the realm were proved; the Court of Canterbury in the deanery of the Arches, where clerical cases for the province were taken up; and the Court of Audience, where appeals or complaints were heard.
As archbishop, Cranmer outranked senior members of the aristocracy. He held the lordship of extensive properties. Canterbury, Lambeth, and Knole were the most distinguished of his twenty-one palaces, but Croydon and Otford were almost as splendid. He had other estates along the River Thames at Wimbledon and Mortlake.4 Cranmer had his own barge and servants to row him across the river. He maintained extensive stables, and he hunted deer in his parks. The tenants of his properties were numerous. At Canterbury, the archbishopric had a mint. In 1535, the archbishop’s annual income was estimated by the Valor Ecclesiasticus as £3093. He could not always collect the full amount, but his income placed him, at least in theory, in the company of peers of the realm.5
Most of the powers and possessions Cranmer enjoyed owed their origins to the archbishop’s role as the representative of the pope in England. But from the beginning of his archiepiscopate, he was unusually dependent upon Henry VIII’s goodwill, a fact he acknowledged at his consecration, as we have already observed. With the rest of the English Church, the archbishopric was becoming subordinated to the king, a process that had already begun under his predecessor William Warham.
Cranmer was in Italy in 1530 when Henry mounted his first great challenge against Warham’s authority. Two months after Cambridge was canvassed for its opinion in the Divorce, Henry interposed himself in his role as Defender of the Faith when Convocation examined heretical books. William Tyndale’s first translation of the New Testament of 1526 was denounced as dangerously corrupt and it was banned. But surprisingly, at the conclusion of their deliberations, Henry embarrassed Warham and lord chancellor Sir Thomas More by announcing that he would commission a more accurate translation of Holy Scripture that he intended to give to his people with his own hands, once they demonstrated that they were sufficiently prepared to receive it. His promise was one of the first indications that Henry intended to take a direct role in the spiritual lives of his subjects in exchange for their loyalty, and he probably was encouraged to take this step by Anne Boleyn.6
When Cranmer was on embassy in May 1532, he was not present also for the episode that has become known as the Submission of the Clergy, one of the pivotal moments in the history of the English Church, when Warham made a desperate attempt in Convocation to protect ecclesiastical privilege against the king. The crisis began during a review of the canons, the laws governing the Church, the most important assessment of canon law that had been attempted for nearly two hundred years. Warham wanted to improve clerical discipline and education, and his review might have led to substantial corrections. However, as we have noted in the previous chapter, he was interrupted when Henry charged him with praemunire. Initially, Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester sided with Warham. As a canon lawyer, Gardiner defended Convocation’s right to make laws independently for the Church in England without royal intervention or approval by Parliament. But Warham and Gardiner did not succeed. The Church lost its ancient powers of making its own laws without interference. Henry presented Convocation with an ultimatum and, under intense pressure, Warham and the members of the Upper House capitulated. The Submission of the Clergy was one of the contributing causes that led to Sir Thomas More’s resignation from the office of lord chancellor on 15 May 1532, and Gardiner’s outspoken defiance of the king probably cost him the archbishopric of Canterbury when Warham died in August.7 The Submission of the Clergy helped to deliver the Church into the hands of the king. As archbishop, Cranmer knew he was limited by Convocation’s subordination to royal authority and parliamentary oversight.
Although Cranmer’s title Totius Anglie primas made him Primate of all England, in actual terms the kingdom was divided into two provinces, Canterbury and York. In the fourteenth century, long and acrimonious disagreements about precedence were settled when the archbishops of Canterbury were allowed to call themselves ‘Primate of all England’, while the archbishops of York were termed more simply ‘Primate of England’. The archbishop of York at the start of Cranmer’s tenure was Edward Lee, who succeeded Cardinal Wolsey in 1531. Each province had its own Convocation that met separately, though York’s tended to ratify Canterbury’s decisions. The independent action of the two Convocations meant that during the middle ages the English clergy had not been able to unify into one body that might have become an additional and even dominant chamber as part of Parliament. As a consequence, especially after the defeat of 1532, the Convocation of Canterbury was permanently weakened.8 In political terms, because its authority was limited to the southern province, Cranmer had almost no power in the north. As we will see, Henry gave Thomas Cromwell greater authority over the entire Church in England than he allowed to Cranmer, and the king permitted his archbishop of Canterbury almost no direct political influence in lay affairs.
Over time, Cranmer developed a modest ‘affinity’ of clients and dependents. Unlike many bishops, he had never been head of a college, which would have given him valuable experience and an extensive network of friends to place in positions of influence. He drew members of his own family and men from various Cambridge colleges into his service. Eventually he was able to advance friends into high places. William Benson became abbot of Westminster and later its dean. Others rose to bishoprics, including Edward Fox of Hereford, who brought him to Henry’s attention. John Capon (d. 1557), the brother of the master of Jesus College, became bishop of Salisbury. Other Cambridge men advanced by Cranmer included John Bale, George Daye, Nicholas Heath, John Ponet, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Shaxton. The most prominent amongst them was Thomas Goodrich, who was both bishop of Ely from 1534 and lord chancellor from late 1551. Gradually Cranmer was able to extend the range of his influence, especially under Henry’s son Edward. However, Cranmer lacked the resources and perhaps the personal ability to develop what historians call a faction: a tight-knit group of people who were dedicated to the success of certain specific policies or causes. In the absence of organized political parties, factions became increasingly important, especially in the last decade of Henry’s reign. Too often Cranmer was disappointed by his friends’ deaths, dismissals, or defections. His loyal secretary Ralph Morice discounted some of Cranmer’s bishops as ‘rabblement’ who abandoned him during various crises, including the passage of the Act of Six Articles in 1539.9 So ineffectual has Cranmer seemed in political matters that some historians have characterized him as of ‘little use in a political struggle’ or said that he was ‘of little value as a political operator’,10 even though he was able to demonstrate considerable (but self-effacing) acumen throughout his career.
Inside the Church, Cranmer faced formidable challenges in administering his office. Immediately after Warham’s death, Richard Gwent was appointed to the key position of dean of the Arches, and he remained in that post until his death in 1543. Cranmer inherited an administrative system in Canterbury that he could not fully control, in part because Warham’s relatives and clients continued to enjoy offices that gave them lifetime sinecures. Kent formed the only archdeaconry in the diocese of Canterbury, and its archdeacon was responsible for its administration. He sat in the Lower House of Convocation, and he carried out the policies that the archbishop promoted. So sensitive was the relationship between the archbishop and his archdeacon that for many years Warham employed his nephew (sometimes described as his illegitimate son), who occupied the office at Cranmer’s entrance. Few of Warham’s men could be dislodged unless death deprived them, and they owed the new archbishop nothing. The same was true of the church livings that were in the archbishop’s gift. Traditionalists occupied the wealthiest livings, like the active preacher Rowland Philips, who presided as vicar of Croydon on Cranmer’s own doorstep. Enemies spread rumours that Cranmer was as ignorant as a gosling that wandered on the village green. Gibes from the time of his early marriage came back to haunt him. They said Cranmer was fit only to keep an inn, and they sneered that his wife had been the tapster at the Dolphin.11 Cranmer knew that ‘priests report the worse of me’. They spread ‘mere lies and tales’.12
The cathedral chapter at Canterbury also posed difficult problems that Cranmer could not overcome. It was ruled by Benedictine monks of the Priory of Christ Church, one of the oldest, wealthiest and most powerful religious houses in England, and the monks feared (with good reason) that the new archbishop was arriving as their nemesis. Cranmer struggled against withering opposition in Canterbury. As we will see in later chapters, even after the cathedral chapter was refounded and secularized, the former monks came close to destroying him in 1543. Then, after the accession of Queen Mary in 1553, they were instrumental in creating the final crisis that led to Cranmer’s arrest and his ultimate destruction.
Cranmer’s purposes as archbishop
In the protest Cranmer made before taking the oath at his consecration, he referred to his desire to reform those things in the Church that seemed to him in need of reformation.13 He had plans for the English Church that he was not always at liberty to express, and that he was not always successful in realizing, but may be summarized here.
The duties of a bishop were encapsulated by St Paul’s epistles, and especially in his letters to Timothy and Titus. Cranmer believed that the instruction of the laity was one of his greatest responsibilities, which he interpreted in light of Paul’s teaching in Romans 10:8–17 that ‘faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God’. Cranmer was a frequent and impressive preacher, a fact that has not always been noted because, rather surprisingly, his sermons have not survived. He oversaw all preachers in his province. He offered licenses to those he trusted, and he inhibited many. Most clergymen in the 1530s were ‘massing priests’, rather than trained preachers. For those who were unused to writing their own sermons and preaching in their own words, Cranmer wanted to supply homilies that they could read to their parishioners.
Under the royal supremacy, Cranmer worked to create what we now understand was a national Church. His great goal was to evangelize the English people. Like Queen Anne Boleyn, he wanted the legalization of an English Bible, and he and the queen offered Tyndale as much protection as they could. Secretly, using agents in his employ, Cranmer supported Tyndale and other translators who were working in exile in Antwerp and in other places on the continent. In late 1534, when Tyndale released his revised translation of the New Testament, Anne was sent a lavish copy, specially printed for her on vellum and inscribed ‘Anna Regina Angliae’. Tyndale’s New Testament was a daring present to give and for the queen to keep, especially as he was a hunted exile and his translation was an illegal book.14 In the last months of her life, the queen kept a copy of Miles Coverdale’s English Bible on a desk, and she read from it openly before her household.15
Cranmer also wanted the liturgy to be in English, and we have already observed his fascination with the services he observed in Nuremberg. Because he believed that the Mass was not a sacrifice, Cranmer wanted to remove all those practices that he thought distracted from the honour that was due solely to the one sacrifice Christ had made on Calvary. He dismissed traditional prayers like the rosary as unprofitable ‘lip labour’.16 Like the queen, he favoured the transformation of the religious houses into centres of preaching, teaching, and relief of the poor. He opposed pilgrimages and other traditional devotional practices. Like Thomas Bilney, he favoured the removal of religious imagery, including crucifixes and the images of saints, and in his iconoclasm he sharply differed from his Lutheran colleagues, who saw nothing objectionable with holy pictures or statues.
Cranmer also wished to work for doctrinal and political consensus amongst Protestant leaders, and he wanted to create an international Protestant power bloc that would rival the papacy and Catholic powers abroad. He wanted the English Church to have a definition of faith that was in concert with those of other Protestant Churches. He wanted to complete the long-desired revision of canon law that Warham had started, an ambitious and time-consuming project which occupied his attentions at several lengthy intervals. Domestically he wanted obedience from the king’s subjects and conformity from members of the clergy.
However, Cranmer was not allowed to introduce all of the changes he wished to implement in the English Church, even though his Cambridge friends encouraged him to seize the great opportunity that God had sent. Immediately after his consecration, George Joye (d. 1553) suggested that Latimer write Cranmer and ‘animate him to his office’. The archbishopric of Canterbury was ‘a perilous place’, but a ‘glorious’ one ‘to plant the Gospel’.17 Although Henry expected Cranmer to continue to denigrate the papacy with the same success that he brought to invalidating his first marriage, the king was indecisive, and moreover Henry was resistant to doctrinal innovations he did not understand. As we will observe in greater detail in the next chapters, Cranmer’s original intentions for the English Church may never have been possible to achieve without the continued presence of Anne Boleyn. He entered into the archbishopric with expectations that would not be fulfilled following her destruction in 1536. Instead, Cranmer was eclipsed by Cromwell, whose superior skills in creating policy and legislation led the king to make him vicegerent in spirituals at the beginning of 1535, first to conduct a royal visitation of the religious houses, and then to exercise broad powers over the English Church in both provinces as his vicar general from July 1536.18 After Anne’s fall, Cranmer adjusted his expectations, and he and Cromwell worked together to bring the English Church into closer alignment with the Lutheran princes of the League of Schmalkalden. Cranmer was disappointed again when Cromwell was destroyed in 1540. Thereafter, Cranmer was able to revive partially some plans he had deferred since Anne’s destruction, but continued pressure from the king meant that he did not have a freer hand until after Henry’s death in 1547.
Troubling ambiguities about the source of Cranmer’s powers as archbishop would pursue him until the end of his life. By separating the archbishopric from the papacy, and by impugning the power of the pope in England, the essential weakness of his office under the royal supremacy was revealed within a few years of his consecration. The autonomy of the Church in England was sacrificed, and the office of the archbishop of Canterbury was diminished. Cranmer was often outflanked by formidable opposition from other bishops, especially from John Stokesley of London and Stephen Gardiner of Winchester. Henry allowed Cromwell greater powers as vice gerent than Cranmer was ever permitted to exercise. As a consequence, too often Cranmer was reduced to the status of a government functionary, the vulnerable servant of a king whose supremacy he had willingly created by sacrificing himself.
John Frith
Immediately after Anne’s coronation, the king instructed Cranmer to examine John Frith. After his escape from Oxford in 1528 (which we observed in Chapter 2), Frith joined Tyndale in Antwerp, where he may have helped him with the translation of the Bible. In 1529 Frith was in Marburg in Hesse, where he attended Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli’s debate about the nature of the presence of Christ in the sacrament. Frith was the first English author to express a Reformed opinion about the Eucharist, which was at odds with traditional dogma as well as Lutheran opinion. In 1531 he released a provocative attack against Sir Thomas More and John Fisher in A disputacion of purgatory, which displayed his name prominently on the title page. When he returned to England that year, More seized him and sent him to the Tower, where Frith continued to write to Tyndale and the other ‘brethren’. His papers were stolen and delivered to More, who denounced him as a follower of Oecolampadius (1482–1531), who had been deeply influenced by Zwingli’s thinking that the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper is spiritual and a commemoration of his sacrifice on the cross. Frith argued that ‘This is my body’, the words Christ spoke at the Last Supper, should not be understood as a literal statement. More wrote that for Frith, the Eucharist was ‘only bare bread and wine’, and merely ‘a remembrance of Christ’s passion’.19
Not long before Cranmer’s consecration, in a Lenten sermon delivered at court, one of the king’s chaplains denounced the dangers that English sacramentaries posed, and he drew attention to Frith, who was still in the Tower. Henry ordered that Frith be examined by Cranmer in a panel that included Stokesley and Gardiner, as well as his brother-in-law Charles Brandon (d. 1545) the duke of Suffolk; the new Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley (1488–1544); and the earl of Wiltshire, the queen’s father. According to a story that Foxe recounted many years later, as Cranmer’s agents brought Frith from the Tower to be questioned at Croydon, they felt a great reluctance to convey him ‘as a sheep to the slaughter’. Frith was a Kentish man, and at Brixton they encouraged him to run away to his friends. It is unlikely that Cranmer secretly urged them to give Frith a chance to escape, and in any case he refused their offer.20
In the same letter in which Cranmer detailed Anne’s coronation to Nicholas Hawkins, he described Frith’s examinations. His eloquence and charm made a good impression even though his opinions isolated him from the support he might have otherwise enjoyed. His examiners would have preferred to ‘dispatch’ him, except that his opinion was ‘so notably erroneous’ that they felt that they had to let Stokesley pass judgement against him. But rather than let Frith be condemned at once, Cranmer sent for him three or four times and tried to persuade him on his own. He concluded (like More) that Frith had drawn his opinions from Oecolampadius, for Frith said that it was not necessary to believe as an article of Christian faith that the host had within it the very corporeal presence of Christ. Nothing Cranmer or the other examiners said would make him leave his opinion. Because they believed that the actual body and blood of Christ was present in the Eucharist, in 1533 Cranmer was actually closer to More’s opinion than he was to Frith’s.21
By refusing to submit, Frith placed his own conscience ahead of his obedience to the king and he violated existing statutes against heresy. Because Henry had sent Anne’s father and Suffolk to examine him, Frith had been given unusually generous opportunities to fall into line. Cranmer had also gone to extraordinary lengths to interview him privately. He was only too well aware that English evangelicals were surrounded by enemies, and Frith’s case could not be allowed to endanger the possibility of bringing about doctrinal change in the future. In 1533, Stokesley began to enhance his own power and influence, and he inhibited Latimer from preaching in London, which was an indication of his real opinion of the evangelicals. Cranmer’s own position was precarious, for the other examiners could easily report him to the king if they thought he was making a stubborn case to save Frith. His death was a dreadful warning that evangelicals could not exceed the strictures that Henry placed on them as the Church’s head. Cranmer and his friends had done their utmost for Frith. Had he been willing, he might have been spared, but he refused to equivocate or temporize. Therefore his examiners realized they had no choice but to relinquish him to Stokesley as his ordinary to pass sentence and to hand him over to the secular powers for punishment. Condemned with him for the same opinion was Andrew Hewet, a London tailor. In the same letter Cranmer wrote to Hawkins about Anne’s coronation, he noted that Frith ‘looketh every day to go unto the fire’. Frith and Hewet were burnt together at Smithfield on 4 July 1533.
In later years Frith was admired as one of the great sacrificed heroes of the early Reformation. Cranmer meant Hawkins to share his news at the Emperor Charles’s court, and therefore his letter conveyed official thinking disguised as a friendly missive. But Hawkins was also truly a friend, and he would have become bishop of Ely had not he died in Aragon in 1534 while still on embassy. Reading through the lines, he would have known what Cranmer may have meant privately about Frith. Probably they had both known him at Cambridge. Cranmer’s letter hints that he had sympathy for Frith, a feeling that he knew Hawkins would share, and moreover he felt deep regret that Frith had been lost, or rather that he had thrown himself away, despite the opportunities he had been offered to submit and to save himself. Cranmer’s position was clear: he would put English law and the will of the king ahead of exposing himself to save Frith, despite the remorse he may have felt for the condemned man. Frith’s execution was meant to demonstrate to Pope Clement VII and the Emperor Charles that Henry would uphold the fundamental tenets of Christian belief against heretics in England.
The Nun of Kent
At the beginning of his archiepiscopate, Cranmer’s most immediate practical problem was lack of funds. After Warham’s death, valuables belonging to the archbishopric were carried off or damaged by neglect. Although the king promised Cranmer the loan of one thousand marks (about £666) in his first summer as archbishop, he was worried by a shortage of money so acute that he was forced to sell wood from his properties.22 When he made the gift of a buck to William Capon for the fellows of Jesus College, he could not send with it the small sum necessary for its baking.23 Cranmer accepted the sons of important people into his service, and then he realized ‘I have overcharged my house with servants’ whom he could not afford to feed. So many deer had been killed in the archbishop’s parks while the see was vacant that he had no venison.24 Desperate for assistance, Cranmer summoned Harold Rosell, his sister Dorothy’s husband, to become clerk of his kitchen, an important financial position that involved the supply of his household.25 In the months between his consecration and his enthronement, he called into his service other relatives from Nottinghamshire and friends from Cambridge, including Nicholas Heath as his chaplain.26 Morice may have eventually joined his service upon the recommendation of Anne’s brother, Lord Rochford. Shortly before his enthronement, Cranmer learned that the king had reduced the loan he had promised him to no more than ₤500, and he was forced to turn to the queen’s father and others for assistance.27 Cranmer’s financial position did not improve for another five or more years.28
At the beginning of September 1533, Cranmer was in attendance at court for Anne’s lying in at Greenwich. On 6 September the queen was brought to bed of a girl instead of the expected prince. Had Anne given birth to a son, Henry would have greeted his heir as the indubitable sign of God’s favour, and Anne would have been secure. Cranmer was godfather for the infant Elizabeth.
Just five weeks before her birth, Rochford brought stunning news from the continent that Pope Clement had at last issued a ruling in the king’s case. The pope found in Katherine’s favour, and he ordered Henry to take her back or be excommunicated.29
At this dangerous moment, Henry embarked on daring new diplomatic overtures. For the first time, he sent requests to the elector of Saxony, Duke John Frederick, and Landgrave Philip of Hesse that English ambassadorial posts be created at their courts. To ward off papal retribution, Henry asked King Francis I of France to mediate with the pope on his behalf. He instructed Cranmer to warn the English ambassadors in France that Clement intended ‘to make some manner of prejudicial process against me and my church’.30 Henry also decided to call for a meeting of a General Council, whose aim would be the reduction of the power of the papacy and the reform of long-standing abuses in the Christian Church. In the distant future, Henry’s suggestion bore fruit in the Council of Trent, which began to sit (without English participation) in 1545. Taking further defensive steps, in December 1533, the king’s council determined that the pope henceforth should be referred to merely as the diocesan bishop of Rome. Official English documents no longer made any mention of ‘the pope’.31
In an atmosphere of rising urgency, threats had to be eliminated, and Cranmer had a central role in removing one of the king’s most formidable opponents: Elizabeth Barton, the visionary known as the Nun of Kent. Barton had achieved wide fame in the 1520s for her revelations. At the outset, her predictions concerned personal matters of the soul, and she offered advice to the men and women who came to her for guidance. She was brought to Warham’s attention by one of his chaplains, Henry Gold (d. 1534), the incumbent of Aldington in Kent (important as the parish that provided Erasmus’s pension), who as a Cambridge theology student in the late 1520s had asked Cranmer to examine him.32 Warham placed Barton in a Benedictine convent in Canterbury and Dr Edmund Bocking (d. 1534), one of the monks of Christ Church, collected her utterances for publication. Many people regarded her as a living saint, and thousands of pilgrims on their way to St Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral stopped at her convent to visit her.
But in time Barton began to criticize the king’s desire for a divorce, and the extensive clientele who revered her for what Sir Thomas More called her ‘good inspirations and great revelations’ allowed her to reach the very highest audience chambers. Warham introduced her to Wolsey, and she warned them against their involvement in the king’s Great Matter. She sent letters to Pope Clement to warn him of disaster should he assist the king’s designs. More than once she was brought to court to meet Henry. Cranmer concluded later that her influence was so great that she managed to delay the business of the ‘Divorce’.33
Barton’s greatest prophesy concerned the divine punishment that would be meted out should Henry marry Anne: within a month, he would no longer be king in the eyes of God, and then England would be laid waste by the plague. Some of her revelations were already in print, and Bocking was about to release the rest when More warned Barton that she should refrain from speaking about matters that pertained to princes. But he was too late.34
In mid-July 1533, once the news arrived of Clement’s threat to excommunicate Henry, Cranmer summoned Barton for questioning. At first she would confess nothing, although he encouraged her, in an unhurried fashion, to confide in him just as she had confided in Warham. Later, More found the mildness of Cranmer’s technique remarkably disconcerting.35 Bocking was seized, and Barton’s contact with the pope’s ambassadors in England was revealed. She had been helped by a scribe employed by Archdeacon Warham. At length, Cranmer, Latimer, and Cromwell exposed her as a fraud. Cranmer wrote Hawkins, who was still with the imperial court, that the nun confessed ‘that she never had a vision in all her life’. She had invented everything to impress her friends.36
In November 1533, Lord Chancellor Audley brought Barton before an assembly of the king’s councilors, bishops, and noblemen, and when he finished denouncing her, there were cries that she should be sent to the stake. For centuries, the special penalty that women paid for treason or for murdering their husbands (which was understood as a form of ‘petty’ treason) was execution by burning, but Barton’s case represented something new. Cranmer decided that those who stubbornly supported the papal supremacy could be condemned as heretics because they were enemies of the Gospel.37 For both heretics and women convicted of treason, the penalty was the same: death by burning. Further, Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher were implicated as Barton’s friends.
On 23 November 1533, the day after Cranmer wrote that the king wanted to call a General Council, Barton, with nine of her followers, including Bocking and Gold, were exposed at Paul’s Cross. In a grim act of humiliation, they were made to stand on a scaffold next to the pulpit. The preacher was John Capon, Cranmer’s nominee for the bishopric of Bangor, and his sermon castigated Barton for encouraging Henry’s subjects to think that God no longer accepted him as a righteous king who deserved to be obeyed. Sir Thomas More was amongst the thousands in the audience that day. Horrified by what he heard, he immediately tried to shield himself from impending disaster. He sent his servant to the Charterhouse monks to inform them that Barton ‘was undoubtedly proved a false deceiving hypocrite’.38
The suppression of the Nun of Kent and her supporters played an important part in Cranmer’s enthronement at the end of the year. When he entered Canterbury for the first time, he came as the king’s man. On 3 December 1533, Cranmer was enthroned by the monks in the cathedral’s Trinity Chapel. Only a few steps away towered the jewel-encrusted shrine of his greatest predecessor, the martyred St Thomas Becket, murdered in 1170 at the behest of King Henry II (1133–1189) for his allegiance to the papacy. In its shadow, Warham had been interred just a year ago. The irony of the situation was not lost on Christ Church’s prior Thomas Goldwell. His house was threatened by Bocking’s arrest. At the enthronement banquet, Goldwell served swans, an impressive but inexpensive dish that was wholly inadequate for the occasion. Up to the last, Cranmer was sending out pleas for venison.39
On 7 December, the Sunday following Cranmer’s enthronement, Barton and her followers were exposed to humiliation once again in Canterbury. The preacher on this occasion was Heath, who repeated Salcot’s sermon with additions that had been prepared by Cranmer himself. He emphasized her crimes of idolatry and heresy. Barton had told her followers that from heaven, Mary Magdalen had sent her a letter, illuminated in gold with the Names of Jesus and Mary. Cranmer wrote the king that Heath ‘grievously rebuked’ Barton and her supporters for their crimes. Cranmer also reported that the people of Canterbury seemed glad that the nun’s ‘false and forged matters’ had been exposed.40
Immediately Cranmer began a visitation of the diocese of Canterbury. He ‘diligently examined’ the monks of Christ Church to discover how deeply they were implicated with Bocking and the Nun, and he was able to inform the king that few had had anything to do with Barton’s ‘false revelations’. Fearful of Henry’s disfavour, Goldwell asked Cranmer to intercede for Christ Church, and offered the king two or three hundred pounds for his clemency, although (as Cranmer noted) the house was already heavily in debt.41
Cranmer’s visitation was also noteworthy for its iconoclasm. From the Abbey of Boxley near Maidstone, he took down a huge crucifix known as the Rood of Grace that once had moveable features, and he sent it to Westminster to show to the king.42 This was the first occasion of many in which Cranmer or his officers removed religious imagery to prevent them from being objects of devotion.
The defeat of Barton and her allies in Canterbury meant that at one blow Cranmer intimidated the senior members of Canterbury’s diocesan clergy into a kind of spiteful acquiescence that lasted long enough for him to strengthen his own position over them, at least for the time being.43 In early 1534, Cranmer was able to pension off Warham’s nephew (who was fortunate to escape) and he collated (or named) his brother Edmund to the archdeaconry of Canterbury.44
Edmund’s lifelong support of his brother has not always been fully appreciated. We should think of the two Cranmers as inseparable, working together in mutual interest. Edmund served as the archbishop’s consultant, confidant, and protector. In step with him, he shared his brother’s opinions in religion as they developed over time. Edmund pursued Kentish clergy who affirmed the authority of the pope.45 He handled matters that were too delicate to be entrusted to anyone else, including the sifting of controversial religious tracts.46 Edmund was essential to his brother. Cranmer also brought their sister Alice out of her Cistercian convent in Lincolnshire. She was elected prioress of the Benedictine house of Sheppey in Minster in the Isle of Thanet, even though she had to change her religious order.47 The Cranmers were completely devoted to each other and, as we shall see, they defended and built on their family’s prosperity whenever the opportunity arose.
The Act of Succession
The threat against the king’s security that Pope Clement continued to pose convinced Henry and his advisors that not enough legislative and administrative measures had been put into place to guarantee his headship over the Church, and especially to ensure the loyalty of the English people. In November 1533, the king asked some of his bishops if they would consent to reject papal authority in England. The special protest that Cranmer made at his consecration meant that he had no hesitancy in consenting to the king’s request now. But others refused, mindful that they had taken oaths when they entered into their bishoprics to be loyal to the pope.48
The next session of the Reformation Parliament opened on 15 January 1534. Cranmer attended the House of Lords almost every day, more often than any other bishop. His help was essential in securing the passage of the king’s new legislation.49 Towards the end of February a bill of attainder was sent to the House of Lords against Barton, Bocking, Gold and her other associates. At the insistence of the king, Fisher and More were also named in the bill. They sprang to defend themselves from the charge of treason. More was examined for the first time at the beginning of March by Cranmer, Cromwell, the duke of Norfolk, and Lord Chancellor Audley. More distanced himself so ably from any association with ‘the wicked woman of Canterbury’ that he was able to deflect the attainder, at least for the present, though he remained frantically worried. Fisher was too ill in Rochester to appear in his own defence, but he was also able to escape for the time being by paying the enormous sum of £300 as a penalty.50 Barton was attainted by Parliament.
In 1534 Parliament created a new Faculty Office that empowered the archbishop of Canterbury to issue the kind of licenses, dispensations or grants that were handled by the papal courts. Previously, wealthy or influential people had routinely sent suits to Wolsey as legate.51 After he fell, as we have already seen, Cranmer had overseen this kind of business at Rome in 1530 when he was briefly Penitentiary for England. The Faculty Office continued the process of claiming powers for the English Church that had originally rested with the papacy. It offered Cranmer a vital extension of his authority that was not, however, designed to infringe upon similar powers that the archbishop of York and the other bishops already enjoyed over the clergy and laity in their own dioceses. In mid-April 1534, the Faculty Office began to issue its first dispensations.52
Parliament reduced Katherine’s style to Princess Dowager, to reflect the fact that as Arthur’s widow she had never been truly married to the king. Those who recognized her as princess dowager tacitly accepted Cranmer’s verdict and thus they denied the authority of the pope in England.53
The most important piece of legislation that was passed in the early session of 1534 has become known as the first Henrician Act of Succession. Its preamble denounced the popes for usurping powers that rightfully belonged to England’s kings. It stated that Henry’s marriage to Katherine was against the law of God, and it could not be dispensed by any earthly power. It validated the king’s marriage to Anne, and the statute denounced the pope for interfering with England’s succession. The throne was to pass to the male heirs that Henry might have with his lawful wife Anne, or failing them, to his sons with a subsequent wife. Should the king have no sons, their daughter Elizabeth would succeed, and her children after her, and then any other daughters yet to be born to Henry and Anne, and their issue after them in the order of their birth. Anyone who wrote against the Act would be guilty of the capital offence of treason. Anyone who spoke against it would be guilty of misprision of treason and liable to imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. Katherine’s daughter Mary was not mentioned in the statute, and thus she was implicitly excluded from the succession.54
The Act of Succession also stipulated that the king’s subjects should, at a time appointed, take an oath in the presence of the king or his officers, and swear that they would ‘without fraud or guile’ to observe, maintain, and keep the provisions of the Act upon pain of misprision of treason and imprisonment. Katherine remained extremely popular, and in light of Clement’s ruling in her favour, the government feared widespread unrest by her demotion.55
Henry came to the Lords when the session closed on 30 March 1534 to watch as the oath was administered by Cranmer and the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. Its text was prepared by Cromwell and Audley after the Succession Act passed. Each man signed his oath to bear his ‘faith, truth, and obedience’ only to the king and his heirs, and not to any foreign authority, prince or potentate’.56 The next day Convocation met at St Paul’s to vote on the proposition that the bishop of Rome had no greater jurisdiction in England, given to him by God in Scripture, than did any other foreign bishop. Cranmer and ten bishops signed, followed by ninety-one clergymen.57
Meanwhile, in Rome, the Consistory agreed with Clement’s decisions, and it ruled on 23 March 1534 that Katherine’s marriage to Henry was valid. The French had frustrated the decision for as long as possible. The verdict arrived in England just after Parliament was prorogued, and Henry reacted to the news with vindictive fury.58 Immediately Cranmer inhibited all preachers licensed in his province to prevent them from raising doubts concerning ‘the prince, his laws, or succession’.59 In one of the most shocking events of the reign, on 20 April 1534, Barton and her associates, including Bocking and Gold, were brought out of prison and dragged on hurdles through the streets of London. They were taken to Tyburn (near Hyde Parke Corner in the present day), where they were hanged.60
The news from Rome created fresh impetus for the succession oath to be administered. It became the ultimate test of loyalty that identified those who refused to side with the king. The succession oath was a potent weapon that carried with it the threat of perjury as well as eternal damnation for those who swore against good conscience. Bishop Fisher had not attended the Lords or Convocation. At the end of February he was still in Rochester. But now he was summoned, and he made his way to Lambeth Palace on 13 April 1534, when London’s clergy assembled to swear the oath. More noted that he was the only layman to be called that day. The commissioners took great effort to secure his submission. Cranmer was assisted by Cromwell, Audley, and Benson. More was shown the oath under the great seal. He was given the printed roll of the Act of Succession, which he read very carefully ‘secretly by myself’. Then he said that although he would swear to the succession, his conscience would not permit him to take the oath, for he feared the damnation of his soul. Audley told him that he was the first to refuse, and showed him the signatures they had taken from the Lords and the Commons. Still More refused to sign. Then Fisher was called. He too would not sign. More watched as most of the clergy of London swore ‘without any sticking’, even Rowland Philips, vicar of Croydon, who before now had been a staunch defender of Katherine’s marriage. Only Nicholas Wilson (d. 1548) also held out. Then More was shown how many had signed while he was waiting, and when he refused again the commissioners accused him of obstinacy. Then they asked him why he refused. Perhaps this was a trick to trap him into speaking against the Act and thus make him liable to misprision of treason. But More answered that he feared that if he told them he would only exasperate Henry further.61
Then Cranmer tried to persuade him, using a ‘subtle’ argument, that since he knew he must obey the king, he should abandon his doubts, and ‘take the sure way in obeying your prince, and swear it’. Again More decided in his conscience that he could not, and that this was one of those cases when he should not obey his prince. He believed that the price of his soul was too much to pay for his life. Benson told him that his opinion was erroneous, and Cromwell declared that he would rather his only son should lose his head than More should refuse to take the oath. Then Cromwell used a threat: now the king would believe that More was responsible for what Elizabeth Barton had done. When More repeated that he was willing to swear to the succession but he would not take the oath, he was sent to the Tower. Afterwards, Cranmer wrote Cromwell that he concluded that Fisher and More did not wish to repudiate ‘the authority of the bishop of Rome’ or Katherine’s ‘pretensed matrimony’. He suggested that they be persuaded to swear to the Act of Succession but not its preamble, and then let it be known that they had sworn without reservation. Then Henry could ‘stop the mouths’ of Katherine’s defenders, especially the Emperor Charles. However, Henry rejected Cranmer’s suggestion. The king insisted that More must submit to the full statute. More and Fisher remained in the Tower.62
The metropolitical visitation
The rest of Cranmer’s first year as archbishop was spent on a visitation of every diocese in his entire province. Before he set out in May 1534 Cranmer released the most important order he issued to preachers during Henry’s reign: a long set of instructions that established the form for the ‘bidding prayer’ that they should use as they led their audiences in prayer for the king and the ‘most gracious lady queen Anne his wife’. Cranmer ordered the clergy to preach ‘against the usurped power of the bishop of Rome’. To avoid dissension, he ordered no one to preach on matters that had not yet been defined for the English Church: the existence of purgatory, the honouring of saints, clerical marriage, or justification by faith. He ordered preachers to ‘purely, sincerely, and justly preach the scripture and the word of Christ’.63
Visitations were expensive, time-consuming, and intrusive. No diocesan ever welcomed a visitation by his metropolitan, for the process challenged every bishop’s authority in his own jurisdiction. Warham had not visited his province in recent memory. Moreover, Cranmer’s metropolitical visitation was ‘an enormous task’ made even more challenging, because it involved the administration of the oath of succession to the king’s subjects across southern England, a project that was itself so vast that one historian has recently described it as ‘Herculean’ in its ambition.64 Cranmer’s officers sent out citations across the province that inhibited the diocesan bishops’ powers for the length of the visitation. Henry ordered all secular officials to assist his archbishop.65
Cranmer’s first destination was Rochester, where he wanted to investigate any ‘special matters’ that deserved particular scrutiny in light of Fisher’s arrest. He met no resistance there. However, in Norwich the aged Bishop Nix (who had burnt Thomas Bilney) was accused of praemunire, and he was imprisoned briefly.66 In August and September 1534 Cranmer and his men were in the west of England. Because Bishop Girolamo Ghinucci had been deprived as a consequence of the royal supremacy,67 diocesan officials in Worcester were anxious not to offer the archbishop any difficulties.
Diocese by diocese, Cranmer and his assistants called the clergy together in the chapter houses of the cathedrals or the religious houses. In his visitation sermons, he warned the clergy to leave the old deceitful ways that they had pursued under the papacy, to set aside their avarice, and to rededicate themselves to love and care for the people’s salvation. The oath of succession was administered. To refuse it meant exposure and immediate arrest. Each man signed an attestation that he had sworn. Many of the still-surviving sets of signatures, comprising thousands of names, were gathered during Cranmer’s visitation.68
The challenge
At the beginning of the visitation in London, Cranmer ran into serious difficulties when he was confronted by a ‘revolt’ against his authority by Bishop Stokesley.69 The citations that were sent out in Cranmer’s name used the titles that described him as Primate of all England and papal legate. In the fourteenth century, Apostolice sedis legatus had become a standard part of the archbishop’s style at the same time as did Totius Anglie primas. The mandate that the king sent for secular officers to assist Cranmer in his visitation also designated the archbishop as legate of the apostolic see, and Cranmer had been using both titles as a matter of course from the beginning of his tenure, including in his decision that invalidated Katherine’s marriage.70
Inadvertently, Cranmer’s style continued to reflect the very same source of his authority that the new legislation and his own efforts were designed to discredit. Under the circumstances this was an error, for it permitted Stokesley to exploit ambiguities concerning the source of the archbishop’s authority. An ugly episode occurred when Cranmer came to the chapter house of St Paul’s Cathedral, and Stokesley refused his authority out right. In front of the assembled clergy of the entire diocese, Stokesley declared that he would neither accept Cranmer as legate nor obey his visitation because the powers he claimed went against the king’s crown and the law. Stokesley defended his own jurisdiction, and he referred to the statute that created the Faculty Office, which guaranteed the existing rights of bishops without extending to the archbishop new authority over them. When Stokesley insisted that his protest be recorded in the records of the visitation, Cranmer commanded his man to make no mention of it.
Stokesley refused to be inhibited, and in June and July 1534 he continued to conduct routine matters of diocesan administration even after Cranmer excommunicated some of his officers. Stokesley complained to the king that Cranmer acted against Holy Scripture and he used illegal means that exceeded anything the bishops of Rome had attempted at their most tyrannical. Stokesley argued that people would think that Cromwell exercised his powers as vicegerent by the king’s authority, but that Cranmer’s came from the bishop of Rome. Thus Stokesley was able to portray himself as having greater loyalty to Henry and his Church than did the archbishop of Canterbury.71 In response, Cranmer replied that he was visiting London diocese by virtue of his right as primate and metropolitan, and that he was undertaking nothing that could be construed as a derogation of the king’s powers or the statutes of the realm: a statement that Stokesley recorded in his register but did not accept.72
On 4 November 1534, Cranmer appeared in Convocation and he repudiated the title Apostolice sedis legatus. He announced that from henceforth he would be known simply as metropolitan. But his renunciation was not enough. As his visitation proceeded to Winchester in April 1535, Gardiner and his archdeacon Nicholas Harpsfield protested against Cranmer’s use of ‘primate of all England’ which they said was an insult to Henry’s headship. In May, Cranmer wrote to Cromwell to defend himself by saying that he cared for his title, name, or style no more ‘than I do by the paring of an apple’ and no further than they served to set forth God’s word and will. He suggested that Gardiner tendered the king’s interests less than he tendered his own. Cranmer suspected that the bishops preferred to have the archbishops’ titles and powers taken away so that all might be equal together. Turning around the idea from Apostolice sedis legatus, Cranmer wished that Henry’s bishops would rather call themselves ‘apostles of Jesus Christ’.73
The New Testament
In the same session that Cranmer renounced his title, Convocation voted to censure Tyndale’s second translation of the New Testament. However, Cranmer managed to press Henry to make an important concession. When the king came to prorogue the session, the Upper House petitioned him to sponsor the trustworthy translation that he had promised in 1530, and the king agreed.74
In early 1535, Cranmer assigned the books of the New Testament for revision. He did not initiate an original translation, for that would have been a larger effort than he could have been able to mount. Rather, Tyndale’s New Testament was to be ‘thoroughly corrected’ by comparison with the original Greek. He asked the ‘best learned bishops’ to make ‘a perfect correction’. Gardiner was sent the Gospels of Saints Luke and John, which cost him such ‘great labour’ that he feared for his health. Stokesley was given the Acts of the Apostles, but he handed his portion back to Morice uncorrected, saying that he was surprised that Cranmer would abuse the laity by giving them liberty to read the Scriptures in English, which did ‘nothing else but infect them with heresies’. He told Morice ‘I will never be guilty’ of bringing ‘the simple people into errour’. When Cranmer was shown that Stokesley had done nothing towards completing his assignment, he marvelled to his chaplains that the bishop of London was so uncooperative that he ‘will not do as other men do’.75
The executions of Fisher and More
The oath of obedience, to which the Commons and many others had sworn in 1534, was not part of the original Act of Succession. Rather, it was devised by Cromwell and Audley after the statute passed, and thus it had no real standing in the law.76 This was an oversight that permitted Fisher and More to evade condemnation temporarily. Late in 1534 Cromwell perfected a set of procedures that allowed for no escape. The sixth session of the Reformation Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in November with the exact wording of the oath. The new Act demanded that the king’s subjects must renounce the powers of any foreign authority or potentate, and that they must repudiate any oath to a foreign power that they had already taken.77 It was a weapon to ensure the obedience of all the bishops who had arrived on the bench before 1534 and who had taken their oaths to the pope as a matter of course at their elevation, as Cranmer had refused to do. It was also aimed against the members of the religious orders, who had sworn fealty to the pope at the time they entered religion.
The king moved remorselessly against those who would not take the oath of supremacy. The sixth session of the Reformation Parliament also passed a harsh new treason law for use against More and Fisher if they continued to refuse to submit. High treason was defined not only by an actual attempt to injure the king or queen or their heirs, but by any simple expression of a malicious wish that they might suffer some harm. It was high treason if someone maliciously deprived them of their titles: if someone denied that Anne was queen or refused to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church. It was high treason to call the king a heretic, a tyrant, or a usurper. As the bill for the treason law was discussed in the Commons, its severity was denounced. Only the word ‘maliciously’ might stand between an unguarded opinion expressed during a casual conversation and an accusation of high treason. Many people could become subject to the fearsome penalty of being tortured to death in public and having all their property confiscated unless they could show that they had no real malice in their hearts. Despite obvious reluctance in the Commons, the bill passed into law.78 Fisher and More and all who refused to take the oath were now in extreme peril.
Like every person in a position of authority, Cranmer was required to detect offences against the law, and he sent Cromwell evidence of treasonous talk. The archbishop sent Cromwell a priest who had asked for vengeance on the king for the new tax of the First Fruits and Tenths that passed late in 1534. He also sent Cromwell a woman who was accused of saying that there had never been so much despoiling of the realm ‘since this new queen was made’.79
In April 1535, the priors of three Carthusian monasteries were accused of treason under the new law for their failure to accept the king as supreme head of the Church, or for ‘depriving’ him of his title because they would not take the oath. They were John Houghton (d. 1535) of the London Charterhouse; Robert Lawrence (d. 1535) of Beauvale and Augustine Webster (d. 1535) of the Axholme Charterhouse in Lincolnshire. Accused with them was the scholar Richard Reynolds (d. 1535) of Syon Abbey, England’s only Bridgettine house. They were tried at Westminster on 28 and 29 April before Cromwell, Audley, and Norfolk. The monks knew the law, and in their defence they referred to the only small exception it allowed: Houghton said that they denied the king’s supremacy only as a matter of conscience. They had not done so out of any malice. The members of the jury did not want to convict, and Cromwell had to threaten them into returning a guilty verdict.80
On 30 April 1535, Cromwell and several members of the Council examined More in the Tower and told him that Henry wanted his full answer. Although he knew the monks had been condemned for treason, More said that he would not ‘meddle’ with the question of the king’s or the pope’s titles.81 On the same day Cranmer wrote Cromwell that he was shocked to hear of the plight of the condemned men, especially as there was no other charge but treason against them. He knew that Reynolds was a capable theologian. Moreover, Cranmer took a special interest in Webster, a Lincolnshire man, who had promised that he would never openly defend the authority of the pope. Cranmer asked if the king would permit him to examine them, for ‘I suppose I could do very much with them’ by persuading them with ‘sincere doctrine’ to leave their ‘ignorance’. If he succeeded they could ‘publish’ their change of heart to the world, and be an example to others to accept the supremacy. Better that they could be persuaded, Cranmer thought, than to suffer death in the ignorance they now professed.82
But Cranmer was not permitted to speak with Reynolds or Webster. On 4 May 1535 the Carthusian priors and Reynolds were dragged on hurdles from the Tower to Tyburn, where they were hanged in their habits, then cut down alive and disembowelled while they still breathed. Then they were beheaded. Their bodies were hacked apart, and their members were impaled on spears and displayed across London.83
Fisher had always taken a much more open line of opposition than More to Henry’s repudiation of Katherine and the supremacy. When Cromwell questioned him after the Carthusians suffered, he continued to refuse to make even the slightest accommodation to the king. Fisher told Cromwell plainly that he could not consent to take the king as supreme head of the Church, which made him guilty of speaking treason.84
At almost the same time, the new pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, r. 1534–1549) made Fisher a cardinal in acknowledgement of the books he had written against Luther, and he asked King Francis to intercede with Henry for Fisher’s release. Henry received the news vindictively. On 3 June, Cromwell returned to the Tower, this time bringing with him Cranmer, Wiltshire, Suffolk, and Audley. Cromwell told More the king was not satisfied with the answer he had given before the Carthusians were executed, and now Henry commanded him to say whether or not he thought the Act of Supremacy was lawful. This was almost More’s last chance. When he refused to say anything further than he had in April, Cromwell reminded him of the measures he had taken as lord chancellor to suppress heretics. The news had just arrived in England that Tyndale had been seized and imprisoned in the Castle of Vilvorde near Brussels. Cromwell pressed More. If Bilney, Frith, and Tyndale, all whom he had pursued, had been compelled to make answers about the primacy of the pope, then More should be required give his opinion about the supremacy of the king. But More refused to answer.85
Later that same day, 3 June 1535, Cromwell sent every bishop a clear order that in all dioceses, the clergy must preach every Sunday in all public places that the ‘usurped’ power of the bishop of Rome was extinguished in England. The king was now to be recognized by every subject as ‘supreme head in earth, immediately under God, of the Church of England’, a fact that had been acknowledged with the agreement of Parliament, Convocation, and both universities. All schoolmasters were to teach the supremacy to their students. The bishop of Rome was not to be prayed for as pope, and the word papa was to be stricken out of all Mass books in every church and chapel in England.86
That Cromwell, and not Cranmer, issued this order marked a new phase in the ascendancy of the king’s chief minister. For the first time, a layman was given the authority to annex the power of the pulpit in service to the state. That the archbishop seems not to have been consulted about the order in advance is likely. When Cranmer received Cromwell’s letter at Lambeth Palace the next day, he had doubts about it that he sent back orally by messenger. Only a year earlier in his Bidding Prayer Order, Cranmer had commanded preachers to denounce the usurped power of the pope, if not every week, then habitually, using a strong evangelical message. This aspect of the new orders was now stripped away. The king through Cromwell reduced the topics of sermons to a narrow consideration of the supremacy, without the evangelicalism that was a pronounced feature of the instructions Cranmer had given. Angered by the heroic opposition of the Carthusians and the sympathy they evoked as they went to their deaths, Henry concluded that previous measures had been insufficient. His supremacy had not been planted in the hearts of his subjects. Cromwell’s order marked a new feature in the long series of encroachments that the royal supremacy made on ecclesiastical privilege. When Cranmer received his letter he pledged to do all in his power to satisfy the king’s ‘express commandment’.87 Mindful that Fisher was about to follow the Carthusians, the other bishops hastened to ring endorsements of the king’s supremacy from every pulpit. In Mary’s reign, Cranmer could tell his examiners with some truth that he had opposed More and Fisher’s executions, but he could not deflect the king from taking revenge upon them. On 19 June 1535, a second group of Carthusians were dragged to Tyburn to suffer. Bishop Fisher was beheaded on 22 June. Sir Thomas More was killed on 6 July.
The impasse created by Fisher and More’s resistance was overcome when Henry strengthened Thomas Cromwell’s authority over Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and the other bishops. Stokesley’s and Gardiner’s challenges to Cranmer’s visitation were essential in demonstrating that the archbishop’s powers were too weak to be effective. The present crisis required a stronger and more comprehensive approach across both provinces by a vicar-general whose authority could not be challenged because it came exclusively from the king. In the next chapter, we will examine Cranmer’s problematic relationship with Cromwell. The royal supremacy separated the archbishop of Canterbury from his symbolic role as the representative of the pope in England, and as a result Cranmer lost much of the authority and prestige that his office had long enjoyed.
Notes
1The collect for Saint Philip and James day, 3 May, written by Thomas Cranmer, for the second prayer book: The boke of common praier, and administracion of the sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: Richard Grafton, August 1552, RSTC 16285), 107v.
2The essential study on the powers of the archbishops is Canterbury Administration, by I. J. Churchill (London, 1933). See also D. M. Smith, Guide to Bishops’ Registers of England and Wales (London, 1981), 1–19.
3Prince-bishop: P. Ayris, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Metropolitical Visitation of Canterbury Province 1533–1535’, in From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Miscellany, ed. S. Taylor, Church of England Record Society, 7 (1999), 1–46, especially 25.
4P. Hembry, ‘Episcopal palaces, 1535 to 1660’, in Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to S. T. Bindoff, eds. E. W. Ives et al., (London, 1978), 146–66.
5Valor Ecclesiasticus, 1 (London, 1810); G. Alexander, ‘Victim or Spendthrift? The Bishop of London and his income in the sixteenth century’, in Wealth and Power in Tudor England, 128–45; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 166–7. Tenants: Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters nos. 31, 74.
6J. F. Mozley, William Tyndale (London, 1937), 264; D. Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, 1994), 110–34, 361; S. Wabuda, ‘A day after doomsday’: Cranmer and the Bible translations of the 1530s’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, c. 1530–1700, eds. K. Killeen, H. Smith and R. J. Willie (Oxford, 2015), 23–37.
7M. Kelly, ‘The Submission of the Clergy’, TRHS, 5th series, 15 (1965), 97–119.
8S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), 64–7, 72–3, 177–8.
9Morice, 248.
10G. R. Elton, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s Decline and Fall’, HJ, 10 (1951), 151; R. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (London, 2002), 103.
11Morice, 269–72.
12Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters, nos. 14, 118.
13J. M. Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2013), 102; LPL, Cranmer’s Register, 4v.
14Mozley, Tyndale, 264–7, 289–91. M. Dowling, ‘Anne Boleyn as Patron’, Henry VIII: A European Court in England, ed. D. Starkey (London, 1991), 107–11; and the same author’s ‘Anne Boleyn and Reform’, JEH, 35 (1984), 30–45.
15M. Dowling, ed. ‘William Latymer’s Chronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, Camden Miscellany, 30, CS, 4th series, 39 (1990), 62–3.
16‘Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, 58; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 339.
17Joye to Latimer, 29 April 1533: SP 1/ 75, f. 210 (LP, 6, no. 402).
18F. D. Logan, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the Vicegerency in Spirituals’, EHR, 103 (1988), 658–67.
19More, Correspondence, no. 190. The preacher was Dr Richard Curwen: LP, 6, no. 168; Foxe, AM, 8, 695–6; LP, 6, no. 168. See D. Daniell’s entry for Frith in the ODNB; A. Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH, 53 (2002), 74–5.
20Foxe, AM 8, 695–6.
21Cranmer to Hawkins, Croydon, 17 June 1533, printed in Miscellaneous, no. 14, 246.
22Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters nos. 53, 56, 59.
23Cranmer to William Capon, from Croydon, 16 June 1533: Miscellaneous, letter no. 16.
24Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters nos. 17, 24, 38 (his request to Lord Arundel for stags).
25Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters nos. 41, 61–2, 170.
26Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters nos. 35–6, 70, 97.
27Cranmer to Rochford, Miscellaneous, letter no. 52.
28Foxe, AM, 8, 20.
29Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 317–18.
30Cranmer to Bonner, Miscellaneous, letter no. 76; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 14–25.
31R. Rex, ‘The Crisis of Obedience: God’s Word and Henry’s Reformation, HJ, 39 (1996), 880, 889.
32Gold: Foxe 1570, 2033; AM, 8, 4. Grace Book B II, 137, 143, 150; TNA:PRO, SP 1/73, 30r (LP, 5, no. 1700); MacCulloch, Cranmer, 43.
33TNA: PRO SP 1/82, 89–96 (LP, 7, nos. 71–2); L. E. Whatmore, ed., ‘The Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent and her Adherents’, EHR, 58 (1943), 463–75; D. Watt on Elizabeth Baron in the ODNB; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters no. 83; More, Correspondence, no. 197. Aldington was the parish that supplied Erasmus with his pension. Gold was a Cambridge man, and many years earlier he had requested that Cranmer dispute with him when he went up towards his degree. MacCulloch, Cranmer, 103–7.
34More, Correspondence, nos. 192, 197; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 320–2.
35More, Correspondence, no. 200 at 505.
36Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 83; Richard Moryson, Apomaxis calumniarum (London: Thomas Berthlet, 1538, RSTC 18109), 73r–84r.
37Whatmore, ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, 473, n. 1; P. Marshall, ‘Papist as Heretic: The Burning of Friar Forest’, HJ, 41 (1998), 351–74 (at 357–8).
38More, Correspondence, nos. 192, 197; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 320–2.
39‘Chronicle of the years 1532–1537, written by a monk of St Augustine’s, Canterbury’, printed in Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, ed. J. G. Nichols, CS, 77 (1859), 279–81; Goldwell’s account of the feast in his letter to Thomas Cromwell, LP, 7, 1520 (misdated); Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 79.
40Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 81; R. Rex, ‘Paul’s Cross and the Crisis of the 1530s’, in Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, eds. T. Kirby and P. G. Stanwood, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 171 (Brill, 2014), 107–27.
41Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. no. 81.
42Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 74.
43MacCulloch, Cranmer, 107–9.
44LPL, Cranmer’s Register, 343v–35r; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 75; dispensation for Edmund: FOR, 1; Churchill, Administration, 45.
45TNA:PRO, SP 1/91, 89r–92v (LP, 8, nos. 386–7); G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1985).
46In a well-known case, Edmund and Latimer examined Tristam Revel’s translation of François Lambert’s controversial Farrago Rerum Theologicarum when he asked to be allowed to dedicate it to Queen Anne Boleyn in early 1536. She recognized that it was too dangerous for her to endorse. François Lambert, The summe of christianitie, trans. Tristam Revel (London: John Redman, 1536, RSTC 15179); LP, 10, no. 371; Dowling, ‘Anne Boleyn and Reform’, 44; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 283.
47FOR, 2, 72; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters nos. 30, 103–4.
48Gray, Oaths and the Reformation, 56.
49Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 38, 257.
50More, Correspondence, no. 198; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 195–6.
51P. D. Clarke, ed., ‘Rivalling Rome: Cardinal Wolsey and Dispensations’, in Papal Authority and the Limits of the Law in Tudor England, Camden Miscellany, 36, CS, fifth series, 48 (2015), 3–100.
5225 Henry VIII, c. 21, printed in Statutes of the Realm, 3, 464–71; FOR, xi.
5325 Henry VIII, c. 28.
5425 Henry VIII, c. 22 printed in Statutes of the Realm, 3, 471–4; Wilkins, Concilia, 782–3; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 194–9, 213–14.
5525 Henry VIII, c. 28.
5625 Henry VIII, c. 22 printed in Statutes of the Realm, 3, 471–4; Gray, Oaths and the Reformation, 57–8 and Appendix D1; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 194–9, 213–14; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 121–2.
57Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, 14, 23.
58Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 332–3, and footnote 2 on 332.
59Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter 100.
60Chronicle written by a monk, printed in Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, 281.
61Gray, Oaths and the Reformation, 58. Fisher: see his itinerary in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, eds. B. Bradshaw and E. Duffy (Cambridge, 1989), 247. More, Correspondence, no. 200.
62More to Margaret Roper, April 1534, Correspondence, no. 200; Cranmer to Cromwell, 17 April 1534, Letters, no. 105; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 137.
63Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 460–2.
64Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, 4; Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, 59.
65Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, 16–20; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 118; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 72–3.
66Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 66.
6725 Henry VIII, c.27; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 185.
68Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letters nos. 118, 122; J. E. Foster, ed., Churchwardens’ Accounts of St Mary the Great, Cambridge, from 1504 to 1635 (Cambridge, 1905), 77; Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, 16–20; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 72–3. Cranmer’s sermons: Jacobus Gislenus Thalassius to Cromwell, written from Heidelberg, 6 June 1535 (LP, 8, no. 831).
69Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, 5, 8–10.
70Wilkins, Concilia, 31–2; Churchill, Canterbury Administration 155–7; Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, 16–20; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 243, n. 3 and letter no. 118; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 72–3.
71Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, appendix 1B.
72Ayris, ‘Metropolitical Visitation’, 6 and appendix 1A.
73Wilkins, Concilia, 769; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, letter no. 145.
74Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 214; Mozley, Tyndale, 266.
75BL, Harley MS 422, 87r–87v; printed in ‘The Answers of Mr. Thomas Lawney’, in Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, 277–8.
76Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 203.
7726 Henry VIII, c. 2.
78Treason: 26 HenryVIII, c. 13; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 203–6.
79Cranmer to Cromwell, written from Lambeth 7 June [1535], Letters, no. 149, and from Otford [15 August 1535], no. 154.
80A. Dillon, Michelangelo and the English Martyrs (Aldershot, 2012), 25–6; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 206.
81More to Margaret Roper, 2 or 3 May 1535: Correspondence, no. 214.
82Cranmer to Cromwell, Otford 30 April [1535], Miscellaneous, no. 143.
83Dillon, English Martyrs, 26–7.
84Dowling, Fisher of Men, 156–7.
85More to Margaret Roper, May and June 1535: Correspondence, nos. 214, 216; Daniell, Tyndale, 365 from Mozley, Tyndale, 304–7 (LP, 8, no. 449).
86No copy of Cromwell’s original order is known to survive, but it was summarized in Elton, Policy and Police, 231–5; S. Wabuda, ‘Bishop John Longland’s Mandate to His Clergy, 1535’, The Library, 6th series, 13 (1991), 255–61.
87Cranmer’s response: BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra, E. VI., fol. 236r, printed in Letters, no. 148 (LP, 8, no. 820).