Thomas Cranmer

English church reformer and scholar

• Born: July 2, 1489
• Birthplace: Aslacton, Nottinghamshire, England
• Died: March 21, 1556
• Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

Cranmer presided over the creation of the Anglican Church in England and its separation from the Catholic Church along with Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Cranmer was responsible for giving an English Bible to the English people, drafting a new English service through the Book of Common Prayer, and sealing England’s commitment to a Protestant form of worship.

Early Life

Thomas Cranmer (KRAN-muhr), the son of a country squire, was born at Aslacton, Nottinghamshire. As a child he learned to hunt, shoot, and ride. He suffered under a cruel schoolmaster before going to Cambridge University, where he studied the classics, philosophy, logic, and Desiderius Erasmus’s works. He received the bachelor of arts degree in 1511-1512 and the master of arts degree in 1515.

He held a fellowship from Jesus College but lost it on marrying “Black Joan” of the Dolphin Inn. Both Joan and a child died within a year, and Cranmer returned as a fellow at Jesus College. He took Holy Orders as a priest prior to 1520 but did not take an oath of celibacy, since that was not required at the time. He received the bachelor of divinity degree in 1521 and the doctor of divinity degree in 1526, whereupon he became a public examiner in theology at Cambridge.

Cranmer’s idea of enlisting European universities’ opinions on the validity of Henry VIII ’s marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon , brought him to Henry’s attention in the summer of 1529. The marriage cause had been returned to Rome for final determination. At Henry’s behest, Cranmer wrote a treatise on the subject and convinced learned men at Cambridge to side with the king. Eventually, Oxford and the University of Paris took Henry’s part, but no other universities did. Cranmer became chaplain to Anne Boleyn and a member of the household of her father, Thomas Boleyn, accompanying him on a mission in 1530 to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Two years later, Henry sent Cranmer as ambassador to Charles at Ratisborn and Nuremberg. While there, the forty-three-year-old Cranmer married Margaret, the twenty-year-old niece of Andreas Osiander, the Lutheran reformer. On the death of Thomas Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, Henry determined to replace him with Cranmer and succeeded in securing Rome’s approval of the appointment. Before returning to England, Cranmer secretly sent his wife there.

Reluctantly, Cranmer accepted the post as archbishop, being appointed March 30, 1533. Before taking his oath, however, he made a protest that the new oath did not bind him to do anything contrary to Henry’s will. His first business was to pronounce in an ecclesiastical court on May 23 the invalidity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine. Next, on May 28, he declared Henry’s marriage of January 25 to Anne Boleyn lawful. On September 10, he became godfather to Henry and Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, the future Elizabeth I, born on September 7.

Cranmer was short. The July, 1545, painting done by Fliccius shows him with a somewhat stern, forbidding countenance, but that may have been a pose for the painter, since Cranmer was gentle in his dealings with all. Clean-shaven in the portrait, with the suggestion of a fast-growing beard, he did grow a long beard during his imprisonment under Mary, Henry and Catherine’s daughter, a devout Catholic.

Life’s Work

As archbishop, Cranmer deferred to Henry, who was made supreme head of the Church by parliamentary statute in 1534, and to his friend Thomas Cromwell, who was appointed vicar general in spirituals in 1535. Cranmer saw that the pope’s name was eliminated from all service books. Personally sympathetic to Thomas More, the former lord chancellor, and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, he saw them executed in 1535 for refusing to accept Henry’s new succession to Anne’s heirs and to Henry’s new authority. The following year, in May, he visited Anne in the Tower of London, where she had been placed on charges of having had sexual relations with several men, including her brother Thomas. On May 17, Cranmer declared Anne’s union with Henry as invalid from its inception, thus bastardizing Elizabeth, and gave Henry a dispensation to marry Jane Seymour, who, like Henry, was descended from Edward III. Anne was executed on May 19. Jane died twelve days after giving Henry a male heir, Edward, on October 12, 1537. Cranmer became Edward’s godfather evidence, again, of Henry’s intimate affection.

Early in 1536, Cranmer had directed the religious convocation to approve the Ten Articles of Religion, the first formula of faith made by the Church of England . The articles, as their revision the next year in the Bishop’s Book reveals, had been set by Henry and edited by Cranmer. Collectively they denoted a drift toward reformation. Four of the seven Sacraments matrimony, confirmation, religious orders, and extreme unction were not mentioned; only baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and penance were discussed.

Cranmer’s longtime wish to make the English Bible available to the English people was successful when he secured, in August of 1537, Cromwell’s permission to sell copies of Matthew’s Bible, based on the work of the reformers William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, to the public. This Bible, subsequently revised, became the Great Bible, known for its size, and was placed in each parish church from 1541 on. Parliament, however, in 1543 forbade the reading of the Bible at home by women and common folk.

The Reformation in England had seen the abolition of holy days in 1536, including the celebration of Saint Thomas Becket’s feast. Cranmer scandalized conservatives by eating meat on the feast’s eve. Moreover, worship of images and veneration of relics were forbidden. Becket’s shrine at Canterbury was destroyed. Nevertheless, Cranmer had little to do with the suppression of the monasteries that had led, in 1536-1537, to the uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace in the north of England. Even Henry had second thoughts about how far reform had gone, and he introduced into Parliament the Six Articles of religious belief that reaffirmed transubstantiation in the Mass and clerical celibacy. Immediately Cranmer sent his wife to Germany. A common rumor was that she was carried from place to place in a large trunk, ventilated by air holes, to preserve the secrecy of his marriage.

Obediently, Cranmer married Henry to Anne of Cleves , then dissolved that marriage in 1540. Other council members asked Cranmer in the fall of 1541 to inform Henry of his fifth wife Catherine Howard’s infidelity and loose morality. Like Anne, Catherine was executed. Even Cranmer did not escape the threat of the Tower. In 1543, the king’s council secured Henry’s consent to send Cranmer to the Tower, where he would be examined concerning his unorthodox religious views. Rather than let events take their course, Henry told Cranmer in advance and gave him his ring, by which he might appeal to the king for justice. Thus, the tables were turned on Cranmer’s enemies, and no one said anything against him as long as Henry lived. That same year, Cranmer made known to Henry his secret marriage, and Margaret returned to England. At the king’s request, during the following year, he issued prayers in English and an English litany. Cranmer was with Henry the night he died, January 28, 1547.

The new king was Henry’s nine-year-old son, Edward VI , who, along with Lord Protector Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, favored Protestantism. Thus it was possible for Cranmer in 1547 to prescribe new English homilies for preachers, the use of Erasmus’s paraphrases of the New Testament to assist in reading the English Bible, and in the following year to secure Communion in both kinds for the laity and the legality of clerical marriage. Furthermore, candles on Candlemas Day, ashes on Ash Wednesday, and palms on Palm Sunday were abolished. A new English catechism, based on a Lutheran one, was issued. In 1549 came the new order for the service in English in the Book of Common Prayer , mostly written by Cranmer. This occasioned revolt in the counties of Devon and Cornwall. Cranmer also invited distinguished European Protestants to England. He was unsuccessful in his attempts to secure a European synod of leading Protestants, and he was unable to secure a new revision of ecclesiastical law.

On Somerset’s fall from power, Cranmer began to absent himself from the court of Somerset’s successor, John Dudley, duke of Northumberland. The Reformation proceeded nevertheless, and a revised prayer book was issued in 1552 and, in the following year, the Forty-two Articles of Religion. On Edward’s death, July 6, 1553, Cranmer reluctantly agreed to Northumberland’s plan to make Lady Jane Grey (the granddaughter of Henry’s favorite sister, Mary) queen. When this plan failed and Mary, Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon, became queen, Cranmer was sent to the Tower, deprived of his rank, and ultimately executed, on March 21, 1556, despite seven recantations of his Protestant views. In fairness to Mary , one must note that Cranmer was sent to the Tower for writing a tract against the Catholic Mass. Cranmer had fortuitously sent his wife to Germany in 1555. After his death, she married twice.

The spectacle of Cranmer’s death at Oxford is one of the famous moments in Protestant history. Fear for his life brought him to recant. When he learned that Mary would not spare him, he courageously declared his true views. Before he was burned at the stake, he spoke of his great regret at recanting his true faith and then almost ran to the place of burning. He bravely held the hand that had written the recantations in the flame and neither stirred nor cried out. He died quickly.

Significance

Henry VIII’s need for a male heir and his decision to dissolve his union with Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn provided Cranmer with an opportunity to serve his king as archbishop of Canterbury and his country as a facilitator of Reformation doctrines. As archbishop under Henry, Cranmer brought the English people the English Bible, the English Our Father and Creed, English prayers in the Litany of 1544, the abolition of holy days and images, and a subtle movement away from the Mass to a Communion service. Under Henry’s son Edward, Cranmer’s reformist tendencies flowered in the new English worship service as prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer, issued in 1549 and again, in altered form, in 1552. The Forty-two Articles of Religion approved by Parliament in 1552 ultimately became the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles, the basic tenets of Anglicanism today.

Though Cranmer’s language was ambiguous, most scholars agree that he personally believed in a symbolic rather than a real presence in the Lord’s Supper. By emphasizing Scripture as the determinant of religious belief and practice, Cranmer helped Bible-oriented Christians appropriate Scripture as a guide to life. By his own example, he showed the world that clergy should marry. His stress on general confession (in which the whole congregation makes a general confession together) and his invitation to take Communion in both bread and wine were attempts to stimulate more frequent Communion by laypeople. Finally, Cranmer’s death for his faith became an important link in the building of the Anglican faith that is, the faith of communicants in the Church of England under his goddaughter, Elizabeth I , who chose to incorporate most of Cranmer’s reforms in her religious settlement on succeeding her sister Mary as queen. Thus, Cranmer, along with Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and Thomas Cromwell, became founders of the Church of England and the Anglican faith.

Bibliography

Ayris, Paul, and David Selwyn, eds. Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1999. Anthology of essays on all aspects of Cranmer’s thought and career, including his facility with the English language, his stint as ambassador, his revisions of ecclesiastical canon law, and the relationship of his ideas to those of Erasmus and Luther. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Bromiley, G. W. Thomas Cranmer, Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Assesses Cranmer’s theological contributions, noting that he came only slowly to his views and that for the most part they were derivative, influenced in his view of the Eucharist by his friend Nicholas Ridley, bishop of Rochester.

Cranmer, Thomas. Cranmer’s Selected Writings. Edited by Carl S. Meyer. London: S.P.C.K., 1961. Contains the Litany of 1544, assorted prayers and collects, the preface to the English Bible, sample homilies, and Cranmer’s writings on baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Gives the flavor of Cranmer’s language and thought, as do the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer throughout history.

Dickens, A. G. The English Reformation. 2d ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Thoughtful, perceptive, and informed by vast learning. The best short explanation of Cranmer’s view of the Eucharist.

Elton, G. R. Reform and Reformation: England, 1509-1558. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. A detailed text for the period. Stresses the role of Thomas Cromwell rather than Cranmer in bringing the English Bible to the English people.

Hutchinson, F. E. Cranmer and the English Reformation. New York: Macmillan, 1951. A brilliant book and a good place to start one’s search for an understanding of how the Reformation came to England and Cranmer’s role.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Influential and award-winning biography of Cranmer incorporates newfound sources. Includes several appendices, illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Maynard, Theodore. The Life of Thomas Cranmer. London: Staples Press, 1956. Brief, readable account that stresses Cranmer’s contributions to the Protestant tradition and emphasizes the drama of his life.

Null, Ashley. Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Detailed study of Cranmer’s doctrine of repentance examines the medieval notions of repentance Cranmer inherited, then engages in a close analysis of the evolution of his doctrine from 1520 to 1537 to 1544. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Ridley, Jasper. Thomas Cranmer. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1962. Solid, scholarly, yet readable study of Cranmer and his times. Sets Cranmer in the context of the Protestant-Catholic historiographical debate in an introductory section. Puts Cranmer’s Reformation contributions in the frame of his loyalty to the Crown. Definitive account.

Smith, Lacey Baldwin. Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971. Brilliant study of the aging Henry VIII at the time of the English Reformation.

Wilson, Derek. In the Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition, and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Vivid study of the perils of Henry VIII’s court details the fates of six members of the court, including Cranmer and five other men named Thomas. Provides Cranmer’s background and education, as well as a thorough survey of his activities in the court, and the way he avoided the fate of the other five. Includes illustrations, maps, sixteen pages of plates, bibliographic references, and index.