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On March 21, 1556, Thomas Cranmer, English reformer, Archbishop of Canterbury (1533-55), was burned at the stake at the age of 66. From the article:
"Thomas Cranmer
The king needed a right-hand man to push through his reform of the Church and Thomas Cranmer was the ideal candidate. Well-educated, intelligent, loyal, and not an extremist, Cranmer was the most prominent figure in the pro-Reformist faction in England's Church hierarchy, a faction which pushed relentlessly for moderate Lutheran-inspired reforms. Cranmer had even written a book in 1529 CE which supported Henry's position in his quest to annul his first marriage. Cranmer had then served from 1531 CE as Henry's personal chaplain. Accordingly, Cranmer was selected as the successor to William Warham as the Archbishop of Canterbury on 30 March 1533 CE, an appointment subsequently approved by the Pope after diplomatic pressure was applied. Warham had not been very accommodating to the king's reforms but Cranmer would prove to be loyal to his king right to the end.
Thomas Cranmer duly annulled Henry's marriage on 23 May 1533 CE. The Act of Succession (30 April 1534 CE) declared Catherine's daughter Mary illegitimate. Before these momentous decisions, Cranmer had presided over the secret marriage of Henry to Anne Boleyn on 25 January 1533 CE. Unfortunately, Anne would soon fall out favour with the king. Three failed pregnancies and an increasingly stormy relationship between the two led to Henry looking elsewhere for an heir. The king's eye was caught by another lady-in-waiting, one Jane Seymour. Anne was accused of adultery, and the marriage was annulled by Cranmer on 17 May 1536 CE. Anne was imprisoned in the Tower of London and then executed on 19 May 1536. Henry wasted no time at all and married Jane Seymour on 30 May. Jane did finally give the king a legitimate son, Edward, born on 12 October 1537 CE, but she herself died from complications soon after the birth.
After a short and disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves (1519-1557 CE) in 1540 CE, Henry immediately moved on to wife number five, Catherine Howard (c. 1523-1542 CE), another young and pretty lady-in-waiting at court. Unfortunately, it turned out Catherine had been of loose morals both before and during the marriage. The news of her scandalous reputation was broken to the king by Cranmer after he had interviewed Mary Lascelles who had lived in Catherine's house in Norfolk. At first, Henry would not believe it but when Cranmer came back with ample evidence, Catherine's fate was sealed - executed at the Tower in February 1542 CE. The next year Henry married his sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr (c. 1512-1548 CE), on 12 July 1543 CE.
The Reformation Gathers Pace
While the king had been busy in his private life, changing wives, the Reformation had also gathered pace. The Act of Supremacy of 28 November 1534 CE formally declared the king head of the Church in England, replacing the Pope in that exalted position. Cranmer was fully in support of this move and Henry's next one, the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1536 CE Henry presented Parliament with a bill to abolish all monasteries in his kingdom. The bill was passed and the estates of the monasteries were redistributed to the Crown and Henry's supporters. The abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester, Reading, and Woburn were all hanged, and the last monastery to close was Waltham Abbey in Essex in March 1540 CE. However, it was here that Henry met his first major obstacle to his reforms of the Church. An uprising against the closures began in Lincolnshire and then spread to Yorkshire and other northern counties in October 1536 CE. These rebellions, which involved up to 40,000 protestors, are collectively called the 'Pilgrimage of Grace' and one of the specific aims was to see the resignation of Cranmer. However, met by a royal army and given false promises of pardons and a return to Catholic ways, the protestors disbanded peacefully; many of the ringleaders would be executed the next year.
The consequences of failing to block the Six Articles were personal for Cranmer who had to divorce his wife.
Henry and Cranmer pressed on regardless. The Act of Ten Articles of 1536 CE introduced Lutheran-inspired principles into church practices and doctrine. Other reforms included the publication of a translation of the Bible in English in 1539 CE, for which Cranmer wrote the prologue. It is important to remember though, that Henry was not dead set on reforming the doctrine of the Church; his commitment to traditional Catholic practices such as mass, confession and clerical celibacy, is evidenced in the 1539 CE Act of Six Articles. Indeed, Cranmer was not always on the side of Henry, whom the archbishop considered not quite radical enough in his reforms, even if Cranmer himself was not an extremist. For example, the archbishop stood against the Act of Six Articles because it was too conservative and guaranteed many traditional Catholic church practices. The Six Articles had been pushed by Cranmer's rival faction in the church hierarchy, the Catholic conservatives led by Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester. The consequences of failing to block the Six Articles were personal for Cranmer who had to divorce his wife (she went back to Germany to live with relatives). He was also asked to resign from office but refused.
The Reforms of Edward VI
When Henry VIII died of illness in January 1547 CE, he was succeeded by his young son Edward. Cranmer was back at the top of the political pile, and he was on hand as Archbishop of Canterbury to crown the boy-king in Westminster Abbey on 20 February 1547 CE. Edward and his two successive regents (in all but name), Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (l. c. 1500-1552 CE) and John Dudley, the Earl of Northumberland (l. 1504-1553 CE) continued the Reformation even more vigorously than Henry VIII had.
In 1547 CE Cranmer issued his Book of Homilies, a collection of set sermons to be used in church services. Cranmer then introduced his new Book of Common Prayer, issued in English in 1549 CE and made compulsory under the Act of Uniformity of the same year. The prayer book was updated with an even more radical departure from Catholicism in 1552 CE when the idea of transubstantiation was rejected (that the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ). The term Protestantism came into widespread use for the first time. Iconography, murals, and pictorial stained glass windows were all removed from churches, and services were now conducted in English, not Latin. Catholic altars were replaced by communion tables. The worship of saints was discouraged. Priests were now permitted to marry. Religious guilds were suppressed, endowments (chantries) were abolished for priests to sing mass for the souls of the dead, and church lands were confiscated. The riches gained often went straight into the pockets of the nobility.
There were protests, just like there had been over the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Again, the mix of a poor economic situation for many and resentment at changes in traditional parish life led to a rebellion, this time in Cornwall and then Norfolk in 1549 CE. The latter, known as the Kett Rebellion after its leader Robert Kett, was the more serious but was quashed without pity by a massacre of rebels at Dussindale in August. The Reformation was pursued relentlessly with more 'Popish' practices being banned such as eliminating the more garish elements of clergy's vestments and the abolition of prayers for the dead."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SPC Woody Bullard 1SG Steven Imerman SFC William Farrell Lt Col Charlie Brown Col Carl Whicker SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth SP5 Geoffrey Vannerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. 'Bill' Price PO1 H Gene Lawrence LTC Jeff Shearer ] LTC Wayne Brandon PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SPC Douglas Bolton PVT Mark Zehner
"Thomas Cranmer
The king needed a right-hand man to push through his reform of the Church and Thomas Cranmer was the ideal candidate. Well-educated, intelligent, loyal, and not an extremist, Cranmer was the most prominent figure in the pro-Reformist faction in England's Church hierarchy, a faction which pushed relentlessly for moderate Lutheran-inspired reforms. Cranmer had even written a book in 1529 CE which supported Henry's position in his quest to annul his first marriage. Cranmer had then served from 1531 CE as Henry's personal chaplain. Accordingly, Cranmer was selected as the successor to William Warham as the Archbishop of Canterbury on 30 March 1533 CE, an appointment subsequently approved by the Pope after diplomatic pressure was applied. Warham had not been very accommodating to the king's reforms but Cranmer would prove to be loyal to his king right to the end.
Thomas Cranmer duly annulled Henry's marriage on 23 May 1533 CE. The Act of Succession (30 April 1534 CE) declared Catherine's daughter Mary illegitimate. Before these momentous decisions, Cranmer had presided over the secret marriage of Henry to Anne Boleyn on 25 January 1533 CE. Unfortunately, Anne would soon fall out favour with the king. Three failed pregnancies and an increasingly stormy relationship between the two led to Henry looking elsewhere for an heir. The king's eye was caught by another lady-in-waiting, one Jane Seymour. Anne was accused of adultery, and the marriage was annulled by Cranmer on 17 May 1536 CE. Anne was imprisoned in the Tower of London and then executed on 19 May 1536. Henry wasted no time at all and married Jane Seymour on 30 May. Jane did finally give the king a legitimate son, Edward, born on 12 October 1537 CE, but she herself died from complications soon after the birth.
After a short and disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves (1519-1557 CE) in 1540 CE, Henry immediately moved on to wife number five, Catherine Howard (c. 1523-1542 CE), another young and pretty lady-in-waiting at court. Unfortunately, it turned out Catherine had been of loose morals both before and during the marriage. The news of her scandalous reputation was broken to the king by Cranmer after he had interviewed Mary Lascelles who had lived in Catherine's house in Norfolk. At first, Henry would not believe it but when Cranmer came back with ample evidence, Catherine's fate was sealed - executed at the Tower in February 1542 CE. The next year Henry married his sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr (c. 1512-1548 CE), on 12 July 1543 CE.
The Reformation Gathers Pace
While the king had been busy in his private life, changing wives, the Reformation had also gathered pace. The Act of Supremacy of 28 November 1534 CE formally declared the king head of the Church in England, replacing the Pope in that exalted position. Cranmer was fully in support of this move and Henry's next one, the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1536 CE Henry presented Parliament with a bill to abolish all monasteries in his kingdom. The bill was passed and the estates of the monasteries were redistributed to the Crown and Henry's supporters. The abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester, Reading, and Woburn were all hanged, and the last monastery to close was Waltham Abbey in Essex in March 1540 CE. However, it was here that Henry met his first major obstacle to his reforms of the Church. An uprising against the closures began in Lincolnshire and then spread to Yorkshire and other northern counties in October 1536 CE. These rebellions, which involved up to 40,000 protestors, are collectively called the 'Pilgrimage of Grace' and one of the specific aims was to see the resignation of Cranmer. However, met by a royal army and given false promises of pardons and a return to Catholic ways, the protestors disbanded peacefully; many of the ringleaders would be executed the next year.
The consequences of failing to block the Six Articles were personal for Cranmer who had to divorce his wife.
Henry and Cranmer pressed on regardless. The Act of Ten Articles of 1536 CE introduced Lutheran-inspired principles into church practices and doctrine. Other reforms included the publication of a translation of the Bible in English in 1539 CE, for which Cranmer wrote the prologue. It is important to remember though, that Henry was not dead set on reforming the doctrine of the Church; his commitment to traditional Catholic practices such as mass, confession and clerical celibacy, is evidenced in the 1539 CE Act of Six Articles. Indeed, Cranmer was not always on the side of Henry, whom the archbishop considered not quite radical enough in his reforms, even if Cranmer himself was not an extremist. For example, the archbishop stood against the Act of Six Articles because it was too conservative and guaranteed many traditional Catholic church practices. The Six Articles had been pushed by Cranmer's rival faction in the church hierarchy, the Catholic conservatives led by Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester. The consequences of failing to block the Six Articles were personal for Cranmer who had to divorce his wife (she went back to Germany to live with relatives). He was also asked to resign from office but refused.
The Reforms of Edward VI
When Henry VIII died of illness in January 1547 CE, he was succeeded by his young son Edward. Cranmer was back at the top of the political pile, and he was on hand as Archbishop of Canterbury to crown the boy-king in Westminster Abbey on 20 February 1547 CE. Edward and his two successive regents (in all but name), Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (l. c. 1500-1552 CE) and John Dudley, the Earl of Northumberland (l. 1504-1553 CE) continued the Reformation even more vigorously than Henry VIII had.
In 1547 CE Cranmer issued his Book of Homilies, a collection of set sermons to be used in church services. Cranmer then introduced his new Book of Common Prayer, issued in English in 1549 CE and made compulsory under the Act of Uniformity of the same year. The prayer book was updated with an even more radical departure from Catholicism in 1552 CE when the idea of transubstantiation was rejected (that the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ). The term Protestantism came into widespread use for the first time. Iconography, murals, and pictorial stained glass windows were all removed from churches, and services were now conducted in English, not Latin. Catholic altars were replaced by communion tables. The worship of saints was discouraged. Priests were now permitted to marry. Religious guilds were suppressed, endowments (chantries) were abolished for priests to sing mass for the souls of the dead, and church lands were confiscated. The riches gained often went straight into the pockets of the nobility.
There were protests, just like there had been over the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Again, the mix of a poor economic situation for many and resentment at changes in traditional parish life led to a rebellion, this time in Cornwall and then Norfolk in 1549 CE. The latter, known as the Kett Rebellion after its leader Robert Kett, was the more serious but was quashed without pity by a massacre of rebels at Dussindale in August. The Reformation was pursued relentlessly with more 'Popish' practices being banned such as eliminating the more garish elements of clergy's vestments and the abolition of prayers for the dead."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SPC Woody Bullard 1SG Steven Imerman SFC William Farrell Lt Col Charlie Brown Col Carl Whicker SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth SP5 Geoffrey Vannerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. 'Bill' Price PO1 H Gene Lawrence LTC Jeff Shearer ] LTC Wayne Brandon PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SPC Douglas Bolton PVT Mark Zehner
Thomas Cranmer
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Dead Guys You Should Know: Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI ...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us ware that on March 21, 1556 English reformer, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake at the age of 66.
Dead Guys You Should Know: Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I.
During Cranmer's tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, he was responsible for establishing the first doctrinal and liturgical structures of the reformed Church of England.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STeOoFIhIpQ
Images:
1. Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer engraving March 21, 1556
2. March 21st, 1556 - The Burning of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury - 19th-century Book Illustration
3. Execution of Thomas Cranmer by J. Williams
Background from {[https://englishhistory.net/tudor/thomas-cranmer-death/]}
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer Death By Execution
This dramatic account of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s execution was written by an anonymous bystander.
Cranmer was executed on 21 March 1556. Imprisoned by the Catholic Queen Mary I, Cranmer wrote a recantation of Protestantism, but he denied that recantation before he died.
Mary had good cause to dislike Cranmer. Not only was he the premier Protestant in England, he also annulled her parents’ marriage and subsequently married King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn.
But that I know for our great friendships, and long continued love, you look even of duty that I should signify to you of the truth of such things as here chanceth among us; I would not at this time have written to you the unfortunate end, and doubtful tragedy, of Thomas Cranmer late bishop of Canterbury: because I little pleasure take in beholding of such heavy sights. And, when they are once overpassed, I like not to rehearse them again; being but a renewing of my woe, and doubling my grief. For although his former, and wretched end, deserves a greater misery, (if any greater might have chanced than chanced unto him), yet, setting aside his offenses to God and his country, and beholding the man without his faults, I think there was none that pitied not his case, and bewailed not his fortune, and feared not his own chance, to see so noble a prelate, so grave a counsellor, of so long continued honor, after so many dignities, in his old years to be deprived of his estate, adjudged to die, and in so painful a death to end his life. I have no delight to increase it. Alas, it is too much of itself, that ever so heavy a case should betide to man, and man to deserve it.
But to come to the matter: on Saturday last, being 21 of March, was his day appointed to die. And because the morning was much rainy, the sermon appointed by Mr Dr Cole to be made at the stake, was made in St Mary’s church: whither Dr Cranmer was brought by the mayor and aldermen, and my lord Williams: with whom came divers gentlemen of the shire, sir T A Bridges, sir John Browne, and others. Where was prepared, over against the pulpit, a high place for him, that all the people might see him. And, when he had ascended it, he kneeled him down and prayed, weeping tenderly: which moved a great number to tears, that had conceived an assured hope of his conversion and repentance….
When praying was done, he stood up, and, having leave to speak, said, ‘Good people, I had intended indeed to desire you to pray for me; which because Mr Doctor hath desired, and you have done already, I thank you most heartily for it. And now will I pray for myself, as I could best devise for mine own comfort, and say the prayer, word for word, as I have here written it.’ And he read it standing: and after kneeled down, and said the Lord’s Prayer; and all the people on their knees devoutly praying with him….
And then rising, he said, ‘Every man desireth, good people, at the time of their deaths, to give some good exhortation, that other may remember after their deaths, and be the better thereby. So I beseech God grant me grace, that I may speak something, at this my departing, whereby God may be glorified, and you edified….
And now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more than nay other thing that ever I said or did in my life: and that is, the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth. Which here now I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life, if it might be: and that is, all such bills, which I have written or signed with mine own hand since my degradation: wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished: for if I may come to the fire, it shall be first burned. And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and antichrist, with all his false doctrine.’
And here, being admonished of his recantation and dissembling, he said, ‘Alas, my lord, I have been a man that all my life loved plainness, and never dissembled till now against the truth; which I am most sorry for it.’ He added hereunto, that, for the sacrament, he believed as he had taught in his book against the bishop of Winchester. And here he was suffered to speak no more….
Then was he carried away; and a great number, that did run to see him go so wicjedly to his death, ran after him, exhorting him, while time was, to remember himself. And one Friar John, a godly and well learned man, all the way traveled with him to reduce him. But it would not be. What they said in particular I cannot tell, but the effect appeared in the end: for at the stake he professed, that he died in all such opinions as he had taught, and oft repented him of his recantation.
Coming to the stake with a cheerful countenance and willing mind, he put off his garments with haste, and stood upright in his shirt: and bachelor of divinity, named Elye, of Brazen-nose college, labored to convert him to his former recantation, with the two Spanish friars. And when the friars saw his constancy, they said in Latin to one another ‘Let us go from him: we ought not to be nigh him: for the devil is with him.’ But the bachelor of divinity was more earnest with him: unto whom he answered, that, as concerning his recantation, he repented it right sore, because he knew it was against the truth; with other words more. Whereby the Lord Williams cried, ‘Make short, make short.’ Then the bishop took certain of his friends by the hand. But the bachelor of divinity refused to take him by the hand, and blamed all the others that so did, and said, he was sorry that ever he came in his company. And yet again he required him to agree to his former recantation. And the bishop answered, (showing his hand), ‘This was the hand that wrote it, and therefore shall it suffer first punishment.’
Fire being now put to him, he stretched out his right hand, and thrust it into the flame, and held it there a good space, before the fire came to any other part of his body; where his hand was seen of every man sensibly burning, crying with a loud voice, ‘This hand hath offended.’ As soon as the fire got up, he was very soon dead, never stirring or crying all the while.
His patience in the torment, his courage in dying, if it had been taken either for the glory of God, the wealth of his country, or the testimony of truth, as it was for a pernicious error, and subversion of true religion, I could worthily have commended the example, and matched it with the fame of any father of ancient time: but, seeing that not the death, but cause and quarrel thereof, commendeth the sufferer, I cannot but much dispraise his obstinate stubbornness and sturdiness in dying, and specially in so evil a cause. Surely his death much grieved every man; but not after one sort. Some pitied to see his body so tormented with the fire raging upon the silly carcass, that counted not of the folly. Other that passed not much of the body, lamented to see him spill his soul, wretchedly, without redemption, to be plagued for ever. His friends sorrowed for love; his enemies for pity; strangers for a common kind of humanity, whereby we are bound one to another. Thus I have enforced myself, for your sake, to discourse this heavy narration, contrary to my mind: and, being more than half weary, I make a short end, wishing you a quieter life, with less honor; and easier death, with more praise."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles Hayden
Dead Guys You Should Know: Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I.
During Cranmer's tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, he was responsible for establishing the first doctrinal and liturgical structures of the reformed Church of England.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STeOoFIhIpQ
Images:
1. Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer engraving March 21, 1556
2. March 21st, 1556 - The Burning of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury - 19th-century Book Illustration
3. Execution of Thomas Cranmer by J. Williams
Background from {[https://englishhistory.net/tudor/thomas-cranmer-death/]}
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer Death By Execution
This dramatic account of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s execution was written by an anonymous bystander.
Cranmer was executed on 21 March 1556. Imprisoned by the Catholic Queen Mary I, Cranmer wrote a recantation of Protestantism, but he denied that recantation before he died.
Mary had good cause to dislike Cranmer. Not only was he the premier Protestant in England, he also annulled her parents’ marriage and subsequently married King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn.
But that I know for our great friendships, and long continued love, you look even of duty that I should signify to you of the truth of such things as here chanceth among us; I would not at this time have written to you the unfortunate end, and doubtful tragedy, of Thomas Cranmer late bishop of Canterbury: because I little pleasure take in beholding of such heavy sights. And, when they are once overpassed, I like not to rehearse them again; being but a renewing of my woe, and doubling my grief. For although his former, and wretched end, deserves a greater misery, (if any greater might have chanced than chanced unto him), yet, setting aside his offenses to God and his country, and beholding the man without his faults, I think there was none that pitied not his case, and bewailed not his fortune, and feared not his own chance, to see so noble a prelate, so grave a counsellor, of so long continued honor, after so many dignities, in his old years to be deprived of his estate, adjudged to die, and in so painful a death to end his life. I have no delight to increase it. Alas, it is too much of itself, that ever so heavy a case should betide to man, and man to deserve it.
But to come to the matter: on Saturday last, being 21 of March, was his day appointed to die. And because the morning was much rainy, the sermon appointed by Mr Dr Cole to be made at the stake, was made in St Mary’s church: whither Dr Cranmer was brought by the mayor and aldermen, and my lord Williams: with whom came divers gentlemen of the shire, sir T A Bridges, sir John Browne, and others. Where was prepared, over against the pulpit, a high place for him, that all the people might see him. And, when he had ascended it, he kneeled him down and prayed, weeping tenderly: which moved a great number to tears, that had conceived an assured hope of his conversion and repentance….
When praying was done, he stood up, and, having leave to speak, said, ‘Good people, I had intended indeed to desire you to pray for me; which because Mr Doctor hath desired, and you have done already, I thank you most heartily for it. And now will I pray for myself, as I could best devise for mine own comfort, and say the prayer, word for word, as I have here written it.’ And he read it standing: and after kneeled down, and said the Lord’s Prayer; and all the people on their knees devoutly praying with him….
And then rising, he said, ‘Every man desireth, good people, at the time of their deaths, to give some good exhortation, that other may remember after their deaths, and be the better thereby. So I beseech God grant me grace, that I may speak something, at this my departing, whereby God may be glorified, and you edified….
And now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more than nay other thing that ever I said or did in my life: and that is, the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth. Which here now I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life, if it might be: and that is, all such bills, which I have written or signed with mine own hand since my degradation: wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished: for if I may come to the fire, it shall be first burned. And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and antichrist, with all his false doctrine.’
And here, being admonished of his recantation and dissembling, he said, ‘Alas, my lord, I have been a man that all my life loved plainness, and never dissembled till now against the truth; which I am most sorry for it.’ He added hereunto, that, for the sacrament, he believed as he had taught in his book against the bishop of Winchester. And here he was suffered to speak no more….
Then was he carried away; and a great number, that did run to see him go so wicjedly to his death, ran after him, exhorting him, while time was, to remember himself. And one Friar John, a godly and well learned man, all the way traveled with him to reduce him. But it would not be. What they said in particular I cannot tell, but the effect appeared in the end: for at the stake he professed, that he died in all such opinions as he had taught, and oft repented him of his recantation.
Coming to the stake with a cheerful countenance and willing mind, he put off his garments with haste, and stood upright in his shirt: and bachelor of divinity, named Elye, of Brazen-nose college, labored to convert him to his former recantation, with the two Spanish friars. And when the friars saw his constancy, they said in Latin to one another ‘Let us go from him: we ought not to be nigh him: for the devil is with him.’ But the bachelor of divinity was more earnest with him: unto whom he answered, that, as concerning his recantation, he repented it right sore, because he knew it was against the truth; with other words more. Whereby the Lord Williams cried, ‘Make short, make short.’ Then the bishop took certain of his friends by the hand. But the bachelor of divinity refused to take him by the hand, and blamed all the others that so did, and said, he was sorry that ever he came in his company. And yet again he required him to agree to his former recantation. And the bishop answered, (showing his hand), ‘This was the hand that wrote it, and therefore shall it suffer first punishment.’
Fire being now put to him, he stretched out his right hand, and thrust it into the flame, and held it there a good space, before the fire came to any other part of his body; where his hand was seen of every man sensibly burning, crying with a loud voice, ‘This hand hath offended.’ As soon as the fire got up, he was very soon dead, never stirring or crying all the while.
His patience in the torment, his courage in dying, if it had been taken either for the glory of God, the wealth of his country, or the testimony of truth, as it was for a pernicious error, and subversion of true religion, I could worthily have commended the example, and matched it with the fame of any father of ancient time: but, seeing that not the death, but cause and quarrel thereof, commendeth the sufferer, I cannot but much dispraise his obstinate stubbornness and sturdiness in dying, and specially in so evil a cause. Surely his death much grieved every man; but not after one sort. Some pitied to see his body so tormented with the fire raging upon the silly carcass, that counted not of the folly. Other that passed not much of the body, lamented to see him spill his soul, wretchedly, without redemption, to be plagued for ever. His friends sorrowed for love; his enemies for pity; strangers for a common kind of humanity, whereby we are bound one to another. Thus I have enforced myself, for your sake, to discourse this heavy narration, contrary to my mind: and, being more than half weary, I make a short end, wishing you a quieter life, with less honor; and easier death, with more praise."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles Hayden
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The HORRIFIC Execution Of Thomas Cranmer
One of the most influential churchmen during the Tudor era was Thomas Cranmer. Under Henry VIII's reign he became the Archbishop of Canterbury and became ver...
The HORRIFIC Execution Of Thomas Cranmer
One of the most influential churchmen during the Tudor era was Thomas Cranmer. Under Henry VIII's reign he became the Archbishop of Canterbury and became very close to the King. He advised the King of important matters on religion, but also when the King needed rid of his wives, Cranmer was set to work. It would be Archbishop Thomas Cranmer who would declare Catherine of Aragon and Henry's marriage invalid, claim Anne Boleyn to be valid, look for reasons for Anne's execution and much more.
He was incredibly important, and was a leading figure in reforming the Church of England. He became a leading Protestant and carried on his big reforms during the reign of Edward VI. He acted as one of Edward's protectors following the young King rising to the throne. However under Mary I/Bloody Mary he would meet a tragic end. When Mary I came onto the throne, she was Catholic and began to persecute leading Protestants. Thomas Cranmer and Mary had a strong dislike for each other, as Cranmer had caused her mother, Catherine of Aragon's downfall.
Despite recanting and acknowledging the Catholic religion as superior, Thomas Cranmer was executed by being burned at the stake. He was claimed to be a heretic and was burned in Oxford in public. His execution was incredible unlawful and brutal. Join us today as we look at 'The Horrific Execution of Thomas Cranmer.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F34UN9GgEz0
Images:
1. The Arrest of Thomas Cranmer During Cole's Sermon in St. Mary's Church
2. The Burning of Thomas Cranmer. From Foxe's Book of Martyrs
3. July 16, 1556 protestant martyrs Julius Palmer, Thomas Askew and John Gwin burned at the stake at Newbury.
Background from {[ https://anglicanway.org/2019/03/24/thomas-cranmer-his-life-and-martyrdom-21st-march-1556/}]
Thomas Cranmer, His Life and Martyrdom (21st March, 1556)
THOMAS CRANMER (1489-1556)
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, born at Aslacton or Aslockton in Nottinghamshire on the 2nd of July 1489, was the second son of Thomas Cranmer and of his wife Anne Hatfield. He received his early education, according to Morice his secretary, from “a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster,” whose discipline must have been severe indeed to deserve this special mention in an age when no schoolmaster bore the rod in vain. The same authority tells us that he was initiated by his father in those field sports, such as hunting and hawking, which formed one of his recreations in after life. To early training he also owed the skilful horsemanship for which he was conspicuous.
At the age of fourteen he was sent by his mother, who had in 1501 become a widow, to Cambridge. Little is known with certainty of his university career beyond the facts that he became a fellow of Jesus College in 1510 or 1511, that he had soon after to vacate his fellowship, owing to his marriage to “Black Joan,” a relative of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn, and that he was reinstated in it on the death of his wife, which occurred in childbirth before the lapse of the year of grace allowed by the statutes. During the brief period of his married life he held the
appointment of lecturer at Buckingham Hall, now Magdalene College. The fact of his marrying would seem to show that he did not at the time intend to enter the church; possibly the death of his wife caused him to qualify for holy orders. He was ordained in 1523, and soon after he took his doctor’s degree in divinity.
According to Strype, he was invited about this time to become a fellow of the college founded by Cardinal Wolsey at Oxford; but Dean Hook shows that there is some reason to doubt this. If the offer was made, it was declined, and Cranmer continued at Cambridge filling the offices of lecturer in divinity at his own college and of public examiner in divinity to the university. It is interesting, in view of his later efforts to spread the knowledge of the Bible among the people, to know that in the capacity of examiner he insisted on a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures, and rejected several candidates who were deficient in this qualification.
It was a somewhat curious concurrence of circumstances that transferred Cranmer, almost at one step, from the quiet seclusion of the university to the din and bustle of the court. In August 1529 the plague known as the sweating sickness, which prevailed throughout the country, was specially severe at Cambridge, and all who had it in their power forsook the town for the country. Cranmer went with two of his pupils named Cressy, related to him through their mother, to their father’s house at Waltham in Essex. The King (Henry VIII) happened at the time to be visiting in the immediate neighbourhood, and two of his chief counsellors, Gardiner, Secretary of State, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, and Edward Fox, the Lord High Almoner, afterwards Bishop of Hereford, were lodged at Cressy’s house. Meeting with Cranmer, they were naturally led to discuss the King’s meditated divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Cranmer suggested that if the canonists and the universities should decide that marriage with a deceased brother’s widow was illegal, and if it were proved that Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, her marriage to Henry could be declared null and void by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. The necessity of an appeal to Rome was thus dispensed with, and this point was at once seen by the King, who, when Cranmer’s opinion was reported to him, is said to have ordered him to be summoned in these terms: “I will speak to him. Let him be sent for out of hand. This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear.”
At their first interview Cranmer was commanded by the King to lay aside all other pursuits and to devote himself to the question of the divorce. He was to draw up a written treatise, stating the course he proposed, and defending it by arguments from scripture, the fathers and the decrees of general councils. His material interests certainly did not suffer by compliance. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time; the King appointed him archdeacon of Taunton and one of his chaplains; and he also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited, accompanied by Fox and Gardiner. Immediately afterwards he was sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was despatched to Rome in 1530, that “the matter of the divorce should be disputed and ventilated,” and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the Pope with marked courtesy, and was appointed “Grand Penitentiary of England,” but his argument, if he ever had the opportunity of stating it, did not lead to any practical decision of the question.
Cranmer returned in September 1530, but in January 1531 he received a second commission from the King appointing him “Conciliarius Regius et ad Caesarem Orator.” In the summer of 1531 he accordingly proceeded to Germany as sole ambassador to the Emperor. He was also to sound the Lutheran princes with a view to an alliance, and to obtain the removal of some restrictions on English trade. At Nuremberg he became acquainted with Osiander, whose somewhat isolated theological position he probably found to be in many points analogous to his own. Both were convinced that the old order must change; neither saw clearly what the new order should be to which it was to give place. They had frequent interviews, which had doubtless an important influence on Cranmer’s opinions. But Osiander’s house had another attraction of a different kind from theological sympathy. His niece Margaret won the heart of Cranmer, and in 1532 they were married. Hook finds in the fact of the marriage corroboration of Cranmer’s statement that he never expected or desired the primacy; and it seems probable enough that, if he had foreseen how soon the primacy was to be forced upon him, he would have avoided a disqualification which it was difficult to conceal and dangerous to disclose.
Expected or not, the primacy was forced upon him within a very few months of his marriage. In August 1532, Archbishop Warham died, and the King almost immediately afterwards intimated to Cranmer, who had accompanied the Emperor in his campaign against the Turks, his nomination to the vacant see. Cranmer’s conduct was certainly consistent with his profession that he did not desire, as he had not expected, the dangerous promotion. He sent his wife to England, but delayed his own return in the vain hope that another appointment might be made. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March 1533, and the consecration took place on the 30th March. One peculiarity of the ceremony had occasioned considerable discussion. It was the custom for the archbishop elect to take two oaths, the first of episcopal allegiance to the pope, and the second in recognition of the royal supremacy. The latter was so wide in its scope that it might fairly be held to supersede the former in so far as the two were inconsistent. Cranmer, however, was not satisfied with this. He had a special protest recorded, in which he formally declared that he swore allegiance to the pope only in so far as that was consistent with his supreme duty to the King. The morality of this course has been much canvassed, though it seems really to involve nothing more than an express declaration of what the two oaths implied. It was the course that would readily suggest itself to a man of timid nature who wished to secure himself against such a fate as Wolsey’s. It showed weakness, but it added nothing to whatever immorality there might be in successively taking two incompatible oaths.
In the last as in the first step of Cranmer’s promotion, Henry had been actuated by one and the same motive. The business of the divorce — or rather, of the legitimation of Anne Boleyn’s expected issue — had now become very urgent, and in the new archbishop he had an agent who might be expected to forward it with the needful haste. The celerity and skill with which Cranmer did the work intrusted to him must have fully satisfied his master. During the first week of April, Convocation sat almost from day to day to determine questions of fact and law in relation to Catherine’s marriage with Henry as affected by her previous marriage with his brother Arthur. Decisions favourable to the object of the King were given on these questions, though even the despotism of the most despotic of the Tudors failed to secure absolute unanimity.
The next step was taken by Cranmer, who wrote a letter to the King, praying to be allowed to remove the anxiety of loyal subjects as to a possible case of disputed succession, by finally determining the validity of the marriage in his archiepiscopal court. There is evidence that the request was prompted by the King, and his consent was given as a matter of course. Queen Catherine was residing at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, and to suit her convenience the court was held at the priory of Dunstable in the immediate neighbourhood. Declining to appear, she was declared contumacious, and on the 23rd of May the archbishop gave judgment declaring the marriage null and void from the first, and so leaving the King free to marry whom he pleased. The Act of Appeals had already prohibited any appeal from the archbishop’s court. Five days later he pronounced the marriage between Henry and Anne — which had been secretly celebrated about the 25th of January 1533 — to be valid. On the 1st of June he crowned Anne as Queen, and on the l0th of September stood godfather to her child, the future Queen Elizabeth.
The breach with Rome and the subjection of the church in England to the royal supremacy had been practically achieved before Cranmer’s appointment as archbishop: and he had little to do with the other constitutional changes of Henry’s reign. But his position as chief minister of Henry’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction forced him into unpleasant prominence in connexion with the King’s matrimonial experiences. In 1536 he was required to revise his own sentence in favour of the validity of Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn; and on the 17th of May the marriage was declared invalid. The ground on which this sentence is pronounced is fairly clear. Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, had been Henry VIII’s mistress; this by canon law was a bar to his marriage with Anne—a bar which had been removed by papal dispensation in 1527, but now the papal power to dispense in such cases had been repudiated, and the original objection revived. The sentence was grotesquely legal and unjust. With Anne’s condemnation by the House of Lords, Cranmer had nothing to do. He interceded for her in vain with the King, as he had done in the cases of John Fisher, Thomas More and the monks of Christchurch. His share in the divorce of Anne of Cleves was less prominent than that of Bishop Gardiner, though he did preside over the Convocation in which nearly all the dignitaries of the church signified their approval of that measure. To his next and last interposition in the matrimonial affairs of the King no discredit attaches itself. When he was made cognizant of the charges against Catherine Howard, his duty to communicate them to the King was obvious, though painful.
Meanwhile Cranmer was actively carrying out the policy which has associated his name more closely, perhaps, than that of any other ecclesiastic with the Reformation in England. Its most important feature on the theological as distinct from the political side, was the endeavour to promote the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular, by encouraging translation and procuring an order in 1538 that a copy of the Bible in English should be set up in every church in a convenient place for reading. Only second in importance to this was the re-adjustment of the creed and liturgy of the church, which formed Cranmer’s principal work during the latter half of his life.
The progress of the archbishop’s opinion towards that middle Protestantism, if it may be so called, which he did so much to impress on the formularies of the Church of England, was gradual, as a brief enumeration of the successive steps in that progress will show. In 1538 an embassy of German divines visited England with the design, among other things, of forming a common confession for the two countries. This proved impracticable, but the frequent conferences Cranmer had with the theologians composing the embassy had doubtless a great influence in modifying his views. Both in parliament and in Convocation he opposed the Six Articles of 1539, but he stood almost alone. During the period between 1540 and 1543 the archbishop was engaged at the head of a commission in the revision of the “Bishop’s Book” (1537) or Institutions of a Christian Man, and the preparation of the Necessary Erudition (1543) known as the “King’s Book,” which was a modification of the former work in the direction of Roman Catholic doctrine. In June 1545 was issued his Litany, which was substantially the same as that now in use, and shows his mastery of a rhythmical English style.
The course taken by Cranmer in promoting the Reformation exposed him to the bitter hostility of the reactionary party or “men of the old learning,” of whom Gardiner and Bonner were leaders, and on various occasions — notably in 1543 and 1545 — conspiracies were formed in the council or elsewhere to effect his overthrow. The King, however, remained true to him, and all the conspiracies signally failed. It illustrates a favourable trait in the archbishop’s character that he forgave all the conspirators. He was, as his secretary Morice testifies, “a man that delighted not in revenging.” Cranmer was present with Henry VIII when he died (1547). By the will of the King he was nominated one of a council of regency composed of sixteen persons, but he acquiesced in the arrangement by which Somerset became Lord Protector. He officiated at the coronation of the boy King Edward VI, and is supposed to have instituted a sinister change in the order of the ceremony, by which the right of the monarch to reign was made to appear to depend upon inheritance alone, without the concurrent consent of the people. But Edward’s title had been expressly sanctioned by act of parliament, so that there was no more room for election in his case than in that of George I, and the real motive of the changes was to shorten the weary ceremony for the frail child.
During this reign the work of the Reformation made rapid progress, the sympathies both of the Protector and of the young King being decidedly Protestant. Cranmer was therefore enabled without let or hindrance to complete the preparation of the church formularies, on which he had been for some time engaged. In 1547 appeared the Homiliesprepared under his direction. Four of them are attributed to the archbishop himself—those on Salvation, Faith, Good Works and the Reading of Scripture. His translation of the German Catechismof Justus Jonas, known as Cranmer’s Catechism, appeared in the following year. Important, as showing his views on a cardinal doctrine, was the Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, which he published in 1550. It was immediately answered from the side of the ” old learning ” by Gardiner. The first prayerbook of Edward VI was finished in November 1548, and received legal sanction in March 1549; the second was completed and sanctioned in April 1552. The archbishop did much of the work of compilation personally. The forty-two articles of Edward VI, published in 1553, owe their form and style almost entirely to the hand of Cranmer.
The last great undertaking in which he was employed was the revision of his codification of the canon law, which had been all but completed before the death of Henry. The task was one eminently well suited to his powers, and the execution of it was marked by great skill in definition and arrangement. It never received any authoritative sanction, Edward VI dying before the proclamation establishing it could be made, and it remained unpublished until 1571, when a Latin translation by Dr Walter Haddon and Sir John Cheke appeared under the title Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum. It laid down the lawfulness and necessity of persecution to the death for heresy in the most absolute terms; and Cranmer himself condemned Joan Bocher to the flames. But he naturally loathed persecution, and was as tolerant as any in that age.
Cranmer stood by the dying bed of Edward as he had stood by that of his father, and he there suffered himself to be persuaded to take a step against his own convictions. He had pledged himself to respect the testamentary disposition of Henry VIII by which the succession devolved upon Mary, and now he violated his oath by signing Edward’s “device” of the crown to Lady Jane Grey. On grounds of policy and morality alike the act was quite indefensible; but it is perhaps some palliation of his perjury that it was committed to satisfy the last urgent wish of a dying man, and that he alone remained true to the “nine days’ Queen” when the others who had with him signed Edward’s device deserted her.
On the accession of Queen Mary, he was summoned to the council—most of whom had signed the same device—reprimanded for his conduct, and ordered to confine himself to his palace at Lambeth until the queen’s pleasure was known. He refused to follow the advice of his friends and avoid the fate that was clearly impending over him by flight to the continent. Any chance of safety that lay in the friendliness of a strong party in the council was more than nullified by the bitter personal enmity of the Queen, who could not forgive his share in her mother’s divorce and her own disgrace. On the 14th of September 1553 he was sent to the Tower, where Ridley and Latimer were also confined. The immediate occasion of his imprisonment was a strongly worded declaration he had written a few days previously against the mass, the celebration of which, he heard, had been re-established at Canterbury. He had not taken steps to publish this, but by some unknown channel a copy reached the council, and it could not be ignored.
In November, with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and two other Dudleys, Cranmer was condemned for treason. Renard thought he would be executed, but so true a Romanist as Mary could scarcely have an ecclesiastic put to death in consequence of a sentence by a secular court, and Cranmer was reserved for treatment as a heretic by the highest of clerical tribunals, which could not act until parliament had restored the papal jurisdiction. Accordingly in March 1554 he and his two illustrious fellow-prisoners, Ridley and Latimer, were removed to Oxford, where they were confined in the Bocardo or common prison. Ridley and Latimer were unflinching, and suffered bravely at the stake on the 16th of October 1555. Cranmer had been tried by a papal commission, over which Bishop Brooks of Gloucester presided, in September 1555. Brooks had no power to give sentence, but reported to Rome, where Cranmer was summoned, but not permitted, to attend. On the 25th of November he was pronounced contumacious by the pope and excommunicated, and a commission was sent to England to degrade him from his office of archbishop. This was done with the usual humiliating ceremonies in Christ Church, Oxford, on the 14th of February 1556, and he was then handed over to the secular power.
About the same time Cranmer subscribed the first two of his “recantations.” His difficulty consisted in the fact that, like all Anglicans of the 16th century, he recognized no right of private judgment, but believed that the state, as represented by monarchy, parliament and Convocation, had an absolute right to determine the national faith and to impose it on every Englishman. All these authorities had now legally established Roman Catholicism as the national faith, and Cranmer had no logical ground on which to resist. His early recantations” are merely recognitions of his lifelong conviction of this right of the state. But his dilemma on this point led him into further doubts, and he was eventually induced to revile his whole career and the Reformation. This is what the government wanted. Northumberland’s recantation had done much to discredit the Reformation, Cranmer’s, it was hoped, would complete the work. Hence the enormous effect of Cranmer’s recovery at the final scene.
On the 21st of March he was taken to St Mary’s church, and asked to repeat his recantation in the hearing of the people as he had promised. To the surprise of all he declared with dignity and emphasis that what he had recently done troubled him more than anything he ever did or said in his whole life; that he renounced and refused all his recantations as things written with his hand, contrary to the truth which he thought in his heart; and that as his hand had offended, his hand should be first burned when he came to the fire. As he had said, his right hand was steadfastly exposed to the flames. The calm cheerfulness and resolution with which he met his fate show that he felt that he had cleared his conscience, and that his recantation of his recantations was a repentance that needed not to be repented of.
It was a noble end to what, in spite of its besetting sin of infirmity of moral purpose, was a not ignoble life. The key to his character is well given in what Hooper said of him in a letter to Bullinger, that he was “too fearful about what might happen to him.” This weakness was the worst blot on Cranmer’s character, but it was due in some measure to his painful capacity for seeing both sides of a question at the same time, a temperament fatal to martyrdom.
As a theologian it is difficult to class him. As early as 1538 he had repudiated the doctrine of Transubstantiation; by 1550 he had rejected also the Real Presence (Pref. to his Answer to Dr Richard Smith). But here he used the term “real” somewhat unguardedly, for in his Defencehe asserts a real presence, but defines it as exclusively a spiritual presence; and he repudiates the idea that the bread and wine were “bare tokens.” His views on church polity were dominated by his implicit belief in the divine right of kings (not of course the divine hereditary right of kings) which the Anglicans felt it necessary to set up against the divine right of popes. He set practically no limits to the ecclesiastical authority of kings; they were as fully the representatives of the church as the state, and Cranmer hardly distinguished between the two. Church and state to him were one.
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One of the most influential churchmen during the Tudor era was Thomas Cranmer. Under Henry VIII's reign he became the Archbishop of Canterbury and became very close to the King. He advised the King of important matters on religion, but also when the King needed rid of his wives, Cranmer was set to work. It would be Archbishop Thomas Cranmer who would declare Catherine of Aragon and Henry's marriage invalid, claim Anne Boleyn to be valid, look for reasons for Anne's execution and much more.
He was incredibly important, and was a leading figure in reforming the Church of England. He became a leading Protestant and carried on his big reforms during the reign of Edward VI. He acted as one of Edward's protectors following the young King rising to the throne. However under Mary I/Bloody Mary he would meet a tragic end. When Mary I came onto the throne, she was Catholic and began to persecute leading Protestants. Thomas Cranmer and Mary had a strong dislike for each other, as Cranmer had caused her mother, Catherine of Aragon's downfall.
Despite recanting and acknowledging the Catholic religion as superior, Thomas Cranmer was executed by being burned at the stake. He was claimed to be a heretic and was burned in Oxford in public. His execution was incredible unlawful and brutal. Join us today as we look at 'The Horrific Execution of Thomas Cranmer.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F34UN9GgEz0
Images:
1. The Arrest of Thomas Cranmer During Cole's Sermon in St. Mary's Church
2. The Burning of Thomas Cranmer. From Foxe's Book of Martyrs
3. July 16, 1556 protestant martyrs Julius Palmer, Thomas Askew and John Gwin burned at the stake at Newbury.
Background from {[ https://anglicanway.org/2019/03/24/thomas-cranmer-his-life-and-martyrdom-21st-march-1556/}]
Thomas Cranmer, His Life and Martyrdom (21st March, 1556)
THOMAS CRANMER (1489-1556)
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, born at Aslacton or Aslockton in Nottinghamshire on the 2nd of July 1489, was the second son of Thomas Cranmer and of his wife Anne Hatfield. He received his early education, according to Morice his secretary, from “a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster,” whose discipline must have been severe indeed to deserve this special mention in an age when no schoolmaster bore the rod in vain. The same authority tells us that he was initiated by his father in those field sports, such as hunting and hawking, which formed one of his recreations in after life. To early training he also owed the skilful horsemanship for which he was conspicuous.
At the age of fourteen he was sent by his mother, who had in 1501 become a widow, to Cambridge. Little is known with certainty of his university career beyond the facts that he became a fellow of Jesus College in 1510 or 1511, that he had soon after to vacate his fellowship, owing to his marriage to “Black Joan,” a relative of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn, and that he was reinstated in it on the death of his wife, which occurred in childbirth before the lapse of the year of grace allowed by the statutes. During the brief period of his married life he held the
appointment of lecturer at Buckingham Hall, now Magdalene College. The fact of his marrying would seem to show that he did not at the time intend to enter the church; possibly the death of his wife caused him to qualify for holy orders. He was ordained in 1523, and soon after he took his doctor’s degree in divinity.
According to Strype, he was invited about this time to become a fellow of the college founded by Cardinal Wolsey at Oxford; but Dean Hook shows that there is some reason to doubt this. If the offer was made, it was declined, and Cranmer continued at Cambridge filling the offices of lecturer in divinity at his own college and of public examiner in divinity to the university. It is interesting, in view of his later efforts to spread the knowledge of the Bible among the people, to know that in the capacity of examiner he insisted on a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures, and rejected several candidates who were deficient in this qualification.
It was a somewhat curious concurrence of circumstances that transferred Cranmer, almost at one step, from the quiet seclusion of the university to the din and bustle of the court. In August 1529 the plague known as the sweating sickness, which prevailed throughout the country, was specially severe at Cambridge, and all who had it in their power forsook the town for the country. Cranmer went with two of his pupils named Cressy, related to him through their mother, to their father’s house at Waltham in Essex. The King (Henry VIII) happened at the time to be visiting in the immediate neighbourhood, and two of his chief counsellors, Gardiner, Secretary of State, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, and Edward Fox, the Lord High Almoner, afterwards Bishop of Hereford, were lodged at Cressy’s house. Meeting with Cranmer, they were naturally led to discuss the King’s meditated divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Cranmer suggested that if the canonists and the universities should decide that marriage with a deceased brother’s widow was illegal, and if it were proved that Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, her marriage to Henry could be declared null and void by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. The necessity of an appeal to Rome was thus dispensed with, and this point was at once seen by the King, who, when Cranmer’s opinion was reported to him, is said to have ordered him to be summoned in these terms: “I will speak to him. Let him be sent for out of hand. This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear.”
At their first interview Cranmer was commanded by the King to lay aside all other pursuits and to devote himself to the question of the divorce. He was to draw up a written treatise, stating the course he proposed, and defending it by arguments from scripture, the fathers and the decrees of general councils. His material interests certainly did not suffer by compliance. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time; the King appointed him archdeacon of Taunton and one of his chaplains; and he also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited, accompanied by Fox and Gardiner. Immediately afterwards he was sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was despatched to Rome in 1530, that “the matter of the divorce should be disputed and ventilated,” and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the Pope with marked courtesy, and was appointed “Grand Penitentiary of England,” but his argument, if he ever had the opportunity of stating it, did not lead to any practical decision of the question.
Cranmer returned in September 1530, but in January 1531 he received a second commission from the King appointing him “Conciliarius Regius et ad Caesarem Orator.” In the summer of 1531 he accordingly proceeded to Germany as sole ambassador to the Emperor. He was also to sound the Lutheran princes with a view to an alliance, and to obtain the removal of some restrictions on English trade. At Nuremberg he became acquainted with Osiander, whose somewhat isolated theological position he probably found to be in many points analogous to his own. Both were convinced that the old order must change; neither saw clearly what the new order should be to which it was to give place. They had frequent interviews, which had doubtless an important influence on Cranmer’s opinions. But Osiander’s house had another attraction of a different kind from theological sympathy. His niece Margaret won the heart of Cranmer, and in 1532 they were married. Hook finds in the fact of the marriage corroboration of Cranmer’s statement that he never expected or desired the primacy; and it seems probable enough that, if he had foreseen how soon the primacy was to be forced upon him, he would have avoided a disqualification which it was difficult to conceal and dangerous to disclose.
Expected or not, the primacy was forced upon him within a very few months of his marriage. In August 1532, Archbishop Warham died, and the King almost immediately afterwards intimated to Cranmer, who had accompanied the Emperor in his campaign against the Turks, his nomination to the vacant see. Cranmer’s conduct was certainly consistent with his profession that he did not desire, as he had not expected, the dangerous promotion. He sent his wife to England, but delayed his own return in the vain hope that another appointment might be made. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March 1533, and the consecration took place on the 30th March. One peculiarity of the ceremony had occasioned considerable discussion. It was the custom for the archbishop elect to take two oaths, the first of episcopal allegiance to the pope, and the second in recognition of the royal supremacy. The latter was so wide in its scope that it might fairly be held to supersede the former in so far as the two were inconsistent. Cranmer, however, was not satisfied with this. He had a special protest recorded, in which he formally declared that he swore allegiance to the pope only in so far as that was consistent with his supreme duty to the King. The morality of this course has been much canvassed, though it seems really to involve nothing more than an express declaration of what the two oaths implied. It was the course that would readily suggest itself to a man of timid nature who wished to secure himself against such a fate as Wolsey’s. It showed weakness, but it added nothing to whatever immorality there might be in successively taking two incompatible oaths.
In the last as in the first step of Cranmer’s promotion, Henry had been actuated by one and the same motive. The business of the divorce — or rather, of the legitimation of Anne Boleyn’s expected issue — had now become very urgent, and in the new archbishop he had an agent who might be expected to forward it with the needful haste. The celerity and skill with which Cranmer did the work intrusted to him must have fully satisfied his master. During the first week of April, Convocation sat almost from day to day to determine questions of fact and law in relation to Catherine’s marriage with Henry as affected by her previous marriage with his brother Arthur. Decisions favourable to the object of the King were given on these questions, though even the despotism of the most despotic of the Tudors failed to secure absolute unanimity.
The next step was taken by Cranmer, who wrote a letter to the King, praying to be allowed to remove the anxiety of loyal subjects as to a possible case of disputed succession, by finally determining the validity of the marriage in his archiepiscopal court. There is evidence that the request was prompted by the King, and his consent was given as a matter of course. Queen Catherine was residing at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, and to suit her convenience the court was held at the priory of Dunstable in the immediate neighbourhood. Declining to appear, she was declared contumacious, and on the 23rd of May the archbishop gave judgment declaring the marriage null and void from the first, and so leaving the King free to marry whom he pleased. The Act of Appeals had already prohibited any appeal from the archbishop’s court. Five days later he pronounced the marriage between Henry and Anne — which had been secretly celebrated about the 25th of January 1533 — to be valid. On the 1st of June he crowned Anne as Queen, and on the l0th of September stood godfather to her child, the future Queen Elizabeth.
The breach with Rome and the subjection of the church in England to the royal supremacy had been practically achieved before Cranmer’s appointment as archbishop: and he had little to do with the other constitutional changes of Henry’s reign. But his position as chief minister of Henry’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction forced him into unpleasant prominence in connexion with the King’s matrimonial experiences. In 1536 he was required to revise his own sentence in favour of the validity of Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn; and on the 17th of May the marriage was declared invalid. The ground on which this sentence is pronounced is fairly clear. Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, had been Henry VIII’s mistress; this by canon law was a bar to his marriage with Anne—a bar which had been removed by papal dispensation in 1527, but now the papal power to dispense in such cases had been repudiated, and the original objection revived. The sentence was grotesquely legal and unjust. With Anne’s condemnation by the House of Lords, Cranmer had nothing to do. He interceded for her in vain with the King, as he had done in the cases of John Fisher, Thomas More and the monks of Christchurch. His share in the divorce of Anne of Cleves was less prominent than that of Bishop Gardiner, though he did preside over the Convocation in which nearly all the dignitaries of the church signified their approval of that measure. To his next and last interposition in the matrimonial affairs of the King no discredit attaches itself. When he was made cognizant of the charges against Catherine Howard, his duty to communicate them to the King was obvious, though painful.
Meanwhile Cranmer was actively carrying out the policy which has associated his name more closely, perhaps, than that of any other ecclesiastic with the Reformation in England. Its most important feature on the theological as distinct from the political side, was the endeavour to promote the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular, by encouraging translation and procuring an order in 1538 that a copy of the Bible in English should be set up in every church in a convenient place for reading. Only second in importance to this was the re-adjustment of the creed and liturgy of the church, which formed Cranmer’s principal work during the latter half of his life.
The progress of the archbishop’s opinion towards that middle Protestantism, if it may be so called, which he did so much to impress on the formularies of the Church of England, was gradual, as a brief enumeration of the successive steps in that progress will show. In 1538 an embassy of German divines visited England with the design, among other things, of forming a common confession for the two countries. This proved impracticable, but the frequent conferences Cranmer had with the theologians composing the embassy had doubtless a great influence in modifying his views. Both in parliament and in Convocation he opposed the Six Articles of 1539, but he stood almost alone. During the period between 1540 and 1543 the archbishop was engaged at the head of a commission in the revision of the “Bishop’s Book” (1537) or Institutions of a Christian Man, and the preparation of the Necessary Erudition (1543) known as the “King’s Book,” which was a modification of the former work in the direction of Roman Catholic doctrine. In June 1545 was issued his Litany, which was substantially the same as that now in use, and shows his mastery of a rhythmical English style.
The course taken by Cranmer in promoting the Reformation exposed him to the bitter hostility of the reactionary party or “men of the old learning,” of whom Gardiner and Bonner were leaders, and on various occasions — notably in 1543 and 1545 — conspiracies were formed in the council or elsewhere to effect his overthrow. The King, however, remained true to him, and all the conspiracies signally failed. It illustrates a favourable trait in the archbishop’s character that he forgave all the conspirators. He was, as his secretary Morice testifies, “a man that delighted not in revenging.” Cranmer was present with Henry VIII when he died (1547). By the will of the King he was nominated one of a council of regency composed of sixteen persons, but he acquiesced in the arrangement by which Somerset became Lord Protector. He officiated at the coronation of the boy King Edward VI, and is supposed to have instituted a sinister change in the order of the ceremony, by which the right of the monarch to reign was made to appear to depend upon inheritance alone, without the concurrent consent of the people. But Edward’s title had been expressly sanctioned by act of parliament, so that there was no more room for election in his case than in that of George I, and the real motive of the changes was to shorten the weary ceremony for the frail child.
During this reign the work of the Reformation made rapid progress, the sympathies both of the Protector and of the young King being decidedly Protestant. Cranmer was therefore enabled without let or hindrance to complete the preparation of the church formularies, on which he had been for some time engaged. In 1547 appeared the Homiliesprepared under his direction. Four of them are attributed to the archbishop himself—those on Salvation, Faith, Good Works and the Reading of Scripture. His translation of the German Catechismof Justus Jonas, known as Cranmer’s Catechism, appeared in the following year. Important, as showing his views on a cardinal doctrine, was the Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, which he published in 1550. It was immediately answered from the side of the ” old learning ” by Gardiner. The first prayerbook of Edward VI was finished in November 1548, and received legal sanction in March 1549; the second was completed and sanctioned in April 1552. The archbishop did much of the work of compilation personally. The forty-two articles of Edward VI, published in 1553, owe their form and style almost entirely to the hand of Cranmer.
The last great undertaking in which he was employed was the revision of his codification of the canon law, which had been all but completed before the death of Henry. The task was one eminently well suited to his powers, and the execution of it was marked by great skill in definition and arrangement. It never received any authoritative sanction, Edward VI dying before the proclamation establishing it could be made, and it remained unpublished until 1571, when a Latin translation by Dr Walter Haddon and Sir John Cheke appeared under the title Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum. It laid down the lawfulness and necessity of persecution to the death for heresy in the most absolute terms; and Cranmer himself condemned Joan Bocher to the flames. But he naturally loathed persecution, and was as tolerant as any in that age.
Cranmer stood by the dying bed of Edward as he had stood by that of his father, and he there suffered himself to be persuaded to take a step against his own convictions. He had pledged himself to respect the testamentary disposition of Henry VIII by which the succession devolved upon Mary, and now he violated his oath by signing Edward’s “device” of the crown to Lady Jane Grey. On grounds of policy and morality alike the act was quite indefensible; but it is perhaps some palliation of his perjury that it was committed to satisfy the last urgent wish of a dying man, and that he alone remained true to the “nine days’ Queen” when the others who had with him signed Edward’s device deserted her.
On the accession of Queen Mary, he was summoned to the council—most of whom had signed the same device—reprimanded for his conduct, and ordered to confine himself to his palace at Lambeth until the queen’s pleasure was known. He refused to follow the advice of his friends and avoid the fate that was clearly impending over him by flight to the continent. Any chance of safety that lay in the friendliness of a strong party in the council was more than nullified by the bitter personal enmity of the Queen, who could not forgive his share in her mother’s divorce and her own disgrace. On the 14th of September 1553 he was sent to the Tower, where Ridley and Latimer were also confined. The immediate occasion of his imprisonment was a strongly worded declaration he had written a few days previously against the mass, the celebration of which, he heard, had been re-established at Canterbury. He had not taken steps to publish this, but by some unknown channel a copy reached the council, and it could not be ignored.
In November, with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and two other Dudleys, Cranmer was condemned for treason. Renard thought he would be executed, but so true a Romanist as Mary could scarcely have an ecclesiastic put to death in consequence of a sentence by a secular court, and Cranmer was reserved for treatment as a heretic by the highest of clerical tribunals, which could not act until parliament had restored the papal jurisdiction. Accordingly in March 1554 he and his two illustrious fellow-prisoners, Ridley and Latimer, were removed to Oxford, where they were confined in the Bocardo or common prison. Ridley and Latimer were unflinching, and suffered bravely at the stake on the 16th of October 1555. Cranmer had been tried by a papal commission, over which Bishop Brooks of Gloucester presided, in September 1555. Brooks had no power to give sentence, but reported to Rome, where Cranmer was summoned, but not permitted, to attend. On the 25th of November he was pronounced contumacious by the pope and excommunicated, and a commission was sent to England to degrade him from his office of archbishop. This was done with the usual humiliating ceremonies in Christ Church, Oxford, on the 14th of February 1556, and he was then handed over to the secular power.
About the same time Cranmer subscribed the first two of his “recantations.” His difficulty consisted in the fact that, like all Anglicans of the 16th century, he recognized no right of private judgment, but believed that the state, as represented by monarchy, parliament and Convocation, had an absolute right to determine the national faith and to impose it on every Englishman. All these authorities had now legally established Roman Catholicism as the national faith, and Cranmer had no logical ground on which to resist. His early recantations” are merely recognitions of his lifelong conviction of this right of the state. But his dilemma on this point led him into further doubts, and he was eventually induced to revile his whole career and the Reformation. This is what the government wanted. Northumberland’s recantation had done much to discredit the Reformation, Cranmer’s, it was hoped, would complete the work. Hence the enormous effect of Cranmer’s recovery at the final scene.
On the 21st of March he was taken to St Mary’s church, and asked to repeat his recantation in the hearing of the people as he had promised. To the surprise of all he declared with dignity and emphasis that what he had recently done troubled him more than anything he ever did or said in his whole life; that he renounced and refused all his recantations as things written with his hand, contrary to the truth which he thought in his heart; and that as his hand had offended, his hand should be first burned when he came to the fire. As he had said, his right hand was steadfastly exposed to the flames. The calm cheerfulness and resolution with which he met his fate show that he felt that he had cleared his conscience, and that his recantation of his recantations was a repentance that needed not to be repented of.
It was a noble end to what, in spite of its besetting sin of infirmity of moral purpose, was a not ignoble life. The key to his character is well given in what Hooper said of him in a letter to Bullinger, that he was “too fearful about what might happen to him.” This weakness was the worst blot on Cranmer’s character, but it was due in some measure to his painful capacity for seeing both sides of a question at the same time, a temperament fatal to martyrdom.
As a theologian it is difficult to class him. As early as 1538 he had repudiated the doctrine of Transubstantiation; by 1550 he had rejected also the Real Presence (Pref. to his Answer to Dr Richard Smith). But here he used the term “real” somewhat unguardedly, for in his Defencehe asserts a real presence, but defines it as exclusively a spiritual presence; and he repudiates the idea that the bread and wine were “bare tokens.” His views on church polity were dominated by his implicit belief in the divine right of kings (not of course the divine hereditary right of kings) which the Anglicans felt it necessary to set up against the divine right of popes. He set practically no limits to the ecclesiastical authority of kings; they were as fully the representatives of the church as the state, and Cranmer hardly distinguished between the two. Church and state to him were one.
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Reformation Theology: Thomas Cranmer's Martyrdom
For the Reformers, doctrines weren’t just opinions—they were to die for. Perhaps the highest-profile martyr of the whole century was Archbishop of Canterbury...
Reformation Theology: Thomas Cranmer's Martyrdom
For the Reformers, doctrines weren’t just opinions—they were to die for. Perhaps the highest-profile martyr of the whole century was Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, whose bold final confession up-ended Queen Mary's counter-Reformation PR campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9V3CK-JzGw
Image:
1. King Henry VIII with Cranmer and Cromwell.
Background from {[http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/cranmerbio.htm}]
THOMAS CRANMER, Archbishop of Canterbury, born at Aslacton or Aslockton in Nottinghamshire on the 2nd of July 1489, was the second son of Thomas Cranmer and of his wife Anne Hatfield. He received his early education, according to Morice his secretary, from "a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster," whose discipline must have been severe indeed to deserve this special mention in an age when no schoolmaster bore the rod in vain. The same authority tells us that he was initiated by his father in those field sports, such as hunting and hawking, which formed one of his recreations in after life. To early training he also owed the skilful horsemanship for which he was conspicuous.
At the age of fourteen he was sent by his mother, who had in 1501 become a widow, to Cambridge. Little is known with certainty of his university career beyond the facts that he became a fellow of Jesus College in 1510 or 1511, that he had soon after to vacate his fellowship, owing to his marriage to "Black Joan," a relative of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn, and that he was reinstated in it on the death of his wife, which occurred in childbirth before the lapse of the year of grace allowed by the statutes. During the brief period of his married life he held the 'appointment of lecturer at Buckingham Hall, now Magdalene College. The fact of his marrying would seem to show that he did not at the time intend to enter the church; possibly the death of his wife caused him to qualify for holy orders. He was ordained in 1523, and soon after he took his doctor's degree in divinity.
According to Strype, he was invited about this time to become a fellow of the college founded by Cardinal Wolsey at Oxford; but Dean Hook shows that there is some reason to doubt this. If the offer was made, it was declined, and Cranmer continued at Cambridge filling the offices of lecturer in divinity at his own college and of public examiner in divinity to the university. It is interesting, in view of his later efforts to spread the knowledge of the Bible among the people, to know that in the capacity of examiner he insisted on a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures, and rejected several candidates who were deficient in this qualification.
It was a somewhat curious concurrence of circumstances that transferred Cranmer, almost at one step, from the quiet seclusion of the university to the din and bustle of the court. In August 1529 the plague known as the sweating sickness, which prevailed throughout the country, was specially severe at Cambridge, and all who had it in their power forsook the town for the country. Cranmer went with two of his pupils named Cressy, related to him through their mother, to their father's house at Waltham in Essex. The King (Henry VIII) happened at the time to be visiting in the immediate neighbourhood, and two of his chief counsellors, Gardiner, Secretary of State, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, and Edward Fox, the Lord High Almoner, afterwards Bishop of Hereford, were lodged at Cressy's house. Meeting with Cranmer, they were naturally led to discuss the King's meditated divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Cranmer suggested that if the canonists and the universities should decide that marriage with a deceased brother's widow was illegal, and if it were proved that Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, her marriage to Henry could be declared null and void by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. The necessity of an appeal to Rome was thus dispensed with, and this point was at once seen by the King, who, when Cranmer's opinion was reported to him, is said to have ordered him to be summoned in these terms: "I will speak to him. Let him be sent for out of hand. This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear."
At their first interview Cranmer was commanded by the King to lay aside all other pursuits and to devote himself to the question of the divorce. He was to draw up a written treatise, stating the course he proposed, and defending it by arguments from scripture, the fathers and the decrees of general councils. His material interests certainly did not suffer by compliance. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn's father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time; the King appointed him archdeacon of Taunton and one of his chaplains; and he also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited, accompanied by Fox and Gardiner. Immediately afterwards he was sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was despatched to Rome in 1530, that "the matter of the divorce should be disputed and ventilated," and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the Pope with marked courtesy, and was appointed "Grand Penitentiary of England," but his argument, if he ever had the opportunity of stating it, did not lead to any practical decision of the question.
Cranmer returned in September 1530, but in January 1531 he received a second commission from the King appointing him "Conciliarius Regius et ad Caesarem Orator." In the summer of 1531 he accordingly proceeded to Germany as sole ambassador to the Emperor. He was also to sound the Lutheran princes with a view to an alliance, and to obtain the removal of some restrictions on English trade. At Nuremberg he became acquainted with Osiander, whose somewhat isolated theological position he probably found to be in many points analogous to his own. Both were convinced that the old order must change; neither saw clearly what the new order should be to which it was to give place. They had frequent interviews, which had doubtless an important influence on Cranmer's opinions. But Osiander's house had another attraction of a different kind from theological sympathy. His niece Margaret won the heart of Cranmer, and in 1532 they were married. Hook finds in the fact of the marriage corroboration of Cranmer's statement that he never expected or desired the primacy; and it seems probable enough that, if he had foreseen how soon the primacy was to be forced upon him, he would have avoided a disqualification which it was difficult to conceal and dangerous to disclose.
Expected or not, the primacy was forced upon him within a very few months of his marriage. In August 1532, Archbishop Warham died, and the King almost immediately afterwards intimated to Cranmer, who had accompanied the Emperor in his campaign against the Turks, his nomination to the vacant see. Cranmer's conduct was certainly consistent with his profession that he did not desire, as he had not expected, the dangerous promotion. He sent his wife to England, but delayed his own return in the vain hope that another appointment might be made. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March 1533, and the consecration took place on the 30th March. One peculiarity of the ceremony had occasioned considerable discussion. It was the custom for the archbishop elect to take two oaths, the first of episcopal allegiance to the pope, and the second in recognition of the royal supremacy. The latter was so wide in its scope that it might fairly be held to supersede the former in so far as the two were inconsistent. Cranmer, however, was not satisfied with this. He had a special protest recorded, in which he formally declared that he swore allegiance to the pope only in so far as that was consistent with his supreme duty to the King. The morality of this course has been much canvassed, though it seems really to involve nothing more than an express declaration of what the two oaths implied. It was the course that would readily suggest itself to a man of timid nature who wished to secure himself against such a fate as Wolsey's. It showed weakness, but it added nothing to whatever immorality there might be in successively taking two incompatible oaths.
In the last as in the first step of Cranmer's promotion, Henry had been actuated by one and the same motive. The business of the divorce — or rather, of the legitimation of Anne Boleyn's expected issue — had now become very urgent, and in the new archbishop he had an agent who might be expected to forward it with the needful haste. The celerity and skill with which Cranmer did the work intrusted to him must have fully satisfied his master. During the first week of April, Convocation sat almost from day to day to determine questions of fact and law in relation to Catherine's marriage with Henry as affected by her previous marriage with his brother Arthur. Decisions favourable to the object of the King were given on these questions, though even the despotism of the most despotic of the Tudors failed to secure absolute unanimity.
The next step was taken by Cranmer, who wrote a letter to the King, praying to be allowed to remove the anxiety of loyal subjects as to a possible case of disputed succession, by finally determining the validity of the marriage in his archiepiscopal court. There is evidence that the request was prompted by the King, and his consent was given as a matter of course. Queen Catherine was residing at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, and to suit her convenience the court was held at the priory of Dunstable in the immediate neighbourhood. Declining to appear, she was declared contumacious, and on the 23rd of May the archbishop gave judgment declaring the marriage null and void from the first, and so leaving the King free to marry whom he pleased. The Act of Appeals had already prohibited any appeal from the archbishop's court. Five days later he pronounced the marriage between Henry and Anne — which had been secretly celebrated about the 25th of January 1533 — to be valid. On the 1st of June he crowned Anne as Queen, and on the l0th of September stood godfather to her child, the future Queen Elizabeth.
The breach with Rome and the subjection of the church in England to the royal supremacy had been practically achieved before Cranmer's appointment as archbishop: and he had little to do with the other constitutional changes of Henry's reign. But his position as chief minister of Henry's ecclesiastical jurisdiction forced him into unpleasant prominence in connexion with the King's matrimonial experiences. In 1536 he was required to revise his own sentence in favour of the validity of Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn; and on the 17th of May the marriage was declared invalid. The ground on which this sentence is pronounced is fairly clear. Anne's sister, Mary Boleyn, had been Henry VIII's mistress; this by canon law was a bar to his marriage with Anne—a bar which had been removed by papal dispensation in 1527, but now the papal power to dispense in such cases had been repudiated, and the original objection revived. The sentence was grotesquely legal and unjust. With Anne's condemnation by the House of Lords, Cranmer had nothing to do. He interceded for her in vain with the King, as he had done in the cases of John Fisher, Thomas More and the monks of Christchurch. His share in the divorce of Anne of Cleves was less prominent than that of Bishop Gardiner, though he did preside over the Convocation in which nearly all the dignitaries of the church signified their approval of that measure. To his next and last interposition in the matrimonial affairs of the King no discredit attaches itself. When he was made cognizant of the charges against Catherine Howard, his duty to communicate them to the King was obvious, though painful.
Meanwhile Cranmer was actively carrying out the policy which has associated his name more closely, perhaps, than that of any other ecclesiastic with the Reformation in England. Its most important feature on the theological as distinct from the political side, was the endeavour to promote the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular, by encouraging translation and procuring an order in 1538 that a copy of the Bible in English should be set up in every church in a convenient place for reading. Only second in importance to this was the re-adjustment of the creed and liturgy of the church, which formed Cranmer's principal work during the latter half of his life.
The progress of the archbishop's opinion towards that middle Protestantism, if it may be so called, which he did so much to impress on the formularies of the Church of England, was gradual, as a brief enumeration of the successive steps in that progress will show. In 1538 an embassy of German divines visited England with the design, among other things, of forming a common confession for the two countries. This proved impracticable, but the frequent conferences Cranmer had with the theologians composing the embassy had doubtless a great influence in modifying his views. Both in parliament and in Convocation he opposed the Six Articles of 1539, but he stood almost alone. During the period between 1540 and 1543 the archbishop was engaged at the head of a commission in the revision of the "Bishop's Book" (1537) or Institutions of a Christian Man, and the preparation of the Necessary Erudition (1543) known as the "King's Book," which was a modification of the former work in the direction of Roman Catholic doctrine. In June 1545 was issued his Litany, which was substantially the same as that now in use, and shows his mastery of a rhythmical English style.
The course taken by Cranmer in promoting the Reformation exposed him to the bitter hostility of the reactionary party or "men of the old learning," of whom Gardiner and Bonner were leaders, and on various occasions — notably in 1543 and 1545 — conspiracies were formed in the council or elsewhere to effect his overthrow. The King, however, remained true to him, and all the conspiracies signally failed. It illustrates a favourable trait in the archbishop's character that he forgave all the conspirators. He was, as his secretary Morice testifies, "a man that delighted not in revenging." Cranmer was present with Henry VIII when he died (1547). By the will of the King he was nominated one of a council of regency composed of sixteen persons, but he acquiesced in the arrangement by which Somerset became Lord Protector. He officiated at the coronation of the boy King Edward VI, and is supposed to have instituted a sinister change in the order of the ceremony, by which the right of the monarch to reign was made to appear to depend upon inheritance alone, without the concurrent consent of the people. But Edward's title had been expressly sanctioned by act of parliament, so that there was no more room for election in his case than in that of George I, and the real motive of the changes was to shorten the weary ceremony for the frail child.
During this reign the work of the Reformation made rapid progress, the sympathies both of the Protector and of the young King being decidedly Protestant. Cranmer was therefore enabled without let or hindrance to complete the preparation of the church formularies, on which he had been for some time engaged. In 1547 appeared the Homilies prepared under his direction. Four of them are attributed to the archbishop himself—those on Salvation, Faith, Good Works and the Reading of Scripture. His translation of the German Catechism of Justus Jonas, known as Cranmer's Catechism, appeared in the following year. Important, as showing his views on a cardinal doctrine, was the Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, which he published in 1550. It was immediately answered from the side of the " old learning " by Gardiner. The first prayerbook of Edward VI was finished in November 1548, and received legal sanction in March 1549; the second was completed and sanctioned in April 1552. The archbishop did much of the work of compilation personally. The forty-two articles of Edward VI, published in 1553, owe their form and style almost entirely to the hand of Cranmer.
The last great undertaKing in which he was employed was the revision of his codification of the canon law, which had been all but completed before the death of Henry. The task was one eminently well suited to his powers, and the execution of it was marked by great skill in definition and arrangement. It never received any authoritative sanction, Edward VI dying before the proclamation establishing it could be made, and it remained unpublished until 1571, when a Latin translation by Dr Walter Haddon and Sir John Cheke appeared under the title Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum. It laid down the lawfulness and necessity of persecution to the death for heresy in the most absolute terms; and Cranmer himself condemned Joan Bocher to the flames. But he naturally loathed persecution, and was as tolerant as any in that age.
Cranmer stood by the dying bed of Edward as he had stood by that of his father, and he there suffered himself to be persuaded to take a step against his own convictions. He had pledged himself to respect the testamentary disposition of Henry VIII by which the succession devolved upon Mary, and now he violated his oath by signing Edward's "device" of the crown to Lady Jane Grey. On grounds of policy and morality alike the act was quite indefensible; but it is perhaps some palliation of his perjury that it was committed to satisfy the last urgent wish of a dying man, and that he alone remained true to the "nine days' Queen" when the others who had with him signed Edward's device deserted her.
On the accession of Queen Mary, he was summoned to the council—most of whom had signed the same device—reprimanded for his conduct, and ordered to confine himself to his palace at Lambeth until the queen's pleasure was known. He refused to follow the advice of his friends and avoid the fate that was clearly impending over him by flight to the continent. Any chance of safety that lay in the friendliness of a strong party in the council was more than nullified by the bitter personal enmity of the Queen, who could not forgive his share in her mother's divorce and her own disgrace. On the 14th of September 1553 he was sent to the Tower, where Ridley and Latimer were also confined. The immediate occasion of his imprisonment was a strongly worded declaration he had written a few days previously against the mass, the celebration of which, he heard, had been re-established at Canterbury. He had not taken steps to publish this, but by some unknown channel a copy reached the council, and it could not be ignored.
In November, with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and two other Dudleys, Cranmer was condemned for treason. Renard thought he would be executed, but so true a Romanist as Mary could scarcely have an ecclesiastic put to death in consequence of a sentence by a secular court, and Cranmer was reserved for treatment as a heretic by the highest of clerical tribunals, which could not act until parliament had restored the papal jurisdiction. Accordingly in March 1554 he and his two illustrious fellow-prisoners, Ridley and Latimer, were removed to Oxford, where they were confined in the Bocardo or common prison. Ridley and Latimer were unflinching, and suffered bravely at the stake on the 16th of October 1555. Cranmer had been tried by a papal commission, over which Bishop Brooks of Gloucester presided, in September 1555. Brooks had no power to give sentence, but reported to Rome, where Cranmer was summoned, but not permitted, to attend. On the 25th of November he was pronounced contumacious by the pope and excommunicated, and a commission was sent to England to degrade him from his office of archbishop. This was done with the usual humiliating ceremonies in Christ Church, Oxford, on the 14th of February 1556, and he was then handed over to the secular power.
About the same time Cranmer subscribed the first two of his "recantations." His difficulty consisted in the fact that, like all Anglicans of the 16th century, he recognized no right of private judgment, but believed that the state, as represented by monarchy, parliament and Convocation, had an absolute right to determine the national faith and to impose it on every Englishman. All these authorities had now legally established Roman Catholicism as the national faith, and Cranmer had no logical ground on which to resist. His early recantations" are merely recognitions of his lifelong conviction of this right of the state. But his dilemma on this point led him into further doubts, and he was eventually induced to revile his whole career and the Reformation. This is what the government wanted. Northumberland's recantation had done much to discredit the Reformation, Cranmer's, it was hoped, would complete the work. Hence the enormous effect of Cranmer's recovery at the final scene.
On the 21st of March he was taken to St Mary's church, and asked to repeat his recantation in the hearing of the people as he had promised. To the surprise of all he declared with dignity and emphasis that what he had recently done troubled him more than anything he ever did or said in his whole life; that he renounced and refused all his recantations as things written with his hand, contrary to the truth which he thought in his heart; and that as his hand had offended, his hand should be first burned when he came to the fire. As he had said, his right hand was steadfastly exposed to the flames. The calm cheerfulness and resolution with which he met his fate show that he felt that he had cleared his conscience, and that his recantation of his recantations was a repentance that needed not to be repented of.
It was a noble end to what, in spite of its besetting sin of infirmity of moral purpose, was a not ignoble life. The key to his character is well given in what Hooper said of him in a letter to Bullinger, that he was "too fearful about what might happen to him." This weakness was the worst blot on Cranmer's character, but it was due in some measure to his painful capacity for seeing both sides of a question at the same time, a temperament fatal to martyrdom. As a theologian it is difficult to class him. As early as 1538 he had repudiated the doctrine of Transubstantiation; by 1550 he had rejected also the Real Presence (Pref. to his Answer to Dr Richard Smith). But here he used the term "real" somewhat unguardedly, for in his Defence he asserts a real presence, but defines it as exclusively a spiritual presence; and he repudiates the idea that the bread and wine were " bare tokens." His views on church polity were dominated by his implicit belief in the divine right of kings (not of course the divine hereditary right of kings) which the Anglicans felt it necessary to set up against the divine right of popes. He set practically no limits to the ecclesiastical authority of kings; they were as fully the representatives of the church as the state, and Cranmer hardly distinguished between the two. Church and state to him were one."
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For the Reformers, doctrines weren’t just opinions—they were to die for. Perhaps the highest-profile martyr of the whole century was Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, whose bold final confession up-ended Queen Mary's counter-Reformation PR campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9V3CK-JzGw
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1. King Henry VIII with Cranmer and Cromwell.
Background from {[http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/cranmerbio.htm}]
THOMAS CRANMER, Archbishop of Canterbury, born at Aslacton or Aslockton in Nottinghamshire on the 2nd of July 1489, was the second son of Thomas Cranmer and of his wife Anne Hatfield. He received his early education, according to Morice his secretary, from "a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster," whose discipline must have been severe indeed to deserve this special mention in an age when no schoolmaster bore the rod in vain. The same authority tells us that he was initiated by his father in those field sports, such as hunting and hawking, which formed one of his recreations in after life. To early training he also owed the skilful horsemanship for which he was conspicuous.
At the age of fourteen he was sent by his mother, who had in 1501 become a widow, to Cambridge. Little is known with certainty of his university career beyond the facts that he became a fellow of Jesus College in 1510 or 1511, that he had soon after to vacate his fellowship, owing to his marriage to "Black Joan," a relative of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn, and that he was reinstated in it on the death of his wife, which occurred in childbirth before the lapse of the year of grace allowed by the statutes. During the brief period of his married life he held the 'appointment of lecturer at Buckingham Hall, now Magdalene College. The fact of his marrying would seem to show that he did not at the time intend to enter the church; possibly the death of his wife caused him to qualify for holy orders. He was ordained in 1523, and soon after he took his doctor's degree in divinity.
According to Strype, he was invited about this time to become a fellow of the college founded by Cardinal Wolsey at Oxford; but Dean Hook shows that there is some reason to doubt this. If the offer was made, it was declined, and Cranmer continued at Cambridge filling the offices of lecturer in divinity at his own college and of public examiner in divinity to the university. It is interesting, in view of his later efforts to spread the knowledge of the Bible among the people, to know that in the capacity of examiner he insisted on a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures, and rejected several candidates who were deficient in this qualification.
It was a somewhat curious concurrence of circumstances that transferred Cranmer, almost at one step, from the quiet seclusion of the university to the din and bustle of the court. In August 1529 the plague known as the sweating sickness, which prevailed throughout the country, was specially severe at Cambridge, and all who had it in their power forsook the town for the country. Cranmer went with two of his pupils named Cressy, related to him through their mother, to their father's house at Waltham in Essex. The King (Henry VIII) happened at the time to be visiting in the immediate neighbourhood, and two of his chief counsellors, Gardiner, Secretary of State, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, and Edward Fox, the Lord High Almoner, afterwards Bishop of Hereford, were lodged at Cressy's house. Meeting with Cranmer, they were naturally led to discuss the King's meditated divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Cranmer suggested that if the canonists and the universities should decide that marriage with a deceased brother's widow was illegal, and if it were proved that Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, her marriage to Henry could be declared null and void by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. The necessity of an appeal to Rome was thus dispensed with, and this point was at once seen by the King, who, when Cranmer's opinion was reported to him, is said to have ordered him to be summoned in these terms: "I will speak to him. Let him be sent for out of hand. This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear."
At their first interview Cranmer was commanded by the King to lay aside all other pursuits and to devote himself to the question of the divorce. He was to draw up a written treatise, stating the course he proposed, and defending it by arguments from scripture, the fathers and the decrees of general councils. His material interests certainly did not suffer by compliance. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn's father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time; the King appointed him archdeacon of Taunton and one of his chaplains; and he also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited, accompanied by Fox and Gardiner. Immediately afterwards he was sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was despatched to Rome in 1530, that "the matter of the divorce should be disputed and ventilated," and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the Pope with marked courtesy, and was appointed "Grand Penitentiary of England," but his argument, if he ever had the opportunity of stating it, did not lead to any practical decision of the question.
Cranmer returned in September 1530, but in January 1531 he received a second commission from the King appointing him "Conciliarius Regius et ad Caesarem Orator." In the summer of 1531 he accordingly proceeded to Germany as sole ambassador to the Emperor. He was also to sound the Lutheran princes with a view to an alliance, and to obtain the removal of some restrictions on English trade. At Nuremberg he became acquainted with Osiander, whose somewhat isolated theological position he probably found to be in many points analogous to his own. Both were convinced that the old order must change; neither saw clearly what the new order should be to which it was to give place. They had frequent interviews, which had doubtless an important influence on Cranmer's opinions. But Osiander's house had another attraction of a different kind from theological sympathy. His niece Margaret won the heart of Cranmer, and in 1532 they were married. Hook finds in the fact of the marriage corroboration of Cranmer's statement that he never expected or desired the primacy; and it seems probable enough that, if he had foreseen how soon the primacy was to be forced upon him, he would have avoided a disqualification which it was difficult to conceal and dangerous to disclose.
Expected or not, the primacy was forced upon him within a very few months of his marriage. In August 1532, Archbishop Warham died, and the King almost immediately afterwards intimated to Cranmer, who had accompanied the Emperor in his campaign against the Turks, his nomination to the vacant see. Cranmer's conduct was certainly consistent with his profession that he did not desire, as he had not expected, the dangerous promotion. He sent his wife to England, but delayed his own return in the vain hope that another appointment might be made. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March 1533, and the consecration took place on the 30th March. One peculiarity of the ceremony had occasioned considerable discussion. It was the custom for the archbishop elect to take two oaths, the first of episcopal allegiance to the pope, and the second in recognition of the royal supremacy. The latter was so wide in its scope that it might fairly be held to supersede the former in so far as the two were inconsistent. Cranmer, however, was not satisfied with this. He had a special protest recorded, in which he formally declared that he swore allegiance to the pope only in so far as that was consistent with his supreme duty to the King. The morality of this course has been much canvassed, though it seems really to involve nothing more than an express declaration of what the two oaths implied. It was the course that would readily suggest itself to a man of timid nature who wished to secure himself against such a fate as Wolsey's. It showed weakness, but it added nothing to whatever immorality there might be in successively taking two incompatible oaths.
In the last as in the first step of Cranmer's promotion, Henry had been actuated by one and the same motive. The business of the divorce — or rather, of the legitimation of Anne Boleyn's expected issue — had now become very urgent, and in the new archbishop he had an agent who might be expected to forward it with the needful haste. The celerity and skill with which Cranmer did the work intrusted to him must have fully satisfied his master. During the first week of April, Convocation sat almost from day to day to determine questions of fact and law in relation to Catherine's marriage with Henry as affected by her previous marriage with his brother Arthur. Decisions favourable to the object of the King were given on these questions, though even the despotism of the most despotic of the Tudors failed to secure absolute unanimity.
The next step was taken by Cranmer, who wrote a letter to the King, praying to be allowed to remove the anxiety of loyal subjects as to a possible case of disputed succession, by finally determining the validity of the marriage in his archiepiscopal court. There is evidence that the request was prompted by the King, and his consent was given as a matter of course. Queen Catherine was residing at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, and to suit her convenience the court was held at the priory of Dunstable in the immediate neighbourhood. Declining to appear, she was declared contumacious, and on the 23rd of May the archbishop gave judgment declaring the marriage null and void from the first, and so leaving the King free to marry whom he pleased. The Act of Appeals had already prohibited any appeal from the archbishop's court. Five days later he pronounced the marriage between Henry and Anne — which had been secretly celebrated about the 25th of January 1533 — to be valid. On the 1st of June he crowned Anne as Queen, and on the l0th of September stood godfather to her child, the future Queen Elizabeth.
The breach with Rome and the subjection of the church in England to the royal supremacy had been practically achieved before Cranmer's appointment as archbishop: and he had little to do with the other constitutional changes of Henry's reign. But his position as chief minister of Henry's ecclesiastical jurisdiction forced him into unpleasant prominence in connexion with the King's matrimonial experiences. In 1536 he was required to revise his own sentence in favour of the validity of Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn; and on the 17th of May the marriage was declared invalid. The ground on which this sentence is pronounced is fairly clear. Anne's sister, Mary Boleyn, had been Henry VIII's mistress; this by canon law was a bar to his marriage with Anne—a bar which had been removed by papal dispensation in 1527, but now the papal power to dispense in such cases had been repudiated, and the original objection revived. The sentence was grotesquely legal and unjust. With Anne's condemnation by the House of Lords, Cranmer had nothing to do. He interceded for her in vain with the King, as he had done in the cases of John Fisher, Thomas More and the monks of Christchurch. His share in the divorce of Anne of Cleves was less prominent than that of Bishop Gardiner, though he did preside over the Convocation in which nearly all the dignitaries of the church signified their approval of that measure. To his next and last interposition in the matrimonial affairs of the King no discredit attaches itself. When he was made cognizant of the charges against Catherine Howard, his duty to communicate them to the King was obvious, though painful.
Meanwhile Cranmer was actively carrying out the policy which has associated his name more closely, perhaps, than that of any other ecclesiastic with the Reformation in England. Its most important feature on the theological as distinct from the political side, was the endeavour to promote the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular, by encouraging translation and procuring an order in 1538 that a copy of the Bible in English should be set up in every church in a convenient place for reading. Only second in importance to this was the re-adjustment of the creed and liturgy of the church, which formed Cranmer's principal work during the latter half of his life.
The progress of the archbishop's opinion towards that middle Protestantism, if it may be so called, which he did so much to impress on the formularies of the Church of England, was gradual, as a brief enumeration of the successive steps in that progress will show. In 1538 an embassy of German divines visited England with the design, among other things, of forming a common confession for the two countries. This proved impracticable, but the frequent conferences Cranmer had with the theologians composing the embassy had doubtless a great influence in modifying his views. Both in parliament and in Convocation he opposed the Six Articles of 1539, but he stood almost alone. During the period between 1540 and 1543 the archbishop was engaged at the head of a commission in the revision of the "Bishop's Book" (1537) or Institutions of a Christian Man, and the preparation of the Necessary Erudition (1543) known as the "King's Book," which was a modification of the former work in the direction of Roman Catholic doctrine. In June 1545 was issued his Litany, which was substantially the same as that now in use, and shows his mastery of a rhythmical English style.
The course taken by Cranmer in promoting the Reformation exposed him to the bitter hostility of the reactionary party or "men of the old learning," of whom Gardiner and Bonner were leaders, and on various occasions — notably in 1543 and 1545 — conspiracies were formed in the council or elsewhere to effect his overthrow. The King, however, remained true to him, and all the conspiracies signally failed. It illustrates a favourable trait in the archbishop's character that he forgave all the conspirators. He was, as his secretary Morice testifies, "a man that delighted not in revenging." Cranmer was present with Henry VIII when he died (1547). By the will of the King he was nominated one of a council of regency composed of sixteen persons, but he acquiesced in the arrangement by which Somerset became Lord Protector. He officiated at the coronation of the boy King Edward VI, and is supposed to have instituted a sinister change in the order of the ceremony, by which the right of the monarch to reign was made to appear to depend upon inheritance alone, without the concurrent consent of the people. But Edward's title had been expressly sanctioned by act of parliament, so that there was no more room for election in his case than in that of George I, and the real motive of the changes was to shorten the weary ceremony for the frail child.
During this reign the work of the Reformation made rapid progress, the sympathies both of the Protector and of the young King being decidedly Protestant. Cranmer was therefore enabled without let or hindrance to complete the preparation of the church formularies, on which he had been for some time engaged. In 1547 appeared the Homilies prepared under his direction. Four of them are attributed to the archbishop himself—those on Salvation, Faith, Good Works and the Reading of Scripture. His translation of the German Catechism of Justus Jonas, known as Cranmer's Catechism, appeared in the following year. Important, as showing his views on a cardinal doctrine, was the Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, which he published in 1550. It was immediately answered from the side of the " old learning " by Gardiner. The first prayerbook of Edward VI was finished in November 1548, and received legal sanction in March 1549; the second was completed and sanctioned in April 1552. The archbishop did much of the work of compilation personally. The forty-two articles of Edward VI, published in 1553, owe their form and style almost entirely to the hand of Cranmer.
The last great undertaKing in which he was employed was the revision of his codification of the canon law, which had been all but completed before the death of Henry. The task was one eminently well suited to his powers, and the execution of it was marked by great skill in definition and arrangement. It never received any authoritative sanction, Edward VI dying before the proclamation establishing it could be made, and it remained unpublished until 1571, when a Latin translation by Dr Walter Haddon and Sir John Cheke appeared under the title Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum. It laid down the lawfulness and necessity of persecution to the death for heresy in the most absolute terms; and Cranmer himself condemned Joan Bocher to the flames. But he naturally loathed persecution, and was as tolerant as any in that age.
Cranmer stood by the dying bed of Edward as he had stood by that of his father, and he there suffered himself to be persuaded to take a step against his own convictions. He had pledged himself to respect the testamentary disposition of Henry VIII by which the succession devolved upon Mary, and now he violated his oath by signing Edward's "device" of the crown to Lady Jane Grey. On grounds of policy and morality alike the act was quite indefensible; but it is perhaps some palliation of his perjury that it was committed to satisfy the last urgent wish of a dying man, and that he alone remained true to the "nine days' Queen" when the others who had with him signed Edward's device deserted her.
On the accession of Queen Mary, he was summoned to the council—most of whom had signed the same device—reprimanded for his conduct, and ordered to confine himself to his palace at Lambeth until the queen's pleasure was known. He refused to follow the advice of his friends and avoid the fate that was clearly impending over him by flight to the continent. Any chance of safety that lay in the friendliness of a strong party in the council was more than nullified by the bitter personal enmity of the Queen, who could not forgive his share in her mother's divorce and her own disgrace. On the 14th of September 1553 he was sent to the Tower, where Ridley and Latimer were also confined. The immediate occasion of his imprisonment was a strongly worded declaration he had written a few days previously against the mass, the celebration of which, he heard, had been re-established at Canterbury. He had not taken steps to publish this, but by some unknown channel a copy reached the council, and it could not be ignored.
In November, with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and two other Dudleys, Cranmer was condemned for treason. Renard thought he would be executed, but so true a Romanist as Mary could scarcely have an ecclesiastic put to death in consequence of a sentence by a secular court, and Cranmer was reserved for treatment as a heretic by the highest of clerical tribunals, which could not act until parliament had restored the papal jurisdiction. Accordingly in March 1554 he and his two illustrious fellow-prisoners, Ridley and Latimer, were removed to Oxford, where they were confined in the Bocardo or common prison. Ridley and Latimer were unflinching, and suffered bravely at the stake on the 16th of October 1555. Cranmer had been tried by a papal commission, over which Bishop Brooks of Gloucester presided, in September 1555. Brooks had no power to give sentence, but reported to Rome, where Cranmer was summoned, but not permitted, to attend. On the 25th of November he was pronounced contumacious by the pope and excommunicated, and a commission was sent to England to degrade him from his office of archbishop. This was done with the usual humiliating ceremonies in Christ Church, Oxford, on the 14th of February 1556, and he was then handed over to the secular power.
About the same time Cranmer subscribed the first two of his "recantations." His difficulty consisted in the fact that, like all Anglicans of the 16th century, he recognized no right of private judgment, but believed that the state, as represented by monarchy, parliament and Convocation, had an absolute right to determine the national faith and to impose it on every Englishman. All these authorities had now legally established Roman Catholicism as the national faith, and Cranmer had no logical ground on which to resist. His early recantations" are merely recognitions of his lifelong conviction of this right of the state. But his dilemma on this point led him into further doubts, and he was eventually induced to revile his whole career and the Reformation. This is what the government wanted. Northumberland's recantation had done much to discredit the Reformation, Cranmer's, it was hoped, would complete the work. Hence the enormous effect of Cranmer's recovery at the final scene.
On the 21st of March he was taken to St Mary's church, and asked to repeat his recantation in the hearing of the people as he had promised. To the surprise of all he declared with dignity and emphasis that what he had recently done troubled him more than anything he ever did or said in his whole life; that he renounced and refused all his recantations as things written with his hand, contrary to the truth which he thought in his heart; and that as his hand had offended, his hand should be first burned when he came to the fire. As he had said, his right hand was steadfastly exposed to the flames. The calm cheerfulness and resolution with which he met his fate show that he felt that he had cleared his conscience, and that his recantation of his recantations was a repentance that needed not to be repented of.
It was a noble end to what, in spite of its besetting sin of infirmity of moral purpose, was a not ignoble life. The key to his character is well given in what Hooper said of him in a letter to Bullinger, that he was "too fearful about what might happen to him." This weakness was the worst blot on Cranmer's character, but it was due in some measure to his painful capacity for seeing both sides of a question at the same time, a temperament fatal to martyrdom. As a theologian it is difficult to class him. As early as 1538 he had repudiated the doctrine of Transubstantiation; by 1550 he had rejected also the Real Presence (Pref. to his Answer to Dr Richard Smith). But here he used the term "real" somewhat unguardedly, for in his Defence he asserts a real presence, but defines it as exclusively a spiritual presence; and he repudiates the idea that the bread and wine were " bare tokens." His views on church polity were dominated by his implicit belief in the divine right of kings (not of course the divine hereditary right of kings) which the Anglicans felt it necessary to set up against the divine right of popes. He set practically no limits to the ecclesiastical authority of kings; they were as fully the representatives of the church as the state, and Cranmer hardly distinguished between the two. Church and state to him were one."
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