Christian History Magazine Collection

Thomas Cranmer was the most cautious, even indecisive, of reformers—until his final hour.

by Mark Galli from Christian History magazine no. 48

Candles flickered in the darkness as Thomas Cranmer, seated before a plain wooden desk, tried to make sense of his life. It was the night of March 20, 1556. He sat alone and confused in an Oxford jail cell, weary from months of trial, interrogation, and imprisonment. Before him on the desk were strewn a number of official documents.

There were 14 copies of his fifth recantation, in which he had repudiated the heresies of Martin Luther. The Spanish friars had asked him to sign them before morning so they would have sufficient copies for the printers. Though Cranmer had refused to do so the previous night—he had signed one, wasn’t that enough?—now he debated whether to put his name to them.

Next to these lay the speech he was to give the next morning, a speech that repudiated his writings that had denied Catholic teaching.

Also before him was a different version of the same speech, which he had just finished composing. After declaring his faith according to the Nicene Creed, the speech swerved sharply: in it he called the pope “Christ’s enemy and Anti-christ.”

Cranmer agonized. Which speech should he read on the morrow? Which speech represented what he really believed?

His critics—and there were many—had accused him for years of hypocrisy; he was a cowardly archbishop who flip-flopped at crucial moments to curry favor with his king. That wasn’t the way Cranmer saw it, but he had to admit it would be hard to interpret the last few months in any other way.

At 5:00 a.m., the exhausted, solitary prisoner, weary of internal debate, brought himself to sign the 14 copies of his recantation. He noted it was four hours before he was to be escorted to the stake and burned alive.

Thrust into National Affairs

Cranmer was born 66 years earlier in simpler times, on July 2, 1489. Aslacton, Nottinghamshire, far from the intrigue of court life, was his home, and his father, Thomas, belonged to the lowest rank of gentry. He had only enough property to endow his eldest son, so Thomas and his younger brother were destined for church work.

Later in life, Cranmer would blame his “marvelous severe and cruel schoolmaster” for his lack of ability in studies; still, Cranmer attended Cambridge in 1503 and in 1510 became a fellow of Jesus College.

When he fell in love and married a relative of the landlady of the local Dolphin Inn, he lost his fellowship (which was given only to celibates). But his wife, Joan, died in childbirth within a year of their wedding, and Jesus College restored Cranmer to his fellowship.

He now became ordained as a priest and threw himself into his studies, becoming an outstanding theologian, a man of immense, though not original, learning. In about 1520, he joined some scholars who met regularly to discuss Luther’s theological revolt on the Continent. In the group, dubbed “Little Germany,” were many who would play key roles in the coming decades of the English Reformation, including William Tyndale, Robert Barnes, and of course, Cranmer, who already by 1525 had included in his prayers one for the abolition of papal power in England.

Cranmer’s leanings toward reform would have remained merely academic had he not been drawn into the politics of the day. In August 1529, King Henry VIII happened to be in a neighborhood Cranmer was visiting, and Cranmer ended up conversing with two of the king’s councilors. For two years, Henry had been scheming: how could he be freed from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne Boleyn? Cranmer told the councilors he believed that the king had the right to divorce Catherine and that the king should seek out English theologians who could firmly establish his case. Henry summoned Cranmer for an interview and commanded him to write a treatise backing the king’s right to divorce and defending it with arguments from Scripture, the church fathers, and church councils. Cranmer took up residence at Durham Palace, the home of Anne Boleyn’s father, and finished the treatise. But before he could defend it publicly, he was appointed to an embassy dispatched to Rome to lobby for the divorce (of which nothing came), and then to Germany to contact the Lutheran princes. There he met Lutheran reformer Andreas Osiander—and Osiander’s niece, Margaret. Osiander’s theology and his niece so appealed to Cranmer that, despite his priest’s orders, he married her in 1532. He had moved decidedly in the direction of the Reformation, but he was not yet ready to make his marriage, or his theology, public.

Archbishop for Henry

For Cranmer, 1532 proved to be a critical year in another respect. In August, the aged archbishop of Canterbury died. With the divorce question coming to a head, the see would have to be filled quickly.

Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s new chief adviser in ecclesiastical affairs, was pursuing the divorce energetically, and to complicate matters, by January 1533, Anne Boleyn was pregnant. Stephen Gardiner, the obvious candidate for the archbishopric, was out of favor, and so (perhaps through the lobbying of the Boleyn family), the king pointed to Cranmer. When Cranmer heard of his appointment, he balked, but by March 1533, Cranmer was consecrated and instituted at Canterbury. He took the obligatory oath to be subject ultimately to the pope—although the day before, he had signed a statement qualifying this oath, saying he was not binding himself to “do or attempt anything which will or may seem to be contrary to God’s law, or against His Majesty the King of England.”

With his priorities set, Cranmer proceeded to do what was expected of him. In May he convened his court and declared the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon void from the beginning; he then pronounced the marriage to Anne Boleyn (which had secretly taken place in January) valid.

This would be the first of many Cranmer decisions that make him seem servile. But Cranmer believed in royal absolutism, that his primary duty was to obey the king, God’s chosen to lead his nation and church. Cranmer was prepared to sacrifice nearly all other doctrines to this one. If the king were to order him to sin, Cranmer would draw the line. Time and again in Henry’s rocky reign, Cranmer was ordered to support religious policies of which he disapproved, and he had to decide whether to resist or obey. Under Henry, he always obeyed.

In 1536, he became convinced by rather dubious evidence that Anne had committed adultery, and he invalidated the marriage. In 1540, he ruled that Henry’s proposed marriage to Anne of Cleves was lawful—and when Henry sought a divorce six months later, Cranmer approved it on the grounds that the original marriage was unlawful!

In these matters, he did as he was told, though it seems he convinced himself in each case that he was doing the right thing. Many times it may have been justified as the right thing to do because Henry wanted it, and Henry was God’s voice for Cranmer and the nation.

But Cranmer wasn’t a lackey. Time and again, Cranmer alone of all Henry’s advisers pleaded for the lives of people who fell out of royal favor. With equal courage, and futility, he pleaded for Sir Thomas More and John Fisher (Catholics who refused to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the English church), Anne Boleyn (when the king wanted her beheaded), and even Thomas Cromwell.

Cromwell was Henry’s point man in ecclesiastical affairs. With his help, by 1536, the Church of England’s ties with Rome were completely severed, and Henry had been proclaimed supreme head of the English church. Cromwell had pushed for the distribution of an English Bible in every parish church. With Cranmer, he had helped bring about the Ten Articles (and its commentary, the Bishop’s Book), which moved the nation in a Protestant direction.

But Cromwell’s plans soured in 1540. He had negotiated Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves to secure closer ties to German Lutherans. But Henry found Anne disgusting, and with the divorce, Cromwell’s enemies convinced Henry that Cromwell should be destroyed.

Cromwell was accused of treason, stripped of his office, and consigned to the Tower. Cranmer was stunned. At once he wrote to Henry, “He that was such a servant in my judgment, in wisdom, diligence, faithfulness, and experience, as no prince in this realm ever had … I loved him as my friend, for so I took him to be; but I chiefly loved him for the love which I thought I saw him bear ever towards Your Grace.”

It was a courageous letter. Cranmer was in danger of being thrown in the Tower himself for declaring himself in this way. Nonetheless, Cromwell was condemned without a trial and beheaded.