ARCHBISHOP CRANMER
I
INTRODUCTORY
The Protector Somerset accounted himself a statesman. Of his own choice, he grasped at power; and being unfitted for it, he broke down disastrously. Thomas Cranmer affords a striking contrast. He was dragged into the turmoil of public affairs, in the vortex of the Reformation; against his will, he was compelled to accept ecclesiastical responsibilities which were in themselves semi-political, and to play a part also in affairs which were political exclusively. In the second capacity, he never assumed the direction, but was merely called upon to assent to the actions of others; but as archbishop he was compelled willy nilly to be a protagonist in the religious revolution—a term covering not only changes in the authorised doctrines of the Church and the authorised practices of the clergy, but in the relations of the clerical organisation in England both to the clerical organisation of Christendom and the secular powers at home.
THOMAS CRANMER
From a Painting by G. Fliccius in the National Portrait Gallery
In the eyes of an earnest school of ecclesiastical critics, he proved himself a traitor to the sacred trust which was imposed on him; a time-serving tool of lay usurpers; who, if he had convictions, lacked the courage of them, disowning all that he had most strongly avowed to save himself from the stake; and only at the last in some measure redeeming himself by a belated and almost incomprehensible courage in the hour of his doom. Ardent Protestants endorse half the charges, and condemn him as at best a Laodicean, though one who found grace at the eleventh hour. And historians who display no marked bias on the ecclesiastical questions are apt almost to pass him by, with contemptuous reference to his weakness and subserviency. Still there are not a few who have studied his career with care and sympathy; and their verdict is by no means the one conventionally accepted. It would, indeed, be strange and sad if such a verdict gave a true account of the man who did more than any other individual, on the one hand, to preserve the continuity of the Church, while, on the other hand, he strove to make her comprehensive and national. To no one, indeed, can he assume the proportions of a master-spirit; but the more closely we study him, the more readily we recognise in him a pre-eminently gentle and charitable soul, simple and sincere, striving to do his duty through good and evil report, in a task which he would fain have left to men who were not—as he was—born to be students, not fighters; and actually accomplishing what men of far greater practical ability would have deemed it vain to attempt. If it was better for England that the Church should be what it became than that it should have taken the shape into which either a Gardiner or a Knox would have moulded it, it was well for England that for twenty years Cranmer was her foremost ecclesiastic.
II
CRANMER AT CAMBRIDGE
Thomas Cranmer was born not two years before Henry VIII., in 1489; the son of a country gentleman of no great estate. An elder son was to carry on the family; Thomas and his younger brother were destined to the Church. The younger sons of a country gentleman of straitened means had no very encouraging prospects, and the career chosen for the boy was, no doubt, dictated merely by convenience, though it was well enough suited to his talents and temperament. Somewhat lacking, perhaps, in that cheerful heedlessness of danger and physical pain which is the happy heritage of the normal English boy—the outcome often of rude health and imperturbable nerves rather than of any properly moral endowment—a certain timidity and want of self-confidence in him were evidently fostered by the unsympathetic severity of a pedagogue whose theory of education was, a stick with a master at one end and a boy at the other. In due course he went up to the recent foundation of Jesus College, Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship on taking his degree. Till his fortieth year he continued in these academic shades, and would have remained there peacefully enough to his life’s end if an accident had not brought him under the notice of Henry VIII.